This transcript appears to be from a City Council Workshop. Based on the context of the dialogue and the list of officials provided, I have identified the speakers below. *Note: The name "Council Member Beom" appears frequently in the transcript; while she is not on your specific list, Katrina Beom is a known member of the Lake Elmo City Council. I have also identified "Director Stopa" as likely being the Community Development Director.* *** **[00:00:00] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** I think Julie—I think Julie screwed it up. It’s my fault, yeah, buck stops here. Normally you have to be on the main, just escape out, right? Do you want me to minimize this? Well, I don’t want to minimize. Anybody else have an idea? This is what Sophia says... okay, I have two kids under 15, yeah, double jeopardy. We could... yep, okay. All right, thank you. All right, let’s try this again. Um, I guess we’re ready to roll. Uh, I’ve got seven slides here; I was originally intending on having three, so we’re going to roll pretty quickly. **[00:00:45] Link (LDO Association):** For those who don’t know the LDO, our association was started in 1985. It was started due to low water. If anybody knows the history, for quite a few years they were pumping water into Olson trying to bring the lake levels up. The Valley Branch Watershed District created the 2007 project which brought the levels up and stabilized in 2009. Eurasian Watermilfoil was detected in the lake and things got pretty bad by about 2014. You can see the photo that’s from the DNR. Problem was nobody really knew how to treat it very well and nobody had funding sources to pay for these things. So, it didn’t—there was a small treatment in '14, but we didn’t really start moving on this stuff until about '16. Now in '22 and '23 we did a Fluridone treatment. For those of you not familiar, that’s a whole basin—so the entire lake—and it is targeted at Eurasian milfoil and it also takes out curly-leaf pondweed. Very good treatment, it was very successful. It’s very expensive and we still have some issues with it which I’ll talk about. One other thing for everybody to understand: you can almost eradicate—almost, not completely, but almost—eradicate Eurasian watermilfoil. Curly-leaf pondweed is almost impossible until somebody comes out with some new tools for us to utilize. That plant buries turions into the sediment which are not touched by herbicides, so it will keep coming up. So until we get something that stops turion growth, that’s going to be an ongoing expense for any body of water that has curly-leaf in it. What is our focus right now? It’s management. So we run a shoreline program. All of our residents that treat their properties for invasive and non-invasive weeds/plants, they run through us. We do this so we can manage the herbicide that’s in the lake. We also do it because we can offer a greater discount because we’re doing a lot of the administrative work that the applicator would have to do. As an organization, we do that; it reduces the price for the residents. The other thing we do is the AIS control. We also do lake health monitoring. One of the folks is here, Tom, who goes out and takes samples for the Met Council and the Met Council will process those and, you know, check for heavy metal concentration and various algae concentration and so forth, and you can go out to the Met Council’s website and see that info. We also do a lake cleanup day and we’re trying to get into more education and prevention. If you look on the right, you’ll see a picture of before and after. This was a few years ago when we treated—or actually about two weeks before is up above and after is down below. But more importantly is to give you an idea of what we’re spending on these lakes. This is why we created a 501c3 so that we could generate a funding source. You know, we’re not coming here and asking for the city or anybody to take over the total expense. I guess, you know, the charter of this particular session was about grants, but as you can see, we spend a lot more than what’s being talked about here. What’s up next for us? Curly-leaf management. We did detect that even after our Fluridone treatment, we have some Eurasian milfoil. I’ll be out surveying the lake tomorrow, submitting the survey to the treater and to the DNR, and we’ll be spending probably another $5,000. Shoreline buffer restoration—that’s a big push by the Washington Conservation District, it’s a big push by us. Everything has a cause and effect. So if we remove all these invasive species, something’s got to take up the nutrients that is entering the lakes. Hopefully it’s natives, until they reach a nuisance level because we have too many nutrients in the lakes and this is what we’re starting to experience now with this macro-algae. If you look at that lower picture, these are big balls of really like gritty, grainy algae, and it’s a native so we can’t get rid of that. The only way we can get rid of it is to reduce what’s going into our lakes, and a big part of that is education. And of course, I have "recruit board members and resident participation." As you know, with any volunteer organization, that’s always a challenge. What if we get zebra mussels? What if we get starry stonewort? I mean, it doesn’t get any worse than starry stonewort. What if we don’t have people to backfill the current board members? I’m stepping down from being the president next year; we have a new president, so I am able to step down. I think I’ve brought up to the city council before the idea of a Lake Improvement District. I still feel very strongly that the city should look into that and consider having one source of management for the lakes underneath your control. And then I’ll just end with saying that it is very expensive and, you know, we support the ramp monitoring program through the Washington Conservation District with the same level of funding that the Valley Branch supports it, so we double our coverage to try and do prevention. And that’s one of the ramp monitors—she let me take her picture the other day. And that’s what I have. So I don’t know if anybody has any questions or if you want to do questions afterwards after the other lakes present. **[00:06:40] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Yeah, we can do questions now, Link. I saw you had "Barr" [Engineering]—is that because they support the Valley Branch Watershed District? **[00:06:50] Link (LDO Association):** It is. And I should also have Freshwater Science on here. I’ve been authorized by the DNR to do our lake surveys, so that saves us $5,000 a year because it’s $2,500 per lake to survey. But now as we get into curly-leaf pondweed, I’m not really qualified for that, so now we have to pay somebody to survey. You know, tomorrow I’m going to go out and do a survey for Eurasian milfoil so we won’t have a fee, but the curly will have to. Barr is on there primarily because of the Valley Branch. MAISRC is on there because we’ve done a lot of work with the Minnesota Aquatic Invasive Species Research Center, also with the genetics lab in Montana and some others to make sure—like before we put Fluridone in our lake, we sent 64 samples of milfoil to the lab in Montana, which is the only lab for doing genetics on Eurasian milfoil, had it tested to make sure that we did not have a strain that was resistant so we wouldn’t lose money by just putting herbicide into a lake that wouldn’t do anything. **[00:07:55] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Of these other that you listed—the DNR, City, Washington County—what kind of funding do you get from these other groups to help out with some of this? **[00:08:05] Link (LDO Association):** So Washington County has a grant program. It varies per year and really their funding comes from the DNR. The DNR also has funding, which they’ve had for the last two years, but it’s not an every-year thing. It depends on how much is moved over their budget which is basically done through lobbying, and Minnesota Lakes and Rivers does most of that lobbying. So if you get money—let’s say we got money this year, which we did not—we would be in a better position next year. This whole process has really changed over the last five to eight years and has now become a much fairer program. It used to be you were only considered for a grant if you got your submission in first. So at 12:00 a.m. everybody’s trying to submit and their systems are becoming overloaded and maybe you made it, maybe you didn’t. And then there's only so much money; when they get to that point, then they’re done. There’s no scoring criteria. So now the process does have more of a scoring. First, it’s targeting what they consider to be the most invasive. So if you have starry stonewort, you are probably going to be higher up in the pecking order than somebody who has an AIS problem that is, we’ll say, more of a reoccurring, like curly-leaf where you know you’re not going to get rid of it and it’s going to be a continued expense. So they’d rather target something that is as bad as it can be first. And then there’s other criteria—like we did receive some money the year that we did Fluridone treatments, which was fabulous because that was a big, big expense for us, but that pretty much put us out of the running then for the next couple of years. And it’s by lake ID, so you know we can file for Olson, we can file for DeMontreville. There’s been some years where we’ve gotten for one lake and not another. **[00:09:50] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Okay. Any other questions for Link? **[00:09:55] Council Member Matt Hirn:** Yeah, just two questions. So the first one, just more of like a technical question: when you were talking about the nutrients, the excess nutrients, what is it that’s elevating that so high? If you could speak to that a little bit, I guess I’m just not sure. **[00:10:10] Link (LDO Association):** First off, I’ll tell you it’s controversial, okay? But I’ll give you some opinions—educated opinions and things that have come out of Minnesota Lakes and Rivers research. First off, we do know that all the lakes are getting more boating activity than they were 10 years ago. So we know boating activity has increased; boats are bigger, there’s different style boats—ones that have more thrust, ones that put out more wake. So we have that, because when you bring the sediment up into the water column, that takes nutrients that were locked down and it throws them up there, and then we have algae growth and plant growth—things that we don’t want. The other thing that we have is, according to the DNR, every 100 feet of shoreline that is grass to the water contributes 200 pounds of algae to the lake per year. If you have a shoreline buffer, you contribute—they say—somewhere between 5 and 20 pounds. So the educational process about having a natural waterfront instead of something that looks like it should be on a golf course is part of a process where it’s going to be an ongoing thing, especially for new homeowners who maybe want to come and have a great big grass section for the kids down to a beach. But if we have a buffer, that’s another part. Another part that we see specifically on DeMontreville is the road construction that was done around the lake wasn’t done properly for drainage, and what we’re seeing is instead of the runoff going into a settlement pond and then into the lake, we see it building up on the street and then washing directly into the lake. So you can take all these things, and I don’t think you can point at one thing. You can’t point at boats or any specific thing. That’s all we can do is address what we can. **[00:12:00] Council Member Matt Hirn:** Okay, perfect, that’s helpful. Thank you. And then the second question, I guess kind of following up with the Mayor’s questions about some of the funding sources: with the numbers that you had thrown up there on the annual amount of money that you spent on it, how much of that funding has come from grants versus self-funded from lake homes? If you just kind of help me understand that breakdown a little bit. **[00:12:20] Link (LDO Association):** Well, if we just pick a year—we’ll pick like an average year, let’s say 2018—we probably received $5,000 from the City of Lake Elmo. We may or may not have received any money from Washington County because it used to be we were pretty much guaranteed, but more lakes are infected and there’s only a certain pool of money. So I’m going to say if we got anything from Washington County in 2018, it was probably $2,000 to $3,000, and I don’t think we received