september 9th economic development commission meeting to order at 6 30 pm tonight's economic development commission meeting will be held virtually by zoom and in-person while following social distancing guidelines the public is welcome to participate when invited throughout the meeting members of the public may attend the meeting in person or join via online zoom if attendees experience audio problems we suggest you leave the meeting and then rejoin this has usually fixed the issue additional instructions on how to participate are posted online at burnsvillemn.gov in the public meeting calendar as usual tonight's meeting is available for viewing on bctv and on the city's website you may participate in the meeting tonight online by going to zoom dot u s backslash join and typing in meeting id 984 5082 6445. once you are logged into the meeting please use the chat feature to tell the moderator which item you wish to speak to you may also call into the meeting at 651 372-8299 and enter meeting id 984-5082-6445 and now on to the agenda the first item of the of tonight's meeting is the adoption of the agenda do any members of the commission have any changes to the agenda staff do you have any changes to the agenda none from staff right may i have a motion to adopt your gender then it's removed question second and i will have to do a roll call um just a heads up yep it's like a uh motion by the far the favor sorry in a second by uh anderson um move to yep yep go ahead regina commissioner newman aye commissioner anderson aye commissioner couplet all right commissioner lafaver hi commissioner clavita i believe you're on mute all right sorry commissioner schmitz aye and the motion carries uh the second agenda item approval of july 8th 2020 economic development commission meeting minutes uh staff are there any changes to the meeting minutes none from staff anything from commission any changes looking for a motion so move motion by anderson looking for a second like invite couplic and regina could do a roll call commissioner newman all right commissioner anderson aye commissioner kepler aye commissioner lafaver aye commissioner kloviter hi thank you commissioner schmidt aye the motion passes and on to agenda item number three here um election of the chair regina will provide a presentation and give an item overview of the background of this regina thank you um just a brief presentation um our current chair is commissioner newman and vice chair is folkstead i inquired with the commission via email to see if there was any interest in serving in either the chair or vice chair capacity commissioner anderson commissioner fitchit and commissioner newman all expressed interest in uh chair of vice chair capacity certainly um both of the items chair and vice chair are open for discussion and i encourage you to discuss each of the chair and vice chair recommendations um prior to making your recommendation in motion so first step is chair so before we get into that i just want to say i'm happy to continue becoming in the chair if you so elect me to do so but also recognize that i like to you know kind of rotate and give other people the opportunity to be the chair as well so with that we can open discussion on on the chair people who feel want to be elected into that position or if you have any interest commissioner anderson what is your preference um i was i volunteered to be vice chair if no one else had woken up so i'm just very fine with mr goodman and commissioner newman this is your would be your second year is that right this would be my second year if i was elected yes uh and so do we have the the other commissioner on on i cannot see here is the other commissioner candidate on commissioner fitchett is having trouble um logging into the zoom meeting she is not on currently and i have not heard from commissioner volstead okay and and the uh uh commissioner having what is her last name again uh crystal fitchett bitchett is she a voice and interest in chair vice chair she did voice um an interest in um either position you know from a chair standpoint so that's the topic of discussion from my viewpoint i think commissioner newman's doing a great job i think as long as he still has interest and a passion i don't think two years is too long and i i recommend that we continue in that on that path that's my personal recommendation anything online from laura chris yeah dan i i agree with uh christopher lefebvre i think mr newman's doing a fine job and two years seems appropriate so i also agree with mr lefaber newman's been doing a great job thanks everyone so if someone has to make a motion if they want to elect for a chair so looking for a motion or other discussions commissioner newman uh be elected as uh chair for this coming year for the commission i'll second that motion we have motioned by anderson second by my favorite to recommend dear newman as uh the chair um i'll pass it over to regina for roll call commissioner newman aye commissioner anderson aye commissioner cup couplic all right commissioner lefebvre commissioner clavitor aye commissioner schmitz hi motion kerry is on the chair so i'm moving over to vice chair opening up the discussion looks like we had uh interest with anderson vichette uh isn't clever he had an interest in vice i think as well it would be a great opportunity for anderson i think that's where i'd put my vote for right now i don't know anyone else on the commission online yeah it's un unfortunate the other candidate isn't on so you know it'd be nice to have i would like to mr anderson's uh a good participant i would endorse him mr anderson this is your second year on the committee is that right correct we can always come back to the item if you want to pause us to see if um commissioner fitchett is able to join us due to technical difficulties yeah i think that would be great i think it'd be fine just a point of clarification though commissioner uh this is her first year on the commission no second this is her second as well yes no is that right um what's your second it will be um i think her full second year she'll be starting so she started at the same time commissioner anderson okay [Music] yeah let's pause uh uh agenda item number three move it back to the last item here and move on to item number four we need can we just go right on to item number four do we have to make a motion to pass it to the last item you could move on move on okay we'll pause this one and come back to it and move on to agenda item number four uh discussion on economic development teaching plan goal number four i'll pass it over to jenny faulkner we'll give you a little presentation and overview and background of this thank you mr chair commissioners you may recall about a year and a half ago we adopted the economic development strategic plan so this december will be two years since it's been adopted so we have five goals outlined in the plan and this is what it looks like i think you all got a copy of this in some way shape or form and so we want to get things going on goal number four which is to enhance and build awareness around our existing housing and commercial programs and develop new programs as appropriate so to get us started with this we've asked jason arsworld from ellers they're the ones who helped us prepare this plan to kind of walk us through preparing a strategy for these housing and commercial programs similar to how he helped guide us through the development tools policy work last year i thought that was a very effective process that the council and the edc went through to get to the end so so jason is here to help us with that i did list in the background the seven specific strategies that were called out in the plan and listed the link to the plan just as a refresher if you needed that and we also included some information in our background from may of last year where we presented some different tools that other cities are using just as a reference of what's out there so with that i'll turn it over to mr argevold and he has a brief presentation and then the discussion will be yours we're looking for feedback tonight as we kick this off all right thank you jenny again jason erzold with ellers so just a few things that we wanted to cover tonight really just talking a little bit about housing statistics just so you have some context for the discussion i always think that's helpful uh a little background about some of the potential tools and resources that are out there many of which you know you're already using in your community but the big one that's why it's highlighted there and jenny alluded to this is that what we want is to understand what your priorities are and what outcomes you'd like to see for housing in burnsville and so i want to spend the most time on that and give you the opportunity because that really is going to inform the basis for what we ultimately come back with to you um we don't need you at all to just decide the how part we just want you to talk about what what you want to see and let the staff kind of give you some ideas about how to do that and then a little bit about what the next steps might look like so just really quick we looked at this chart when we talked about the strategic plan back in 2018 and it's updated with more current data just median sales prices and i think that it's an indicator of where your housing market is at and i think it's just helpful to set some context and it's not any big surprises here you know the one thing that we kind of looked at this is that one thing you see is the va if you look on the far left side of the chart where burnsville was pretty much on par with a couple of cities there in the twin cities metro uh in the uh orangish color and as you fast forward to 2020 uh that there's a little bit of a disparity growing there and where those values are trending now there's a lot of reasons for that it doesn't mean that there's a problem it's just some some helpful background in context as we think about what we want to accomplish on a going forward basis housing tenure which is just really owner renter occupied this question comes up all the time do we have too many rental properties do we have not enough do we need more of a diversity of rental um you know i use the same peer communities as a comparison um some of those maybe aren't the best comparisons from an owner to renter 10-year kind of standpoint but uh you know you've got you've got burnsville you're about 33 35 35 and a half percent rental which you know that's a reasonable ratio of rental housing this is 2018 data though and i know that you've added several multi-family properties since then so this is the most recent available from the census to make apples to apples comparisons so that's all going to shift a little bit and that's just something to think about as you go forward now we work in a lot of communities where these ratios are flipped right like a city like hopkins is 65 percent rental and 35 percent owner occupied and you know perfectly healthy cities good school systems so it's not an indicator of you know anything other than just its information for you as you're thinking about housing policy in the city this is rental licenses another one we like to look at to see if there's any trends happening in the rental licensing particularly in neighborhoods and this is pulled straight out of the 2018 uh annual report i think there's a term for it jenny that i can't remember the name monitoring report yeah and so it was the most recent available with trend data associated with it and you know when i think about think how the city's going to impact policy or or programs on a going forward basis i like i tend to focus on single family rental housing right what's happening in the single-family housing stock with rental trends and if you look at this one you look back in 14 and there were 333 single-family rentals uh and then you're down to 279 in 2018. so kind of when we look at this or look at are there any big trends you know i think part of the job of a community development department is to make sure that you're always looking at change that's happening out there in the community and being able to respond and react to that and so if you start seeing things happening you want to be able to move quickly to be able to counteract some of those things and so they don't adversely impact your neighborhoods not that you know having single-family rentals is a bad thing but you know too many of them might start to tip a neighborhood into into a situation that you don't necessarily didn't ever intend and so i like to look at that same thing and we didn't have it with foreclosure data but it's a good one and a lesson back from the early 2000s you could watch those trend right up and it was a call to action if you're a staff person uh when you started to see that sorry jeff budd are you okay if we interrupt you yeah please do i don't this is totally conversational we're pretty casual here so please enter up whenever you need to so i'm looking at this graph on the rental licenses i guess my question to you is i don't know how this data is captured if it's publicly advertised rental units or how that's captured but in light of airbnb these days do we feel like we're fully capturing the units that are first that are for lease and the trend down is just simply because we're not capturing it in the same way and we're missing things well in and maybe the staff can speak to this but i do know that you are tracking short-term rentals like airbnb type uses right and uh and and there there is some uh problem uh often with um single-family rentals not actually getting a license and thereby before you wouldn't know that they're licensed but i do know you're also doing some tracking around um trying to ferret those out right looking at records and trying to decide is this maybe your rental and i think if i looked at some of the reporting showed you know potential unlicensed rentals and looked at those numbers too so i think the city's trying to make sure that it's fully accounting for every rental situation and making sure it gets a license and inspection that's my understanding if there's anything to add to that so the source of this data is our actual rental licenses so those are those folks that are complying getting the license and the inspection the census data is usually a little different because that's people replying to the survey of what they're of what they're getting so we do break it out by like town homes in an association because those are those are easy for people to rent out but they are managed by an hoa so it's kind of in a different class and then the single families and then the conversions there are new single-family or individual rental units so you can see the trend in that as well so miss faulconer do you believe that this app appropriately captures what's really going on yes from year to year to year it does we're missing some but i would say we're missing the same amounts every year okay and i would say this local data generated from your own records right is is generally the most reliable i mean the census date again has got a lag associated with it there's some projecting that they do right off of the decennial census so you kind of have some noise in there but this is what we like to see when we're trying to make decisions about what to actually do as a community and what kind of programs to implement thank you so that's rental licenses uh you know the other one uh code enforcement violations and this is again straight out of that annual report table that i mentioned again city tract right so you get a you take a code enforcement action there's a record associated with that this gets reported out in your annual reports and you know i think again with this um you got to be a little careful but you're just trying to look for trends i mean are there categories that we're seeing that are becoming problematic and if so there's something we need to do