all right good evening ladies and gentlemen it is now 5 30 and I will call this regular meeting of the Burnsville city council to order it is our tradition to stand for a moment of silence followed by the Pledge of Allegiance and we invite you to join us I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you tonight's meeting is being conducted in person and online all council members are in the chamber along with our staff members of the public May attend in person or watch this meeting online at burnsvillemn.gov slash meetings or on Comcast channel 16 or 8 59. the public can also participate through Zoom by joining us at zoom.us slash join all of the information about our meeting is available in our meeting web page and in a council agenda packet the next item on the agenda is announcements and proclamations and we have two proclamations this evening our announcements have to do with all of our upcoming meetings regular Council meetings are scheduled for Tuesday May 2nd and Tuesday May 16th at 5 30 pm work sessions are scheduled for Tuesday May 9th at 5 30 pm we have a closed session for security training tonight April 18th at 6 PM in Dakota B we also have a special work session and it is a quarterly round table and that's on Tuesday April 25th at 6 PM in Dakota B unless noted all meetings are held here in the council chambers so I will go to that side to do the proclamation I will do the Earth Day and Arbor Day Proclamation first because the other is that we're going to want to make sure that we have a picture with the executive director of our experience Burnsville so but our Proclamation for Earth Day and Arbor Day is April 29th whereas Burnsville has taken great pride in the quality of our natural environment including the beautiful shade trees and native plants that provide many essential services to the community and enrich our lives in many ways and whereas the city of Burnsville sustainability plan lays out the foundation for the city's continuing sustainability efforts and addresses preservation and expansion of tree resources we need to practice safe environmental approaches in managing our forests Lakes wetlands and other spaces and whereas Burnsville promotes development that maintain or enhance Economic Opportunity and Community well-being what protecting and restoring the natural environment and whereas the purpose of the Earth Day Arbor Day celebration is to emphasize the importance of preserving our natural environment through sustainable activities such as recycling waste reduction and resource conservation whereas Burnsville recognizes the need to protect and preserve the beauty of our community by promoting good stewardship of our natural environment for future Generations now therefore be it resolved that I Elizabeth Coates mayor of the city of Burnsville on behalf of the city council do hereby Proclaim April 29 2022 as Earth Day and Arbor Day in the city of Burnsville in celebration the city hosts an annual community tree sale at the end of April learn more online at www.burnsvillemn.gov tree sale Proclaim this 18th day of April 2022. the next uh Proclamation is tourism Awareness Week whereas tourism and Hospitality has been the foundation of a healthy Workforce serving as one of the largest private sector Employers in the U.S supporting close to 15 000 Dakota County jobs and whereas Leisure and Hospitality in Minnesota is a 11.7 billion industry employing more than 205 000 people generating 731 million dollars in state sales and taxes whereas in the past year every sector of the travel industry has started to recover after the coronavirus pandemic and whereas this rebound of travel will drive the rebuilding of the U.S economy and American Workforce and whereas tourism and Hospitality in Burnsville provides full-time and part-time employment for the citizens of our city and whereas the experience Burnsville dedic dedicated itself with 36 years to stimulating visitor traffic to Burnsville area creating income for both the Leisure and hospitality industry and the general business community and whereas the city of Burnsville takes great pride in welcoming and welcoming Hospitality it shows its guests now therefore I Elizabeth counts mayor of the city of Burnsville on behalf of the city council do hereby Proclaim this week of May 7th through the 13th 2023 to be National travel and tourism week in the city of Burnsville and urge citizens to celebrate this special event Proclaim this 18th day of April 2023 and if Miss Amy girl from the experience Burnsville would come up and receive this and then we're going to just go over there okay everybody that's tall always says thank you thank you [Applause] the next item on the agenda is Citizens comments this is the opportunity for anyone that would like to address the Council on an item that is not on the printed agenda and not an application form that will be coming before us at a future date is there anyone in the audience who wishes to address the council anyone in the audience Mrs Collins anyone on Zoom no matter okay thank you um we will then move on the next item is for emergency item Sony this is a additions to the final agenda and it's only for emergency items uh city manager Lindbergh are there any emergency items to come before the body nothing from Staffmark members of the council thank you we will then move on the next item on the agenda is the consent agenda this is a group of items that's considered to be routine and will be enacted by one motion however an item on a consent agenda can be removed for a separate discussion and vote is there anyone in the audience who wishes an item to be removed for a separate discussion and vote anyone who wishes to remove an item Mrs Collins anyone on Zoom no one online there okay city manager Lindberg any item from staff to be removed nothing from staffmir thank you may I have a motion to adopt the consent agenda please so moved there is a motion second and a second all in paper please say aye aye aye opposing a and a motion carries thank you we now will move on to the regular agenda and the first item on the regular agenda uh is item five a and this is a public hearing and this is a resolution adopting a 2022 code enforcement assessments presenting this evening is Christopher forslin he's our licensing and code enforcement coordinator Mr forslin good evening Madam American Consul um tonight we is the public hearing for the 2020 assessments for code enforcement a little bit of background on this is our city policy 5020 provides for Recovery costs associated with any Court enforcement Services those code enforcement Services may be re-inspection fees cost for abatement like grass Mowing and administrative citation fees the city is allowed to assess these fees by state law and recover some of the costs for our code enforcement services part of the process is prior to these fees or fines being assessed we work with property owners who have had any code violations through sending them notices letting them know what the corrective actions were what we needed them to do prior to those fees and charges being assessed and when they're not corrected or continue then we perform additional inspections or again additional services such as mowing the timeline for 2023 2022 this year we we basically took the whole year from January 1st to December 31st and put it into one for this year so that's a little bit different we did send initial notices out on February 8th we sent final notices out on March 24th and we also had an open house in City Hall here for any of the effective property owners that come in and try to answer any of their questions they may have or to resolve any of those those expenses we had nobody show up at that at that hearing or uh open house the public hearing here is to provide any opportunity for owners owners to address any questions concerns with those costs this last year's 2020 assessment total charges are 2090 that's a little bit less than what we originally had we had some late minute payments come in and I suspect it may even drop a little bit more before that this will include again all unreimbursed charges for all of last year and but what does not include any costs associated with still unresolved litigation so recommendation all the public hearing and we recommend adoption of the assessments for 2022 as proposed any questions from Mr forsman council member Gustafson uh correct me if I'm wrong but this seems like the lowest one I've ever seen come through is unfair assessments that's a whole Year's worth it is yeah everybody is complying to where what we're doing we've I think reached out a lot more to you know everybody's still recovering somewhat and I think that's had a difference yeah thank you well it's also great that you all are doing great Neighborhood Services thank you because that's what we're here to do is to educate and to help yeah so very good anything else uh any other questions okay thank you this is a public hearing I will now open a public hearing is there anyone who wishes to speak to this item anyone who wishes to speak to this item yeah this is for um code enforcement yes please give us your name and address for the record okay that's one of these special assessments are these uh complaints by the tenants or is it just City enforcement Mr forslin it's probably for General code enforcement wouldn't include rentals without knowing the specifics of the case I can't answer that one 100 so you can't tell me if it's a tenants complaining or if it's you just trying to enforce code well it can tennis complain don't necessarily result in a violation um it has to be verified first and I'm asking you is this due to tenant compliance now it could be but you don't know not without going through the specific case don't you think you should know we have we have many cases we have hundreds of cases but I'll be glad to open it or look it up if you'd like yeah I'd like you to look it up okay what was your address again 13202 James Avenue South yeah I can look right up afterwards and some of that is also neighbors complaining right yeah so those are some of the things that how how that comes to our attention so again we'll we'll talk with you and we'll take a look at um your particular record yeah I'm not involved in any of this but I I'm just it's more for you know I'm just wondering if it's a if it's tenants or if the the city you know you start off with this rental license that started off a hundred dollars and it goes up and then you you're coming in and doing inspections and the cost just keeps going up uh council member Schultz so I I have a question because perhaps two issues are getting conflated um so what this is is so like I I live in my house and I didn't cut my grass and my neighbor narc saw me and they come over and they're like yes Kara shame on you no grass cutting and then I get a I get a fine for it so this this is not specific to rental properties this is more things like you left your garbage can out um you get peeling paint like those kind of things just throughout the city it's not specific to rentals or not rentals it's just yeah yeah this is this is something altogether different that will come up and then you can speak when the rental licensing item comes up this is not rental license this is enforcement for uh assessments okay yeah all right come back up when it's that subject okay thank you yes a point of clarification it does include some apartment properties but it's not about rental license it's a separate issue yeah yeah that that's coming up okay okay thank you is there anyone else who wishes to speak to this item Mrs Collins anybody on Zoom no one online mayor okay all right um I will now close the public hearing members of the council your pleasure councilmember Workman makes the motion second second by council member gossip said all in favor please say aye aye opposing a an emotion carrier um one abstention thank you the next item uh is also a public hearing and this is a resolution vacating a portion of Cliff Road right away for Kramer Mining and materials presenting is our city engineer Jen desert Mrs desert good evening Madame mayor members of the council um so this will be a public hearing tonight I have a short presentation um so Kramer mining materials located a portion of their site located uh where I'm located on the map has requested a vacation of a right-of-way so we got we've received an application making this request and the request is to vacate this Cliff Road right of way that is over the top of their private road and doing their research with title companies the city the county it was not determined how this came to be and so this is really a cleanup item from probably the 60s when whenever it was acquired for right-of-way but the city is not maintaining that road and we're not it's gated so we don't really have access to it um but there is a water main that we do need to have a utility over so we're vacating the right-of-way but we are retaining a utility easement to cover just the utility that we have so the staff recommendation is to approve the vacation of right-of-way dedicate the easement with the condition to dedicate a utility easement over that existing utility we don't anticipate any utility relocations but if some were to be determined or found then it would be if relocation are needed it would be at the applicant's cost okay um members Council any questions for Mrs desireud okay thank you this is a public hearing is there anyone who wishes to speak to this item anyone who wishes to speak to this item Mrs Collins anyone online no one online thank you members of the council your pleasure move to approve mayor I would close the public hearing okay close the public hearing members of the council your pleasure I'll move to approve the second all in favor please say aye aye aye opposing a and a motion carries thank you the next item Under The Heart of the City the city Trail connection from Pleasant to Pillsbury and presenting this evening is Mrs gender root city engineer Mr Des root um yeah so we are looking I'm going to do a short presentation on this portrayal project as well in our multimodal plan that was before the council in October of 2021 and our heart of the city public space guidelines that was also before the city council in December of 2022 we show a proposed Connection in the location South of the real life Co-op north of the ISD 191 property between the um Pleasant and Pillsbury so we have an existing sidewalk Network everything in blue is an existing sidewalk and we also know that we have a couple of apartment buildings that are under construction right now so the Villas um were approved at 135 units Concord Flats at 162 units and then we have the Gateway housing second edition plant that the council approved where they're proposing approximately 111 units all in that sort of triangle shaped piece so just looking at it from the perspective of using the existing sidewalk Network a new Resident to one of those apartment buildings the Red Dot shows how they would get to Nicola Commons park from their apartment building and it's not very straight or direct but that's how they would using the sidewalk Network on City public sidewalks the yellow dot is I think the more direct route and what people will tend to do we believe is just cut right through the property that green space on the south side of the real life Co-op so um in July of 2022 a couple of residents with the real life Co-op and I met to talk about the concerns of of people cutting through dog walking happening people cleaning up the dog waste things like that um and then I presented to the real life co-op in October of 2022 similar slide saying this is kind of what we expect would happen is people as we have more residents on that West Side wanting to get to sort of the activities in the heart of the city that they'll likely cut through because us is the most direct role um the real life Club had some questions though what what does this mean how how will the impacts be to the property and so we got permission to collect some survey data from um the property with permission from real life NISD 191 in November of 2022 so that we could come up with a little bit more of a detailed concept and this is our preliminary layout based on that topography there is a potentially 21 trees that would have to be removed with the project and then in talking with the real life Co-op I mean that was a major concern was the loss of mature trees we talked about privacy funds I think that's on my next slide anyway um so this is the the route that would be um and we would need a 20-foot easement from them in order to accomplish this so with that concept I went back to the real life co-op in February and had more of a q a I didn't have a prepared presentation I had that preliminary concept layout we discussed the easement needs 20-foot easement needed for the 10-foot Trail the tree removal and replacement in that if we removed a tree we would plant a tree um a one for one they were interested in having some privacy fencing to really delineate the public Trail and then their private property and then we talked about future maintenance and as with