Based on the context provided for the City of Burnsville, here is the transcribed text with speaker names and formatted timestamps. [00:00:00] **Elizabeth Kautz (Mayor):** Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It is 5:30 and I will call this regular work session of the Burnsville City Council to order. And I just have an announcement to make and that is about how you can participate. And so we welcome everyone to be here with us in person. Welcome. But the public can also attend in person virtually and also choose to watch us on burnsvillemn.gov/meetings or Comcast channel 16 or 859. The public can also participate through Zoom by joining us at zoom.us/join. And more information is available on our meetings web page and in the council agenda packet. So our work sessions are very informal and we go directly to the items on the agenda—the first item on the agenda. So, welcome everybody and welcome guests. It's good to see you all and I bet you I know what item you're all here for. And that's the first item on the agenda and that's the neighborhood organization and grant program evaluation. And presenting this evening is Mike Tracy, our human resource and interim communications director, and Amber Jacobson, assistant communications director, are presenting. Mike, the floor is yours. [00:01:25] **Mike Tracy (Interim Communications Director):** Yes. Good evening, Mayor and Council. Like you said, we're here to talk about our neighborhood pilot program evaluation. I'm also joined here by Steph Cass, who is our new communications director. This is week three for Steph joining our team. And then Ishmail Say, our engagement specialist, is also joining us who's done a lot of the work with this neighborhood pilot program. [00:01:50] **Elizabeth Kautz (Mayor):** Welcome. Welcome Amber and Ishmail. [00:01:55] **Mike Tracy (Interim Communications Director):** Thank you. Sorry. Oh, you need the clicker. Thank you. All right. So, just to get us started here, I just wanted to provide council and the community a little bit of a background on the neighborhood pilot program. So, we created this program really to do a one-year experiment designed to make outrageous efforts to reach and connect the community, really with the goal of creating a very simple and easy-to-follow neighborhood organization and grant program. And then over the course of these last 12 months, the idea was to learn from our experience and make adjustments accordingly as we learn and receive feedback from both neighborhood and staff who participated in the program. The City Council gave us some direction. Council direction was really around community defining the neighborhoods. They didn't want city staff drawing borders for the neighborhood; really wanted this to be a community-led effort. We provided grant funding—so up to $100,000 in grant funding from surplus property sales, with neighborhoods being able to apply for up to $10,000 of that funding. And then for the program administration, we reallocated staff resources to fund the administration portion of this program. A quick timeline: It started back in September of 2023 is when conversations around participatory budgeting—a white paper—was completed by staff. And then fast forward to September 2024 is when the City Council provided direction to pilot a neighborhood and grant program starting in 2025. So, it's exactly what we did in January. We launched the program. We worked throughout those first several months trying to organize neighborhoods. As you'll see in a future slide, we have five neighborhoods that we were able to organize or that were officially recognized in 2025. We opened up the grant application period in the summer with applications closing in September. And then this last December, we came to council with those grant applications for the city council to review and ultimately approve, which we'll talk about here in a future slide. And then here we are in February talking about the program evaluation. As we kind of have said to the community and said to the City Council over the course of this 12-month pilot program, our evaluation was really going to focus on two things. One was neighborhood feedback, which we received through a formal survey that we sent out to every resident who lives in one of those organized neighborhoods as well as informal feedback that we heard through neighborhood interactions throughout the year. We participated in a number of different neighborhood meetings, plenty of correspondence back and forth with neighborhood leaders and people in the neighborhood, as well as some of those informal community events that we've done throughout the year. And then lessons learned: over the course of the year, things that staff have learned through either those feedback and interactions with the community members or just our own professional experiences. And with that, I'm going to pass the evaluation portion over to Amber. [00:04:55] **Amber Jacobson (Assistant Communications Director):** Thank you. So as Mike mentioned, we have five established neighborhoods within the first year: Cedar Bridge, River's Edge, Early Lake, North River Hills, Parkwood South, and South River Hills. Um, some highlights to share: We have five grant applications submitted and approved for a total of $50,000. And with that $50,000, we funded 12 projects. We mailed out 2,208 postcards, which was a $7,000 investment. Everyone who lived within those neighborhoods received a postcard. And then we had six neighborhood organizing meetings during this time. We had three different neighborhood popup events and we held those at different parks throughout the