foreign good evening everyone work sessions without service level conversations and this evening our city manager will make some remarks and introduce the service areas that we're going to be addressing this evening and to our residents you have in the last few months taking a look at what we do here at uh at Burnsville City Hall to deliver services to all of you from each of the different departments our city manager Greg Lindberg thank you mayor mayor council this is our fourth meeting now with service conversations with each of our department just by way of a reminder primarily for the community these conversations are designed really to dive into the details of of our operations how we deliver service to the community tied with the conversations that we've been having about our organizational analysis and our 2023 budget process so this evening brings us to our fourth and final meeting we have three departments tonight who will be talking with you human resources the city clerk's office and Community Development so again as I've said in previous meetings I really appreciate the time that each of our department directors and their managers and teams have put in to preparing for these conversations and really trying to best reflect the service that they're providing to the community and along the way answer your questions educate you alongside the community with the work that we day in and day out for Burnsville with that a couple of of reminders first would be that after this discussion tonight the leadership team will take a look at a final draft of the complete inventory of services that we delivered uh to the city that inventory will be delivered in a report to you that kind of is a Capstone of this of these conversations as part of the budget process I anticipate that you'll see that sometime Bethany's looking at me she's wondering when I'm going to say sometime you should expect it sometime middle of September so the leadership team will be talking more about that tomorrow as we as we debrief these conversations and and prepare to get that to you also the community can follow along with our our budget conversation and each of these service conversations at Burnsville mn.gov budget the budget page has kind of a timeline of each of these conversation ends woven together with each of your budget conversations including our comprehensive discussions on the organizational analysis so it's all there laid out with links to the slide decks you'll see tonight as well as videos to each of these meetings so trying to make it as easy as possible alongside our budget transparency portal kind of the real-time ability for folks to get in and dive into our budget this Friday I'll I'll send you a note on this as well but just in terms of budget process moving forward I expect that our draft budget book will be available to you sometime the first week in November with a future goal to get us kind of more in line with a pattern of that budget book being available to you at the time of Max tax with this year's budget process we've had kind of an iterative experience over the course of the past several months and staff needs a little bit more time this year to prepare that so just by way of timing a good run under there again all of that will be available online at burtonsvillemn.gov budget and Carissa walked into the room just when I didn't screw up with it that's slash budget not backslash budget which is apparently a bad habit that I have um with that I believe that human resources is going to kick our evening off so I'll turn it over to cursive Bartholomew Karissa and welcome to you and your team good evening thank you for having me Madam mayor and Council I'm excited to talk to you a little bit tonight about the services that the HR department provides and really kind of boast about some really cool things that we're doing so just agenda for this evening I'm gonna kind of talk a little bit about who we are show you our org chart who else within the department talk about how our service delivery has changed um and this might sound a little familiar to you in in March if you remember we were talking about the HR strategic plan and talking about our goals and our strategy moving forward so this is another great opportunity for me to share with you what we're doing and what we're proud of and how we're moving forward as a department and then lastly how our services align with the Strategic priorities so who are we we really consider ourselves the care team for our employees we take care of our employees so our employees can focus on taking care of the community we're really proud of that so looking at what we do for our employees whether we're bringing them on board making a great recruiting or onboarding experience supporting them throughout their life cycle here as an employee helping grow them develop them help them be their best so that they can be the best out there in our community and then just you know providing financial and well-being support for them too are we providing them fair and competitive wages are we providing them with a good comprehensive Total Rewards package are we providing them with opportunities for well-being in and outside of the workplace for whatever needs they may have so who are we here's our org chart you can see the department is comprised you'll see five ftes on there we have one temporary staff currently so if you're counting the heads that is six on there we have myself we have an assistant HR Director we have a payroll and benefits coordinator and an HR partner and then organizational development is under the HR umbrella and we have our organizational development and strategic initiatives manager and then we also have our temporary staff which is an organizational development consultant that organizational development consultant is critical to the continued success and you know movement forward of our organizational development initiatives helping move us towards an employer of choice and it is in the 2023 city managers proposed budget foreign resources I kind of like to put it out into three different categories Human Resources when you think of recruiting policies procedures creating HR the HR team is working on creating Best in Class best practices Leading Edge policies something like looking at remote work or flexible flexible work you know working with our employees to make them feel like they have opportunities if it works with their Department to have more flexibility to lean towards that employer of choice organizational development making sure our employees really have the tools and resources to be their best so the implementation of Burnsville university has been huge for us as an organization really giving employees and people managers the tools to to do their job and to do it well to understand their strengths and leverage that to be the best that they can be in whatever service they're providing to our community and then Total Rewards again making sure we're taking care of our staff members looking at them from a financial standpoint and then a well-being standpoint so compensation package Insurance well-being leaves the whole Total Rewards package right sick vacation leave some of the things that you might not necessarily think about from the HR team that we do do on a fairly regular basis Employee Appreciation events so we help lead and direct employee-led events Employee Appreciation um that's that's part of the HR team and we're in the background of that well-being we have a very comprehensive Wellness committee and well-being package so working with employees through various funders to make sure that they have the resources that they need to help them throughout any phase of their life whether it's inside or outside of work inclusion and belonging we have an inclusion belonging committee and we work work with our team to make sure our employees feel valued that they feel connected to their job and they feel like they belong here and they're a part of the organization and a part of the community and then people something that you might not know since we're the care team for all of our employees um we're caring for that 75 percent of that general fund budget right our employees are 75 of them are budget we're providing all the Care and support for that percentage of the budget so for all of our employees so it's a pretty big undertaking that that we have on our hands and we're happy to do so something we're really proud of so organizational development this is new to the department as of as of recently in 2020 we brought organizational development on board historically there was a blip in time where we had organizational development and Human Resources years ago brought it back and we're doing some really great things with it so in 2020 broad organizational development back on board in the HR department and since then we've done amazing things so we've created Burnsville University a training a growth and development platform for all of our employees and our people managers and since 2020 to now reading because that's a little fine print for me we've been able to train all managers in in strengths all managers and employees and strengths we've been able to facilitate strengths conversations in all of our work teams and we've been able to provide individual strengths coaching to all of our people managers as well so helping them really facilitate and grow their teams and develop their teams so that they can be the best that they can be and just some fun facts for you just this year alone within Burnsville University we've had 55 classes 65 individual coaching sessions and over 1 000 hours of professional development so we've we've made huge progress within just the organizational support the training and development of our employees and something that we're really proud of slide might look familiar to you and we were talking about the HR strategic plan so this is just a snapshot again of our HR department in comparison to our own our Market City counterparts so you can see we are operating with three staffs so we're operating with less staff and we're doing a lot more we have one payroll staff not all HR departments have payroll payroll historically has gone in and outside of the HR department at present payroll is under the HR department and then something we're extremely proud of organizational development we are the only agency that has dedicated resources FTE to organizational development and I I think it shows through Burnsville University and some of the culture culture changes we're seeing and the support that our employees and people managers are experiencing strategic priorities so just tying what we do back to the council's Strategic priorities right helping us become that employer of choice being on the Leading Edge when it comes to policies and creating a work environment where we can attract and retain our staff to create a consistency for our community and and best service for our community because the longer we have staff here the more they're familiar familiar with our organization familiar with our community and can best serve them so safety we have very comprehensive wellness and safety programs to make sure our employees are at their best in and outside of the workplace and they have a safe workplace and have resources to be safe Community engagement figuring out how we can do community-based recruiting we want to bring our community members into our organization and then we want to keep them here so how can we make sure that we are that employer of choice that employer that community members want to come to and they want to stay working with us organizational culture this is kind of where bu shines right so creating that work environment where employees have the tools and resources to do their job where they feel like they belong they feel like they're heard and they have the resources to be their best they know how to be their best and provide the best service that they possibly can for our community and then of course working towards Employee Engagement that's also under the organizational development umbrella making sure we're doing all we can to engage employees retain them and again back to that organizational culture and workplace culture really important to make sure we're we're doing all we can to create an environment where employees feel actively engaged because actively engaged employees are going to provide better service for our community and they're going to stay here longer because they feel engaged with the organization and with the community Community vibrancy so using a strengths-based cultural competence approach to um wave that out into our community it's to make sure we can represent that not only into the organization but then externally as well and then aligning our values