all of our Trails we do maintain them so all of those questions were answered and then in March the real life Co-op residents voted do they want to continue conversations about this easement acquisition and Trail and they did vote to move forward with continuing conversations getting an appraisal for the easement and things like that so we have a project budget of about eight hundred thousand dollars in park dedication funding we did obtain Park dedication payments for all of those new apartments so kind of utilizing those funds towards this project we have it in the CIP for 2020 spread out in over three years so 2023 24 and 25 if timing was right we would in spring and summer start to negotiate an easement acquisition with the real life Co-op working with public engagement with ISD 191 and complete plans and specs in late summer we could bid the project and then have a fall construction that would be if all the timing aligned it's possible that we would slip into a spring 2024 construction depending on how easement negotiations were to go and if the real life Co-op were still interested in pursuing it as we developed the plans so um I'm available to answer any questions the staff recommendation is to order the project as noted and will continue to work with the real life Co-op and and have public engagement yeah thank you I just want to thank you because when the two projects that are being built right now happened one of the things that you also brought to us at a work session was this Trail and then I know that the folks from real life were also very interested in making sure that their property um because they also saw that it was going to create a lot of traffic that's true and that we work with them to find a better solution than just having people cut through their property so I think uh you I and I see some head nodding because they have also they can contacted me about wanting to make sure that they work with us so thank you so much for all the work that you have done and that's identified in your outline uh today um you've done a great job in really identifying all of that so members of the council any other questions for Miss desert yes council member Workman thank you Jen was there any discussion about lighting in this area or if that would be a dark space at night we have preliminarily looked at some pedestrian level lighting um we don't have it totally scoped but there that's part of the preliminary cost estimate is to include lighting okay thank you yeah because I think we want that to be lit up especially because that was one of the concerns from real life is all of the people coming through but having a a designated path that's constructed and lighting that's going to help them also okay any other questions members of the council we need a motion uh to um to approve the project there's a motion second and a second all in favor please say aye aye aye opposing a and emotion carries yeah great you've worked on it for a long time and thank you so much for your dedication and for you know working through all of this I know it wasn't very easy for all of you thank you the next item on the agenda is uh item 5D and 5D is uh to order the Heart of the City and multi-family parking study and this is again presented by our city engineer Mrs Jan desrud thank you again so um just as a over um view we did bring the Heart of the City public space guidelines before the council in December and parking was one of the chapters that was discussed and then in the implementation plan was um also a parking study was presented as a near-term Improvement or a near-term activity so the near-term action item was to create a Heart of the City District parking management plan that considers long-term parking needs for the district expansion and Redevelopment overnight on street parking policy for the Heart of the City and shared parking policies and then um in September of 2022 the council had some conversations about multi-family parking and a request was made to expand the scope to include multi-family parking study as well so we reached out to um our consultant to work on a scope of work that was both For The Heart of the City and multi-family here's the general outline of the scope reviewing our code The Heart of the City public space guidelines The Institute of Transportation Engineers or ite and Urban Land Institute Uli they have all parking guidelines documents so sort of a review and then collect parking data so having staff or their staff Counting Cars seeing who's parked where the parking data collection will occur during Peak aim Center events overnight so trying to get a range of what the parking needs are during various events and times of day stakeholder and public engagement component where we will do a pop-up open house at one of our Heart of the City events and ask people what do they think about parking and try and get some feedback on that and then from the multi-family part of it interviewing more of a focus group interviewing the um building managers and some of the residents to see what are their parking issues that they're dealing with and then for Heart of the City they'll have analysis and recommendations and from multi-family parking management recommendations and a tool kit to be used because not when you have multi-family projects throughout the city you can't have like a one-size-fits all so they're coming up with a tool kit that we can use and apply to various situations at the time we had sculpt the project it was just for the Heart of the City part and so that was uh estimated to be around 75 000 but with the additional scope it's now up to ninety five thousand dollars so the staff recommendation is to order the Heart of the City and multi-family parking study and adjust the project budget from 75 000 to 95 . any questions for Mr Des root um there are no questions uh on this and and you've done and followed through because I remember discussions about because there have been complaints about the parking uh in Heart of the City and especially when we have big events at the Ames Center and then of course with the Mediterranean cruise and we have a we have an agreement with them with the shared parking model and so forth so and now with all of the apartment buildings that are going up uh it appears that a lot of the residents in some of our multi-housing units are parking in the Heart of the City parking which creates a lot of problems um okay so members of the council your pleasure move to approve second there's a motion in a second all in favor please say aye aye opposing a an emotion carries thank you so much Mrs desert okay the next uh item is item 5e this is the ordinance adopting the revisions to city code title 3 chapter 28. rental licensing title IV building regulations entitled five uh fire regulations presenting this evening is uh our city clerk Mrs Michelle Collins and our fire chief Mr B.J jungman and the first item is going to be presented thank you madam mayor I'll key this up right away for us and then um I do want to mention that we would like for the council to adopt this in three separate motions one for the title three chapter 28 rental licensing Ordinance one for the title four and five ordinance and then one for the authorizing of the summary publication all the substantial changes were noted in your background I stand for any questions Chief jungman also has some information for us okay chief good evening Madam members of the council happy to be before you to propose some rental license ordinance changes that we've been working on with staff in the code review task force over the last six eight months um I just want to take us back a little bit to where we started with rental licensing a number of years ago we've made some unfortunate news uh over the years and um you know a number of our fires in our apartment complexes have made headlines for different reasons and um you know last census reminded us that over 40 percent of our residents live in rental housing and we know that that number is continuing to increase and this is just kind of what we're trying to prevent from my perspective um this is this is the worst case scenario is we end up with these fires um we know that a large number of our buildings are non-sprinkler and these fires propagate quickly putting police and fire staff uh in hazardous conditions trying to Evac evacuate residents out of these structures so um I'll show you some data at the end of this but but these are the catastrophes that we're trying to prevent um and so kind of where we're at is we have numerous rental properties with code violations this is not just a one-off it's really become a resource constraint on being able to address them and having enhanced enforcements uh over 50 percent of our multi-family buildings don't have fire sprinkler systems I would tell you as the fire chief these are our highest life safety risk buildings and occupancies in our city these are the ones that I'm worried about that can both injure and kill residents and firefighters and we have a number of our buildings that are 40 to 50 years old they were built under previous codes that didn't require a lot of the same standards we have today when we look at the Historical challenges we have here there's five things that stand out to me is the number of firefighter injuries that we see in these buildings the number of Civilian injuries that we've seen the displaced resonance it comes to the substantial fire loss and the image it creates for our city and really the proposal tonight's really about caring for our community our residents and our staff when I look at these things in the fire department and code code folks look at this we really have five modalities to reducing risk in our community education engineering enforcement economic and emergency response the first four are the preventative ways that we can approach these and we look for tools to try to stay away from the fifth because that's a reactive mode and things are are gone at that point and we're just trying to mitigate how bad it is at that point so really our focus with these changes is how do we look at those top four to reduce the the the fifth from happening so when we looked at this what are the things that we are seeing that our life safety risks that are are common across a number of properties that we're seeing we're seeing fire doors that are not rated I know you saw this picture on the left knot that long ago they took a fire door and put a non-rated fire door now the now there's a braided fire door back in there but it took us making them do that this one on the right came in the last two weeks that's in a hallway it was a rated fire door when they replaced it they put a hollow core door in there and took the rating label off the previous door and reaffixed it to a non-rated door we have doors that don't latch I know all of you seen post-fire buildings this is how smoke propagates and this is how people end up being injured is when we have smoke go throughout these buildings and the fire doors need to close and latch that's that in the sheet rocker the only two things that keep that fire and that smoke from propagating throughout the building we have doors without Closers again simple things that can be fixed sheetrock that's not intact again one of the two things that keeps fire and smoke from propagating and injuring more people trash shoot doors that don't close and garbage rooms that are overflowing and don't have the appropriate fusible link to close it when there is a fire we've also seen sprinkler systems and alarm systems that aren't serviced due to the age of the buildings we're seeing fire protection systems at or near at the end of their serviceable life and garage carbon monoxide ventilation that's inoperable and I can tell you that last one becomes a big deal you get a car fire in a garage and a tucked under garage which is common what we have it is night and day difference between when the ventilation system works and when it doesn't we had a car fire and one that worked the other day and you can literally walk in there and put the fire out and the good part about that is not just for the responders but if there's residents in that garage when that car fire happens they can get to the exits what we're finding is when we have some of these they don't work and that whole building is or that whole garage is charged with smoke and now all the stairwells get charged with smoke so now our problem isn't just in the garage moves throughout the building so what does this mean for us what what are we seeing why are we here so when you look at this since 2004 it doesn't look like much you look at some ups and downs right but there's there's little variation in the number of occurrences and that doesn't tell the story the story is really about how do we attenuate the severity and the impact where we start to see what happens the bottom graph is the 2004 to 2007. the light green is firefighter entries the dark green of Civilian fatalities and The Bluest civilian injuries so from 2004 to 2007 you didn't see any firefighter injuries we saw some civilian fatalities and civilian injuries from 08l11 we saw quite a bit of firefighter injuries we saw civilian fatalities and we saw significant civilian injuries and that's when we implemented the first version of the rental ordinance before that we currently have intact today yeah so then following that we saw a commensurate decrease in firefighter injuries civilian fatalities and civilian injuries now what's concerning to me is when we start to look at the last six years and seven years we're starting to see that Trend go up on civilian injuries and my concern is as we start to see that civilian injury Trend go up it starts to introduce the risk of Civilian fatalities in these buildings so I think it's important that we consider that as we're looking at these these reforms because we want to get ahead of these things we don't want civilians injured or killed we don't want firefighters entered or killed we don't want to put anybody any undue risk and the best way we can do that is those four e's before we get to emergency response and there is no Silver Bullet to any of this but these are all tools in the toolbox to help us prevent this from happening you can also look at it from an economic standpoint this is just purely fire loss again you see some spikes here and there but what I would tell you from 2019 on we're starting to start see that upward trend and I don't think that that's a one-off from some of these violations I've seen in the responses that we've gone on so what I don't want to get us back to is that pre-2012 level where we're seeing significant property and contents lost Chief council member Schultz has a question okay so you're starting to see uh some rise in Contents and property in the 2022 could you go into a little more detail over what that is and why that is happening uh well I mean it's due to the fires right and more significant fire so what you what you see here is if you remember back to the original number of fires so what we're seeing when we start to see the bigger losses we're having more fires that are uncontained right so that's when we start to see them propagate Beyond room of contents and they start to go as we may see failures in systems if you recall last year in 2022 we had a fire an apartment building where the fire alarm system didn't sound right that thing got Way Beyond before anybody contacted us about that fire so we're starting to see some of these critical failures that are allowing fires to get farther before we get to them okay that's what I was looking for so it looks more like um more units are being affected per fire in a multi-family living arrangements is that a correct characterization of the trend you're seeing that is correct thank you So within this ordinance uh staff recommends uh in in with support from the code review task force um four kind of uh pillars here um the first is to to license individual managers and again like I said not a one of these and and not everything we're going to do with a rental license ordinance is going to fix everything but it's about giving staff the tools in the toolbox to use the right tool in the right situation um and why licensing managers is important uh it'll require them to have education every year we've we in the past have provided education our manager meeting and and have encouraged that uh but not necessarily required it it gives the council the ability to suspend or revoke it and without affecting the residents that live there and I can tell you we've had some less than desirable property managers that just go from one property to the next to the next and you watch that property fall into disrepair and start to have problems it used to be a fine property then that manager comes and now it's a problem um we are providing at no cost to them we don't propose any license fees for the the managers and we provide we plan on providing that that uh education to them at no cost and so they will have an online ability to take the the class and then take a test and then submit that they've they've completed that Chief uh two questions