good evening ladies and gentlemen it is 5 30 and i'll call this work session of the burnsville city council to order and if the city clerk would note on the record that all members of the city council are present except for councilmember workman i'm sure that he will be here momentarily i have not heard from him and our uh work sessions are informal and we go directly to our agenda but i'd like to first of all inform everyone that tonight's meeting is being conducted both in person and online city council members and our staff are in the council chambers practicing social distancing members of the public may attend in person if they like otherwise the public can watch this meeting online at burnsvillemn.gov slash meetings or comcast channel 16 or 8 59. the public can also still participate through zoom by joining us at zoom dot us slash join or call 651-372-8299 and more information is available on our meetings web page and in the council agenda packet please note there is an audio delay if you are watching us on tv or online so if you speak please mute your video broadcast first if zoom meetings attendees experience audio issues we ask you to leave the meeting and log back in this usually resolves the issue okay our first item this evening is the livable communities act affordable housing goals and jenny faulconer our community development director is going to be teeing this item up and then introducing our guest miss faulkner thank you madam mayor members of the council to tee this up i just wanted to put up a quick presentation um to let you know what the ask is tonight and the ask tonight is to adopt a resolution opting in to the livable communities act program um housing let's see here anyways it's on my next life and we can opt in anytime but if we don't opt in we're not eligible for some grant opportunities so um to opt in we need to adopt a resolution in november and just so you know the grant process generally begins in may and applications are due in november so if we don't opt in now we would lose an opportunity to opt in let's say in january or february for funding for 2021. so timing is important um the goal for us for that planning period uh 2021 to 2030 is 146 to 266 affordable housing units and our life cycle goal is 900 so that's what we would be committing to and for reference in our 2040 comp plan we indicated that there was the opportunity for up to 266 new affordable units possible and 584 new units overall and that's based on the development and redevelopment potential when we look at kind of where development and redevelopment could happen at those higher densities that's how those numbers came to be ms faulkner in in reading our comp plan that includes all of the adopted plans for the burnsville shopping center area and uh the proposed minnesota river quadrant i've met in the next 30 years when the comp plan was approved only part of the burnsell center shopping area was was re-guided to mix not the entire thing after we did the study after the comp plan was adopted then we went back and redid the whole thing so this our comp plan numbers are a couple of years older than i would say where current policy is at and where when you just look at the number of apartment units in the queue in the last year and coming next year we are going to exceed 584 units since we adopted the comp plan even though this planning period is up until 2040. there's just been a lot of changes in development opportunity here more than we expected when we set out to write that plan four years ago yeah so the other part of that my question also has to do with the existing affordable units that we have now that's calculated into that number no these are new units madam mayor okay new units we do get credit for our existing um naturally occurring affordable housing and new units brought on in our housing performance okay yeah i thought that was but i wanted to make sure that it's clear for our listening public as well yes so the discussion this evening we have tara beard with us she's the livable communities manager at the met council and the question before you to staff is does the council want to adopt a resolution electing to participate in the local housing incentive program under lca for 2021 to 2030. so that's the the question before you and with that i'm going to set up uh miss beard's presentation and hand it over to her okay welcome thank you yeah elizabeth i had a question for you yes councilmember gustafson jenny could you give us a little background in this livable communities as it relates to the heart of the city and how that all came about yeah because i was one of those people who helped put this livable community's act in place back in 1995. thank you okay well i was not around in 1995 good thing madam mayor was but she was on the on the group that did create the program back then and so um we did receive two grants lca grants boy i want to say 2000 and 2002. tara knows um four heart of the city for land acquisition um at the time when we did and that's where nicholas commons park and the aim center was the old aaa building if you remember that um and then also we bought land where the parking the first parking ramp is off of pillsbury avenue so we use the grants for that when we got the grants we made a commitment as part of that that 20 of the housing in part of the city would be considered affordable and we have exceeded that goal with what was constructed and with market rate naturally occurring affordable units just given the high density and the rents and selling prices of some of the condos so that's hopefully that answers your question but we have been benefactors of this grant program in the past i guess i'm getting to i don't think the heart of the city would have happened without that grant you would receive four million dollars that was that was how much we received those two grants what a big amount of money we received to the city yeah council member gustafson we also received a grant well we worked in partnership with the dakota county cda and presbyterian homes for the redevelopment of the valley ridge shopping center yeah um that received some funds as well if i recall correctly that would have been about 2008 2009 something like that um jenny did we also get some funds for the deck um would that have been the pre-development funds from 2018. it may have been there's no development in 2018 yeah so we we got a lot of money through the livable communities act yes and we've gotten planning grants from the met council yeah as well for our tod ordinance i think that was the last most recent one that we have so yeah that's okay thank you james thank you okay welcome hello okay thank you for your report i i am really happy to be here it was really exciting to change out of my yoga pants for the first time in six months and feel like i actually work a real job so this is a fun opportunity um so thank you so much i really am always so grateful when communities want to learn a little bit more because it is really easy to kind of get lost in the weeds and sometimes misunderstand or or just you know so then you hear one thing somewhere and think that must be the truth and um so i really appreciate the opportunity to share with you today um how we come up with some of the numbers um that are required in the statutes both the land planning act statute and the livable communities act statute for in terms of affordable housing i've been at the council for almost seven years but i've only been managing the livable communities act group for about 10 months um the long tenured manager paul burns retired in uh november and i uh was promoted but prior to that i was uh doing uh housing uh policy analysis so i was um the staff working on the housing policy plan and coming up with the methodology for the affordable housing allocation that affordable housing goals are based on we're going to get to all this so just to say that um i've only been in this role for so long but i've been doing a lot of this work for for a good couple of years um so as i'm sure most of you know the the livable communities act is a voluntary grant program adopted by the legislature in 1995 um and the three high level goals and purposes for all the programs within livable communities act are to support living wage jobs a full range of housing options throughout the region and compact and interconnected development really trying to take advantage of infrastructure and transit and support it with denser development and participants or applicants must be units of local government so just to be clear um that counties can apply uh for livable communities funds however the city on behalf of which the or the city where whatever they're doing is located must be a participating community for them to be able to apply so we have three active accounts within livable communities the tax-based revitalization account we call tbra which is soil remediation and investigation so it's a brownfield cleanup grant and we partner with deed and um in hennepin and ramsey counties with those county brownfield cleanup funds and for that reason it's important sometimes for folks to realize that you must be a liberal community exact participant to receive those deed funds as well so that's an important consideration too sometimes for folks that think well we probably wouldn't ever apply to lca but if you think you might apply to deed for any brownfield cleanup it would also be a requirement the local housing incentive account is the one account within livable communities that is specifically and purposefully for the creation of affordable housing and for that reason we partner with minnesota housing as one of the funding partners of their consolidated rfp which comes out once a year and includes all sorts of affordable housing resources such as tax low income housing tax credits housing infrastructure bonds and other funding that minnesota housing and their partners have the livable communities demonstration account is really the the kind of the big big kahuna um and and not only because the uh it has the the highest kind of allocation of funding available to it per the statutory guidelines um but also because it's um it can kind of be the most exciting one and it's the one we sort of you know versus local housing incentives account where we partner with a lot of other folks that are actually bringing a lot more money to the table we have a lot of ownership over the lcda accounts and um so we take a lot of pride in kind of making sure we're getting it right we did create in 2011 a subcategory within lcda for areas that are within a half-mile radius of high use transit station areas whether lrt brt or park and rides and both lcda and lcda tod include pre-development programs for usually a smaller amount of monies available for some pre-development feasibility studies community engagement etc held separately in a separate rfp and process from the development programs the uh 2020 funding awards totaled uh over 24 million dollars and we usually uh have between 20 and 25 million um total across all these accounts in a given year so it's quite a quite a sum of money that adds up since uh lca was passed and we've been awarding grants we have made over a thousand grand awards totaling over 400 million dollars and so this map just gives you kind of a hot spot with the blue dots idea of where um awards have been made we currently have 97 cities that participate um in this current decade of 2011 to 2020 which is um uh which is expiring at the end of this year all but 13 have received some sort of lca funding since 1996. so it's been a widely used program although unsurprisingly you can see that there have been more awards the further into the center center of the region over 49 000 housing units have been built using and leveraging lca funds and over 25 000 of those were affordable uh over 56 000 jobs have been preserved or created and over 20 2400 acres of soil have been cleaned up so we're very proud and very grateful for the opportunity to do this one thing paul burns would always say that i'd like to say too is that um when we go to like national conferences and speak to our peers which is admittedly a small group of like regional government agencies they just their jaws just drop that we have this that we have this tool that we have this program and that we're able to um you know provide opportunities for cities to do you know to make their visions come true for development i mentioned that we currently have 97 cities participating here is a map to show you who is currently participating and um as mayor coutts knows there are some requirements we talk a lot at the council about carrots and sticks and lca is a great example of carrots um and here is the uh but but it doesn't come for free so the the requirements that cities have to agree to in order to participate include adopting affordable and life cycle housing goals which is the particular requirement we're going to talk about today that they establish a housing action plan and that is something that statute says has to be developed by june 30th of the year after signing up to participate so in so your housing action plan would be due by june 30th um what we are advising folks on is that given the incredibly intensive work we've all been doing on comprehensive planning the housing element of your comprehensive plan assuming it's complete and consistent with council policy is sufficient to show direction of your housing action plan it's also really hard to show action when you just started you know so one of the things that will also comprise your causing action plan will be starting in 2022 an annual housing production survey we send all communities jenny is probably familiar with it gets filled out we will ask a couple additional questions to talk about how it's going meeting goals what barriers have been to toward meeting the adopted goals and if there's anything the council can do to help with achieving those goals so that combination of responding to that survey starting in 2022 on an annual basis and a housing element in your comprehensive plan that's consistent with with council policy those two things comprise your housing action plan for the decade film that's weird we're in redevelopment and a lot of this is contingent upon developers and financing yes so is that taken into consideration when you're looking at meeting goals or delay in goals being met because we don't have any land raw land so most of what we have on the books is redevelopment mayor coutts thank you um the uh there is no penalty if you aren't meeting your goals um there is no um uh uh sort of shaming or anything like that we use the survey to track how successful communities are being because we want to help if they are having trouble and if there are any resources or tools out there that could be used um but the idea of adopting affordable life cycle housing goals on a decennial basis right to know what's going to be possible over 10 years is next to impossible so we do our best at the high level to kind of set a reasonable expectation but there's no sort of penalty for not reaching goals because we all know that we can't control everything that would go into them getting built we kind of make our best guess yeah because we don't own the land right and then the final kind of requirement from statute for participation in liberal communities is that you spend what we lovingly call el hoa the affordable and life cycle housing opportunity amount and that is a statutory defined equation based on your property tax capacity and every city to be in good standing for participation needs to spend at least 85 percent of that amount toward uh creating affordable or life cycle housing opportunities to be in good standing on an annual basis so every august we send you a letter telling you what the calculation of your aho amount amount is for the next year so that you can plan but i will say that we do use any local tax sent to county cdas so dakota county your contribution to dakota county and the share of that that goes towards creating affordable housing opportunities counts towards your alhoa burnsville has never had any trouble meeting its el hoa we we monitor that as a question in that survey that i mentioned annually we ask you know have you spent this much but sometimes if we can get from the county that your contribution already exceeded your hoe we don't even ask the question because we've already documented that you've met it so why do cities have to re-enroll now well of those three requirements um the adoption of affordable and life cycle housing goals is done decennially and so your current adopted goals expire and every lca participants current adopted and life cycle housing affordable and life cycle housing goals expire at the end of this year so to be meeting the statutory requirement to have adopted goals they need to be adopted before the end of this year and statute calls out november 15th as the deadline for participation in the next year so if for some reason you didn't adopt goals by november 15th of this year you wouldn't be eligible to apply in 2021 but as long as you adopted them by november 15th of next year you could be participating again by 2022. um let's see i think i just said all those things so oh and save the day so this slide is talking about a different housing measure because it's the basis of the measure for affordable housing goals and so the next part of the presentation is to kind of share with you all where these numbers come from and your goals are calculated based on your future need for affordable housing so i'm going to start with sharing how we calculated that need and there was a great question at the beginning about existing units and and that counting and so i want to be clear that the the estimated number of additional households that will need affordable housing in 2021 to 2030 they don't exist yet there are projections of additional households that don't exist right now so if affordable housing is being built right now that's really important and addresses the need for 2011 to 2020 affordable housing based on that population um but when we are talking about the allocation of affordable housing need it's based on an estimate of additional households derek also explain to everybody because when you make that calculation you're looking at commercial as well because of jobs and then what you're determining as what the need would be for affordable housing for the different kinds of jobs in the different commercial industrial areas that every community has so if you can talk a little bit about that so people understand the nexus of how you get to all of those numbers because it's not just numbers you're pulling out and saying this burnsville this is your allocation you're looking at our commercial industrial and also the different businesses that we have one of the things that the met council that i always raise the awareness of is that jobs and economic development has no boundaries so a lot of the people who also work in burnsville and may live in affordable housing may not live in burnsville but are commuting into burnsville for jobs so talk a little bit about that because that's part of how all of this is knitted together yes thank you absolutely um that is that is on the agenda um and to your point so the forecasted growth in households we expect in the entire region for 2021 to 2030 is 119 000 households and that expected forecasted growth factors so many things in it factors in land use so we look at communities current land use and what it would allow so we aren't projecting growth that represents densities that don't actually exist it looks at job growth and job creation it looks at past trends and development and preferences in where folks want to live it definitely looks at kind of our economic competitiveness compared to other regions so that we can think about immigration versus out migration you know the folks on our research team and the economists and researchers and phds they work really hard and use really sophisticated models to come up with these admittedly never going to be exactly correct forecasts their forecasts we plan off them but a lot a lot goes into you know transit patterns and where where roadways are all goes into how this uh expected growth number is calculated for calculating community share of affordable housing for that same decade we start by using some of that economic and job-based data to estimate how much of those 119 000 households will be earning 80 percent of the area median income or below and so for twenty twenty eighty percent of the area median income would be about eighty thousand dollars a year for a family of four um and so that number was estimated to be thirty seven thousand nine hundred and that's about 33 percent of 119 000. um could you just repeat that little bit you were putting numbers up and i don't think we think correctly you bet so of the 119 000 additional households we expect to come to the region in the 2021 to 20 30 decade we expect that 37 900 of them will be earning 80 percent of the area needed income or less which was how much about thirty seven thousand nine hundred households what did you say that eighty percent ami was did you say that was eight that's about that's eighty thousand dollars in 2020 for a family of four wow yeah family of four yep thank you you're welcome and so that's how we determine what the regional need for affordable housing is it's the it's the future need for folks earning 80 ami to not pay more than 30 percent of their income toward housing costs and that 37 900 number is about 33 percent of that total 119 000 so we're looking at a growth in the coming decade about 33 percent of it will be households in need of what we currently define as affordable housing could i ask a question yeah yeah council member keeley and then did you have a cut then i'll go to council member uh shops i just want to know where that 33 came from is that really what it it consistently is today and that's what you're using is your forecast tool or there's other data that indicates where that a third comes from yes um so the those kind of sophisticated models and estimates of of how much growth we're expecting include a lot of looking at what types of jobs are we are expecting and what kind of wages they pay um what are certainly what our past kind of in-migration and out-migration patterns have been across demographic backgrounds and income levels um and so like i said it's definitely not an exact science but a lot of of data and analysis goes into this projection of how much uh households coming to the region will be earning how how does that 33 compared to the last 10 years it was i think 50 something per se i was 50 i'm gonna get confused i know that the regional need for affordable housing in the 2011 to 2020 decade was in the 50 something thousands so it's much higher than 37 000 what i don't remember is the growth the total growth and so the percentage i can look it up real quick um or i can look it up at the end i'm just curious about trending better or worse as far as the need is you know is this 37.9 as a third a third of the new houses is that an improvement in other words a smaller amount required because incomes are getting better or is it a battle that we're sort of losing over