about that and as i look at this i don't nothing jumps out at me right away right i mean there's some some more exterior structure complaints that i that i noted in there but that are happening is i don't know if you'd call it a trend but sometimes with this type of data when there's more inspections you find more violations so you kind of can't just look at it in a vacuum you need to kind of take all that into consideration and i will add if i can uh mr chair to this is that this is through 2018 and there have been significant changes in the codes related to this since then so for instance um the first one trash cans number one violation consistently for an ex for decades right council made a change to the ordinance last year to now allow trash cans to be in view they no longer have to be 100 screened so the number of complaints in that or violations goes down because what may have been non-compliant at one point is now compliant also the council made a significant change in code enforcement in changing from being proactive where we would drive around the city every three years cover every neighborhood to being complaint based only the way we used to be prior to i want to say 2008 and so we um complaints may are we expect complaints to go up because of that but the violations may go down because there's no proactive activity so it just it's going to take a while for those numbers to wash out but there will be changes in the data of what we can track we won't be tracking trash cans in view or it's a different code now so you can't compare the apples to apples so that's all important background because again it's there's so much nuance that goes into this but you know just some high level uh just so as we start to think about about some of this and some of the things that you all want to see in the community so just jumping into tools and resources so any uh you know i tend to think about this you know we talked about it in the strategic plan as a housing policy we also talk about it as a program i think it's both i mean i think what we're talking about here is more of an overarching housing strategy and when we start looking at what tools and resources are available out there the intent of this just diagram is just so you understand it's not a one source kind of a deal right i mean we just talked about code enforcement so that's one of your regulatory tools and that's probably the most effective tool in the toolbox that you have by far right to maintain uh your property within the community that and so we'll talk a little more about what those are you have resources that the city you know generates right whether it be through a levy or what or what not they're city dollars and then there are other outside resources that are there that are available to your residents just by virtue of the fact that you know they're available to all minnesotans right for minnesota housing for example is is a is a source of funding so when we put together a strategy we're going to be trying to draw from all those places not just one place and leverage everything to the best of our ability here to bring the goals forward that you want to see as far as housing is concerned so just briefly some of the city resources again i think staffing is probably um the biggest one and i think if you can you know a lot of times there's there are resources that just exist and are available to residents i mentioned the minnesota housing resources there are others that are out there sometimes residents just don't know about those things right so a city and i know you do a lot of this as it is so this isn't something that is new but um an important role that a staff can play is just as a connect somebody that can connect your residents to all those available resources right it's just a one-stop shop for people that don't know where to go uh you can help them with a list of all the things that are available to your residents right and you can understand what their need is and then try to fit them in with the thing that's going to help them the most so that's a city resource that takes staff time right but it's a it's other than the staffing cost there's not necessarily a monetary piece that goes along with that uh you know more proactive and systematic investment so you can start if you start seeing areas that need to be targeted and right now you might be scatter investment right you might just have broad-based and existing resources that are just broadly focused you might decide that no we've got an area in the city that we really would like to focus on maybe you want to bring those resources and bring them to bear just on one specific area it's another way to kind of use the same amount of money in a targeted way essentially is what we're talking about there uh you know direct funding so you can actually if you have priority programs you can reallocate existing funds for broad broad programs throughout the city you can uh add new funds right you can you can levy as a community if you so choose to add to your tools that you have available so it's another way to do that you know it's a task or a tax impact you know you can uh think about budgeting through your through your various sources for marketing awareness and outreach i mean this is one of the things we talked about in the strategic plan was just this idea that people just weren't aware right of the things that you might have already be doing or you have available so doing a little more around outreach and marketing there again that might not be you know a huge line item in the budget but you might need some printing or advertising expenses that go into that uh and then just as i talked about the monitoring trends that are going on out there to anticipate what those changes are so you know if if you don't have staff that's constantly looking at what's happening in the market and what's going on with your housing stock you sometimes you wake up one day and you realize you know boy we've really got a big problem i use the foreclosure example a lot of places you know it didn't just happen overnight you know we kind of feel like we woke up one day and everybody's house was foreclosed but it took a long time to to really get there and you could really see that start happening in the data if you look historically in a lot of communities you know there's kind of a kind of a consistent low amount of foreclosures annually and it just kind of little thing blips up and it kind of keeps going and you can see that happening so if you've got somebody there doing that that's also very helpful just to be able to react quickly and be in position to do something about it talk about regulatory tools so you know your zoning code your ordinances those are all things that can shape housing in your community whether it be through new development redevelopment or maintenance of existing housing so those are all things that you have at your disposal to be able to shape housing in the city rental licensing inspections you know you're doing this but it's a good way to make sure that rental housing is maintaining a certain standard and that you're aware of where those properties are i mean that's that's a helpful aspect of a licensing program um you know we talked about co-enforcement that's a regulatory tool you can do that on a proactive or a reactive basis i think jenny already explained where you're at in terms of a city here but there's there's a way you can do that question specifically code enforcement have the number of positions in that area changed with the proactive versus reactive um of the change was just went into effect in 2020 i believe and then when covet hit and we had a position opening so we have an unfilled position right now that we put on hold because of this our code cases on the complaint side have changed a lot and our processes have also changed so we've added more jason as education on here so we've added another step in the process the first step now is that someone gets an education letter from the city a did you know kind of letter that we don't necessarily give folks a set amount of time to comply with we kind of get to it when we get to it so it's extended the compliance period but that takes more resources to manage when you add different steps to the process so it's kind of a wait and see i would say on complaints don't necessarily go hand in hand with the resources just because we're not doing proactive because they can be complaint driven so if if we're not doing it and people have that expectation they have every right and ability to file a complaint with the city and they do so um i don't have the full answer for that yet but we are we're monitoring it and we have an unfilled position that we've left unfilled because of covid so and so yeah again i did education on here too and and jenny alluded to that some places through their proactive efforts and i imagine you probably did this while you were doing it proactively but your first your first and it's kind of a little bit of a bedside manner thing right nobody likes to have a the city knocking at their door telling them their property needs to be fixed up so you know a lot of times uh that education piece will be the first sort of entree into this right so if you pick a neighborhood which is what you did you kind of broke things up geographically and and focus on a particular neighborhood and then went to another next one and the next one after that a lot of times cities will start with education about the codes generally speaking before they go in there and start you know issuing notices to people about that they need to fix things so there's just ways that you can employ those tools uh to to get what it is you're looking for and then i talked about outside resources so obviously you know you've got the county active here funding programs minnesota housing finance agency um you know has fix up funds available to everybody right so if you need a home improvement loan you can you know everybody can go through them and if they meet those those requirements access financing through that agency um grant funds you know that might be out there you've got some some lists here federal home loan bank one of the kind of lesser known sources that's out there but they provide dollars for things like down payment assistance and things of that nature and award grants to communities to uh you know conduct those kinds of programs so you can supplement your your existing core uh strategy with other outside resources and at the bottom again like i talked about just just making people aware that these resources exist might be enough to meet your needs right if someone comes in and says look i really need a loan to fix up my house well geez we don't offer that but you know what minnesota housing does here's a flyer and about how you access that and here you go and that might be all that they need to fix up their house and goal accomplished for you all and it didn't cost you anything other than directing people in the right place so like i said i wanted to focus more on the discussion questions that's all the background i'm certainly happy to talk more about that if you'd like to but i know what we really wanted to focus on is these i've got four just basic questions and you know your feedback obviously is is very would be very much appreciated here and uh that will will aggregate that you know and we'll use that as we start fleshing out what a strategy might look like so so the first one is just very very simple these are all very simple but what is it that you all of you are the most urgent needs and or issues in burnsville as it relates to housing i'll um comment a couple of things uh one is in our previous conversations it was noted that burnsville's the best kept secret i'm talking about the the south metro if if we compare it to other places we have a lot more parks we have a lot more amenities we have a wide range of of type of homes from lower cost rental to high-end a bunch of them on lakes so the general impression i get from people outside of burnsville is it's a tired blue-collar neighborhood which it's not it's a vibrant multi-generational great city so i'm not sure why that's the case but i'm just kind of like that's interesting perspective um and i'm not sure some of that data you showed doesn't even substantiate that you know the housing value is not dramatically less than egan and rosemont and there's newer developments in lakeville and and things like that which of course push up their numbers but that that would be one thing um that i would put out there so that and we talked a little bit about that back in 18 is more the the image not matching the reality is that kind of how you're yeah the second thing would be this awareness like those grants like i've never heard of these grants i mean if there's most people might know there's loans which most people are you know they're happy to take a loan but there's grant money boy we should be aware of that and be communicating it and i mean i have no idea how deep and long these these resources are so that'd be just helpful to know in education as key leaders just a little anecdote but it might say why of your first point of you know best kept secret there's a couple that moved into our neighborhood they don't have any kids they said well we bought you know we i asked why they bought in you know where they did and they said well we looked in egan and we for the same house we're getting here it's you know five or ten thousand dollars less because it's in burnsville and the school district is not thought of as well as other school districts and you know it kind of i i hadn't even thought of that difference in pricing but it's really related to the school district and what people think of it not necessarily that the school district is bad but they they don't look at it as as highly as other school districts around burnsville and it doesn't help that you get some shopping centers that are when you come into burnsville on the east side there that are look like they're falling down you know that could cause our image whether it's housing or not you know to be not the greatest right and we did talk about that too and that so you know that this community is not the only one that experiences that sort of disparity when it comes to different school districts and it's just sometimes a matter of perception and so there's there's an opportunity there right to do some education i think there was a back here yes thank you for recognizing me i think that the feedback that i hear is that there's a distance from the twin either twin city um i i don't think it's a long distance but um the majority of the feedback that i hear is it's a distance it's quite a distance to get to burnsville and i think the other um information that i would receive is for the millennials they're the housing they're looking for like new new build type housing and burnsville doesn't well i shouldn't say we don't offer that because we do have some new builds here but the majority of our homes are they're older and less appealing to the millennial so do you think just to kind of build on that a little bit is that primarily a function of new builds for single-family housing or is it new builds for rental housing or is it both or how do you kind of you know what that's a good question i would think that um it would probably encompass both right because you're gonna have um uh the millennials are not ready to buy and then you're gonna have the ones that are ready to buy so i would i would think that that would encompass both definitely because they're looking for that new build i think hgtv has really just turned people onto this this new look and then you have to really want the type of housing that we have here in burnsville mr chair yeah we we have heard that before i don't know if there's some study or something that came out a year or two ago that spoke to that that millennials are kind of afraid of