anything from the DNR. So the rest was funded by the LDO. And that’s pretty common—pretty common. You know, the year that we did Fluridone, we were really lucky and we received a grant from the DNR for $10,000 for each lake. That was like unheard of, and maybe they felt bad or, you know, maybe I begged enough, I don’t know. But prior to that, from the DNR it was amounts like $500—you know, not $5,000, $500. So the percentage of what’s coming in from grants versus self-funded is probably 20% or less most of the time. **[00:13:30] Council Member Matt Hirn:** Perfect, thank you. **[00:13:32] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Anyone else? All right, thanks Link. **[00:13:35] Link (LDO Association):** Thank you. **[00:13:38] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** All right, let’s... I’ll let you find... **[00:13:40] Man in Audience:** Can I make [a comment] please? **[00:13:42] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** We’re going to let the speakers go and then if you have something to say, you can do that at that time, okay sir? **[00:13:48] Liz Nehaous:** Hi, Mayor, council members, staff. My name is Liz Nehaous and I’ve been the secretary for Lake Elmo Lake Association since we became an association. I just can’t get off that board—like once you say yes, you’re there for life, it appears. **[00:14:02] Wendy Griffin:** I’m Wendy Griffin. I am the President of the Lake Elmo Lake Association and I have lived on that shore my entire life, and I can tell you some pretty interesting things about that lake within the last couple of years. So a little bit about Lake Elmo lake itself: we have one public access point and that’s through the Lake Elmo Regional Park. And so with that, we see about an average of 10 to 20 additional boats on the lake almost per day—fishermen, you know, just actual water activities themselves. And with that, of course, can be additional spreading of any invasive species carried from one lake to another, from one boat to another lake—that kind of stuff. Along with milfoil just breaks off and replants itself anyway, so you’re constantly trying to manage that knowing that it’s going to replant itself and become even stronger in some areas. So eradication is hard. You know, you’re lucky if you can get areas really clean, but you need maintenance—ongoing maintenance to try to stay on top of that. And that’s kind of where we’ve been trying to go these last couple of years. We had the opportunity to get money from the DNR in 2015. We found out in 2005 that milfoil had been found on the north end of the lake. We had the opportunity—we had divers come in and hand-pull the milfoil in small areas. We noticed on the north end of the lake that the milfoil had pretty much closed the whole entire north end of the lake off, but it’s also shallower there. The unique thing about Lake Elmo lake is the depth—it’s 140 feet deep. It drops off fairly quickly when you move off from your shoreline. We have milfoil that can grow up to 25 feet because of the water quality. We also—Link was mentioning about sending milfoil off and getting it tested to see what it is—we have found in the past that the Eurasian milfoil has also cross-bred with the native milfoil. So again, there’s another challenge that presents itself. In the beginning, we did harvesting. We had a harvester come in to harvest the milfoil; they collected the biomass. We did that because we wanted to get the biomass out of the water to keep the water quality. We have people that come and fish on the lake until noon or later in the day, but fishermen are there in the morning, and from noon on it’s wide open for boats to recreate and do as they wish. Again, knowing that the milfoil breaks off, it ends up receding itself. They also found that the biggest spread of milfoil are fishermen because they go, they get on a lake, they’ll go and fish, and if they don’t get anything they’ll get off the lake and they’ll go. And because of the location of Lake Elmo, DeMontreville, Olson, and Jane, it’s pretty easy to get that milfoil to move from one lake to the next. Lake Elmo is also spring-fed, which keeps the temperature at a different level than it does. And because it is deep, there is the thermocline that comes in. Where—I’m not real sure how deep your lakes are? **[00:17:10] Link (LDO Association):** Uh, well Jane is about halfway and then... yeah, and DeMontreville and Olson are both very shallow. **[00:17:15] Wendy Griffin:** Yeah, I remember monitoring and I don’t remember the 100% total for... right, so yeah. So these lakes are, you know, each one of these lakes require a very different approach for management. Yeah, thanks Link. We have members that join our Lake Association and they have been more than willing to—we have a $75 membership fee, but we get more money in because they are more than willing to donate to help for the cause of the milfoil. We also have curly-leaf pondweed and haven’t started with that. We also have narrow-leaf cattails which is another invasive which we haven’t even looked at because we’re working on trying to get the milfoil down to a manageable level so that we can just spot-spray it back. Talking about Barr Engineering, Meg Rattei from Barr Engineering, I think it was in 2015, did a presentation saying that for us to treat the lake—to treat Lake Elmo—it would be $117,000, which was expensive in 2015. We decided against that because we would be treating a great deal of water that didn’t have the milfoil, so we just couldn’t see spending that kind of money treating water that didn’t have milfoil. So we went back to the harvesting of milfoil and then now we do treat it chemically because they added a surfactant to the chemical which will make it adhere to the milfoil instead of just treating the entire water. Hopefully we can get it to adhere to where the milfoil is. I go too far? **[00:18:50] Liz Nehaous:** No, that’s right. We have approximately 56 lakeshore owners on Lake Elmo lake and so right now we have approximately 90-96% of them are members of the Lake Association. So we’ve gotten some great commitment from everyone to try to help manage what the lake does. About 6,000 feet of the lake is the regional park, and Washington County has never joined us as being a member. So that’s always a challenge because we’re really treating half of the lake, you know, for some... **[00:19:25] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Have you asked them to join? **[00:19:27] Wendy Griffin:** Oh, oh yeah. And they don’t have the money. They because the park is run off of what people spend on their park passes to get in. So they just don’t have any extra money. The park did let us put our biomass on their property, but you know, we were thankful for that so we didn’t have to find a place to put it. But yeah, that’s it. I mean and that’s what we hear every time we go to ask for money. We asked for them to increase their fees for people to come into the park, which they did, but that went into administration. We were thinking it would be a good idea if we could get a buck or two here to help with that, but that went back into administration. So yeah, that’s what I hear all the time is that their funding comes from the people that use the parks and they have a number of parks. **[00:20:15] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Yeah, right. Okay, thank you for that explanation. **[00:20:20] Wendy Griffin:** So funding—we’ve had Minnesota DNR funding us small grants, very small grants, since 2015. This is our first year that we will not receive DNR funding. Washington County we’ve received since 2016 in census, and we will get funding this year for that as well. Lake Elmo Jaycees have been supportive, Lake Elmo Rotary Club, the City of Lake Elmo... and we’re hoping for 2024. And then our own fundraisers and our own memberships. Council member Hirn, you asked the question about how money—what’s the percentage type of thing. You know, it’s us. It’s very little funding from the DNR, the city... all that when you put into play how much it costs to actually do this work. And we learn something new every year. **[00:21:10] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Yes, I’m sure. Any questions for the Lake Elmo Lake Association representatives? Any questions? **[00:21:18] Wendy Griffin:** I can tell you that the ice came on in January, was off in March—that was the first. I can tell you the temperature of the water on Christmas Eve Day was 41 degrees. I can tell you until today the lake was absolutely hard with the algae, with what was going on. I mean this is a very atypical year for the water and I don’t know what you guys have been finding over there, but yeah, it was atrocious as to what we were seeing. And I don’t know if it was because the lake hadn’t turned completely over—if the lake is turned completely over now, I haven’t... I don’t have any of those answers but I’m still searching. And thank you very much for your time. **[00:21:55] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Yep, thank you. Thank you. Any questions? No? All right. And Lake Jane? **[00:22:05] Lan Leach (Lake Jane Association):** Hi, my name is Lan Leach and I have lived on Lake Jane for 34 years. So I think you said your whole life, so maybe just a couple more years, yeah? And from our entire Association, a big thank you, because like you heard from the other associations, the money is so critical to us and your support is really helpful in keeping this lake for us for future generations and for all the citizens that come out and use it. You know, it’s not just us lake owners; it’s all the citizens that come and use the lakes. So we do appreciate it very much, want to keep that beautiful natural resource useful. I’ll try not to go over some of the same things that the other associations did. We kind of had a formal/informal organization before 2014; it was mostly associated with shoreline management. We really didn’t have weed issues before then so there wasn’t a lot for an association to do. In 2017, I think it was, they did a study—Valley Branch Watershed—and found that we only had 2% milfoil. So at that time they said it’s really not an issue. But as you’ve heard, 2% becomes 50% very, very quickly. So from 2017 until now it’s been a huge issue. For many years DNR only supported 15% of the littoral area, which is just the surrounding shoreline, so we weren’t able to treat a lot. They just wouldn’t let us; they said it wasn’t bad enough. In 2018 it became so bad—I know I couldn’t get our pontoon out and that’s when I said something’s got to change here, it’s time to get this organization going. And we formed Lake Jane Association a little bit more formally and got an actual board together and meetings. Again, as you’ve heard from the others, we every year ask for help from you guys, from Washington County and DNR, which you know you heard is not much. Our money comes from pretty much our lake owners, and I know I personally went door-to-door begging because we had no money when we first started out and we knew we had to do something. So we all had to pony up and take care of it. Since then, we’ve been working more closely with Barr Engineering and the DNR. By working closely with the DNR, they kind of agreed to do a study for us and we used this new chemical called ProcellaCOR. It was brand new; they said this was going to be the ticket. Very expensive. It’s not a whole-lake treatment; it was for areas. So we do delineations, find out where it was the worst and treat those areas. It was a three-year plan and we felt after three years—you never totally get rid of it, but it would be under control. So we embarked down this path hand-in-hand with the DNR thinking this was the ticket. It wasn’t. And so after a lot of expense and a lot of work, we just realized this isn’t the answer. But the DNR was not letting us do anything else; this was more of a spot treatment or an area treatment. Finally, when they realized that, you know, we’ve been working closely with this Lake Association and this was our recommendation—it really hasn’t worked—we’re going to give them their whole-lake treatment. Following the learnings from Link’s organization with the Fluridone, which is the whole-lake treatment, we decided to go down that path. Unbeknownst to us, we didn’t have money, so we lost a whole year because we just didn’t have money to do it. So we were just doing other treatments like temporaries to get us through. Of course, when you do something like that, the next year it’s really bad. So we did a whole treatment of Fluridone last year. Well, you