The city of Colorado Springs has moved “from good to great” over the past year, Mayor John Suthers said Thursday, ticking off a long list of improvements in Olympic City USA.

But the news from his second annual State of the City speech surfaced in Suthers’ priorities for 2017.

First, he said, is to complete the Springs Rescue Mission campus with comprehensive services for homeless people, a project being financed by $2.5 million from the federal government and $850,000 from the Colorado Division of Housing.

The mission’s new day shelter and 150-bed shelter are scheduled to open Nov. 1. A large dining facility and welcome center are slated to be completed in 2017.

Second, Suthers cited the need for an amended annexation plan for the Banning Lewis Ranch, a sprawling expanse including 18,000 acres owned by Nor’wood Development Group and 2,600 acres owned by Denver-based Oakwood Homes. A few hundred homes have been erected southeast of Woodmen and Marksheffel roads.

The mayor said a pact is needed to ensure the development “pays for itself in terms of city services and public infrastructure.”

Because property taxes are so low, Suthers said later, an agreement needs to ensure that the expenses for police protection, public infrastructure and other needs are “not an imposition on the city.”

In citing his next item, the need to finish the privately financed U.S. Olympic Museum, Suthers dropped a bombshell, announcing that the $10 million funding gap has been reduced to $6 million thanks to a $4 million gift he learned about Thursday morning.

Asked later to identify the donor, the mayor demurred.

Other important tasks in the year ahead include raising about $25 million more for a new Summit House on Pikes Peak “worthy of America’s Mountain”; establishing a 311 system to keep residents readily and easily informed; staffing Fire Station 22; restoring transit funding to levels promised to voters in 2004; and choosing a site for a new downtown transit center.

The city also has launched a two-year revision to its comprehensive plan, seeking extensive input from the community to determine priorities.

And it needs to finance about $13.5 million over 10 years to build a police substation in the city’s southeast quadrant.

But Suthers won the loudest, most sustained applause when he called for political parties to “do whatever has to be done as soon as possible” to expand 17 miles of Interstate 25 between Monument and Castle Rock to eliminate the daily logjams and improve commerce between Colorado Springs and Denver.

The project’s proposed 10-year time frame “is simply unacceptable,” he said. “It only took eight years after John F. Kennedy’s challenge to America to put a man on the moon. Surely, we can expand 17 miles of interstate a lot sooner than that.”

In a heartwarming presentation after his speech, Suthers bestowed the Spirit of the Springs Lifetime Achievement Award to George Fellows, who served as city manager from 1966 to 1985, overseeing explosive growth in the city.

Fellows helped found Cheyenne Village for adults with developmental disabilities, has a city park named for him behind the Pikes Peak East Library, and crafts Southwestern jewelry.