here a council member Workman has a question and then followed by council member Schultz uh you kind of answered the question before I asked it um but maybe you can reiterate again um the financial implication seems to be the biggest concern on some of the emails that I've we've gotten but there's the license we're not charging for the education we're not charging for aside from the paper that the document itself inspection would be printed on there's no added financial burden the one thing I would say is there are some increased uh proposed fees for the multi-family if they have significant life safety issues so if we go in there in their fire alarm system is is disabled that's a 200 fine right there like those significant Life Safety things not like uh you have a small hole in the sheetrock but we're finding Life Safety things that should have been repaired there's a fine attached to that right up front and that's fully preventable fully preventable if correct we're doing our jobs correctly then we're not worrying about these issues popping up correct okay thank you that's the only increased fees that we've proposed and the license is to make sure that we're holding everybody accountable yeah yeah Madam mayor members of the council the idea is to set a standard right here's a standard expectation that all of our managers will meet the self-inspection component doesn't apply to single family only applies applies to multi-family that has a common Corridor where these things would apply it was a discussion at code review task force of whether the license the management license should apply to single family or only a certain level of multi-family and the code review task force consensus was that if you're going to per if you're going to have a rental business in Burnsville you should all have the same training and and licensure regardless of whether it's a single family all the way through multi-family and like I said our goal is to make this as easy as possible and at no cost to the the manager because really our goal is the education we want to take away the uninformed piece of this right so that they know what to do and what's expected to keep the residents safe councilmember Schultz okay so the first one is you said that the required education would be every year but it says still says once every three years into here under 328 nine under additional requirements uh F so it says once every three years for education so my question is is it every year or is it every three years I councilmember Schultz I may have misspoke to that I'm sorry okay not a problem just checking on that the other thing I I would ask is could you walk us through what a documented self-inspection would look like you're you're the owner and property manager you're going to do a self-inspection what does that look like Madam mayor members of the council so we have a self-inspection checklist already published out on the website so you can take that and go through it and really at the end of the day we're looking for them to log that we don't need the whole sheet of paper we're just saying when you go through that there's common area items and there's exterior items and all we want you to do is walk through do the fire doors open and do they close all the way do the exit lights work are the smoke detectors intact are the fire extinguishers there do the doors open and close and latch and and you don't have to go through that whole checklist and check that each time you just need to create a log that says on April 18th my initials I completed this and they don't even have to use our checklist as long as it exceeds what our requirements are and my understanding that walking through your properties and Industry best practice already we just want them to document it so we know it's being done and we can have that discussion with them if we show up and all of a sudden all the fire doors work and they're telling us they're walking through each week right and it gives us another opportunity to connect with them and say are you really doing this right and hopefully get ahead of those things so we don't come on come and have a dozen fire doors that don't work okay I just have a follow-up so say we're in a single family home um they don't have common in areas and that kind of stuff so of course that would not be something that they would do um but the requirement is that they do a documented self-inspection yearly or if they have a tenant move out and before the new tenant moves in correct amen Rose consulate is correct yep and that's what that checklist would be for so once a year before we come to the inspection we'd prefer they go through before we come and get all those things corrected and then if they have turnover of the residents then they should also do that checklist so yes those are the two opportunities okay so now I'm a little confused on that so it's not just a documented self-inspection it's also an inspection by City staff no no um members of the council so the self-inspection is required when someone moves out and someone moves in right they're supposed to do the self-inspection okay annually or I'm sorry every three years in the single family we do the inspection before we come to do that every third year inspection that's when we would want them to do it they need to do it at least once a year but we would recommend that they do it so we don't show up and find that the smoke alarms don't have batteries in it right like it's prudent for them to do it the requirement just says once a year we would just hope that they would align that and I know Mr forzen's folks recommend that they do that and give them that information of like Hey we're coming out here's where the self-inspection checklist is so single-family homes currently are inspected by the city every three years that is great so there's nothing changing on that nope it's the same as it was yeah correct thank you okay councilmember Gustafson thank you uh hi Chief um can owners of property be property managers that Madam mayor members of the council they can absolutely be property managers so a couple that owns a home or two in Burnsville they can be their own property manager they just need to take our continuing education and that's at no charge that's at no charge online again we're working on creating that we wanted this to pass before stick staff time into that but if if this ordinance were to pass that would be staff's next step is to create an online uh training session with a test at the end and they complete that at no cost and and they can be licensed managers in here so so the hardship that there's a hardship basically would do that three or four hour training correct amount of member of this account so that's correct and that's every year or every three years every three years I'm sorry I missed no no that's fine I'm glad you got it because yeah yeah okay council member Keeley thank you madam mayor thank you chief some of those photos did bring back some bad memories of a current situation that were that you've been working through I like the idea of Licensing the managers for free with the free training because it is all about education but that automatically holds them accountable because they're now bred in they're educated they're trained that can only benefit a lot of things for the residents and this is all about to me this is all about the safety of the residents those people who choose to live in these multi-tenant apartment buildings it's their home it's their Sanctuary it's where they go back every day from their work their jobs and the pressure and they need to know that they're living in a safe building that isn't at a high risk of a fire or or other things but mold right mildew and you know things that we've seen in the photos um I also like you you pointed out something that really caught my eye and that's raising the penalties for the violators I have maintained since we started this rental licensing that we have a lot of apartment owners who are excellent um managers excellent owners they rarely ever have anything they address things instantly they're proud of the properties they're proud of having a safe clean environment for their residents to come live um one would think in today's world of reviews that if you don't provide that that you would have a hard time leasing out your uh your rental properties but we also know that countering that we have a huge shortage of housing affordable housing in many cases or just housing selection and so even the apartment complexes that are suffering from horrible conditions are almost fully leased and that's unfortunate because they're being rewarded to be a bad player yeah and so our job comes in to say we're not going to allow that and we have to put the tools in place to be able to do that so I I just want to see I think the shift of the financial burden has to be even heavier on the violators and the folks who run great operations they should be inspected and have an opportunity to be inspected but rewarded and acknowledged for their good performance without any additional fees it's really this whole thing is we're all we're having this discussion not because of the apartment complex that has no violations and runs a clean great operation it's because we have the exact opposite we have apartment owners and managers running slumlord situations with horrible as you think as you showed the picture that is the whole reason that we're having this discussion and why we've had discussions like this recently so I want the focus to be truly on the violators and that's where really the fines can get heavy in my book because it's clear that when the fine isn't very large it's really unfortunate when you have people just continue to be a bad player because the cost of being a bad player isn't severe enough to cause them to do the right thing and create a nice safe environment for the residents and the people that live there I mean it's it is about the safety of the people and and they don't deserve to live in some of these places it's horrible so I I see what you're doing is in all in the right direction to address these problems well councilmember Kilian council member gossip so nephew you recall the residents of Country Village in 2011 had us as their last hope and they came here with their children and they brought pictures not how's that they brought the pictures of the conditions that they were living in but our staff have been working with them for years trying to get them to comply and then finally we had to step in and shut them down but then the burden of the relocation of all of those people how staff did that work in partnership with the counties both Dakota and Scott you know and so here we are again and I really do not want to go back to having to deal with 2011 and what we had to do with all of the what we had to do I mean and to have those residents and I can tell you if the residents of these other buildings were told that we were having this meeting today they would be here because they're the ones who come to us and say you're our last hope absolutely well and we'll put in I you know you bring up a good point who who Advocates and speaks for the residents of Parkview there's some that have stood up and reached out to us without fear with with fear but strong enough that the repercussions and the retribution by management was not going to be worse than what they're living in right now and and it's not an easy thing to do so for the folks of Country View to step up and some of those at Parkview and these other places are we're going to learn about I understand later on that are that are kind of in the same boat um you know what National Association group is actually advocating for them to have a safe legal aid no one there It Is Us they're coming to us and they're our residents they rent from the multi-family housing folks but they're our residents 40 of them live in Burnsville they're our constituents we're their last hope I think it you know ultimately it closes out it's really unfortunate that we're in this position yeah it I mean I don't know how many cities have as many rentals uh units as we do that are 40 and 50 years old but it is uh it is those companies and those property managers who have allowed their properties to get to the point where we have this crisis situation for these residents and it's unfortunate that we're here but we're gonna well it's our it's our responsibility to do what it takes to to correct it and turn it around and to your point uh give you the tools to keep it from happening again and in education and a lot will uh will help and obviously really stiff fines but again to my other side I think this is all great to address those problem folks the people who run a great clean operation you know they deserve to be acknowledged for that and and uh and and just uh have their have their properties looked at but it's a whole different thing right they're not the problem yeah Chief please members of the council to that point is we we want to take incremental steps because we do have some great operators in town and that was the point of not putting a fee making it online how convenient can we make it for those folks that are running a good operation might provide some value of education for them but we didn't want it to be over onerous obviously with the issues we've had we could have come up with a lot more restrictive things to propose of note I would just tell you that the code review task force it wasn't the consensus but there there was a one or two folks on there that did propose having significantly higher fees for some of this stuff for violations significant violations to the tune of two thousand dollars so um to your point I you know I none of this is written in stone right like if it's not working for us we can come back to you and say this is or isn't working and if we need bigger fines or other tools I feel like staff does a good job of coming back and working with a council on things so that it works for us uh just the last piece on here I want to hit on is this displacement plan because as we've seen in the feedback people says said no one else is doing this um really My Hope here is that this helps us be prepared to respond and take care of our community is we've had a number of these incidents that we show up and we're displacing a number of residents in the middle of the night in the middle of winter and really my goal is to have like six a simple questionnaire that they can fill out uh kind of a framework to help them uh tell us what's available to these residents things like do you have an immediate place that residents can go such as a clubhouse or a community room will you provide food for the displaced residents if so um for how long will you provide temporary housing for those Place residents such as hotels and if so how long uh will you displace uh Place displaced residents and if in vacant units if it's available and lastly do you require renters insurance and there's a few follow-ups to that because one thing we've found out is a lot of these properties require renters insurance and um they offer what they're telling people is renters insurance which is really liability insurance for the property and folks have unfortunately experienced a loss and then they go to find out that really they only have liability coverage in none of their contents or anything are covered and by having that information that allows us to be prepared so when we show up do I need to cost Red Cross do I need to call Salvation Army do I need to look at a shelter because lots of times the local manager doesn't know these answers and at two in the morning we might not be able to get a hold of the corporate person that can make those decisions so knowing what to expect because on many of these situations we've been told one thing and we're waiting for them to follow through on what they said they'll provide and then they don't so I would rather be prepared up front so that when our responders get there we can care for the community in a timely fashion that's the idea of a displaced a displacement plan is is what is available what are they willing to do and not do so that when we show up we're prepared to help the community so Chief councilmember Gustafson has a question in and followed by more kind of a statement I guess this kind of reminds you back in 2005 when we first did a rental licensing and we didn't charge a fee for it we had everyone sign up for it multi-housing actually signed off on it on that whole thing uh part of what happened in those days we did have education we had our meetings and we had a star system and the good players if they weren't getting violations they weren't getting fines and the ones that were there all the time they were getting some heavy fines and they escalated every time they got more and more violations so I like the approach you're doing on this I think that worked well for us for a while but we didn't have any teeth in it and that's why we ended up in 2011 I think it was when we changed it to a much more strict rental policy and I'm afraid that again because of bad players unfortunately and of ordinances quite often