Based on the context provided and the phonetic clues in the transcript, here is the formatted transcript with speaker names. **Note on unidentified names:** Some names mentioned in the roll call (Guesmi, Grot, Londelle) and a staff member named "Neil" were not on your provided list but appear to be active participants. I have included them as they were addressed. *** [0:28] **[Silence/Environmental Noise]** [4:54] **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Call to order a City of Cannon Falls City Council meeting for Tuesday, February 6th, 2024. If I could get a roll call, please. [5:05] **City Clerk Sara Peer:** Guesmi? **Council Member Guesmi:** Here. **City Clerk Sara Peer:** Grot? **Council Member Grot:** Here. **City Clerk Sara Peer:** Jeppesen? **Council Member Ryan Jeppesen:** Here. **City Clerk Sara Peer:** Johnson? **Council Member Johnson:** Here. **City Clerk Sara Peer:** Kronenberger? **Council Member Laura Kronenberger:** Here. **City Clerk Sara Peer:** Londelle? **Council Member Londelle:** Here. **City Clerk Sara Peer:** Montgomery? **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Here. Please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance. 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. I get an approval of tonight's agenda? [5:34] **Council Member Londelle:** So moved. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Motion from Londelle. Second? **Council Member Johnson:** Second. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Second from Johnson. All those in favor? **Council:** Aye. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Opposed? Carries. We're going to skip public input; nobody signed up for that here tonight. That leads us straight to number six, our public hearing. The resolution 2737 certifying unpaid utility charges to be collected with taxes. So we will open the public hearing. Would anybody like to speak on unpaid utility charges collected by taxes? Going once, going twice, third and final call. Public hearing is closed. Council discussion, resolution 2737? [6:21] **Council Member Grot:** Just hearing, yep, one question: is it through the end of 2025, not 2024? [6:26] **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Okay, I would take a motion to approve certifying unpaid utility charges to be collected by taxes. **Council Member Ryan Jeppesen:** So moved. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Motion by Jeppesen. **Council Member Grot:** I’ll second. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Second by Grot. All those in favor? **Council:** Aye. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Opposed? Carries. Gets us to the consent agenda. Consent agenda items may be adopted under one motion as presented or may be removed for discussion and resolution as Council business. Item A: Just and correct claims, the accounting period ending on January 31st, 2024. B: Meeting minutes for January 16th, 2024 City Council. C: Second reading and adoption of Ordinance 402 and summary of publication, an ordinance amending the city code Title 3 relating to fees, charges, and rates. Item D: Resolution 2734 adopting presidential nomination primary election judges for 2024 and setting hourly wages. Item E: Resolution 2735 accepting a monetary donation of $700 from the HLE Foundation to the library. Item F: Approve 2024 contracted police service rates. Item G: Approve hire of unscheduled part-time employee to the ambulance. And Item H: Approve March 5th, 2024 city council meeting cancellation. Is there anything the council would like to pull down? [8:00] **Council Member:** I'm going to pull down C, Matt. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Pull down C. That will become Item C for Council business: the fees and charges. Is there anything else the council would like pulled down? Hearing none, I would seek a motion to approve the consent agenda. **Council Member Johnson:** So moved. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Motion from Johnson. **Council Member Grot:** Second. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Second from Grot. All those in favor? **Council:** Aye. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Opposed? Carries. That gets us to Council Business Item A tonight: disposal of defibrillators. Chief McCormick, if you'd like to speak on this. [8:18] **Police Chief Jeff McCormick:** Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So the police department received new AEDs and we have repurposed three of our AEDs. One is going to go here into Chambers and then two are going to go into Public Works facilities. We still have three of the units. However, today when I was parsing them out to where they were going, I discovered that one is not passing. Put new batteries in, it would turn green and then it would turn red. So I do not know if it's bad pads or a bad unit. So right at the moment we have three—two I know are functional—and so what I'm looking for from Council is what do you want to do to dispose of them? They're just sitting around in my office. And now that we've figured out what could be used within the city, we still have some to get rid of. The vendor that provided us the AEDs will take them back, refurbish them, and then move them out to organizations or nonprofits. The other option would be dispersing it here within the city to nonprofits or churches, and the third would be just sending them to an e-recycler for recovery/disposal that way. If the Council wants to disperse them locally, just give me some guidance so I don't have somebody complaining that "well, I wanted one but I didn't get it." So if it's, you know, what ranking you would want to do as far as distributing it within