guys know what the winter was like. Fluridone is not as effective when the lake is open, you know, the lake never fully closed, so the sunlight was there letting the milfoil grow. The Fluridone was not as effective. This year it’s probably the worst it’s ever been. So we’re continuing to treat with the Fluridone. Yes, it’s expensive, but we don’t really know what other options we have. We’re hopeful that it will be the answer, but we’re just continuing to work with DNR and our treaters to find the solution. **[00:26:15] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Okay. Are there any questions? I don’t have any questions. Anybody else? No? It’s a lot of work. I don’t think there’s any questions. Thank you. **[00:26:25] Lan Leach (Lake Jane Association):** Thank you again for all your support. **[00:26:28] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Thank you. Yeah, sir? You wanted to speak to the Council? You’ll need to come up to the podium, state your name and address for the record. **[00:26:35] Jerry Gray:** I just wanted to make one quick comment. I’m Jerry Gray and I’m on the LDO board. When Link mentioned that we got lucky and got $10,000 a year for each lake—I saw a lot of "wows." But if you looked up there, those two lakes cost us about $100,000 to do that whole-lake treatment. So the $10,000 was nice, but it was a long way from the two and the five that we... I just wanted to bring that up because it’s very expensive. More like $111,000, but yeah. **[00:27:10] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Okay. I stand corrected. **[00:27:12] Jerry Gray:** Okay, that’s all I had. I just want to bring that up, thank you. **[00:27:15] Link (LDO Association):** Can I make one more comment? **[00:27:18] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Sure, please come to the podium. **[00:27:20] Link (LDO Association):** So what we have here is, you know, three different bodies of water that are very different from each other. They require different management—or four different bodies of water that require different management techniques. They require a lot of effort from the associations. You know, there’s only a few of us for each association that are trying to manage this. At some point, I would really like to, besides funding, I would like to ask the council and mayor to please give some thought to either a Lake Improvement District or a centralized meeting plan to bring people together and try and talk about how we manage these resources beyond the Lake Associations. Because like what was said before, you know, yes the people on the lakes use these, but I can go over to our boat ramp and see that that launch parking lot is full probably 70-80% of the time. So those are people—maybe they’re from Lake Elmo, maybe they’re not—but those are outside resources that are using these bodies of water for recreation. And besides the funding source, it would just be nice to have more of a centralized thought process or at least, you know, brainstorming process to get together and think about how we manage these resources. Thank you. **[00:28:30] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Thank you. Thanks. All right, so from that, we’re supposed to discuss what goes into the 2025 budget, right? **[00:28:40] Nicole Miller (City Administrator):** Yes. One of the thought recommendations in talking with the associations: we have four main lakes and we have three associations. One of the things we may want to consider is adding $5,000 to the grant process, so we have $5,000 for each lake. And as Link said, they’re individual and each needs special treatment. So that’s something we—I would recommend at least for your 2025 budget cycle. **[00:29:10] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Yeah, I could see that. I mean, these lakes are from my perspective a real jewel for the whole city of Lake Elmo and the surrounding area. I think they’re critical to not only the people that live on them and enjoy them—I don’t spend a lot of time on them, but I like seeing open water, it’s nice. And I know a lot of people come in to go fish or recreate. I would like to maybe make a push for, instead of just the Lake Elmo Lake Association, have the city request that the Lake Elmo Park Reserve—since they do have, I mean, they add a lot of boats per year from their launch—help manage some of that lake since they’re the primary recipient of that use. I think it’s at least worth the ask on the city’s part. Like us to think about that. Thank you. Yeah, it just seems logical to me. But I do see that... I read up a little bit, I had the good fortune to spend some time with Link a couple years ago and learned about the littoral area. Those lakes are very shallow and they’re suspect to much more of the damage from large motors and some of these wakeboards that use water as ballast and disturbing the muck bottoms or whatever—brings it up, right? So from my standpoint, I mean if we can figure it out with Clarissa [Hadler] when we look at the budgets, if it’s something that we can do to add Lake Olson in there as well as the other three, I would be for that. But I would like for us to take a look at the budgets that we have. **[00:30:45] Nicole Miller (City Administrator):** Yeah, we can tentatively put that in there. Your first real budget workshop we’re going to be discussing will be on August 28th, if I remember correctly. I think that’s the right date where we’re going to be looking at the budget. So we can tentatively put that in there and if we run into problems, Council can certainly remove it if there’s not consensus or if they don’t feel it’s a worthy cause. **[00:31:10] Council Member Beom:** Mayor, I would agree with that. I think it’s important to support as much as we can the lakes. So I think when the grant requests have come before us in the past, they certainly supported those. It’s unfortunate that I guess we don’t get a greater amount of support from the state and the DNR for this and it’s really on the backs of our residents. But certainly support the grant and adding that to the budget as we have in past years and adding in the fourth lake. I also wonder if—and I’m not sure if it’s the right group or not—but if the Park Commission or if it’s our Planning Commission to look at what would it take to have a Lake Improvement District. I don’t know anything about that. I think it’s worth at least exploring to see what it would look like. Or at the very least, I think pulling the associations together for some discussions. I was curious as you were each talking how connected you are between your associations and your learnings and in your approaches you’re taking, and so if there’s something that the city can do to help facilitate that, I think we should for the greater good of the city. So again, I’m not sure which group that would be in the City, but I certainly would support that. **[00:32:45] Council Member Jeff Holtz:** I would echo both those comments. Not only to make sure it’s a grant per lake—because they are independent watersheds—I think we can have an honest and genuine conversation of, maybe it’s $6,000, maybe it’s $7,000. It’s not $50,000 obviously, but can we add a bit more flexibility seeing as the grant has not changed since its inception, at least from what we’ve been told tonight? I would also agree with Council Member Beom; I would be curious to know more about the Lake Improvement Districts. We have our yearly work plan, but things come up and there are opportunities to obviously serve the public, and I at least would want to know more what that looks like. Are there examples from other nearby cities where this has been in place? How long has it been in place? What does that structurally look like? Because obviously any new change takes time to walk through to establish it. But if the wheel has already been created by someone else, what can we learn from that? What are some of those best practices? I think that would be a great topic for a workshop that we probably already have filled for the next four or five workshops, but to me it’s a worthwhile thing. We value our environment in this city, so to me we should have that conversation. **[00:34:00] Council Member Nick Dragisich:** Yes, I’d like to echo what Councilor Holtz said. I think—I know we haven’t even got into our budget yet—but I would hope as we got into it we could look at perhaps increasing that somewhat since it’s been like $5,000 for a long time. We don’t know what you know, what we’re going to face as we start getting into it and other challenges. So it would have to be weighed against all of the needs of the city, but it seemed like perhaps a bit more would be helpful and the lakes are really important to the residents—well, residents and the overall lake. It brings people into our city, and hopefully they’re respectful. I’m sure that’s not 100% the case, but yeah. **[00:34:45] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** All right, I think we’ve got some direction on that, right? Good. Thank you all very much for your time and coming to talk to us tonight, really appreciate it. Appreciate the work that you guys do to help keep the lakes healthy and clean. And yeah, thank you. **[00:35:05] Lan Leach (Lake Jane Association):** Thank you. **[00:35:10] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** All right, so next on the docket, we have Open Space PUD Review. I know we did a little bit of this a while ago and we asked Director Stopa to come back and give us some more thoughts on this. Oh, we’re going to hang on just till we get that door shut. **[00:35:30] Director Stopa:** So I’ll go ahead and run through the presentation one more time—made some edits to it obviously—and then talk about the main thing that came out last time with the cluster developments. As we know, it’s Rural Zone: 20-acre minimum, 50% open space, there’s buffers along the lot lines. Lots are between a half-acre and an acre. It’s mostly single-family. It’s on septic (individual or communal) and the density currently is at 0.5 units per acre. That’s designed for acre lots at a 50% open space, and half-acre lots currently could be developed and are developed in these Planned Unit Developments and they could be built out to a 0.87 with 50% open maximum. You can see that we have 18 existing Ops; most of them are over 100 feet in width. It kind of gives you a breakdown of their size and depth. This is a typical open space Planned Unit Development: the Fields of St. Croix. Their average width is 120 and typical depth is 300 feet with nearly an acre lot size average. **[00:36:45] Council Member Jeff Holtz:** Is that permanent farmland factored into their open space percentage? **[00:36:50] Director Stopa:** I’m assuming it is; I believe it is. This shows—this is a map of possible open space PUDs with zoning. These are sites over 20 acres, rural residential and then agricultural. So I wanted to bring up the cluster developments because really the comments made me think of a few things. Council Member Beom brought up some really good comments of how this is going to look if we allow this, any different than a traditional development—standard suburban development. So I thought that if the Council would want to move forward with this, I would recommend looking at design standards and trying to promote traditional development. And then another comment that came up is, like, "can we locate them in a certain area?" And we looked at the map and thought they should be located—if you wanted to put them in a certain area—south of Union Pacific Railroad. There are over 15 sites that could be built. Some of the development standards would be higher roof pitches, higher ceiling heights with appropriate window and door header heights, promote front porches. A big piece of this would be requiring side- or rear-loaded garages. Also, districts sometimes prohibit certain materials like vinyl siding, for example, could be prohibited. And then it would go through a design review process, so we would treat it similar to the Old Village and go through each housing—you know, each product, each house that is built—and put them through a design review. So that’s something to consider. If this seems like this is too much too soon, my recommendation would be let’s just move with some of the other recommendations that we’re looking at with buffers and lot sizes. But this is something to consider and definitely talk about. But I do want to run through the rest of the presentation just to kind of talk about some of the main issues, and that’s density, open space, lot sizes, buffer, street