city and we tried to really use different areas of the city to hold those popup events. So we held those at Sunset Pond, Red Oak and Interlocken. And these are just different ways that we tried to get the word out about neighborhoods. We had 28 informal outreach activities and events. And so we use some of our already established events like Party on the Plaza and Festival and Fire Muster, those kind of things. We had 41 responses to our neighborhoods program survey. And then we had approximately 750 hours of staff time invested, which was about 50% of the time that we thought we might utilize. Overall, the feedback we received from the neighborhoods was very positive. They really appreciated the opportunities to meet each other, build community. They appreciated the clear, consistent information about events and boundaries. They're very interested in safety, parks, neighborhood identity, and caring for shared spaces. Other lessons learned as we strengthen community connections and improve city communication with neighborhoods: We really found that this program has helped us build really good relationships with community members. neighbor-led connections and projects increase community engagement and vibrancy. And this clear point of contact strengthens information sharing and trust. Some opportunities that we found is we can better standardize how neighborhood boundaries are defined. That's one thing that we had a lot of back and forth on, especially at the beginning—how to define the boundaries. You don't want to leave some areas out, but they have to be small enough, too. So, that's something that we found at the beginning, especially. More structure to support neighborhood formation and long-term sustainability and enhanced communication support for neighborhood leaders. Some things we would recommend is expanded communication support for neighborhoods. One idea is to potentially help each neighborhood set up a Facebook page for their neighborhood—St. Louis Park does that. And we also have worked with the city attorney's office a bit to talk about potentially helping with flyers, web hosting, mailers with the grant funding. Additional guidelines and resources to help neighborhoods organize which would be potentially providing some framework around structure—like both Edina and St. Louis Park have more established... like bylaws, things of that nature just to help. Again, it would be more of a sample or suggestion of trying to help neighborhoods maybe get a little bit more formal leadership. So, the idea is that it doesn't fall on one person or two people to really carry the bulk of the work for the neighborhoods and create a little bit more of a long-term structure. [00:08:15] **Elizabeth Kautz (Mayor):** Do they want us to provide the structure for each organization or they will create their own organizational structure? [00:08:20] **Mike Tracy (Interim Communications Director):** Mayor and Council, I don't think we've heard from the neighborhoods specifically that they want us to dictate a structure. I think it's more of we've heard just anecdotally and even in some of the written feedback of just there's a little bit of a concern, and I think staff also have concern, just over the long-term sustainability of neighborhoods. So, I think the idea at this point in time that staff are recommending is just we put together some sample framework that neighborhoods could use to help strengthen their support and build a leadership structure if they wish. [00:08:50] **Elizabeth Kautz (Mayor):** Okay. So, ours is to support them as they create their own organizational structure. That makes sense for them because every neighborhood might do it differently. I think for us, the outcome in each organization is our fiduciary responsibility—that with the money that they're going to receive, that it's spent the way that they said that they want to spend it. So that's our fiduciary responsibility and that is part of our public purpose policy. So I want to make sure we connect all those pieces. [00:09:20] **Mike Tracy (Interim Communications Director):** Yep. Absolutely, Mayor and Council. and we have a process in place. We've been working with our finance team and with the city attorney's office to make sure that those grant reimbursements that are coming in starting in 2026 are verified and following not only what they submitted and what was approved by the city council but following public purpose expenditure guidelines. We have a good process in place right now and we'll continue to monitor that and track that and make improvements as we see fit. [00:09:50] **Amber Jacobson (Assistant Communications Director):** One other thought is implementing leadership development and connections amongst the neighborhoods. It's really great to see these neighborhoods developing and getting to know each other, but bringing maybe some of the leaders of these neighborhoods together and really creating more community connections and not just neighborhood connections. That's another suggestion staff has for further evaluation. So, we have a year of the neighborhood program and we feel like it's gone very well. So, we are recommending that we continue another year as is, potentially looking at those enhancements, administrating the first year of the grants and continuing to learn, and then coming back to council after one more year of the grants to evaluate again how the program is going. [00:10:40] **Elizabeth Kautz (Mayor):** Before we get to the grant application, will we get a report on the progress of how they spent the money and where they're at—how the neighborhoods have progressed in achieving what