organizations. [9:56] **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Good discussion for the council. I'm leaning towards keeping it in the community like you said, to nonprofit organizations. The only thing I can come up with is allow a time period for them to show interest and then once we get all the groups, maybe have the Police Commission sit down and look at who's interested and try to divvy them up. I don't know if we have a way to—I mean if it's just going to be a lottery style if they want to put their name in the hat. How many were there? [10:23] **Police Chief Jeff McCormick:** There's three, but only two are functioning at the moment. I'm going to have to do some more troubleshooting on the third one to see if I can bring it to life. **Council Member Diane Johnson:** My husband thought to put new pads on it. **Police Chief Jeff McCormick:** Yep, that's the next thing I'm going to try. **Council Member Diane Johnson:** Yeah, he uses them, so he might know. **Police Chief Jeff McCormick:** I don't know. I mean I'd hate to say write a letter and then we decide. Lottery if people are interested. If there's three, give them all away. I know there's one church that's interested at the moment, there might be others. They contacted us before knowing that we were going to be doing this. [10:55] **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Anything from the Council? Direction for what to do with the AEDs? **Council Member:** I think it'd be nice to keep them local. Donate it to somewhere in town that would like them. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** How do you guys feel about a two-week or a month-long period to see if people show their interest? **Council Member:** I think, you know, given the fact that it wouldn't even make the Beacon until next week, probably three to four weeks would be more appropriate. And then with that, the caveat that if we get no takers, then we would dispose of them in whatever way your alternate plan would be. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** We get three requests, we've got three that are working, then we don't need to worry about it. We get multiple requests and we route it into the Police Commission. We get one request and no others, then what you had mentioned with the company that can refurbish? [11:45] **Police Chief Jeff McCormick:** Okay. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Does that work for the Council? **Council:** Yeah, works for me. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** With that said, I could take a motion to approve keeping the AEDs local to those interested in a four-week period, and if not, the rest of what Chief McCormick had stated. **Council Member Lisa Zimmerman:** So moved. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Motion from Lisa. Do I have a second? **Council Member Diane Johnson:** Second. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Second from Diane. Any further discussion? All those in favor? **Council:** Aye. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Opposed? Carries. That brings us to Resolution 2736 approving plans and specifications for ordering advertisement for bids for the 72nd Avenue Way Improvement Project. Bill isn't here tonight, but I see we got representation from WHKS if you'd like to take this one. [12:35] **Darren Scking (WHKS Engineering):** Thank you, Mayor. So yes, Bill Angerman was not available to be here tonight, so I'm Darren Scking from WHKS. Back in November, the Council had voted to proceed with the 72nd Avenue project, so we have completed those plans. What City staff is requesting from the Council is to pass a resolution approving plans and then going out for an advertisement for bids. This would be an advertisement that appears in the local newspaper and would also be posted online. Contractors would be able to see it and then obviously bid on it. We would be taking bids on March 13th and then coming to the March 19th meeting to present those bids. At that meeting, you would be looking to set your assessment amounts and then following that, about another month later, you'd have your assessment hearing. That's the process going forward. But for tonight, we're just requesting that City Council act on the resolution approving the plans and advertising for bids. [13:38] **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Any questions for Darren from the Council? **Council Member Diane Johnson:** So, the cover letter kind of looks like the project will be assessed to the adjacent benefiting properties, but we still take into consideration our whole prior conversation on how we were going to do that more fairly? **Darren Scking (WHKS Engineering):** Yeah, I believe so. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Correct. So what was discussed at the Council Workshop, we will come back at that March 19th meeting and apply that discussion to the assessment, and then you would then be able to act on it or make changes if you wanted to at that 19th meeting. **Council Member Diane Johnson:** Thank you, that's all. [14:46] **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** All right, any other questions or comments? If not, I'd seek a motion to approve Resolution 2736. **Council Member Guesmi:** Motion. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Motion from Guesmi. Second? **Council Member Ryan Jeppesen:** Second. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Second from Jeppesen. Any further discussion? All those in favor? **Council:** Aye. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Opposed? Carries. Brings us to Item C: the second reading and adoption of Ordinance 402, the summary of publication and ordinance amending the city code for related fees and charges and rates. When Derek brought this up last week about the on-sale liquor license, I kind of did some poking around town. On average, these bars are paying like $15,000 in property taxes, $600 to $700 in water bills a month. I was just thinking like Derek said, if we could drop their permit fees down, at least it's helping them out a little bit. January is a tough time of year for businesses too. Is that possible, Neil, to do stuff like that? [15:43] **Staff Member (Neil):** Okay. I wouldn't—I would recommend that you adopt this ordinance for the second reading simply because of water bills, and then we can work on that after the fact. Like we talked about at the last meeting, we’ve got the sexual-orientated business fees to discuss and the liquor license. I have done some research on what the area towns have got for their fees, so I did put it on the Finance agenda for next Monday. But I would recommend approving these fees and then we can work on lowering the ones that you want to talk about. I'd hate to—it would jeopardize another month's worth of water bills that we wouldn't get our increase on. [16:26] **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Gotcha. Okay. All right, any other questions? **Council Member Diane Johnson:** Yeah, go ahead. Looking at both our sewer charges and water charges, we really do seem to over-exceed when it comes to a comparison to Zumbrota, Pine Island, and Northfield. Northfield normally seems to be way ahead of us on fee structure except when it comes to water and sewer. We're getting hit with a lot, and I guess I would still like us to come more in conformity with some of the surrounding communities. I look at my water, sewer, storm sewer bill and it just, to me, seems incredibly high. And now I look at what Zumbrota, Pine Island, and Northfield people are paying and I'm thinking, yeah, it is high. Perhaps not for the first 400 cubic feet, but once you go past that, it just... so if we're looking at on-sale liquor fees, I would also like us to revisit water charges. And again, our hookup fees are more than the surrounding communities. If we want businesses to come to Cannon Falls and stay in Cannon Falls, we need to keep our fees especially in line with surrounding communities. [18:50] **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Would this also be something that we could address—not that's included in the rates and fees and all those things, right? **Council Member Diane Johnson:** Right. And actually, I'm thinking in addition to Finance, could we have a work session on this whole thing so that more Council [is involved]? **Council Member:** The fees we're voting on soon—isn't the only major change the water? So why are we—if we're going to vote this in tonight then we're going to have another meeting to talk about water again? Didn't we just have a meeting to approve these 1% or whatever it is? **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** This is the second reading. **Staff Member (Neil):** This is the second, correct. **Council Member:** I didn't like it the first time around and you guys know that. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** We approved these rates in the budget. [20:11] **Council Member Laura Kronenberger:** Got to be a little careful, a little after the fact here. I think what I hear is we already approved that we're going to increase these fees; we've talked about it several times. I agree that you just move forward with this. That being said, if we believe that our—we're charging too much in water—then let's talk about that in 2024. Maybe that is a work session thing that we need to do. One thing that I would caution is, I agree our water bills are high. I hear it from people all the time. But what I caution people on is when you look at one-to-one comparisons on something like water, you're not looking at the whole picture. What's their tax rate? Maybe they pay more in taxes and they pay less in water, and we pay less in taxes and higher in water. You just have to be really careful looking at a bigger picture; a strict comparison sometimes is not accurate. Now, your WAC and SAC fees, sure, maybe we need to be a little bit more comparable. Again, what are the other fees associated? I don't feel like you can look at just one piece. [21:47] **Staff Member (Neil):** I'll give you kind of an example of how the ebb and flow of water and sewer rates go between towns. It really depends on if you've done a sewer upgrade and you've spent millions of dollars. Your water rates or your sewer charges are going to go up to make that payment. All councils, no matter where they're from, don't want to raise water rates. So they wait and they wait, and then when the time comes to do a major upgrade, guess what? You guys saw it here 20 years ago and your fees hit the roof. People go crazy. Small 3% increments—I've done that my whole career, you usually don't get a lot of repercussion. Jed asked me yesterday, we got a $35,000 heat exchanger heater to put in the sewer plant. We got to be careful on reducing rates; inflation is eating us alive. But getting back to the upgrades: Zumbrota—they call it the North Zumbrota Regional Facility—they're working on getting a $40 million loan. Their rates are going to go up a lot because they got to pay for it. They haven't had an upgrade for 25 years. It's coming. So be a little careful; you don't know what the other towns are up to. Some are going to experience an increase in rates simply because they've got to fix their wastewater plants, build a tower, or drill a well. That stuff all costs money. [23:44] **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Just how much did it cost to paint our tower here last year? But