through Leading Edge policies and procedures again making sure that what we're doing here is supporting our staff so that they feel like they have everything that they need so they can go out into the community and be all the best that they can be the infrastructure looking at how do we provide the tools and resources that our employees need as efficiently and as effectively as we can so thinking about payroll system hris systems access that employees have at their fingertips when they need it for any type of information that they need and then sustainability making sure we're being good Financial stewards right so a good example is an organizational analysis but do are we doing um are we doing things as efficiently and as effectively as we can do we do we leverage technology do we have employees in the right spot are we configured appropriately so that we can create synergies between departments it's really making sure that we're looking at what we're doing and making sure we're doing it well and and the best that we can knowing that you know ftes are are expensive and we want to make sure that we're using using our staff and having the appropriate number of staff and then creating the appropriate number of resources beyond that so we can use technology different can we leverage different departments and and build synergies off one another if we you know um work together in certain areas and then what is important to us it's important to us that every member of our community feel feels welcomed we want to make sure every employee feels like they're a part of the organization that they feel like they belong here that they feel like we're here to support them and that they feel like we're a value we're a value to them so we as an HR team provide value to them we're a good consultant we're a good partner we're a good resource for them so that they can do their jobs as efficiently and as effectively as possible and they have the support from us that they need challenges it's a tight labor market it's it's tough out there so um trying to find the best candidates for the city of Burnsville and then knowing it's a tight labor market it's it's competitive out there too so employees and prospective employees are looking at the organization as a whole so not only just what what is the compensation but what does the organization do for the employees how how are the employees engaged at Burnsville how do they feel do they want to stay there how are we retaining our staff that's all really important to us as we move forward in the labor market and recruiting employees and retaining employees to stay here um looking at staff resources for recruiting and creating you know strategies to make sure that we're we're doing everything we can to recruit recruit and attract so those strategies might be Leading Edge policies right or again really focusing like we are on our workplace culture and our Employee Engagement all those things matter and then just looking um looking at the compensation that we're providing as you you're aware we did a compensation study a while back that was a challenge we were we were behind in the market so making sure that we're we're at market and we're competitive to retain and attract staff again and then lastly another challenge we're a small team so when we want to roll out our strategic initiatives and and work on our strategic plan we don't always have as much time as we want for it we don't always have as much time as we want um to provide our our people manager managers and our employees support so that's another struggle for us at present is making sure that we have the time to do all the things that we want to do and provide the support that we want to provide operations we want to be a trusted partner focusing on employee and people management we want to develop our employees and teams to be their best we want to create clear processes and procedures and have them rooted in best practices this might sound a little familiar based on the HR strategic plan here and then we want to continue to enhance our services and efficiency through advancing technology right so how can we do things more efficiently more effectively and again how concrete how can we create access to our employees as easy as intuitive and as user-friendly as possible yeah Human Resources as I mentioned the current current Department FTE is five in doing the organizational analysis the recommendation for the HR department was eight FTE notable is in 2006 we had oh sorry I can't read the fine print again I think we were down three staff yes we're down three FTE from 2006. um so the Department's gone quite quite a few years with you know less staff than anticipated and our services have not dropped since we've actually added services on um so it's been a little difficult to continue to make sure we're providing as best Services we can and as we continue to talk about improving our service and continuing to be that valued partner looking for additional staff to make sure we can provide that great service to our employees um and then of course when we look at increasing head counts in other departments we're the team that's doing the recruiting the onboarding and we care through the the entire employee's life cycle for those staff members so as we continue to look at potentially adding ftes being cognizant of the fact that HR is the department that that all runs through and we we work hard to make sure we recruit retract attract and retain them throughout their life cycle here and that's what I have that's the HR department any comments or questions for Carissa you do a lot yeah you do thank you thank you yeah you've accomplished a great deal with the number of employees that you have and you talk about your challenges and that you don't have the time so part of that I see is the lack of resources to accomplish the tasks that we need to do and you're right any time any other department increases their employee count it affects you so it's like a domino because you now have to address all of the issues with all of those employees and then to train them and to make sure that they um have the resources and the training and the improvements that they need to do their jobs well so and looking at the market analysis it was also very interesting um do other organizations have the same practices that we have here with regard to Burnsville University and the work that we do to improve and to support our employees they do not we we are on the Leading Edge we are the only agency that's doing that so it's something that we're extremely proud of right now because we're the only one and I have agencies asking me hey did you do a training on this what did your organizational development manager do on this can we can we see a copy of that resource they're asking about our trainings they're asking about what we're doing they're talking about our Employee Engagement initiatives they're asking questions on it it's creating Buzz within the community so it's something we're extremely proud of so this market analysis is really not an Apples to Apples comparison that's correct correct so when I'm looking at this it's uh really not a good comparison because I know I have talked about our Burnsville University to other colleagues other mayors and they don't know anything about that in their organization that's why I'm asking the questions and that's why when I look at this market analysis it's not an Apples to Apples comparison yep very true good work yeah and thank you to your whole team and the work that you're doing anything else okay thank you so much Carissa and please extend our gratitude to the rest of your team that's not present here this evening well thank you so much thank you thanks Chris thank you okay the next um department is Community Development of mirror that's almost a pop quiz for me because I don't know the answer but I'm getting nods of the head that is correct um because it's the way Bethany gave me okay so um Regina are you the one that's going to be presenting for Community Development madamera I'll start with uh fire chief gentleman and then we will get into the Department's presentation okay higher Chief thank you I'll wait for the slide deck to come up here who's in charge of your slide down we'll get that for you in just a second BJ if you can um some sort of interim entertainment we'd really appreciate it yeah yeah I'm really good at that price would be but there's nothing bundt cakes [Music] burning food when they cook and accidentally bring food there right we're good all right amount of Mayor members of the council thanks for the opportunity to present tonight um fortunate to be joined by the Community Development leadership team here with Regina Chris and Chris so you'll hear from all of us as we kind of go through this presentation uh given my interim role of this I thought it was important that you hear directly from them uh what's going on what they're excited about and what their challenges are so that's really kind of uh what the agenda is here uh as far as who we are a total of 20 ftes we have nine in the building inspections department so Building Inspections includes things like electrical Mechanical plumbing all the permits kind of all those trades right planning Economic Development around land use we have five ftes our code enforcement and Rental Licensing Division has five ftes and then there's a director of the department which adds up to the total of 20 ftes I'll turn it over to our building official Chris basti for the next couple of slides here come and start in their their development process or building process within our city so we have partnered with our stakeholders even before the design development stage when they're just questioning hey we would like to take a look at this building or this place or this land for this use we come alongside them and start the process through our development Review Committee and also before that just face to face Overlook is a great example there was quite a few issues that came up with our infrastructure our assets Within within uh the property of our how we're going to deal with our storm and our sewers and we're able to solve some of those problems before the design was fully incomplete about with our the city engineer plans examiner planners and made sure that we're on track for the build if I can just add in I think that's a differentiator not all cities do that our staff's willing to meet with folks when they're looking at designing something so we don't say well you have to have an application and you have to have a permit before we'll meet with you and they grab all the stakeholders I see Jen our city Engineers sitting over there and Chris was talking about Outlook the perfect example where there was infrastructure challenges and Engineering planning code we're all in involved well before anything was on paper from an architect so I think that's a an important differentiator where we come alongside a developer a landowner a business owner to help them understand what's required so that they don't get surprised by those things right it's a lot easier to deal with those before you put anything on paper rather than hey we've spent all this time designing all this and now I got to go back and rework it so kudos to the group on on coming alongside folks and really helping them thank you and here here with uh Community Development Services one of the things that we do here is we partner with the chamber in a program called Grow Minnesota there's 21 businesses that we visit with them per year and we go out and take a look at how they're doing their operations and listen to their struggles and their successes and see how we can have an opportunity to come alongside them as a city we also take an education before enforcement approach on how we handle all elements whether somebody's building without a permit or something is going on there might be some mistakes made in the construction we always try to educate first and solve the problem up front and we're always trying to find resources for these individuals whether it's within our city or at the state level or other municipalities will go at an international level even just to try to help them along their way our customer service we have online permit system that's been for tracking in the past now we have one where it's transparent to the public where they can go in they can take a look at what permits are on the property what the resulting has been on the property and it's a very good interaction also a quick development time with our planning department and Planning Commission and Council approvals we can have a 60 to 90 day schedule other cities I see at 120 and so this is a big benefit we usually get some good comments on that and nine out of ten times it it's