[00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: On Tuesday, December 9th. Uh we have a little switch in the agenda. Item number three is going to have to wait for a little bit. Traffic and weather impacted that. So, we're going to go right into number four, which is 2026 personnel policies with uh Jennifer. [00:00] **Jennifer Doyle**: Yes. So, there's not a ton of changes. There was a pretty large overhaul last year. Um so, just some minor changes. Um number 130, code of conduct, just adding some honesty language, uh which goes really well with the city's core value of integrity. Um and then uh also the—this is from the LMC handbook um sample—talking about uh using official authority or influence in our employment with the city um to apply for memberships or whatnot. So it's just kind of standard language. Um, number 135 on page 14, just adding a little bit to the appearance, making sure um clarifying it should be neat, clean, not ripped, heavily frayed, worn, or expose an excessive amount of skin. Number 170 talking about probationary period could be extended if need be, and then adding uh that temporary and seasonal employees do qualify for ESST as a benefit. Number 185 adding the summer hours uh that city hall is open and for meals and rest breaks to comply with the new Minnesota law that employees who work six hours or more will get a half hour or would have a a half hour uh sufficient time to eat a meal is actually the language. Um they don't specify an amount of time um but sufficient um ours says 30 minutes of a lunch and then in that same policy clarifying um adverse weather conditions—and actually I need to remove the ESST language—uh they can use vacation if uh we're not if we're closed for a weather event if we're not closed for a weather event and they aren't making it in. Number 210, payroll and compensation. There was some inconsistent language. It sounds like this policy was recently changed last year about having firefighters being able to carry over 32 hours of fire firefighter holiday leave. So, uh making consistent with the language on page 46. Um section 225 leaves of absence with the new Minnesota paid leave language. We just wanted to make sure some clarifying language or otherwise indicated in the leave policy was added to our current some of our current leave policies. Um clarifying all I did was put federal to clarify that family medical leave is a federal program. Not to be confused with our state Minnesota paid leave. Adding that Minnesota paid leave policy pages 64 to um 62 to 64. Uh carryover in carryover of ESST. Currently, um, all of our accruals that are over max carryover get paid out the last payroll in December. Um, with the exception we we won't be able to do that with ESST because they could use—last payroll ends December 19th. There's still a couple weeks left in the in the year. State provides uh use of ESST till that December 31st date. So, we'll have to pay that out in January, the first payroll in January. We are looking at possibly doing all of those uh accrual payouts in that first payroll in January, but with the new software conversion, we want to make sure we're not doing too much and changing uh too much while we're doing that transition. So, but we will need to change that ESST to comply with state law. Vacation leave. Again, because of our finance software, uh it was easier to assign an accrual for part-time employees. We don't have any part-time employees that are earning PTO or vacation, but we just wanted to make sure it was in the policy in case we're ever in that situation. It was easiest to set it up with the finance software that they would accrue .06 hours for every hour worked. Um, and then we're just going to keep it at the 0 to 2 year of service accrual rate. The next section 236, uh, vacation to sick leave donation with Minnesota paid leave in our long-term disability plan. I don't see a reason that we shouldn't pull this out of our policy. Um, this was a policy that would allow people to to convert their vacation and donate it to somebody that didn't have any accrued time. But with those policies or the those plans, I just don't think there's a reason to to continue that. And the last one is our employee recognition. Earlier this year, um in the spring, I believe before I before I came on board, department heads had um talked about increasing um the recognition award amount for every five years of service. So $50 for the first five years, $100 for 10 years, 150 for 15 years. Doing that incrementally. I talked that over with our employee engagement committee what options they thought uh and their recommendation. They also agreed. I talked with uh other cities and there are incremental in most of the cities—other cities. Um some are $50 increases, some are $25 increases. So just putting that out there for consideration of of what you would like to do. Other parts of that uh policy: It's currently gift cards. Talked with employee recognition committee, employee engagement committee and talked about the option of either doing a gift card or cash. Again, talked with other cities and it's about 50/50 of what they do. Some are solely cash, some are solely gift cards. Um thinking about doing an option of what the employee would prefer. Um and then prior employees were would be required to come to city council to receive that recognition award or recognition gift card and certificate. Feedback has been that they would prefer not to do that. Um, and making that a condition of if they receive that or not—kind of you'll only be recognized if you come to council. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: Question on that. Well, beforehand like the state of Minnesota for recognition, it's neither cash nor gift cards. It's the state overall subscribes to some entity where it's based upon your service length. You pick a gift from—these are the gifts in category three. These are the gifts in category 4. Does the League of Minnesota cities or any other entity have that type of thing for cities to be a part of? [00:00] **Jennifer Doyle**: The cities that I've talked to, I have an HR networking group. They either do the gift card or the cash. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: Right? It's not unheard of. Regardless, the employees are taxed on that. Whether it's a a gift, clothing, whatever they choose, or if it's the cash or the gift card, it is a taxable benefit. [00:00] **Jennifer Doyle**: Thank you. [00:00] **Council Member Hirn**: Did have a question. Um, I thought you said 0.6 hours per hour is worked for part-time as opposed to .06. [00:00] **Jennifer Doyle**: .06. [00:00] **Council Member Hirn**: Okay. Thank you. [00:00] **Jennifer Doyle**: Works about out to be about three minutes. [00:00] **Council Member Hirn**: Right? That makes more sense. I'm like, why I get a half hour off if I work an hour? [00:00] **Jennifer Doyle**: Right. It's equivalent to half of what a full-time employee would earn would accrue at the zero to two years of experience. [00:00] **Council Member Hirn**: Got it. [00:00] **Jennifer Doyle**: Or service. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Any questions for Miss Doyle on the 2026 personnel policy changes? [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: I guess I guess just with the the recognition, I didn't see anything in there about the gift card versus the cash. Are you looking for feedback tonight on what we'd like to do to to have that added to it? [00:00] **Jennifer Doyle**: Yes. So, it's currently uh number two says the city administrator or designee is directed to purchase suitable gift cards for the purpose of approximately $50. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: Okay. [00:00] **Jennifer Doyle**: So, that's what we currently do. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: And then so you're looking for feedback of should that be tiered? Should it be cash versus gift card? [00:00] **Jennifer Doyle**: Correct. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: Do you have to come to a city council meeting to receive it? [00:00] **Jennifer Doyle**: Correct. All right. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: And if we do the incremental, would council prefer $25 per year of service, $50? Sorry, not per year, per every five years. And, um, the other piece of that, um, possibility of retroing that back to January 1st of this year. We had three employees that served 10 years this year. Um the next one won't be until 2027. There's not a lot of employees that are going to fall into that um and take and and be able to be recognized for that. So we thought it would be nice to do that for 2025, sorry, January 1st of 2025. [00:00] **Council Member Hirn**: Thoughts? I think the incremental $50 for every five years is sufficient for me. I don't think it should be any less than that. I think if you've been here for 10 years, you deserve a hundred bucks. So, I I I like how all of it's written out. I have no dissenting opinions on how anything's written. So, everything looks good to me. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: Yeah. Yeah, I didn't have anything else from reading through other than just for the feedback then I guess from that item. Um I agree. I think a $50 increase for every five years is totally fine. And I I don't know as far as the Visa gift card versus or a gift card, you know, you could do a Visa gift card where they could use it for anything versus cash versus I don't—can it just be added as a bonus onto their payroll potentially maybe? I mean if it's going to be the same anyways. [00:00] **Jennifer Doyle**: Correct. That's what they that's how it would be received is in their paycheck. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: Okay. I guess I'd just be in favor of that. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Yeah. My thought. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: And then um I don't think they should be required to come to the city council meeting for it. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: You don't think they should come and do a dance? [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: I think I think the mayor gets to do a dance. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Sweet. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: Song and dance. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Song and dance. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: We can split up the song versus the dance. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Jeff will do that song. [00:00] **Council Member Hirn**: Um, one other thing that I believe I remember hearing um, employees discuss was some prefer not to have it added to their paycheck as they thought... [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: they feel it. [00:00] **Council Member Hirn**: No, they don't. So maybe a gift card. So it's like— [00:00] **Jennifer Doyle**: Okay. Yeah. [00:00] **Council Member Hirn**: It's kind of just a mind thing, but you know— [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: either way. Yeah. [00:00] **Council Member Hirn**: because there's no difference for tax purposes for them either, right? [00:00] **Jennifer Doyle**: They're they're taxed for either way. Yep. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: Yeah, correct. [00:00] **Council Member Hirn**: It's a good point. It's kind of nice to receive something. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: Yeah. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: Yeah. And if you have a joint checking account, that's something she's gone. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: Yeah, that's good. Great point. [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: I think 50 is is good. I know many private entities that where it's far more. So I I have no issue having this as part of how we use our tax dollars. It's more than more than deserved. I think down the road we'll obviously have to in some year say it's 55 or 60 when that time comes. But I have no preference as to the method and I would support language that just keeps it open-ended and at the discretion of the two of you because each employee is going to differ. That's fine. [00:00] **Jennifer Doyle**: Okay. [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: I I I assume there are some employees where like you know their favorite store is Gander Mountain or wherever. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: I had to pick a very specific one. [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: Those are gone. Don't give them that—Dicks Sporting Goods, wherever. Uh second swing. Like, that has a value to a certain employee. So I keeping it open to your discretion I think is is probably preferable. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: I think all those are fine recommendations, Jennifer. [00:00] **Jennifer Doyle**: And retroing back to 1-1 of this year. Is that is that also the direction? [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: I like that. Okay. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Yeah, that's fine. [00:00] **Jennifer Doyle**: All right. Thank you. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Those changes will be made and it'll be back on the council agenda for next week. [00:00] **Jennifer Doyle**: Perfect. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Thank you. Well, uh we're still waiting on uh Mr. Griffin, so we'll jump into City of Lake Elmo strategic communications plan. Miss Smith. We'll see if the communications person can make this work. All right, maybe. Okay, Kathie's there. [00:00] **Kathie Smith**: Hi. Hi. Yeah, nice to meet all of you guys tonight. Thanks for coming on this snowy day. Mayor, city council, I'm excited to be here. Um, so let's just get into it. Okay, so why does a city need communications? City municipalities need effective communication to communicate clearly, consistently, and effectively with residents, businesses, and community partners. Effective communication with the city fosters trust and transparency, encourages public engagement, and ensures that messages are accurate and coordinated across all departments. Municipal communications components consist of um following components to keep residents informed, engaged, and connected: Public information and transparency, strategic planning, media, digital communications and website, social media, internal communications and marketing branding. Our communications plan—this is just going to be an overview. So, if you guys want to see all the specifics, it's in the packet. You're welcome to look at it. It starts with our mission statement. The mission of city of Lake Elmo is to provide planned quality public services consistent with the city's character in a fiscally responsible manner in partnership with our community. We're guided by the strategic initiatives adopted in the January 2025 primarily to build a vibrant, inclusive, and connected community through celebration, engagement, and shared spaces while also delivering efficient, reliable, and innovative communications with transparency. It consists of a communications department, roles and responsibilities, tools and communication channels, social media, measuring success, and we'll talk about the ADA accessibility. Lake Elmo's communication plan builds trust. A clear communication plan helps residents understand city decisions and services, fostering public trust, and accountability. It enhances engagement. When residents are informed, they're more likely to participate in local government activities. It ensures consistency. The plan establishes unified messaging that will in fact make everyone more comfortable and it strengthens the city's reputation. Communications planning—this is how we do our annual planning. Um, we have a calendar that's set up for all the months and then within those things, all the top meetings are there and then we can know how we're going to be directed on what we're putting out, whether it's social media, on the website, what have you. But it's been a really nice way to be organized and concise with what we're doing. Our website, the new Civic Plus website is officially up and running as of August. This platform is much more user friendly and keeps residents informed in many ways. You can search through the search bar at the top, interact with the "how do I" section, find specific information under departments, find things including the mayor and the city council and um just go to lakeelmo.gov. It's pretty user friendly. There's something called the WCAG 2.2 web content accessibility guidelines. Web content accessibility guidelines part of the Americans with Disability Act title two defines how to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities. WCAG is based on four principles of web accessibility: It must be perceivable. It must be operable, understandable, and robust. Accessibility involves accommodating for a wide range of disabilities including visual, auditory, physical speech cognitive language learning, and neurological disabilities. Compliance with these ADA rules extends to local, state, and federal government municipalities and has compliance deadlines broken down by population. For cities with 49,999 or more, compliance must be completed by April of 2026. For cities with populations under 49,999, um completion must be by April. As a small city, we don't have to comply completely until 2027. However, they start looking at our municipality communications now. So, we have to start working towards the guidelines. Um here are some examples of criteria and techniques that we have to do. You've got to make sure all of your PDFs and your um presentations have to have this accessibility. So text alternatives, whenever you have an image or some type of a graphic, you have to put something under there that's describing. It can't just be a simple thing either. It's got to be a little bit more information. Um time-based media. So right now with um SEC, our communications people, they are able to do audio and video time-based media. Um, all of our video is going to have to have captions. It's got to have a meaningful sequence for documents and powerpoints and PDFs. So, it has to have headline and follow subsequently like that. If you're out of order, then it's not going to be compliant. There's a use of color and contrast that you need to use. And these are all recommendations that we plan to do as a sitting training in January so that everybody's kind of up to date. The text sizes and images are all part of that guideline. Next, we do have Google Analytics on our website, which is something new. We didn't have that on the last one, but it gives you an opportunity to to see individual information, whether it's what web pages they're going to, how many people are looking at our website. Um, it provides valuable insights into user behavior, traffic sources, popular content, and engagement patterns. Um, so this is an example from November. You can see um what the page views are for the city municipality. You can look at—I'm sorry I'm going fast. Um you can look at the agenda center. You can look at any of those pages and it will tell you how many people are looking at it, how long are their visits, that kind of thing. So that can also guide us when our communication strategies are moving forward, what kind of things people are looking at. We can always know if they're looking at that new GIS thing that you guys have. And you know, so publications, the city of Lake Elmo publishes both external and internal newsletters sharing stories with residents and employees. Currently, we have the Fresh and that's through constant contact. Um, in the new year, we're planning to use our new website. They have similar platform that's called Civic Send. And then that's going to save us a little bit of money. We won't need to use Constant Contact anymore, but it's been very efficient and we can track all that information. Um, we have something called The Source and that is a biannual publication. We mail to all the residents and businesses in the community. We have The Loop which is our new internal communications that we send monthly to all of our employees and they seem to like it. And then finally um we produced a Lake Elmo Water Brochure this year which was our administrator's advice and I think it's been very well-received in the community. Um a lot of the different government communications teams that I communicate with wanted copies of it because they're like, "Oh that's so cool. We want to do it." So, good job to our administrator. Um, social media. Our social media channels include Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Next Door, and YouTube. We we measure our social media all the time so that we can kind of see what kind of content is getting people um excited and what kind of things that they're looking for. If you look um we we measure everything and I think if you look in our city reports monthly I try to give you those that information. Um what I'm finding so far is the things residents are most interested in are what's going on with the snow plows, what's going on with road closures. Those kind of things are very important. So um that's it in a nutshell. Um, if you guys have any questions, um, are there any things that you feel are missing from our communications plan? If you've had a chance to look it over. [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: I know when I looked at the the plan, it looked like it was pretty complete. I guess just the the um the non-quantitative, you know, part of me says I see a lot more out there. I think people are getting more information than they had before. Um, it's hitting on more fronts. Um, you know, we've heard that some people don't use Facebook, they use Instagram, and we've got LinkedIn and I see other things, you know, things from the fire department getting out there and um, activities that are happening with public works and the engineering stuff that's going on with our roadway. So, the ties to the information and it's nice to be able to point people to um questions related around water on our website without having to go through everything uh each time that questions arise. So, I've been I've been really happy with uh the communications um since you've come on board. [00:00] **Kathie Smith**: Thank you. Do you guys have any modifications or additions you would like to see in the website at all? Have you done a little tour? Have you taken a look a little deeper? [00:00] **Council Member Hirn**: Sorry. May I step back actually the first one and I don't think it's missing because you you're doing it. I just didn't see it in the plan. Um, but the texting, and again, I suppose it's person by person, but for me personally, those text updates that the city sends out—I find those to be the most impactful for me. I'm able to see it immediately. You know, it pops up on my phone, which we carry with us everywhere. I don't have to go into an app. So, just for me personally at least, I I find it to be very useful with our business. You know, texting is always the thing that seems to get people's attention the most. [00:00] **Kathie Smith**: There's something called "Notify Me" on the website and you can sign up for learning about the agenda, you know, getting agenda sent to you, any news and you can have them texted or emailed. Um, I think that's one of the reasons our administrator had us move to this new site is because she knew that we were going to be able to get that information to people a lot sooner and a lot more smoothly. So, I think I'm glad to see that you are enjoying that. I think— [00:00] **Council Member Hirn**: Yeah. So, I mean that would be my only suggestion of maybe what to add to the to the actual plan is having some focus on that text messaging. My only question on that was I don't know how it works for the text messaging. Is it you have to pay a a fee per text message? Is it unlimited? [00:00] **Kathie Smith**: Yeah, thanks for asking. No, no, it's absolutely free. You can just go on to lakeelmo.gov and it'll be "Notify Me" and— [00:00] **Council Member Hirn**: or I'm sorry for the—does the city have to pay a per message fee? So like the larger that texting list is does— [00:00] **Kathie Smith**: Nope. That's part of the program. [00:00] **Council Member Hirn**: Okay. [00:00] **Kathie Smith**: Just part of the platform. [00:00] **Council Member Hirn**: And then just one more question about—so in the the communications plan there was a section that was um titled for the crisis management communication. And it looked like maybe some of the the verbiage in there was just maybe copy-pasted from a different section and it wasn't updated. I'm wondering if there was maybe some because I was very interested in hearing a little bit as far as like what is our communication strategy for crisis type situations. [00:00] **Kathie Smith**: Yeah, I'll look back in there because and see if it's updated. It should have been, but um what we've decided from our administrator is we're kind of taking a collaborative approach with public safety. So, um Dustin, the chief is working on cementing their written plan of how they're working together. And we had an update today with um both he and um Ty to just talk about, you know, their public safety messaging and things. So, it's kind—we're taking their lead. We're going to kind of work in collaboration with them. But, I'll make sure that that looks like that's what it says in there. I thought I had updated that, but I'll take it. [00:00] **Nicole Miller**: I just wanted to add on to what Kathie is saying. So, this was just um just uh in this plan to just be general to say we do have a crisis communications plan, but it will live in our emergency operations plan because most likely we will be partnering with our um public safety folks on an event or other um organizations too. So and that will be for internal use obviously—our plan on how we go about messaging and the players and all that. So but thanks that was a good question. [00:00] **Kathie Smith**: Um are there any projects that you like the communications team to be working on in 2026? Um just as a reminder this is the first year that your city has had a formal communications plan. So, it's we'll always be updating and implementing things as we go, but if there are things that you think, "Hey, Kathie, we really want you to focus more on XYZ." Are there any ideas that you have to share with me? [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: Well, Washington County does a really good job with their construction stuff. I think it would be key for residents to focus on that Lake Elmo Avenue 36 project coming this year, whether it's tying in information they have or gleaning it, sending it separately. I think that would be important to our residents. [00:00] **Kathie Smith**: Okay. Um I'm just getting this winter Source stories written and I think that's one of the stories I wanted to kind of focus on in January, too. So, I think that's a good point here. Thank you. [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: I think as we move into planning our new recreation center, 70 acre site, that a communications plan to encouraging civic engagement and involvement as we go through that planning process would be a good project to have. [00:00] **Kathie Smith**: So that's a good idea. Yeah. Um, I would love to talk further if you guys have information or ideas that you think we could do some kind of a kickoff or something once you get further into the planning where we could do some type of an event or I mean there's lots of opportunities but— [00:00] **Council Member Hirn**: I would agree with that. There's going to be a lot of opportunities for the comm's side of it. [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: Definitely. I mean the simple fact of the matter is that project will be—depending upon how it plays out—the biggest... I'll just say the biggest project that the city has taken on that is city-only um depending upon if there's external partners however it plays out, but it's pretty impactful so it's—I think there there's definitely opportunity for a very deliberate plan. Opportunistic communications. The other thing I was going to say: the water packet. [00:00] **Kathie Smith**: For sure. Yeah. They're playing. [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: Okay. Yep. