hereby call to order the Roseville City Council meeting for Monday, July 7th, 2025. Mr. City Manager, would you call the role, please? Council member Grath, here. Council member Stron, here. Council member Sharter here. Council member Bower here. Mayor Ro here. Uh and with us at the deis we have uh by way of introductions our city attorney Rachel Tierney who's on my right at the end of the day. We also have our city manager Pat Trean who is on my left at the other end of the deis. Uh and we will make other introductions of uh staff and presenters as agenda items come forward. Would want to let folks know that we have a copy of meeting materials for the public in the back of the room on the table under the big clock. Uh we also have extra copies of the agenda that are uh yours to have and and use uh throughout the meeting if you want to follow along. Uh but we do just have the one set of uh meeting materials for the public. So we do ask that you share. Um want to remind folks too if you have a cell phone to be sure that that is silenced or otherwise doesn't disrupt tonight's meeting. With that, we'll go ahead and ask folks to stand if you're able for the pledge of allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. All right, with that then next on our agenda is consideration of uh tonight's agenda. And I'll check as we always do to start with with Mr. Trean to see if there are any uh changes to the agenda from a staff perspective this evening. Uh there are no changes to the agenda, Mr. All right. And then we'll check with council members. Uh council members, do you have any uh changes you'd like to make to the agenda? Uh or any items from the consent agenda that you'd like to remove for separate consideration this evening? Did we want to add or make that change? Just a small change from Miss Olsen about the um vacancies for the youth commissioners. Right. So there's no no actual change to the agenda itself, but the uh materials under item 10F, excuse me, 10E related to youth commissioner vacancies. We did uh receive word from one of the youth commissioners that had not yet uh given us information that they do want to be reappointed. And so we do have a bench handout uh for the council as well as that's updated in the meeting materials for the public uh as to that individual seeking reappointment. So, we'll note that uh but no change to the agenda and I'll mention that as part of the consent agenda summary about that additional name. All right. Very good. I'd like to move the uh youth commissioner vacancy uh from the consent agenda to the regular agenda. All right. Is that E? That is E. Right. Are there any other changes to the agenda this evening? Otherwise, a motion to Oh, excuse me. I should do a quick check with members of the public. Is anyone from the public here uh for one of the items in the consent agenda that we just were talking about? Items 10 A through I. Uh if you're here for a comment or question on one of those, we can like we did for council member Bower uh take that off the consent from the end of the meeting and move it to the beginning of the meeting uh earlier so that we can give you a chance to ask your question or make your comment without having to stay to the end. Is there anyone here for an item in section 10 of tonight's agenda? Does not appear to be the case. Uh then a motion to approve the agenda as amended would be in order. So second. All right. It's been moved by council member Sharter, seconded by council member Grath. Uh discussion on that motion. Hearing none. All those in favor signify by saying I. I. Opposed. That passes unanimously. We have our agenda this evening. Uh next on our agenda is our first opportunity for public comment. Uh this is a chance uh to uh for members of the public to speak on items that are not on this evening's agenda uh but may be of interest to people in the community uh or related to city business that once again isn't on tonight's agenda. Uh is there anyone here this evening to speak under general public comment this evening does not appear to be the case. With that then we'll proceed with our agenda and uh right to business excuse me right to items removed from the consent agenda. Uh we haven't had that changed for a while. Uh so we'll uh take up item 10E and I'll first turn it over to uh city manager Trejan to introduce this item for council consideration. Yes. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Agenda item 10E declares vacancies for youth commissioners on various city commissions and does reappoint youth commissioners asking uh to serve another term. Those being reappointed as part of this action would be Gwen Godin uh to the Equity Inclusion Commission, Audrey Ernerson to the Parks and Recreation Commission, Kristen Bower and Alexis Gendro to the public works environment and transportation commission. So this actually did two things would reappoint those folks and then also declare vacancies under other commissions, some of which uh never had youth commissioner, but we still would advertise for that. Um and otherwise we place them that aren't and that's the action for tonight. All right. Thank you, Mr. Tretin and council member Bower as to the item being removed for separate consideration. Just note that uh one knowing that such a wonderful program that we have with the use commissioners, talked to a number of them and they've really enjoyed such a program. One question I have for the council is the um meeting attendance