contractors and home remodeling stuff as much as they see it they want to buy it and they want it turnkey because they see the problems maybe that their parents or relatives went through dealing with contractors contractors kind of get a bad rap and they don't want to deal with it they don't have the time so they want something that's turnkey brand new ready to go there i think there have been there have been studies on that in market analysis of what they're looking for so for sure and i'll just highlight while i have the microphone um goal number two in your edu strategic plan is to improve the image of school district 191 and the city just as a reminder so that is up there as as well on the list so okay so i can take this question a couple different ways one is the broader overall housing needs of the community i know some people would mistake me for a millennial but i'm not but i will tell you that even at my age when we were looking for homes we didn't want a home that was a fixer-upper ease it was just easier to buy a newer home that was in good shape but i would say from a burnsill standpoint the most urgent housing needs are kind of i think of in terms of standard deviation and it's the outliers that are probably the most in the micro uh context are the most important that we need to address around this goal and then also i i would say that there's probably a desire to really cater to a lot of senior citizens as well that would like to age within their house and maybe don't have the capability to do that i wish some retirees would stood up with the burnsville angels and provide free labor if we provide a program that offers material costs or something to help a lot of these retirees in the city age within their home but ultimately it's the outliers that are deteriorating the neighborhood that in my mind in the micro sense needs to be most addressed you uh elaborate on that a little bit because i'm not sure i fully understand you mean that there are outliers in neighborhoods that are affecting neighborhood quality or is that um yeah so what i'm saying is you know a standard deviation 80 percent fall under the bell curve right and then you have your outliers outside of that and what i would say it's those outliers that we probably need to address that are homes that are deteriorating and they're not being understanding or kept up to neighborhood standards that ultimately i would like to see addressed in a micro uh level that we originally created this idea about sure and then with respect to the idea of housing choice it was i think you said a couple of things but one thing i heard was potentially the development of new housing that can accommodate seniors but the other thing you said was maybe something that helps people stay within their homes as they age in place did you mean both or just one of those things no i really was talking about uh based upon our existing housing being a fully built out community being able to come up with a program that also allows those who would prefer to age in place uh but at the same time don't have the means to maybe keep the house up or make the changes that need to be made for instance the first floor bedroom that allows some of that to happen as well laura had a question online there go ahead laura hi yeah i wanted to speak a little bit to some needs that i am observing uh in the area one of the things that really stands out to me is that there are a lot of areas given the age of burnsville a lot of people are still in their homes a lot later in life we're seeing that in the slowing down in our school district that's because many people who still own their homes in burnsville and love their homes in burnsville haven't left letting younger families in who would utilize the school district so i think i think it's important to pay attention to the age of our residents and to take a look at where we've got little pockets of that where we've got a an older owner resident and making sure that we speak to again helping them maintain their property improve their property update their property and that means that when they do decide to sell and leave that property and it does go to a younger family in all likelihood it is turnkey it isn't new construction it maybe has all the features of our more uniquely mid-century modern homes which is more of the era that a lot of these homes were built but those are incredibly popular too as long as they're well maintained and they certainly have a lot more interesting architectural features which as a millennial i'll say all of my friends really enjoy guess i think you had a question go ahead uh yeah more just a statement as to um so i've been talking to a lot of people in burnsville lately over the last few months um actually ran into largest the other day so one issue we're having is that uh that i've seen that i've been hearing a lot about is that we don't have amenities that that seem to attract young people around mid 40s i'm down things such as breweries food truck events communal activities um and a lot of the look of burnsville the perception is it's it's homogenized and seems to have stalled in its progress around the mid 90s there's a lot of strip malls that look dated and there's just not a lot to do within the city for people of the of the gen x generation and the millennial generation it's just something to consider when we're talking about trying to entice new new buyers new homeowners younger homeowners who are going to be there for a long time um some neighborhoods like bloomington st paul you see older homes and you see people where young people are very motivated to get in and redesign rebuild those older homes and and turn the whole neighborhoods into an updated neighborhood all on all on their own um i think they're out there i just think it's it's getting attraction points to to get people to say there's a lot to do in burnsville there's a lot to there's a lot of reasons to live here and it's a city within itself you don't have to venture out to get these activities that you want to partake in that's great feedback charity of any other comments nope i think we're gonna go well thanks i appreciate that's great feedback i'm just gonna jump to the next question you know if uh at the end of the day we put a housing strategy in place what kind of outcomes would you like to see what things would you like to see happen as a result of this i'm not shy so i'll jump in on that one if nobody else is going to so number one i'd like to see funds that embrace a multiplier effect so that as we invest those relate in a good return on that investment whether it's in form of higher property taxes or maybe a low interest that we then can take those funds and reapply them to others so i i'd like to see a program that doesn't necessarily have a sunset but the multiplier effect is alive and well second of all i'd like to see a program where we're seeing houses being updated simply our housing stock with the community really a lot of it being started in the 60s and so forth is simply getting older and there's no reason why we can't continue to have great homes in our community that are older homes but we do need to reinvest in them and so it would be great to have a lot of those homes reinvested in and some of them may have a higher and better use it simply means it's time to tear them down and build something new whether that's a an upscale twin home for senior citizens or whatever it might be but for those that still make a lot of sense as the highest and best uses of single-family home homes are that are keeping up with the times and that are modern even though the shell of the home is an older home first i think you had a comment there yeah um i'd like to see i'd like to go back to talks about the marketing of the we have grants available that again i didn't know about them either until looking at these notes and uh i'd like to see an aggressive marketing campaign towards how we're how we're able to help people who want to invest in their homes bring their homes up to date make new houses or people who want to move into an area that says hey this if you're industrious and you want to buy a home renovate it this city will help you that would encourage people to move in here and also why you want to move to burnsville again we have a lot of great things in burnsville we just don't have a great way of letting our residents or the surrounding communities know why you'd want to come to burnsville and spend your spend your time and your money i think if we make the city just appeal more attractive through an aggressive marketing campaign we can really change a lot of the image which in turn would bring in a lot fix a lot of our problems laura looks like i get to come in as well yeah i just want to echo sort of an effort to attract young professionals and young families i think when you fill up that school district all of those struggles start to turn the tide a bit as much as they can and and young professionals in to either build toward the entrepreneurial undercurrents of our city or to be spending their beautiful economic dollars in our city as well so those would be really highlights for me of where i think we could target best um to help our city flourish all right i have a question did we do a study or was there a study of any sort um that was done that can kind of help us understand where are the millennials moving um and what types of things that they're interested in because when i think about feedback that i've heard especially from millennials they want they want an opportunity to be able to enjoy themselves outside of the home as well as have a decent place to live so for example i'm not sure if i know the area very well but i want to say edina has some things that are happening where they could the young people can get out they can enjoy the neighborhood and do some things and then but be able to go back to a nice home and um some of those homes don't look like just single family homes they might look more like condominiums or you know spaces where they don't necessarily have to cut grass or shovel snow i understand that that's not something that millennials are turned on by either so in the in the best world if i were to think about what would be the best opportunity for residents i would be thinking about something that embraces not only the millennial but or the younger generation but what would also embrace um the older generation so how can they co cohabitate together um and still have everything they need for example that could look like uh housing that is um able to you know to serve a young family but yet and still maybe mom and dad might need the assistance or maybe mom's alone now because that's not here and she just needs to support or a family member or somebody needs to support um so i i think that's turning into another type style of housing i know that at one point st paul was interested in building on housing to kind of fill that gap to fill that need to help the older generation still be able to live independently but yet jointly where they have the support so maybe something along those lines i'll just keep it on to that i think yeah well it's good to focus on millennials as well we should be focusing like you said the the senior seniors in aging a big population there i know we're doing a lot of new buildings that came on the market with our senior living centers surrounding burnsville and kind of maintaining both them as well and even people that want to move out of bigger cities in the downtown areas and want to move into more of the suburb area and kind of resort here as we know we have all the amenities of parks and in lakes and walking paths and everything within within our city limits that kind of encompasses you know we put multiple cities together and that's a city of burnsville i know i think the other piece that i would look at is that parts of our city don't have real good internet access the any place that's not served by um comcast or you know the uh what's our phone company centurylink you know their the reliability of their internet is not very good as witnessed by the public utilities commission for the state finding the frontier and other companies that have you know they've contracted to supply a certain amount of internet access but they failed in the speed and things like that i think the other piece is that if we do promote the availability of funds making sure we have enough funds available because i could see burnsville it's like you were saying the housing stock really needs to be updated and if all of a sudden you do enough marketing that you run out of funds that's not very good either so making sure that the funds that are available i mean you look at the cares grant there were what three and a half million dollars requested and the council only allocated like a a million and a half or something like that so it's like okay there was a promise but you can't deliver all of the promise and i know it wasn't promised that everybody could get something but still it's um you know putting something out there and then you can't deliver what it is that's that would be the other piece that i would look at it's great i'll keep us moving along here um so the third one starts getting at the question of what role the city should play in shaping housing in the city and so what i guess what i've asked here is you know what are your thoughts about how the city should get involved with housing in burnsville you know what what degree of involvement um you know on a kind of a scale what do you think is the most appropriate role for the city as it relates to getting involved in housing in the city i think we've kind of been tapping on it a lot tonight so as a homeowner here in burnsville and especially when i first moved into burnsville back in 2006 and i bought an older home i bought a 1966 home some of the things that concerned us was okay your furnace is going to be outdated you um your air conditi our air conditioning was definitely outdated um the old air handler where we actually were considering having to have somebody open up our ceiling just to get that out of there i think providing the resources for homeowners to take the initiative to reinvest in their homes is critical whether that could look like a a small loan with a small interest to pay it back or maybe it's not paid back in some capacities just so people can have the opportunity to really feel like their property is worthwhile and making sure that we're bringing the pride back to the city right because if our residents don't have that then the city won't have that collectively so i think making some opportunities for residents to be able to reinvest in their houses would be a great great start we've talked about the solar panels on the homes before but i've never really heard of the programs that actually do that it was not anything that was widely shared so that i could take advantage of something like that and maybe there are some opportunities where the homes can be updated in a way that people find them more desirable like the newer homes i mean we're right next door to lakeville what's what's pulling people to lakeville with all these new builds what is that um because a house is a house right but what are the bells and whistles that are pulling uh new residents in that direction so i think i think reinvesting finding some some grants some money maybe that's resources that are here in the city maybe that's businesses that are here in the city that provides the resources for individuals to um you know make their homes more worthwhile and that's what comes to mind when you ask that question for me that's great i think the other thing from my perspective is um you someone talked about it earlier having to deal with contractors you know could the city i know you can't recommend any individual one but can you certify contractors is are there some ways that you could say here's a list of certified contractors