time where we keep needing more sounds like it might be a little bit better depending on what the new house numbers were for the last 10 years against your 50 000 number okay mayor cause i mean you think you want to follow up with yes if i may yes please i think that the the exact number yes is lower um but just uh you know how we kind of measure a need and um includes a lot of other factors like how many households are housing costs burdened um like how many uh households are homeless or housing and stable and so it's hard to use a term like is it getting better or not from just this measure but yes the number is is less than the last decade okay and i believe the growth we expected was less as well okay kara my question was answered thank you very much okay good yeah and i think some things are going to change to as we go forward because all paradigms have shifted oh my gosh right and so when all paradigms have shifted you go back to zero and then you're going to have to recreate so it'll be interesting to see what happens next year as the scientists get into really looking at recalculating all of this with regard to all of the different things that are happening in the in the different industries and the economy i agree mayor couts i think we we honestly have no idea how this will be impacted um and so these numbers definitely don't represent the latest and greatest information and i know the 2011 to 2020 numbers did not factor in the great recession and we got much less gross growth than we anticipated in that decade and so that number of 56 000 i believe some households certainly wasn't that high 56 000 right that was during the recession yep so you know again totally admit it's not an exact science um as far as i know we have never stopped mid-decade and recalculated again i think part part of it is considering you know the purpose is to take stock every 10 years plan to the best of our ability there isn't a real consequence for for you know not getting there but who knows i don't think it's impossible that we could take a look mid mid decade if if things changed drastically yeah if i may met him here yes part of the reason i asked the question is you know we when we throw a lot of money at something we expect it to improve and and there's uh now what 25 this was started in 1986 or 55 95 so we have you know 25 years the first five probably maybe not a lot happened but in that that you know o's decade you got some traction and then now we're in our we finished our second decade and you would hope that we've made measurable progress and that we're not just chasing a cat's tail and never actually improving in the circumstance right yeah you can even look even if you look at the communities that started in 1995 and started to um apply for all of this and in the livable communities burnsville st louis park were the first ones who really got going with all of the mixed-use development and all of that you can see progress where you look at all of this and you look at hennepin and ramsey county a lot of a lot of money was thrown into those two counties and those two cities yeah and so those of us in the suburbs always have to compete with a lot of that what's going on these two counties get a lot of money yeah they stayed in a lot of different ways yeah yeah i just pulled this slide back a couple to to to point out the 25 500 affordable units built and that's over 25 years not in one decade but i think we could i could fairly confidently say that i think we'd be in rougher shape in terms of affordable housing outcomes if that many units didn't if we didn't have those units councilmember gustafsson i have a question as a community of if we're fortunate enough to receive grants which we have in the past are there any restrictions on what we can do with that working with developers i'm talking about land acquisitions or demolition or any of that can that money be used for pretty much anything to to partner with the with a developer to do something mayor coutts cast member um there are uh restrictions for how uses how funds can be used so eligible costs can include acquisition it depends on the type of project so eligible costs will be um acquisition is an eligible cost within the lcda programs for affordable housing and if it's a mixed income we would prorate the land cost with the amount of affordable housing in the in the proposed project we have as a practice for as far back as i don't know not allowed the use of lcda or tod funds to be used for building improvements so our funding has been used for site improvements site preparation infrastructure development et cetera that's not a statutory limitation that is a long-standing practice and so but no our funds can't be used for just anything but in our annual look at our fund distribution plan and the scoring criteria um you know we are we are able to have conversations about whether or not the eligible uses continue to be the right eligible uses and i'll offer that one of the things specifically called out in statute as an intention of the program is to preserve affordable housing opportunities but because we don't fund building improvements and preservation of existing housing often requires money to fund improvements only to the building you're not building a new stormwater system or a new sidewalk system um and so it's basically rendered that money in in you know unusable for that use and so in 2021 we are making a change to allow for construction costs on the building for preservation projects um and that's that's a big change but it's it's um it's one of those things that i think will make the program be able to operate more true to the intent yeah so remember council member gossip son we used that money to purchase so acquisition we purchased a triple a right and and the heart of the city was a special district so it was the 20 was spread over all of the 54 acres i'm just thinking of in our city because we are a redevelopment city because we're pretty much built out and that we can help out with things like demolition should somebody buy a piece of property that has a building that does no longer makes sense and yeah can we help we can help with that kind of thing demolition is an eligible cost thank you so how do we get from the the 37 900 to individual communities allocation of affordable housing need in 2021. um so i kind of talked a little bit about that top cube of determining the regional need that it's 37 900 households um but we uh and then we allocate it to cities so that they can um uh fulfill their comp plan requirement in the land planning act to guide enough land such that they can meet the future need for affordable housing and that's that's directly from the land planning act um but we only allocate that need to cities that are experiencing sewer service growth and the reason for that is that um you know council policy is not to encourage high density where there isn't sewer service capacity it's not a it's not a good use of land and in past years more than 97 98 of all new affordable housing has been in a form of high density and the average there's somewhere between 20 or 30 units an acre so we only require we only we only expect land guided at at least eight units an acre or above counts toward being land available for potential affordable housing development but anything less than eight acres isn't really feasible land for affordable housing development in our current reality um and so we only allocate that growth in affordable housing need to cities with sewer service growth and if you're a city with a portion of sewer service growth we kind of prorate it so for local adjustments we start with the straight uh 33 right that is equitable across the region that 33 of new households were expecting to need affordable housing um but then we do make some adjustments so one of the adjustments is for existing affordable housing so if you are a community with more than an average community share of affordable housing your allocation number will be adjusted downward and the opposite is also true and eight when we were using the 80 ami kind of measure for what was affordable in 2014 and 15 when we were developing this um this number um the average community's existing affordable housing stock was around 62-ish percent um i'm always really close but i'm really bad with exact numbers so i hope that that's okay with you but i know it's in the 60s um and so uh uh so and a lot of people are surprised to find that out that the average community actually has more than half of its housing is affordable at 80 ami um but if you had more than 62 percent i believe that was it um your allocation would be adjusted downward and vice versa we also look at that job worker ratio that mayor couts was talking about so if from within your community in a five mile radius you have a lot of low-wage working a lot of low-wage workers a lot of low-wage paying jobs and very little low-wage very little housing affordable at those wages your allocation would get adjusted upward because you're exporting or you're sorry you're importing low-wage workers right and then the reverse is true if you have a a don't have a lot of low-wage jobs but you have a lot of low-wage workers residing in that area your allocation will be adjusted downward because you are exporting um low-wage workers and and so that adjustment is made as well important to note that the existing affordable housing adjustment is twice as impactful as the low-wage jobs to low-wage workers adjustment just because we think and we hear that that is the single most important issue to consider um among cities when thinking about allocating future affordable housing need and we know that the intention is to create a little bit more parity across the region in terms of housing choices um and so uh the the existing affordable housing as a kind of adjustment measure for future uh commitment to to guideland so that it could be met is really really important and then for this decade we didn't do this last decade we actually kind of go back to that existing affordable housing piece and um we factor we kind of do that um that we look at your existing affordable housing and where it lands and those bands of affordability and compare that to the regional bands of affordability and so then even within your final allocation it may the numbers may move a bit within the bands of affordability to reflect um you know existing housing conditions for example you know at the time of doing this uh math this equation the city of edina had a lot less affordable housing than other cities overall but they had seven percent of their housing was uh affordable at um 30 percent am i or below because of a of a large area of really deeply affordable assisted living and senior housing options and so their allocation number didn't go down but it it focuses on the 50 to 80 ami level or the 30 to 50 ami level so we made adjustments uh in that direction as any well yeah and the methodology there no i don't see anybody okay so that's that's how we calculated your allocation of affordable housing need which you adopted in in your comprehensive plan and i believe that was 266 units um so uh and i think i didn't i didn't mention i think it's implied but just to be sure when i say we start with 33 we start with 33 of your forecasted growth for the decade so we certainly wouldn't give you an allocation of need for a number of units higher than the number of units you are anticipating to to be developed in that decade so how are affordable housing goals different than your allocation of affordable housing need and we kind of shorthand them goals versus need how are your affordable housing goals for lca participation calculated and we have been doing work with a wide variety of stakeholders since about november we actually had some live meetings before march um where we talked about um kind of how should we calculate it because we only do it every 10 years it's worth sitting down and thinking hard about what the purpose of adopting affordable housing goals are and how they should be calculated um and we brought a lot of folks that had been a part of the original conversation not the original the last conversation in 2011 people from metro cities people from many different cities and counties we kind of got a stakeholder group together and took a look at how we did it the last time and how we might want to do it this time the short uh the short version of the story is that we decided that the way they came up with with how to do it 10 years ago was a pretty smart way and so we should probably do it that way again and basically it takes the approach of saying that your allocation of affordable housing need is based on households we expect to come here it's not it those households don't care if we have the available housing or not you know um but we're expecting it but that doesn't mean we have the resources to build that much affordable housing and so if we're talking about a goal it shouldn't stray it shouldn't only be based on you know increasing demand it should also factor in on what's kind of possible and so we worked with minnesota housing just as was done 10 years ago to kind of do some you know envelope math um to say okay look if from what we know about the housing resource affordable housing finance environment what's the last five years look like what do we think about the next few years let's come up with kind of a sense of what's what we can expect in terms of resources and affordable housing creation in a given year looking over the next 10 years and the the math came to about 45 percent of that 37 900 number of future need in the 2020 decade could be met if resources for affordable housing stay you know somewhat relevant or somewhat similar to how they are today again not exact math at all but certainly our best guess stop i believe there's a question here uh councilmember gustafsson uh when you look at affordable housing with the met council look at adus and and tiny houses as part of the affordable housing stock that we create in the city there council great question um to be considered affordable it needs to be in for these types of measures it needs to be income restricted so communities have a lot of existing affordable housing um and that doesn't mean that it's serving households that need affordable housing because folks can choose in the free market just to live less than their means which isn't a bad idea um but it does it does really mean if we can't be sure it's serving a household that needs affordable housing a household at a certain income or less we we can't consider it affordable so um so the answer is it depends if your adu policy if it included some kind of you know covenant or agreement with the property owner that it would be rented to folks who were screened for their income then yes we would consider it affordable but that's a lot of work that isn't typically built into most adu policies right now and the number of adus that got built might not be enough to make it worth it um for that kind of administrative effort but that would be a local decision you guys could make tiny tiny houses would also fall into that category same exact yep what we're looking for is is there a mechanism to require the income be at um 80 or less thank you okay um it doesn't mean naturally occurring without subsidy isn't really important and doesn't help a lot of folks it just isn't something we can safely or accurately count um okay so the the st so i will say that the last decade when minnesota housing worked with a lot of these similar partners to determine what a feasible resource amount would be um they actually had were at 65 so your your affordable housing goals for this decade are actually represent 65 of your allocation of need for this decade and that was considered a lot by the group and they thought you know the minnesota housing process captures the vast vast majority of funding for affordable housing in the region but it doesn't capture everything there are ways that local governments or federal resources that don't have to go through minnesota housing can be used and so um this group decided that they thought 45 was a little low let's be ambitious and let's set the low end of our affordable housing goals 10 higher than that at 55 of your affordable housing need allocation so the equation ends up like this you have a need for 2021 to 2030 for this decade um multiply that by 55 that's the low end of your affordable housing goal and then we do keep it as a range as we did 10 years ago and so it does go up all the way to the high end is your your allocation of need and that was a fascinating discussion i mean we had folks representing cities on this on this committee that said if you set this goal as 55 of our need our council will meet that need and say we're done we we we'll meet that goal and say we're done and there will be nothing we can do to convince them to build anything more and then we had other folks say if you try if you ask me to tell my council that um the need number is our goal as well when we know we don't have enough funding to build it they won't re-enroll in lca and so um for that reason we decided to keep it arranged go figure which i think makes a lot of sense actually um it sort of acknowledges that these numbers are not you know exact so we what does that look like for burnsville your allocation of need for the decade is 266 55 of that is 146. and that's why your affordable housing goal is 146 to 266 for the 2020 decade in a lot of you kind of this is my last slide a lot of you spoke to some of these things already but i couldn't i wouldn't be doing my job if i didn't have one slide encouraging you and sharing the reasons why i certainly think there's value in participating in lca it's an opportunity for you to implement the vision you have for your community to add value to projects and do things that you wouldn't be able to do with a standard kind of pro forma um you can clean up your land create jobs provide a range of housing and and do some transit oriented development which burnsville has has a handful of eligible locations for the tod grants as well um i'll stop there but i'm happy to continue to answer questions any questions or did you take a look at the resolution uh councilmember schultz so and i get that the the housing affordable housing goal that you're asking us today is 146 to 266. and pardon me if i missed it but where was the discussion on the life cycle goal you did not miss it no okay okay good because i'm like you noticed an intentional omission okay um and i would be fascinated on your um take of this uh mayor kurtz because um you know my best understanding is that in 1995 when this was being considered it was incredibly difficult to encourage multi-family housing outside of the central cities and so the life cycle in the burns in burnsville and most suburbs density was a bad word right um and so my understanding is that the life cycle goal was really kind of intended to create not just an affordable housing goal but a goal to just diversify housing stock and provide some density diversity in communities and start to to support some of the transit and other infrastructure investments that were helping the region grow um yeah and that's how we got to the the diversity of housing stock in the heart of the city where you have condominiums and you have senior housing and so forth right because then you have life cycle housing from in the so could you define what could you say how you have life cycle housing defined multi-family housing yeah okay so that's just what it's multi-family housing okay i thought we were on to something entirely different like i think most people do you may have been suspecting it was yeah what's your first place out of college like what's your first starter home what's your home when you're exactly yeah so that's why this did not make sense sure that makes i can see that and it's a common misconception and life cycle is not defined in the statute um and you know if you think about a post-recession multi-family housing has been some of the only housing being built so this sort of idea of needing needing to encourage or incentivize communities to do multifamily is is really less of a need at this point in time um i think in terms of the life cycle goal being more of that trajectory of housing choice over your lifetime you know you know i can tell you there would be no way for the council to accurately measure goals for that um you know to to sort of understand that kind of nuanced need and that level of data would be really difficult and so i don't think it was the intent in the first place but even when i think about like well could we even do that it it i think we would need a couple additional research staff doing that full time just to just to track it that way but we do have you still have to adopt them for statute and so we do calculate them and and basically all we do is um look at those residential densities that are eight acres um eight units per acre or higher that are planned to be developed in the 2020 decade we look at the midpoint density of that range so for so we look at if it's eight to ten it would be nine units an acre if it's 8 to 20 it would be 14 units an acre and we apply that to how many acres you're expecting to develop in that decade of that particular land use and we do the math and we did the math for you and it was well over a thousand units but your forecasted growth for 2021 to 2030 is only 900 units so for any communities where we did that land use calculation based on your development staging tables and your comp plan if it was over your your um forecasted growth for the decade we capped it there so that's why you're capped at 900. so this is saying that the expectation is that there will be 900 not not built not counting the ones built this year or the ones currently in process which includes ones that um the plans have been approved but perhaps ground hasn't been broken so it's definitely a little sticky this year and next year just because it's it's really hard right um i think we would go by the day that the units are are uh occupiable yeah the certificate of occupancy okay yeah the certificate occupancy rather than because the healy raimi project i would say is all part of that next decade and that's already being some of it is already being built but not yet occupied did not get their suggested certificate of occupancy yeah for the cutoff okay so we're looking at 900 more in the next 10 year i understand that there's a statute but i i mean i guess that's for the legislature whomever um but when we're being asked to adopt goals and i don't like to adopt bs goals like i don't like to do that um that's that's just not anything i want to do like if we adopt goals like that's i want us to actually be doing that um and so that so then this life cycle housing goal i mean whether we hit it or not it's something that we can't really calculate truthfully and we i don't know it seems like a nonsense goal and it seems like a nonsense way that this goal came about um and i'm unhappy with that i'm i'm unhappy that that that would still be a part of that if if there is a problem with it i would rather it be changed then everyone just go got a doer you know what i mean i i don't know i think that's that's