come from Bad players that we're now looking at having to take up the next step again I do like I do like the the free I like the education that everyone gets including someone that buys a house and wants to rent it and just so they have an understanding because not everyone that buys a house and rents houses understand what's all needed and all that that's uh it's a it's an interesting conversation it's a it's a national conversation that's going on in Kansas City last year they were talking about it and watching DC this year they're talking about a lot of it had to do with the REITs coming in and and the big organizations that come in and buy buildings they buy several buildings sometimes they don't take care of them and we don't know how to get a hold of them and it's not just Burnsville it's the entire country country is going through this right now and so we got to get a handle on it and I'm hoping this is just another arrow in our quiver that can help us get some things done and maybe maybe it's some some things some other cities that are struggling as well can take a look at as well for Solutions because a lot of you know we all get together as as governments all over the country talk about our problems and our Solutions and share all that activity so I think your approach is good and we'll see how it evolves from there okay council member Schultz okay so this is a question about the displacement plan um so they need to fill out the displacement plan but they do not need to there's not requirements of what they do provide it's just do your don't you and this is what it is um that's correct and again that's for a single family home rental yes no I'm sorry no only multi-family only multi-family okay so that helps on that I have a few other questions do you want me to run through them or give other people a shot uh well let's see if the the the the the chief needs to finish his report um this is the last slide so we're good okay this is your last slide this yeah I'm good so I'm done presenting okay council member Schultz okay uh let's see okay so first question um on the battery I noticed the battery like someone not having a battery in or a working battery or that type of thing any smoke detector would be a two hundred dollar fine uh man members of the council that's only in a common area that's but that's not in the unit nope so uh in in Mr forslin's rental uh fee schedule for code enforcement it's twenty dollars for a unit so if they come in it's a non-working smoke detector that's in our current fee schedule okay and so then that is just in the common area it's not in the unit itself correct that is correct the 200 fine for life safety violations is only in the common area so it would only apply to multi-families that have a common area right we answered that question could you explain to me what the background check is going to be looking at for the property manager there's no background sure where can you give me the reference to that uh yes so uh 3-28-4-2 Property Management license and it talks about the license required and one of the things that they need to do is successfully complete a background check and pay a licensing fee 32842 correct 328 Property Management license and that does talk about a licensing fee so I had a question if that was in conflict with some of the other language which was saying there's not a licensing fee uh Madame remembers of the council I don't think our intent was to have our background check so I don't I I don't Mr Shepard I don't know if you can if you have any other context on that from what I recall we that wasn't our intent that may have snuck by us and there was not a license fee so the council would have to adopt a license fee in the fee schedule we're not proposing any okay so if if we were to adopt that would be something to strike correct it would be I would agree yeah okay um because okay and then we get down to 3-28-6 license fees there again it says annual license fee licensee must pay an annual license fee for each licensed rental unit and that is with the the license fee for the property that's not specific to the manager that's outlined with the um the the property rental license that's not to the manager okay and again it's the same as it always was there's no change a single family home has a current license fee the only ones that don't are owner occupied am I correct on that that is my recollection I'm trying to think if there's anything else no I don't yeah it's only yeah rental Mr Shepard I see you agreeing with the chief yes okay okay so I have a question under 3-28-9 additional requirements under G which is a new one uh license shall be conspicuously posted in any dwelling operating as a rental unit in the common area or if it's you know conspicuously posted where that you know that most tenants can view it if I am renting a home I do not want your crap on my wall that's unreasonable that seriously isn't reasonable people are renting a single family they're renting homes that look like that because they want the feel of a home not an apartment that's unreasonable um so that posting I believe is unnecessary okay explain the self-inspection I'm happy about that you explain the battery I think I'm getting to near the end of my questions thank you [Applause] uh let's see okay so 4-2-7 design standards under swimming pools is that a separate that's the next one sorry wrong one oh well it was still under agenda item five E they're both both ordinances are fighting yeah okay so we will and then we go into yeah thank you okay then that is the end of my questions and I thank you very much mayor and Council may I just make a comment just to make sure that Mr Shepard when we're when we're talking about um you know eventual approval of this ordinance we are going to be striking the the license fee that we discussed under the property management and the background check so you would be proving it with that okay so the Amendments will be included yeah okay chief yeah that's all I have for a presentation I appreciate it um council member Gustafson more thanks chief um what is what is our procedure for inspecting multi-family homes members of the council uh our code enforcement inspectors go through each unit every three years so they do a third at a time so a third of the individual units every year and then if it has a common area there's a fire inspection of the common area every year how do we get to the inspection how do we get to the inspection how do we do we just show up at the building I'm sorry notice uh it's getting late memory members of council those are all scheduled inspections these are not surprise inspections um the only way we would show up under a surprise inspection is uh if we had a complaint we may show up to go investigate it or if for example our crews are out on a call and notice something egregious they're going to address it right then and there but the the license inspection is a scheduled inspection that we that works for both the the licensee as well as our our inspectors so they know when we're coming absolutely do they know what we're looking for absolutely there's a self-inspection uh list that's published out on the website for them okay yep so it's not a surprise if they know we're going to look at it doors and all these different things okay I just want to talk about the fine for a minute okay is is that is that something we just find them if we find something when we go there or is it they get fined if they just don't take care of it after we've been there so the uh members of the council there's an additional fine in the common areas for egregious life safety issues that they get fined with the violation right up front so if the fire alarm system doesn't work or they've shut off the sprinkler system we can find them for the life safety violation right up front so they can they can get the violation to get it repaired but there's also a financial penalty to those what I would call egregious violations okay okay all right thank you council member Schultz okay I'm just clarifying our procedure uh so what we're looking to do even though 5e is one in one item we're going to do a vote on title three then we will talk about title four and do a vote on that then we will do a discussion and vote on Title Five these are all separated out instead of on individual agenda items um Mrs Collins thank you madam mayor councilmember Schultz the title III came through the code review task force had at a separate Time title four and five came through together so those were separate ordinances that came through the the task force and that's why they're separated but so we need one motion for title three one for four and five and one for the summary publication thank you for that clarification thank you okay all right Chief don't leave um we have people who have signed up and they want to speak uh Donna Jensen please come to the podium yeah and uh your name and address for the record uh Donna Jensen uh property address is 14709 West Burnsville Parkway for being open and honest I'm a member of the code task force so just so that you know on that part of it I was also one that was not 100 happy with this section the code task force because I come from the property management side and I think this section of the task of the code needs more work I don't think you have teeth in it that are addressing what I'm hearing that there are REITs going out there and buying up properties that are not managing properly and yet in Burnsville we've had so many turnover in our properties that I couldn't tell you the name of some of them anymore I can't keep track who's who and what's what and that's not one property two property that's half a dozen or more on that part of it so perhaps one thing I had a thought with as I spoke with mha and getting them involved because that is our organization in the state for multi-family is that maybe when those properties are sold there should be something in our code that says okay you bought this property this is your first license here's a walkthrough of it here's what we expect from you your fire doors your smoke your area so that there is absolutely no question what is required of these companies coming in so that anytime that a new property license is done and then maybe that's something we have to look at for some of these properties that are failing that have been owned for two three four five years that we need to back them up and go we need to have a one-on-one we need somebody at city or whether it's a fire or the code or somebody to walk through that's signed off and it's not just the property manager it's got to go up I only have so much power I have so much ability but there are going to be other people that are property managers just trying to survive day today for that job so when you put it on there with due diligence what support teeth does that person in that position have when they don't have the upper levels supporting them when they don't get the ability to follow through on code but they got to still support their families they got to still do this stuff and yes they want to do the right thing but if you don't have the upper levels up there and that's very evident for what I'm hearing in the background that it's not up there what do they have for options without fear of retaliation or something else going on so I agree punish those that are doing the fine and the fines on that part when it is Aquarius like that yes when it's something that's not and we get a chance to fix it because I can't tell you how many times I've had it and thank goodness my residents backed me it's yesterday that thing worked today my inspector comes in pushes a button and she squawks it's not working but we're doing our due Dylan so I would say on this section it needs more work yes it needs more teeth licensing I'll get over it there's no costs and there's and the education I'm always for that because I've already taken one of the classes that were offered from the Lutheran on that but I think this section needs more work to address what we're seeing because we're getting lots and lots more properties they're not going to be new forever and new doesn't mean without problems so I think on this it needs more and I'd be happy to stand in and work but I don't think it's done and I don't think it's enough to address what you're looking at because we're back where we were 2011. why and I don't hear that I don't see that and I know it's not a perfect answer but there's got to be something more there instead of us just okay we're doing it now five years from now we're going to be back here again what are we really doing to try to keep from the extremes that I'm hearing and seeing in these okay so Mrs Johnson this is a first step but I hear you and you make a good point so I think our chief also has some remarks in that regard Chief man mayor members of the council I just note that and I'll double check with Mr Forza but the licenses don't transfer so a new owner would have to apply for a new license which would also require they'd likely bring in a new manager that would have some education and and again to miss Jensen's point this may not be the end I'll be all we maybe find some holes as we move forward and and we're happy to have that discussion and and continue to work on it right like and I'm so happy that you're part of the uh the task force because you bring a knowledge base in the industry that you're in I mean as a manager of a property so that helps a great deal and thank you for all the work that you have done there so uh hang on just a moment councilmember Schultz she brings up an excellent point thank you very much uh what if a property manager can prove that they've been trying to address things but the owner will not and now you have the manager worried about losing their personal license what protections do they have Madam mayor members of the council I would tell you that in our experience we get a pretty good sense of that really quick with our inspectors on where the roadblocks are um I can tell you we've had managers tell us I'm not doing that we don't need to do that and that's what we're trying to prevent with this we've had other managers saying I can't get approval on this and um we can tell you where the roadblocks are because the managers that want to fix it talk to us and we're not going to go after their individual license that's when we would be looking to the council to take more action on the global front of the the property license but I would tell you a lot of the violations are fixable if there's good Property Maintenance and a good manager being proactive on those things because then they don't become Capital assets that need to be replaced so quickly if they're maintaining them well but yes if they're if they're trying and they can tell us and prove to us they're trying We're not gonna we're not going to bring any license action against the individual when they are doing their best and they're running into roadblocks that's not their issue we just want them to take the effort to try to fix it it's not their fault when corporate doesn't approve it because they all have limits on what they can spend and what they can do and and so when they're trying their best and they've moved it up the ladder then we don't want to take any action against those folks that are trying to do their best thank you okay councilmember Keely thank you madam Aaron thank you for your work government's run by those who show up and you're always here you do a great job thank you for all that work um you you brought up a very good question how did we get here um earlier cited that every every year a third of each of these apartment complex are inspected except for a period of time when this small little diversion called a pandemic happened and inspections on sites got diverted and it allowed things to continue to deteriorate that could have gotten caught and I think that you know today we have the ability to go everywhere and inspect and we're starting to see lots of things that we hadn't had a chance to see in a couple years so I I think your your concerns are valid and I'm very interested in you know more of more specifics of what you think this section needs in more work at the same time I want to give the chief and the inspection staff every tool they can as soon as they can because the problem did get really bad during a period of time when inspections were challenging or not happening and and they may have had a valid excuse at the time for that but for for at least not having the inspections done and maybe Chief want to touch on what happened over the pandemic just so everybody knows during the pandemic um they were there were many properties that didn't uh didn't want us in their property uh for reasons of of not spreading the virus so they're you know there were there was a period of time and I think it speaks to the fragility of some of our properties uh when they fall off the radar and kind of how close we are to the edge on some of those so yeah there were there were some properties that went a couple of years before we could get into them during that during the pandemic until like you said