width, trails, sidewalks, and impervious surface. So as you can see, 1 acre at 50% is 0.45 (0.43 is what you could build); half-acre is 0.87. We had talked about going to 60% open space. I think the recommendation is that if we don’t go forward with cluster, just leave it at 50%. I think it simplifies the process but still leave the density at 0.8—as a recommendation. Currently the buffers are confusing to follow, so we’re looking at a simplification and then potentially reducing the buffers. The proposed buffer would be 100 [feet] along all adjacent property lines and a 200-foot buffer from all existing residential dwellings within an abutting residential development. What that means is if there’s a farmhouse adjacent to this development, it would have to be 200 feet from that farmhouse. And the buffers cannot be part of a buildable lot—that is unclear in the current code. The idea is those buffers could not be counted towards the lot size, which is what we’re promoting is a 100 by 160 minimum. Street, sidewalks, impervious trails, and impervious surface: the 20-foot street is preferred from developers that we’re hearing. Concrete curb and gutter is something we’re going to continue to require. We would like to—the code promotes sidewalks and trails. So currently it promotes a sidewalk on one side and a trail typically on the other side. It requires that the trail be the distance of the centerline of all roads, so it doesn’t necessarily require that the trail go the entire length of the Housing Development. It could go behind the houses, but as long as they have, let’s say 5,000 linear feet, they have to satisfy that. 25% maximum impervious coverage per lot. Currently the code reads "per development"; it’s very difficult to track who then assigning the coverage to each person. So by default we’ve been using the 25%. I think that is a good way of moving forward in the future. So that’s what we’re looking at. We did some code rewrites and some edits and some edits from the last meeting that was submitted in your packet too. So really any questions that you have—if you want to talk about cluster developments, if you think that moving towards design standards and allowing clusters—really any questions that you can have. **[00:41:20] Council Member Jeff Holtz:** Is it fair to say with the buffer aspect, some of the language you’re proposing that actually some of the ones we currently have align with what the proposed is? Based upon—we know you had that chart of all the developments that have been there and that there is variation right now as it is. And because it wasn't necessarily clear on some of those ones what that rule was exactly, there may not actually be a conservation easement type buffer between the lot and the property boundary of the Planned Unit Development. It’s just a lot maybe 400-500 feet deep and there may be 200 feet of wooded area or trees. **[00:42:00] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Thank you. I guess one thing that struck me a little bit was, I like most of it. I know that for a lot of people and even myself, you know, you start talking about cluster developments, it’s kind of like "well that’s just different" for people that have been in the community a long time. I like the idea of maybe keeping it in a zone south of the railroad tracks. The one thing—I personally, my opinion is to stay away from dictating some of the design elements. You know, let the developer, HOA, or whoever has that do that. I’m not a big guy on the government saying you can’t use vinyl siding or you have to have it look this way. We have some general—I know that in our code, don’t we have some general design guidelines? Which I always thought was kind of funny because everybody has their own view of what looks nice and what doesn’t. So that’s the only thing I would try to stay away from—to keep things that are needed as a foundation for the city to operate functionally, whether it’s you know, safety requirement, width of street, maintenance stuff. You know, I think we want to maintain that trail connectivity piece when developments come in to make sure that we’re trying to tie all those together. Those types of things that are fundamental for the city itself, but some of the other stuff I hesitate to get government involved in that. **[00:43:25] Council Member Matt Hirn:** I agree with the design standard; I’d prefer to stay away from that. Outside that, I guess there was just like a couple things that stood out to me that maybe just would be like concerns or things I think would maybe be good for us to discuss. And one of the questions was actually—you mentioned that trails would be considered part of the open space, and then there was a lot of conversation about sidewalks possibly being encouraged as well. Would that be considered part of the open space area as well or would that not be included in that calculation? **[00:43:55] Director Stopa:** The trails that go into the open space, that would still be considered open space, but not the right-of-way sidewalk. **[00:44:00] Council Member Matt Hirn:** Okay, great. And then we also encourage, like, old farm buildings, barns? **[00:44:05] Director Stopa:** We wouldn’t discount that; we would just consider that open space too, so we preserve it. **[00:44:08] Council Member Matt Hirn:** All right. And then just I guess one of the things that just kind of I noticed was when you were talking about the density bonus where there’s a little bit of vague language with "could be" a 10% density bonus with "considerable wetlands or natural area" or "stormwater reuse for irrigation." I guess my thought on that is again, it’s a little bit vague, and I know vague can sometimes be good. I just would love to maybe make more of that incentive for specifically for the stormwater reuse, where you know, maybe it’s more of an 8% / 2% where we’re just trying to load a little bit more of the incentive towards what might help Lake Elmo with the water a little bit more. **[00:44:45] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Can we make the water reuse mandatory? **[00:44:48] Council Member Matt Hirn:** I was about to say, I would for the... **[00:44:50] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** You want to make it mandatory for the percentage increase? Just for Open Space PUD? **[00:44:55] Council Member Matt Hirn:** Okay, sorry to interrupt. I... yes. If we’re digging into this overall area, let’s make it a requirement. **[00:45:00] Director Stopa:** My two cents. I just want to bring up, too, since this is a Planned Unit Development, the idea of the 10% bonus density is to guide the developer to say like, "Oh, I can get 10% if I do these things." It’s up to the Council that can make a decision through that process. Just so you know, they seem to like to try to go for those incentives, so I feel like if we can make it a win-win, it’d be ideal. **[00:45:25] Council Member Beom:** I just don’t like it. I don’t like bonus density. I don’t... I’d rather that was completely out of here. Because I mean, I just don’t think we should have it in our PUDs—that if you jump through these hoops, we’ll give you more housing beyond what we’ve said we would allow. **[00:45:45] Director Stopa:** So one challenge—I agree, like bonus density can be challenging. We have two standards, though: the buildable area, right? So you have someone who has a really nice piece of property with wetlands who is being penalized for having this in terms of their density and the units they can build. If they can meet the standards for lot sizes—and we have someone going through that process right now—so we were looking at it and thinking like, "Well, if they have certain slopes or wetlands, they could receive a bonus density," and just kind of give them support from the Council to say, "Okay, we understand that you have challenges with your site, we’re okay with the density." And that way, because when they’re submitting their concept plans and everything, they’re spending a lot of money, and it’s kind of like giving them guidance to say that potentially you could receive this bonus density. **[00:46:40] Council Member Matt Hirn:** Maybe that would be where if it was just a little less vague... because I agree with you as well that I don’t really like bonus density. **[00:46:45] Director Stopa:** Now, yeah, I mean maybe it’s just unfortunate for the landowner if that’s the case. But one suggestion I would make: instead of using buildable area, we could use, you know, the gross acreage calculation and then from there you could say the stormwater reuse—if you want to require it, can be required. **[00:47:05] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Yeah, I mean I was speaking regardless of bonus density. If you do an Open Space PUD, you’re no matter what doing this regardless of density levels. So that could be a path forward so that way that person would get the density as if it was 100% buildable and they just have to figure out how to meet the standards at 0.8. **[00:47:30] Council Member Beom:** I just don’t want bonus density. I just don’t think it’s the right thing to do and I never have. I never understood that. But I know that’s not consistent with how we’ve done other things. And I also don’t think that we should be creating a plan here in a way that we’re trying to get a developer to be able to develop a piece of property. We should be creating what we want and what we need as a community for standards going forward, and not trying to work this whatever direction we can so a developer can develop the lot that he bought. I just don’t think that’s the right approach. **[00:48:05] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** I guess from my standpoint, there are times when it benefits the city and the developer can do it—they normally wouldn’t have to do it, but if they do it and it benefits the city, I think that’s the basis of what a density bonus is based on, right? So then the Council can still make the determination if that flexibility... let’s say they took all their parking and had underground parking for visitors, additional. Well, that’s above and beyond. Maybe we would find that as keeping a larger impervious piece up on top. Maybe that’s something we would look at. So from that standpoint, I don’t know that I want to really limit some of our tools in the toolbox. Not that they always get used, right? I have a hammer in my toolbox, but sometimes I need the screwdriver. And so I guess having some of those available to me I see as a benefit for the city as well, not just the developer. I do agree sometimes it gets to be like, "Well, is that really a benefit for the city?" **[00:49:15] Council Member Beom:** That’s exactly it. And that’s what we need to determine. Like, sometimes when there’s an open space, well, it’s going to have to be an open space because it’s not buildable. I don’t know that that’s necessarily a benefit to the city. At that point, they’re not adding any additional value. But there are things that they can bring additional value—whether it’s connecting a trail or putting in some amenities that the city finds appropriate. So from that vein, I think having that in there can be advantageous. **[00:49:45] Council Member Nick Dragisich:** Yes, I agree with you, Mayor, in that context. I think you have to look and say, "What is the benefit to the city of giving the bonus, and not necessarily the betterment to the developer?" What do the citizens get from granting this extra density that’s worth the tradeoff so we all walk out win-win? But I think we need to weigh carefully and evaluate what is our benefit in this, so we end up with the kind of community that we want, as you speak quite a bit about. **[00:50:15] Council Member Beom:** Yeah, that’s really it. And I think we just—I’m not saying we’ve done anything wrong, I’m just saying as those things have come before us, I think it’s it’s hard to say no when they meet the requirements for the added density because they’ve done this and they’ve done that. But when you break it down and really ask the question, is it to the betterment of the city? Are we gaining? We’re not necessarily gaining. And so I don’t know, besides the bonus density approach, if there’s any other way of getting at that. I do agree allowing some flexibility because there are those occasions where there is a benefit to the city, but I think it sways the other way far too often. So it’s good to be cognizant of that. **[00:50:55] Director Stopa:** Yes. So the only thing I want to add is that we did receive an application for an Open Space Planned Unit Development. It’s