not good government and i don't like that i don't like that so if you could please pass that feedback back and uh cara that's the reason why i um raised the issue that we're redevelopment and we and we are we have no control over what developers and financiers are going to do yeah and so the thing is we put things in place but and that's why you talk about the carrot rather than the stick that the goals are put out there because i remember the discussion when goals were put in place and it's hard for a community like burnsville that that we're we don't have any raw land so redevelopment is tougher to do what i would offer yeah um is that i you know this goal is actually much lower than the amount of land you have guided at the densities you have guided that your comp plan suggests will develop in the decade that's higher than 900 actually so yeah i and i and i i apologize if i gave the impression that it's meaningless i think what a better way to characterize it would be that it's not it was an incentive that was really the focus then that i don't think we would need these goals for cities to build multi-family anymore but i don't think it's it's um uh totally you know uh invaluable to sort of think about okay we have this goal so we don't we are thinking about kind of our multi-family single-family mix and it is kind of a venn diagram so if if you have multi-family that gets built and it's affordable it counts towards both goals okay councilmember workman thank you and thank you miss beard that was a very helpful uh presentation i just have some kind of not as complicated as cara questions um what is your funding source for the 24 million dollars where does that money come from typically yeah i i'm boy you're testing me and your couch is gonna catch me here um it depends so uh the vast majority of it is funded through property tax levy um and there's a calculation that goes into how much gets put in the livable communities demonstration account fund it's usually at this point it's been like 14 15 million dollars a year use using that equation that's based on on property tax throughout the entire region so you are contributing toward that this funding that we're able to dole out um and i completely acknowledge and own that the the awards tend to be conglomerate in the central city and we i'm my focus as the new manager is to see how we can increase applications from more geographic diversity but we are also limited by only making awards for projects that have applied and so that's our job is to encourage more applications coming from other parts of the region making sure folks know this program works for them the tbra grant comes from a fiscal disparities fund and there's a portion of that five million dollars set a mountain statute that comes from fiscal disparities that goes into tbra and the the local housing incentives account gets um a million dollars uh also from fiscal disparities plus 500 000 from the lcda pot um and then we often have relinquishments or interest earnings especially 25 years in so sometimes in our allocate in our annual fund distribution plan we the council often adds additional funding to those pots so if a community decides to opt out of this they're still contributing to these funds regardless or if a city were to opt out then the piece of the property tax would not be forwarded to this program no the former we still so you pay for it regardless if you participate or not okay um we're a net loss yeah well and that's what kind of helped me pave to my next question was and i don't know if we have a specific answer for this but this would be for jenny or melanie but do we know about how many applications we have submitted for this grant and maybe not gotten in comparison to the three that we have okay uh maybe terry doesn't know terra says four you've applied and my data shows that you've applied four times and been awarded four times oh three in the in the i think it was 99 2000 2001 and then this one pre-development one in 2018. yeah i uh madame are members of the council i know there are at least two applications that i was a part of the first application for valley ridge shopping center was turned down by the met council because of the project they had in waizetta that they were struggling with some issues and they thought they'd have the same issues here and we had to go back a second time to prove them wrong the next grant we applied for was for a potential hotel in heart of the city and we got turned down for that project um because it didn't have any affordable housing to it yeah i apologize those weren't in my database and they should have been thank you okay and then i just got one more question okay i know but yeah and then i'll go to council member which kind of leads me to my next question is what is the and you don't have to give away any trade secrets here but can you just kind of give uh an idea of what the process is when the met council reviews these applications and what things are considered or is it just a punch like a checklist and you're saying okay you've met these and then here or is there something else that we're not aware of that would help that's a great question we just put them in a bucket we have a very elaborate dis as described in our four people have read fund distribution plan um that describes a two-step scoring process the scoring criteria and step one is reviewed by subject matter experts in staff in our on our net council staff so you know if it's a environmental piece we have an environmental planner maybe a wastewater services planner that would look at the that piece of it if it's a housing evaluation in fact before i was manager i was often asked to score for housing on livable communities projects as a housing policy analyst at the council and then there's a minimum score you have to meet in step one and if you meet it you move on to step two step two is evaluated outside by an external advisory committee called the livable communities advisory committee and that is a i believe a 16-member group and it's made up of elected officials of city staff of developers of architects landscape architects community you know development experts of all types and currently this and last year the chair has been mayor joe emerson from white bear lake and that committee reviews on the step two scoring criteria they interview all the applicants have to come in and and to answer questions and then they you know share their different thoughts and everybody puts in a score and the average scores come out and then the step one scores and the step two scores are added to create kind of a list of winners but then there is oftentimes either a statutory required or a council policy adopted depending on which fund it's coming from um that limits how much of the award can go to the central cities um so for example in lcda no more than 40 percent of the awards can go to minneapolis and st paul um that's not statutorily required but it's a council practice and then for um the tod awards there's not a split but there is a two million dollar award limit that any city for any number of applications can't go beyond 2 million again that could be that's not required it's a council practice um i believe the tbre program the brownfield program has a statutorily defined breakout for central cities versus suburban communities and i can't remember that break out exactly right now but it's something probably like the 40-60 split okay so then our communities does in that assessment process is there a report card there on how cities are doing to meet these goals and is that part of the assessment too and would that maybe speak to why minneapolis and st paul are maybe getting more of the chunk of money because they're actually have more dots on the map that's a fantastic question so until well we still i guess we still do it so we do this thing called calculate an annual housing performance score and that's a practice that the council started i think in response to the idea of kind of measuring cities efforts toward uh creating a full range of housing options and having that impact their competitiveness in the lca process and so for as for i think as long as as long as i can remember up until last year a housing performance score which every city would get on a scale of 1 to 100 would be a final tack-on to your score converted down to 10. so it would be you know if your score was 97 it would be 9.7 and that would just get added to the end now minneapolis and st paul almost always score 100 for their for their housing performance score um but what we found and this was so interesting because um we had never allowed the housing performance score to be a part of the lhia the affordable housing scoring process because we the whole point was to create additional affordable housing options well like somewhere upwards of 70 percent of our housing funded through lcda is affordable housing so we were kind of doing exactly what we were trying not to do with lhia inadvertently and unintentionally with lcda we also found that it didn't have a very big impact it wasn't strongly swaying the scores because you know if a community one community is in 83 and one community is a 93 that's a big difference if a community's you know that but that difference gets distilled down to one point out of like 165 points for a total score in your lca process so given that given that as much as the housing performance score is an incredibly helpful exercise on our part to know where folks are at their goals where things are working where folks are having trouble what maybe has changed what policies are in place it's incredibly helpful in that way creating this sort of numerical apples to apples comparison um you know was problematic and using that as a part of the scoring criteria was something that the council agreed was not helpful and we took it out for this year was the very first time so we no longer count that but we still send out that survey ask lots of information about affordable housing production compare that against your goal to understand how things are going in track that we absolutely track affordable housing production we do all of those things and we still currently technically calculate a score for you um i will be honest i you know i think that staff's recommendation would be to just continue it as a kind of a annual exercise without necessarily coming up with numerical scores um but the last time we talked about it with a broad group of stakeholders they said no we really like being scored so for now we're keeping it but it's no longer a part of the scoring process okay okay thank you all right councilman gustafson you know as i've been listening to this tonight i look at the goals put forward in that in the city in our redevelopment efforts i think the goals are very achievable for the city of burnsville i i know uh not only our chamber of commerce but uh our employers and our employees are are screaming for some affordable housing here in in the city with with the type of jobs we have here we we definitely need that in in the city here and i i can't help but think that it as a city that has to redevelop that these grants really help us toward our goals of getting these things done because we know it's more expensive to redevelop because people have to tear things down and it's not greenfield that others have and so having just one more like arrow in our quiver for redevelopment i think just makes a whole lot of sense for us as a community and it's more of a statement than a question but this is what i was getting from all if we don't opt in if we don't opt in we just sit there i mean we we just turned down uh an affordable housing because you want a tiff yeah had we had something like this in our back pocket we can go hey we've got some grants that we can do something with that might have offset that and made that affordable housing happen couldn't we have done that yeah that was my question if i may just nobody brought it up yeah we were exhausted all those options excuse me what was that well it was the project that came first at a work session that we sent back in fairly quickly because they wanted a housing tip and we rejected it out of hand for that reason it's a workforce housing project it's a project we don't have currently so i think it fits within our mix of what's missing i'm curious if there if this grant program could be used in any way with that type of project and we're talking with the county about that project now so we can find a way to bring it back but is this an option is this grant program or not tara is that a an option for to use uh grant money for affordable housing oh absolutely i mean i can't speak to the competition that that that's right the cycle and whether it would be awarded but um you know and then to meet the criteria we just have to make sure that they come in and they they tell us what it is that they need and then it can be then you can apply for the grant but otherwise i don't think that was income restricted though was it oh he was saying it was a force it's affordable it was yeah it was yeah rents were like 900 to 13. it was affordable housing it was subsidized subsidizing some degree right lcda um it's it's just that you're highly prioritized for affordable housing in the point system and so the vast majority yeah but if you don't if you don't opt in you get you you don't have the ability to to apply for a grant no we pay but we never get back yeah so the thing is there's nothing that we lose by opting into the program and this was a discussion we had also back in the 90s and we said what do we have to lose and of course i was the second chair of the livable communities advisory board so but if you don't opt in then you don't have the opportunity to to apply for a grant but if you're part of it then you have the opportunity so before us then uh if you don't have any other questions is uh a sample resolution that we can direct staff to prepare to bring before us yeah i think we should okay i agree that we have to participate to get the funding grant and the goal is i think far more achievable because i believe we have we've talked many times on on the record at this council that we have a lot of affordable housing because our housing stock is older and some of the newer product that's coming in uh this one project that we just spoke of i think had 132 units does that sound about right um are you talking about the gili bramy no the counter road 5 and mcandrews the project or the project yeah um that would be uh half of our entire 10-year decade goal and one project if that could get funded and we could find ways to work with cda and and your department uh to make it work that'd be great because that i'm a big believer that that's a housing product that we don't necessarily offer and and this is it's it's maybe because we have so much older product right now but newer few more amenities a little bit more modern design in a workforce housing is missing in burnsville we we sort of have now this market rate higher end product we have lots of affordable older product and we have some you know new market rate but we don't really have any new workforce to offer so yeah we have some apartment buildings that are reinvesting into it what's park view now park you park view flats and so they're adding more uh amenities and updating so you know but that's not new that's updated and improved yeah so yeah but this is it so i see um kara are you in favor of uh of the resolution i would be in favor of us being on slightly less of the losing end of fiscal disparities like that's what i would like yeah i mean i'll just be blunt about that um we historically are a donor and you know i i would make the case that our money could very effectively be used in our community and we do have projects and things and things that we have needs for um so it you know it um flat out i'm not a fan of physical disparities i'm just i'm not um but i also get that you're just gonna take this money anyway so with ill grace i will say yes okay yeah i mean i don't want to remove ourselves from an opportunity to apply if we're going to be paying it anyways and as terrorists stated they're not going to come and you know wake their fist at us if we don't meet our goals their goals but they're not sanctioned goals um and like we've all discussed we're likely to meet those goals in the next 10 years maybe the next five as is so i want tara to go and be our best friend at the met council and get us some yeses city manager that's your goal city manager lee there's a consensus can we put that in our resolution that we have a goal and then we can have you have a goal yeah we'll fund our city manager we will have the consensus of the council to bring back the resolution for adoption we do okay thank you so much thank you very much can i ask you one parting question of our presenter um do you know what lakeville's goal in the next 10 years is i'm just really curious for my good friends on the city council down there i'd like to know how they're going to get there asking for a friend i don't usually bring my laptop but i i knew there was too much data for me to remember off the top of my head um okay so i can tell you that the 2011 to 2020 goals for affordable housing for lakeville were 1582 to 2260. so that was this decade's goal for them did they did they get close i could find that out too but i'd have that was sort of a loaded question i apologize i know the answer is no but i don't know how much um their 2021 to 2030 uh affordable housing goals are 778 through 1414. a lot of that is a product of uh less forecasted growth for this coming decade than the past decade which again was sort of inflated and didn't encounter and anticipate the great recession so is there a cumulative there they have to make up for what they missed the last time they have a lot of green space yeah not brown field yeah they're yeah it accumulates right yeah it does not accumulate let's do it you know and also i do appreciate and i did hear you when you said that you were looking to get more of these awards you know out to the suburbs and not just like that tight little center ring and so i do hear that and i do appreciate that so i thank you that's a huge priority in this role yeah absolutely and then then you will see me have here right yeah so ms beard thank you so much for coming in we appreciate uh your report well done thank you you may not have been in that role very long but you sound like you've been doing it for 20 years you really and you said i don't know i'm not good with numbers but you really did a great job like you had all of this off the top of your head so you're clearly very passionate about what you're doing very successful at it i appreciate that thank you very nicely done thank you okay we'll move on to the next item on our agenda and this is the uh discussion on experience burnsville and uh presenting this evening is uh amy vero the executive director and the chair of the experience burnsville board dan mcelroy so two presenters jenny yeah madam mayor members of the council if i could just kick us off real quick um just for those watching this is an item that's a follow-up from the all-day your council's all-day work session you had asked that uh there'd be a future discussion on two things regarding experience burnsville and the contract that we have with them um you wanted to see marketing campaign that has some more specificity and was very clear and then you also wanted to review the agreement to make sure it was relevant and expectations were clear with cohesive marketing with the city so with that um amy um and dan mcelroy from experience burnsville we'll start in with the marketing information and then i'll follow up with um highlights of the agreement changes that are before you i could just ask to refresh my memory on what date was that uh all-day work session is it january 21st pre-covered how the world has changed since january 21st so welcome amy and dan thank you so much and to the board of directors of of experience burnsville who are here welcome thank you very much madam mayor members of the council we thought we'd kick off this evening with an overview on very high level in your background you received our marketing plan and marketing outcomes so i'm happy to ask and answer any questions on that as well we'd like to just interject what we call a marketing plan and timeline is what some agencies might call a campaign but this is um and we're going to show you at a relatively high level i assure you there's all the detail you could imagine available um but i um when council membership asked where is the campaign our plan is our campaign okay okay thank you the current situation with the hospitality and leisure industry since earlier this year we have been working in phases our initial phase for recovery and the tourism and hospitality industry really began in summer of 2020 and it began on a very localized level day trips really the drive market we really focused in our efforts for a 250 mile radius and then there's been some domestic leisure flying that has taken place but as you've seen the news there hasn't been a whole lot of movement we entered or will be entering the second phase of recovery um beginning in the first quarter of 2021 and that will um start with essential meetings small and medium events and then more regional international travel so again shorter flights and then the final phase of recovery if things go as projected we'll begin in the third quarter of 2021 and that's when we will hopefully be able to host larger events and then we'll have more lift with our air service on to broader international markets um the return to normal volumes so pre-covered levels in travel and hospitality are not projected until 2023 to give you an idea of where we're at with our average daily rate and hotel occupancy in the minneapolis south area as compared to in parentheses minneapolis our average daily rate this july which is one of our historically higher revenue months and what the hotels usually charge the most because of the the um the impact 87 where minneapolis is 94. a year ago we're at 117 dollars on average and minneapolis is typically at around 170 hotel occupancy is around 44 percent burnsville has been slightly lower than that on average in my conversations with our hoteliers minneapolis is at 15 percent occupancy so those are a lot of vacant hotel rooms in the minneapolis area and then you can see the numbers in july 74 and almost 79 can i am i able to take my mask off when i'm presenting you can is that okay yeah okay yep thank you okay that's a lot better yeah okay i did okay thank you so our funding experience burnsville is a destination marketing organization and we're funded almost entirely through local option lodging tax so with limited overnight hotel stays um lower occupancy levels and lower average daily rate that has an impact on the lodging tax that is collected by our hotels and then through the city of burnsville here's a global idea of the impact of the devastation for the hotel industry eight in ten hotel rooms are empty 2020 is projected to be the worst year on record for hotel occupancy and 70 of hotel employees have either been laid off or furloughed so we're losing a lot of industry institutional knowledge and