and the contractor has to go through and perform and show the work they've done proven they're a good you know contractor that that'll cost some money but it's not any funds where you have to put money into a house or anything like that it's just basically certifying somebody so that people could say okay if i go to these people the the city has at least some sort of uh you know investigated these people some way um even when you go to like the better business bureau's website you could look somebody up but almost everybody has a plus unless they're really bad yeah some kind of incentives uh incentives say for example like even with um electric uh panel boxes right sometimes you have to upgrade those with 220. i don't i'm looking more towards the feelings because i know you guys know that more than i do whatever it is so like some kind of incentive to do that type of thing or even with the um the plumbing you know sometimes um with these how these homes the the plumbing is there the pipes are really small and um you know just listening to the millennials they would be i would be afraid of that even as an older resident to kind of go and have to repair some of that but if there are incentives for that work to be done maybe the product is sold at a lesser rate or maybe if you purchase that product then here's a certificate where you can have that work done just some things to help people want to reinvest in the housing it can be even simple as partnering with center point energy or energy consortium when doing home energy audits and maybe it's a a small credit back to you know partner with them and giving the homeowner little flexibility to you know update their homes and save a little money on their utility bills and giving back to that or yeah even yeah kind of making we have all said it here today but making awareness to all the grant programs and as a owner of a older house myself uh when we purchased this i've done a lot of renovating ourselves and you know you gotta pick and choose what was what you needed to replace first was it the windows was it the furnace was it the you know was it the the bathroom floor or whatnot and you know knowing that these grant programs are out there and to be able to take utilization of it or even having organisms of looking into them could have you know helped swayed some decisions uh one way or another but yeah i think it's just creating awareness to kind of these programs out there even i think in our background presentation there was mention of like rapids and they created their own uh programs like deferred loan program or like a fix up loan program could be even something like that where we kind of branch out of of existing grant programs from the dakota county or statewide and kind of could build one of our own programs and and partner with some type of funding agency to help out with that thank jeffy so i concur with a lot of that i my answer to that short answer would be as little as possible at a minimum i think it means that we the city has responsibility to define the programs and vet those programs and promote those programs on top of that or in addition to that i'd say then the city has responsibility additional responsibility to make sure they're a success if we could partner with somebody that administers the process of all of that and that would be terrific and not put the city in that business if we can't find that person the city in order for it to be success may need to get involved but my short answer is for the city to be involved as little as possible you know i'll go to lower laurie i had a comment so i think the city does have a role that's important to incentivize um opportunities that express their values so if we say that burnsville is a vibrant city and boldly leading and welcoming to all the choices should reflect that one of my favorite experiences as a burnsville resident was a couple of years ago when i was putting in a rain garden and i went to the dakota county uh water and land uh seminars to do their program to put in a rain garden and when they went through the different cities and what opportunities they had for grants and additional funding for that burnsville stood out head and shoulders above the rest other cities might offer 50 of a rebate or a refund or um a hundred dollars burnsville was offering a thousand dollars to incentivize putting in these environmentally friendly rain gardens and when we can make our choices reflect our values like that when we show we are boldly leading on economic or on environmental issues like water um then we we shine so those might be energy efficiency updating mechanicals uh i loved the program discussed about down payment assistant that assistance that encourages or enables young families and professionals to move to the city maybe a program for architectural enhancements that incentivizes improvements that enhance the beauty of the mid-century homes that we have as opposed to trying to hide it and pretend that it's not an older home they're full of interesting character or enhancing the exterior landscaping that makes all of our communities look their best so in summary just making sure our choices in programs reflect those sorts of um values that we've set forth on chris one thing i've come across is this is just here to say but the um a lot of the people who i've ran into who are doing remodels to their homes um they're enthusiastic and they're they're really into their projects but when they go to apply for permits to the city they present their uh proposal the city approves it they go over whatever they need to go to they get approval after the fact they really run into other problems where things weren't clear for an example i ran into a guy who wanted to do hot roofing he got approval from the city for his project and then afterwards the contractor said you know this isn't legal in burnsville there's only two cities in minnesota that this is illegal and one of them is burnsville so he goes and inquires about this they say yeah you can't hot roof the city engineer does get back to him after a few days and says uh you can't hot roof requires why they never get back to him he inquires of the contractor the contract just says reasons he's gotten before long story short that's one example there's other examples too of people putting decks and additions their houses and stuff like that and it's just frustrating sounds like it's just frustrating right now to work with the city you get approval for something and then they they retract that approval later on or they say that the city inspectors come back and they say this is a violation you need to fix this significant site where was that in the beginning is what the homeowner will ask what i think we need to do is have a better upfront portfolio packet ready for people who want to do remodel projects and really be ready to help people who want to remodel projects instead of being the reason for their frustration that's what seems to be happening a lot and if we want we have these older homes and we want people to move in and redesign them and revitalize them we need to be a city that is known for working with the residents and being really easy to work with and whether if that means removing restrictions lifting permits or providing grant money you know these packets could have come inclusively with hey if you're doing this this is also how you can get some of this funded too that's great gonna jump ahead and this is more cutting to the chase and you all have i think answered this at least to some extent already but um you know it's about using city funds i mean do you think that there is an interest in using actual city funds and staff to enhance programs or create new ones and i mean i think i heard yes in a lot of quarters there i know jeff you said as little as possible i don't take that as a no necessarily but more that you're leveraging other maybe other things i don't know but i'd like to hear a little more about the thoughts on using actual city dollars to uh put into some of these programs i mean i'll jump in first i think my comment would be just as it makes sense i think i don't i don't want to be tapping into more property tax increases or or increasing the tax levy to create a a program that may not be utilized or anything but i mean if there's enough uh enough influence not influenced but enough affirmation for it or people are you know really wanting a certain certain program i think the city should certainly look into it and maybe divert funds from one city fund to the next first before they start looking in increasing property taxes or increasing the tax roll go maybe there's a way to create some sort of tax increment financing for residential housing where you know if somebody goes and buys a house that's really run down and it's only worth 150 000 well the tax on that's only so much but if they you know completely redo it and the value goes up to 350 000 can they get some of that tax money back like a business would in with tax increment financing you know can that be what supports a program to help people you know just the increase in their tax not everybody's tax but their tax so when i said as little as possible i didn't necessarily talk about or think about funds i was thinking more about process or administrative support on the fun side i would say that once we've explored the grants that are out there that may be available to the city and let's hypothetically say that they come to five hundred thousand dollars but we determine as a city to be effective and make this program successful we need a million and a half then i think the city is going to have to take a good hard look at that and say okay do we cover that gap and then how do we cover that gap i think part of the easy answer for me is and this is this whole conversation was not only originally centered on homes it was also centered on a lot of the older commercial buildings in the city as well and from for me the easy thing to suggest is that if on the city owned land when they sell a commercial property that land that money becomes available to the commercial upgrade commercial industrial upgrades if we have residential lots through tax forfeiture or through the city owned that we sell those funds then become available for residential development so to me that's maybe an easy thing again i don't know at the end of the day how the math works on that the reality is that in order for to be successful we have to find we have to have the funds available to make it successful right thanks thanks for that clarification i made a note that we're talking about staffing and admin on the littlest possible side which i think makes sense so i know what regina is going to talk about later with the land that's down in the south burnsville i mean if they build nine houses on there that's a lot of in addition to the you know the money we get from selling the land that's a lot of taxes we're going to get that we're not seeing at all right now and and something like that to me could be part of the equation too chris did you have a comment yeah just to uh i like did what the rapids has done with their home for generations 2 program and offering permit rebates it does it's not the worst idea in the world and uh i do like that they offer a low interest loan of up to thousand dollars which also generates income for the city too when you get to collect um that interest money and then it helps it shows people again that you're you're willing to help them as much as you can in revitalizing their homes or their businesses that they bought great feedback on that all right i'll go ahead and jump ahead then okay so i mean this is great you guys are always terrific as far as providing feedback so i makes our lives a little easier uh in terms of next steps i mean our thought was that you know this is an uh an initial discussion and and it's we've gotten a long ways and i appreciate that but would think we'd like to aggregate some of this feedback and start looking at what priorities make the most sense uh you know the city already does an awful lot uh whether everybody knows it or not right you have a lot of things that you're doing that are on par with what a lot of other great cities are doing with respect to housing and so i think it's a function of evaluating how the existing programs match up to where we want to see priorities go into the future and then start thinking about how we tweak that or you know either eliminate or improve certain programs but i think that's staff work right i mean i think that's for the staff to go back and and answer these questions for you and give you some things to think about with respect to how programs may change within the city of burnsville and and have a conversation about those bring some of those back for consideration with the final goal ultimately of of being to prepare sort of this final housing strategy that will become you know the guiding document i guess for the staff as they move forward with housing in the city of burnsville so that's kind of what our thoughts were are there other sort of closing or final things that anybody did get a chance to talk about that we want to make sure we're getting into the thought process here i just have a question for the edc okay jenny um the goal does include commercial programs and a couple of you have brought that up so do you have similar ideals and tendencies towards the commercial programs as we do the housing as far as use of funds use the city resources just as we craft this to cover both bases want to make sure we know where you're at with those thank you so that's how we originally had talked about it and we had the same need in the same conversation on the industrial or on the commercial and industrial side with the agent of some of those properties at the end of the day we can only do so much and we can only do it so fast and so if it makes the most sense to start small which it usually does and work out the kinks and have a really well-defined process and then expand it from there where a year from now we're having the conversation about extending into commercial industrial properties then i'm all for that at the end of the day we all want it to be a success and we can't take on too much too fast and so i kind of throw that back at staff a little bit saying what is realistic to take on at this time i am um so i've been watching uh nationwide really what's what are we going to do with all these buildings now that everything has changed since covet 19 i think our reality that we're living and that we're seeing is a lot of these buildings that housed people to do work even to sell goods right that's not going to look the same after all the dust settles i think after covet 19 now that they've learned that people can actually work from home and they don't have to go to a facility to actually get a job done i i shudder to think what what it what is it going to look like with all these empty buildings all around right there's conversation that we're having at work right now um we're not going to send employees back to buildings so how do we downsize these buildings and which ones do we actually need and i think that's going to actually um be the reality that we have here in burnsville what are we going to do with all these empty buildings and how can we how can we reinvent what we do with these empty buildings because i don't think that being able to sell them to get businesses to come in and to offer goods and services the way that it looks yesteryear is going to look the same moving forward so and i'm basically just having a conversation out loud because these are thoughts that have been going through my mind as i've been watching all of this um the transition since covet 19. but i think that's going to be a reality we deal with as a city we're going to have empty buildings and what are we going to do with those and how are we going to make the city attractive because everyone