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Good. Because I was a brilliant idea coming up with it and I I think it's one of those like in Lake Elmo—that is a topic that people need to get through snail mail. Like that is something where they do need to have a physical copy in their house to look at. Um, but I I will say that I'm very happy considering this is year one of having communications itself, let alone a plan, let alone labor, let alone um someone who is focusing on that. As a prime example, the website already is updated with news and the video from Light up Lake Elmo. Like that, that's fantastic. That that's the type that's the type of thing that we wanted to see. That's one piece among many. But the video clip the other day of going riding uh with public works like—and that that's like, I personally, that's the type of thing where I think the city has a great opportunity to say, "Here are things that the city is doing. Here's what it looks like from the the staff side when they're going out doing this and yes, it's impacting residents." It's it's not the TikTok style of being 10 seconds only, but a little bit more for longer attention spans, but I think those are fantastic ways to show and to help be involved to say this is what the city is doing. [00:00] **Kathie Smith**: Yeah, I put something out yesterday about the swans and it's hilarious, but I think it's had like 10,000 views or something. So, it's I think um I I talked with our administrator and just said, you know, I look forward to in 2026 becoming a little bit more creative and maybe doing, you know, venturing into TikTok. It's just a little not sure yet if we want to do that, but I want to be more creative. I think this first year just getting everything secured and on board with all the different parts that go into communications—that's really been my primary focus, but now I hope to—and also we need our public works people to not be so nervous. They don't like their pictures taken. So sometimes they're like, "No, don't do it." [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: Go with the engineers. [00:00] **Kathie Smith**: Yeah. There you go. Go for a ride somewhere. Huh. Well, if you have any other questions, please feel free to email me. I'm very excited to see where 2026 leads us. And um I'm always here to do what you guys need. So, I appreciate your time. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Thank you. [00:00] **Kathie Smith**: Thank you. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Well, looks like we can jump back to item number three. Um we'll go to the Highway 36 Lake Elmo Avenue option three concept plan with Jack Griffin. [00:00] **Jack Griffin**: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Members of the council, I my apologies. I obviously didn't leave myself enough time given the road conditions to to get here. Um so I'm bringing back the trunk highway 3617 uh what we're calling now the option three for update and discussion um after we spent some time on this with Washington County's presentation at the November workshop. Um, I'll just uh spend a quick time on the background just for context. Um, going back to May of 2024, the city council approved a resolution of municipal consent uh for the preliminary layout for this project. Um, it's known as the overpass with button hook ramps alternative. So, this was a this was a design alternative that was focused on the interchange only. There were arms going both east and west for the south frontage road, but they ended in cul-de-sacs. They only extended far enough to get the on and off ramps onto Highway 36 and to eliminate driveways that were had direct access to 36. So, that was the project that the council officially approved. Um, as the project continued to move forward, um, MnDOT at a point in time came forward with additional money, uh, and to apply it to the South Frontage Road to extend it further to Keats to connect to Keats Avenue, which was an important project the city had been working on going all the way back to 2016. It was actually a design the city had laid out and submitted to MnDOT. And so, they were coming forward with the funding to get that project done. Um, but the caveat there was it it came with a full closure of Keats Avenue and that was the alternative that the county and MnDOT showed up and presented to the council at the November 11 workshop. Um, council at that time a month ago requested that a third option be considered which would just maintain one turning movement, one additional turning movement and that's the right turn access from eastbound 36 to southbound Keats. So, that's just an add to the frontage road design. Um, and it's um we're calling it option three and it would come with performance monitoring to determine if a future closure is warranted so that we would watch that. So, that's where we ended in November. Um, so the issue um for the council at this point in time is: should we—are we ready at this point to bring forward a resolution of municipal consent for that option? MnDOT has come forward with a draft option to allow that turning movement and has spelled out performance monitoring which we've put in the staff write up and we've put in the council packet for you tonight um or for the workshop packet. So um the question that we're looking for tonight is um are is there more that we need to be looking at? Is there something else we should talk about or are we ready to bring that resolution forward for the council um for approval? So this is the basics of what we received back from MnDOT from November. They evaluated the council's request for that turning movement. They came up with this concept plan um of that leaves that turning movement open. Um and then they gave us four safety and performance measures. Um turn in which we'd continue to watch the turn volumes whether they exceed that right turn lane capacity. Queuing on trunk highway 36. I asked a couple of times—I actually think those are the same issue. So, I really think it's only three criteria we're looking at. Um crashes at trunk highway 36 and Keats Avenue and incidents of going the wrong way on Keats Avenue coming up to 36. So those are the four performance measures that they would like to watch and monitor and and as long as operations and safety are not showing issues with that, that that would be allowed to remain open. Zoomed in a little bit here on the on the option that they they drew up. Um it is still a concept plan. Um what they would be looking for is the council to approve this in in concept. um and then they would move forward and do the design details around this and so we can work out um additional design um issues as we work through it. Um but what they what I've highlighted in yellow there is the right-of-way acquisition that the county has already initiated um for the for the original design. And what happened with the concept plan that they came back to us with is they're trying to stay within that original footprint. Um they're very fearful that if we push outside of that footprint with our design with our redesign that it will delay the June start and they see the June start of June 26 as being critical. Um keep in mind that the phasing of this project they're getting the whole South Frontage Road constructed in 2026 and one half of the bridge at the intersection of 36 and then switching over for 2027 construction. So they have a pretty aggressive schedule to of what needs to get done in that first year before the first winter in their phasing and staging. So they're they're really looking at that June is an essential start time. So that's not to say we can't look at additional right-of-way acquisition, look at other design options, things like that as we move forward. But what we would be looking for coming back as early as next week would be having the council approve this design. And if we can continue to further improve the design that that's great, but we would fall back on this if it causes delay in the project schedule. Um, so the you can see the blue all the blue lines those are contour lines for a pond. So that storm pond has already been designed and is under review by the Valley Branch right now for approval. And then you can see um the yellow is the right-of-way acquisition that they're already initiated the right-of-way acquisition process in timetable which is a significant timetable and all it does is it results in those two tight curves. They're 20 mph curves rather than 30 mph curves. Um and then you see the it inter- the intersection comes in um at Keats Avenue 165 ft south of the 36 intersection. MnDOT ideally in their design parameters would like to see that more like 200 feet, but they're tightening that up to 165 ft um in order to stay within that right-of-way acquisition area. I I had our transportation consultant SRF review this um even though there's some design exceptions here, they they don't see any operational issues with it. They don't think um their their big red flags are of significant concern. So while they are not the ideal design, we we think this is a workable design and it shouldn't shouldn't have operational issues. Um the other criteria that you see the green strip up on Highway 36, one of the contingencies MnDOT has laid out for us is that that um deceleration right turn lane needs to be lengthened as part of this. They are asking that the city would pay for that piece of the project and they're not 100% confident yet that it can be made part of this project. Their intent would be to make it part of this project, but because of all the steps they have to go through with their grants and environmental findings and all that kind of stuff, if it can't be part of this, they would ask the city to do this as a separate project. But either way, this lengthening would have to get done. It's it's really uh it's already a paved shoulder. It's really just thickening up the section with pavement. It's not I don't think it's a very expensive or very robust project by any means. Um we believe we don't have an estimate of what that is because we don't have the details of exactly what the scope is, but we believe even with the addition of that, we're going to come in underneath our $5 million ask of the—that we've been budgeting for in our CIP um for for the upfront project. Um the other um criteria they have uh spelled out for the city is that we would go forward, we'd build this project this way. We would have these safety performance measures that we would monitor. Um they spell out—and I put it in the packet—they spell out in detail how we would go about um looking at each incident that might occur. They don't have—they're not setting specific criteria that if there's one crash, two crashes or five crashes or anything like that. When they have an incidence of—that's a concern—they're—they want to look at this as a very collaborative effort and their suggestion and what they're laying out in that process verbally is that Washington County, MnDOT, and the city will get together, look at that—is that incident related to the design? Is it not related to the design?—and look at each incident like that and make an evaluation of whether the intersection is performing safely or not. If the decision is made that it needs to be closed, um then it will be the city's responsibility and obligation to pay for uh the redesign of this intersection to close that that access off. Again, the improvements on 36 itself for that turn lane is just restriping because it just goes back to a shoulder. So, that's a really insignificant cost. There'll be a little bit of cost of deconstructing that the uh Keats portion, the one-way Keats portion basically. And then if there's any thing we want to do with the intersection itself, it would be up to the city how to design that at that point. So I just spelled out in this slide uh basically the safety monitoring and performance measures. This is the outline of their process. I asked uh more clarification of whether they were going to—so the way this would get memorialized is through a cooperative construction agreement. So the details of this would be laid out in an agreement. So there'd be another agreement we'd bring forward for council approval at a future date. Uh but it would basically be around this premise and those bullets of those performance safety measures. And I—they're not going to be quantified. They're going to be more of a verbal process of "this is how we will work together and review those situations." Um the ultimate design of that intersection will be—they are—will be approved by the city of Lake Elmo. So as we continue to move forward we'll have a say in how that design occurs. Um and then there is some um bullets in MnDOT's communications about wayfinding challenges just as a um there they do have some concerns that the more intersections we have the more signage we have um they just want to pass along. They expect you're going to have some people getting off at Keats that are meaning to get off at Lake Elmo Avenue. It could be trucks and then you have them meandering through your city streets and things like that because they can't get back on 36. Um, so it's just kind of a heads-up that they expect to see some of that happen with an intersection like this. Um, I just threw this in here as another design alternative. Um, it was suggesting we don't need to have allow that traffic that's getting off of 36 to be able to turn left on the South Frontage Road. Um, that wouldn't because they could go to 59th Street. Um this was the issue that they pushed back on