for some CARES money, we'd have had to cut that check. We got to be careful as we move forward. You can do a study on it, you can spend $15,000 to estimate what your rate should be, but I think we're pretty close. [24:07] **Council Member Laura Kronenberger:** Does our rates—the Public Works budget—and I should know, I'm sorry I don't know that off the top of my head—what we're charging now includes putting money away so that when we have a $35,000 expense we can just pay it? Or if we have $100,000 we can just pay it versus having to go get a loan or bond? **Staff Member (Neil):** Correct. And not only that, I know we've been on the other end of that and it's a lot more fun to be on this end. Although, bumping at 3%—comparing to other communities—we're prepared. A lot of them, when they come to that fork in the road, they're going to say, "Well, we don't have any in our fund now," so it's going to be 100% financed and their rates are going to be over the top of ours. It leapfrogs. Their time's coming. [25:35] **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Any further discussion for the second reading of Ordinance 402? I would seek a motion to approve the second reading and adoption of Ordinance 402. **Council Member Ryan Jeppesen:** So moved. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Motion from Jeppesen. **Council Member Guesmi:** Second. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Second from Guesmi. All those in favor? **Council:** Aye. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Opposed? Carries. That brings us to reports. Chamber is not here. EDA had a meeting but we were not present. Police committee, is there anything you'd like to address, Chief? [26:15] **Police Chief Jeff McCormick:** The Police Commission met on the second. The first item on the agenda was cannabis. The last council meeting there was a moratorium in front of this body; it did not pass, it ended up at a tie. So the Police Commission has directed me to move forward with putting together research on regulation, mirroring our liquor ordinance, structuring with a matrix, that type of thing. I'm also doing research on the license types—the state has, I believe, 16 license types—and so we're going to look at that, work with Staff relative to the zoning side, where they could be located, etc. It's much more of an issue than just enforcement; it's licensing, zoning, all this other stuff. It'll be coming back to the Police Commission as research gets put together. The second agenda item was just an update: Officer Fox is in the final stage of field training called "Shadow Phase." We expect that probably by the second third of the month he will be out on his own. [28:01] **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Thank you, Chief. Jed, anything from you? **Public Works Director Jed Petersen:** Nothing at this time. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** All right. Anything else from our engineers? [28:08] **Darren Scking (WHKS Engineering):** Yep, just wanted to give a Council update. We had our pre-construction meeting on the 2024 Street project. We met with City staff and the contractor today. With the nice warm weather, everyone thinks they can get started, so their first thought is to start doing some tree clearing by the city pond site. Once weather officially becomes spring, then they'll start doing utility work, but as of right now, it'll be just clearing and grubbing. [28:59] **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Thank you. Chief, anything else you'd like to add? **Police Chief Jeff McCormick:** Nope. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Sarah? Neil? All right, council members. We'll start over here. Derek? **Council Member Guesmi:** Nothing. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Diane? **Council Member Diane Johnson:** I think the Bomber dance team is going to sectionals—whatever it’s called—this Saturday, so good luck to them. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Awesome. Steve? **Council Member:** Nothing. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Lisa? [29:32] **Council Member Lisa Zimmerman:** Is there an update on The Terrace at all? Kind of forgot about them. **Police Chief Jeff McCormick:** So, the blue tarp is gone. Lieutenant Berg was able to finally reach the owner of The Terrace. He indicated he was coming to town and had hired a contractor. We know the contractor was working; they were collecting the tarps, getting them off the sides of the buildings, and boarded up the broken windows. I know the owner was going to be here, I believe it was Tuesday, but he never made contact with us. Public Works and my officers noticed a vehicle out in front of it. So at the moment, it seems to have been addressed. I did take updated photos and provided that to our City Attorney. Should problems develop in the future, we have references. **Council Member Lisa Zimmerman:** Well, good. [30:18] **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** All right. Ryan, anything you've got? **Council Member Ryan Jeppesen:** Nothing. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Nothing too exciting. Next Wednesday morning I'll do the "State of the City" with the Chamber breakfast. Other than that, thank you for holding down the fort while I was gone last meeting; I appreciate that. Thank you very much. So, I would take a motion to adjourn. **Council Member Chad Johnson:** So moved. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Motion from Johnson. Second? **Council Member Laura Kronenberger:** Second. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** Second from Laura. All those in favor? **Council:** Aye. **Mayor Matt Montgomery:** We are adjourned.