called Rachel Development, Ard property? Yeah, so that came in a couple days ago and obviously will be processed under the current code. Just so you know. **[00:51:15] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Okay. All right, thank you. **[00:51:17] Director Stopa:** Thank you, Director. **[00:51:20] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Next we have the Parks Master Plan, Bolton and Mink. That short little document we were blessed to read through with a lot of great information. **[00:51:30] Adam Swanepoel (Public Works Assistant Director):** Yes, thank you, Mayor, Council. Again, just as described, back in October '23 we selected Bolton and Mink to prepare a new Parks Master Plan for the City of Lake Elmo. This document will help us guide staff’s decisions as well as the Parks Commission for about the next 10 years. Part of this plan did consist of an advisory group where we met four times, as well as two additional pop-up meetings. These meetings helped us gather additional information that we prepared for us. With that said, there are—we did ask Bolton and Mink to provide the following information in the Parks Master Plan: some "musts" and some additionals as well. So I’ll take those into consideration as you review through this as well. **[00:52:15] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Got plenty of water for your voice for going through all this? You got plenty of water to keep your voice lubricated for all the talking you’re going to do? **[00:52:25] Adam Swanepoel:** Just filled up, thank you for asking. **[00:52:30] Anna Springer (Bolton & Mink):** Hello, I’m Anna Springer, Senior Landscape Architect with Bolton and Mink. Thank you for your time this evening. I think you’re all familiar with the work that we’ve done and you had some time with the very short document as you described it. But I will go through our process, just kind of outline what we did as part of the system plan, and then talk about any changes you might like to see in the plan as we move towards adoption. Let me see if I can get this to go full screen here... there we go. So again, just going to over the purpose, the process, and then we’ll have some time for discussion and feedback at the end. We had a four-person team for the project. It was myself, and Josh Shields was the Principal, and a Public Engagement Specialist as well who helped us with the pop-ups and the online survey. As Adam said, this plan aims to provide guidance for the development and direction of Lake Elmo’s parks, open space, and trail system for the next 10 years. We started this process back in September and we are here in June at this City Council Workshop. We broke the project into four tasks. The first task was project coordination and kickoff where we were sort of information gathering and just getting ourselves set up for the process. And then we dove into inventory analysis where we spent some time in your parks, on your trails, and also doing a lot of mapping and just understanding and listening through the advisory committee and the public engagement events. We developed some priority recommendations and we shared those at a pop-up event and got some feedback, modified things, and came back with the final document which we have reviewed with the advisory committee for the project, the Parks Commission, and now with you. One of the steps that we like to include is understanding the vision for the system and setting forth some guiding principles so that we know where we’re going with the system—what do people want to see? And we try to tie that into the existing community vision. So we look at the vision from the 2040 plan and pull out key things from that to build on. So it should describe the future state of the system and it should inspire and show what this looks like long term. So with the help of the advisory committee, we came up with the statement that "Lake Elmo parks, trails, and open spaces should provide convenient access to a wide range of opportunities for all residents to recreate and connect." And the guiding principles that we developed were focused around "Connecting, Growing, Maintaining, and Adapting." Connecting the community to each other, to the outdoors, to strengthen relationships. Grow is enhance and improve the existing assets as well as provide room for future growth of the park and trail system and healthy lifestyles for residents in the future. Maintain—to provide guidance and recommendations that are implementable, maintainable, and sustainable. And with the idea that the plan is assisting the city to adapt to ever-changing trends and needs in parks and recreation as well as the rapidly growing population of Lake Elmo. So we kind of start high level: what does the system look like at a glance? Well, you have 24 city parks, 510 acres. You have 82 total miles of trail in the city and it serves organized sports, casual play, hiking, relaxing, nature appreciation—all sorts of activities. You have ball fields, basketball courts, flex fields, pickleball courts, tennis courts, and volleyball courts. **[00:56:05] Council Member Jeff Holtz:** And so we have a question point of clarification: if I recall this right, does that "soccer/football"—that includes our contractual agreement with 834 for Oakland fields? Is that where some of that is coming from? **[00:56:20] Anna Springer:** It does not. This is just like open field space in the within the parks themselves. We look at demographic highlights—so you know, who lives in Lake Elmo? Who is the system being developed for? What’s the education attainment in the community? What’s the housing status? Other demographic highlights that tell us about people are that you know most people are driving to work alone, only 3% of households are below the poverty level here, there’s 17% of your households have one or more persons with a disability. Then we’ll review the public engagement. So we had a booth set up at Light up Lake Elmo at the library downtown, and a number of people came through and provided some feedback and had conversations with folks. It was a very successful event I would say. I think we estimate probably almost 400 people probably passed through that space and interacted with the setup in some form or another. There were things that are geared towards children—they were voting on things with little balls. So maybe not the most scientific engagement, but it’s fun for them to get them involved and thinking about what they want to see in their parks. But some of the top priorities that emerged were new and additional walking trails, multi-use courts, inclusive playgrounds, the dog park (you’re ticking off), and fitness or health stations. Not going to over everything because I’m sure you all spent a lot of time with the documents already, but the survey summary: we had 552 responses to the survey, which we were very pleased with. 86% of respondents believe that parks, trails, and open spaces are very important to the overall quality of life, and 88% were Lake Elmo respondents. So there were people that responded to the survey that were from Afton or Bayport or some of your neighboring communities. Most of the respondents had been living in Lake Elmo for at least one to five years. And if we look at age groups present in the respondents' households, we have a lot of children and middle-aged folks and people maybe on the cusp of retiring here too. People are visiting parks or using trails half of them at least once a week, which is great, and one of the more popular parks is Sunfish Lake Park. We also asked people about priorities. So some of the priorities that I’ve already mentioned: walking trails, multi-use courts, addition of seasonal use facilities—so things to do in the winter—and inclusive playgrounds. A lot of people like to walk to parks if they can. I think we were kind of curious, how does this survey response rate stack up to other projects that we’ve worked on or projects that we know about? So with that 4% response rate, that’s in the higher end, I would say, from our experience. Sometimes you’re only getting 1.3% response on the surveys. So the bulk of the document... **[00:59:45] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** I’m sorry, could you scan back just for one quick second? The last slide? Oh, scan back—I thought you said stand back to the one... oh, right there. Okay, thank you. That’s all I needed. **[01:00:00] Anna Springer:** So parks are classified in a way that helps us kind of understand how to manage them, how people use them, how they should be distributed throughout the community. Neighborhood Parks, Community Parks, Regional Parks, Special Use Parks, Natural Resource Protection Areas, and Community Athletic Parks. We here have identified how things were categorized in the current 2040 plan. So you can see we didn’t have any Special Use Parks in the 2040 plan and there were no Community Athletic Parks in the 2040 plan as well. So we just, you know, we can’t help ourselves, we like to map and see how things are distributed. So this map just shows what the current park classifications are and how they’re distributed across the city. And then we like to do this park inventory table which gives us a nice snapshot that shows us the classifications, what all the amenities are, maybe where some of the gaps exist. Or you can look at this really quickly and say, "Oh, there’s two or three city-owned sledding hills, okay." We’ve also included proposed classifications in this table because we are recommending that you reclassify some of your parks, which will help set the baseline for what goes into these parks and how they get managed moving forward. We also look at recreation facility service standards. So the National Recreation and Parks Association shares standards on a yearly basis, which kind of gives us a baseline for what the typical US park and rec association is offering. Aquatic centers—these are all broken down into "per 10,000 people." So it looks like you know if we’re looking just at these benchmarks, you know, you’re missing one aquatic center, maybe missing an indoor ice rink. But I think it’s important to keep local knowledge applied to these standards as well. So you know you might not have an aquatic center, but you’ve got some nearby, and the community—I think you can ask yourselves—is the need of the community being met by these neighboring facilities? So things to take into consideration. I will say, you know, we called out just a couple of the deficits: basketball half-court—deficit of two half-courts, but maybe the trends in this community is that people aren’t playing basketball as much, so that’s okay if we don’t meet that benchmark. Have quite a number of multi-use fields, currently meeting the need for pickleball and playgrounds. We look at agency benchmarks which is more in the operations and maintenance side of things, where it’s broken down into all US park and rec agencies, and then we also get a little bit more granular information looking at cities that are 20,000 in population or less. But some of these numbers are pretty interesting. Like, you know, you have high park acreage; the average has like 1,100 residents per park and you have 573 residents per park—that’s pretty good. Acres of Parkland per 1,000 residents—you’re high in acreage per 1,000 residents as well. We did split the trails—local miles versus what’s in the county park or are considered regional trails. So you have 49 local trail miles. **[01:03:15] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Beyond Anna—beyond the Lake Elmo Park Reserve—are there other County trails? **[01:03:25] Anna Springer:** There’s regional trails—the Gateway trail passes through the corner... **[01:03:30] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Oh, just that little bit? Yeah. **[01:03:32] Anna Springer:** Yeah, and then there’s another regional trail that goes up into to the park reserve. **[01:03:35] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Okay, on Keats, that’s considered regional I believe, so from 94 North? **[01:03:40] Anna Springer:** Yeah, I believe so. When we get into the budget numbers, that’s telling a story as well. Your annual operating expenditures: the typical agency spends 1.4 million on annual operating expenses and you all are at $431,000. Annual operating expenditures per resident: $135 for the typical median agency and you’re at just under $32. So just, you know, again it’s one piece of the puzzle, one snippet of information, but it does kind of help I think always to compare yourself to what other agencies are doing