in the past year now we're kind of back in full swing but now we're kind of seeing the full view of what happens so Mr Shepard mayor and Council I just wanted to follow up and close the loop on council member Schultz's question about uh property managers and their um ability to sort of protect themselves through our appeal rights built into the code so if there was a revocation action taken or a suspension taken they had would have the ability to appeal and and assert that they you know whatever their basis for that appeal would be thing to appeal um do we have an appeal yes we do have a fee for the appeal process however the hearing officer has the right to waive the waive the violation license I would frankly feel better if for property managers that there is no fee for the appeal since we're not making a fee for the license well I think the chief addressed that when he said when a manager can say you know I'm trying to make it work but I'm not getting the financial resources from the owner of the property to do that and you said that we will work with them and understand chief yeah I I Madam mayor members of council we might be talking kind of two different things I think you know we wouldn't necessarily be bringing a license action if they can show that they're working to get it fixed I think councilmember Schultz's point is if we do take an action and they need to appeal do they have to have money come out of their pocket before we find out where the in whether or not the the appeal is the standard or overturned yeah well that came out of uh Mr Mr Shepard's remarks that there's an appeal process but not when you were talking to us about what happened yes what would we need to do is the shepherd the appeal fee is just in our regular fee schedule correct Michelle yeah so we would have to amend that the appeal set at to appeal a code violation or a rental strike and 300 to appeal a license suspension denial or revocation at what point do we get there after the chief after they had talked to the chief about something that would be only if we did after all of that Chief went through with having that those conversations with a property manager and still nothing happens is when that happens now is the revocation with the ownership of the of the of the company or with the property manager and I think that that would be based on staff yeah members of the council it depends on what kind of license action right are we going after the the manager's license or the rental license yeah you're looking at the manager's license and I don't think our fee schedule delineates we could bring something back to to clarify that in the council's fee schedule if they desire to not uh charge an appeal fee for the rental or the manager's appeal but I would tell you that it takes Council action to suspend or revoke both a rental license or a manager's license none of that is Administrative that would all require a council action so okay very good um councilmember Workman so just for clarification Council would have to vote to revoke said license yeah then the fee would be assessed if they did not agree with council's final action remembers of the council if if the council took action to suspend or revoke individual managers rental or individual managers license and they they wish to appeal that then the fee would apply so prior to the appeal process the manager would have that opportunity here as we normally have those items and could speak at a public hearing at no cost Madam mayor members of the council that's been our past practice is that we noticed them ahead of time that this is coming before the council so they can come speak to that as we did with the recent rental license uh suspension okay thank you okay all right it's there and thank you Mr Johnson the next speaker is uh Mr seal Smith please come to the poor Mr Cecile Smith come to the podium give us your name and address for the record and I understand that you represent the Minnesota Housing Association yes Madam Jim my name is Cecil Smith I'm the president and CEO of Minnesota Housing Association we represent 2200 owners operators developers vendor members in the mental Housing Industry with 600 000 renters who make their home in more than three hundred thousand units of housing across the state some of them in Burnsville um I'm here today because uh I'm very concerned about the direction that we're taking here and having heard some of the comments tonight that we have a lot of good actors good managers good operators in the city of Burnsville and yet we've got some bad actors that we need to address but we have a regulatory framework that's been established here that is inclusive of everybody and I would like to suggest a strategic reset on the regulatory framework that you're developing because uh we get to see a lot of regulatory Frameworks across Minnesota at the state level and even with amongst our peers across the country and to develop a framework that targets the Bad actors versus one that is all inclusive and puts a burden or a regulatory measure on everybody who already is engaged in best practices has their business model and business practices that they're engaged in with good effect for the residents and the city and to the approval of the regulator so the framework that I would suggest is that you should have tools in your tool bag that address the Bad actors actions like tenant remedies action where you can get repairs ordered and the city can take action on on behalf of the renters when there is no compliance with your orders or even receive a ship which if you want to get the attention of national REITs who are maybe considered in your view absentee landlords if they do not control the asset their investment is null and void their investors inspect them and their Bankers inspect them to maintain control of the asset receivership takes that away and then you can actually manage the property the way you want it managed through the actions of your receiver who is paid through the proceeds of the property these are all tools that people have in their tool bag that focus on the Bad actors including fines that escalate when there is no response or a delayed response further change of ownership inspections if you're concerned about the nature of a property because it's been passed around then have a change of ownership inspection and write up the orders they need to be written up at their property this approach shifts away from being all-inclusive now some of the ideas that have been proposed in this ordinance are excellent and sound but again should be targeted to Bad actors as a condition of license you've met a certain threshold of bad behavior so now you will write a displacement plan you will have your property manager licensed rather than just registered with the city and you will need to have Education and Training you will have a log that you maintain of your inspections subject to our review which we may ask you to supply to us on a monthly basis this kind of scope and approach arrows the actions of the the city to Bad actors rather than including everybody and I'm bringing this to you today because we came late to this we only became aware of this about six weeks ago and even a week ago we weren't even aware that this was going to be on your agenda tonight for final Passage our members our industry has a lot of experience we have a lot of very good actors in our state especially our local ownership and we would urge that you take a pause reconsider and think about the strategy that you're embarking upon here because to maintain the investment and the um partnership that you have with the good property managers and owners in your city reward that behavior with a light regulatory touch and use a scalpel-like approach of Regulation to go after the Bad actors so we applaud your effort Bad actors are no friend of our industry I have to go all around the state dealing with the consequences of what Bad actors have done to communities because they try to remedy it through a regulatory approach and I would urge the city of Burnsville rather than acting first of its kind regulations in the state in terms of Licensing property managers displacement plans that a pause be taken to reconsider that I appreciate your time thank you Vietnamese thank you the chief because he's had it at least three conversations with us um has been engaged with us but we would recommend that approach thank you council member Schultz uh would you come back Mr Smith come back to the podium council member Schultz uh so my my thank you very much uh my question to you is does your Association have a certification program for property managers we do we have a certified razor to manager program it's quite extensive in its training and development are those names public who have received their certification most of them put it as a designation after their name because they're very proud of their to earn their designation as a certified residential manager we don't have a published list but we know who is eligible because they have to complete continuing education requirements every year at least five credit hours a year okay for you is sort of Realtors has so say a property manager is repeatedly not not doing a good job and they're you know like going from place to place and just cramping all over it right conversely um like a property owner right like you know they're crap okay so do you have something within your Association that is similar to what the board of realtors has to kind of police your own so what we have is because we are a just a trade Association where you freely associate if you uh break our code of ethics and every member has to review the code of ethics every year then if there is a complaint brought against you our Ethics Committee reviews the complaint and we have dismissed members from our association and and even on occasion given lifetime Bans so they cannot join us okay I have a question so what is the difference between what you're doing what we're doing is that that with a management license it's free but we're holding them accountable so what is your objection to that so you have a licensing what now we have a certification which is voluntary okay so I might suggest that the city of Burnsville may want to because of the the circumstances that the Chiefs described to us maintain a register of property managers that when there's a property manager that works at a property you want to know who's working at that property just as you probably have a provision in your code that says you want to know who the license holder is and how to get hold of them on short order then if you have a problem with a restaurant then start enforcing against them okay you're a registrant who is now going to be on probation and you're going to have to do this education and if you don't then we will ban you from the city that's a lighter touch on all the other property managers who are acting and doing their jobs and getting training through their professional associations and so forth that they are part of and then focusing on Bad actors who you identify and will quickly identify and then can say all right you are now in a separate status and eventually you may actually work to the point where you say you can't work in our city that's what the management license is all about and nobody is going that's right and we do then through that methodology have a log if you will to use your word of who is working in the city I don't see the difference of what we're doing and what you're suggesting so registration versus licensing is a lighter touch registration you have a registry and you maintain a registry versus licensing where I mean up until a moment ago we assumed that there was background checks so that seems to have gone away all of a sudden um so there's background checks that's the training that's required in the city certification of their training as well as a test and that's just another thing that's put onto the plate of a property manager Who's acting professionally doing their job and it's another hoop that they have to jump through versus registry which is I'm on the registry as a property manager in the city I'm a good actor I'm not drawing any attention to myself because I act professionally that's a much lighter touch thank you okay members of the council we've heard from our chief is there anybody else who wants to speak but did not sign in all right come to the podium give us your name and address for the record my name is Nicole Wilkins and I work with trellis management I oversee Chancellor Manor which is a property in Burtonsville it's 200 units of affordable housing and I learned of this um just a week ago and I wish that I would have been included and part of the task force um I think it's really important to know that like everyone else has said it's the Bad actors that need to be held accountable not the good actors I've been doing this for 28 years and I take much pride in my properties that I've maintained not only in Burnsville but in other cities so just last week we completed our annual City inspection and we were complimented on how well maintained and how stable the staff in place gave us that outcome I understand the importance of ensuring that all rental properties in the city meet certain safety Health standards and I urge the council to consider the unintended consequences that may arise from the changes these code changes call for licensing of all property managers that's really concerning to me a lot of the questions were answered Kara that you're those are a lot of my questions the background check the personal responsibility to the property manager that was very scary to me yeah um it's hard getting staff to be property managers especially in affordable housing it's a rough event in some instances a property manager may not be able to procure the funds from an owner like previously discussed for necessary repairs is US put in a very difficult situation you're basically putting the property manager in between the owner and the City this is a personal risk for property manager it could cause a property manager to be unable to find other property management employment in the city or even elsewhere recruiting site staff could create a whole new level of challenges if I were a property manager considering the city of Burnsville it would impact my decision as I mentioned Staffing is currently challenging with this said the proposed changes it may make it more difficult for landlords like me to maintain our properties in compliance with the new codes due to staff shortages which then could lead to unintended violations and penalties this could ultimately discourage responsible landlords from investing in the community and negatively impacting the quality of rental housing verify respectfully request that the council take a balanced approach to revising the rental license codes one that considers impact in both the landlords and the residents and works towards achieving the common goal of ensuring safe and affordable housing for all I personally would like to participate in a collaborative approach with the task force invite me to the table and I thank you for the time and I thank you for your service Chief my brothers in Minneapolis firefighter so I understand the dangers that are faced thank you hi thank you I thank you for listening to me today thank you is there anyone else who wishes to speak on this item yep um wait a minute uh council member Gustafson we're taking applications for the task force so you can go online and sign up and be interviewed for it and we have openings we have we have openings for all that is this on the website uh it should be on the yeah it's on the website it ismn.gov commissions I'm always recruiting yeah exactly always closing um I think they're with some more logical things said um by the gentleman from the Housing Association um and I I do like the idea of a stepped approach here um maybe starting with a registry and then moving up to formal action I I I'm not saying that that's the direction that I'll vote for but I think that there was some Sound Logic in that idea and that that's right assists in I think alleviating some of the tension that our staff might face with our good Property Owners um because I think there will be some pushback to this um so I just I guess I wanted to get that out in the air that I I appreciate the the feedback by the gentleman from the association I think that seems reasonable to me but I'll let the discussion continue councilmember Schultz so I have a question uh and he spoke about write-up orders um could you are you familiar with that process the registry no no no write-up orders so um a rental unit is just not fixing things like their their fire door does not close we've told them told them told them we'd find them it's not happening it appeared he was speaking about write-up orders which would be we would say this has to happen by this date or rearrange for someone to come fix your stuff and you are charged for it is is that correct process apologies could he come up again Mr Smith so they're a mechanism through state law through the tenant remedies actions and the