on consent and it gets approved we go through all right we'll turn to Regina for a couple of slides I just want to highlight some of a couple of the items that were charged with in planning and economic development code enforcement and building not going to read all those bullet points it sure is a lot but it's just a snapshot of many of the responsibilities that we have and many of those responsibilities are regulatory in nature or required since we're a statutory City a couple of the highlights implied in Economic Development we provide development review for our processes and that like fasty said Chris fasty said um it happened our customer service happens from the time we get that phone call We Begin the research on people looking for for sites to build in Burnsville and we're having those interactions before they make application and really through the whole process from that time they make application until the time it goes in front of Planning Commission and Council and then and for building permit if it makes it to building permit sometimes that doesn't happen but when it does we're still alongside reviewing those plans and then doing that final landscape inspection 18 months later after the building's built so we're really working with property owners and Developers for longer than that time that they make application to the time they see you were working before and after the process we also strengthen and work with our relationships with our businesses through our business retention and expansion program that's something that we've really taken more focused on in the last couple of years and something we're really proud on on building those stronger relationships with our building inspections again like was mentioned before we we do a lot of those project pre-meetings and oftentimes if a site doesn't work whether it's a for a tenant Improvement or new construction or Redevelopment we're redirecting people to other sites where it may work within the community so we're I'd say problem solvers and providing the best customer service that we can to our community a unique thing that we do in Burnsville is we host homeowners workshops educating our residents that are your weekend Warriors and I'm really excited about the community and engagement vehicle that we have that was just showcase today I could picture us going out in the community and hosting a kind of a road show a weekend warrior Road show out in a community it's really exciting to put some of those new tools to use and code enforcement of course we have a rental licensing and inspections and I think we've brought what over a thousand new new units and just the past couple years and we've got our housing and energy programs that are unique to Burnsville with our code cash program to to help before it gets to any enforcement action to help our our homeowners fix problems before it gets to any type of compliance issues so we're there to help people out and give people the tools that they need to make their home safe and to make our community a better place and then we have our housing energy Assessment program so or I shouldn't say assessment audit program so that people can learn about their opportunities for saving energy in their homes and making their cutting down on their energy bills and also adding to sustainability of just Burnsville in general our impact so this I think this slide again a lot of bullet points here but I think it's a great example of how our departments work well together but I'll also collaboratively um outside the organization as well and we all have a common goal to serve the community and keep and keep people safe all of our departments I'd say have touched have touched I guess I all of our um let me step back um all of our new apartments that we have in Burnsville have touched all of our areas from hosting neighborhood meetings before the project comes to the Planning Commission and Council to working with developers collaboratively internally with staff and with our external Partners like the Department of Natural Resources and Minnesota Department of Transportation to the actual construction of the building and and the inspections that are completed throughout the project to the rental inspections that happen and then the ongoing service to those new residents that we have and connecting them with programs and connecting them with other departments in the city once they're here so just one little snapshot and one little example that actually is pretty impactful another thing I'd want to touch on is we've been very successful in obtaining grants not only from different agencies and different organizations like the Metropolitan Council and Department of Employment and economic development but we're also lucky enough to with the council's blessing have over two million dollars to work with our businesses to provide much needed resources during covid and that could not have happened without without the council and at the same time took a lot of resources to manage that program and um it takes time it takes staff to once we're successful or once we have that that availability of funding it does take time to make sure that we're checking all the boxes for the grant requirements and doing our reporting correctly and monitoring and ongoing monitoring for for really years to come and and that's something we've taken on and we've seen great results and but it does take take time and people to to manage that Service delivery Evolution um so again we've seen a significant increase in our rental properties not only with our new apartments but also within our single family neighborhoods and I think Chris forsum will speak to that a little later in Greater depth we've also had a great focus in priority priority areas including Heart of the City and the center Village and we've taken a more proactive approach to Economic Development connecting developers to Economic Development tools like tax increment financing grants those public private Partnerships and special legislation within the center Village that all took extra time and effort and and it will be great success but it it it took a number of us collaboratively working not only inside the organization but outside the organization and another thing with our building department we have state delegation Authority which allows our building and fire departments to keep plan review and inspections local an example of that is our electrical inspections we do that in-house where many other cities work through the state to to get that done and that means better customer service for the city of Burnsville and for our residents and more effective and we always hear from developers time is money and whether it's for a commercial project or you're a resident trying to get your porch done for your or your deck done with your lighting for your son or daughter's graduation party um it it really means something and so we're lucky to to have that here and be able to be responsive to to our community so I'm going to talk about planning an economic development then we'll transition to the other departments as well um I was thinking I should put up a slide that shows the various permit zoning permits and sign permits and development review applications but that would show that we're pretty steady as far as the number of applications we see but what that doesn't show is all the different type of work that we've taken on in the past few years starting with the center of Village vision and the economic development strategic plan we have our integrated marketing and communication plan and our Heart of the City design framework which we partnered on with our engineering department all of those have implementation strategies and goals and are great to keep us focused but also take time to to work through and implement I touched on some of the grants that we were successful in obtaining with the cares business grants our business retention and expansion program that's been New York partnership with the chamber and then we also have a a separate program that we run on our own working with our culturally diverse businesses and we have a goal of meeting with um a minimum of 12 businesses each year and highlighting their successes in our opportunity belongs to our newsletter and our Burnsville bulletin and other other sources as well and we have all the new apartments and new apartments that are on the horizon as well as new maps that I just love to highlight we have our development map that showcases our projects from development application through the approval process to construction and completion last I heard I believe it's either the first or second amount of hits on our website as far as Maps so people are looking at it our residents are following along to see you know what's going on in my neighborhood and the Press picks up the information too and other developers so it's a great tool not only for communicating what's going on in the city but also highlighting the efforts and the work that that is going on and then we have our commercial property map which we highlight properties that are for sale or for a lease and we pull data from different sources as well as land that we have for sale in the city and and highlight a map as well that that gets used and a great resources for our customers those Maps take people to input the information and to display the information to make sure they're they're working right and working well but they're a great source to have and then of course we've got our different ordinance amendments that we've done throughout the years from the accessory dwelling unit changes that we made and that went through a governance process to our short-term rental governance that was completed in eventual ordinance changes and our mixed use of mixed use amendments that we've done and our Transit oriented development zoning ordinance so we've seen changes as a result of those amendments but these are for newer initiatives and at the reaction of either the market or some of the implementation plans that we've completed foreign to I think 2017. and year to date is our last chart so we're really not down as much as it looks we're doing quite well and it represents as you can see the inspections and the number of permits line up pretty close per year there is quite a bit of Consulting that goes on besides that and we have quite a few interactions per per year as you can see most of the growth that you see in the last four years here including this year is large apartment buildings are very complex and take a great deal of study and time and research and inspections we do them in phases so you might get one permit but you have maybe a hundred inspections as opposed or compared to a residential home like a new home would be you might end up with 10 inspections for the building code end of it we're experiencing Redevelopment also for certain areas we have some warehouses and a little bit of uh like um TJ Maxx and some of those stores moving from place to place or keeping them within the city which is nice but they require quite a bit of work and inspections for those are also just um one of the things that we we do that we're proud of is our plan review time is on most residential all residential is less than a week but our commercial our smaller projects are around a week to two weeks of time before we can turn around our plan review that is equal to or if not way better than other cities uh we're very efficient with that we get our replies and response out immediately and then also just working with them from the beginning of the project even before we get the permit we already have enough interaction going on where they that most of the customers know what is happening and they're in the know and one of the things that we do struggle with is we have a lack of depth and we have certain certifications and certified individuals that need to do these delegated projects and we have several different tiers of Delegation we have all of them in our city for hospitals schools license other licensed facilities which is great there's been right when I came on we didn't have that and it was noticed and it was a it was shared with two Council that they wanted that service back and were able to have Plumbing but I just have one person so it's nice if we can go into depth there and have some backup and electrical and some of the building delegations we have some good depth but electrical and plumbing is where we really need some some additional staff or yesterday um our customer and employee interaction interaction growth uh continue with our Open golf system as we go electronic it's brought up many more questions so once they have the knowledge that citizens have more knowledge of what's happening out there with the inspections and our results and