expertise to this global pandemic and people are leaving the travel and tourism industry at record amounts so that's going to have a long-term impact on us as well here's an idea just a snapshot of the financial impact so the top bar on the left hand side the darker blue that was our lodging tax revenue in 2018 at the end of august then next is 2019 and where we're at today as of the end of august that represents around 180 138 000 our organization as we started out the year in the pandemic hit we have experienced a 40 percent decrease in our staffing levels year to date we have a 41 percent decrease in our lodging tax revenue if you were to take the months of april through september or august i should say because we don't have our september numbers yet it's closer to a 60 60 percent decrease in the lodging tax and we've really relied heavily on a couple of our vendor partnerships to help us um with our creative we have the vision we know burnsville the best and then we work with them to help us establish creative and digital strategies and then staff myself and sydney really work on the implementation and the execution of that and here's an idea who we partner with our staff like i said it's myself and our marketing coordinator who's now part-time and then our primary vendors are 2-6 digital and wa fisher the 2020 plan an overview of our marketing and promotion initiatives so 2020 was starting out very promising we were really looking for a record year in travel and hospitality with average daily rate and occupancy we launched our brand new website in late january we're really excited about that we used a lot of our analytics our visitor profile our branding our taglines to develop this new interactive website and then march happened and in march we really kind of took our plans for 2020 and threw them in the garbage can not literally but pretty much we took that time to really pause and assess what is the current situation with the virus with travel with stay-at-home orders um and what's the consumer sediment do people even want to travel right now are they comfortable staying in a hotel or going to a restaurant we again relied heavily on our partnerships with our vendors are the research that we have our analytics education through our global partners through destinations international and us travel association and then we started to really build our new content and creative and did an audit and really looked at all the plans that we had had in place and that we kind of tossed to the wayside then with the plan we strategized we prioritized and we began creating and when we began creating we kept it on a very local basis really focused on the burnsville residents they're at home now they're doing school from home so what activities can they do socially distance in a safe and healthy manner to get them outside and experiencing parts of burnsville that they might not have otherwise experienced then we began to adapt our organization needed to continue to be fluid and to be nimble to be able to change on a dime we had to accept change that what we had planned and what we had been doing and had great success over the most recent years we had to change all that and then it was really important for us in our industry to be kind and to have really positive messages emanating from experience burnsville because a lot of our friends and our colleagues were losing their jobs and losing their businesses and then we wanted to continue to be viable so we needed to have good timing we needed to be able to activate and capitalize when people are ready to travel again and to get outside of the home part of our strategy was to really dial in our geographic audience we are now really focused on a 250 mile radius from the burnsville area so a really strong drive market but it still encourages overnight stays in our hotel motels and part of our um recovery initiatives was building different content on our website like recreating a date night at home in burnsville we did puzzles we did bingo cards we did scavenger hunts all with the sense to really market and promote all the amenities that burnsville offers and again on targeting the locals but also very enticing for those that just really wanted to get out of their house and get in the car and drive and go stay overnight somewhere during the um our recovery we um really thought about what makes burnsville a great community to visit to live to do business and we came up with locally strong we're a very strong determined community so we've created a blog series that is going to focus on hospitality businesses or hospitality individuals that have really um recreated and reinvented themselves during the pandemic and what their outlook is as the recovery continues so our first blog focused on jensen's cafe with dorne and brian we are now working on a blog to focus on to highlight tnj restaurant the new sushi restaurant in the former brewers bagels location chianti grill will be highlighted this year as well as olivia's organic cafe and then with the blogs we also do a content activation program on social media to drive home that messaging and to direct traffic to our website we continued with our newsletter we have a fairly strong e-news letter list that our database that we've been building over the past handful of years and we normally have a very leisure focus but then we turn that newsletter that resource into a way to communicate with our hospitality community in addition we as part of our strategic plan this year we were going to host a web um i'm sorry an in-person not used to say an in-person meeting with 2-6 digital to educate and train our hospitality partners on the effectiveness of social media and digital advertising with the onset of covid we decided to make that a three-part virtual series so we had great attendance with that and we recorded all the web series and we've been able to share that with our hospitality partners as well as refer back to it as staff ourselves and here is an overlook of our marketing calendar or the different um campaigns that we've done year to date um very it doesn't it really include our daily social media posts because that would be very overwhelming and a great deal of detail but hopefully you all follow along with us on social and you are aware of what activity we do have to market and promote burnsville next i wanted to show some of our creative examples sort of our new look with our new brand local flavor local flair here's the digital billboard digital signage that we started with at the eam center and we were the goal was to change it on a seasonal basis so we could really highlight the four different seasons here in burnsville here's some of the promotions that we did at the onset of covet with our bingo card the theme puzzles and the scavenger hunt and we're currently working on um updating all that for fall and then for winter as people are still at learning from home and here's a sample of some of the facebook and instagram ads that we did as part of our content activation campaigns this year highlighting the outdoor recreation um that photo was taken pre-covet at buckhill and then you know our restaurants the unique attraction of the burnsville skate park and then the relief sessions that happened in july august and the beginning of september our engagement as a community partner is very important that our staff and our board have a presence in our community on a local basis as well as globally so we have been really partnering closely this year with the city and the chamber of commerce some of the initiatives there include small business week with the chamber we've been doing convening hospitality zoom meetings with the different segments in the hospitality industry we did some promotions around national travel and tourism week the great american takeout we distributed face mask and alcohol wipes to businesses and partnership with the chamber and city tour to flavor that was a really fun promotion the cares act the grant which we are so grateful and appreciative of and then a sample of our newsletter and part of our goal is to continue building our promotional assets and that is going out to our various hospitality businesses that maybe can't otherwise afford professional photography and we've partnered with our photographer over the years and now we've created these segments called mini sessions where we go out and we spend ideally less than an hour and we get in we shoot and then we get out so places that we've been this year are the new deck at buck hill buck 54 the lions lions park t j restaurant olivia's tennis mountain biking we did a blog earlier this year on the public art features in burnsville which was wildly successful of course and the skate park so those are just a variety of those future plans and beyond so for the remainder of the year we of course are working on our amending our agreement with the city of burnsville upcoming next week we have our board of directors retreat where the board will revisit our strategies and we'll take a look at our draft budget and really set the tone for 2021 and beyond and based on that then we'll we've already started working on our marketing plan for next year but given the state of our funding we're going to have to be very selective on what we can choose and deliver upon and what's going to have a really good impact not only to drive overnight stays in our hotel motels but to help promote the community as well and then the remainder of the year we are working on some additional blogs and then content activation campaigns to focus on winter activities socially distanced and then holiday shopping and events that are available we're going to continue with our locally strong blog like as i mentioned and then also with our newsletter then looking forward to 2021 some considerations that we are looking at is an enhancement to our e-newsletter it's a great way to meet people and to get our information in their hands at an affordable investment so again focusing on leisure travelers on a bi-monthly basis um this is new focusing on the local markets so building a database of burnsville residents and businesses that want to receive information on events happening and attractions in the city and then continuing with our quarterly partners on newsletter so that's focus on our hotel and our restaurants attractions those type of businesses we're going to continue to engage our social media channels with the primary focus on facebook and instagram that's those are the most popular pages that we have and where we get the most engagement so again the most bang for our buck lead generation we want to continue to build our databases with qualified users so we have a lead gen program that we're looking to do through facebook to acquire those email addresses and then a seasonal awareness campaign so the frequency may decrease of our blogs and content in 2021 but i'll have a really more global seasonal appeal and i think a more dialed in message to the to the end user to influence visitation continuing again like i said locally strong blog and then we're adding a more robust monthly reporting dashboard which we're partnering with 2-6 digital on that to help create that was something that came out of the edits throughout the agreement um so i wanted to make sure we included that and it's available when you have the dashboard it will be on your website so i can be accessed i don't know that we'd have it on our website but it would definitely be shared with our board of directors and city council and stakeholders okay so that would probably be something that we would add to our our um hospitality partner newsletter so that they have that information and if they want to collaborate with us on any promotions that we're happy to collaborate and partner it's great to have a broader reach budgeting so we have um as we started 2021 we had some reserves built about a five month reserve our policy is for about a three month but we had a bit healthier reserve and we had some money in our savings account with the onset of coved we have taken some money out of our savings as we had budgeted last year when we were going through the process but the outlook for tourism looks to be about the same until about 2023 so the more we invest down our reserves and our savings account um they'll be gone you know and so we're not in a position right now to really build those so how do we continue to market and promote burnsville in the most positive way while maintaining some level of reserves because in case of crisis and then looking at staffing with one and a half people we're still doing the work of two and a half and is that sustainable and then what does that look like next year and years to come and then um the balance you know is we do we have to have balance you know what are the primary focus of our destination marketing organization as it aligns with the state statute that talks about the way we're funded and the purpose of lodging tax with our new agreement and then how do we sustain that moving forward so in closing i just want to say that we appreciate the partnership and the collaboration that we have with the city council and with city staff and that we really look forward to building this path forward and we want to continue to be your partner in this um so with that i will i'm available for question otherwise um dan mcelroy if you have anything councilmember gustafson amy um he mentioned something about events calendars and that are you looking to become a clearinghouse for events for the city that we can all go to and see what's going on um council member gustafson and um anime are members of the council on that is something that was um in addition to the agreement the edit the revision of the um agreement jenny faulconer and of i have been emailing back and forth on that wondering what that really looks like um you know there's definitely possibilities that we could be the clearing house or the the owner if you will manager of a more community community-centric my question came up with how would we do that in a in a very favorable way and is this something that businesses and residents are wanting and so i think that there's opportunity to engage the community to find out what exactly what information they're looking for and then based on that further discussion on if we update our website or add a new landing page do we create a portal where art and all that jazz would upload the information to populate our website so there's a lot of different opportunities there and they all have a price tag yeah so on the priority level you know where does that fall within the scope of service a lot having to do with the details when you have to look at the school district the chamber of commerce and everything else in the community and where do you draw the line with regard to becoming all of that but i think that's something that the board can speak to and when you're doing your strategic plan and dan you had your hand up and you wanted to address that issue that has received a fair amount of attention when i was at hospitality minnesota the number of communities tried to develop comprehensive community calendars that may include their amateur athletics their school groups other volunteer issues some even tried to get church calendars integrated into it minnesota school boards association probably went the farthest with this and i will check with them to see what they ultimately invested but during this covered period they have put it lower on their priority list but we'll see what software tool they may have available when i first went to city government in 1990 state government rather in 1995 arne carlson had launched an effort called market minnesota it was an effort to have all the state agencies the minnesota historical society and others collaborate the first fruit from that was bore fruit 30 years later with the adoption of a single logo with tag lines the blue and green mn and then deed has there um positively minnesota and historical society puts their their level on it they have not attempted a statewide calendar but i know it is on their long-term uh problem project it's not simple um it and it gets to the distinction of organizations that have staff like the city government and the school district and those that are all volunteer like baa or apple valley athletics or the community theater ducati valley civic orchestra and what we can expect for cooperation i don't foresee with the lodging tax situation the way it is that we'll have a lot of resources to put that we'll try with some volunteers to see what we can do to be helpful thank you i have two more follow-up questions okay what what do you have for your measurables for success with how you're doing things now how do we know we're being effective at doing that i i'm sorry i didn't hear the first part what is the what are your measurables you use for your success in your current i know things have changed totally and you're in a whole different thing are you finding ways to measure what's going on to see if we're actually getting traction and bringing people to our city to do things so we um utilize our analytics but you know google analytics um the social media channels have analytics and we do um a month year to year by month comparison that you know if we um are we higher have we had a greater reach on facebook in august of 2020 over august of 2019 what activities have we executed that would increase traffic to our website um you know so we this year are we do a monthly blog and content activation and that's something that we partner with 2-6 digital on um and then we also do an internal blog and we do our own facebook ad on that at a much lower investment level um so you know our bread and butter is really driving traffic to our website for our engagement so that is our primary focus and we report to you on that in the dashboard and the the reports you get that show the number of page views the number the time on page the number of likes and new friends that we may have on our social media and then ultimately the measurable is occupancy and adr we are a little better than some other communities like downtown minneapolis that's just really in deep yogurt we're not nearly where we'd like to be thank you one last question are our hotels engaged with the cvb right now with all the what you're trying to get done here you know you used to have all these meetings all the time with them and that's with quote it's much more difficult to do but yeah so we reach out regularly um via email and phone calls i call our hotel operators we also are doing the convening hospitality meetings and partnership with the chamber of commerce we have one of those tomorrow morning we're our guest speaker someone from hospitality minnesota and um the meetings that you were referring to were great meetings that we had a handful of years ago and as the recession happened and hotels had fewer staff to send to the various meetings a lot of them are small limited service hotels and they're owner operated so you're running the hotel you're doing the front desk and you're flipping over rooms so they attendance really decreased but we did ask and the hotels really like the information that we send them and then just the one-on-one phone calls and messages that we send and you have hotel uh industry folks on your board yes we have two hotel representatives on our board of directors currently and then council member gustafson about events i was thinking about this our facebook page is an excellent resource for us to be able to build an event calendar and which we really try to get to i in the evening sit on facebook and try to add events so if like the relief sessions for example had a face a facebook event we can add that to our event calendar and that's a um sort of a low hanging fruit way to build a more robust community calendar so sydney and i tried to do that that was one of free's responsibilities roles and with her departure sydney and i are trying to pick up the pieces and get that added but as we you know continue to recover and more and more events happen our own event calendar on our website will continue to build hopefully back to the levels that it was pre-coping some of the events we can promote are things for example at aim center which is currently not having events softball tournaments and soccer tournaments and hockey tournaments have all been big events that we can help with most of them haven't occurred now the destination drivers um whether they're weddings or funerals or family reunions we believe that those will come back to normal in 22 and 23 but there hasn't been a lot to put on a calendar since st patrick's day i can always remember when the lockdown began because it was on an irishman's high holy day okay councilmember schultz uh what what database are you using for the back end of your website we have wordpress oh okay then um there's actually like several ways that you can tie in multi-users onto a back-end calendar it would just be you defining who who you put in that group of who what what groups have events that are destination drivers and then they can all have separate logins which load their information in but it doesn't go live until you say yes correct yes so yeah yeah yeah good yeah so i mean like i mean it sucks that we don't have a lot to put on the calendar right now but maybe this is the time when there's not a lot of business to to prepare for that with all of your you know partner organizations that could have something to eventually load on there because like when i'm looking at this um having a kind of a one-stop place for major like most of our major events um and no i'm not getting down into church calendars and that type of thing that that would be very valuable and then that is something that you could really drive people towards um you know in in the other types of marketing you do and and that type of thing because that you know um i i know my frustration level when i'm going to travel or i'm looking for something to do and the information is absolutely fragmented if i have to spend more than 30 seconds and i can't find something right away i say screw it and i go to something else and so people's attention span for searching for things is beyond low right like the threshold is like on the floor so anything anything that you can do to make that extremely readily accessible i think would be a valuable value to our city and then i don't know the answer to this and i will probably be told kara that's a terrible idea but i'm going to ask our city manager anyway if if experience burnsville is our partner organization and we are contracting with them are we able to lend some of our i.t expertise to them kara that's not a terrible idea um councilman mayor and councilmember i don't know that's something we've been we've been asked to do i mean we've looked at experience burnsville's they're they're in charge of them you got it i got it and certainly can we rethink about what what we want to do out of that partnership look yeah that's why the agreement is going to be important to define what does that look like so i haven't i even would you hate that or would you if you remember members of the council um we actually um city it used to be our it supports yeah yep yep and then there was a time when