around the country and locally. Then we also like to do gap analysis. So we’ll map things and overlay it with the land use. We did this to look at just general park access. So you know there’s this pink lighter pink buffer is a half a mile and the darker pink is a quarter mile. So that’s generally what we would consider walkable distances. So most of the residential areas are covered, you have good access to a park, but I would say there’s a bit of a gap down here in the southeast corner, especially as you start to develop a little bit more in these areas. We also mapped playgrounds—we didn’t map some of the privately owned playgrounds or school facilities just with the understanding that it’s not under the city’s direct influence or control what happens in these properties. But you can see again there’s maybe less access here in the southeast corner. Existing natural areas—right now current classification there’s just a couple of places to go to for natural area access. And then we look at court distribution—where are the specific courts located across the city? You know, again we can see this gap in the southeast portion of Lake Elmo. The same goes for ball fields—we’ve got pretty good distribution across the city, but no ball fields down here. We looked at the trails—so mapping current trails, so that includes local trails, snowmobile trails, unpaved trails. And also we know that there’s future planning efforts with you and other entities so we like to show those as well. County trails, regional trails. And then we can pull out some kind of key findings from that need assessment. I would say you know your trail miles are good, the connectivity is maybe lacking. You know just getting from north to south, east to west is a little challenging across the city, but you do have a lot of nice pockets of trails that different neighborhoods have access to. But the community is looking for that greater connectivity. Additional upgraded baseball facilities are desired for competitive gameplay. More access to winter recreation—we heard a lot about plowing trails so that folks can use trails in the winter. Park acreage is good, distribution is generally good—again that connectivity piece getting to parks can be challenging. And updating of play equipment would improve user experience. So we take all of what we heard and develop a set of recommendations. And this presentation just has a snippet of some of the recommendations. We lay them out as goals—broader general statements—and then the policies, which is the general way that you would achieve these things, and then initiatives are more specific actions. So just kind of breaking down the park recommendations into access: you know this talks about working to fill the access gap in the southeast and north central area of the city when development occurs. Plan for future park integration by adding parks as the community grows. Requiring the dedication of Parkland in strategic locations that align with the long-term goals for park size, access, and amenities. Not going to read through all of these. But we are proposing a number of parks be reclassified, specifically looking at more natural areas and managing those more as natural areas and just adding signs so that people know that they are public and they could potentially have winter trail, you know, unpaved surfaces, and just some things that would support passive more passive park use in the natural areas. We get into facility recommendations. We’re looking at adding a special facility to meet the needs of tweens, teens, and young adults—it’s something that you’re not alone in lacking facilities for that group. Some communities have implemented challenge courses or ninja skills courses, skate parks, or disc golf courses—I think could all be facilities that would serve that kind of underserved group at the moment. Looking at places for larger group gatherings—developing a reservable shelter with potable water, electrical, and permanent restrooms could support larger community gatherings. Incorporating inclusive play features when you’re redeveloping your play equipment just to serve that part of the population as well—maybe the less able-bodied. And then when we get into connectivity recommendations, we’ve got a couple of search corridors. You know, is there a way that we could connect folks from this Gateway Trail and get them to the regional park eventually? So we just, you know, we recognize that this is a challenging spot, but if we don’t put the line on the map, we’ll probably never start looking for a connection there. So this is one way to start doing that. And then there’s low-hanging—well, we think is more low-hanging fruit which would be called out in these with these specific boxes here. **[01:09:20] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** What’s the dark dashed line? **[01:09:22] Anna Springer:** The dark black? Yeah, it is labeled as "Recommended Connectivity Improvements." And more specific open space recommendations: there’s some content in there about addressing invasive species. We heard quite a few people talk about managing emerald ash borer and just the need to really stand on top of that and be a little more proactive on that side of things in in the preserves and the parks. **[01:09:50] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** What’s that say under 5.3.1? "Encourage volunteer efforts efforts"... looks like an export error there. **[01:09:58] Anna Springer:** We’ll make sure that gets taken care of. **[01:10:00] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Makes sense. **[01:10:01] Anna Springer:** And then we get into the implementation chapter, which is about setting priorities and giving some high-level planning figures for what it might take to implement some of these recommendations. Both the advisory committee and the Parks Commission thought it was this first step of hiring a Parks Director is kind of the key step to improving the system overall. That adding that capacity would allow for more time to be spent to pursue some of the grant money and the funding mechanisms that are needed to to implement some of these recommendations. **[01:10:40] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Let me ask you a question, and it’s because you deal with a lot of other communities and and things like this pop up on my radar. As, you know, as Lake Elmo has grown since I moved here—like 6,600 people—and there’s certain things you can do and as you gain in population and ability to do things, it’s always questioning myself: so when is the right time to do something like a Parks Director? And tend to look at other communities that say, "Well, we’ve we’ve got this going on, it makes sense for us to now include that in our staffing plan as we go forward." Is there any kind of—I mean you showed some of the other communities and what we spent relative to those and that makes sense—just curious if there’s anything that kind of says, "Well yeah, you’ve you’re at that part and cities of your size typically have a position like this to cover that." And that’s, you know, what we spend on this to make those amenities beneficial to your residents. Is there any kind of guidance on something like that? Just like when you hit that inflection point. **[01:11:40] Anna Springer:** Yeah, um, I don’t think there’s anything hard and fast. I mean I think for me—or like what makes it obvious to me for Lake Elmo—is that sometimes there might not be a Parks Director but there’s a Program Coordinator, somebody that’s, you know, planning activities in the parks and working with volunteer groups and just doing a whole set of things that, you know, somebody who is also doing two other jobs just aren’t going to be able to do. I have not worked in a community that didn’t have a Parks Director, so it was new territory for me. **[01:12:15] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Got it. I’ll be honest. **[01:12:18] Anna Springer:** But also just like when you see kind of where your population is too, you have a lot of young kids in the community and younger parents, and I think they’re just kind of clamoring for a little bit more programming in the community which is something that a Parks Director would have a lot to do with. **[01:12:35] Council Member Matt Hirn:** I was just going—just to maybe get some clarity on that too because I think there was a slide on here where you showed some of the other community sizes. When you mentioned those the other communities you worked with that had the parks directors, is that the communities you’re referencing—the ones that I’ve listed up here? **[01:12:55] Anna Springer:** The survey size ones? **[01:12:57] Council Member Matt Hirn:** The survey size ones, yes. **[01:12:58] Anna Springer:** Um, some of these I didn’t work on—Wabasha or Blue Earth—but Josh worked on Blue Earth, so I can’t say for sure that they had specific Park directors. But Chanhassen for sure, Otsego yes, Little Canada yes, Maple Grove yes, Elk River yes. They all had Parks Directors. **[01:13:20] Council Member Matt Hirn:** See and that’s where I’m looking at Otsego, Little Canada... Chanhassen’s about 10,000 more than us and obviously Maple Grove and Elk River larger than we are, but the other two are kind of ballpark in that arena. **[01:13:32] Council Member Jeff Holtz:** With that topic of the Director: based upon the information you’re gathering and what you’ve been able to see so far, would your thought be that there are already then positions that exist that would be shifted under that, or are you thinking that it would be a Parks Director and then additional new FTE under that? Or is it more so maybe a reorganization of people and what they’re already doing and maybe changing who they’re answering to? **[01:14:00] Anna Springer:** We didn’t go that far. We didn’t aim to get into the organizational structure. You know, if if there’s certain tasks that someone’s doing now that would be shifted over to that job description, I would imagine that it there would be things that would get shifted over, but that person would also get capacity to start doing some of the other things that we’re showing in the plan. **[01:14:20] Council Member Beom:** I would just caution us on jumping on a just adding a position without understanding. I mean each of these cities has their own unique structure. They may or may not have a Public Works Director and an Assistant Director, they may not have a Community Development Director. So I would just want us to to be cautious about jumping on "we need we would need to create a position for a Parks Director." Because I might ask Adam just, you know, how much of his time is spent with Parks? You know, you do a lot with parks. And so I think it’s it’s great to recommend it and put it in there, but again I think there’s a whole lot of other information in here that I’d rather get to than start position discussions. **[01:15:10] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Certainly would have to be discussed; it was just a question I had relative to that. And I’m certainly not by any means recommending that that’s something we do off of this parks plan right away. But thank you. **[01:15:25] Council Member Nick Dragisich:** Yeah, I think—interesting report, I read had a good time looking through it. In terms of whether we have a Park Director or not, you know, my first glance I kind of look back historically over City of Lake Elmo in their financial report. They have 10 years of history and the city has gained significant amount of population; we really haven’t changed our number of staff hardly at all. And if we look at at a Park Director—I’m not at this point sure enough—but you’d want to go back and I think the first step would be identify comparable cities and what makes them comparable to us: age demographics, population size, all those kind of things, right? And say, so when did—as they grew—when did they add a park structure? Which ones have, which ones don’t, and how are they structured in their operations? If they don’t have a Parks Director, how do they manage their parks? Is there, you know, the Assistant Public Works Director whose primary responsibility is parking? So I think there’s some investigation that we could do. My sense is we’ll find out as we look that staff is going to be a more pressing issue given our growth, but looking at how other people have addressed it gives you a good guideline. At any rate... **[01:16:45] Council Member Beom:** Just to follow up: so I think one thing that might be helpful to go back and look at is we’ve done operational audits over the past couple years. And so I thought we did one for Public Works, but maybe we didn’t. And I know we did for planning. And so I guess I would go back to those operational audits that were done where there were recommendations for positions for sure. Yeah, and it may be buried in there somewhere. So it might be just resurrecting some of that. So, good discussion. Can I probe on some of the recommendations? **[01:17:25] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Well and let’s—or are you still have more? I don’t think she’s done, so we kind of jumped in but I think this is leading to a great discussion. So we can—I don’t want to shut your flow. **[01:17:35] Anna Springer:** No, I was just going to you know kind of highlight or just show at very minimum kind of how the implementation table is laid out with the priority levels of low, medium, and high, and what that means for a time frame. So a high priority would be within the next one to three years, medium four to seven, and low priority level would be eight years and beyond. So we can open it up to questions with that. **[01:18:00] Council Member Jeff Holtz:** Well, I guess sorry, I just wrote down a bunch of the three numbers... 