requirements. We don't currently have meeting attendance requirements. I'm wondering if that's something that we should consider. In this case, there is just one applicant here that's made just half of the meetings. I tried looking to the city code. I don't believe I saw anything that is a requirement. It's probably something we should maybe address going forward, but wanted to bring it up to council's uh discussion here if that's something we should consider. I am very um happy about having uh commissioner youth commissioners on there and so you know making half the meetings in my opinion is still sufficient but wanted to have that discussion. Okay. And I'm trying to remember on our overall uh commission code, I think we do make reference to attendance as being sort of a factor in considering reappointment. I'm not sure if we have anything more specific than that, Mr. Tre. No, my recollection without looking at it is that uh we do notify the council of attendance uh issues uh for um any commission member um and the council reserves to right to take that into account either reappoint or um if need be to remove them from commission. Um, usually what we do is share the information and and try to have some conversations to see if there's some other issues in in play, but ultimately the council does can make that decision um to not reappoint based on that or uh to remove based on lack of attendance. Great. U council wish to revisit that as an item uh at a future agenda for discussion or where we at thoughts, council member Sher? Um, yes, I I think so if I I think it would be something that we should clarify for sure. Um, and I think um um it's good to know um um you know that kind of information you know even though you may not um use it or you may but I think it's something that um we could um easily um have the same um thoughts from um all all commission members. Same requirements you mean? Yes. Okay. Uh council Bower. Yeah. I think it may be worth us expanding and uh bringing forth consideration of youth commissioners uh overall policy. I think we have youth commissioners kind of spread throughout uh the city code and it may make sense for us to re look at that again and evaluate such as you know positions or roles that they may have on the youth commission as well as um certain privacy and safety requirements since they are minors may be worth us addressing to see if there's deficiencies. So just to that uh I believe that we do have the commissioner the youth commissioner area is a specific part of the commission code. The main code at the beginning of the commission section of our of our city code. So I think that is kind of grouped together as as it's covered in the code. I can't remember for sure if we had a separate policy document about some of the matters or if it's all in the code. I'm sort of getting an indication from our assistant city manager that it is uh probably all in the code uh in that regard. So, we would be able to refer to that. Um, but we can certainly have the discussion if that's where the council would like to go. And, uh, council member Strong, well, I know in the four years that I've been on council, we have discussed this pretty exhaustively. Um, and we did come up with some significant alterations and so I don't know if there's a a big need. I know that for a while we struggled to get adequate um commission interest and I am hesitant to apply the same rules exactly uh for the youth commissioners because high school can be pretty unpredictable. Um if you're in pep band you might not know when you know that you have to be there um on a Wednesday in February when you sign up in September. So I think that 50% is um is pretty good and I do know that we but maybe not depends on the person and I think we have asked in the past we've asked the chair of each commission for information about you know their contribution and if they're an active member while they're in the um in the meetings and also whether or not they participate in other events throughout the year that may not may not be indicative of how they actually participate. But I we have already put quite a few significant barriers on who can be part of this by requiring that the person um be you know they have to be a Roseville resident even if they attend Roseville High School. They can't participate if they're not um even if they spend the majority of their day in the in Roseville if they don't actually physically reside here. And so I want to make sure that we aren't that our rules aren't so restrictive because we clearly still have three positions that have been vacant and for several years we had all positions vacant and um that's just going to kind of depend on the kids and the timing and everything else. But I I think we have to realize that high school is not the same as an adult's commitment because you're going to have a better understanding. So, while I think we could revisit, I know we spent a lot of time on this um a couple years ago and I I don't know that we need to spend a ton more time on it revisiting at this point since we made such significant um decisions at that point. And I do think that sometimes things can be just reviewed and um you know if there's a question for someone who wasn't on the council at the time they certainly could review that policy um and the um time that went into and the decisions that happened at that time. Great. Council member Grath. Well, I don't mind re revisiting if we keep