they said they wanted to achieve with the grant money? Will that be part of the report before we award another grant? [00:10:55] **Mike Tracy (Interim Communications Director):** So, yes, Mayor and Council, we will definitely keep the City Council up to date on grant reimbursements and projects that are being completed in real time throughout the year. The idea is that at least on a quarterly basis, or if a big project is completed, that we'll be communicating with the City Council. And I'm looking at Jenny Rhode at the moment in terms of the form—that might be a written report, could be through Council Weekly, it could be through a number of different channels, but we'll make sure not only council, but the community is also aware because we think also seeing these grant projects come to life is going to be a great way to get future neighborhoods or other neighborhoods interested and hopefully organized throughout the next year. [00:11:35] **Elizabeth Kautz (Mayor):** Well, it's a good way of advertising the program and then people can see what the neighborhoods have achieved and how it has made a difference in that neighborhood. That communicates a lot of excitement, I think, not only from the neighborhoods already in the grant program, but then others might say, "Oh, if they can do it, we can do it, too." [00:11:55] **Mike Tracy (Interim Communications Director):** Absolutely. I and we'll be celebrating some of those things in bulletins and other communication, social media throughout the year, too. As again, as those projects happen and are in the ground or events are kicking off, we'll definitely be celebrating those. And so with that, again, the recommendation from staff is that we continue this program kind of as is in 2026 along with those enhancements that Amber presented with the idea of coming back to the City Council in December with a grant program evaluation. [00:12:30] **Elizabeth Kautz (Mayor):** I think it's a good plan. Let's see how it works. Do another one. See how it works and see how it thrives throughout the community. So, really good. Okay, any questions? Yeah, Dan G? [00:12:40] **Dan Gustafson (Council Member):** I agree. We should move forward with this. I like how it's bringing the community together and actually I like how it's bringing our staff together with the community. So, it's we're all kind of growing together. I do have a concern about your next steps. If we're going to put neighborhood leaders together in August and they expect a grant application by September, is that cutting it a bit short trying to get their neighborhood organized? Because it took a while for these other neighborhoods to kind of come up with their projects and I'm not sure if a 30 or 45-day period in here is going to be enough time for the get good quality work done in the neighborhoods itself. [00:13:20] **Mike Tracy (Interim Communications Director):** Yeah, Mayor and Council. I think to that one, the idea with that August meeting is really to bring the established neighborhoods together just to share what's working, what isn't working, and try to build those connections. We'll be holding, like we did this last year, grant information sessions and doing communications with neighborhoods and newly established neighborhoods, especially around the grant process well before August. You know, this last year, I think we kicked off the process for the grant application in June or July, and that was really because we were just getting it kickstarted. We'll start that even sooner than we did this last year. So, we wouldn't wait till August to start talking to neighborhoods about grant projects. [00:14:05] **Dan Gustafson (Council Member):** Thank you. [00:14:10] **Elizabeth Kautz (Mayor):** Any other questions, comments? I think it's great. I'm anxious to... I know that Jonathan Ortoff would like to... because you're with which neighborhood? Jonathan, please come and take one of the seats with a microphone and introduce yourself. You don't have to give us your address—we're trying to be very conscientious about people's address—but just say that you're a Burnsville resident. [00:14:35] **Jonathan Ortoff (Resident):** Sounds good. Yeah, I'm Jonathan Ortoff, Burnsville resident with the Cedar Bridge neighborhood. I am the liaison for that group. And so I just wanted to come out here and thank the Mayor and the City Council for this program. We did have a kickoff meeting. Ishmail was able to come out there and, you know, the information that was on the website was very pretty clear and concise, but it was nice to have the city to come out and explain it to us and we had 20-25 people out there that were all very interested in it. I had a follow-up meeting a week or two later just to say, "Hey, what are some ideas?" I got an email list. So again, we probably have a core of 20-25 people on this email list to keep things trying to keep it going. The grant ideas we have were kind of stuff this year, but we did some signage for safety, things at the park again, hopefully to get more people coming. With our HOA, we're trying to start this monthly thing for kids; we have a lot of young kids and stuff. So last year was definitely about beautification, you know, that type of stuff. And hopefully this year and moving forward, maybe more events. I think it would be a good idea to get the other leaders together to say what are you guys doing? What are you seeing that's working? Since we're part of an HOA, it is kind of on our HOA meeting list now, but I can see if we weren't... if a few people off this list kind of walked away, the program could kind of fall away. So that'd just be a suggestion