they we were and then when the recession uh and budget cuts and staffing cuts here at city that is when we that partnership terminated and then we sought our own i.t support and company so we have had our when i started we had a humongous closet server tower that tom venables helped us yeah um we did a team so yes we've we've been down that road and you know it worked well yeah it worked well i mean with one and a half staff people we don't have a great right great need for it services you know we've integrated everything into the cloud with office 365 so um we're you know we're slowly getting there are we at the level where the city is probably not yeah um but we're getting there so it's um it's all again prioritizing you know we're marketing organization so i want to put all of our efforts my time into marketing not necessarily i still have to manage the organization hr payroll accounts payable all that stuff but i really focus want to focus into the marketing and promotion so definitely a conversation and marketing and promotions is an art so in trying to try to understand how what the what the return is on all of that is how many people show up and so forth but if you don't have it out there then they don't know but driving traffic to the destination is what we need to do so any other questions dan keely uh an observation and a few questions if i may um well first and foremost after going through all this background and i know this really started maybe last year with some discussions um i have to stop and and think about what we been putting you through the last few months with a new contract which had a lot of changes in it and realized that with the pandemic you had a you lost a couple folks on your staff you went from four to two um and your revenue is taking a nosedive and yet we're sort of almost conducting business as usual trying to get a new contract arrangement done get a new plan together et cetera et cetera so i guess i i feel like i should apologize that maybe we we kept pressing forward on something that probably we should have pulled back and said why don't we give you until next year let's just operate status quo in your old contract and what can we do to help you survive now we did provide a grant which is great it's a one-time band-aid it's not a long-term solution and so there's you still have a massive revenue challenge given your presentation and everything we've read about the industry so i guess i'm in a way i'm saying i'm sorry we kind of kept pushing on this we probably should have pulled back and at a time like this i think we're we're expecting a lot out of an operation that has half the people and less than half of the money to do your job so i apologize um i really appreciate your presentation because there's a couple things i gleaned out of it that for whatever the reason i didn't get in your previous presentations over the last 12 years how long have you been there 14 years 14 years well i've been here 14 years so i've been here ever since you've been doing presentations and somehow i the the whole heads and beds thing didn't sink in the way i should have uh you know because we've been talking about over the last year how does the cbb promote more of the stuff that's going on because we're so excited about all these new things that we're doing in the city but how many of those new things that are going on in the city are actually driving overnight hotel stays which is where your 100 dependency comes on that comes in and i want to touch on that as my last question and so your focus has to be to bring people into the city to stay overnight or you have no revenues right or your revenues go down which means your ability to do what many of us including me want is let's make sure that the art and all that jazz and the release series and the race and the and the fire muster and the party on the plaza and all these things get your marketing channels and media attention to help spread the word you can do that as long as you have this solid base of revenue coming from heads and beds otherwise you can't do anything so uh that that sort of really hit home as i was i was kind of getting caught up in the you know what else you know what else can you do right to talk about the city and get more people excited about wanting to live here right creating a desire to live here uh so dan you want to touch on something comment that we have to put heads in bed so we don't have money to do anything else great we are aware that we have other opportunities and and ways to be of service both the city government and city community one of the things we are doing is to use the you belong in vivo tag on virtually everything we use we don't use it exclusively any local flavor local flour may also be there or other of our tags but we've been i hope your best partner in using uh you molang and veda we some of our destination drivers are local and i mentioned uh weddings and unfortunately funerals and family reunions and tournaments some are regional in nature like valley fair and the renaissance festival and the county fair and the state fair and even the steele county fair professional athletics professional theater and we can't contr none of us can control when they start to get back to normal we hope it will be in second quarter of next year it may be third or even fourth quarter before they're back to normal so some of what um amy and i would talk about as destination drivers or business drivers are within our control and many are not thank you can any of us even imagine the state fair being canceled for a second year just can't even conceive that yeah the only time it happened was in 1945 and 1946. don't just say that it's not going to happen it won't happen but i don't think it's out of the classroom yeah that's that and that's really as as this sort of um you know reaches into your industry especially you start to think about that six it was cancelled because of the polio epidemic yeah in 1945 it was cancelled because of travel restrictions at the end of world war ii and travel resources were needed to get troops back home obviously in 2020 we canceled the state fair entirely because of the pandemic and the risk of becoming a super spreader event i'm hopeful we'll know more and know enough and like j hammer is a friend of mine the general manager at the state fair i suppose if i tried to get him to give me a number he's 60 or 70 percent certain we're going to have a normal or near normal fail but that's not a hundred yeah that's a challenge yeah um so uh my first question is are you comfortable at the language that's been worked on until today in this new contract i mean you feel good about it you feel you could fulfill the spirit of this new agreement and all the new entries that are part of it we weren't comfortable with the first draft then we went to a second draft we got a little more comfortable i think we're on a third draft which is better i suspect that we'll be working with jenny and there may be a few more changes but we're getting okay did you agree with that i would agree with that um i would just ask uh as we move forward and the unknown is be before all of us is um you know the more we can collaborate and communicate as partners and we're on the same page the better we can market and promote our destination our community um so you know i think that that's key moving forward agreed yeah if you know if we want a closer relationship we have to have a closer relationship right you need to be at the at the table in everything that we're doing and all of these events and stuff that are going on um well thank you that's that's good considering you know what you've gone through the last six months like everybody else but you know we're really speaking to a hotel or a restaurant you know or an event center that's what you live and die off of obviously with the hotel tax but restaurants are so and events are so integrated in what you do it's like having a hoteler in front of us going hey can you do better right and you're really down i mean you really have been beaten down by the pandemic and it's been a challenging time to go through a contract of this nature to this degree so i appreciate your willingness to move forward um a couple other questions uh what are you hearing from other cbb's around the country because your presentation sort of highlighted the the really really bad situation going on in minneapolis and st paul so they're not really a good resource to find out how they're trying to although they might have come up with some incredible ideas but what are you hearing around the country from your peer group as far as what other cvb's have done to try and create some excitement and new reasons to you know focus on their cities etc very good question councilmember um you know i think the global message is that we need to convey gentle optimism that you know we are still in the midst of this pandemic and people are still afraid to travel and then people that are traveling are being travel shamed for traveling you know so it's a there's a lot of moving pieces in this whole um our new universe um you know so that's primarily it uh you know the majority of cvbs when the pandemic was first upon us really took a pause a lot i don't have the number off the top of my head but many pause completely and they really reassessed they furloughed and laid off staff and they cut spending but for the operation of their organization we had a different approach to that because that is when our hospitality partners need us the most is when something happens like a pandemic or 9 11 you know events like that so i think moving forward you know we we rely as dmos on other organizations events and businesses and hospitality and their willingness to be open for visitors so as we begin to open up minnesota hopefully and people are comfortable traveling again you know we're going to be there ready with our messaging and ready to welcome them back you know throughout the summer months we've had several renditions of our marketing plan and our strategies and blogs that we had outlines for and things happened and gets tossed out you know cancellation of the state fair cancellation of the renaissance valley fair not opening mall of america opening but on the limited concert series yeah so um you know just being nimble and being able to adjust with the times if you will or adjust with the events and the businesses that are open yeah thank you um lastly um when you look at a model that is dependent on one single revenue source makes you nervous and up until the pandemic it was okay you know fluctuate a little bit but it was good in 2018. uh it appears that that was your peak but it's at times like this when that revenue source is crippled that you start to think maybe we need to invest in a broader model or diversify our revenue base are you having any discussions with partner organizations with um and that could be the chamber and cvb's and chambers have got a very close relationship in a lot of cities but where you can look at exploring some additional additional uh revenue models even if things come back in 2023 which is i think very unfortunate that that industry your industry has to wait that long i hope something bounces back a lot faster than that but the reality is you're planning for a very you know slow recovery um i'm reading a lot of your industry related uh news and articles and and publications that are talking about a lot of these types of partnerships with the local economic development authority the chamber other organizations the hospitality uh the hotel the restaurants i mean i see what you're doing the hotels are bringing in the revenue but you're benefiting a lot of other entities restaurants and event centers that aren't contributing to they're basically harvesting from your effort that the hotels are funding so maybe there's some some conversations to explore there as we kind of get out of this uh not not a good one to have right now but because nobody has anything but uh and i don't know dan when you were the uh president of the tourism and retail organization you know because you even had to address all of that uh with regard to partnerships and so forth i've had several people accuse me of perfect timing and having retired in july of 2018 and not having been in that position during the the pandemic i will tell you that our bylaws had prohibited our having members or member dues remember promotions took that out of the violence and we're not yet we don't want to compete with the chamber at this time but that doesn't mean that at some point in the future there may be a way to get some revenue help from other businesses i will tell you the smart thing that van gaalis and other leaders have done was to build reserves in the organization and the fact that we had five or six months of reserve kind of in our primary accounts and some additional savings we've been able to backfill some of that with the two part-time grants but absent that we wouldn't be able to be in a position to to do the work going forward council member keel you asked if there was anything you could do to help we did uh place an ask with aim center management about the rent that we currently pay at aim center we're not able to really use the office very much because of the work from homeowner and name center being largely closed we continue to pay the rent because we need a place for our furniture and our database and our supplies and all of the things that that we will desperately need as we relaunch but if the city would be in a position to consider an adjustment to the rent for 21 that would be helpful okay yep i think we're in that case we're a landlord like any other landlord that in the current pandemic uh crisis they've had to come to the table to be able to uh you know keep a long-term tenant or help in some way shape or form so i think it's a fair and we made adjustments to our liquor license holders so we help them uh so there are things that we can and we say that we'll be fair and just with everybody that we work with appreciate that that would be something uh councilmember workman thank you um amy you mentioned something earlier that i wanted to focus on as being i think a key component to your success and that was the collaboration and communication piece of this um and i do owe you a phone call still [Laughter] maybe that was geared towards you well you looked at me when you said it just know that i'm not i'm not not calling you back i'm not not calling everybody here back so um that's the truth it's not gonna happen can i interject justice i got a text from someone who uh wasn't able to hear most of what you said mr mcelroy so maybe whoever is speaking um slide the mask aside so the microphone can better pick up what you're saying you said a lot of great stuff and unfortunately our audience that's tuning in can't hear it very well all right i will uh try to remember to do that um yeah i just lost my train of thought sorry i want to make sure they could hear what you're saying um collaboration oh i was going to say so in the for even just since i started here i've noticed um a tangible difference in just the overall relationships between this organization and the chamber and even the festivals um as opposed to pre i'm not attributing any of this to me but just saying that i've noticed a difference in the interaction that the cdb has had with these other groups so that is very important the other things i wanted to quick touch on was that the i i know that the calendar does seem like a big undertaking but the more that i think about that um and the more that i think about see the cvb being kind of the lead on that the more it makes sense to me when i think about where people that aren't from here are going to likely go first to see what to do here i would imagine they would probably go to you first and if there's an easy way to get that integrated um i just i think that's a wonderful idea and a huge asset um for people coming in and i think it speaks directly to what a cbb is trying to accomplish you know and to what i think kara said is i don't know that we need to get down to church calendars but even if we're targeting you know sports tournaments and not necessarily standard games but you know where people are coming in from greater minnesota for tournaments having that available to them makes sense when i look at our background and i see the other items under deliverables and activities proposed the only other item i see where there might be some discomfort was the proactively lead tourism placemaking in the city and i don't know if amy you want to speak to that or jenny but maybe just expand on what that kind of means and then what the reaction to that item is yeah that is give me yourself you have to take your mask off so people can yeah council member workmen members of the council um tourism placemaking it's an impart an important part of a destination everyone wants that instagramable moment whether it's next to the bean or the spoon and cherry or centrifuge or the ames horses you know that type of thing i think where we were coming from is that we are a marketing organization and we are we would be thrilled to continue to market place making opportunities um within our destination as this excuse me the cvb the best to lead the effort in creating place making as the staff person i would say we are not we as an organization don't own land or buildings or parks or we don't own space you know we own computers and desks you know and um and and people in town thank you yeah um so thank you so you know that was where um our point on that um edition was coming from it's not that we are not supportive we would support and continue to support place making opportunities um just not with us being the the lead on it we can be the lead promoter we'll take that any day because that's what we do that's our that's what marketing is i think there might be room for something in between there too you know and a lot of that place making that you speak of um oftentimes i think happens organically and it's not really planned um so maybe there's something in our community that we're not even aware of that is instagramable like a landfill or a quarry okay um the only other question i had was um yeah we we spend a lot of time discussing analytics from our social media or your social media but i'm curious was heads and beds really the primary driver of measurable's pre facebook and google analytics or how did you how did you measure those things before those resources were available um council member workmen members of the council when i started in 2006 our measurables were um the number of phone calls we'd receive on our 800 number and the number of requests we'd received for our visitor guide so we'd place an ad in usa today on a sunday and monday morning we'd come in and we'd have dozens of messages requesting our coupon book and as marketing has changed and developed so has our analytics you know marketing is sort of a intangible item you know you can place an ad somewhere but you don't know if it's really driving traffic to someone's hotel you know there's ways that that could be accomplished you know to measure and get that information it is extremely expensive to do um so what we've really relied on is we did what for example we did a visitor profile study research project by the by the university and we did it during our shoulder season so um september through february historically the slower times for visitation to our community and slower hotel stays and that helped us really define who was traveling here what they're doing when they're traveling here what's the age group how much do they spend on an overnight stay how much do they spend on a day trip so then based on that information we've used that data to help develop our current marketing plan and the geographic and demographic areas that we really target we we were very broad into canada and a very big big footprint of our marketing efforts when i first started because things were print um and now with digital we're able to dial that in and target the people that we know like burnsville and we can do a look-alike audience with social media there's you know website pickle pic pixels not pickles sorry pixels and uh you know just we can follow people now we retarget we geofence we do all those types of things so it's not an exact science on how many people stay overnight in our hotels because of our marketing efforts we we don't have a booking engine on our website expedia travel awesome they're better at doing all that yeah yeah i'm gonna go to skip he's had his hand up thank you madam mayor um just a thought that came to mind as councilmember workman was talking about tournaments and things as you all know probably you know one of the greatest hurdles in putting a calendar together is actually getting the various groups to submit the information and it's it's actually a much bigger hurdle than you would think it would be for free advertising but one of the ways the city could help in the partnership is if you're going to hold a baseball term a softball tournament a soccer term or anything else you're going to have to rent city fields and certainly if the recreation department would either a alert those groups that this calendar is available are even better get all the information together and put it on the calendar themselves that would certainly go a strong way to you know helping get that calendar populated and move forward and it hopefully would not take that much more effort out of our recreation department okay i like that okay shall i move on to the takara or are you still asking questions um i guess i don't have my parting shot would be um i'm not an online professional but one thing that i've noticed is that the the content that gets shared the most often gets noticed the most um and there's got to be some algorithm out there whether it be through memes or or comedy or heartstrings that you know gets content shared that i think has always been more effective than just you know passive likes or views and that's not me micro managing or telling you to do that is just kind of an observation that i've i've picked up so thank you for helping me understand some of this better thank you kiara uh the question i have for you and this deals not just with the fact that you rent space how would closing the aim center for six to eight months affect you in effect um hotels things like that in burnsville yep the aim center were able to operate with attractions that draw people the lutheran church women basement and the lorry line show and a variety of other attractions those help those dude put heads in bed um the dance program put certainly put heads in bed and also help our other non-hotel interest restaurant i'm sorry um i'm used to when people are pointing at me it's not something as helpful as take my mask so if the aim center were open but not busy it doesn't help as much if they're open and they have activities it helps a lot and particularly with the holidays coming up we know that many people are have cabin fever and whatever the equivalent is i gotta get out of this place and i was hopeful that programs that drew bus traffic like the church basement ladies and and the singing nuns and glory lion and others we're hoping those