it to a short thing. I don't think this is going to be a full meetings conversation or something. I would hope not. Uh the the thing I see here is uh I hope we're letting them know when when they're starting that that it is a commitment. I don't expect them to be the same as another me. I don't remember. Do we have vote? Are they all voting members or just some of them? They can be. It's an option. Yeah. So then then there is a commitment there. There's a time commitment. We have to be flexible because they are high school students. We don't want to eliminate them just because they're busy with other activities. So I would not put it at the same as what we expect of our other CO commission members. If we had long lines of people waiting to get on these comm as youth commissioners, it would be a different conversation for me. But I want to have us have maximum flexibility on it. So that's where I would land. All right. And just um looking at the code, um we do talk about the appointment of youth commissioners, uh terms, uh we have a general attendance section on um members in general. there's sort of a 30% uh if you miss more than 30% that's a notification to the uh council or three straight meetings in a in a row um it's a notification and then that just is taken into account by the council um as far as I can tell I believe some of the other information for youth commissioners about um you know whether they choose to be voting members or not that might be part of the application materials rather than in the code itself and so it may make sense to follow up with the council on on those materials just so we have that uh in advance of looking at having a discussion in the future. Council member Bower. Right. And I read exactly what you just um mentioned here at this meeting. And the reason I brought this up was because of that 30% requirement. And you know um and if we follow the rules that what we have in the city code, this would be an issue with this 50%. Hence me bringing this forth. Should we revisit it to make it more flexible like council member Grath had mentioned? And that's what I'm in favor of doing. Okay. Which does not exist there even though it was looked at how many years ago? Sure. Two to three. And and honestly, I don't know in that review how much detail we went into about specifically youth commissioner attendance perhaps. So if that's a sort of an additional topic or a topic we want to do some clarification on, it may make sense. Council member Sher. Yeah, I want to clarify. It's it's more and I think in there it says it's more to notify the council. It doesn't mean they're not going to continue on a commission. It's just more if if you know to keep us informed on the attendance and that would just be um um more information. Again, it doesn't mean that people would not be reappointed or be on the commission for that. But I think it is worthwhile just to know if uh and and to make sure and that we can visit with them and say, "Hey, is this too much of a burden for you?" And to be clear, not the council, but the staff, but yeah, that's what I mean. So that way, you know, there's some the people know to maybe work with them to see because sometimes they might take on something and it might be too much and then it might be hard for them to back out and so to give them an option to make sure everything is um still good for them. So perhaps we can bring back an item for consideration about looking at um the attendance policy as it relates to youth commissioners and if we want to have a different different language or standard as it relates to youth commissioners. Um, and that would be the specific topic. I'd be in favor of that. Okay. Okay. Right. Then we have the item before us. Uh, I guess since we pulled it from the consent agenda, we'll just do a quick check. Is there anyone from the public who wishes to speak to this item before the council takes up uh this matter? Right. Does not appear to be the case. Then uh a motion uh to approve the or excuse me a motion to uh accept or reappoint the uh commissioners youth commissioners interested in reappointment and then declare vacancies for the other uh positions uh would be in order as outlined in the bench handout. So move. All right. I think it's been moved by council member Stron. Okay. Moved by council member Stron. seconded by council member Schroeder uh to uh uh reappoint those who are eligible and seeking reappointment uh on the as youth commissioners and then uh to declare the vacancies in the other seats. Uh discussion on that motion as the maker council member Strong nothing. Okay. Uh as the second council member Schroer All right. Additional discussion just to clarify that does include all of them that are expressed right with today's the bench handout. Right. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, unless somebody makes that motion specifically right now, it includes everybody on the list because of the discussion. I want to be sure that's what we're doing. Okay. All right. We've got that uh motion before us then. If there's no further discussion, all those in favor signify by saying I. I opposed. That passes unanimously. Oh. All right. I didn't think there would be an abstension. All right. Passes four to zero. With an abstension by make a decision who who has a family member up for appointment. Yeah. All right. I appreciate that. Thank you. All right. Uh with that uh then that does pass forward to zero with one abstension from council member bar. That brings us then to our business items for this evening. Uh and our first business item is item 7A. Uh which is to receive um information from the police department in regard to their resource and operational efficiency plan and implementation of the um the recommendations that were brought forward to the council in the report at our last meeting by the Axtel group. We have our chief and deputy chief with us this evening. Uh so welcome uh and look forward to your presentation. Good evening. Uh we just figured out about 15 minutes ago that we've got a full hour. So we thought it was just going to be a half hour. So now we've got plenty of time. It's okay. No pressure. I I think I think it's a typo. You just have 15 minutes. Don't you have to fill it. Well, appreciate um being able to be here tonight and really talk about kind of our next steps forward as we look um to the future after the uh Axel report um came out a couple weeks ago. I'll start off by saying or talking about I often have like tour groups come through, especially kids, and they ask what my job is. What does a chief actually do? And I often say my job is to support the men and women um that work in this agency that answer 911 calls. And I really feel like that's what this report was all about to make sure that we've got the right operations in place, the right um structure in place, and the right staffing so that our officers can do the job that they need to do and that our support staff can do the job that they do um with the department. So really this Axel report um I think did a really good job of taking a holistic report or a holistic view of the department um and help us kind of provide us with the the groundwork so that we could come up with a five-year uh implementation plan. And I just want to make sure to to start off by also thanking the council. Um we really appreciate your support in making this happen. I think as I mentioned early on we had never done this kind of study. We kind of piece meal things together at what our needs were, but to really look at it holistically and figure out what is the roadmap forward because we certainly know the world has changed, policing has changed, and we need to make sure that we're continuing to improve. Another thing that kind of came out of this report is we know we can't get this done all at once. Um, I'm kind of a doer. So, as I was reading the report, you're ready to just put things in motion and we realized this needs to be strategic. we need to look at what we can do over the next five years uh to make some improvements and make sure the department is headed in the right direction. So, we're really going to talk tonight mostly about 2026, but also kind of laying the groundwork for where we see the next four, five years, um also developing. So, with that, um just a quick recap of kind of how we got here and I'm not going to go through all the slides, just kind of touch upon it. Um obviously, this this study launched in January. I will tell you it was a huge lift. There was so much data that we pulled. Um and that was why it was really important to go with an outside consultant that could do that work. But there's a number of people in our police department. Um Deputy Chief Adams here was the main point of contacting and getting all this data because the consultants obviously did the work but they had to be supplied the data. So there were a number of people not only within the police department but in the city just the finance department, human resources that really helped us out. So I just want to acknowledge that work um as well. And really when we started this work with the Axel group, I had a number of conversations and I said, "We're not looking for a checklist or just a pat on the back of what we're doing well. We truly want to make improvements and we want to do better." And I think that that was kind of the overall mission of this of this study is how can we be a better department. Kind of brings us to where we are tonight and some of the key recommendations. And in the I know it's a very long report, but in the 90some page report, there was really these key recommendations in different buckets um that the Axel group identified. And really, we sat down with a 5-year plan and figured out what are the top priorities, what do we need to be focused on right now, and what can we maybe wait until 27, 2028, or even into the future because as I mentioned, we knew we could not get this all um done uh not only from a resource uh perspective, but also just financially. So the full report just a um to add is on our website uh now on the police department website. So if people haven't seen it, they can certainly uh go to that direct link. I will tell you one of the things that when this report came out um it was like let's let's get moving on this. This is not a let's wait till 2026. We've already done a number of um I think improvements and we're already seeing some success. This is just a quick list of some of the uh operation uh implementations we've made to try to improve um some of our operations, reduce some of the frustrations, and hopefully work to be a better department. And one of the things that we talked to our to our staff of each division is what can you do within your own division right now? Not waiting until 2026, but what can you do now? And I can tell you I've already heard from a lot of people that some of these changes are really um helping. One