they have more questions that go along with that so it's it's a positive thing it's a great thing that they're coming to us and we're having a more in-depth uh relations relational experience with our customers both the with the contractor and the homeowner and and the business owners as we come in it's just a clear way to communicate and let's see I think on to Mr forestland mad Mary council members I'm going to just do a brief snapshot here of the the rental licenses that we have currently out there in uh 2013 when the program first started I find it hard to believe in all it's already been 10 years seems like we just started it we've seen approximately a 21 increase in the number of our rental licenses that are out there rental units I should say under a rental license um it's interesting that uh we we expect is trying to continue the number that I estimated for 2023 is probably on the conservative side it probably is a little bit more than that because we haven't opened up a few of the the new construction units at that we're expecting to have up but uh the trends expect to continue it's continuing all the way around the metro area right now what makes Burnsville different in some respects with some of the neighboring cities is we have about 50 percent of our housing stock that's approaching 50 years or more in age and we're seeing failures in a lot of their large Capital items whether it be fire suppression systems elevator systems a lot of life safety issues that we have serious concerns about and involved for all of our purposes uh all of us include certainly fire and police as well a lot of careful attention attention to those Life Safety Systems and the general maintenance of them and we we spend a lot of time dealing with this and the expectation is buildings have a life cycle and as they age they demand more attention just like we all do too we're seeing that trend with the especially the multi-families we've also seen a you know the single family homes have tended to been steadily claiming I I think this is kind of interesting even through two years of covet that we've still seen this happen but the cons not the concern but an observation would be that uh some of the ownership has been moving towards large Property Maintenance companies these are being becoming corporate versus the mom and pop type single-family homes they they have a home up north or someplace they want to rent it out we're not seeing that anymore we're having corporations buy up several large numbers of homes and uh working through a central agent that's a shift that I think is noted and should be considered rented manufactured homes has stayed constant at 64 in the last 10 years so that hasn't moved but they're still out there so technical issues somebody stepped on the court it looks like a blue screen of death which actually is uh needs to foreign [Laughter] [Laughter] you know Regina is that person yeah audience we just have some technical problems that we're trying to fix at this time and what we'll do is we'll recess cure otherwise you can certainly do that so we won't recess um councilmember Gustafson you have a question I had a question about the code I think that's not something they have in terms of the delivery of function I believe it's around uh I want to say uh 25 000. 25 000 I believe that's what it is and how do we get the word out of that when we have a situation where we we believe we have certain qualifications for code cash you have to be well have a violation that's resolvable um and you're either a economically disadvantaged individuals you know we don't have money or meet any of the three criteria that are on there you can apply for it go online fill it out we'll review what your what your project is let's say it's a roof repair windows and the city will cover 50 percent of that cost um they have to have you know the applicant has to have some skin in the game so they they have employer incorp 50 of cost on that as well so it's so the resident have to have an interaction with our inspections group to know about this or as we found a way to get it out there for people that probably know they have some code violations that they can contact us and say hey we've got some real nice cards that we've been insert in there with a uh what they call it the there's a QR code QR code specifically I mean I mean how does that work how do you interact when do they get that card what causes that card inspector will hand it to them so there is that interaction we'll talk to people um it's one of these leading the horse to water but you can't make them drink and we've had a few applicants two of which you know didn't apply didn't qualify for it because they didn't read that they had there was a income guideline on it so if you're if you're in the neighborhood you happen to see something that probably needs some attention can you just put a card in the door for them or um we could but that's um if we see it that kind of puts us in contact proactive yeah well we we like we have remote we have to figure out how do people know that we are doing this unless somebody complains about this person I guess what I'm getting at all right councilman Justin I think the first requirement is they have to have a code violation right yeah so right so lots of times these things are routine maintenance issues that might not be rise a level or code violation so that's why the inspector kind of preemptively giving it to them as they write them a violation is how it currently works and that comes about by complaint usually by complaint most of the time unless something Life Safety that we see but all right thank you okay now you want to reassess something we also have information on our City website we've launched it's called the under the homeworks program it's one of the services that we offer and there is information on our website as well as I think we may have done a page on our Burnsville and brief I'm sorry Burnsville bulletin Sorry probably also the Brazilian brief as well to let people know you know maybe it's not the person reading the information but maybe they know of a neighbor or a family member and that they can share that information with so um and we'll it's a new program we'll try to think creatively on different ways that we can get the word out as well might be a Carissa thing wow it's been discussed I know we're trying to think through different ways get it out there with that it's been discussed we I know we've been trying to think of different ways to get it out there but make sure that the information is properly saying who who's uh it applies to um because we had a little bit of confusion at that at first and when we do a code for cash is there a limit to what we'll do with somebody or yeah there is you mean an upper limit yeah um I believe it was five thousand up to two thousand dollars yeah with a fifty percent match thanks okay we're we're back on okay okay thank you to all of the people who work to get the technology fixed so that we're back on track and back to you uh Chris forslin thanks what we have here is I think it's it's uh some interesting information that Trends we've seen in complaints that we received and initially when we first started the program back in 2013 this wasn't anything in our database that we necessarily separated out um starting in about 2015 we did break down all our complaints to a public complaint or was staff received and collected that information and um up to November 2019 the that's that's the point when we switch from the proactive program to complaint based so we started seeing a downward shift on the staff complaints that we received um coupled with the local emergency being declared for covid that certainly had an impact on how we responded how we communicated with people too and the plates that we get our focus at that point in time was strictly on the life safety issues that we were getting and uh and that was with limited staff during that time period um in September uh of 2020 we went with the open gov software program which is a little bit difficult to query a lot of these things so our our data is kind of loose towards the lower end there but what we have been able to determine is that we're starting to see an upward Trend in into complaints and what's what's interesting is uh an increase in severity I mean these aren't the grass is eight inches now the grad is two feet high and that's a trend that we didn't see before um what it what it also said is when we went more of that reactionary ship um we were finding that it's also not only are the complaints perhaps or not only increasing severity but more complex and it's drawing more of our time to deal with them we're instead of saying it I'll give an example of sending uh just a single mowing crew out to do a vacant property we're sending out a large tractor a couple other things it's it's not the same as what what we used to have and they are taking more time resolve part of that is because the The Slowdown and uh court system as well so let's look at what Community Development does compared to other cities um for for our purposes cities base their needs based on a desired level what their customers demand their residence demand and what the resources resources are for example and I think we brought this up as a prior example Edina and EG and both do not do electrical inspections they provide the state provides that service and uh you know I can give up both revenue and the service but in Bloomington Spring Lake Park do point of sale inspections I mean we've got different services are offered traditionally through Community Development Community Development so let's say what one City compared to another is awkward because it's driven by the customer and what the expectations are for the community um one of the things that we looked at well the organizational analysis looked at is Staffing levels for Community Development staff have been relatively flat from 2006 to 2020 with the addition of the our code enforcement Group which started a whole new service expectation level so what the Staffing report recommended was four additional staff where that will benefit all of our divisions and I think we'll can help us continue providing the best customer service we can give so what we're going to talk about now is some of the Strategic priorities um Community development's work involves revolves around those six priorities and to help maintain and develop vibrancy of the community first part we want to talk about is safety all three of us in our departments and our staff are involved in keeping people safe this is what we live and breathe for this is the thing we want to do best and we're proud of that and that we can do that how do we do that well we form a lot of Partnerships there's very few organizations in the city that we haven't worked with at one point in one way shape or Another Not only in the city outside the city from the state level to the federal level we're involved with them to try to make the best thing we we the best community that we can in the safest environment that we can uh we help ensure uh that communities and structures are safely built healthy to occupy and when people have concerns about that we're a resource for them and we provide to the best of our knowledge that resources to help solve their problem if we don't know we'll find an answer and I think we do that very well we also ensure things like access to buildings ADA requirements we're obligated to stay on top of these rules and codes as they change and do our best to do that interpretation to keep people safe some of the other partners that we work with that we may be familiar with Dakota County CDA the Center for Energy environment please fire from various cities from the state Architects building owners contractors um many many many groups of people we do this through our comprehensive plans zoning codes property maintenance code building codes so we have to be well I like to consider ourselves the caretakers of the community in some respects and uh we strive to do that we want to protect the general welfare safety is one of our priorities that's the next one all right uh I guess I'm on this slide here education engagement when it comes to the community engagement we love to educate improve our outcomes maintain safe buildings make sure that we are looking at them from start to finish and then once they are put into place and built and finished that we maintain them properly working to create videos and other engagement resources is what we have been working on we have one out there on smoke and fire detectors as and Co detection and we'll continue to add to those those groups and uh held numerous education workshops as discussed before and an additional development opportunities that we can do