could take place so my question is what if it's closed closed for six to eight months if it's uh that's not helpful um but it also it only helps if it's busy if it's open and empty it doesn't help us out and so i don't know what brian's uh hearing from organizers and presenters and people who do the kinds of things that would help us do our job and laurie amy do you have anything else you can add do you know more um with the aim center staff thank you um with aimcenter staff brian you know they're building their event calendar um especially for the holidays lori line is coming and there's uh tickets yep and so um there is activity at the aim center um i think closing a regional destination such as the aim center for an extended period of time would have a long long term impact with the fact that brian and his staff wouldn't be able to continue their efforts to bring events back into so it would be a pause in the event calendar and how long would that take to rebuild the event calendar and then do you risk the chance of losing events such as church basement ladies or lorry line do they look to other venues for future performances because the entertainment industry has been hit hard just like the hospitality industry and these artists are hungry and they want to get back out and perform and now you know if we get the government restrictions on group size you know if that if we can continue to turn the dial and get more people out with higher capacity in a healthy safe way that's a win for everyone in my my opinion so one of the things that was experience burnsville and what you do in highlighting destination areas in the city you did a piece about skateville so our most famous person who came to burnsville uh because of the of skateville is katy perry yep so skip was our most famous person so the thing is there is you don't know what you don't know and she wanted to fly under the radar but i got information from them that she was going to be at skateboard and she was there with her group for a birthday party i had no idea yeah that was a couple years ago yeah so you never know that when you're marketing the city and you're marketing destinations what all of that means what your net might catch right yeah okay so dan did you want to address the agreement because we got uh and i think this is one that you and our staff worked on and from everything that i uh understand with the way that we want to work and in terms of the culture within our organization is we work collaboratively i think jenny has some comments and we can respond madam mayor i was going to go through highlights of the changes but okay because there's a behind the highlights and red highlights and purple okay i'll go through my presentation i need to change stuff you are so well prepared you can sanitize let me do it i learned from the experts okay um so a couple of the changes in the agreement and we went back and forth a couple of times um trying to address some of the comments from the all-day work session from council and presenting those to experience burnsville and seeing kind of where we could come to agreement so the deliverables that have been added to the agreement include analytics on reach audience impressions excuse me that's going to be immeasurable including the you belong here brand where appropriate appropriate collaborating with partners things that amy has talked about the public calendar collaboration when she talked about some of the stressors on that proactively working with the city to pursue projects benefiting from tourism and place making we talked about that that was something that we threw out there and experience burnsville is happy to support that but does not feel they should be leading it as talked about by amy and dan and then we added in measurables that was something that came up at the all-day work session and trying to manage expectations your expectations because i think that's partially why this came up um and so if we can measure the opportunities or how experienced burnsville has actively partnered and participated with the city kind of working more closely together what does that look like number and type of audience reach on engagement and marketing and the number of informational programs undertaken audience in reach and those measurables were taken from the deliverables so those are just the highlights of the agreement looking for any additions anything you want to take out does it capture what you're looking for when you said you wanted to bring this back okay so can you go back to the next the slide just before this one and from amy and dan when you look at the measurable specified and just looking at everything that you have presented this is a marketing organization so what are you what are your thoughts right you take your master yeah thank you council members madam mayor um i think the the measurables are obtainable um i would you know when when i as the sole full-time staff person look at actively participate um what does that mean does that mean my presence at the event or participate in um marketing and again it's just it's not that i'm not willing to attend events but as the the driver of the ship if you will the my time you know where is my time best spent under the new expectations of the agreement and um you know what role do you want us to play in that and i think that's valid when you say actively participate what does that mean so that we all know what the definition is um and it may be that we'll have to do some of that active participation using volunteer board members and not our paid staff and we'll take the draft to our board next week at the retreat and talk more about this um we want we need to be realistic so the things that we do we do well and that we don't uh anticipate that our staff is working a lot of overtime that we can't necessarily compensate for madam mayor yes councilmember keeley that's one of those points that um if av had a complete staff yeah it'd be a no-brainer but it's a real difficult ask and so i think what i hear saying is what's the little literal interpretation that because i don't i don't want to set her up to fail yeah just to have a measurable that she can't achieve right now so maybe that could be worded differently um you know so it is staff and or a volunteer board member wherever possible for now right until we have we're back to uh better times and better you know more staff coming back participating means that you collaborate and look at what all of this means for a particular event and partner with the different activities is that and then and then when the launch hits is it the members of the board and you know our staff asks us to participate in some of our activities some show up some don't yeah i think uh her amy's coming earlier about um you want us to publish it and market it that's you know i'm all in that's what we do right so giving her creative and having her publish it is one thing physically being involved at the table in every single organization and every single event maybe kind of getting to what she's saying is like i don't know that right now with me being the only full-time i can commit to that it might might be a challenge yeah we'll look at the exact language and it may need for the next two years to have some language like to the extent possible yeah melanie yeah madam mayor and council i'm going to throw an option out because um it seems like there's still some opportunity to refine the agreement and it sounds like the board hasn't looked at it yet so perhaps amy and mr mcelroy can take the discussion back to the board at their meeting next week we have some work to do it appears okay so why don't we why don't we allow the board to weigh in on their options and then from a staff perspective we'll come back to the council with some edit some updates and and go from there unless there's any other specific guidance or or direction the council would like to provide tonight yeah that's that and that's a great great idea so uh i have council member workman and then gustafson then schultz thank you i just wanna i think we're all looking at the same item um letter i in the agreement and it says participate and actively partner in activities that promote the city which i think is a little different than partner and actively participate in activities so as i read that participate and actively partner in activities that promote the city i'm understanding that to read kind of what we just got done talking about is actively partnering with the chamber and fire monster and all these other city kind of one-off groups um that's how i'm interpreting that and i think we've already kind of validated that that's part of the basis of what you're currently doing but i agree with our city manager that this probably doesn't need to go to the board so you guys can dissect this and and see um as a whole where this does or doesn't make sense yeah councilmember gustafson i agree i think it needs to uh go back to the board so we can all discuss it at our meeting and i will say though as someone who creates events as dan does as pretty much everybody else so there are tons of volunteers in the city just love to engage and get involved with all kinds of different organizations and so i think there's a way to cultivate some people that normally would may not interact with the cbp that might want to because you're part of different events around town and they can just be there to help promote their city and help promote those events and but that's that's more discussion we can have next week at the all day okay council remember shows so i see a difference between actively participate and partner and the word attendance what i'm looking for from you is that you know what's going on not just that it's a date but you have some level of information about what the event is if there are any changes if it's a new event because you cannot market something unless you know what the hook is going to be right and so when i'm looking at that that's what i'm looking for that you understand what the hook is on that event and that you can then promote that event in a way that people when they attend the event they're like yes that is what it is but also so that it peaks their interests so that's what i'm looking for and actively participate and partner with city activities that may at times mean you're physically at the event itself it may not if it is a recurring event it may be that you or you have someone else um get the promotional materials that you will need to then promote it again next year um and yes the city does that as well but sometimes cities are even when we're looking at something for marketing we're looking at it slightly different than perhaps you are because you are looking for people to come and not just come for the day and bug out you're like you're looking for them to stay so you're looking to position some of these events slightly differently than our city is so that's that's what i'm looking at and that's what my expectation is um for this to actively participate and partner with city activities just that we have a closer relationship where we are communicating effectively with one another that's what i'm looking for okay well i think melanie you have a great idea amy and her board will have discussion and go through the agreement and continue to work with staff before it comes back to us pardon me i said thank you madam mayor yeah thank you mr mcelroy thank you okay so we um is everybody okay with the direction that we're taking right now and i want to say thank you for your uh report uh amy and dan on on the marketing efforts that you've taken through this colbit time that we're in and you've done quite a bit and i know that i have received some comments from what you did for buck 54 because of the traffic that you've driven to also to their dining and opening uh grand opening and so forth so that was well done i mean it drove traffic to that and uh councilmember keeley uh posted his dinners from buck yeah that was great 54. friday night fish fry saturday night prime rib both specials were absolutely fantastic yeah yeah councilmember augustine i just want to add on uh having done the relief sessions this year and cbb was a big part of it and it went off the charts as far as people the hits that were that was amazing yeah what was going on out there because not only were you posting it he was posting it and so when you continue crazy yeah and so that was good it's in our background yeah we had a great campaign yeah that was around yeah we had a great campaign around the relief session so i think that the partnership um is a great one and you're marketing the city you're marketing the destination per state statute but at the same time during cobit you have pivoted as you've said in your report and did some things that brought people within a 10-mile radius to understand what's open in burnsville what they can do and so forth and so that was nice you had some creative things to help them um get into restaurants and so thank you for that it's a lot of work for one and a half people to be doing uh and and i think you accomplished a great deal you had your you had your uh did you hire the drone that flew around at one of the relief sessions that was not that was not you that was someone that was someone sitting his pickup for taking pictures yeah but the other thing is that you had a photographer taking some some photos did you uh madam mayor not um at the relief sessions we were at fire muster um oh that's right in 2018 i believe it was yeah we we had two professional photographers at disability sessions this year well that's that comes back to the collaboration and partnership right so the more information that we're given on the front end about events and occurrences in the city the better we're able to finesse that messaging yeah and market it as a destination driver yeah and i got a ton of pictures before for next year perfect i look forward to getting those i'll email you there you go the nice thing uh in your report was also the blogs that you're doing um i hope we can save t and j yes that is our goal everyone eats sushi yeah yeah hey i am doing my part i'm like there like twice a week so yeah yeah i think we're growing we're all trying yeah so thank you because you did a nice job with buck 54 olivia and and um in taking pictures and also t and j so thank you very good i just want to thank city staff jenny melanie our board members dan gustafson and the folks that are here tonight and the ones that are i'm sure watching from home yeah just thank you that we are able to do what we can do as staff with the support of everyone yeah so thank you for all that you've done the covet environment okay thank you thank you okay we're going to take a recess a five seven minute seven minute recess seven minute recess and then we'll we'll reconvene so 807 we're back and the next item is the twin lakes drainage improvement and our city engineer jen desrood is going to tee this one up and we have a consultant that's going to be presenting jen yes thank you mayor council um so tonight we're just going to do a brief overview of the twin lakes drainage improvements i think many if not all of you have been contacted by residents in the past about certain drainage issues high water levels on both crystal lake and south twin lake and so we wanted to we did some studies i'll get to that and want to make some improvements on on both of those lakes additionally with the twin lakes residential projects that have become been coming through the council had been contacted about stormwater management concerns with those so this will address that as well this timeline just shows that we started studying an overall citywide drainage issues back in 2019 we just wrapped up the study it had three components one was updating our our overall citywide model uh resiliency study to find problem areas and and come up with potential solutions and then the lake levels on the chain of lakes from keller lake to the minnesota river and the outcome of that study is our first project which is this twin lakes drainage improvement so we are in the preliminary design phase right now and justin will go through our preliminary design um i suppose that arrow tells us where we're at right now and then um we're taking feedback from from the residents and hopefully if you have any feedback for these projects we'll get them and incorporate them into our design and moving forward so we have a project website where we'll be putting project updates an online comment form we've held two open houses one virtually last monday night we had about 15 attendance to that we held an in-person open house last wednesday we had i think about 15 households some people didn't sign in uh separately but as a family um and so we were able to respond to some of the the questions about the project and i'll turn it over to justin he can go through some of those details all right thank you very much jen so the three projects we identified through the study phase is one here working ourselves from the upstream to downstream is the crystal lake outlet modification on south town lake to the north we're looking at installing a new outlet and a new storm sewer system from the pond or the lake itself and the third one is the regional pond expansion so as we look at these we want to really identify the benefits and i'll give you an overall understanding of the dynamics of the system so crystal lake actually flows into south twin to the north then from south twin to south of the south cross drive there's a storm service connection that goes in the north wind ultimately north twin then flows back into the storm sewer on south cross and heads west across i-35w through the chain of lakes and ultimately to the minnesota river valley so what i'm trying to get to this point is that any improvement on any of these lakes will benefit all three of them together basically because they all work in concert together so if we can make improvements in one location it'll also have that domino effect in other locations and so the goal we're trying to provide is the two main things that came out of the study the public involvement it was one specifically for crystal lake is there's the extended period of high water level condition so we want to the draw down right so how long does it take the lake to drain down we want to get that done quicker because what it does if it's an elevated high water levels restricts the use just basic fundamentals the second part of it is causes erosion is the water level is higher on the lake it actually helps to erode the lake shore and i know that has been a known problem by residents and one of the concerns that we heard as we move north into south twin high water levels have been a concern also similar to crystal lake how long those high water levels are there so consistent across the board is can we reduce high water levels to this system but also can we reduce the drawdown which these projects that we're proposing all do both of those combined factors so as i dig into a little bit more detail of each one of these and trying to keep it high level here is so we're looking at the crystal lake improvements as i mentioned before we're looking at replacing that box outlet structure if you guys have seen it along the shoreline there we're looking at just replacing that increasing and making some modifications um the modifications you look at this the graph on the bottom and what does that mean how much reduction we're seeing a 30 reduction in time it takes for the lake to reestablish the normal pool elevation what that means is it's not just hours we're talking days of improvement where it might have taken a couple weeks and residents are like hey you know they're getting phone calls why is this water so high we're actually going to reduce that you know six to seven days a week comparatively speaking of how long it would typically draw down and one of the other residential concerns we heard was you know how are you guys going to build this when is it going to be built and the part of that is the parking lot right people want to use the parking lot the boat landing we don't have a lot of space down there there's the street in proximity so we're looking at proposing to improve this area in the fall when there's limited activity you know the recreational use of the lake is overall limited compared to the summer months so we're targeting fall of 21 to do the construction for crystal lake you know are we going to be notifying all of those residents around there with all of this because we had some complaints about all of the traffic and the cars parking around that area this summer yeah prior to doing any construction we'll be sending out notifications of when the construction is going to start yeah because you didn't like all of the complaints and i got a whole bunch of them also so yeah it needs we need to be open transparent we need to let people know what's going to be happening over there madam mayor is that yes you're looking at councilmember the red box extends into the parking lot area and takes up what looks like parking space correct correct that's just temporary like parking for vehicles equipment temporarily so they can have a spot you know vehicles of equipment of tools and things like that that they can shuttle back and forth to the work zone and back so no actual improvements will happen in the parking lot just think of it as a staging area yeah which is just i'm just going to point out you're going to start when it wouldn't be until after labor day okay so that's what we want to avoid the 7 months in the really busy time and look at you know like a late september october time frame are you going to be having meetings with the crystal lake association so we've already um reached out to everybody who lives along crystal lake and some of them attended our meeting that we had already but we'll keep that same group in our in our correspondence and we've been directing everyone to the website but we'll likely have another open house type meeting prior to construction okay so as we move continue down the chain of lakes we get to south twin lake similar to what we just talked about at crystal lake what we're proposing here is to install a new outlet as i mentioned initially the water from south wind flows into north twin and then that water to leave the two chain of lakes or actually has to flow out of a pipe that's located at north twin lake what we want to do to maximize the drawdown and maximize the discharge from the system is we're actually going to install a new outlet on southwind that connects directly in with the downstream trunk storm sewer system that way it allows south wind to drain faster and that's where we're seeing again 30 35 percent change in reduction in drawdown time we are seeing reduction in high water levels but the problem with reducing how well is further is that you'd have to upsize the pipe further downstream and substantial improvement project to try to accommodate that so we're maximizing what we can from a high water level reduction and really trying to get that draw down to reduce as much as possible okay before you go on um have we communicated with mr demasters and have him understand what's happening here mayor council mr demaster was both at