knows if you leave them vacant and empty they attract rodents and a lot of other things so we're we're actually seeing some activity even now right um uptick because people are not working the same way they used to so i think while it's interesting to answer this question we have to kind of focus on what's to come with how we treat buildings and the use of them what is that really going to look like i don't think anyone has an answer right now but i think we can all imagine that it's probably going to look dramatically different than we anticipated maybe six or seven months ago so if we want to be thoughtful moving forward kind of considering that what that's going to look like it's going to be imperative i think i think your point about commercial industrial is is a good point but at this point in time i think you've got people out there who are willing to work forward and come up with proposals to use the resources that when the city has versus the housing stock itself i don't think people have that same thought process that you know if they want to redevelop something they can come to the city they can work with the city that type of thing that really has to be set i think first and then we get you know to crystal's point in another year or two we'll know what the the industrial buildings are needed for and um my guess is there's going to be a need it's going to be different than what it is now thank you that's it for me all right uh any last questions comments from the commission before we move on this was just discussion purposes only so there's no motion on this one so if there's nothing else we can move on right closing out item four moving on to agenda item number five recommendation related to south cross drive and portland avenue and land sale and i'll shift it over to regina to give an overview and background on this good evening chair members of the commission um so before you tonight uh we have a proposed land sale um it is city owned land opposed to economic development authority land i just want to make that distinction just for background the property was acquired by the city in in the late 90s and it was acquired for the purpose of landing a fire station in this location and that plan never moved forward we continued to retain the land and in the 2000s the city went out for rfp to develop the site um so the intent was to develop the property and we actually entered into purchase agreement to develop land into six slots because of the timing of that it just kind of fizzled out the market wasn't was basically we're heading to recession at that time and it never never moved forward so after that happened there were a couple of attempts for it to move forward fizzled out and then the city's position was well let's retain it because we might want it for a fire station again someday just held on to it for years and then with the recent fire station one expansion and relocation to a different site after much analysis it was determined that we would not need this site anymore and that it could become for sale again so a sign was posted on the land back in late 2019 we had multiple inquiries phone calls emails people asking you know this is you know what's the price how do i how do i purchase this so because we were unsure if these were legitimate questions legitimate offers we decided to request a letter of interest and we received i think there were eight letters of interest that we received six to eight letters of interest we have a policy and that was included in your packet that talks about land sales so when you have one or more party interested in a property we require an rfp process so because we received that number of letter of interest we went then went through the rfp process so we received four proposals at the end of the process from brandel anderson don a holmes ryan contracting and timeless homes and the purchase prices ranged from 138 000 to 585 thousand dollars i do want to note with don a holmes their purchase price um for actually all of the properties except for don a homes were first six lots um johnny holmes is proposing to do nine lots however in their rfp they stated that there would be a reduction if they were unable to attain nine lots after doing detailed plans and working with the city that there would be a reduction in price so we did reach out to allers jason was kind enough to provide us with the memo of the full memo is in your background which details the one reduction in don a homes from nine units to six units and what the purchase price could look like and then um what the the tax value would be for the city based off all based off of all the proposals um john a holmes proposal again um includes nine lots uh they were all single family and character reduced lot lines with private roads in the end we met internally as a staff evaluated the memo that was received from hours evaluated our planner and engineer and jenny we're on the review team based off of the land use which is low density the zoning which is r2 the purchase price the product type and the history that donnie holmes has in burnsville and the twin cities we are recommending donai holmes for the land sale and this is just an example of the product type all of the proposals included a family reduced lot line type of product and that's what surrounds it correct same type of prop they're single family homes but they're smaller lots and association based commissioner anderson correct um so it's very similar to i think it's the wildwood development which has reduction in lot size and reduction in setbacks for the area so it would almost mirror what's just to the north so not only are we asking for a recommendation from the economic development commission on the specific land sale and selection of the the proposal or the developer but we're also asking you to consider where the funds could potentially go and this is a recommendation ultimately it's the city council's decision but knowing what you know from our discussion on the previous item one of the things we we would like to know is if you would like to recommend that maybe a new program be funded maybe related to residential and we can explore that a little more if that's your you know recommendation what those details look like if that actually happens but we want to get some feedback from the commission on that typically the proceeds of a city-owned land sale would go straight to the general fund or a capital fund now sometimes if it's related to tiff it would go to the tif district or if if it's the eda it would go to an eda budget but this specific land sale will go to the general fender capital improvement fund so if you have a desire and perhaps want it redirected to one of these programs we would love to hear that discussion and and recommendation it looks like commissioner clavier has a question uh first there's are there any commercial investors looking to buy that property um do you mean a to build a commercial project or like a bit let me just cut let me just save everyone some time and come to the chase are there any are there anyone proposing to build a bar in that area because that's like a block away from my house um we did not receive we did not receive any bar restaurant gas station fast food type of um cool brewery type of proposals on that property you know all right well on to my next point then so one thing that we have in the city that is a problem is we are closely understaffed in our fire service the uh the we're understaffed by 22 people by nfpa recommendations if we're getting this what i still look to the numbers i believe it was forty thousand dollars potentially a year from as high as forty thousand dollars a year from the sale of this property and investment into it correct i think you might be talking about the property tax uh yep future products increase i think that's somewhere around there i don't know i guess we can't flip back to that page so i'd like yeah yeah i was about city portion was like 17. so it'd be nice to see that this money get allocate this is a serious issue i mean we're running two ambulances for 12 hours a day that's one car accident away from wiping out our ambulance services and making us rely on mutual aid uh we need more fire staffing i'd like to see not only this money but other money get earmarked going forward towards fixing that problem before it becomes a real issue it's a life safety concern any more of the presentation otherwise um okay yes so how much how much is the sale for and what's the estimated tax revenues so if don a holmes is selected and they are able to build the nine lots the purchase price would be 585 000 and then the city property tax and jason maybe you can help me clarify the numbers on the property tax so the orange or pink color there is is tax capacity and you know when we had the discussion about the strategic plan there was a desire on the part of council members to represent these um new market values as an expression of tax capacity because obviously you have to decide to levy against that tax capacity to raise those taxes so it probably is a little confusing but what each of these generate a new tax capacity is showing there we have a range of on the ryan just because of the range of values but what that would translate into from a property tax standpoint with today's tax rates is what's showing what the city would raise in taxes at current tax rates on the far right how much is that so for which one range that'll be supposed to 17. donnie 17 475 a year correct how many houses are there there are nine okay yeah and you know with an average tax bill i mean total is probably you know almost four to five four to five thousand dollars at those values okay thanks okay so i'm sorry go ahead crystal i was gonna what runs through my mind is okay they purchase these lots they build on them single family homes which is a plus right we've been just talking about how do we draw um younger people to our community here's just one idea um but then how do we reinvest so we get those families here but there's other things that keep those families from desiring to want to be here stay here so why if we reinvest that money into um this gets to your point with what to do with buildings um if we reinvest that money into something that is attractive to the younger families young families um then whatever we get coming from what they do activity wise goes back to the city right we can tax something to go back to the city it gets my whole point is this is my ideas you're selling these homes you're probably going to draw young younger families to buy these homes then what are you going to do to attract them to stay what can we do to attract them to stay reinvest in our community in ways that keeps the younger generation here or younger families here but when they spend money to leave their homes to go and enjoy activities so for example i'm just going to be hypothetical some kind of indoor amusement park of some sort we we would gain taxes from whatever it was that they were doing with that right so if we were able to gain taxes in some capacity that reinvests in our community i'm trying to look at a way of how do you solve one issue to solve another issue but to still raise tax dollars or bring in tax dollars to the city so that we can keep growing if that just made sense to everybody so it's all in my mind it's all intertwined what commissioner chris has said is i i don't want to minimize that because it is an important issue but my recommendation would be that we take the funds we build a new program exactly around what we're talking about tonight the reason being is that at seventeen thousand dollars a year in taxes that we're not achieving today today it's city-owned property there's no taxes being generated essentially in 20 years almost 20 years you've recovered that 390 000 and that tax base that we're creating some of the beneficiary of that will be the fire department and so in my mind if we give to the fire department one time it's money that's not continuing to to work for us where if we reinvest that money into these programs at the same time creating the tax base we're kind of addressing all at one time even though it's over a period of time versus just immediately here in the next year right so my my my thoughts would be very much to create a new program with those dollars that allows us to do some of the things we're talking about tonight and sure okay if i could just add to that um the the spirit of the recommendation that we made in the memo is really kind of geared at what you just said right so the the land sale proceeds are a one-time revenue right right so if you took them and tried to you know fund city operations you'd only be able to do it once right or maybe a couple times if you spread it out over a couple of years and then you're kind of right back where you started from so the the reason for recommending the don a homes obviously the sales price is the highest so that's for a good reason right but but mo as important as the growth in tax base this is an opportunity to get more tax base within your community which is kind of think what you're going with this yes which is provides an opportunity for the city to levy without impacting taxpayers right so you they could theoretically levy 17 more thousand dollars every year without impacting taxpayers that's essentially what this is doing and so to pay for fire pay for whatever you want to pay for right as a city you have to decide that through your budgeting process but those were kind of the two things that we always view are as important because that's a recurring sort of annuity to the city right that tax base is there all the time and can be used for that purpose and so i just wanted to clarify you're going where we were going with it but that was the spirit of our recommendation was to be looking at both of those aspects yeah i would emphasize in terms of the allocation the lump sum having be the seed capital for this new project these new programs and i i in the 17 000 i know that the city council is going to have 10 other great ideas on how to redirect that and it could be for the fire department it could be all sorts of other things but if we're going to be serious about these new programs and the rejuvenization and the contemporarization of our housing and industrial stock this half million is a nice start the second thing is i would encourage us to look at how to leverage that money via be a alone have it be a way to subsidize loans for example if the all right as everyone knows loans are really cheap right now but even in vegan no interest loan and so you go to the commercial bank you say okay what can you give us and the bank gives us a two percent loan great we'll take the interest and we'll pay this so now when we not only have a half a million dollars you can leverage this to five million dollars i mean because now you're servicing just the the interest on a very large loan and that now you've got a real industrial i mean now you have a program that you won't burn through because half a million dollars frankly is not enough to get a program going so that would be something i would challenge the staff to think about kind of break new ground or have corporate partners or something like matching grants that that sort of thing when when i'm i i've served on boards on non-profits who are always constantly leveraging donations and that's what the city could also do have these intelligent conversations with other vested interests and say hey we're doing a matching grant big corporations can you pitch in now we got some seed money we're going to use this um to add it added no whole new flavor a whole new way of of getting resources available so those are a couple of my ideas for you before we get into some more comments on here i just wanted to let the commission know and i think he's still available i think we have steve benke from danny holmes developer if you have any questions