we're just always brainstorming and coming up with ideas and putting into action how we can keep educating the public and ourselves as we move forward our organizational culture we've been working diligently I would say over the last couple years especially since covet started it's kind of a nice transition to go into we have come up with some very innovative ideas of flexible schedules for the inspectors it's not only benefited the inspection staff but it's since it's also benefited the customer when it provides a greater degree of time from morning till after late afternoon that inspections are available for for the inspection staff and for the customer it's just also to keep that retention keep the employee happy and and also keep them involved with this job here what we have here at even like Burnsville University provides some opportunity to learn and just always providing these new innovative ideas to keep employees engaged and enjoying their their place here also we have a safety program to ensure that field staff is recognized we'd meet with police fire code enforcement licensing building code and anyone else fight who wants to come along side of us and we go over some iffy or tense intense areas that we can keep staff away from or at least know when to go to police first and before we engage into the the inspections and the that community I'll go next um Community vibrancy we're committed to working with developers contractors homeowners landlords to maintain our building stock both residential and Commercial within the community in our in our world sometimes that means Redevelopment too we Foster our businesses through building relationships with our business retention and expansion efforts and we collaborate with our partners like the Burnsville Chamber of Commerce we work with the community and other stakeholders to imagine and plan for the future through the comprehensive plan and through other strategic plans and visions including the economic development strategic plan in the Heart of the City design framework for infrastructure we collaborate with our engineering and Parks departments often not only on those Grant applications I'd mentioned before but on any effort we we can collaborate I'll let you in on a little secret I have a nickname it's wreck Gina it just I think it shows again just how collaborative we can be at times we communicate with our businesses and residents on numerous multimodal opportunities including connecting people to services that we have in the community Through MBTA Services Metro Mobility darts and letting them know that we're working to make improvements through trails and on on-street bike lanes and there's certainly an intersection of what we do in planning and and building and not so much code enforcement in that respect but we do do a lot of collaborative collaborative efforts with multimodal activities planning staff leads our development Review Committee which includes staff from multiple departments engineering police fire Parks and Rec and they say engineering our building department and we look at Creative Solutions to solving infrastructure challenges on things like tenant improvements and a new and Redevelopment one of my favorite recent projects was the Capstone 35 project where there was a lot of impediments on the land which made it difficult for any new development to occur on that site and we worked collaboratively with not only our internal Partners but with a developer to relocate infrastructure and were able to also seek out grant money and there were a lot of partners that came in in into play there but now we have two new buildings under construction and and there's a lot a lot you can do when you when you collaborate and have people at the table growing in the same direction sustainability we have a unique program with our building inspections department a take-home vehicle program that allows our inspectors to take home a vehicle but they are able to bring those Vehicles back to work earlier in the morning instead of coming to the straight to the office they can go straight to their first inspection and it it's and a retention and attraction I think to our staff to be able to do that um their vehicle that they use it's their it's really their office and um they're able to be more efficient and it's something Innovative that other cities just don't do and I say we're on the Leading Edge and to be able to to offer that um isn't I would say an amenity to our our to our inspectors we also were able to get thank you I can interject that we're able to get additional inspections per day and it's it's never less than one it's and if we can get to two that's great and that's often what happens so it's really nice just opens it up for Builders homeowners they really really like this program so that we're available earlier and later in the day again with sustainability uh one of the things that we've been able to do is support higher density housing and accessory dwelling units believe a lot of accessory dwelling units I think for three or four years now a lot of cities in the metro area it's either not allowed or they need to apply for a conditional use permit or some special requirement in Burnsville as long as it's meets city code setbacks size requirements you can pull a building permit and and this allows families to either expand on site maybe it's a an elderly parent or that needs some care but they can be close by maybe it's a children moving back home after college and want their own space or or just a way to make some extra money by renting out the unit they're able to intensify their land and bring up their property values so they're using the land that's there and and being good stewards in a sense where it you don't have to expand outside and [Music] another thing that we do is connect businesses and residents to resources whether it's solar energy and providing them the resources they need to pull their building permits helping to educate them on on the benefits our recycling programs and reuse programs that we connect people with and grant opportunities related to those efforts all right I'll close this out here thanks to Regina Chris and Chris um so what's important to Community Development uh really boils down to in my mind three things it's customer service being responsive to the customer and able to assist them really engaging with the community we want to meet meet them where they are and really help them solve their challenges right and that's from neighborhoods to businesses to development Economic Development all those tools that we have and Innovation as I told you before or we referenced before where we will meet with people well before they have an application in through some of the videos through some of the programs whether it's code cash and trying to help people you know we're really trying to do things differently right and trying to think out of the proverbial box to do things a little bit differently when I look at our challenges um as we talked about you see the theme there right we have a lot of new housing units particularly the multi-family front uh with a lot under the construction currently we have an aging housing stock that challenges in all kinds of areas whether it's it's multi-family single-family business all of that is a challenge to keep that vibrant we have an increasing Demand on our resources in order to maintain a level of service really retaining our qualified Workforce just like everybody's having challenges right so we're trying to do everything we can to keep the very technically competent folks that we have that do a great job and we've invested in them want to continue to invest in them so that they stay here and continue to serve our community as well as they do and then again one of our challenges uh Chris fastly talked about this is a lack of really redundancy particularly in some of those trade areas where we really if someone goes on vacation we don't have another plumbing inspector we have one so if he's out sick we don't have anybody so that becomes challenging and one of our concerns is we don't want to see the turnover of that experienced staff we want to retain these folks that are doing a really good job because there is a limited available pool to replace them with so we want to keep the folks we have and continue to provide the high level of service so when you look at it um we have a lot of great aspirations we want to provide a streamlined process for minor projects we would love for someone to come in and be able to be with a permit right there an ability to to review something like a deck right at the at the counter right so they don't have to drop it off wait up to a week like you come in and you have it not I'll give Chris fast he's got some great ideas we can't design it for him but he'd love to have some pre-made plans that are approved by an architect or an engineer so that we can say if you want a 10 by 10 deck here's a pre-made plan you turn that in we'll give you a permit right here right uh really kind of breaking the the mold of how things are done how can we make it easier for folks to invest and keep our community vibrant you know how do we meet them and educate them we want to be helpful to them we don't want to be seen as the barrier um so again we want to we want to cross certify and cross-train our staff so we do have some of that redundancy um we want to make sure that we continue to develop robust standard operating procedures I know these guys are sick of me asking about documenting some of this stuff right um I'm all about that I want to be able to if something happens God forbid we're able to continue on forward so we want to have those things and it also creates standard expectations you know we had a transition of an admin assistant in Chris forslin's area thankfully we were able to document a lot of that stuff and that's been very helpful to have that manual how do I issue rental licenses what challenges do we have with that how does the system work so getting all those standard procedures documented uh from a redundancy standpoint but also a standard expectation standpoint so everybody's talking the same language uh we're already talking uh 2050 comprehensive plan if you can believe that or thinking about it I shouldn't say talking but it feels like we just finished 2040 but uh you know uh Regina's done a good job starting to think about that what are we going to need for resources to be able to accomplish that in a few years here um and really this comes down to how do we maintain a self uh safe and healthy rental housing stock and really a Vibrant Community that's our goal is we uh look at Community Development is a Vibrant Community we want this to be successful we want the community vibrant and for us to be able to help them so we look at from an FTE count we mentioned this earlier the analysis recommends additional four ft ftes Chris forslin mentioned this we've seen the 21 over 21 increase uh in rental housing stock we expect that to be over 11 000 rental units in the next year online uh we continue to see the demand for building permits and inspections increasing and we see the economic development strategic uh plan is a priority and want to continue to to come alongside people and connect people for development and Redevelopment so we will stand for any questions we appreciate your time and attention we know we had a lot to go through and again thanks to Regina Chris and Chris for their expertise and input on this thank you um I'll go to Events first and then Dan G quick question for Mr forzand um on the increase in severity for complaints have you noticed a correlation in that between the turnover of ownership to those larger corporate entities because it seems like a lot of the ones that I've personally seen have been or at least the homes that have been in the most disrepair were rentals and then when you dig a Little Deeper they were owned by you know an out of town management company and then do we have a clear line of communication with some of those groups like Invitation Homes and others that have a big footprint to your first part of that statement I'd say do we have anything that's measurable out there it would be General observances and sometimes that's the clue to tell us that maybe a transition occurred um they don't tell us all of a sudden we look under ownership and oh it's changed again that may be part of it the second part some of them we do some of them we don't some of them have been around for since we started the program and we have good working relationship with them others you know we struggle with how are they going to respond oh somebody doesn't work here anymore we have to start over to maintain the contact list for all our rentals is a struggle but yeah that can be a