both meetings the virtual and the in person we spoke with him um he did have concerns that um this wouldn't address the problem we tried to explain to him what we're doing is lowering the uh the drawdown quicker this the high water level will reduce slightly but it will still have that bounce up we explained all of that to him um in both meetings will he be experience flooding like he's been getting he will still experience high water levels but the water won't stay there as long it will draw down much much faster there's not much that we can do besides chase this problem with a larger pipe about a mile of new pipe at a much larger size which is not a feasible or cost effective solution which is one of the goals that justin was given with his project but it will bring the water down faster i think how many days faster on southwind yeah this one is again in the about a week week to eight days time frame relatively speaking of the weeks and the one thing too to touch on is we've been experiencing a lot of frequent storm events so because the system takes so long to draw down and there's so many lakes in the sequence of it if we're able to get that water out there faster that means crystal lake has more storage to hold back water same with south twin and north wind all have capacity to hold water versus when it takes it 21 days for them to draw down that means they're already starting with the water level that might be three or four feet in the lake so we get that water water out of the system and re-establish the normal that means there's just more volume to handle those events that we've been experiencing this last summer the year before and ultimately you know provide additional benefit that isn't necessarily shown in a model when we look at traditional story events okay but he was there you did reach out i reached out and he was at both meetings okay good but he wasn't quite happy with the information he was not sure of it he didn't know that he believed that it would solve the problem and i was clear that it will not it the waters will still rise almost to the level they are today but it won't just hang out there for days it's going to recede probably quicker than he's ever thought and you know if a storm comes through at night it might even start receding before he even notices some of that stuff is you know his concerns with killing plants and things like that water that just damages his property water that just sits there is what did that and so we're we're this will help with that okay and just if i may met america to clarify you mentioned improve it by six days it's from 21 to 15 instead of 21 days it'll correct yeah correct think of like a roughly a 30 reduction in time cut a week off of the high water yeah duration right yeah and the flooding where it just keeps um flooding his property and ruining it yeah so as we look to the third improvement then which is located just on the north side of north twin lake the regional pond that's located here is actually taking in water from the north from the different developments the residential areas there's large diameter storm systems that discharge into this provide water quality benefits and also flood control and so what we're proposing to do here to help you know again reduce you know flood levels but also improve volume is we're looking at expanding the regional pond so what i mean by that is we're removing dirt along the hillside and so how much water can fill that regional base and we're looking at providing more live storage we call it so more just more volume period that you can fill that area without sending that water downstream within north winter southwind so it helps hold water back create more storage for it with this we did have residents we actually met in sight with a local resident adjacent to the project you know initially in this graph in the concept we want to make sure we want to solicit input right and so we show just a larger area being impacted from a tree standpoint you know through conversations with him and working with jen and her staff you know right now we're looking at providing a buffer you know undisturbed buffer between the residential properties located on the east side in our work zone just to maintain the feel that they had as much as much as we can while also providing the benefit of providing that reduction and the additional volume that we need within the regional pond to help create more volume within the overall system so those are the couple things that we we got from that the other part of it we're looking at doing and is still in the concept phase is can we provide additional water quality right so if we provide additional water quality benefit within this pond that means north to wind and south to and also have additional water quality benefit because that water ultimately does reach both of them as well and the water quality benefit would be provided by increasing the amount of permanent pool that's there how much water stays there long term the more volume you can provide that means the more area or the more resuspension of sediment would not occur and you can hold more material in there over a longer period of time so as we look at those are the three improvements as jen mentioned before all these improvements are focusing on reducing the drawdown period and reducing high water levels and it reduces the high water levels throughout the system entirely within the area that we're looking there's no increases and it also reduces that drawdown period so we can eliminate those nuisance back-to-back conditions that create artificially high high water levels as we look to then expanding the schedule agenda noted we're in that polymeric engineering phase right now we're looking to you know move into a final design phase putting the details in and working with city staff through this fall and winter in the winter of 2021 we look at bidding the project out to a contractor starting construction in the spring through the fall again on this construction side we'd be holding off crystal lake and only requiring the contractor to start that project when we want them to which would be at the earliest you know after labor day into september but allowing the regional base and the south cross drive storm sewer system to be installed you know in the spring summer months ultimately speaking with fema they are fema designated flood plains and we look at remapping just based on the improvements we want to make sure that everything matches up within the city ordinances to what the maps are showing in fema so we do a remapping post construction project to get that all equalized out with that would love to take any questions you guys have any questions for and jen just it's a big help yeah obviously to the lake owners on crystal lake during heavy rainfall when they have a no wake or extended three times the downstream same thing i mean one's more recreational than the other but um but the flooding that some of the folks experience there seeing that water recede quicker is going to be a positive sign yep it it is we'll wait and see next year after or what wouldn't be 21 it'll be 22 and hopefully we don't have the kind of rain events that we've experienced that have flooded and kept that water high for 21 days and really was devastating for some of our residents because of the impact on their property okay thank you that was it's it's good i'm glad we're good we're doing some things to help move that water faster out of there and be good for the lake owners and i mean the lakes and the property owners around the lake so after that you'll do the lomar so did we have to do that with like twin lakes and with some of the flooding because it's there's already been a mapping effort for twin lakes and this is just going to redo that based on the new modeling and the project that we're doing okay all right anything else i think so okay thank you so much nicely done thank you thank you jen thank you ryan okay the next item uh on the agenda is the proactive property maintenance measurables and jenny miss faulconer our community development director and um who else is going to be i see that you have jason arthur i think there's a technical error in the background and i was thinking okay i don't see jason from ellers no no but i do see chris chris horsland's our uh my co-host co-presenter tonight on the show okay so uh thank you madam mayor members of the council um we're gonna go back and forth here but i just will start with the history and kind of why we're here this was this is a follow-up to the november 26 2019 work session where we halted the proactive property maintenance program as part of that discussion you had wanted some kind of information to be brought back for monitoring purposes and we're struggling with what that could be if we're not doing it so we're seeking clarity on what that information is and we'll start with letting you know what information we do have that we could bring back to you i'll just do a next slide american members um first thing i want to talk about is a little bit of the types of data that we have available right now we can take a look at we we can i guess determine what our quantity of data is quantitative data kind of tells us how much it's what we would traditionally use when we want to know where we're at on on certain things examples would be the number of complaints number and type of violations where those complaints may originate whether it be staff generated or public generated unfounded complaints as well as a number of complaints at a certain location so there's a lot of numerical parameters that can be assigned to that we also want we can generate take a look at qualitative data qualitative data is more of where it's going where it's again we can look at outcomes of any actions that we take in for enforcement steps whether it be a first violation whether it be just an informational letter things along that line as well as perhaps take a look at risk assessments where are we moving are we seeing more of a particular type of violation so we can divert our resources that way right now we can do that it's it's somewhat difficult with the current software program we have what we can't do is we don't collect data on perhaps phone calls content anything like that emails we may attach emails as a as a part of that but we don't track we can't parse it out very easily time spent on any particular case from end to end as well as the severity of the cases there's some pro as far as problems with the data it's just a point in time and it can be affected by a couple different things changes any code processes which we've had plenty of uh seasonality i it was this the last two years i've actually received a complaint for long weeds and grass in the middle of december which i thought was interesting but that's an example where that can fluctuate staffing levels uh and also again limitations on our software our data sets the software that we're currently running right now the statistical portions of it are about 10 years old so very difficult for us to very very labor intensive and like anything is very dependent on how it's inserted what data is put in and what we parse out of it so it's uh it's tough to use we have some maybe some other considerations when we think about what we could bring back and we can analyze the data we have and just throwing this out there that perhaps you want to create parameters for success you know are there certain benchmarks that you would want to put in place kind of as measurable uh compliance rates our response rates the engagement on our request tracker how we're following up on those do we want to do an analysis on the top 10 complaints and evaluative changes are needed to those that are complaining educating the public look at our top 10 violations do we need to make changes there changes to the ordinance perhaps changes to process so there's certain other kinds of benchmarks on how we use the data that could measure kind of the overall outcomes of the program when we look at 2021 and trying to provide you something um it's going to be a challenge for us so we've had a lot of changes this last year as you know and so we've spent a lot of our time on educating residents of those changes because things are different right and so we're not doing proactive we have increased the process by sending education letters and i'm not saying this is bad but these are the changes and so we get calls why are things taking longer well we've cha we've added another step in our process and so it takes a couple more weeks to get compliance significant change on the trash can screening we get calls i think we still get calls on this and having to explain it's fine where it's at or we'll go take a look and it's not a violation so a lot of edge public education on that and then of course with kovid that has changed kind of our code enforcement and what we've done there we've been down one staff person this entire year so again not knowing what the financials would be for the city next year some things that we have in the pipeline we're looking at new community development software suite so we expect this to help in a lot of ways across community development and licensing and with our reporting we're also looking at next year service delivery changes kind of improving what we do how we work with our residents through our economic development strategic plan we're looking at housing initiatives and how we can be partners with our residents on improvements kinds of things so just a different way of thinking about how we work with the residents that takes time may take some money but it's it's something we're looking forward to getting into next year and so with that we're looking for direction from you on what if anything we've made these changes a couple of you said but we want to bring it back we want to know how is it going and we're not quite sure how to quantify that for you if we're not doing it so if you say you're fine we can talk about this in three years if you say this is jenny this is what i want you to bring back then we can talk about that too so we don't have to do anything here is what i'm saying so jenny one of the things is that it's not fine because i look at the number of complaints that i've received this year i mean i i think we need to take a look at that and when you have neighbors um write and write and write and are frustrated because their neighbor isn't maintaining their property and it now has an effect on their property and they're concerned it's hard when when people are frustrated and i know that we don't have a proactive measure in place but um you know i respond to these folks you you all see my response because i copy you all um but when they come back and then another neighbor would write and um but they don't want to be they want don't want to cause a conflict but they know it has you know and they say things like she's a lovely person but and it goes on and that's just one i mean i have all of them and when people say you know perhaps i need to move out of burnsville perhaps you know it's i i want to get the value for my home now before the neighborhood deteriorates and the appraised value for my home is going to go down that's a hard one for me to to read or listen to so and i know these are all property maintenance and you know it's hard when a man who is struggling with cancer and doesn't get any response because it has to do when he tries to help his neighbor or talk to his neighbor but he's a renter the neighbor is a renter and so the owner isn't taking care of things and then our process creates is so protracted and it causes him frustration so and you all know this because you see my response and i always feel so bad i don't know you know and he's in his 80s so i think we need to take a look at this and say what are those measures and what do we do um to keep our neighborhoods vibrant you know our vision is that burnsville is a vibrant city but we also need to take put attention to the vibrancy of our neighborhoods and make sure that it continues to improve in terms of its value because it's for most people their homes are the largest um asset in their portfolio and when they see that it's devaluing they get scared especially when they're seniors and then i hear things like well maybe i should move out of birdsville i don't like that councilmember schultz so seeing what you have in your report i agree you definitely have challenges on what to report back to us absolutely and i think coming on top of what we're going to be doing is doing that major ordinance overhaul and so we're going to be having some changes there um coming on top of that we're looking at um looking at things through a more inclusive and culturally diverse lens on the reason why we have some of our ordinances and if that's something that still um fits it fits our our community and so we're gonna be looking at this um not just the overhaul but we're gonna be looking at it with a different lens and also in how we communicate with our community as well that's going to be affecting that you're listing that you have the new software which is coming up which is good and i yeah it's probably way overdue so that's good um and you're trying out your new um service delivery processes which i think is excellent because we always want to take a more educational approach and i really appreciate how hard you guys are working to do that you know we asked you to do it um and and i think you were inclined to be that way anyway naturally so this is a good fit so i think with all of that coming together i think we should put this on pause for a report at least for a year because we've got a lot going on you've got a lot going on and we're going to be having a lot more significant changes so having you try to report on something you're having difficulty reporting because your software doesn't allow you to you don't track the data um and we're going through all of these changes uh you know plus i mean let's face it 2020 has just been the year of taking a mulligan i think we should you know we should pause for at least at least a year let's get some of all of these changes some of them at least in place and some of them going forward before we try to make an assessment because otherwise we're trying to make an assessment during kind of a really multi-pronged chaotic time so that that would be my suggestion and you know i was one of them that asked for you guys to report back and so i have to apologize to you for that um because seeing your presentation now i see the difficulties in what we were asking you to do so um my preference would be let's let's just pause this for a year and shake things out a little bit councilmember gus simpson um yeah i think it's a kind of bad timing on this um but i do have a couple of questions that hopefully you can answer can you do are we ever to monitor whether the complaints are up compared to before we were proactive um yes we have a few backup slides in case you asked some questions so trying to stay on topic of the data and yeah and i have a second one too as long as you have this slide up the other one are our violations we're issuing their citation positioning are they up and down since we made this change they're down across the board about complaints um complaints we can't you know i i would love to say yes or no that's that's our summary as of today okay i'm just thinking because we were a proactive community we probably didn't get a lot of complaints because we were actually out there every day just pounding on yeah so i would expect that i would have expected the complaints would have gone up just because we weren't being proactive the the problem with that i believe is that you know we coveted had a huge impact yeah people didn't even know if we were in the office and we were unable to evolve [Laughter] yeah so there are many factors that drive the numbers that you're seeing um so i again i was one that kind of wanted to stay with the pro the only but that's a lot of that's part of my realtor hat too because i look at neighborhoods and it's i go to houses where one's in total disrepair and the other one's good the one that's good isn't going to make the money it should make because of what's in disrepair but what i'm trying to figure out if if our citizen complaint thing is working for us or not well do i mean you guys you guys are out in the neighborhoods i know you go on complaint but you're not blind you see what's going on when you're in the neighborhood you see there are 10 other houses in violation and you don't do anything about it probably i don't know but you see it because you're out there we all see it we also yeah i see i see when i'm out there madam mayor members of the council um as we're embarking on the discussion with housing with the economic development commission our next meeting will be talking about what tools we have and what tools are possible and art i will tell you that our team came up with some creative ideas and it's our job to present kind of the information you and the edc can say no no no no no but um you know one of the things that came up from our staff was you know we haven't done a housing survey in a while we used to do these on a regular basis where it was it was an intern but at least that intern looked at every neighborhood in the city so it was the same perspective with the same scoring sheet not 10 different people's opinions and so we were able to get a measurement over time of kind of the condition of certain neighborhoods there's a there's a fine line there right because this is where people live and they're proud of their neighborhoods i'd like to think and so in the data but it was presented to council if i'm recalling in in a high level overview so we maybe knew where to focus some of our efforts on and then back in the late 90s madam mayor will remember this we got grants department of justice grants or they were called weed and seed seed and it was over by um neil and the students of you to help make improvements um to those neighborhoods and so but that survey data was important to be able to gauge kind of where we're where we're at um we had interns do them i think we did them every five or eight years and we haven't had interns for for a while um for various reasons but that was one of the things that that certainly came up was was that um the other thing that came up was that proactive code enforcement um we're not the only community to use it and in other communities that have it and and one of the reasons why we started it's a it can be a good tool to maintain your housing stock and so um that was another thing we talked about and when we look at what other communities do so we look forward to this discussion with the edc and having them come before you in december so we can talk about some of these things again are excited for where this can lead us in the kind of government that we want to be and the services that we want to provide to our residents you know i heard the comment from our staff and we do this but we want to be more forthright in walking with people and helping them with their projects is what came up out of our meeting this week so yeah that you're going to do a housing stock review and also the neighborhoods like we've we've done in the past because