for him or if you want to have him field any questions he's available as well i need a motion on that to approve that what the staff is recommending or not we will need a motion to recommend the sale to don a homes for this for this one but steve is available for questions if we have any questions for him before i get to ul i think laura had a question or comment so laura go ahead first of all i'm wondering has anybody checked back i mean obviously it's great to have a representative from don a holmes but has anybody checked back these dates they were submitted before coronavirus kit so are these suggestions and proposals still valid are they still interested in these projects second of all i have some questions that steve maybe can answer specifically i'm curious if you can discuss what it is that's setting the ryan contracting bid apart from yours where they've got houses in a a little bit higher range um what is it about those homes i didn't get so deep in it that i bleed exactly what was going on that put them in a little different price range for some of the homes that they're proposing versus the ones that you have suggested and plotted um and why are you the only one who thought that nine houses was gonna fit is there some logic there where everybody else is seeing six lots and you see nine possible how realistic is it to get all nine um and finally for the city i'm curious do we need houses in the 450 000 range do we need more houses in the 700 000 range how will these meet sort of the needs or the gaps in our housing market right now lots of questions so chair if i may answer the question regarding um the four different proposals we received and if there's still interest from all of them yes they throughout the entire process they were kept informed and they are they were all interested until the day that i had mentioned that staff would be recommending don a holmes they are all aware of this meeting as well tonight as far as some of the other questions maybe they can be best directed you know to steve with donnie holmes yes steve if you want to chime in here and some of the questions that laura had sure uh i'm not sure can anybody hear me yep we're good okay yeah occasionally i have technical issues here um i want to thank the commission for for the time here um honestly as to laura's questions and i didn't write them down so i'm sort of going to just try to touch on the ones that i remember here and you can fill in any i i forget but um i think my biggest thing is is i have a significant history in the city here and i actually had done some work with scott larson who developed the wildflower property next door i've been very interested in that parcel since the fire station was uh proposed because it seemed to cut a corner out of what should have been a residential area um that sort of shows you how far back i go uh in the planning part of this um and what i noticed when i first saw the pud was it really didn't address the adjacent properties and there's a multi-family to the west there are single family across south cross but that's a significant artillery road and what was immediately adjacent to it was a narrower lot single family project which when i investigated it to refresh my memory essentially was the same prop pro same product that i had just completed a project in in woodbury so it it really spoke to things that we do that we do well and uh the other part of it is we were just coming to the end of our summer kill project where we built 99 units and worked our way through the recession took 14 years to build it out but we stuck through it and got it done i'm on the last three i'm on the last three units right now but essentially what i saw was a a a need to address today's planning concepts where a little bit more density actually helps um you know you're not putting in so much that it it changes the character the neighborhood we're matching the character of the neighborhood um you know we're trying to basically uh offer product that can do two things one is yes it's definitely possible we're going to sell to um to younger families or or people of that nature i think the the most of our product line that we're proposing here actually is going to be more of an empty nester type product and what that does is it brings some of those people yes maybe only nine but it brings some of those people out of the existing homes in burnsville and frees them up for new families um this is one little piece where you know we can get that going and you know maybe there's other land in burnsville that we can do this with as well and add to it but currently uh you know this is a piece that came at us that it was very very um attractive and you know we we definitely felt that uh that the site needed a little bit more than just the the six lot 85 foot wide uh product that was originally proposed um that's sort of where we're at with the project here um honestly uh the we have uh single-level villas uh villa style not really villas because evil is an association that it's it's really more of a of a maintenance of the private drive of a you know probably garbage but it's not that the whole project is handled like a townhome project or anything else it's it's simply we have some single level units but as part of the product line that we've developed for woodbury we also have some two stories and some splits and generally any of the product that i built in in woodbury the plans would just fit in here without with virtually no change um so anyway like i said i just saw an opportunity where the piece as proposed uh back in the early 2000s was not really using the property to its its its highest advantage and i think this does so ask a laura you might have any more comments down on this tv sir one question hold on one second laura sorry um i would just hope that the city staff would take a look at what housing price ranges we really need to fill out our offerings here in burnsville to make sure that the offerings suggested fit our needs um i don't really have any inside knowledge on that so i don't claim to uh but then i also wanted to circle back to the discussion right before uh steve shared with us about what we might do to use any sort of potential revenues and advantages from the sale to help build the city's path for the future and to me when you're looking at being a draw for families and young professionals it's straight in the school district and if we could find any sort of a prestige education program that could get a really good pr footing and and be something to draw attention to with regularity as a partnership with 191 if we were to use some funds for that that would that high tide would lift a lot of votes along with it dan you want to go well i just had a question on the lat size on how how big is the is the lot size on these you you'd mention 65 feet or 85 yeah the adjacent part the adjacent project is actually 40 55 foot lots with 45-foot houses on it so you basically have wow 10 feet of setback five on each side and then you have 10 feet between the houses once they're up i think one thing to keep in mind here is that because it's a small project in an odd-shaped lot yeah the homes at the end of each side of the block actually have additional space now some of that's going to end up being used for our water retention and our you know stormwater management some of that kind of stuff and we've got some grading uh because of the the pill that goes uphill into wildflower and those kinds of things but you know generally they are a lot single they are not you know the big backyard they're not more the the typical ex urban or suburban style uh home which we actually have large numbers of in burnsville i mean i grew up in one i grew up in river hills and that you know that area was extremely you know well-built a lot of lots single-family you know very good you know we're much closer to you know little center which we all hope is going to be getting redone into a new um a new character i think that obviously the more that we can do to help that happen it's going to help you know the entire city but in the meantime you know i do feel that the the units here are more of a lower maintenance type structure and at our pricing they are matching the wildflower current pricing i think that's something to keep in mind very clearly that currently wildflower homes immediately adjacent to this are typically in the four to four fifty range i don't think it's really appropriate to attempt to move into something that is significantly off that mark i i think that that kind of a project would not really move very well personally that's our opinion that's why we propose this i totally agree i think you want something that complements the local neighborhood when you're only dropping nine houses in it's gonna sound like it's a little more dense and that's quite all right with me so thank you well there was a wildflower that just came on the market at 450 in the last couple of days and i went through and looked at the lot sizes on wildflower and they're less than uh you know what one-fifth of an acre yeah so this is very comparable it's more of a townhouse feel that's great thank you yeah i'll just put in my two cents here and yeah when i was looking at the proposals and and thinking of how can they put nine houses on on a complex in in the neighborhood development like this when everyone else was proposing six lots but once you start doing your research and looking at the adjacent properties and in the wildflower neighborhood you start to realize that the when they're going into this nine houses they're they're comparing to the wildflower development going into that two of an acre or six to eight thousand square feet per per lot size and and looking at uh the proposed sales value is between you know 450 000 median target range you look in wildflower and all the homes are ranging from 350 000 up to like what i was saying is the highest one i saw was about 470 000 in that development and i think you don't want to go stretch yourself too far outside that range because then you kind of take away from the wildflower neighborhood development changes the the property in in that area if if woodbrook is more if you want to call it more elite or higher home values it'll either drop wildflower or there won't be any interest in in the wood brook and i think for my recommendation i think this is a a great project for dining homes to take over i like that they're trying to match kind of the surrounding areas with the wildflower neighborhood and um overall i kind of i like the development and kind of the plan they've proposed for us tonight i think chris might have had something oh chris did you have something uh just to agree with you i think that this uh donnie holmes i trust that they have in their plan for the nine homes um it looks like we get the best of both worlds we get the half a million dollars which i agree with what we said earlier take that money and invest in the future we get the 17 000 but up to 70 possibly up to 70 000 of a tax revenue base per year that's going to be continual and there to help fund things like my proposal for the fire department or whatever it goes that's going to be a continual income so it looks like they have everything that you could want right here i mean good purchase price good tax base coming out of it steve seems to have his ducks in a row i mean seems like a successful guy so i don't think you know we're that's his he's an expert in that subject so it looks like everything's great mean one of the reason why i thought the nine lot would work is that i'm not uh i'm i this is what i do taking things through city councils and things so i had absolutely no qualms about you know taking the proposal you know going back to planning commission going back to council going it getting the comp plan updated if needed you know all those things are part of what we do so if that part of it didn't bother me and i do feel like you know sticking with the six slots it basically takes a a project that was approved back in 2000-ish and and doesn't really do anything new and i think i think really burnsville needs to do it yeah i got something there i'll make a motion that we uh recommend to the city council that the city take the donne homes nine lot offer i'll second i get it that was getting recycled but area of motion by a second by a favor i guess we go to regina for a roll call okay just a moment commissioner newman commissioner anderson aye commissioner kepler all right commissioner lafaver aye commissioner clavitor all right commissioner fitchett aye and the motion carries yeah just one point of clarification that commission laura brought up on the school tax base on property taxes i don't know if everybody's aware of this but a certain percentage and it's a fairly high percentage goes to the school district so some of the property taxes goes to the city some goes to the school district and then the other portion goes to the county you guys probably know the breakdown on that i do not off the top of my head i do not i mean some goes to the watershed district there's a whole breakdown on your system the school district gets more than anybody yeah they get a big chunk of it so they are indirectly benefiting to that question 23 or so it's a big chunk thank you congratulations all right thanks steve for joining us making questions available eric can we also make a recommendation for the use of the funds yeah that's what i was going to say i'd like to make a second notion that a separate um fund be set up for any city-owned property sales to go into and that would be designated at a later date for you know projects within the city but set up a recommendation to set up a separate fund for these dollars to go into to be used to better the city in a way that is determined in the future now staff are looking for a motion on where the funds are allocated to is that just more recommendations and comments packed um i i think it would be appropriate um a recommendation that any city based off of commissioner anderson's motion any recommendation of city-owned land sales go to a residential or business program development fund a new fund new fund related to residential and business programs right i think that's you know to be formed at criteria to be formed at a later date yep sure so we have a motion on the table looking for a second a second got a second we'll go to regina for a roll call just a second commissioner newman hi commissioner anderson aye commissioner kepler aye commissioner lafaver aye commissioner clavita aye commence commissioner fitchett hi thank you all right i think that concludes item number five going to agenda item number six looking at the edc legislative portion for discussion thanks jason i'll move it over to jenny deprived overview and background on this agenda item thank you mr chair regina is pulling up the brief powerpoint so you've probably noticed if you've been with us a while that this legislative priority item is a lot shorter i think than ones in the past so we made a significant change last year and how these are prioritized and the level of detail that was in our list so it was really pared down i just want to update you on what which ones we have here that are related to economic development so um on the screen and in your packet we have our priorities and those are still we had priorities before and these are things that we advocate for and take action on and engage our legislative delegation on first on the list we have freeway landfill dump and the city's position on that is that we would want legislation that protects the groundwater and the river through remediation and we want a way that can support economic redevelopment that benefits not only the city but the region and we support use of non-bonding state dollars for remediation the reason why we have that in there is because it gives us the greatest flexibility for redevelopment so um and if