problem well we've seen these are Shadow companies most of the time you know where there's five or six different investment companies and you're not even sure where to point your parameter app yeah we can be chasing our Tails sometimes trying to find out a a who they are and who the responsible party is find that out when they have to get a rental license because and my question was coming around to the same but we're tracking on the same problem because we have they have to pull a rental license yes and no yes they need to tell us no they don't always pull the license till we find out sometimes we don't know if there's a change of ownership always um that that would that would be uh more of the single family homes yeah and that that's yeah again we're tracking literally you know thousands of entities out there and as everybody knows the Market's been quite hot lately we have a lot of things change hands sometimes within a couple weeks some you know again it's it's tough because Vince is right there are a lot of Corporations and I've been made aware of that by people in different neighborhoods and I sent some of that information to you and you know about that the there are companies that are buying up homes and renting them out so you gave uh statistics that 40 percent of our population are in rental homes there's a correlation there's something happening here that we have to pay attention to if 40 percent of our population are renters then there's a correlation and there's a problem coming because I look at your rental licensing um graph you know I need to understand a little bit more about that graph and the 40 percent of our population are in rental homes and all of the companies that are coming in and purchasing single-family homes and putting them up for rental I got a complaint from people in around the Crystal Lake Area company coming in and purchasing homes it's it's happening it's happening all over uh Star Tribune I believe had several articles on it either last year within the last six months about the same problem that they're having with that so it's it's not a it's a national phenomenon I believe the housing Market's red hot I understand um okay Dan G but I wasn't going to talk about that apartment some of the biggest problems we've had in the city have been from the homeowners themselves they're still in their homes they're not running their homes but we're in court with them constantly trying to get things done so I wouldn't blame everything on renters it's that's I don't think that's right I know some of these corporate I know some of these corporations don't take care of it and we'll be dealing with that I know it's coming down the line at us but just to throw it out because there's renters there's problems that I don't think is appropriate for us to do because renters make up a big part of our city and they care about our city just as much as we do that's my mind but what I wanted to ask was how far are we on inspections years ago we used to take a long time to get an inspection in the city do you know when someone wants to get something inspected how long it takes for an inspector to get there I'm putting in a new bathroom I'm waiting for an inspector to come out so I can put the sheetrock back in because the plumbing electricity is done and so it depends on the inspector yep and the specialty so with electrical as of today we're a little over a week a week out so I could sit there with an open bathroom for a week waiting to finish the job yeah and uh Plumbing that fluctuates from week to week but it's about a week about a week as well okay and then we're doing pretty good with the building and we're a little deeper in that end but we're still waiting for the other trades and we try to do combination as much as legally possible so we we go to the state law we we get very creative with that we've are very fortunate to have inspectors that are willing to do that most electrical inspectors will not and we have one that will I know a couple years back we had this discussion and the single homes it was more more of some of the developers and what they were doing as they were remodeling buildings and the time the amount of time it took to get inspections isn't it so they can finish out their buildings so they could even get CO's on them and you know sometimes weeks before we can get in there to let them start you know renting their building out Chris do you know how that compares to other communities those wait times uh anecdotally I know you don't have all of the data in your back pocket but you know that that we in the busier times we are a little further behind on some of some of those on the commercials that hasn't improved then it hasn't improved on the different times so in the middle of the winter when isn't that busy uh we're on a regular schedule we're on a full schedule which is nice to keep us going but we hit summer and I have one electrical and he goes on vacation or goes to a conference and we're required to have continuing ed now we have to plan ahead of time how do we do that he starts reaching out to the contractors way ahead of time weeks ahead of time months ahead of time depending on he's going to a conference now and I have a backup consultant but he is completely booked also so in the next I think next week there isn't going to be any electrical inspections until he gets back from his from it so BJ and and Greg um and Hugo there's a model out there that's called Mutual Aid and I'm wondering is that a possibility with some of the inspections because they have to be certified in an electrical in inspector if we only have one and then you and then there's a plumber and he has to be certified in his own discipline area can we do something where we leverage Resources with other communities so we can help each other out I don't know if that's a possibility uh whether there are restrictions by law but um I mean because it is I've had people call and says you know it's been four weeks and I haven't had an inspector out but then come to find out someone is sick so that you don't have anybody to go out and do that inspection um so the people are waiting oh but I don't know yeah it's something we can look into I think there there's some challenges with it depending on again it's going to be depending on the building type because the things like the delegation of authority are by person so yeah like School certain things only certain inspectors can work on so in our city so some of that is delegation some of that is trade specific and I would tell you that most of the communities around us are feeling the same pinch because they're extremely busy so they don't necessarily have a lot of capacity but it's I mean it's not that we can't ask I just don't know that there's a lot of capacity laying out there but it's a problem that we've had for a long time yep and it speaks to the depth challenge right I mean that's it's um it really is a challenge and you know we've tried to do everything like you said with the combination inspections with a number of our inspectors being also certified as building and officials so that they have the ability to do many of these inspections um so we've tried to maximize everything we can um I think we do pretty good keeping it around that one week but um there there is challenges when you have a single person for a single trade no doubt yeah Madam mayor I do reach out for that to see if we can do some sort of under a memoir memorandum of understanding or some sort of joint Authority and find out if it's a possibility because I hear what the chief is saying um you know I don't know I I I I I don't know if all of the inspectors under the different disciplines whether it's Plumbing electrician Etc are they in a union no no and if not well Mary I think is a I think it's a a good set of questions I will say that operationally it's our commitment to review our standards to identify how we can most effectively um ensure that our staff are well equipped to deliver service to the community and at the end of the day that's my bottom line uh we've talked a lot about during our our transition in Community Development and and throughout the organization about our role in providing responsible and responsive service to the community and these are all questions that we need to continue to uh to work through as a department I think is the as the department has new leadership and is more uh more appropriately resourced these are these are questions that we can answer I would also just anecdotally caution the council uh about about stepping into the suggestion of sharing Services across that's why I said you look into it you know that's operations we're we're getting we're just been told about you know some challenges and what are the aspirations so I I addressed it to BJ and you it's operational tactics that's your domain and you do that yeah one last question uh the four ftes you're looking for is that to increase your depth into those areas I'd speak a little bit to that is we haven't slotted exactly which ones which year but yes that will definitely help in the building side with some depth on some of the um yep at least a trade thank you yeah now it I know you have some issues and some problems uh and Community Development that you have to address so it'll be interesting to take a look at but um it is an issue Cara you have any comments or questions no no thank you okay Dan okay no but I know that you also received an email with regard to inspections and a building that needed to be inspected and nobody shown and and that might have to do with that but it also if I remember correctly in asking that question it had to do with somebody being sick and being out and there was no redundancy so some of the issues that you all have to take a look at I think a week is better than what we heard the last time we had this discussion it was more like three weeks in a month at one point it was yeah there wasn't you know so I think we're doing a lot better in the construction industry right now a one-week delay is probably the least of their concerns yeah and I would say that that's reflective of the hard work that's gone in on the part of our staff to address that level of responsiveness it's important to them it's important to you it's important to the community as a guy who built a house in in another Community it's important to individuals and very stressful and that's something that we we take very seriously in terms of no matter what the interaction is that it's important for us to create the type of experience that's reflective of who we say that we want to be yeah thank you very much thank you chief nicely done and thank you Regina and Chris and Chris thank you appreciate you being here okay um city manager you want to tee up we have one more presentation conversation mayor and that is uh our city clerk function s very representative of the clerk's function that you were just multitasking bringing up your own presentation uh to start our conversation tonight don't read them all Michelle yeah you're on Deck because they're just going to continue to get something to eat I understand well thank you for having me here tonight last but not least city clerk's office glad to wrap this up and I'll try to make this a quick little quicker than some departments all right um we're gonna go ahead and talk about the city clerk's office we really we kind of end up being a catch-all right because we catch things that come from the public we catch things that come from the other from departments to departments and we can be a resource for things like What's the statute for this what's the policy for that or what's our past practice at the city um we have three and a half FTE we have two and a half are part of our budget um one is being proposed and that is currently the deputy city clerk position that's filled by Erica Henderson a little bit about what we do all things Council meetings so that includes um preparing everything for your agenda packets and making sure that that's disseminated to the council to the public other interested parties we also do the things after the council meeting uh executing resolutions proclamations um ordinances updating the city code we have a new program called municode that is a self-publishing codification program we used to have to send ordinances out to our codifier and wait for them to update our website and wait for them to update our city code and now that's something that we do in-house it saves the city quite a lot of money and specifically it was motivated by the code review task force because the project of updating the city code from that project was going to cost about approximately thirty thousand dollars to start with so this process actually brought that in-house more work for my staff but we