from me. [00:16:15] **Elizabeth Kautz (Mayor):** So I'm excited that you're in the program and I know your neighborhood real well. We appreciate you stopping out, too. Thank you. Anybody else? Did you want to speak also? Are you with the same neighborhood or a different neighborhood? [00:16:35] **Mark Ghart (Resident):** I am from a different neighborhood. I'm from the local neighborhood Parkwood South. My name is Mark Ghart and I just love doing this. This is my passion to do. I was trying to get the neighborhood connected some way. And then I hear about last February that you guys are organizing. I said I'm all in because you're going to make it easy for me because I'm a one-man show. I'm not a one-man show anymore, but I got about core of nine people to help. We're going to do two events. I have a website; I show it to Mike and Jonathan and Amber. So it's going to be great. We're really, really excited. But I want to thank you guys for helping me do more in my neighborhood. Thank you. [00:17:15] **Elizabeth Kautz (Mayor):** Well, thank you very much. All right. So we're all good. And have you awarded the grant money yet? [00:17:25] **Mike Tracy (Interim Communications Director):** Mayor and Council, we haven't awarded any. There have been two reimbursement requests that have come in that are in process right now. Not for the grants themselves—those were approved—but these are small monetary expenses for printing costs. We have the council's awards of the grants, so we'll process those as they come in. [00:17:45] **Elizabeth Kautz (Mayor):** Okay. Very good. Nice work, Amber. The next item on the agenda is our cyber security briefing from our IT director Tom Venables. It's a very very important subject. Tom? [00:18:00] **Tom Venables (IT Director):** I'm excited to talk about it. Hi, Madam Mayor. Council members, thank you for having me tonight to talk about our cyber security posture here at the city. It's a culmination of ongoing work that we've been doing for many years, but also more intentional work through assessments that we've completed in the last year and a half. Leading up to the briefing today, we've performed three different more recent assessments in the organization around IT activities within the last 18 months. The first being an information technology assessment that focused on IT operations and how we do our jobs on a day-to-day basis. Then we did a specific IT security assessment in February of 2025 which I'm going to talk about mostly today. And then in July 2025, we also completed a capital infrastructure planning assessment for IT infrastructure. All three of these assessments had cyber security components to them and provided us good information that we can grow on. To give everybody a sense of what one week in the City of Burnsville looks like in terms of our cyber security activity: This is a 7-day period in January of 2026 where our security platforms and tools and services provide us protection. In a week's period of time, we receive about 60,000 emails coming into this organization. Many are blocked. We manage credentials for staff through password management platforms—we have about 5,600 of those credentials stored. We scan about 2,000 devices in a 7-day period for vulnerabilities. We also have many authentications through multifactor authentication. We also block a lot of websites—but we also access a lot of websites, about 16 million in that 7-day period. [00:20:15] **Elizabeth Kautz (Mayor):** 16 million in one week? [00:20:18] **Tom Venables (IT Director):** In one week. So there's a lot of activity coming and going out of our internet service today in the organization. And we have advanced tools that monitor and maintain protection around that activity. On top of that, we also have managed, detect, and response on all staff devices. In that same given week, we actually respond to about 28 incidents that are reported. Those are typical low-severity items like fishing emails or website popups. As part of the external assessment performed by a third-party vendor, they looked at several different things: our current protection strategies, vulnerability assessments, and a gap analysis between our environment and five different industry standards (CIS version 8, HIPAA, NIST CSF 2.0, NIST 800-53, and PCI DSS). Overall, our score was a 7.7. The vendor verbally indicated that we scored higher than most of the agencies they do similar assessments against. It means we have room to improve—we want to be at a 10—but they said this is a very reasonable score. We also do our own assessments. We implement risk assessments for third-party vendors. We are also subject to mandatory audits like the FBI and Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension audits every three years. We also go through our annual financial audit, and we have an assessment when we renew our cyber security insurance through the League of Minnesota Cities. We are also subject to the Water Infrastructure Act at the federal level because we're a water utility provider and we go through an assessment with that at least every five years. [00:22:45] **Elizabeth Kautz (Mayor):** Before you move on water—because I remember when we went through 9/11 that we had to really secure the water system because it was vulnerable. And I think we really put some standards in place. You were here, Tom, at that time. And now when you go back and you look at the water infrastructure act and the risk and resiliency audit, do you believe that the water treatment plant is secure? [00:23:10] **Tom Venables (IT Director):** Madame Mayor, it's a more formalized process that we've gone through for at