3.1. And I guess this might be a question for staff. So that all of "Three" is about connectivity—trying to fill the gaps, make sure that the recommendation of 10 to 15 minute walk is available for everyone. Rough guesstimate based upon what’s already in our CIP, how many—how much work is this recommending that’s not in our CIP? Like, does our CIP call out maybe a third of what we’re looking at, a half of what we’re looking at, or is it not even a drop in the bucket for how much connectivity is really being looked into here and is geared right towards trails? **[01:18:45] Adam Swanepoel:** Yeah, probably not as much as you know development kind of strands the trail system, right? So if we’re trying to mix those gaps, we probably don’t have a lot in there right now. **[01:18:55] Council Member Jeff Holtz:** And I noticed some of the at least on the map, like connectivity was recommended along Lake Elmo Avenue and along Manning. And I mean those are County roads. I mean we... yeah, those aren’t happening anytime soon. **[01:19:10] Anna Springer:** Those are great opportunities to start chatting with the County right now. And just—I’m sure you are doing that—but you know, again putting lines on the map is important, but it’s definitely key to get those conversations going and try to work with the County early to get some of your needs met. Address some you know difficult crossings or if there’s opportunities to get some grade-separated crossings of some of the higher traffic roads, you know, it’s better—better to start chipping away at those as soon as possible. **[01:19:40] Council Member Jeff Holtz:** Understandable. With 2.3.2, that that was inclusive parks, and I fully understand and fully agree with that. Was the thought process maybe like one inclusive park overall within the city? Was it maybe add inclusivity to parks across—like maybe a playground might have partial inclusivity access but it’s not necessarily, you know, your master—or is it more so probably a more centralized singular one? **[01:20:05] Anna Springer:** I think it would be good to have a centralized singular park that’s universal—so it doesn’t have just parts of it that are designed to be accessible by all, it’s completely accessible to all. But in all of the parks, I think there should be at least one accessible feature so that, you know, every park has something for everybody. **[01:20:25] Council Member Jeff Holtz:** Gotcha. That’s—you know, that can happen over time as as parks are updated. On 1.5, there was mention of so reclassifying VFW Park from Neighborhood to Athletic Park and support competitive and townball play there. I’m just wondering what does that look like? Because it didn’t involve expanding the field. **[01:20:50] Anna Springer:** Yeah, town ball can’t be played on that field, right. We’ll take that off so that it just says competitive. But it’s just like working with your baseball associations to understand their needs and how can you support competitive play there. So it might be looking at improving dugouts. I think the parking there could use some reorganization—there’s not a lot of room to do much like in terms of reorganizing, but... **[01:21:12] Council Member Jeff Holtz:** Do is the full plan on this computer somewhere so I can see the recommendation? And I guess just the last one was 1.3.3 was discussing of you know other opportunities in downtown to develop a special use or a mini park or maybe private development to create open space. A "mini park"—what are we thinking? Is that—is that like a common space? Is that a place with a fountain where people gather or what what’s a mini park? **[01:21:40] Anna Springer:** A mini park is—well, we went back and forth with the advisory committee too about this language a little bit. We initially had "pocket park" in the plan, which in my mind is just it’s like a park that’s less than an acre in size and it’s just designed to serve one function. And usually in the case of like a downtown mini park, it would just be like plaza space for people to gather, maybe eat an ice cream cone or drink their coffee—seating or something like that. **[01:22:05] Council Member Jeff Holtz:** Seating and maybe some nice plantings? Just another place to fill in and and let people gather. **[01:22:10] Anna Springer:** Gotcha. **[01:22:11] Council Member Jeff Holtz:** I used up my time. Thank you. **[01:22:12] Council Member Beom:** So I just want to take a step back on one of the items Council Member Holtz referenced. And I—my document is so big it won’t load the page for me to reference, so I think it was 1.5, the baseball section. Does that sound about right? So my my question is: as I read through the report—and I did read the whole thing, and great work by the way, this is fabulous information that’s really going to help us—but I was curious about how we came to a point of making a recommendation we needed baseball fields. When I look at the data—where we have adequate competitive fields according to the standards, and we actually have excess of recreational fields, and our multi-use fields also like we have an excess of seven of those fields—and so I was just curious where where did that recommendation come from? What’s supporting that one? **[01:23:25] Anna Springer:** Well, I should back up and say that those—the benchmarks that have the quantity don’t say anything about quality. So a lot of the ball fields that are in some of the neighborhood parks, they’re not up to competitive standards. They might not have bases, they might just be like a little bit of crushed egg with a backstop and they’re really designed for more informal play, so kids going out and just doing a pickup game. But there was a—we were given a survey from a couple of years ago, I think it was 2022, there was a baseball survey that just said... **[01:23:55] Council Member Beom:** 30 people that with 30 respondents? Is that—I didn’t look at how many. It was a low low turn on it. It was a flawed survey. So it shouldn’t have been used. So I’m curious... so it was survey data that was primarily the driver of the baseball field recommendation? Is that—that was part of it? **[01:24:15] Anna Springer:** I think we heard that at the Light Up Lake Elmo event too, a lot about baseball. **[01:24:20] Council Member Beom:** I didn’t see that in the screenshots I looked at all those cause I was curious if it was coming up anywhere—but a survey. And I didn’t see that any of the dots in in those pictures depicted anything related to baseball. And so I’m wondering, with the the bigger survey that was done, which we had the 4% response on, did you look at those results and evaluate against any bias in the results by chance? **[01:24:55] Anna Springer:** We did include the full survey responses in the appendix. I did read most of the responses. **[01:25:00] Council Member Beom:** I wonder if I could just point out a couple of things with that survey that might raise a—maybe a red flag on a potential bias in the results. So there were just over 500 and some respondents. When we look at the breakdown of Lake Elmo versus non-Lake Elmo, there are 65 respondents who are not in Lake Elmo, which is fine. And when I looked at the detailed results, and it looked like with Question 18 was where really baseball seemed to come up in the other comments a lot, because it wasn’t an option to select in any of the survey questions. And as I looked closer at the the data and the responses, what was interesting is from the beginning of the survey in November until the 7th of January, there were a total of 54 write-in comments for "Other" and two of those were related to baseball. And then from January 8th until the 24th of January, there were 103 write-in responses for "Other" and 52 of those were related to baseball—so 50% of the write-ins after the 8th. And what you might find interesting is that Lake Elmo Baseball posted a Facebook message on January 8th to all their members to complete the survey and tell Lake Elmo City how important baseball fields are. Which to me, as I look at the data, it’s very clear. And as I go back to the non-Lake Elmo respondents—of the 65, 55 completed the survey after January 8th. So 55 out of the 65 non-Lake Elmo residents. And again, the bulk of the baseball comments came after the post. And so I certainly hope we’re not using survey results that appear to me to be biased in determining that we need baseball fields, nor that two of the members on the advisory committee are actually board members for the Lake Elmo Baseball Association. **[01:27:15] Anna Springer:** Okay. Well, that’s all well pointed out. The one thing I’ll say: it’s not just about baseball fields. In 1.5 it talks about meeting the needs of recreational league and tournament play baseball. What does that equal? Well, that just means that a lot of our recreational ball fields—like she was indicating—they’re more like recreational that have the crushed sandstone. If you’re going to have any sort of like softball leagues or baseball leagues or tournament play, those don’t really serve the need. So I guess that’s where I would read that a little differently than just just a normal baseball field. I would upgrade the fields. **[01:28:00] Council Member Beom:** And again I’m looking for the data that says that we have a problem. There’s reference to capacity, but is that capacity concern coming from Lake Elmo Baseball versus a capacity in our broader community? I mean, it’s not atypical that a specific Association would, you know, voice loudly over concerns for their... **[01:28:20] Council Member Matt Hirn:** Right. I think that’s my feeling on this is, I guess like what’s the point of doing any surveys if we’re going to question the results of any survey? I mean, that is going to be part of any survey, and I guess I get what you’re saying with it and there’s bias—that does appear that way. But at the same time it’s like, well, so are we going to just look at this again and say all right, we’re not going to use the survey again like we did with the previous one? **[01:28:45] Council Member Beom:** Not at all. I don’t think that should be driving what we’re doing with baseball fields. I’d like to see the other data that says that we have a problem and we need to fix it by spending a few million dollars on a baseball sports complex. Because I did not... I was looking for that specifically. As we’re going out and looking at land, part of the reason we really wanted to do this park Master Plan was to hear from the community, to understand what they what they really want. And so if we go and purchase land, what what do they really want? And so to make recommendations based on one Association, I’m curious if—you know, one of the things early on in this that I was worried about going into this is how are we engaging other associations? And so, did as part of the engagement process, did we reach out to any soccer leagues or Stillwater Baseball or any lacrosse groups or flag football? I mean, I know that was something that as a Council we talked about when we looked at potential groups to hire to do this—that the community engagement part was really important and making sure we had feedback from those other sports leagues was also very important. And and so, are you able to speak to any of that engagement that was done? **[01:30:15] Anna Springer:** We did not directly engage with any other organizations. It was all done