can maintain it if there's a typo in there we can get it corrected we don't have to wait for somebody else to do that so that was really I think a good Improvement on our part um when we talk about Council meetings Greg was giving me a hard time about how many minutes there were in the council packet tonight and I told him that it's his fault because I think Greg is setting some records on how many meetings we can have in a year sorry Michelle and everyone else yes we also do licensing business licensing and you know that's liquor tobacco massage resellers gambling those types of things processing the applications and we also have the the new gov open gov system for that and that has improved that process quite a bit we also do all the appeals so if somebody gets a license denial if they get a license violation if they and or if they have a code violation of some sort those are all things that we process the appeal applications for we set up the public or the hearing um the hearing schedule the hearings for the appellants and get everything processed for them and that that can be um a long drawn out process I think that this Council has seen one that went through the entire appeal process and then came to the council to appeal afterward but luckily we don't typically get to that point elections of course is a big part of what we do coordinate the polling places there are 17 polling places in Burnsville election judges typically about 250 election judges for a general election cycle um Publications Community engagement we have to assess the candidates as they're going through their process as you run for office you're going to get emails from me asking about your campaign Finance reports and those types of things we also help voters with what are the options for voting if they can't make it to their polling place on Election Day you can apply online we can mail you an absentee application ballot those types of things we have the 87 pull pads now that we administrate to help assist with checking in voters at our polls and we also use something called election judge dashboard a few years ago we did win an award for that project that we coordinated that now it really it helps administrate the whole election judge process we provide a lot of administrative support to the city council to the city manager sometimes to other departments if needed it's we handle the complaints and concerns that come into the city council's voicemail and email inbox and make sure that those get to you as appropriate make sure that they get to appropriate staff as needed so that they're aware that there's a complaint out there we also do a lot of conference and travel registrations and those types of things for the records management we do serve as the city's responsible Authority for overseeing public data requests and maintain the documents we have like laser fish software that helps maintain our electronic records but then there are also records and other types of software that we can help people with the maintenance of those and of course there's always paper records still out there boards and commissions we help coordinate the terms of them make sure everybody's got the right terms assigned to them the recruitment the interview process and that type of thing who's on Deck and then the code review task force has been recently added that does take up quite a bit of our staff time we looked and we have clocked 638 hours for the code review task force so far and that's hopefully everybody remembering to put their hours in when they when they worked on that for an hour here or half hour there with licensing one of the things that we were noticing is that we were getting a lot of massage licensing so we did a quick survey to see how we were doing in comparison to some other cities and it looked like we were right at the top until about 4 25 today when Eagan finally got back to us and they did outpace Us by six additional massage licenses the reason it took them so long to get back to us was because we found out that their city clerk didn't do massage licensing they that went through their Police Department so we were asking the wrong people for the information um in comparison's sake we did not add Minneapolis on here but we actually did get a response from them and they have 178 massage license 178. well they're all so much bigger they're much bigger yes delivery Community engagement we have been really striving to improve our community engagement one of the things we did this year was um advertise for our public accuracy test now we've always been required to put a legal notice in the paper for our public accuracy test but this year we took out two a half page ad in the paper for two separate weeks to try to get the public involved and we also reached out more to our election judges encouraging them to come and we ended up with about 30 members of the public showing up and we ended up with the Secretary of State for the first time showing up at one of our public accuracy tests there were only five of us and and they were all uh election judges that were there to help to help yeah so this is the first time we've actually had people from the public that we didn't already invite there to help facilitate the process so that I thought was good considering it was our first try at this with the public I'm glad that um we did that and we got some public participation we got the code review task force of course um we're about a little over a year into the process with the code review task force and we are still at the end of title three um we have 11 titles and I know titles 10 and 11 are going to the Planning Commission but still we're worried about the about how fast this is going and but you know we are also very proud of the fact that our task force members are very diligent amount taking their their responsibilities at heart and when we say we want you to simplify make this easier for our residents to understand remove any on any unnecessary barriers they are actually taking that to heart and really asking some of those tough questions is do we really need this or can we reword this and sometimes we get some of that statutory legal speak and it's it's not easy to get around that and still make things clear and simple to understand we have the new open gas system that started last year you may have heard from Community Development all of our licensing goes through that process so we're really pleased with how that is working out for being able to provide a completely online process for some people where they can go on apply for the license pay for it it can get approved and issued all completely along line without having to step foot in City Hall that'd be awesome um a little bit of a evolution of how elections has been going in um 2010 the absentee voted expanded from 30 days to 45 days so that's a 50 increase in how long we offered absentee voting these are changes at the state level of course in 2016 we and we started to have that what's called in-person direct balloting or people call it early voting right where you get to put the ballot right into the ballot counter and that increased our increase from our absentee voting from like 10 percent to about 25 to 27 percent on average in 2018 we implemented the new pull pads and that increases staff demands for not only for maintaining and updating these machines but also for training for all of our election judges instead of having to have a two-hour training session now you also have to have a two hour hole pad training so in it basically doubled our training actually more than doubled because we can't have them all in one room at one time and with that you also test all of your election equipments yep that's all in there too yep in 2020 we've got a new presidential nominating primary that would happen in March um and some people don't realize if we have a presidential nominating Primary in March that means we start absentee voting in January so that makes for an entire year with very little time off of of Elections and in 2022 then we go through the redistricting and we have to reset our Precinct boundaries so that they align with the new legislative of districts so that also so that we try to maintain the Integrity of the boundaries that we can so that less people have to find a new polling place and also we need to try to maintain a certain balance we don't want some very large precincts in some very small ones as far as our staffing is concerned in 2006 we had three ftes in 2000 and I started in 2005 and I think they had a slightly different model right before I started so I'm going to say oh the three so it was you oh and Tina because that was under you and Vicky yeah and Vicky yeah okay in 2011 the elections and Licensing coordinator position was a limited and Licensing was relocated to the police department and so we were down to two ftes and 2012 we changed what was once just a senior admin assistant and converted that into a deputy clerk slash executive assistant to the city manager position uh into then and that stayed unchanged until 2020 or actually it's still unchanged uh in 2020 we integrated the licensing back into the city clerk's office and also added the front desk operations and then not too long after that in November of the same year the community engagement Department was up and running and they did take over the front desk operations at that time uh in 2021 we added the temporary Deputy clerk to support licensing code review municode those things and so we now are at two and a half full-time e plus the one temporary position we have probably um five for primary and 15 for general election but um once one other difference that has come about over the years is we used to have many four six sometimes volunteers we're down to one volunteer so that's something that kind of coveted did away with and we have only had one come back after covet absentee voting over the years has transformed into something we never expected it with the Advent of all those different the longer absentee periods the early in-person voting the push for covid to vote early by absentee or mail Ballot or in person we've seen it rise over the years the cost of absentee voting has skyrocketed in 2010 it cost the city about sixty five thousand dollars in 2016 it cost the city about a hundred and seven thousand dollars in 2020 it cost us over two hundred thousand dollars um luckily we had about forty thousand dollars of that was reimbursed by this state because it was for the president presidential nominating primary and we did get money back for that but we don't know if that's a guaranteed refund to US every year we do have to submit for it and hopefully get it and they don't do not cover all costs there's certain costs that they cover I think that's an important place to to pause Michelle um in your your timeline did a nice job of kind of comparing the evolution of elections in the city of Burnsville to our staffing model in in this slide to the absentee voting reality but the fact of the matter is the the addition of in 2021 of that temporary FTE was not only the the project and Licensing realities that we're facing it also is about changing the way that we plan for and build a sustainable and Reliable Staffing model moving into what elections are going to look like in the state of Minnesota um and to your earlier Point as much as I would love to trust our friends at the state to provide things like reimbursement to the community frankly uh fingers crossed fingers crossed so I think it's important for us to not only recognize that that responsibility is increasing but this is the single largest touch point that we have with our community it's one of the the most essential services that we provide and the way that we staff for it the way that we budget for elections is going to need to evolve uh it's just the reality that we face it's it's not it is no longer in every other year proposition it's a it's an every year proposition and it depends on the year how much how many resources and how much we're putting in certain places to address the the community's needs um and I'll also say and then I'll get off my soapbox I'll also say that I believe very strongly that our communities engagement and participation not only in not only at election day up to in in into election day but but things like participation in in the public accuracy test I think it is is not only fantastic but but also very reflective of the interest that our community has in the important work that we do to maintain safe secure elections in Burnsville through the state um and and with our with our partners at the county so that that works just can't be the importance of that work can't be underestimated as we look to the Future priorities safety a lot of this has to do with our