of the things I'll just give as an example, we knew communication w was an issue. I think that was pretty clear in the report that we we needed to to do better on that and one of the specific items was roll call trainings or roll call briefings. They were kind of run different ways. It was sometimes hard to access information and so we sat down with another department that's using teams and we've now implemented a team's um roll call that all the officers can pull up on their phone. much easier to access information and it's making that that operation much more efficient. So just an example of something that didn't need to wait uh for budgets or for a different year. We're really trying to improve those things uh now. So the next phase I'm just going to talk about what we're recommending for 2026 and that's kind of the bulk of what we'll talk about tonight. Certainly happy to answer additional uh questions. I do want to take an opportunity because this came up at the Axel group um discussion and I didn't want to jump in because it was getting late in the night but I it came up about our facility needs and I just wanted to address we have some significant facility issues. Unfortunately when our department was built 20ome years ago there was no planning for the future. Um it when we moved in 20ome years ago we took up every space. So although I think we've tried to be creative in reusing closets that are now offices, um we've converted our interview rooms, we used to have three, we now have one because those spaces have have to be used for other things. So as I often joke, the only unused space we have is an elevator, which doesn't seem like it would be a great space for an office, but um but there are those those needs are real. And I can tell you there's frustrations throughout our departments that I hear about of just not having us enough space. And we've done some things working with the city manager for our CAT team to take over some space. But without a doubt, our our building just was not designed 20 years ago for the future. We've got and I can tell you in the women's locker room, we are out of lockers. Um so that is a problem. I haven't quite come up with a great solution, but it's things like that. You just reach your capacity. So, since it came up, I wanted to make sure to at least touch on that quickly. Shifting back to really what the Axel group and what this study was about is really identifying our priorities um starting in 2026. And we've really um identified some critical staffing needs that I believe are critical to our mission. Um and these didn't come as a surprise. Um we we've known that there's a lot of things stretched really thin, but what we're going to be recommending for 2026 um is to add one patrol officer to each of the four patrol teams. So we've got four patrol uh teams, two days, two nights, and we're um recommending adding one patrol officer to each of those shifts. And we really believe that's going to help with response times. It's going to help with just having more resources out there. Um, so that's the first thing that we're going to be recommending. The second one is enhancing our supervisory coverage and uh, Deputy Chief Adams is going to talk a little bit about the how important that role is and what that need is. And then the last uh, 2026 recommendation um, is to strengthen our records and property operations and that's having a dedicated person that can help both divisions. There were some if in the report it talked about maybe adding two positions. We've really tried to look at could we start with one that provides support both to our records team and to our property uh room operations. And I'll get into a little bit more depth on those kind of just breaking down kind of the why behind these asks. And I'll start kind of with our our case numbers. When you look at the Axel group report, I think it was pretty clear and consistent that our call volumes have gone up um across the years. It continues to increase. There's a lot of different ways to calculate our numbers depending on if you include dispatch only dispatch case numbers, if you include all the cases that come into us, other ways. The chart that we have up here is kind of our standard one that we use that includes everything. And when you look at those numbers or you look at any of the charts, our calls do continue to go up. Back in about at 2017, we averaged about a 100 calls for service or incidents a day. That was total case numbers. Now we're sitting at about 122. I can tell you there was a day within about the last two weeks that we were much higher. We're sitting above 150 for one day. That's typical for summer. You start seeing calls kind of go up and you have those spikes, but that definitely has increased over the years. And I think the quote that um from the Axel group that really captured the issue is we've been able to maintain service levels, but we're really doing it by stretching our officers thin and it's just not sustainable. We we did add add two patrol officers a number of years ago about four or five years ago but when you look overall over the last two dec decades we have not made any kind of significant uh increases to the frontline patrol officers that are responding to calls and that's where we're looking to invest in for 2026. And it isn't just about talking about more officers. It really is about those response times. Making sure that we're taking care of our officers. making sure