statute Minnesota 504 B that provide that municipality if there's unresponsive they can ask for a tin remedy action and then there's a judge's order that's issued so this due process um and obviously it's a last resort mechanism even higher than that is receivership which also happens through the 10 remedies action where there's a court appointed receiver because it's just been a transigence obstructive Behavior and the city runs out of patience as it should so that is a cities are empowered to do that you have the ability to do that so that situations like Parkview should not be happening they should be in receivership given what I the evidence that's been shown to me okay if I could ask our police chief so I know that we've done this sorry police Chiefs back there fire chief over here um our fire chief so I do know that we have like we've done this road could you explain the timeline on this and the challenges that we have encountered in taking this route yeah what's the cost amount of Mayor members of the council so it requires a civil action and Mr Shepard is going to be much more equipped to handle that but Mr Shepherd is uh in queues it's significant staff and and um legal time to file these actions and the other issue is getting in front of a judge is not always timely I can tell you the last one we filed it was like a six month wait to to be heard in court and I would defer to Mr Shepard talk more about details but okay I'll go to Mr Shepard prior to miss because the two council member Gustafson Mr Shepard all right mayor and Council I think with the receivership we're sort of asking the wrong question that is an enforcement mechanism so when we think about tools to enforce our code we know that we have suspension revocation the council is very familiar with that we have a civil action for injunctive Relief the council is very familiar with that there's also hazardous building actions and receivership tenant remedies action is in the mix there for for potential when it makes sense but it is a significant investment and what we're talking about here all of these amendments are not are designed to clarify the obligations of landlords to the city and to their tenants and to make sure that everyone understands what they're supposed to do and to make sure that they are meeting their expectations and obligations on that code that this is not about what we will do ultimately um all that is sort of fact specific right whether an individual property manager maybe is is causing the problem are are really the large focus is still going to be on the ultimate owner of that property and making sure that they're going to get things done and we know what those remedies are but those really aren't being affected or Changed by our code amendments here what we're trying to do is provide a little Clarity on if if good property owners are already inspecting their code well then they shouldn't have any problem yeah inspecting Bank ready inspecting checklists and making sure that we can we can confirm that they're meeting their obligations that they already say they're meeting the displacement plan this is whether it's a good landlord or a bad landlord we're talking about a fire that could happen and whether they're ready to help protect the residents in the aftermath of that and that can happen whether you're a quote unquote good landlord or a bad landlord so really we're really trying to get at these ongoing expectations for our property owners what is the difference between what they're saying a registry versus what we're doing with the um management license I mean because it seems like the same thing where it doesn't cost them anything we just want to know who they are so that they're not going from one property to the next and causing a great deal of harm within the city mayor and Council I'm myself struggling to figure out what the difference is being proposed it seems like when we have a licensing scheme that doesn't require a background check doesn't require fees I understand council member Schultz was concerned about the appeal and the ability to protect their rights and have due process makes sense what we're really talking about is a hook to get that property manager to be buy to buy into our expectations and obligations and I don't to me and the council can obviously make this choice but I don't think that's um a super onerous ask and we know from our experience that the property managers do have an effect on how fast things get done and how property issues get addressed and we know that from very recent experience so that is sort of the backbone of The Proposal that we've had yeah council member Gustafson I'm on the task force of the liaison as you all know and I'm still learning a lot about this tonight even um correct me if I'm wrong but this almost seems like an educational ordinance what you're looking for is that people take best practices training and they get licensed to do it we don't charge them for any of that stuff the landlord themselves the landlord themselves for a displacement plan could actually say we're not going to do anything if they have to displace and that's going to be acceptable so I don't know what's so hard on it asking people to spend three to four hours a year or every three years to look at one of our classes and say these are the best practices for running running buildings in the city of Burnsville and these are our expectations and go from there it's it doesn't doesn't seem that tough a deal yeah um Chief yeah the council I would agree with you like this gives us the tools to deal with the Bad actors but such a Level Playing Field of what the minimum is for everybody and again we don't want to be onerous yup do are they going to need to take some online classes but whether you you manage one unit or a hundred units making sure that you have some of those life safety features that you understand some of those things um and then by having that that manager's license it gives the council the ability to act quicker so that we're not drawn out 14 months to deal with something we don't want these as you know we don't bring a lot of license actions in front of you and as staff we want to work these things out and work with the property managers and really that's our goal and if I could May or pivot back to what councilmember Schultz's question was about the tenant remedies is if my understanding and Mr Shepard correct me if I'm wrong but once we were to get a court order that we could fix that fire door for your example the city would have to go get bids right get that fixed and assess it back yes so then we are taking on the repair process yeah and it's costly and it's costly uh council member Schultz uh you're in Q did you get your question at nope I'm still being a Peter okay uh okay so what's a feta pain in the oh yeah thank you okay so apple right so question uh one thing I have is I um I do want to reiterate my question and idea of amending that we would strike having to post the manager license I I I I think that's now you're you're dictating because you don't have common spaces in in many of these rentals now you're you're dictating what a person who is renting the place has up on their wall and that's that's something that's acceptable um but my question is and this will be to our attorney is there is there a problem if we just change the word from license to registry Mr Shepard and um and chief mayor and Council yes I mean if we're just registering them and just taking note then we don't have any regulatory hook the the the license is to say you have to have a a license to operate as a property manager in the city of Burnsville if they do not comply with the obligations under the code we have the ability to revoke or suspend that license if they're just a register registrant um there's nothing there is nothing that that hook and so it doesn't matter whether or not and there's nothing to do to sort of uh attack their license and therefore get get they ultimately get the property owner to to have a property manager in there that that is going to take care of business Okay the reason why I asked that question is when it was asked before what the difference was it was said that there was no difference so that's why I was that's why I was wondering if the issue is calling it a license versus calling it a registry I I council member Schultz I think I was just struggling with looking at ultimately the uh why then uh he was asserting that and and and and what what the ultimate goal was I was saying there was no difference in terms of like the actual how onerous it is on the individual to sign out to be a licensee you know to me there's not much you you take you sign up you take the class you get a license yeah right um that's that's what I was struggling with as I was sitting there listening to The Proposal that's what I meant sorry if it was confusing no I get that so the difference between like a register registrant and a licensee would be on the front end they take their four hours of classes every three years they um they gotta fill out the form so that they can be on a monthly basis be licensed right um but they have to do a yearly um self-inspection of the property or when property changes hands um and then the other difference is if you're just a registrant you can't remove their license and remove their livelihood but if they are licensee that is the that is the punishment mechanism in it is since it's a license you can remove that from them and it affects livelihood ability within this career field do I have that framed correctly I I don't know that you have it framed from the city's perspective it's not about removing their livelihood it's about making sure that they're meeting their obligations under the city code so yeah um so their livelihood so they would still be allowed to be a manager in the city of Burnsville then if their license was removed I don't know if their license is revoked right they're not allowed to be a property manager in the city of Burnsville that's correct but the city is concerned about making sure that as a property manager they meet their obligations under city code if the property manager is meeting their obligations as a licensee under city code they won't have any issues yeah no I totally get that and the framing that I'm using is because I'm trying to I'm trying to reframe the concerns that I'm hearing from the audience and from our emails so I'm trying to make sure that that were were acknowledging that concern right because I like I know what we're trying to do um and then I'm trying to make sure we understand what their concerns are and so that like we're all getting on the same page so it's it's not a derogatory framing I'm not meaning to do it that way I'm just trying to Res restate what I'm hearing from others closer to their language but still being accurate yeah right fair enough yeah okay for me it's it's really there's a voice of the residence the renters of these properties that's not heard here we have uh folks from uh uh an industry that uh is talking about all of this and what our staff is saying is that there has to be a mechanism for us to understand who is operating in our city it's not going to cost them anything but it also allows them to be accountable it allows them to make sure that they comply with the code and also and chief you can correct me if I'm wrong I think they have a log that they have to also comply with so that at least you can take a look at it because it's online and you can tell that they're doing what they need to do to make sure the building is safe and also um um in a state where people are as health are also taken into consideration now that's what I'm hearing you uh proposing for all of this so council member Workman thank you and I don't I don't want to go down the rabbit hole but if we've got I'm going to do it anyways but if we got if we have a uh you know a husband and wife team that owns single family property and the husband um this license is suspended you know what's stopping the wife from then obtaining one and then the son and then the daughter and you know this problem continues to Fester obviously that's a very unique and obscure situation but I can name a family usually yeah you know the single families are you know they're it's kind of a family business so I I don't need an answer to that necessarily but I just I'm trying to think about all the variables councilmember Keeley thank you madam mayor I just want to like bring this idea to a close on whether we need to have this license for everybody to start with even the good players or is there a path from any other sort of starting point uh to the gentleman's Point what I think he was getting after and we I think we all agreed it was we were getting to the same end result managing the Bad actors I think what he was articulating was a Step Up program so everybody starts with uh assuming that they're a good actor and in many cases we would have some immediately graduate almost the next day to a bad actor and it would trigger this license so to the to the City attorney is there a path to start out with a registration but trigger the license for anybody that has uh hit a certain threshold I mean is just trying to put some a process in place like that something that's feasible for us as a city off the cuff here I think um having the property management license sort of just ad hoc based on the problem at in individual property I think that's problematic I think it needs to be whether it's it's licensing across the board um some of the other Provisions you know you could do obviously the inspection checklist if you want to do that right away but say Okay they've reached the threshold they're not meeting their obligations to every time we have an inspection um clearly they haven't inspected yes that could be um part of some sort of suspension or restricted license if you will I think some of the other things as I was trying to mention with the displacement plan to me that is that is a plan that oh applies across the board and I struggle to see uh what's so problematic or onerous with it myself it is just hey if you own a multi-family residential building things can happen so we just want you to think about it and let us know if you've thought about it and that way when staff is having an emergency response they have something to go on to help the residents and help the community so so I think it all kind of depends on which particular you know major or minor edit you're you're talking about so I can't give you kind of a straight up or down but there's a way to do it yeah city manager Lindbergh medical members of the council from my perspective from a staff perspective I I hear the council's policy discussion uh and certainly respect the feedback that you're getting uh the the framework um in the City attorney mentioned this is really about a Clarity of expectations around the four areas that we've talked about the the licensing but but more predominantly from my perspective both education the idea that that we're working alongside property managers and Property Owners to self-inspect to to get ahead of and prevent certain situations from unfolding and to the city attorney's Point kind of the the plan to make sure that we can take care of the community should should a really bad event happen I would say from my perspective uh what's in front of you right now is a balanced approach I think it is uniquely Burnsville I believe that it IT addresses um through the work of the code review task force um IT addresses the issues that we're facing and to me those issues are twofold it's really public life safety for our community the folks who are living in in our multi-family housing and it's all about staff safety if you think back to the the video that the chief showed as part of his presentation we not only have firefighters going into these situations with a heavy amount of personal protective equipment we have our police staff with with less personal protective equipment or fire admin staff with less equipment going into these situations and the last thing is is your city manager but but more importantly as the person who's responsible for for their work their lives their safety and ultimately is accountable to them and their families this is about taking care of our staff ensuring their safety as much as we're ensuring the community's safety so from my perspective I think this is a reasoned approach I think these questions are good the dialogue is good but at the end of the day I'd submit to you that this isn't about good or bad actors this is about all of us in Burnsville um taking being very clear about what's expected in these situations and ensuring at the end of the day that our staff are well cared for that our community are is well cared for throughout multi-family housing okay council member Schultz uh just so I get an idea the scope of the issue about how many how many property managers or property owners that would then become property managers do we have in Burnsville and do we have an idea of how many of those are problematic to where they're hopping to property to property Chief Madam mayor members of the council