licensing function but I also feel like uh safety involves the security Integrity of our election equipment we've always done this but at this point in time the scrutiny around election Integrity election security and ensuring election accuracy has been to a point where we are getting questions about this on a regular basis with Community engagement um we've really seen an increase in community engagement this year we talked about the public accuracy test we we also have an election q a at the library on September 22nd which is the night before absentee voting starts for the general election and we're hoping that people who have questions about voting and how to vote in Burnsville will come and ask us those questions um one of the things about our department that I really am proud of is that we don't just send somebody away when they call us and ask us something that we don't do or we don't know the fact that we will stop and take the time to redirect somebody and make sure they're going to the right place make sure that they're getting the right phone number make sure we're not sending them on a wild goose chase it's something that I take a lot of pride in because I have people sometimes that call me and say I've been sent to three different places and they told me to come to you and of course if it's something that's happened is handled at the county or something else there's not much that I can do to help them but I can make sure that the next person they talk to is the right person and sometimes I can even make sure that they get directly sent to that person at the county or someplace else or maybe it's a DMV off office if they're looking for a death certificate or something like that but it's something that I'm really proud and I think that we do good job of engaging with the community organizational culture I really like our organizational culture that and how it has been evolving like I said we do act as a resource for a lot of different people and provide a lot of different administrative support for different areas we also do research like a couple of weeks ago somebody from the Communications Department said they needed proof that we owned the Ice Center and so that's you know it's not like we have a a Dean showing that we own the Ice Center so I had to go back and find the deed for where we purchased the land that eventually became Civic Center Park that eventually the eye center was built upon and that was actually proof enough to to let that go through but it you know when you it's like where do you find some of these things that's the name of the land has changed hands and and the name of the plot has changed and everything has changed over the years so it's something that that we can do in our office that you know it may be harder for somebody from a different department to do and you found out that we bought the land from the school district we didn't who did we buy the land from the pop quiz and I failed that one yeah from the school district the school district bought it from the Nichols family I'll show you tomorrow yeah all right vibrancy um I think that the new open gov system and been able to have those completely online processes makes things a lot easier for our businesses to access and we also help facilitate and the community Builder Award nominations the volunteer recognition events we help with infrastructure but we have a lot of Records management and yes a lot of it is in our laser fish but um we also have to make sure we maintain the records uh in with the help of the I.T Department of course but in laser piece but there's other software programs that we also have to maintain records in in paper paper still exists and that still sometimes does need to be maintained um we talk about a the community access to public information we have a gobqa system where people can at any time of day go online and request uh public information so sometimes they request not public information and we have to be aware of the statutes that govern that information for sustainability we're working on using less paper all the time we actually are using a new process for the accepting and rejecting of absentee ballot for our absentee ballot board that that creates less paper to start with by using um leveraging our electronic systems and thanks to the I.T department for giving us some extra laptops to do that with we also help people participate in online Council meetings like with the zoom Administration that we do we currently have no one on Zoom participating in this meeting but we did have someone at our regular council meeting earlier tonight even though they did not want to say anything to us all right talking about our challenges this picture is a picture of uh two of our election judges one on each side and then someone from the public actually watching them as they explain to them how they conduct the public actually public accuracy test um one of our main concerns is we have a lot more voters that have a so many concerns about the election process of the election security making sure that things are done accurately and so we really are pleased to see that people are getting involved and finding out more about this we have increased interest in absentee and early voting which has significantly increased in the last 12 years extended timeline and staff time uh we expected the code review task force to last about 18 to 24 months we are seeing that it's going to be likely a full 24 months and that it requires a lot more of my staff time my staff's time to complete the rewrites to ensure the consistency from chapter to chapter regarding appeal language and those types of things otherwise we could end up with a code at the end that didn't look consistent increase in licensing activities and things like new legislation with THC increase in number and length of Council meetings also that takes up more time with staff for preparing packets minutes and attending meetings our aspirations we want to be more proactive more proactive with addressing any election Administration needs promote transparency inclusion not just in elections but in everything we do that um commission recruitment maybe not everybody's aware that they could apply for these commissions and one of the things we do we've always done is like if somebody applies for a commission and doesn't get on we also let them know there are other volunteer opportunities in the city you can you you might be interested in NBN or maybe you'll be interested in serving as an election judge or something to that effect where you could there are other opportunities just because you don't have one opportunity there are other opportunities to be engaged with the city and uh the city clerk's office is at this point 2.5 we do have 3.5 with the one temporary in our office now and that is what we are hoping to stay at we see these are our observations are the increase in in early voting and absentee voting our city manager is without a dedicated executive assistant um Megan serves as both Deputy City Clerk and executive assistant to the city manager and I can tell you that during election time Greg doesn't get a lot of support from our office but we try if something if that person is gone then the rest of my department is trying to back up that executive executive assistant position as well and the increasing demands and complexity and Licensing and data requests stand for any questions any questions I have no questions but I would like to make a comment um if this is hiring on Erica then um personally I think it's a no-brainer I got to work with her on the Planning Commission she's very good at what she does and highly intelligent very charismatic obviously a good addition to our team and so I yeah two thumbs up I agree having worked with Erica on the code review she's invaluable to us and if we don't have someone there that could go a lot longer than it should and quite frankly I'm starting to be a little concerned about fatigue of our commissioners themselves the amount of time they have to put in this in the years of commitment they have to put into this some are okay some of them would like to get this done as quickly as possible yeah with the licensing back in the city clerk's office I agree with you I Erica is invaluable she she is a master's in public administration she is very diligent and thoughtful I've listened to her when people call with regard to licensing and how she addresses it in a very kind and compassionately but also very clear as to what they need to do her and I met for lunch so she could take notes on how to be the chair of the Planning Commission she was that invested in making sure that she did it right that I don't know why she asked me for advice but well because you have the experience yeah she was looking for the job yeah what I do think for as much as I've promised all of our directors and staff that I wouldn't make examples out of specific people thank you for your comments about about Erica she's she had a tremendous value to the clerk's office I will also say that the addition of that position in a temporary capacity was purely a matter of our policy in the way that we budget the position is essential to moving not only the clerk's office forward but frankly the support that we provide to the council and the community in some of our most important areas so um thank you for for that feedback I'll also say that one of the things that we've done is just try to sacrifice where we can to make sure things like elections code review the list goes on are successful and one of those things has been any sort of support for any so any sort of organized support for for my position and that has no reflection on our current incumbent staff they're fantastic it has every it has everything to do with with just the amount of resources that have gone into elections particularly since I uh since I've been part of the organization the past three years there's been a lot of evolution um and frankly we've just had to relieve certain staff members Time by organizing my calendar and keeping me honest to the commitments that I have in order to provide those services to the community so one of the things that you have seen and that we've talked about in your budget and Michelle mentioned it here is I'm asking the council to to include a full-time executive assistant or assistant to the city manager which is very reflective of other communities of our size in order to help me continue to be effective and to to not take away from some of the other important functions that are happening in the clerk's office so I'm certainly happy to talk more about that suggestion but just in an abundance of clarity with the council that is included I still feel like it's something that needs to be there because you don't have we don't have anybody cross-trained also so if you have a full-time executive assistant then that would be somebody that not only we could help train into that position but we could we could be cross-trained to assist when that person was on vacation so you wouldn't be left without anyone absolutely and vice versa can be cross-trained in the clerk's function and other areas of the organization to provide to provide support so there is a an efficiency and an Effectiveness component in my mind to to that well we have also directed you um and and we all agreed from the at the first all-day work session more transparency which puts a lot of um added activity to your workload and how all of that and the reporting that you're doing is more than ever but Michelle uh and you can correct me if I'm wrong but I think you have two halftime people because Megan isn't working full-time Megan is full-time it's full-time but she hasn't been working full-time or has had it's a manamere members of the council that the we have two we have one Deputy city clerk executive assistant that is a full-time FTE um there is a second Deputy clerk that is the temporary FTE and then there's an administrative uh clerk that is a halftime FTE in the department just saying somebody's been sick a lot well there certainly are in any number of areas that we talked about tonight uh from building code to to what have you there are certainly areas where um where we have to get creative sure with how we we manage workloads yeah any comments questions okay Michelle to you and your team thank you very much I appreciate all of that and um if there are no other questions uh any comments then without objection We Stand adjourn by acclimation I'd like one comment before you adjourn oh I wish my wife a happy anniversary [Music] um actually spent some time with it I'm sure she watched this whole meeting [Laughter] happy anniversary with that and without objection there with a glass of champagne yeah just we we stand in your champagne hey is the Mac is