least the last 10 years. It involves not only IT but it involves our entire water utilities group. A major portion of that audit is also regarding physical security as it relates to our water utility infrastructure access to facilities. When I talk about cyber security, there is a physical component to it—we do have to physically secure access to systems also. Most recently, council approved security upgrades to the water treatment facility. So those are ongoing activities that we'll continue to do through our capital improvements plan. [00:24:10] **Elizabeth Kautz (Mayor):** They're mutual but also distinct. Okay. [00:24:15] **Tom Venables (IT Director):** Additionally, as part of the security assessment from our third-party vendor, we grouped their recommendations into five different activities. One significant finding was the number of Microsoft Windows 10 devices we still have in use. We were aware of that—Windows 10 went end-of-life effective October of 2025. It is included in our 2026 capital improvements plan to address this. They also recommended separating security roles from IT leadership roles so there's dedicated focus on security ongoing. I wear a couple of hats today, including Local Agency Security Officer for the BCA and FBI. We are looking at assignments to existing staff and handing off more services to third parties. In 2026, we have some very big investments in security. Our capital budget includes $896,000, which primarily reflects the plan to replace staff devices (the Windows 10 devices mentioned earlier) in readiness for our move into the new facility. [00:26:00] **Elizabeth Kautz (Mayor):** Are we all going to have new badges? Will our current badges work with the new system? [00:26:05] **Tom Venables (IT Director):** The new card access control platform will continue to use your current badge unless you would like a new picture taken and you want a new badge. In addition to the staff devices, we're implementing network infrastructure upgrades across all facilities. We're touching about 60 to 76 sites in the next few months—a majority of those are connected via 40 miles of private fiber optic infrastructure that the city owns. [00:27:15] **Elizabeth Kautz (Mayor):** I'm glad we invested in city-owned fiber because that allowed us to address all of the water utility aspects and to connect. [00:27:25] **Tom Venables (IT Director):** It's a private network today that the city owns and manages. One of our goals after moving into the new data center at City Hall is to transition away from a second physical data center at our maintenance center and supplement with hosted cloud services to reduce costs in capital replacements, power, and cooling. Regarding incidents, we categorize them in low, medium, and high severity. When a high-severity incident is recognized, that will trigger a communication to the City Council so that you're aware that something is happening. We have a formal incident response plan that defines roles and responsibilities. Looking at the future, artificial intelligence and quantum computing pose advanced threats. We are also managing the "Internet of Things"—simple things like clocks or speakers that plug into networks. We have to isolate those so they're not on the same network traffic as our more important systems. Finally, we are looking at increasing our cyber security insurance. Today it is $500,000 through the LMC; we have sought quotes for $3 million to $5 million policies. [00:30:15] **Elizabeth Kautz (Mayor):** Very well done. Very comprehensive. [00:30:20] **Cara Schulz (Council Member):** Can I just ask one—and you don't have to elaborate on this—like when you talked about the Internet of Things, you know, you hear these stories about people's homes getting hacked through their washing machines because everything's connected to Wi-Fi now. Are we taking inventory of those things with the new city hall and how much we are connecting to those types of devices for thermostats and otherwise? [00:30:45] **Tom Venables (IT Director):** Madame Mayor, Council Member Schulz, we do have a regular inventory of our assets. As we move forward into the new facility, we will know all the devices that are connected. We can isolate clocks and other devices that may just do some rudimentary things but pose bigger risks because they don't have the level of security built into them. [00:31:10] **Cara Schulz (Council Member):** I have to battle BattleStar Galactica. My lights at my house are all connected to my phone so I can change the color, and I'm sure that's probably a vulnerability. I'll just keep quiet. [00:31:25] **Elizabeth Kautz (Mayor):** Thank you. Okay, well thank you so much. Vince, do you have anything for round table? [00:31:35] **Vince Workman (Council Member):** I got nothing. [00:31:40] **Dan Kealey (Council Member):** Regarding the MBTA, our board retreat is February 19th. We're having it at the Burnsville bus garage. At the last meeting, we held the annual dinner for the 2025 driver of the year. I-35 solutions and MBTA are presenting their 2026 planning this Thursday. In March, we have MnDOT coming in to present an update on the Highway 13 corridor. And the NLC Congressional City Conference in Washington is March 14th to 18th. I'll be participating on the board of directors and the board legislative committee. That's it. [00:32:30] **Elizabeth Kautz (Mayor):** Gregg, anything? [00:32:33] **Gregg Lindberg (City Manager):** Nothing for me. [00:32:35] **Elizabeth Kautz (Mayor):** Macheal, you have anything? Okay. Well, thank you everyone. And if there's nothing else, we stand adjourned by acclamation. Have a good evening everybody.