CLIC stands for Capital Long-Range Improvement Committee. CLIC is made up of 33 resident representatives appointed by City Council Members (two per ward) and the Mayor (seven at-large members). The job of CLIC is to review projects brought to us by City of Minneapolis departments as part of the City’s five-year capital budget, and to then make recommendations for funding to the City Council and the Mayor based on a number of criteria.

I’ve served on CLIC for a few years now as a Ward 2 appointee, and it’s been an incredible insight into how the city uses citizen input to help guide the budgeting process for our long-term capital projects. It’s also meant I’ve gotten to see a lot of cool photos of people standing inside massive sewer and storm tunnels - though I haven’t been invited to see one in person yet (though we do very infrequently get tours of facilities built with capital funds).

My hope with this blog post (and a few more) is to give a deeper dive into the process, challenges I’ve seen with how the CLIC process functions, and then highlights (or low-lights) of the coming capital budget.