you've been tracking this um for maybe the last year the council's preference is for an alternative dig and haul option which would allow for complete 100 redevelopment and that's the city's position on that so that's the priority the current status of that with covid things really changed a lot at the legislature and things that were on our list are still on our list i will say because so many things didn't get done and just kind of stopped midstream mpca has informed us that this project has been delayed for one year so they will be looking at going out to bid in 2021 to get dollar amounts for an alternative option which is a hybrid model so they sought public comments on this and the hybrid model has there was one where it was really flat one where it was really tall most amount of developable land no amount of developable land and the hybrid model is the one in the middle if you were if you were tracking that and so that's the one that they will be recommending and going to get bids for in addition to an alternate bid which is for digging hall so that is still on the table but that bidding process was supposed to happen this year it's been delayed a year and then they expect to ask for bonding funds once they know how much plan a and plan b costs in 2022 so that's the status of that one the other priority that we have related to economic development has to do with center village regina and i and our lobbyists and city manager have been trying to get some special legislation that would declare the burnsville center make it a redevelopment district it's been maintained and so it's not in bad shape to meet the criteria but we want it to be considered substandard for purposes of being able to create this type of tif district so we were making some inroads i believe with some legislator when the session started and things stopped and they still remain stopped and we'll see where things happen this is still on our radar we still need this this designation for us to have tiff as a tool which is our best tool to help fund the public infrastructure that's needed for the plan but that's where we sit with that certainly the retail environment has changed we talked about some empty buildings and what that means i mean this really could be a case study for other properties around the state and that's kind of what what our story is to the legislature we're this we're not alone in this there are other cities that are going to have this and let us be the test pilot for this so um so that's what's happening there i'm gonna make a sense of pictures of wall and show them i've invited them out it's certain senator yes remark on on that and this is getting away from the legislative genomes but the the owner defaulting on their tax mortgage payments does that have any impact on like the on the tif district or going after being certified for a tif area no it has to do with the amount of building inadequacies under the building code so how subs how deficient is the building how substandard is the building by the standard of the building code that's the legal analysis that has to be made so and then there are supporting positions and we have a few here related to economic development first and foremost is local control burnsville is a big advocate for local control and there are things that pop up from time to time that the legislature wants to take that local control away from cities and specifically we we continue to strongly advocate and support local control when it comes to land use when it comes to flexibility with different tools like local options sales tax franchise fees etc our council believes those should be left up to city councils to decide not the state and certainly maintaining our existing revenue tools that the city has in its toolbox and the city does not support legislation that would remove local control that imposes unfunded mandates takes away our ability to manage right-of-way and takes away our authority in the areas of zoning planning utility and transportation planning again our council believes those should those decisions should strongly be made at the local level and then specifically regarding economic development we are recipient of the deed host community economic development grant program and that is a grant program that recognizes the impacts of cities that have existing and operating landfills in this in the metro area and so we use those funds for certain economic development projects every year for city infrastructure it has to be for a public purpose we can't use it like tiff to a developer but we can use it for public improvements that help support a development or redevelopment project so so we have a supporting position so that we can have something there to continue to maintain our funding for those programs question how much do you have any idea how much that is every year is 450 000 a year 440 about that a little under a little more than 400 000. thank you so those are that's the summation of the economic development positions that we have right now council will be talking about their positions for 2021 at their october work session so as a matter of policy if you have thoughts or ideas or changes on what you'd like to propose we'll bring those forward to the city council for their discussion in october it's going to be another weird it's going to be a weird year though i think as these things if they open up and how the legislature items that are on their docket and their priority to open it up for discussion for the commission mr chair i would assume you'd want these to stay on here as priorities oh yeah the freeway i like the priorities i have no okay and i i think it's nice because you don't have too much yeah there was a lot on there but right it was i mean it was three times as long i think yes anything missing from a city standpoint or any further discussions i know this is just a discussion purposes only there's no emotion or anything on this one just in your recommendation looks good steph see nothing on oh chris uh i don't know this is what you're looking for but uh just to discuss the idea of the tiff legislation on that area as it's currently proposed with the center village initiative um when the center fish center village initiative was initially being kicked off back in between 2016 and 2018 with the idea of reta bringing retail tourism to the area dedicating that area to a retail shopping district with mixed-use housing built in since then we've seen a lot of downfall of similar areas city walk in woodbury [Music] maple grove area you're seeing go look around and see all these spaces for lease and empty buildings around there i don't see a positive gain in turning that into a tif tif district in 25 years from now i don't see that paying back i don't see that that retail shopping being being a a viable option going forward and i think it's going to be a blighted area within five years if that's the plan to go with so i'll just add on to that creating a tif district doesn't mean you have to put it back into retail or shopping center capacity the tif is for anything for development in which the increment of property taxes go back into developing that designated area so it can be fully redeveloped into kind of our center village image that we're trying to go to more of a kind of a dual purpose capacity but half that purpose isn't going to be serving the community that have that purpose won't exist and the retail side of that purpose is isn't going to be isn't a viable plan and that area can be changed into anything it could be retail it could be it's a vision the plan's a vision it gives a framework and with covid as as was noted earlier that's a change element and we may have to contemporize our our vision so you're right but that doesn't mean it won't be used for tiff it could be used for different more housing we might have more housing down there instead of in less retail or but we need we need a better plan support center or something so yeah and if it's something that seems viable then we can open the discussion to it making it into a tiff district but until we have a plan i don't think the conversation of making a tif district is the number one priority i think the center village is is the plan and it's a robust plan that we've put together over city staff eda edc has collaborated on this and created a whole center village vision to it and i think it's one of the best ones that we had i don't think any other city has come up with a vision for blighted or redeveloping areas that are looking run down in needs redevelopment this is the village is a redevelopment plan to repurpose into multi-multi-dimensional it could be retail it could be housing multi-complexes it could be entertainment it's a whole zoning rezoning kind of area so what you see today as the burnsville center might not be the will not be the burnsville center in five or ten years that that ball could be split in half it could be depending on where the market goes it could be fully demolished and re-changed into different sections of development what i find interesting is on the north side of 42 you pretty much have everything full you've got all the retail full it's the mall itself that is the thing that's hampering and if you look at southdale what they put in is they've got condos they've got apartments they've got a hotel i mean that's all what's made the difference at southdale and i think that's what can happen out here and it's not retail absolutely not you know that's they'll be part of it because there'd be people there but the retail is is small in the end i think and just kind of speaking to them all kind of library my point is the city has no ownership in the mall it's all owned by other third-party providers and and the city is creating a voice and uh collaboration and getting all the interested parties into into discussions of how can we now that i'll pick on sears here's has been out of there and how can we redevelopment get sears on involved and either selling their their property to another developer and kind of how to redevelopment and that's what the whole center village the vision is kind of all about and i believe all those redevelopments can happen without a tiff we don't have a lot of land available in burnsville there's there's a reason enough there's enough reasons to to to develop and with this with cdl filing for bankruptcy and going into foreclosure there's opportunity for somebody to buy it straight out and redevelop it in their own life without any incentives like a tif zone we can have the benefits of the tax base right away without waiting years and years for it to come back to us i love your optimism mr chair members of the commission we don't have tiff as a tool right now and so this is seeking to be able to have a tool in the toolbox and how it gets used and when it gets used has yet to be determined and because it's tiff it will be driven by a development so you have to have a development that shows an increase in tax base to be able to create that increment to use it for whatever purpose you would decide when that comes forward so but without the tool you don't even get to decide or make that decision because it's not an option so this is just about putting more tools in the toolbox and those decisions will be made down the road and you're absolutely right it's a vision plan it's not a pud or specific development plan that will come later much later and the market will be much different but a lot of decisions to come later absolutely but this is a starting point and we have to start somewhere and this is this is where these things start laura do you think you had a comment you literally took the words out of my mouth i have right here the tiff is a tool in the toolbox so the only thing i have to add anymore is that i think you've got exactly the right angle for a lobbying perspective that the area that is formerly known as burnsville center can be the testing ground for the next vision of the minnesota economy and so i i hope you continue to advocate for it strongly okay we've seen nothing else on [Music] legislative agenda so i think i'll go back to our well we got one more before we go back thank you commissioners for the for the discussion thank you thanks jenny we're moving on to agenda item number oh that was number six now we're going to agenda item number seven uh talking about the economic development strategic plan i'll flip it over to regina to give us an overview and background on that when she pulls up their powerpoint i just would like to give kudos to regina for helping run the meeting behind the scenes she is taking the minutes she is queuing up the power points and she's presenting so thank you miss duncan she's feeling two jobs yeah exactly and helping with zoom with eric so thank you thank you okay i need oh yes okay um so this is just a standing update oh this is just a standing update that we've provided probably over the last year or so since the strategic plan was in place and so each meeting have been given an update on those five different items starting out with ensure sustainability of the burnsville shopping center and county road 42 corridor and things that we've been doing working towards all of these goals so five below is now open so be sure to check them out if you haven't yet i checked them out probably about a month ago and bought some cool fun things i bought a spongebob t-shirt for my son for like five dollars it was awesome that's why it's five or five i guess so check them out um as mentioned before sierra trading and tj maxx home goods uh will hopefully be opening very soon looks like they're making some progress internally um and i'm probably going to mess up the name ineffable brewing is coming soon if you haven't checked out the news story on kstp please do there was a really nice piece councilmember gustafson was present and they will be taking over um what was the nutmeg spot right by india palace on county road 5 in county road 42. so check them out i believe they're opening in about a month from now really really cool to see somebody opening and opening up during these times and then the county road 42 study is underway by dakota county right now and that stretches from rosemont to the burnsville very western border the entire corridor and they're evaluating the road and the sidewalks trails within the area to see what type of improvements any type of changes that will need to be happening throughout the entire corridor so there is a survey like a wiki map that you can add comments and feedback to if you haven't done that already please do so this will be ongoing for the next few months before an actual report is provided but they'd love to hear from not only are the businesses within the area residents within the area people that use the corridor members of the public so please take the survey and encourage your friends and networks to do so as well and then a highlight we were the recipient of a rig grant for an auar so a lot of acronyms here so through the dakota county community development agency i always want to say authority but it's agency they have a redevelopment incentive grant and some of the funds can be used towards more planning type documents so we applied for a fifteen thousand dollar grant to be used towards an area-wide no getting to get this wrong what aur stands for alternative urban area-wide review this is something that needs to occur for the center village area really in order to get the area's shovel ready for development so we could have taken the approach that each developer that comes in depending on the type of development the intensity of the develop development they may have triggered the need for an eaw and environmental assessment worksheet which adds a lot of time analysis for the developer in the future you can also do this auar which looks at a larger area and you create development scenarios and that document gets updated every five years and also based off of