through the pop-ups, the online survey... yeah, we didn’t hold any specific listening sessions with any association or group. **[01:30:30] Council Member Beom:** Were any of the members on the advisory committee connected to any other sports besides Lake Elmo Baseball? **[01:30:35] Anna Springer:** We didn’t talk about affiliations, I guess, as a a group. **[01:30:40] Council Member Beom:** So that would be my concern with with... I mean there’s a lot in this report and it’s fantastic, but that’s millions of dollars that are being recommended for something that I guess is not supported by the report. And I certainly hope it’s not in there because there’s one group driving that. **[01:31:00] Anna Springer:** Yeah, and I would say you know if you’re looking at adding a community athletic facility or a park that’s just dedicated towards a certain sport, you know, that should be something that’s supported by the community. Because you’re right, it’s a big outlay of cash. **[01:31:15] Council Member Beom:** Thank you. **[01:31:17] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** All right. If there’s any more questions, otherwise we’re a little behind time. Want to thank Bolton and Mink for presenting this. I want to thank all the members of your committee. Certainly did appreciate the pop-up events; I did walk into the one during the Light Up Lake Elmo which was great to see everybody in there. And you know, kids putting what was important—and I heard one dad saying, "Well, you’ve only got five dots, you got to figure out what’s most important to you, right? So you can put them all in one or you can spread them out just however you want to do that." So it’s good to see getting younger people involved and kind of their parents involving them in it, which I kind of like to see. I don’t know—is this on this? We this this has already been presented to the Parks Commission? **[01:32:00] Adam Swanepoel:** Yes. **[01:32:02] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Okay. So then the next thing would be to, if there’s any flushing out of this—which I didn’t really see anything that I would tend to make any changes on—it would come to Council for adoption. **[01:32:15] Nicole Miller (City Administrator):** Yep. **[01:32:16] Council Member Beom:** I’d like some data on the baseball side of it if there’s some data available. **[01:32:20] Adam Swanepoel:** If you can provide any data for Council Member Beom on the baseball side of it, that would be appreciated. Thank you. **[01:32:25] Anna Springer:** Okay, thank you very much. Excellent. Thank you for your time. **[01:32:30] Adam Swanepoel:** Thank you. Next we have Community Room Rental. And now for something truly important, I need you to focus intensely on this issue. So we basically are here... we have a room outside this City Council chambers—it says "Community Room"—and the Mayor had brought up that we should either use it for the community or change the name. And so we basically came to a previous workshop and I got feedback from Council and Mayor concerning what did they like to see in it. And I took that feedback in addition to 30 pages of other city information that you could certainly read. So there’s a whole gamut of cities—sometimes only doing it during the day, sometimes they charge a significant amount of money (it’s a profit center for some cities), some cities use it as a community good—it’s owned by the taxpayers, it’s utilized by the taxpayers. And so this is my interpretation of what I’m hearing from the Council concerning this. So we basically would use the community room or the 3800 old Council chambers, as we call them. And I’m recommending that we don’t charge for them. I’m recommending that we utilize it for the groups which we’ve—you know, it’s for the benefit of Lake Elmo. We’re not looking to have outside cities and stuff like that. I would recommend it not be utilized for firms, commercial activities, religious groups, individual organizations that are for-profit in nature, selling goods or services, or for private celebrations or parties. And that’s kind of what I heard Council say last time. We have some general—you know, people can request, we have a form in here. We would have it available between 8:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. We basically would buy one of those—at the airport you got the traffic control things or where people are guided—what are they called? **[01:34:25] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Stanchions. **[01:34:26] Adam Swanepoel:** Stanchions, thank you. So we basically put that in front of the doors here, you know, because we can’t close these doors off—this is your storm shelter. And so if they happen to be in a meeting, there happen to be a thunderstorm, this is where everybody would come. So we can’t lock these doors. And so we basically just use hopefully the goodwill of people: "Stop," "Don't go," whatever, something like that. They have access to the bathrooms and the rest of the building is locked off. They at the end of the meetings they would have to haul their trash out and they would have to clean the room, return the room to the condition that they found it in, and then drop their key inside the lockbox. If they’re utilizing the old City Hall, they can just drop it in the outside lockbox. And so you know, all we have—food or drinks could be brought in, but no alcohol. We wouldn’t provide any coffee makers, cups, dishes, stuff like that; they pretty much have to haul it in. And individuals would be held liable for any damages should anything occur as the result of their use. So this is where our contact form would have the individuals that they’re signing off and they agree to be personally responsible—or group/organization—if they, you know, rip the TV off the wall or something like that. And I have—the third page—the rental policy. So applicant’s got to be 18 years old, and no alcohol, tobacco, THC, animals (no animals except trained service dogs). So goes through there, then you have the rental room form. So as a workshop we’re looking for further feedback from Council that we can bring back to a meeting for approval and in turn we can start letting the citizens utilize this room. **[01:36:15] Council Member Beom:** Um, just a question. So I know when we talked about this before we talked about no private parties, but I wonder—I got to thinking about that a little bit and looking at some of the other city policies, some cities do. And with it being graduation season, I was thinking about that; I’ve gone to a couple of graduations where they’ve held them in, you know, facilities like our community room. And so I didn’t know if we wanted to/needed to revisit that piece of it at all. You know, I don’t know how big of a deal that is, but that was just one thing I caught in there. **[01:36:45] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** I know at Baytown Township we used to rent it for individual parties, family reunions, and all that stuff, and it ended up just being more problematic than it was worth. And we ended up with more cleaning costs because we ended up with cake, we ended up with all sorts of different things on the floor. And then you have to chase after the people to say, "Okay, you got to pay $200 for carpet cleaning now." And then they got to pay... and trying to simplify it a little bit to kind of keep it as a needed—you know, the HOAs, Boy Scouts, knitting clubs—you know, kind of a little bit more casual versus parties. **[01:37:25] Council Member Beom:** I’m fine with that; I just picked that up in a couple of other ones. **[01:37:30] Council Member Jeff Holtz:** I know on the request form it asked for how many people would attend. Do we need to say in the rental policy what the max capacity is for either room? **[01:37:40] Adam Swanepoel:** Yeah, we probably should. I don’t know what that is. I’m sure it’s either posted on the door or the Fire Department knows. **[01:37:48] Council Member Jeff Holtz:** Should have... yeah, there should be a fire code for that, right? **[01:37:50] Adam Swanepoel:** Yep, yep. Yeah, we’ll we’ll put that on the form. We might know someone... probably somebody. **[01:37:55] Council Member Matt Hirn:** I like that it’s simple. **[01:37:58] Council Member Jeff Holtz:** I’m yeah, add the capacity thing and for me that’s giving the opportunity for people to use it for what it was intended for. **[01:38:05] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** I like it. I like that you know it should be fairly easy to implement, right? It should not take us—you don’t have to deal with credit cards or payment or any of that jazz. **[01:38:15] Adam Swanepoel:** Yeah, I talked to a couple cities where the city clerks were involved with this and they’re just like, "It’s just—they cancel, then you got to give the money back, and oh you got to do a cleaning fee, they only get part of it, we’re going to argue about this." And it’s just not worth it. I mean, the only staff time... you know, so they basically would use Rebecca as our reservation person. And she might have to deal with people walking through—let’s say it’s an HOA and they want to do the presentation on the TV—they might come in early and want five minutes to do that during the day, during the work hours, so they can get that nailed down. **[01:38:50] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Sure. And the only other thing we’ll probably have to address—or we’ll do this at the staff level—which is, so let’s say the meeting’s at 7:00 o’clock, there’s no one here. Who do they call if the key card doesn’t work? You know, that’s we’re going to have to figure that out at a staff level. You know, do they—do they call Nicole up in Wyoming? Probably not. You know, where do you live, Adam? **[01:39:15] Adam Swanepoel:** I reside in Richmond. **[01:39:17] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Oh, well. Okay. **[01:39:20] Adam Swanepoel:** So I think you live in Stillwater? **[01:39:22] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Stillwater. Anyway, yeah. But those are the things we’ll have to figure out because, you know, we can’t [ask] the Fire Department to be available to call to say, "Hey, the key card doesn’t work" and let me—they may be here, they may not be here. So we’ll figure that out at the staff level. **[01:39:40] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** I was just thinking that there’s five people right here that live in Lake Elmo. The Mayor lives in Lake Elmo—coincidence. I’m probably one of the furthest away, but the train might get in my way. I mean, true. He’d be late. **[01:39:55] Adam Swanepoel:** Yeah, we’ll figure that out. No, I thank you for putting that together and checking other communities and doing that. **[01:40:02] Council Member Beom:** Yes. One last question. So there was—just one thing that I noticed in some of the other policies and and I don’t know if it makes sense given the scope of ours, but the priority of who can schedule. I thought that might be nice to spell out if there’s competing needs, where you’ve got non-Lake Elmo residents as the last priority. **[01:40:25] Adam Swanepoel:** So yeah, I think I we have everything subordinate to you and us, you know. But I I was thinking just first-come, first-served. I mean she’s going to have a calendar just like we have an Outlook calendar. You schedule it for 7:00 and same day—well, it’s too late. **[01:40:40] Council Member Beom:** Well, I wouldn’t want non-Lake Elmo groups reserving our community room if there’s Lake Elmo residents. That would be the only thing. But I don’t know if it makes sense enough to even build it into the policy; maybe that’s just something we keep a track of. **[01:40:55] Adam Swanepoel:** No, yeah, and and this will be a document—it’s a living document. Staff will see as we go forward how is it working? Is the room being trashed? Are we keeping care of it? Can we expand the use? So this is something I fully expect that the staff will change as we get experience in this. **[01:41:15] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Yeah, if it gets abused and not used properly, then unfortunately sometimes the greater lose out because of a poor few. But I mean they need to be cognizant of that. We always used to have this expression: "We just can’t have nice things anymore." **[01:41:35] Mayor Charles Cadenhead:** Okay. Items for future work session agenda would be: Land Use Training, Village Area Study, City Debt Level, Tax Rate, and Street Project Policy. All on the next one. Thank you everybody for your time and we will adjourn at 8:34.