I I'll turn over to Mr Forza I know we've got over 10 000 rental units right I couldn't tell you the number of properties last I knew we had about 85 complexes that makes up the vast majority of the units I want to say we had 1200 or so single family so you got the 1200 single family that may be managed by individuals so you could have as much as 1200 of those but some of those May own multiple properties right and then you have the the 80 to 100 managers of the multi-family um as far as some of the Bad actors I can tell you right now um just on the Fireside and I'm not speaking for the code side I I have eight properties I am triaging that's what I want to come through right now of enhanced enforcement just because of fire code violations that I know about in the moment so roughly 10 percent of the current uh multi-family complexes have significant fire issues that I'm concerned about oh yeah okay so how many of those eight is it the manager that is the issue and how many is it does it appear that is the property manager or I don't know both their partners in crime I don't know the council I'm a bit off the cuff on this I know I put it on the spot but I would tell you probably two-thirds are things that that could have been managed by the property manager but have gotten out of control there there's another quarter to a third are vast things like the replacement of the attic sprinkler system that they haven't followed through right that's not a manager problem when they have they've gotten bids and they won't approve it right that that's not their issue it's the the fire doors the trash chutes all those things I showed you that if they were managed and fixed as they were broken wouldn't have to be replaced and um so my off the cuff answer to you is about a a 60 or two-thirds to one-third roughly got it okay council member Schultz so another question so if we're looking at where it's 85 complexes but 1200 single family and the issues appear to be with multi-family complexes perhaps we don't include single family perhaps that's the step that we're looking for right now I I don't know I'm throwing that out there tell me Chief the pro or the con of that please Madame mayor members of the council uh I couldn't speak to the fire code issues in the single family because we don't get into Mr forslin could I can tell you that was a recommendation of the code code review task force that took discussion of where to land in the code review task force brought the recommendation that all property managers regardless of single unit or multi-family get licensed so obviously I'm more familiar and more aware of the issues in the multi-family dwellings and frankly those have the larger impact right someone not having something done there can impact more than one family not that each individual isn't important but when you start talking about the scale of the impact obviously the multi-family has a larger impact so right I don't know if Mr Forza do you have a sense of single families as far as life safety issues how many you would have or I think you're right about the numbers okay and as far as comparable conditions very similar to it they're all a single living unit so they're going to have Smalls would you come to the uh Podium and just so that everybody can hear you and see you speak man mayor council members uh we're looking at a lot the numbers that Chief gave were approximately the same they're I think very much along the lines what we we had talked about before single families are going to have a lot of the same attributes that a single apartment unit would have they're going to have smoke alarms they're going to have egress issues they're going to have those kind of things that we're going to look for just like um you know in a multi-family unit too so those would be of concern um you know one of the things that we really hoped with this too is we could use this as an educational piece as well this is what we want you when we go in there smokes are all working pathways are clear and reinforcing that idea over and over is very helpful okay thank you all right council member Schultz so I realize it's probably not 1200 individual owners like some there'll be there'll be some people that own like a couple properties and that type of thing um in those single family homes we're also looking at corporations that own yeah you know multiple multiples right um and sorry I'm kind of thinking out loud so I can get to get to this uh so I do understand the corporate aspect of that that this is now acting as like a large business Enterprise so even though the unit is single family the corporation is multi-family like you know what I'm saying and I know I'm legally wrong I know this um so but there's a difference between that and an Envision an individual owner like just a family that owns a couple even if they incorporate to protect assets and I don't know how to delineate between those or what the numbers are that we're talking about on that because some of this I you know and I get I get that there's no license and I or no fee and it's a four-hour education and and things like that um but now we're now we're looking at possibly taking away someone's retirement because that's that's how people do these investment properties um so I'm I'm having difficulty on these like just a person owning a couple homes and renting them out versus larger corporations that do this as a business and multi-family so I don't exactly have a question that's that's the one piece of this that I'm trying to puzzle out and figure out isn't it about holding everyone accountable and it isn't it about the life safety of the renters and uh and at this is what we're getting at is the the life safety of the people in our community so council member Workman um just to that point on a kind of circle back to where we started I I don't think BJ or Mr forsland are going to willy-nilly just pull a license um no I don't either you know and so it would take a dramatic yeah and it comes before disregard for the steps taken to get to the point of revocation um so if somebody's retirement was at risk it would have to be because they just said well I'm not you know I'm I'm not gonna do what you're telling me to do which isn't I know you know it's not going to be something as simple as a smoke detector I mean we're talking about major life safety issues here um so I understand what you're saying yeah but it's a slow moving process with steps for correction in between um so I know my thoughts of that council member Schultz I just think that I think when we're talking about doing like starting a licensing that could potentially affect a thousand or so people to where before this was something they weren't licensed to do their job and now we are creating an occupational license for that large of a number of people um it is a big change yeah like that that is a big change and this is an occupational license but also remember it has to come before us for that revocation uh to be Pro to be approved it doesn't just happen administratively uh city manager Lindbergh thank you madam mayor members of the council to councilmember Schultz's Point uh it's it was the recommendation of the code review task force to include both single and multi-family it is the council's prerogative you could you could very simply uh tonight split the two apart um uh or cover multi-family and not single family that is within the council's purview as long as this City attorney tells me that's okay Mr Shepard a mayor and Council I I think you could make that distinction uh on a reasonable basis I do want to uh to council member Schultz's Point as well to think about so some sort of mom and pop homeowners they're already going to be licensed as a a licensee rental so they're already on the hook for uh complying with the rental code yes it's just that because of this new Property Management scheme they might have be wearing two hats under the code one of which um is a license I have to pay for the other one they don't but they still have to go through the education but just wanted to make that point yeah and and to um city manager Lindbergh and also to Chief jungman's um comments this King uh from the uh the code review task force it was their recommendation to do everything and then I listened uh to uh Mrs Jensen and she says we're not doing enough and I always think about the people who live in those residents whether they are in multi-family and also in single family it is they who are who are our residents and tonight they don't have a voice this specific discussion and that uh we're their voice we've gone down this road before with all kinds of things and that's what we need to do uh chief uh Madam mayor members of the council is city manager Lindbergh said and see training Shepherd I would just if we split those two multi-family and single family I would just want to have Clarity if the council wants the single family to also have the education requirement whether you license them or not do you want whoever licenses them because we require either the owner or the manager to live within 75 miles so if they live out of state and they have someone else managing it do you want them to have the education requirement I just I just for sake of clarity moving forward whether you license them or not does the education requirement for the single family still stand I guess is the only question I would want some clarity on yeah well from my perspective we want the education if it's going to be split why it's about the health and safety of the people who are living there that at the end of the day that's what it's about council member Gustafson thank you madam mayor um to your point about the single family homes I worked with investors and Mom and Pop buyers for many many years in real estate and they buy those as Investments they buy those because there's passive income every month and they try to acquire as many as they can so that they can actually make a living off of that most of the single family ones that I've dealt with my experience have been pretty good about taking care of their properties not all of them you do have a couple out there that would do things the problem with the problem I see with the eliminating single family is we have a lot of REITs that own single families in this city that's what I'm starting yeah that's the big thing is we have a lot of REITs that are doing it and they're not going to do it and yeah we're kind of stuck and again I this goes back to the to me this just seems to be a continuing education ordinance is all we're doing here it's yeah make sure that you get best practices yeah and you get your license and and take care of your property most of the property when you talk to these Property Owners they rent they want to do the right thing I mean it's some of the bigger ones that aren't necessarily wanting to do that but that's their problem and I don't know how they get away with it but and the other thing is that we've had complaints from Neighbors from rental properties where they're not taking care of the yard and then they have all of the you know garbage all over the yard and it has an effect on the neighborhood so the thing is this is about education this is about making sure that the community uh as a whole is continuing to be vibrant yeah it's all about it's all about safety that's really yes we're concerned about the safety of people that are renting out here and they when you rent in this city you should have a reasonable expectation that you're going to be in a safe home it's going to be up the code as much as it has to be and you know I can't whether the cupboards are good or bad that's not what we're looking at we're looking at safety issues right now and that's all we've been looking at for many years in this city and so I think this path helps maintain our housing stock which we need to do yeah I mean we can't let our rentals go down because that's going to affect the single families and probably everyone in this room has lives close to a rental home in their neighborhood and they don't want to see that just turned to junk so we got to stay on top of that stuff all right members of the council if the deliberation satisfied I need the lady that wants to talk to you um okay come forward and you know I usually take when people sign up then I know who needs to speak but um give us your name and address for the record please my name is spewette Jefferson the address of my property is 14112 Park Avenue South in Burnsville so I am the mom-and-pop investor that council member Gustafson was just talking about um I'm a I'm a lawyer and I have owned single family homes in Burnsville for nearly two decades my personal code of ethics is that I will never rent a property that I would not live in myself which was just as well because I got divorced a lot of years ago now and I had to live in one of my properties and it was it was great until my husband was awarded the property along with a few others in the divorce settlement so that was that Daddy dog I agree with council member is it uh it's not shots um when you talked about how the focus should be on the violators and you know I I and I also wanted to address the display of the rental licenses as required by as I read it section 3-28-9g I completely agree with council member Schultz in objecting to the posting of the licenses in the home and so I have one rental property in the city of Burnsville it is a single family home and I have three rules for my tenants number one you have to take care of the property number two you got to pay your rent on time and number three do not cause trouble for the Neighbors because if you do you are out of here right those are material breaches of Miley's and I don't even have to wait until the end of the lease term to kick people out for those three things right and so my tenant today has a lovely home she takes great care of it it's beautiful chances are nobody who walks into that house would know that she was renting that house and she probably doesn't want people to know that right and so I would I think it would be a um and undue hardship for me to have to tell her that for the sake of a property inspection that's going to happen this one day for the other 365 days of the year she's got to post this thing in her house and I have lived in single-family homes Ogden Apartments and I expect I think you a few things like that in the common areas of apartment buildings just like you expect to see those license and inspection certificates when you walk onto an elevator but I've never lived in a in an apartment building where I've had to post that in my unit and so what I would suggest is you know I I understand the goal of it and I think the objective is to make sure that there is a license right not to make sure that everybody else who walks into this house can see it so my suggestion would be yes absolutely require the licenses you always have or at least as far as I can remember you have required the license um but perhaps if you're going to require a posting it would be more appropriate to have it posted in the public areas of multi-family units as opposed to the individual units themselves because somebody said you know your apartment is the same as your home I think that's true my home is my cocoon is my safe place and I don't want to see anything like that if I walk into my house and I I would hate for my tenant to have to be subjected to that simply because she can't afford to buy her home the way I can so the other thing I would like to address is the way I read the amendment 3-28-4-2 and this is the one that um uh uh wait hang on is that the right section I want to address the section that talks about the yes it is it reads a license no person may serve as a property manager for a rental unit within the city without first obtaining a license successfully completing a background check and paying a license fee so my questions really are around the background checks and um I'll just sort of rattle off the questions that came to my mind that I wasn't sure were adequately answered um so what is the purpose of the background check and what would it screen for and how would the information be used who would be responsible for conducting the background check if the property owner like me is the property manager then who conducts the background check and where is that information housed in order to protect the privacy of the subjects of the checks how long is that information retained how often do the managers have to be subjected to the background checks and if some adverse action is taken because of the background check results will the city then disclose that to the manager um and I understand the desire to address slumlords and personally I think you absolutely should um I was shocked by the the whoever it was who fraudulently changed the the label on the door that's horrible that's absolutely awful um and but as far as I know and I haven't been a criminal defense lawyer for a long time but being a slum Lord is not a crime right it's horrible but it's not a crime so it's not going to show up on a background check and so you're not going to be able to screen for that