the different development scenarios we are as a city taking that approach to do an aur many cities do this as well to help with their planning purposes basically once this is done this makes the area really shovel ready for developers so that they don't have to go through that extra entitlement process so the goal is one to you know help make this more attractive get the impediments out of the way another thing is we're changing the guiding the land use to mixed use for many of the properties basically from county road 42 north and then the very northern portion of the burnsville center properties to mixed use in order to do that through the metropolitan council they also require this environmental type work so that's another trigger for doing the auar it is budgeted amount that the city council has approved for the 2020 budget and so by obtaining the grant we're helping bring down that cost so the next strategic plan item through the economic development strategic plan is improve the image of 191 and the city we've been meeting regularly quarterly with what we call our partners group which includes the school district the chamber of commerce the city and experience burnsville or cvb and we've kind of changed from uh just giving each other updates and working on sharing information to more of a let's roll up our sleeves and and and get some things done so the next tasks that we're working on are a new resident packet and some type of celebration for our new residents we'll be working on a 2021 manufacturing week plan not only to highlight some of our cool industrial type uses within the city but then also to highlight some of the cool things that they're doing in the school district through their programming and then a future realtor event via zoom so we had a great turnout probably about a year year and a half ago where we invited actually it was the idea of a realtor i think it was coldwell banker or edina realty and they basically filled the room skip and i gave them an update on the economic development strategic plan and different priorities and and really great feedback from that so we thought well let's open it up and have a zoom event commissioner anderson i would combine your last one and your first one and not make it a new resident pack which you can use it for anyway but get it to the realtors so they can give it to prospective residents so they unders can understand the value of the school district that's a really good idea thank you the next item is continued development within heart of the city gallery on the parkway is now open that's a new chase development within heart of the city drive by it it's a really really nice building and check that out um and then you're doing for rentals price right price range no um occupancy have they filled the building or oh um i'm not sure on those numbers that's a great question to follow up on i don't know if jenny if you have any numbers um let's see here is that the roars project no um the chase project yeah i don't know the chase i had read in the business journal i think that the roars project on travelers trail yeah 95 occupancy after three months in heart of the city yeah they are they're very complementary to doing their projects in the suburbs for that reason they said the demand is pretty high well they've got a good view to downtown too where the other one doesn't quite have the same you know view of from all their different apartments and stuff right i have a quick great testimonial on the haven so one of our tenants in one of our buildings is a young guy that's about 27 i would say and he told me that he had just moved from a very nice apartment in minneapolis to the haven and he said even though i've lost some amenities that i have i have most of them like i wanted that are walkable but at the same time i'm really close to work and it's expensive but it's not as expensive it was in minneapolis i'm going that's exactly the story that we wanted to tell with those you know getting those younger generations to to come into the city thank you thanks for sharing we are in the process of rezoning land uh within what's known as heart of the city it will still be known as heart of the city uh but we're changing the land to transit oriented development now a few months ago the city council approved the transit oriented development ordinance so once the land is rezoned to tod then you can use the ordinance that matches right now it's just kind of floating on the books right now and then the orange line bus rapid transit plans are in for review the next item is enhance and build awareness around going back to the transit orientated development have you talked to kraus anderson at all that owns most of that vacant land we we have been in contact with crosstalk i mean they're building a big apartment in downtown minneapolis you got this haven story here might be a good story to tell them there's potential interest so the next item enhance and build awareness around the city's existing housing and commercial programs and develop programs as appropriate and we talked a lot about this tonight with um our discussion with ellers but some of the things that we've been working on kind of working towards a relationship to this goal are growing minnesota visits and those have begun with the chamber as the lead we are contributing some funds to that i will report back when we do have the data our our first visit was a virtual visit with the burnsville chamber of commerce ambassadors and their board kind of as a kickoff and a test case before we start meeting with businesses and having those virtual visits with businesses so kind of a test case for us the city um and the experience burnsville or cvb have partnered in in many ways with the chamber of commerce chamber of commerce typically has hosted listening sessions with themes around manufacturing small businesses the hospitality industry and any opportunity that we have to join the chamber we have just to share resources with the people that are attending connecting them with resources and then the burnsville cares program we had 160 one applications received um have some notes here uh 127 were deemed eligible 20 ineligible and 14 were incomplete of those applications i'm not sure of the status of the lottery if that has occurred or that's in progress but we hope to get the funding in the recipients very soon the non-profits have been cut checks and so [Music] thank you economic development commission for your quick feedback on development of this program it's appreciated more to come on this sure so the lottery was done today and so we're in the process of notifying those folks that they will get funded or not get funded in the next coming days um that list will become public but we want to notify those that want to notify those that applied first sure and then tonight we have the uh at the start of the housing strategy discussion so um and more to come on that the next item continue the city's position as a regional destination so we've been doing some kind of fun stuff not only from our economic development planning community development department but we've started to integrate with some of our other departments and really collaborate we're working with the new fire station fire station number one to create a place making area i encourage you here's another opportunity for you to be engaged maybe some of you received an email today or yesterday regarding participation i'm giving your input on what you would like to see here and how you would like to interact with whatever this area will transform to there's a debt there will be a dedicated wall space and dedicated landscaping area for something and what that something is it's um we're leaving it up to the community to help guide what that will be so encourage you to participate and hopefully you know this just won't be a fire station but this will be you know community gathering opportunity space and people may have a kid's birthday party and have a little you know time for reflection or um maybe they'll be on a walk from a neighboring business and have a nice place to to sit and enjoy or for our firefighters emergency personnel little space for them to to get outside and enjoy so i encourage you to participate in that effort toward a flavor i think i kicked that off at the last economic development commission really fun event next year we hope to do it again in some capacity hopefully we'll have some more or we will have some more time to plan the event and to rethink some more strategy around that but really fun event to highlight our racially and ethnically diverse businesses and encourage people to get out and and support restaurants during covid we had three parks and wrecked drive-in movies this was sponsored by the park and rock department but we kind of tagged along and used our ub long here brand to provide our residents um and maybe visitors you could it was basically open to the public so burnsville residents or people from surrounding areas were welcome to attend i think there were 180 vehicles that were allowed at any of the drive-in movies times however many could fit in a car so we had a a great turnout we provided cups with candy and some ub long hair swag as well as some promo information connecting people with restaurants through the visitors and convention bureau and then also to our place making um opportunity for people to give feedback and to to join at the groundbreaking and then um the ub long hair song contest so there the winners were announced uh i don't know if you heard the song it's really they're all fantastic like every entry was really cool like anyway um so ben and shannon will get the opportunity to record their song at the garage really really cool couple they moved to burnsville their family they have i think two kids and just you know moved here for the nice backyard and they really love their neighborhood very complimentary of moving here so um we're just so excited to work with them and we'll be integrating the song into different marketing avenues and that's it if anybody has any questions i'm more than happy to answer otherwise um i'll turn it over to the chair any comments or anything from this subject item this is uh really really good but this is i have one really off-the-wall comment it's not related to this but i want to share it go ahead i use the old people for my thoughts this money that we're talking about that we're proposing be used for housing redevelopment i wonder if we approach the school district and this goes back to some of the comments earlier tonight and we offer to buy one of the elementary schools that's sitting there vacant it's going to be mothballed and deteriorating and not looking good in the community we then use some of the grants that we have available to for demolition work we demo it we re-zone it we clean it up we mark it up considerably in price and we sell it to a residential developer which generates new housing and new families in our community in a new tax base which now signific could potentially double that money and now we leverage it even more and we help the school district in the short term mr chair commissioners it's my understanding that there's that opportunity does not exist in burnsville because there's no elementary schools for sale in burnsville so they're going to repurpose um is it sioux trail i believe is the ones my understanding that they're going to repurpose that so there's metcalfe which is an eagan and then the other one i think was in savage yep yeah hidden something and then but at the diamond head education center the school board did agree or come to consensus to sell two out lots in the parking lot for development redevelopment so we've been in discussions with them certainly along the way and doing what we can to facilitate redevelopment exactly like you said commissioner exactly like that thanks jeff so you're not off the wall you're not alone it's too bad suit rail isn't available there's lots of land over there too beside it it would be an awesome residential development for new for a part of the community that has been really beat up with closing of schools and that you know those buildings are so old that without putting significant money in i'm afraid they're not adding a whole lot to the community anymore i hate to say it but very funny all right we'll close out uh genital number seven there there's no motion on this one this is just an update and we'll go back to we postponed our election of chair and vice chair because commissioner fitchett was having some technical issues with uh zoom and she decided to come in to council chambers uh we'll go back to that one i think are we going to redo everything or are we just doing chair because i don't know just the vice chancellor okay i know you had interest in i think where's the vice chair or either or either okay we we made a we made a motion on the chair and then we postponed on vice chair so i'll pull back together open it up to the discussion on vice chair leave it up to discussions for the commission and then anyone online want to comment as well because i know we have interest with anderson pachette um am i missing anyone collider or anything just those two there's tools too it's just two i'm open to either one serving as vice chair i have no influence one way or another are you both equally strong your opinion on it acquiesce to the other well um i i don't i know i've got a few more years to serve um so i i feel like being as of service for the community and being able to help in the capacity of being a vice chair be something that i'd be very proud of doing and getting more immersed into the work of the board so but i know other people have strong feelings towards it too so i'm not opposed to you know spending another year just as a commissioner and not a chair or co-chair but it would be something i would highly be interested in to be able to you know get a little further into the work that we have here in burnsville thank you a lot of skills i think laura you had a comment that comment was several minutes old and the conversation has moved on oh i must have missed it i'm sorry laura you can still you can still comment down if it has any relevance if it was desperately important i would definitely interrupt i apologize for missing it all right eric are you still here i am still cheering yeah so how yield do you thank you good you know i'm not afraid to express my opinions and you're not prohibited from expressing them anymore no yeah we're good so i'll serve as needed so i need a motion to recommend fish head for vice a second alright first second i'll move it over to regina for roll call commissioner newman all right commissioner anderson aye commissioner kepler aye commissioner lafaver aye commissioner clavitor aye commissioner fitchett all right thank you thank you thank you commissioner gracious all right thank you around that's the election of cheer and vice chair we'll go back to agenda item number eight which is updates i'll switch it over to staff you have any updates divided by ubc so the city council meeting that agenda item number five the south cross and portland avenue land sale that will go to september 22nd i failed to mention that earlier and then just i'd encourage you to participate in the place making public feedback great opportunity for you to help shape our community that's all i have excellent all right thanks staff for the updates and with that there's no other items to come before us tonight and at this time would like to request a call for adjournment for the september 9th economic development commission meeting in a second well took your regina for real call i don't think technically we need to vote on it for a closure do it commissioner newman aye commissioner anderson all right commissioner kepler aye commissioner lafaver commissioner clavita right commissioner fitchit hi thank you and the motion carries thanks for joining in tonight you