that's how we got a lot of information that helped us to keep our neighborhoods vibrant and healthy and our real estate community was very much a part of that because they're the ones who are out there and they're the ones who also gave us feedback where um i remember um hearing from them saying well when people come in to burnsville and they go into a certain neighborhood the client would say drive on go someplace else this is not and i and i remember the neighborhood they were talking about and i'm not going to say it tonight but you know this is why we moved towards proactive also was because our neighborhoods were beginning to look depressed and not well kept so it's another tool as you're saying madam mayor in the in the potential toolbox that we'll be bringing forward is the housing survey yeah did you say we'll be discussing this in december with edc december work session is what we have planned for right now yeah yes yeah because when this happened and we had people in the audience i wanted to we always come back after a year and so i wanted to make sure we understand what was happening so i'm happy to hear that you have some some activities that we can review and take a look at because we need to do something so it's good thank you so this did you need anything else only if not necessarily only if you wanted to tell us what you want but if you want to defer it for a year and gets through i think you're you're on a roll you're on a roll staff is doing some things let's keep moving if you you've got the capacity to do it and you already have scheduled this to be on our uh december work session and you're going to be talking to the economic development commission so you're on a road let's keep going okay thank you madam mayor thank you council thank you very much okay great thank you good work and now the next item is our legislative priorities and melanie thank you madam mayor and council last agenda item of the evening so i'm going too fast here so i will be efficient with the presentation you have seen these items before um the goal of our legislative priorities is really to understand what is important to the council for us to advocate for in the upcoming legislative session as well as during the off you know part of the year when the legislature isn't meeting it also helps provide guidance to staff on what our role is to be and what resources we will invest in our advocacy so during last year's discussion we really refined our legislative priorities and established three primary positions these are the ones that we're going to work most hard on we're going to we're going to really pound the pavement on these we're going to work with our legislative delegation with our lobbyists we're gonna be writing letters helping draft legislation if necessary testifying being very active and those three positions are on the freeway landfill and dump remediation so not only can it be a marketing tool for us council member workmen but we also can hopefully get the site cleaned up the council has advocated for uh protection of our water our groundwater and minnesota river while also a viable creative economic development opportunity as an outcome as well additionally the city is advocating for non-bonding funds to be allocated for this remediation the second item of priority is fire service districts we all know that providing service fire service is an expensive proposition current statute does not allow for collaboration for joint fire service districts we would we are would support special legislation to allow that and then the final topic final priority is our center village tiff district our burnsville center area as we know that is in need of redevelopment we are wanting to get ahead of it and achieve special legislation because this doesn't meet the traditional tip definition of blighted however we know it's functionally obsolete so we're seeking um to get ahead of that and be a leader and and get some legislation that would allow for tiff to be a tool for this for this uh area and then we developed supporting positions now these are important positions but we would like maybe sign letters of support assistant research work with our partners at the league metro cities mlc on these positions generally the broad the overarching goal would be support for local control then it means land use use of revenue letting cities be able to determine what is the best use for the city of burnsville what are the needs of our community and being able to make those decisions that fit our communities needs then we have three items that are very specific to burnsville the host community economic development grant program that's a grant program that recognizes the economic impacts of being a host community for a landfill aggregate mining fee again allow would allow for a mutually agreeable upon local fee to be to be uh levied and then primary service area that is uh has to do with our ambulance service and it's it's ensuring that we have the ability to um provide guidance on who provides ambulance service in uh in our community as well as encouraging the state to take a look at some of the antiquated and out of date um language regarding psas primary service areas so upcoming items we ask for council feedback tonight we do have a council work session in december where we have invited our lobbyists as well as our legislative delegation to um join us and we'll have a roundtable discussion on those items in anticipation of the legislative session convening uh early 2021. so with that you have all seen the the priorities it has been in your packet you've seen it we have not made any changes from last year so i'm looking for any guidance if there's any changes you'd like to see or any priorities that are missing that we should be discussing with that i will stand for any questions any questions anybody yeah i think the presidency priorities are good and the thing is 2021 january 5th we don't know what's going to happen but you know we plan and move forward yeah what so um melanie there's consensus that all is good and so we'll look forward to meet our legislative uh delegation in december absolutely thank you madam mayor council okay thank you okay um i think michelle you you have um an item for us to to review and that's to schedule a special meeting to canvas the general election results thank you madam mayor i actually have two roundtable items this night about scheduling meetings the first one is to canvass the general election results and due to the change in how we're counting the absentee ballots this year where because of covet it has been extended an extra week that we'll count in any extra ballots that come in postmarked by election day up to seven days after um we're asking that uh we extend that um period normally we would do it like one week after we're looking to push that to the 10 days after it um at november 13th that way we will come after the county does their canvas okay and i'm looking at the schedule and i do see that there are some things on the schedule for friday morning but it looks like there's some availability for friday afternoon and i need three at least three from the council get to be present to canvas is on the 13th you're talking about 13th so we're looking like one to 230. [Laughter] what do we want to validate you want to put us together on the 13th really to go over election results so well uh what time did you have i'm looking and it looks like uh there's the schedule is open after lunch about for lunch for lunch we have a one more before lunch like during the noon hour can we do it like twelve to one oh and um because the campus doesn't take that it's a very efficient meeting so i think i have a gwdb executive committee meeting uh for from 11 30 to 12 30. can we do it did you say that morning wasn't available like 8 00 am or 7 30 a.m is that or 10 30 or so first time what do you have i'm i think that my calendar must be still updating because the gwdb just popped up on it let me i'm sorry i'm my calendar it must be still updating here for you for you um do we not have a because i can do it at one o'clock can you do it at one o'clock take us take a light lunch not until nine o'clock from nine to eleven yep and then okay and then for some reason that just disappeared off of her calendar that i'm looking at and then okay so we then we've got a 11 30 to 12 so anything yeah i after lunch we're seeing tomorrow's can we still bring lunch well it's very hard for him because he's helping with uh getting the kids yeah so early morning after lunch is what vince is saying one o'clock yeah yeah one o'clock one o'clock lunch one one works okay and then um the second item i have is that you know every three years we have uh to make reappointments for our appointments and reappointments for our black dog uh watershed management commission and this is our third year their current appointments will uh expire at the end of november and so we're looking to get um sometime in november we the the current commissioners will serve until the next appointments are made but i'm looking at appointments for the first meeting in december and so we're looking to set a potential interview time in the past we have had never more than uh five apply or reapply for this commission or six so that it's usually and then with the incumbents that may be reapplying well there's one company that has told me he's not going to want to i think there's one that is really that i know of but i haven't talked to all of them yet um but i don't expect there to be more than four probably four or five interviews so it would be an hour or less potentially it could be 30 minutes yep um i think what i had on here was as a potential date was uh monday the 20th so monday before thanksgiving and maybe somewhere around 5 p.m the 23rd works i can do that that work for everybody yep yes i applied for that commission once i remember and everybody laughed okay okay you got what you needed now i've got the special meanings that i need and um report on our advice reports that's all we have left madame okay what was that date i haven't 23 the 23rd at or 5pm 23 11 okay i have a question dan g michelle can you explain to us what uh election day is going to look like as far as once the polls what are we going to see when the polls close out of burnsville okay so um you know election day of course is still elect any election day during a pandemic is somewhat of a mystery but what i can tell you for what we are expecting right now is that um we are of course experiencing high incredulous numbers for absentee voting which during a pandemic we did expect um i we're going to be on election day with the numbers of how many will be going to the polls on election day and coming in person i think that we're going to see a lot more absentee and early voting ballots than than we've ever seen um but i think the big issue is people are wondering what's going to be happening with the results on election night right and so um my intention as of right now this is the the the plan is that we will have every ballot that is voted on election day and every ballot that's received by for absentee by election day counted on election night and that's typically what we have always done that is our plan to make sure that that happens again this election now we are going to have that seven days after we're going to be collecting having those ballots come in that maybe didn't make it through the mail fast enough or something like that we hope that that's not going to be a significant number shouldn't change any races unless they're very close so i think that we'll have a good understanding of where we sit by election night does that help yes it does thank you i think it helps for our citizens out here to hear that yeah yeah okay council member keeley you have a report anything to talk about um yeah something that you're working on too um tomorrow the um this is mvta related um our redline service which is subcontracted from the met council um has been in place for what eight years and we were notified over the summer that the net council wasn't going to put it out for contract and they were going to take over the route it's a lake bill to mall of america run um more of a local service in in the in the heart of mvta's service area and so it's a brt route that's where the funding came from and when the county uh transit tax was dismantled the met council took over 100 funding of it and so uh we've been working with them quite extensively to try and bring that or keep that contract and retain that service by mbta we have the infrastructure the buses the garage the drivers the maintenance everything so it's uh it's a big deal for mvta to not have that route and so we've been working with uh chair zeli and uh we had a we talked about this a little bit on our i-35 solutions zoom call where charizali presented and i spoke about this issue and asked that he make sure that he his staff responds to our mvta and sta staff reaching out to have a meeting and our chair and our executive director will be meeting with uh mr zelly tomorrow about this um i'm hopeful but we don't know um that council's been basically driving um this to to essentially just take it over and basically tell us we're not going to renew your contract we're not going to go out for bid we're just going to take it over and it's been not the most ideal communication and partnership situation so what did chairman zelly say to that um he's certainly he acknowledged his history with mbta as a as the uh with his uh jefferson lines and many many many years ago came to mbta i was on the board when we formed that partnership yep so uh um he didn't really expound on uh his feelings or his thoughts just that he's open to having a conversation and acknowledged uh his history with mbta and wanted to have the conversation um it's part driven by efficiency cost efficiency um right now mvta has significantly reduced service we have some people on furlough that transit has a lot of people on furlough and reduced service and so this would uh allow them to put some of their folks back to work it would cause some folks in mbta to be cut loose and so it's a very tenuous situation and it really gets back to the model which this is my reference to madam mayor being involved in this she sits on the governor's blue ribbon commission and one of their uh goals and tasks at hand is to discuss transit in the region and efficiencies and how it's delivered and it that brings up questions that date back to the 80s when the um legislature in minnesota gave authority for cities and or joint powers agreements to form and provide their own bus service funded through various sources but controlled by the met council and um it's been a challenge uh in especially in the last 10 years i would say there's been a lot of uh tug of war over territory and where certain bus brt lines come through a given opt-outs territory like mbta the many many years ago you'll remember there was a bus line that opened up at kendrick in lakeville there was some very questionable things going on with that bidding process which uh lakeville chose the lowest price of bid which was med transit which is actually mbta's financing source yeah frankly and so we uh you know that was really a bad way of conducting business to bid well under cost just to make sure that you get it so you cut right through the middle of mbta's traffic territory so that was maybe the first you know um that was a shot across the bottom that was yeah and and it was a really it was an underhanded way to take over to take a route and actually stick it in the face of an opt out and run a route right through you they feel lost in that thing too yeah because there was because without mvta there's there was no service from lakeville into burnsville they had to go right through us because they weren't allowed to stop here yeah so i mean that route was the beginning of it and then of course there was a there's there's been challenges with funding and the model is mike my complaint has always been the model is really poor when opt-outs rely on funding from their main competitor met council oversees metro transit that's our competitor and so it's it's it's really bad um fortunately the blue ribbon commission is having this discussion your most recent meeting i saw the notes and all the dialogue and you addressed a lot of this the governance of how transportation is provided funded et cetera delivered and they they were you were taking up the 2011 legislative auditor's report on the subject and there was a lot of things in there and comparing to metro planning organizations and transit around the country we we have a very unusual unique and poor model in this region pretty much nobody else does it as bad as we do as far as how the governance model is structured and how transit is funded there is just a lot of things about our model that need to be overhauled and i'm hoping that the blue i'm i'm hopeful that the blue bourbon commission can provide some clarity and maybe a new model um that gets to even the governance model of my council and elected versus appointed and staggered terms and a lot of discussion on that at various levels so hopefully i'll hand it to governor wallace to pull this blue bourbon commission together and it's chaired by a former representative and jerry liz dakota county commissioner mary liz holberg who's been a transportation guru for decades so a lot of uh a good cross mix of ideological uh values at the table so a lot of great discussion and and uh glad to follow that so anyway it's uh tomorrow's a big day big meeting with mr zelie on behalf of the mbta we've been advocating a lot of us have had a lot of back channel communications trying to work this forward and get his ear and get a fair look at the whole situation there's a lot more and that's gone on since 2017 related to that and it has to do with cap funding and quite frankly no negotiation on that council's part just kicking the football down the road weren't responding to mbta's requests and and more of the same bad model put it that way so hopefully something good comes out of that um i-35 as i mentioned we did have what what is mbta's position on what an excellent model would look like or perhaps you want to tell me that offline yeah i mean and i wouldn't i don't know that i would be able to uh answer that question fully anyway right now because that gets into the bigger funding model we're just battling right now to hang on to the red line service and and we believe um i mean there's a question whether that line is truly under the statute definition of a brt because it only goes from lakeville to the mall of america it's really a local regional service station to station service it doesn't go into downtown uh connects to other buses that do so uh you know there's there's a lot to discuss about the red line um but uh chairs alley did present at i-35 it was a really good presentation he gave us a global perspective of transit what's been going on with my council and the funding and of course all the covet impacts and so um i mean i charlie mr zelie comes from the private sector jefferson bus lines i'm i'm really happy that he's in that position i think he's going to be one of the most um fair and balanced and equitable minded people running the the met council so i was i was very impressed with that pick and so he'll be put to the test tomorrow at the meeting and we'll see what comes out of it um that's it that's really the majority of what's going on it's with i-35 and mbta okay angie i hate to ask you this question dan but i'm going to do you feel do you feel like our rapid transit here in burnsville is in jeopardy as far as our express buses go there is certainly a an underlying current of desire for consolidation by some legislative members who tipped us off with some comments they dropped a couple years ago and a year ago i think covid and the the massive financial impact that it has caused throughout the entire region we don't have a transportation budget yeah sets the table for quite frankly unfortunately for opt-outs in a way it sets the table for that discussion behind now um we can go back in time and go back to horribly poor inefficient underserved bus service like what drove the opposite legislation in the first place right the reason that we have opt-outs in maple grove and southwest and mbta exist is because the met transit never provided any kind of good quality service that the suburbs were looking for and the innovation wasn't there that's the other thing we would lose so i think we have a great case for quality service feedback customer ratings efficiencies and innovation we're partnering with private sector businesses amazon is our first model and it's going very well and growing and there's others we've we're actually testing the the i'll call to uber model thanks for tuning this up for me by the way no problem um the uber model we have nvta connect which just expanded into apple valley and rosemont uh on demand three dollar bus service from point a to point b point b anywhere within the mvt connect service that to me is one of those innovative things improve on is that it it needs to be on a mobile device yes it is because it is app driven but if a person doesn't have a smartphone and it doesn't have the app they can't access the service so that's remember remember one of our residents who doesn't have a a smartphone and doesn't have a ipad yeah could not actually access they could not access it so we need uh access one of the things that we're talking about is accessibility issues and how we can make that there's a way to obviously take that mobile app and turn it into just a web enabled website so any kind of access to the web uh but it could but it may have to turn maybe some people will need to make a phone call because that's the only way they can connect um and there's certainly some need there but this is something that you know mvta is innovating met transit didn't come up with this this is this is the opt out thinking outside the box and how do we meet tomorrow's transit needs uh because fixed bus routes are better than a train because they're more flexible but they can't get to every single address in the city so the uber on demand model really is the long-term solution for that uh last mile type of thing so okay thank you mr gustafsson for teaming up for me dan you have anything one more question before i go just kidding um cbb meets next week we all heard tonight so nothing to report on that and dbb is tomorrow at four o'clock okay and i'll report back on that with our next work set okay kara i am good okay good i also have nothing okay and um let's see melanie and i we have um it's tomorrow or thursday that uh we have our mlc meeting thursday we also have a meeting with savage on thursday morning and then thursday we have a meeting with savage still in person or that is a zoom meeting is it you should have gotten an invitation this morning council member i'll probably tune in with an earphone like i did last time yeah so um and that's that's what i have airpod yes okay so there's nothing else to come before us melanie do you have anything else i do not madam mayor okay tuesday night football and amazon prime day yeah we stand the turn by affirmation thank you everybody you