because I think that's part of the goal right you want good landlords and the other thing is I happen to be an employment lawyer these days and I'll spare you the history of how this came to be but the EEOC prohibits employers from discriminating against job candidates by denying them employment to uh if they have certain kinds of even felony convictions right and so although the city is not an employer it is a state actor and what you have here is you've got managers who are employed by multi-unit owners right and so I was I was concerned that depending on how this background check is used what you may be doing is you may be creating a situation where the property owner is required to hire a manager even if there are certain things that show up on their background check but then here comes the city and then penalizes that's a manager that then may not be able to actually conduct the job that they were that that the owner had to give them in the first place and there are good reasons for that right so if the felony conviction had nothing to do with the job they're doing and it wasn't recent and you know there are other parameters then people are allowed to hire candidates employees with convicted felonies so I was wondering if the city has thought through that part because I don't see it here and so I would encourage you before you put this background check requirement in place give some thought to what is it that you really want to accomplish and who is it that you really want to tailor this requirement to so that it does what you intend in the way that it should without discriminating against certain employees okay thank you for your remarks and I think I'm going to go to Mr Shepard I think on the background check we you might have come in a little later yes because that that was Miss Jefferson we've already discussed that that provision for background checks and the license fee is being stricken it was erroneously put into that section of the code yeah so it's good yeah yeah so you went through all of that but you might have come in uh after that was identified and stricken so it's not part of the ordinance okay okay thank you thank you okay before we vote yes please come and give us your name and address for the record my name is Dave better with her Steven Scott management we operated properly at 1701 Burnsville Parkway called Burnsville Parkway Apartments um we are a management company uh part of the founding members uh our investors in that property so they take great pride in it we are one of our big models the name of the property again is Burnsville Parkway the owner was very involved when we did the rental licensing and I thank you because a lot of the rental licensing came through uh the owner at that time yeah um and we and that's we're very involved and we would have loved to have a voice in um in creating this uh um ordinance that you're working on I think that we uh and I know that um many others that might not have understood that this was a possibility to be on a task force um would have liked that opportunity to be able to have our input um it's on the website so you can have someone from your organization be part of this test of course because I clarify that task force yeah that's dealing with all of our services it's not just houses it's about a two-year commitment to as well you never know I might have had somebody that would be interested I don't know if I would have been it's about the code in the city that that was colgated probably when the city was a Township and we were going through all of it well I kind of want to talk about we we one of our miles is we do the right thing and we do the right thing on a daily basis we do a fire residents for um owners for our co-workers and for our community um and we're very involved in our community and we take it great pride in and have any well-run building and that we we just had our inspection I think we got one one small thing that was found in our common areas and was corrected right away um but I've heard three to four different things about striking a couple different parts of this ordinance um also just you know some things that look like they need some more clarifications so I would really ask that you reconsider voting tonight and that you go back we do a little bit more work on this maybe we could work with the staff and help with cleaning up some of the the items that uh that have been addressed tonight so I would just just ask that that you uh step back for a minute review some of the comments that you've gotten tonight and maybe if if possible involves some of the players including residents um as I know you've talked about you speak for the residents well maybe they can speak some of them can speak for themselves they might have some feedback that you hadn't even thought of yet so maybe there's an opportunity to sit back talk this through a little bit more before you go on a boat so you object to the education process so achieve if you can put up the four things that uh here's what I don't I don't object to that but what I one thing I think that you're we're not considering is that you're you're asking um for us to do self-reporting uh we do a lot of reporting internally already yep it doesn't bother you that you need to self-report so that we could have so we know that when we send all those reports into your staff who's going to review those who's going to check them uh chief Madam mayor members of the council the multi-family self-inspection is a log that they keep on premise and when we come to do both the fire inspection and or the annual uh third of the units those inspectors can ask for those logs so it's not getting sent in to be because to me it just it sounded like there's probably going to be extra administrative burden and an extra expense and I'm assuming that the license fees I know they're like we're not going to have a license fee for a manager but we're going to have license fees to have a license for the to be able to occupy the building and those fees may be increased to help cover some of the costs I'm assuming no that's you might have come in late that has never been part of the discussion okay and there's no cost to the license for the managers what we are trying to get at is education continuous Improvement and making sure that there is a displacement plan in place if an incident happens so that our fire chief and all of our First Responders when they get there know that there is a plan and that we are not responsible for the displacement and the relocation of the residents so you may have come in a little later after the chief had given his full report but there's I mean it was very we've been working with this for a long time now uh the owner of your property was part of when we did the rental licensing and I think that was back in 2004 five five and then of course a lot of things continue to happen and we were the last resort and we did shut down and we're both a license for a property and that's because the residents that sounds like it might have some more they need to do that too so and we we do it in a very uh thoughtful way you know we we don't jump at it right away I was staff does a lot of work to try to get people to comply fix things make sure that the Health and Welfare of our residents your renters our residents in the city of Burnsville are cared for all right well thank you thank you okay is there anyone before we vote okay come give us your name and address for the record my name is Tracy Wetzel and our current property is 2404 Highland View Avenue South and I've had several rental properties in the city over the last 11 years or so when I started it was basically you had to have a pulse to be a landlord and now it's there was then there was a next tier and there was a next year so it sounds like this is kind of like a new phase and I think that um a very extreme comparison but like gun control I would say plenty of people would be for Banning assault rifles but it's the idea of it starts there and then it just continues so it just feels like I feel as a mom-and-pop landlord that um it's changed so much over the years yes it's for the better I when we renew our license she's always like oh you're the best what we do a great job however it's where does it like it just is the progression I think that some people are worried about of right now there's no license fee well before there wasn't a there's no license for the fee for the manager right now but there wasn't a license for the fee previously there was no inspections previously so it's just the idea of what type of progression will happen and then the other piece is just on the educational video or training or whatever will there be separate trainings set up for multi-family versus single family since it will be such different standards of I mean it's kind of two completely different ball games of what you're looking at so those are cute finally uh Madam mayor members of the council we haven't decided on that actually a lot of the things are the same you know whether the sleeping units is a single family or multi-family having a smoke alarm and some of those so there is a fair amount of overlap but at a staff level we haven't decided if we delineate between those or not so thank you thank you um Mrs Collins I think thank you Madame mayor city council I just one of the points was I was going to confirm that yes there's no change to the license fees per this ordinance and the second thing I wanted to make sure the council was aware of is that the city staff has sent out a notice to everyone who has a rental license to their email address letting them know before this council meeting as of last Thursday when the council packets went out and before every code review task force meeting as well so if some of you did not get that notice please make sure that you connect with the rental license office because we may have a wrong email address for you okay sir you wanted to speak and now give us your name and address for the record for the correct item that I think you're interested in okay yeah Ron Olson 13202 James Avenue South uh I'm a mom-and-pop director okay and uh I just want to keep that in mind and doing these amendments or regulation that some of us and I have other friends too that uh depend on one rental yeah for uh some retirement income and uh I just want to say you know be careful about the regulations because I want to tell you a story that happened to me not too long ago where I had some health issues and I couldn't repo reply to the to pay the fee my rent the license fee and health issues and I missed it upon finding out about it I paid it I provided documentation but they still sent out award for my arrest and I was arrested in Minneapolis and spent the night in the Minneapolis jail not only to go to court and the judge said what are we doing here he threw it out all the fines all the fees so I want you to be careful was that from the city of Burnsville yes this was some city of Burnsville your county attorney even said I don't know what you're doing here I'd presented this stuff I still have documentation of where I was and my health issues and when I found out about it and I paid by fee and was caught up and I said can you just forget the court date no no I still had to go to court after being in them the jail was Minneapolis jail okay so I just wanted you to be careful about well where where some of the schools yeah we'll look into that issue okay thank you thank you all right members of the council where are you at at this point I think we'll just have to let staff take a look at that and find out what what's going on yeah uh councilmember Gustafson I I think we could talk about this all night we're not going to have a perfect ordinance out of this and my experience since 2005 with rental ordinance is it continues to evolve and if things aren't working we can make changes and if they are we don't have to make changes but we have to start doing something somewhere here because it's not going to be perfect and I don't think we should throw out the whole ordinance because you got a couple pieces that might feel a little off okay moving forward okay do you want to separate out the multi-family from the single family you are on the task force not necessarily no I think you want to have keep it as the recommendation we're talking about it's an educational ordinance that's all it is it's just best practices okay so there's a motion council member Gustafson is there a second yeah I think Madame mayor turned it into a formal one I think I'm in support of it council member gossip said you make the motion okay is there a second I second the motion and um will you accept an amendment uh as the maker of the motion uh and the amendment is uh the friendly I'm asking for a friendly Amendment and that would be to strike posting the license strike the background check strike the license fee for the manager okay there is no fee for the manager and there isn't a background it's written in here so all of those that we had talked about and that was yeah but everything stands it's only those details on in the ordinance right okay as a maker yeah Mr Shepard I think I heard that he accepted the friendly Amendment he did okay yeah we have a second I seconded yeah for the friendly event but all we're doing is we it's the things that we had already talked about no background checks yes yeah there's no license fee and no problem there's no fee because it was always no fee posting in Residence in single family in the single family okay or in inside the apartment well I don't think I I don't think that she had anything to do inside the apartments it's only in the common areas of the multi-family house that's what we're amending yes we need to make the amendment to get to that language understood okay sir so it's only in the common areas and I believe Chief that's what your report was um Madame mayor members of the council originally it just said in the dwelling unit and then the common areas of the multi-family building building I think we're clear now that it's nothing for single family and in the common area of the multi-family so I think we're clear okay perfect very good okay there's a motion and a second all in favor please say aye aye aye opposing a an emotion carries thank you and that was for title three Now we move on to title four mattamere I have to excuse myself for the rest of the night I have a personal commitment that I have to make I'm excusing myself in the meeting okay and um as council member Phoebe thank you yeah you are excused thank you okay thank you uh we now move on to uh the next part of uh the ordinance and this is title IV building regulations and Title Five fire regulations Mrs Collins yes thank you madam mayor we did have um title four and five group together tonight and I have in here somewhere where is it we've got here a list of the significant changes to title four and Title Five we do have a couple of our staff subject matter experts here there's something in particular you'd like to have a question to otherwise I'm happy to stand for questions members of the council council member Schultz all right let me pull her up because I jumped the gun before okay so when we're looking at uh 4-2-7 design standards uh the language stricken um took out on a before it said all public pools shall be designed standards of the international building code or the Minnesota blah blah blah um and then it updates the building code of that um why are we going to why are we striking public council members uh Public Schools pools are licensed by the Minnesota Department of Health they're also they're also subject to their internal plan review the actual construction is under the con the Minnesota building code okay so this is talking about new construction which is why you're saying all pools correct it would be to new construction okay so existing we're not changing anything with existing that's my understanding Noah because existing pools would have already been reviewed and licensed by the state of Minnesota and that includes private ones in people's backyards no no public pools only okay that's just what I'm making sure is very very clear because that is one of the questions that I I received so there was we had a homeowner having a moment of panic right okay okay anything else I don't believe so but let me just check no I have no further questions okay if there are no further questions uh members of the council are you ready to uh vote on title four and Title Five and accept um the changes move to approve second there's a motion in a second all in favor please say aye aye aye opposed say nay and the motion carries and I now need a motion for the summary ordinance uh so moved second there's a motion and a second all in favor please say aye aye aye opposing a an emotion carries all right thank you everyone and thank you uh Chief gentleman and Mr forsland and Mrs Collins thank you attorney Shepherd for all of your hard work on all of this and also a big thank you to the old review task force for all of the work that they continue to do every month and all the reading that they put into evaluating all of these codes