with their response was the inter- this turning movement is too close to 36 and so um it's obviously something that can be looked at a little bit more as we move forward in the design but they there was some immediate push back on that for that reason and I just received that response today so I had left this in here but we will be able to continue— [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: They understood that's not the scale right I mean— [00:00] **Jack Griffin**: Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. There's there's—I like—there's some elements of this that are really promising. I it not I haven't quite figured out how to make it work holistically in my mind, but it it it has—it gives you some pause to think a little more deeply about it. Uh but but nonetheless, the exact design isn't done yet. And so that's it's important to know that that you'd be you would be approving that we'll have the south frontage road connection uh to Keats and then you'd be approving that we're maintaining that right off access from Highway 36 onto southbound Keats. That would be the approval. So, our recommendations be that if council um is acceptable with what's been presented here that we would bring back a resolution for municipal consent for that option three concept plan uh at the next meeting and then we continue to work with the project team on that intersection. Um things that staff has thought about as increasing... um maybe we look at uh the that that turn lane we're responsible for on on trunk highway 36. Um maybe we go it's a minimum of 500 feet they're requiring. Maybe we spend a little more money and we go a little longer. You know, just because one of the criteria is backing up on that turn lane. So, it's in our advantage to not have this fail if we put this forward. Um I don't know. We we'd want to look at some traffic and we know Rockpoint Church is expanding. Has that been taken into consideration in in this length and and those kinds of things? So, those are some details. We will continue to work with MnDOT forward. Uh work with MnDOT on if the council moves forward with this. Um I already mentioned the second bullet. Consider eliminating the um southbound Keats left turn lane. Um consider improved horizontal geometrics with revised right-of-way acquisition. I think there's an opportunity to still talk about some of those things um as we go forward, but we would we would approve the concept without that um to get to keep it moving on schedule. Um, and then we would be continuing to work with them on an actual agreement form for those performance measures that would come back to the council in the form of a cooperative construction agreement. So, that's uh that's what I have for you tonight. I'd be happy to answer questions at this time. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Any questions? People good with that? I guess I've been chewing on it a while, so I've been fairly involved. So, I'm I'm I'm good with what Jack is saying. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: I guess my only question is, do we have any concerns about the safety considerations? I mean, if it truly is collaborative on, you know, accidents that are happening, will it be—will we have a vote at the table to say we want to keep this open even though there was one accident here, or will MnDOT say no, we're closing it, they have the final say? [00:00] **Jack Griffin**: That's a very good question. Um, based on what we've received in the outline from them, they did have a bullet that specifically says they reserve the right to close it. So, I I do believe when I bring an agreement forward, that's probably going to be in that agreement that they're going to stand on on wanting to do that. So, there is there is probably some leap of faith that we're going to work collaboratively. They've they've emphasized that quite significantly that they see this as working together. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: Okay. I I think just the fact that they went away and came back with this um shows quite a act of good faith and that they are listening to the city and I really like the plan. I just don't—that that part concerns me that they have the final say of just closing and then the city foots the bill closing it. [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: I I've been around long enough with my gray hair to know that it could be five years from now and you just get staff turnover at MnDOT and then you get—you're dealing with somebody else too. That you know those are things that just happen with organizations that that turnover could be better, it could be worse, you know. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: Yeah. Okay. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: Well, on that same vein, say there's there's one accident seven years from now and the new person who's there says, "Nope, we're shutting it down." With this type of agreement, do we have a place to appeal that? Like, what—that that is a quasi-judicial act by a executive branch agency through a contract enforcement. Would we have a a way to appeal that? And to whom? Would it be like an administrative law judge? Would it be to... because I I can't imagine there's a process where we're suddenly being told, "Hey, we made a decision. You the city of Lake Elmo, guess what? You get to pay what—$23,400,000 based upon this decision by a single staffer that we disagree with." [00:00] **Jack Griffin**: Right. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: I presume there would have to be some type of a legal recourse that we would have. [00:00] **Jack Griffin**: I think there's there's language in there that if there are incidents or crashes that happen, the three agencies will get together and look at those individual things and you know, was it caused by a safety incident or some design or lack of the design? Was it caused by something unusual that you know was a one-off? Um— [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: If it's an inebriated driver, you know, things like—there's—it's pretty common when these happen, you look for evidence of: is it the road system that's causing this confusion or is it driver behavior completely? And that's where you can discount that. And while, you know, it's not inconceivable that a—as you're explaining it—a knee-jerk reaction happens, at least in—I have as much gray hair as Jack, but haven't been around quite as long. But I don't—these decisions don't come typically with a knee-jerk. They're not—I mean engineers don't typically act in that manner say "oh that's one thing it's done." It they want to look at it see what happened there and is it in due course and typically it's a one-off is not going to be catastrophic in their eyes or in anybody's eyes really. So, I mean it it is—yes it's a little bit of a leap of faith and um you know and working with a partnership those things those things happen when you you know you're working with other agencies whether it's the county or the state or watershed district and you just have to trust that the process works and by all measure if there is something that this doesn't work. You know, as as the mayor of Lake Elmo at this point in time, if it's if it is an issue, which I don't I don't think it should be, I wouldn't want to keep it in place. So, sometimes you got to look in the mirror and make sure that you're, you know, that you're looking at it straight, too. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Yeah. I think it's a worth pursuing. I'm I don't know, but I see pros and cons to it. One thing I do like is we—think would be nice is to make that left turn when you come off of Highway 36. So you can get on to Keats and go south, but you can't make that left turn and go east. I think that would be more efficient in my mind, but I'm not so locked in against it that, you know, I'd vote no on the idea if I didn't—if we still included the left turn. I just think there's some logic in that. Um, my experience in working with MnDOT—they don't make arbitrary decisions either. Generally, they take a lot of input, there's a lot of discussion, and usually they they'll have a lot of reasons why it makes sense to do that. And oftentimes they'll have some suggestions to alleviate what's causing the problem. I don't think it's it's just real open and shut either. But and as the mayor said, if if there are accidents or things that are occurring there that are endangering people, we probably want to go along with that as well. So, I don't have any any part issue with the agreement or the form or otherwise. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: Yeah. And I'd prefer to keep that left-hand turn just for an option because I feel like if—I don't know—certain people might get off thinking they could take a left and they get lost. I don't know. It's very minute detail but I personally think keep that left-hand turn. And how is that intersection being controlled? Is that just stop signs for people coming to that north and southbound lane? [00:00] **Jack Griffin**: It's a it's a side stop for the people on the south frontage road coming into Keats. So we want to keep want to keep the people coming off Highway 36 and going south on Keats free moving. We don't want them to stop and back up. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: Got it. Okay, that makes sense. Thank you. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: I would also be remiss to uh forget to mention um the other requirement is that the city maintain the one way of Keats Avenue. So it is it does create an inefficient movement for your public works department to have to plow that. They would have to likely get on 36 at Manning and come down and plow it and if they have to do a second pass they have to circle back. So, it's quite a ways out of the way to do that. [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: Jack didn't also say we had to plow the deceleration lane. [00:00] **Jack Griffin**: No, they'll take care of 36. [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: Okay. I thought I thought we had the deceleration lane and the turn, but— [00:00] **Jack Griffin**: yeah, they'll do everything on 36 and then they'll leave that window row of snow across Keats and city public works will have to take that out. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Okay. There you have it. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Jack. [00:00] **Jack Griffin**: Good to bring that back next week then? [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Yes. [00:00] **Jack Griffin**: All right. Thank you very much. Thank you. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: All right. We're going to jump into the public hearing notice and process. Miss Johnson. [00:00] **Julie Johnson**: All right. Thank you, mayor. Um, so starting off with some background on this topic. The planning commission discussed increasing mailing distances for rural residents and adding push notifications for public hearings at that joint workshop that was held in January of this year. Um, since my time here, staff has also received feedback from residents uh requesting notices be more accessible to those that may not be subscribed to the Stillwater Gazette or live within 350 ft of a subject property. Uh, staff has contacted the city attorney for an opinion on the process change. The city attorney advised that we maintain a consistent distance to avoid any potential oversight or conflict in the future of picking and choosing mailing distances. So, at this time, city staff has expanded the content of the public hearing notice letter, which I believe was included in your packet and conducted research into what other cities are doing. So, this is a very very high level table of the research that we did. Um, Lake Elmo, Hugo, Stillwater, and Waconia all follow state statute, which is a mailed notice to property owners within 350 ft of the subject property and uh, published in the official paper at least 10 days prior to the the public hearing meeting. Lakeville, Cottage Grove, and Oakdale are just a step above state statute. They do 500 feet um, for surrounding property owners and then 10 days in the paper. And Forest Lake and Minnetrista have the most robust process: they um vary their mailings based on application type or land use zoning and then again they're doing that paper at least 10 days prior. So the focus of this discussion there's really two topics. The first is um council's thoughts on the public hearing notice mailer distances. Um if we want to change that text amendments are required to city code otherwise leaving that as is. The second part is since we do have that new website that has been published um are we interested in adding public hearing notices as push notifications that people can sign up for um with that new website. I'm going to leave the two discussion questions and I'm happy to answer any questions as they come up. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Comments. Council member Holtz. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: personally I don't have an issue with 350 or the current but we've received pretty strong feedback from our commission. Seeing that there are multiple examples of 500 foot I think that is a logical first step. Out of curiosity—is it—I assume you guys are going into GIS and then you're literally using the distance from whatever the the outermost corners are of the property then just doing a radius and if it touches the property in any way. [00:00] **Julie Johnson**: Correct. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: Yeah. I I have no issue with 500 feet. I as much as I enjoy the idea of differentiating by the the specific event, I think that would be a massive logistical nightmare for staff and I don't think it would be worthwhile unless there's somehow automated in the system and you could do it. It it's just I don't think it would be too much of a value gain for that to do it how Waconia does it. But yeah, 500 foot absolutely I think is a good first step. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Um, I agree we should have a consistent distance. Adding 150 ft to it will add some mailings within our more populated areas. Um, and and the feedback we've gotten are from the areas—now I didn't do any study on this—are in the more rural areas. I don't know does 150 ft make that—it's not going to make it to the next property because they're typically acres, right? So, I mean, I'm okay with 500, but 350 is a state statute. And maybe maybe we attack it a different way and and allow people to get those push notification as council member Hirn—he signs up, he gets text message, and um I don't like a lot of text messages, so I don't sign up for it. But if you want to have those public hearings on there, then you have that availability. So, I mean, I'd prefer to keep it at 350. I don't know that 500 feet gives us the advantage that—just because of the large lot sizes in our in our areas where we've heard the complaints of people not getting notified. It may be stressed to those people, "Hey, you live in the rural area, you may not be within the 350 ft." So, it could be advantageous for you to be on this push notification for public hearings, maybe attack it that way as opposed to if we're down in the Savona neighborhood or Easton Village or Carriage Station, right? Where somebody's outside of that 300, you know, you're going to get 15 more addresses in that 150 ft where you might not even get an extra one in the rural area. I mean, I don't, you know, you could go into all the analytics about it, but I think it'd be pretty hard. I think concentrate your efforts on trying to make sure the people that want to get it get it. [00:00] **Julie Johnson**: I did a GIS analysis just to see how many more people would pick up if we did do 500 and you're looking at a handful of properties if that. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Okay. [00:00] **Julie Johnson**: If you do 500. [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: Yeah, I'd support the 500 foot. Um I think the push notifications are an alternative, but you know, not everybody has internet. Not everybody has a cell phone and we think we do, but there are people who don't. And so, you know, the mailing notice of 500 feet, I didn't think it would add a whole lot more properties even in the densest part of the city. Um, it has a few, yeah, but I don't think it a huge burden. And the 500 feet provides a little bit better notice to people about the potential change. Kind of going back to—we talk about communication plan—make sure it's successful to everybody and and um there are people who don't have those things. [00:00] **Council Member Hirn**: How is it a hard process to add the push notifications or is that something that is just flipping a switch on your guys's end? How does that work? [00:00] **Julie Johnson**: I will defer to Kathie or Nicole. [00:00] **Nicole Miller**: Yeah. Um so we—so this is something um that we can continue to talk about for different topics too, not just the public hearing notices, but it would be setting up a category for people to opt into. And so anytime we're going to add something new, we want to make sure that we're going to be consistent and we're able to sustain it. So um we would be doing all public hearing notices um that will get pushed through there. So it won't take a lot of staff time, but it is something additional that Kathie and staff um will have to make sure we're doing and we're consistent and once we're starting it's not going away. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: Okay. Yeah. I mean, the push notifications would be extremely helpful because I was actually thinking watching the planning commissions and the parks commissions, no one really comes to these public hearings and it would be really good for—we can't force people to come, but just giving them that information more accessibly would be great and it's just adding push notifications. It's not taking it out of the Gazette or anything like that. Correct? [00:00] **Julie Johnson**: Correct. It still maintain the state statute requirement. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: Okay, great. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: I'm actually fine with keeping the 350 is personally my my feeling on this. I think we go to 500 and then we're still going to get the same complaint is kind of my my thought. I think we we're better off putting our energy towards the push notifications. I don't know why I didn't bring this up—I I should have brought this up with the um with the communications. I think this is a great opportunity. Um it could just be the same picture that gets posted on Facebook, Instagram every single time that you know "public hearing" um with that information. I know there's a lot of engagement on there. So I just I think our time would be better spent focusing on trying to get um communication via the other methods that we have versus the mailers. I I just think we're going to go to 500 and then the person that's 600 feet away is going to say, "Well, why didn't I get this message?" and then we go to 600 and then it's—why didn't the 700 foot away get it? That's my my feeling on it. Um so what you're saying is also to add social media into the equation. Yeah, I actually think this would be a great use for—a great um addition to the communications plan. Sorry, I should have brought that up earlier. Um, I think with the with the communications there, yeah, there has to be some of the fun stuff, the Swans, but I think this is a great, you know, what we need to be communicating and um, it's just it's another way that we can get that information out to a lot more people. And when it's on Facebook or it's through the push notification, it's on the website, I think there's a lot better chance that a friend or family sees it or a neighbor sees it and they share it um to the their neighbor, whether that be directly or however they would share it with them. I just I think we're going to get a wider net cast focusing on that versus um the mailing. But I I guess at the same time if going to 500 is going to add, you know, two or three mailers, maybe it's worth it just to say we, you know, we're making the effort. But, um, I just think we're going to run into the same situation of: there's going to be frustration of it still doesn't seem like it's big enough for somebody who's 700 feet away. [00:00] **Julie Johnson**: So you can take the third option off where we go ahead and like pick and choose based on application type and distance. We forget about that one. Either keep it 350 or or push to 500. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: Either way, I'm fine, you know, I guess. Um, but yeah, having that that other that push notification and what other options available are are probably where the the biggest gain is going to get in in my opinion. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: It's funny because like the 350 versus 500 makes me think of the college football playoff. 12 teams. No, it should be 16 teams. Well, when it's 12, the 13th team will be upset. When it's 16, the 17th team will be upset. So it's exactly like you said—it's at 500. Well then the person who's at 510 will be upset. And it's true statement— [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: when I just think about—think about you know some of the when it it was the issue on Keats Avenue right where there was a public hearing and just the neighbors on either side got it and the people in the cul-de-sacs didn't get it because they're over 350 ft. Okay, I get it. But I don't know that they would have gotten it if it would have been 500 ft. Right? It still would have hit—because those properties are large enough. [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: It wasn't going to hit the next one over. I mean, the only thing I could see is if we said in the non-Musa area areas, here's the distance. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: I am so against having different— [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: as am I. That's the only—that's the most simplistic I could think of. But I—if the request were to be a Musa amendment, which that's kind of where— [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Exactly. That's that's why it's just like I I don't want to go down that road. But I mean—sorry. [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: Why not? [00:00] **Julie Johnson**: Yes. [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: You know, do both. Go to 500 ft and put it on the notices. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Well, yeah, that I mean that would— [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: that should cover all the bases. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: Yes. Belts and suspenders. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Right. I just that's—um do you have any concern about using social media for this where we would put out a notice and we do allow comments so for the community to start a little bit— [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: I kind of—the push notifications we—the push notifications because it's—but it's it's maybe maybe okay—so maybe it's using um social media to make people aware of the push notification availability because if you know people don't want to see it, they don't want to see it, right? But like, "Oh, hey, I didn't know I had this option. This is where I go to do that." Um— [00:00] **Nicole Miller**: I mean, you could always disable the comments too on the posts. [00:00] **Kathie Smith**: Uh, yeah, just in general, all of our posts, we allow commenting. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: So, maybe maybe not social media, but the push notifications. I don't know that maybe that's just a a step too much. Um, but I think, you know, obviously the communications to get people to understand if you want to get these the notification of a public hearing, this is how you go about getting that every time it comes out. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: I see that as like a once a quarter or once every six or eight weeks. It's an advertisement for the push notifications for the Fresh. It's the your PR. "Hey, by the way, there's a boatload of things you can do," and it's not saying, "Hey, here's the upcoming agenda item. Let's have a chat on social media about it." No, it's a "By the way, there's all these tools out there." And you just—you're regularly reminding people because there's people who move in, there's people who move out, there's people who suddenly come of age and have a cell phone and they didn't before. So I I could see that as being the the tool myself. [00:00] **Council Member Hirn**: Sarah, is is that—are we allowed to turn off comments for specific posts? Sorry, I know you're presenting on this soon, but— [00:00] **Sarah (City Attorney)**: Mr. Mayor, members of the council, the city, I think, has a social media policy and that it has to be consistent with that policy and usually um it sounds like the city does allow commenting on these types of posts. I mean that's something it could change in its policy to not allow commenting on land use items because um you know this could become an issue where you know you all start chiming in and we can talk about this in my presentation but you know it becomes a time when basically you're having a city council meeting over social media and then you're also getting predisposed to all these people's sentiments about the the project instead of at a public hearing. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: I mean, so if it is, I guess I would still lean towards I would like to put it on social media if that's an option where we'd have to change our policy and specifically for land use, we can turn comments off. And I just go back to even if they are getting those um notifications every eight weeks that says, "Hey, you can get these push notifications." I think the majority of people are just going to pass that up because if it doesn't have anything to do with what's going on with them, they're not going to they're not going to um they're not going to sign up for these notifications. Versus if we can actually have posted that there is a public hearing for this specific area and that's on social media, um that's going to be top of mind for those people. I think that's how we're actually going to get more community involvement and um you know towards our values of trying to to foster more community engagement um in these decisions. I think that is our best way of of going about it. Um so if there is a way to change our social media policy around these types of issues where we could post um post make make posts on social media about situations like this. I think it would be very beneficial for more uh transparency and for more public engagement. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: I certainly don't have any issue with that. That just requires the policy being updated to say here are the types where comments are inherently disabled because it's purpose is not to have a chat. It's just an announcement. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: Yeah. [00:00] **Julie Johnson**: So if there is interest to increase it to 500. That is a text amendment to a handful of sections. So city staff can bring that forward. Otherwise, if there's interest in maybe pursuing the social media and push notifications and then holding off on a text amendment if we're on the fence of the distance, um staff can bring that forward. Again, also— [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: I think we just sounds like we do both. [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: All three is what I'm hearing. Social media, push, and text amendment. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: I mean, I would just say if I'm the only one that feels that way about the social media though, I don't want to ask the staff to go about doing that. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Well, and because that's the thing, it is added labor every single time on something that we don't know what the bang for the buck is, but we have said we want more info out to the public. That's why we are allocating money to a full-time employee. So, I don't know if there's a right or wrong. It's what's our priority. Well, we don't public hearings sometimes are for what I would consider sometimes not so controversial or um need need of the mass. I mean, they're not they're not all they're not all the same, right? So, some you you want to draw that attention to and some of them are like nobody's actually really going to care about that. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: And I think that's kind of the nice thing with social media because I think they could still be shared. Correct. If we turn comments off, you can share the post. And so, it kind of does the job for us. If it's a a public hearing that nobody in the town cares about, it's posted and then then that's and it's done with. Same thing with when we post in the Gazette, right? But if it's something that people are excited about and it is something that is stirring up some some interest, they're going to share it and it's going to—they're going to do the work for us. They're going to send out the mailers that way. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: It's fine by me. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Yeah, fine by me. Like it. What would we do without the—it is, you know, one of our goals is to make sure that our public is informed and we're transparent with what's going on. So, I think we got to add one that, you know, Councelor Holtz go put up post notices on telephone poles around that area. [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: Every 500 ft. Give him 500 ft. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: Give him a staple gun. [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: No, no, it got be a hand. You got to do this, you know. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: Nice. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: We got to save some money on it. [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: Save the money on the staples. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Thank you. All right. Uh, next we go to 2026 Lake Elmo legislative priorities. [00:00] **Nicole Miller**: Yeah. Thank you, mayor and council. Um, so as we're looking into the new year and the legislative session in 2026 um that begins in February. Just wanted to throw this out there for conversation with the council um to see um from my understanding that maybe we haven't had a a formal process for developing legislative priorities every year at least with the city of Lake Elmo. Um some of our surrounding communities do develop them. Um I'm fortunate to have a good group of colleagues um as well as Washington County that I meet with monthly and uh this month we did talk about legislative priorities. I would share more with you. Some of them asked me not to because they are not adopted yet. But some do them and some don't. Some have parameters where um it's just city specific. Some do city specific, east metro focused, and statewide. Some don't do them. So, just kind of wanting to have this conversation um with you guys about it. Also, we uh do have different organizations that we are members of that do advocate for different legislative changes that do impact our city um Minnesota Cities and Metro Cities as well as some other um formal organizations. So, we did discuss this with staff to bring up um any um legislative issues that their professional organizations are going to be advocating for that might affect us. And so I included some of them um in the packet, but just kind of wanting to have that conversation um if this is something you would like um staff to work on and just kind of figuring out um the breadth of it as we go forward. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Yes. I I I think it's important that we we do that. I don't know that we've really concentrated or had the opportunity to concentrate on that previously with the exception of just uh discussing some some of the water issues with our our representative and and senator uh at the state level. But there are a number of things um that I think we should be advocating for, making sure that we're aware of and and that we're on the—we're at least speaking up for the city in these these situations. Um, you know, when it comes to things like the manufactured home resident bill of rights or um things at the LMC, we we we should be aware of those and make sure that we're either piggybacking on those or um maybe abstaining depending on on how the council sits on that relative to how they affect the city in and its residents and businesses. Um, see that there's something from the from the fire department on here. I think we should support those types of things that help with overall public safety. Um, you know, certainly the the last bullet in the Lake Elmo um issue at the White Bear Lake—definitely still need to push on that from my perspective and I think a few others. [00:00] **Nicole Miller**: Now, um are you interested in you're talking about um the the fire stuff in here? You know, we do have um the Minnesota Fire Association that will be advocating for this. And so— [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: if even if it's just if it's if it's a letter of uh support, or something of that nature. Yes. Not that they need us to jump in and push it with them, but to support them and support our fire department in that. [00:00] **Nicole Miller**: Sure. So, so one thing I was thinking about is creating a handout. Um a lot of surrounding communities do do this with um the priorities and then just explaining the why behind it. And so in my mind, that's what I'm thinking. Um and then meeting with our representatives um so if we were going to do a handout, do we want to focus on Lake Elmo specific? Are we interested in doing um East Metro? Are we also looking at state? Kind of just what are your— [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Well I would I would think at a maybe at a max is east metro, but I mean certainly Lake Elmo is—if if Lake Elmo is affected and I think some of the East Metro Lake Elmo is affected in that and if there's a case where we're partnering with the other local communities of—whether it's Maplewood, Oakdale, North St. Paul, Mahtomedi, Stillwater, Woodbury, right? Um, there's strength in numbers. Strength and consistent message. [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: Yes. You know, I think that is a good point to have some kind of legislative priority and plan, but maybe, you know, we could put our focus on those things um that are specific to Lake Elmo like um the water system. Um we could grant money if we're going to have to go to surface water, you know, to to pay the cost of extending that here. Another thought that came to mind as I sitting was, you know, we have trunk highway 36 frontage road where cost $5 million. We should be working with our legislator to get that in the bonding bill if they pass it. And you know, everyone else is looking for it. I mean, Hibbing's looking for 88 million to change their water lines and someone else looking for 10 million for this and 50 million for that. And we have absolutely nothing to lose by asking for five million for the frontage road. I know in my previous positions, um, we always had legislative priority list and we would meet with our area representatives and senators and talk to them about about this and how important it was to our residents and why it was important. And try and gauge their support. Um, we, you know, it and it worked fairly well, um, in my mind, in my memory. But I think, you know, when you look at like the league or—and we would certainly support a number of things a league would do, but there might be things that they're going to advocate for that we don't support. You know, so I think we have to gauge those kind of carefully. Um and but I would tend to narrow our focus down to things that are specific to Lake Elmo and how do we, you know, campaign or or let push for legislation that would benefit city of Lake Elmo in some positive sort of way and then support the league and support the, you know, the metro cities or whatever through the letters and resolutions on those issues we support with them. And another instance would be, you know, we're doing um water treatment facility and ongoing operational costs of those or something that's going to be extended that city's going to have to pay for is, you know, how can—can we get some help with that in the long term if the 3M trustees decide they're going to balk at funding some of those in the long run? And how do we get that golden parachute to make sure that that is is taken care of uh you know for the city and I'm sure we would have some like-minded uh communities around us that would be interested in that same thing. [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: I see an opportunity um for a very cohesive legislative asks um after the White Bear Lake comprehensive work group has their findings in 2027. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: I agree with everything I said and I think it comes down to what are those priorities? How is it in the case of a fact sheet? How is it listed? How is it organized? Because some of it's policy, some of it's fiscal, some of it's ask for, you know, bond dollars. But to me, far and away the most critical one is White Bear Lake. Like I I don't—that is far and away the biggest thing and yes there are opportunities where most all the communities are on the same page of the absurdity and wanting a legislative solution. You know we thought we had one. Um I agree with the mayor. The legislature is not aware of the potential gap between this 3M settlement and the consent agreement. And I think we have an opportunity again with communities that are all in the same boat to help inform them of that potential gap. And then yeah, the the other ones I I think it's whether it's a letter of support because someone else is is doing it. Yes. Absolutely. Anything that's for law enforcement, for fire, for training facilities. Absolutely. LMC if they need a letter about bad ideas for changing zoning ordinances. Absolutely. Like there are some really bad ideas they'll probably come up again. Like that's a guarantee. So I I think that's a part of it too, but to me if there's just one thing we do, it's the White Bear Lake issue and trying to push for language that actually works this time. [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: And maybe we widen our thought a little bit as as sitting here. We have communities in in the agricultural areas that have nitrate contamination in their wells and their water supplies um and other issues. Maybe we put on our hat and say what if we could work with a a program—and I'm just this is just talking off the top of my head now, okay—where we put where we put a a 1% sales tax on pop and bottled water and that money goes to fund water issues in communities where we have PFAS, we have nitrates, we have things like that. I mean they put a 1% tax for housing and 1% tax for you know transit and I mean if we gain strength because there's other areas that have water problems you know and we could work on their support and you have broader legislative support and have a solution you know that maybe we could suggest that might get there. Um then our ongoing maintenance costs could be subsidized by a statewide tax and every city would be eligible like local government aid or um municipal state aid. But I mean we have to think of those kinds of things and how they would benefit and where we had our partnerships to come together and gain traction and support. And if our legislators know the importance of that to our city, then they're going to push for us because, you know, they want to be able to come back and say, "Well, you know, East Metro, Lake Elmo, Oakdale, whatever, you need some way to pay for your ongoing water cost because of the PIFA stuff, and I championed this bill and I got it for you." [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: I think short answer is yes. How it looks is important, and prioritization is important. [00:00] **Nicole Miller**: Okay. Um, are we should we focus just on the Lake Elmo stuff or— [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Yeah. I I think so. This year we could we can always every year we can switch up and again I think 2027 going to 28's going to be um a pretty big one. Um when we do meet with our representatives um do any members of the council wish to be present? [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: I would. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: I do. [00:00] **Nicole Miller**: Okay. Okay. Um because if we have a quorum then we'll have to post for a special meeting. So so we'll have to minimize our—or do we want to do that? [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Yeah. Um you just have if it's—I mean if we feel confident about we all have kind of the same concerns, you guys can go the two of you and express those concerns. That's I'm fine with that. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: You trust Charles? [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: Absolutely. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: Would you buy a used car for this guy? [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: You selling your truck? What's going on? It's a late snowy night. [00:00] **Nicole Miller**: One more question. So, they um we do have the City Day on the Hill in early March at the Capitol. Um I have never been myself. Um, and I will be out of the country this time in March. But do we do we think it's important to send a staff person? Um, is a council member interested in going? Have you ever participated in that before? [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: When say city on the hill, is this Minnesota or—because National League of Cities has a similar legislative issue in in Washington DC every year. [00:00] **Nicole Miller**: Yeah. Congress state one. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: What day is it? [00:00] **Nicole Miller**: It's um last year was March 6, so it's always the beginning. So, this falls on our our city's um—not Lake Elmo, my school district—spring break all the time. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: I've I've attended for uh transportation capital—transportation day on the hill um for a couple different uh industry functions. So, I'd not—Yeah, I'd be willing to to do something like that as well. [00:00] **Nicole Miller**: Okay. So, um the plan would be to create um a document and we'll bring it back for your approval. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Sounds good. [00:00] **Nicole Miller**: Okay. Thank you. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: All right. I'm going to take a point of privilege and let Sarah get ready for social media use. So, five minutes. Did you see some more of that appeal to the Supreme Court? Both the city of the plaintiff. Social media guidelines for city council members. Everybody hear me? [00:00] **Sarah (City Attorney)**: Yes. Not used to not used to speaking from this microphone. Um I was asked to prepare a social media presentation for the city council. I gave this presentation back in 2021. Um but only a few of you were here back then. So, we decided it'd be a good idea to go through it again. It's been updated and I've added a few things. And I know that some of you use social media. So, that is why it's important for me to go over this with you. As you may not be aware that there are certain liability issues for the city when using social media. So, the first thing is social media is powerful. It's important because so many people are using it for their for their news source. I think we talked about that earlier with the push notifications. Uh people also use it to organize movements. So, that's something to keep in mind with these push notifications and also if you're posting land use items on social media um that people may start a social media page to talk about it and they may share and like the post and comment on it and there may be a lot of public comment on social media about a particular project and that you might be interested in as a council member. So, it can reach a lot of different people that um regular news source may not reach. And then that goes to my next point that you will be reaching residents with social media. Um, a lot of people get their news from social media. There are 5.66 billion social media users in the world. Facebook and Instagram are the most popular social media networks. And the city has its own official Facebook and Instagram pages as well that I know you are familiar with. It is kind of cute. Um, and with social media, you may not be thinking of these things. This is why I'm here is to tell you about them. There are there is a lot of potential legal liability with using social media both for the city and for you as council members. And um the first thing is: if you have a city council Facebook page or Instagram page, it can become an issue if you are creating a public forum by allowing people to comment on your posts as an elected official. And then once you start thinking, "Well, I don't like this person's post because they said something mean," and you either block them or take down their comments, then you're violating their first amendment rights. So, that's something to think about when you're using social media as an elected official—that you are creating a public forum and you have to be careful not to violate other people's first amendment rights. That also goes for city employees—they have first amendment rights as well. So, if they're commenting on your posts and you take them down, there may be a first amendment issue as well. And then the second issue—I actually just dealt with this last week, not here, somewhere else. Uh this is copyright issues and um make sure when you are using when you're posting things that you are not using copyrighted images um that have a little C with the circle in them because there have been instances where people have brought a cease and desist order against the city for using copyrighted images and they can demand compensation for that and they could also bring an action against the city for for violating their copyright. I just had an issue with the city that I represent who was using a copyrighted image from a photo from Mexico and the photographer contacted the city and demanded that it pay her for the use of the photo because the image was copyrighted. So the city ended up paying her and then took the photo down. City had been using it on its web page. City didn't realize that it was a copyrighted photo until it was too late and it did violate the copyright law by by doing that. So that's something to keep in mind if you are, you know, sharing or posting images of other things that they might be copyright and you might violate the copyright law. The third thing is data practices. Um that that's something I'll get into a little bit more depth later. And then finally, there can be public relations issues. I think we've seen some of those in the media with certain elected officials. Um, if you say something that is unpopular, you will have a lot of people commenting on it and then possibly sharing your post with others and it may spread all over and you won't be able to control it or respond to it everywhere. If you spread to—it may spread to news stations and the newspaper and you won't be able to stop it. So, it is important to realize what you say might get spread around and it won't be by you and you won't be able to control it. The next one is how to respond to social media posts. Um, as you all know, you are a representative of the city. So, when you're using social media on a city issue, you should make sure to disclaim that you are speaking as yourself and not for the city. So, um, I think that's important. If it relates to a matter that's before the city council or will be before the city council, it's probably best not to discuss it or at least do not advocate one way or another about it. This uh brings to mind a case in Minneapolis. Uh it's called AHO versus Goodman and that was where a council member had been—not been but the the matter had not been before the city council—it was a project and she was speaking against it and the project was ultimately denied by the city council and the developer sued the city and the council member because she had been out there advocating against the project before it even was before the council. And the developer felt that she had tainted the council and that the reason—the reason the council voted against the project was—not based on the information that was before them and it violated their due process and the council member's improper impermissible advocacy efforts. Uh the developer then sued the city and the council member for over 23 million in damages. So, that's something to think about when you're out there talking about projects—that if it hasn't been before the council, you probably shouldn't be having an opinion on it because you don't have all the information in front of you. You haven't had the public hearing. You haven't had um you know the staff report and all the material submitted by the applicant and all any other materials by city staff. [00:00] **Council Member Hirn**: Sarah, can I ask a question quick? Does that pertain to commissioners as well? [00:00] **Sarah (City Attorney)**: Yes. And then you should also ensure that all information posted or shared by you is accurate and fact checked. If a mistake is made, you it should be correct. You should correct it quickly and then be transparent about it. So just say, "I made a mistake. I shouldn't have posted this. It was incorrect." And then also encourage productive civic engagement. Um engaging with trolls or individuals who sole purpose is to provide arguments should be avoided. So that I know that can be difficult because you want to fight back and then you know you get in some argument with these people that they're they're just there to provoke you. The next slide is uh personal social media tips. So um the first tip is "don't tie," and that means don't tie personal social media accounts to a city position. So, I think some of you, I looked online, have your a public social media account for your position as a city representative and then you probably, I would assume, have a personal social media account for your friends and family where you're probably posting pictures of Thanksgiving or your vacation or whatnot. But then on the city page, you're just posting things about city issues and city events. And that that's important I think is to not have them together because then that gets really confusing for everyone. I'll talk more about that during the data practices section. And then and then you also need to make it clear that, "I'm you know this is my social media account for the city of Lake Elmo not my social media account for everybody else" as a private individual. And so that that's one important distinction. And then the second one is "remind," and that's to remind that the I'm going to remind you that the public may be able to see it even if it's not a city account. I think these social media accounts are confusing and I know when I look at them sometimes I'm wondering if people really know that I can see what I can see and I think they think it's all private and there's some things—and it's weird how sometimes I can see some things and I can't see other things. And so just just kind of keep in mind that it's it's all out there and you know so if you're posting anything that people might be able to see it even if you have the privacy setting set to the most private privacy setting. And then the third one is "suggest," and that suggests I'm suggesting to use a disclaimer: "not speaking for the city" when talking about any city business. That would be on your public Facebook or Instagram page just so people are clear that you are just making the statement as an individual and you're not representing the city in that. And then um the next one is to be honest and accurate and quickly correct any factual errors. And then finally promote constructive dialogue and avoid personal attacks, undignified remarks or discourteous comments that lack respect for others. We've seen a lot of that lately. Not here, somewhere else. And um basically, you know, remember what you write or post is public and it will be so for a long time. And it may spread to large audiences. So use common sense when using social media sites. It's a good idea to refrain from sending or posting information or photos that you would not want your boss or other employees to read or that you would want be embarrassed to see in the newspaper. So just keep in mind when you're posting things. And like I said, you don't really know if they're private or not. So just presume they're all public. And then also avoid using statements, photographs, videos, or audio that may reasonably be viewed as malicious, obscene, threatening, intimidating, disparaging, or might constitute harassment or bullying. And that would include conduct that might include offensive posts that are meant to intentionally harm someone's reputation or posts that can contribute to a hostile work environment on the basis of sex, race, national origin, age, color, creed, religion, disability, marital status, familial status, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression status with regard to public assistance or membership or activity in a local human rights commission. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: You just quoted the HRA right there. [00:00] **Sarah (City Attorney)**: Yep. So the next one is one of the liability issues and that's data practices implications and uh Minnesota statutes section 13.02. That's the Data Practices Act. It defines all government data as any data collected, created, received, maintained, disseminated by a city regardless of physical form, storage media or condition of use. So that means that the Data Practices Act assumes that most government data has a presumption that it is public. So if you get a data request for social media data, it will need to be disclosed. So this isn't really any different than if you had an email on your personal email account and it related to city business and somebody requested all your emails—even though it resides on your personal email account and not on your city account, you would need to produce that email. So that's why it's a good idea to have a separate public account for social media because then you can just go to that account—similar to what you do with your city email accounts—and just go to your city email account. All the information is right there. You can search it and provide it in response to a data request. Um so it's important to have that separate city social media account as opposed to a private account. And then um you're responsible for maintaining this information and the city's not responsible for maintaining it. That's per the Data Practices Office. But the city is required to produce it. So it's a matter of making sure that you have access to it if you need to do that in response to a data request. I personally haven't seen any data requests related to social media posts, but I'm sure I'm sure they're out there. And then with the data practice takeaways: um if the city has a requested data, it needs to disclose it if a request is made. So even if it's not something the city has—and you have it to provide it—and the more data that the city maintains, the more data it needs to search for records requests with social media data. So the more the more social media data you create, the more that we're going to have to search through it. And um most social media data will be public, but watch out for posts or comments that contain private data. I can give you some examples. One would be personnel data and that would be everything but the basics is private data on individuals. This is employee city employee data. For example, don't mention that a certain employee has taken a medical leave of absence because they have cancer on social media. That's private personnel data. Um, as far as law enforcement data, that's another one people like to post—the gory details of an accident or something that they saw. Um, some of that is public, but there are there are a lot of exceptions and instances when the data can be withheld and that includes like police reports that discuss an incident in the city. If it's a criminal incident and there is going to be criminal charges, some of the investigatory data in the report will be private for a period of time until that person is convicted. And then also certain people's identities in the report will also not be public such as juveniles. So don't share too much information related to private data on social media. And that's all I have. So, I'm ready for any questions that you might have about social media and using social media. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: Thank you for that. That made me that reminded me because we when we were on planning commission, we would get data requests. There's a couple that came in with the bus terminal. And do we—when they come on board as commissioners, obviously as council, we get council email, which helps them for data requests. It's very much easier. Do we require that they set up a separate—not through the city but say, "Hey you need to set up a new Gmail that's just going to be your parks commission email?" [00:00] **Julie Johnson**: I don't think so. No. [00:00] **Nicole Miller**: No. I mean um so cities I'm familiar with do provide a city-issued email for even their commissioners. So obviously there that would be an additional cost. And then I guess I would look to Sarah for recommendations on that whether we should think about that at all. [00:00] **Sarah (City Attorney)**: I mean I think that would be helpful for these people if they could but then they have to use it. I mean I have some cities where they don't use it and— [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: I have a feeling you have a really some good stories. [00:00] **Sarah (City Attorney)**: Yeah. Yeah. I do. But that that one, you know, it's like "I just use this because it's easier." And it's like, well, do you understand? It's like meshed in with all of your work emails and your personal emails and you know, then when we get a data request, it's a real mess. [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: What's the cost for a new email to get issued? Is it a labor cost or is it an actual cost through our vendor? [00:00] **Nicole Miller**: It it's a cost through our vendor. So, setting it up, but we could we could check on that. It's just an email only account, so it's it's not like a full employee. Um it's well it's what you all have. Yeah. Yeah. So we could we could look at it. [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: And then they have to remember to check it. [00:00] **Council Member Kragness**: Yeah. That's the deal. [00:00] **Sarah (City Attorney)**: That can be the other issue—is that they—it's just another email. They're not maybe used to using Outlook. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: If anything, they should be told to save the emails in a separate folder. [00:00] **Sarah (City Attorney)**: Yeah, separate folder. And then I don't know if the city has an email retention policy, but that might be something to look into. Um and with our data requests, if we have um city-issued emails, then um certain responsible authorities in the city have the tools to be able to search all emails. So that's just so they can fulfill the data request. So that's the—seems like the easiest way to handle the data requests. Um instead of—like if everyone just has a city-issued email versus having asking them or telling them to create a second one and then we do get a data request and and have to work with each person to try and get the emails. I don't know. But we could um look into that and get more information. [00:00] **Council Member Dragisich**: Yeah. I think it'd be a good—because I guarantee you many if not most don't have a separate email because we've probably never brought it up. [00:00] **Nicole Miller**: I think that'd be a worthwhile conversation. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: We're covering that with them in January, right? [00:00] **Nicole Miller**: Um yeah. So we were—so um yes, one thing we're thinking about I did ask Sarah if she's available in January on January 13th we're going to have the joint meetings with the parks and planning commission to go over their work plans. And so I asked Sarah if she was available to maybe address the whole entire group about um potential things to watch out for and you know she have to tell us our great stories but like the top number of things you know—open meeting law violations, data practices, social media—whatever we decide is important. So we could address this with the group but in before that we could definitely check on um the cost of a city email for all them as well. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: I think that'd be worthwhile. Anything else? Thank you very much. [00:00] **Sarah (City Attorney)**: Sure. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Appreciate it. Um, so to piggyback on this conversation, I'm just curious since I haven't um been part of this um conversation, but since I started um and now that we have Kathie as a full-time communications person, I just wanted to kind of have a little discussion about where you all see the role um with the city using social media versus council members using social media and kind of how we can um work together or to enhance that. I mean, not everyone is active on social media. I get that. But I just want to make sure that um if that perhaps we can um have a joint effort to have direct people to the city accounts as the trusted authority or like where to get information. I want to make sure that um council members if they are using social media aren't um sharing information because the city is not doing it. So if we can—do you understand like—so if we can improve on how we're doing things to support council vice versa like what our roles are together. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Well, I guess at times when I post on my Facebook, I got a Facebook page, right, for whatever. Um, try and keep it, you know, obviously factual things that have already been discussed in council. If I'm getting a number of questions that may have not been answered or in the effect of—I think I posted something information on the Excel uh lines getting disrupted, right? It was on a Sunday, things that wouldn't be out there for the city to answer in fashion when people are obviously frustrated with things that are happening at the time. So, um I don't know that uh I don't try and post things that are—I might just share what's already out there on the website, but or um so I guess I'm not trying to take the place of any communications that happened from the city. Um just adding information for residents on timely or wishing everybody a happy Thanksgiving. So I don't I I think as it grows a lot of that information—I think what we can do as council members is is uh if something's you know during the week or during the business hours and coming up we can always you know email Kathie and say, "Hey, are you going to send something out regarding um whatever x topic?" Right? And that's certainly something we can too. [00:00] **Nicole Miller**: That helps. We just want to make sure that we're um supporting the council. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Yeah. I don't think it's I don't think it's a lack of anything. I think it's um you know, I I know that council member Holtz posts quite a bit and I I do get feedback from residents that they're they like the information because it's typically factual. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: And and—what do you mean "typically"? [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Typically it's factual. It's not 100%, but it's most of them. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: Some there there's was at least one or two that were questionable. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Oh, yeah. I said that you had had a scratch score. So, um uh you know, but we didn't have actually communications person before. So, it's it's something that grows over time, right? So as that communication piece takes place, I assume that it will, you know, it will be more commonplace that more and more is just from the city um web page and whatnot. [00:00] **Nicole Miller**: So, but I certainly don't expect Kathie to send out a Happy Thanksgiving from— [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Happy Thanksgiving, happy holidays from myself. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: Well, and ditto and yes, we didn't have communications for years. So, I think that's that is why I do post a lot on multiple avenues. And now that we do, I know I certainly have an obligation to make sure that if and when I am posting, it's not duplicative and it's also not taking away uh some gusto from the city. Like that's because that's not the intent. There are things that should be coming from the city. Um on the flip side, like I I would say the most recent one I had was—I do it every year. Come property tax season, here is a property tax 101 and it is as dry of content as possible because I just am personally feel a need to have a conversation about how property taxes actually work and so that there are many back-and-forth questions then with people who are who have genuine questions where I don't know if that would be the appropriate thing to have on through city social media. I I I don't think it'd be an efficient use of anyone's time whereas I think that's the type of conversation where yeah an elected hopefully provides truthful information where that might be a better place for that conversation but— [00:00] **Nicole Miller**: Clarissa is always willing to talk to anyone explaining property tax and how it works. So we do have her as our subject matter expert in that area. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: Absolutely. And it it's that fine line is gonna be when when that topic comes up when multiple residents are uh asking either in person, by text, by email, however, about a given new issue that comes up and there's that that fine line of: do you want to answer that question or is it going to be something where the city then is is answering that? And I don't know what the answer is—like where is that—how do you define it objectively with a criteria of situation A, situation B? I don't know how to define that. So I'll be honest I don't know how as to is it a Venn diagram of some shared... is it split... I don't know. [00:00] **Council Member Hirn**: I think it's an "and" not an "or." I think having both are good. I think your posts are great and I think some of them could come from the city and it could be both and I don't think there's—it should just be one or the other. Obviously, you know, I think some of your posts might—or some anyone's posts as an elected member might be um more about like what's coming up potentially or a decision that was made where I think if it's coming from the city, it's just more, you know, "This is what happened at the meeting. This was the decision. This is the policy." Um I I guess yeah, I don't I don't think it has to be one or the other. I think there's—the taxes one I think could be both. Clarissa wants to get in on that riveting conversation. She should make a post as well or the city can make a post as well on her behalf. Property taxes aren't like income taxes. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: No. [00:00] **Nicole Miller**: Well, I think we could continue this conversation um too just to make sure that we are supporting each other because I think about this um something that um we we'll continue to build our communications around but um anytime there's a city code change, you know, the city should be now trying to communicate that. Um and so or or we're talking about like if there was a policy change, should it be council members telling about—no, it should probably be the city, right? Like, "This is a new policy change." So we can continue to work together to figure out because it is kind of—doesn't have to be either-or but just also the messaging—messaging should be consistent. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Yeah. Perfect. Thanks again Sarah. [00:00] **Sarah (City Attorney)**: Thank you. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: Now about those stories. So that really concludes all the information we had on our workshop tonight. I hope everybody stays safe. Be patient with the uh public works. I know they'll be out plowing. They'll have to make multiple rounds. Um make sure that you clear around your fire hydrants for the fire department. Make sure that you—you will have wind rows at the end of your driveways. So, you will be needing to remove those. I know that's always fun. As soon as you get your driveway done, then the snow plow comes by and we all shake our fist. But that's just the way life is. So, all right. [00:00] **Council Member Holtz**: Mayor, I I did ask Adam if he could switch to policy and plow in front of the elected official streets first. [00:00] **Mayor Cadenhead**: No, you didn't. Thank you everybody. Have a have a safe night.