that they're not just running call to call that we're able to do that proactive getting out into our neighborhoods and talking to people which I know was a um something that was really important in the community uh voice for the Axel group. This next chart was actually taken directly from the Axel report or Axtel um report and what they found is we are writing significantly more reports. I think it's really important to just highlight that because not only are the officers spending more time writing reports, but those reports have to make its way all the way through the system. And so when you look upstream or downstream, whichever way you're looking, it's creating work for everybody along the way that has to touch that report from the evidence um and property room manager who's now taking evidence in to a person that handles body worn camera footage. There's just so much more to the detectives that actually have to work these cases or get them charged. So when you look at those uh numbers, we found the reports written increased by about 38% between 2021 and 2024 and we are looking at ways to kind of reduce the amount of time officers spend. There's just so many more requirements especially on the FBI side of entering data that it really even though we thought technology was going to make our lives easier, there's just a lot more data you have to enter. So, and this was just one example. I could have used a number of different um locations, but I just wanted to kind of highlight some of the impacts that we've seen. This chart here is showing calls for service at the Oasis and the Harbor. And not picking on them. I just pulled out this data. I think if you looked at other developments, you'd see similar results. And just as an example, before that property was developed, prior to 2020 um 2021, we didn't have a lot of calls. Um in 2021 when it was under construction, we had two calls to those addresses. You fast forward to 2024 and we had over 600 calls. And so when you take all of the different developments that we've seen over like a 5 10 year period, you start to see some of those strains and kind of where they came from. So again, not picking on the the oasis or the harbor, but any of these developments, you just see calls being impacted by them. And this um last slide that I'll that I'll go through before I kind of turn it over to to Deputy Chief Adams is really kind of the why. Um it kind of summarizes we really have not invested in our patrol staffing, our frontline officers, the ones responding to 911 calls. And we know that that work is getting more complex um population changes and really just increased call volumes. And really we believe that by adding one um patrol officer to each crew. We really believe that that's going to have an impact not only on um being able to address those calls but also on officer wellness that we can make sure that we're taking care of our officers so they're not just running call to call um every day. So, it goes above just addressing calls, but also kind of gets into that employee wellness uh piece that we think is so important. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Deputy Chief Adams to kind of talk about the ask behind or the why behind um adding two supervisors. Appreciate that, Chief. So, I'll start out by by saying I've had the opportunity so as the chief to work a lot of different areas within our police department throughout our our careers. We've both been here our entire adult lives uh in the city of Roosevelt, which is not a bad thing. Uh we both love it. Um but I will say this, our sergeants are the most important piece of our police department. We love all of our staff. Uh but our sergeants are the ones going to the calls and making those split-second decisions uh on the high stress calls, sometimes at 3:00 a.m. And we trust them to do a lot. Um, this is an extremely uh important piece and you'll find that throughout all of law enforcement. So, what you're looking at here is we're trying to kind of just paint a picture of what a typical day could look like in some of our hiring. On the left is an actual shift uh that we staffed recently and I'll come back to that. But another component that I want you to look at on the right is some of our hiring over the last two years. We've been extremely fortunate um but it's almost been Achilles heel. We've hired 20 new officers in the last two years, which has been great. Uh, but about half of our police department has under five years on. So, on any given day, this is our one of our evening shifts that we're showing here, our seniority drops off drastically. And at night, our minimum staffing can go down to four hour four officers. So, if the sergeant wasn't on and that three-year officer was off, there's a potential that everybody that's making the most critical decision in the city, we could have two officers with two years and two officers with one year. Now, we hire, great, but there's no substitute for experience, no substitute for training um and everything to do um with that. Next slide, please. So, even when our sergeants are here, one thing that we did want to point out is in in our police department and and throughout the metro, our uh sergeants wear a lot of hats. They're in charge of training. Uh they're in charge of recruitment. They're in charge of our field training process. And so, they do a lot of different things and this routinely pulls them away from a lot of the things that they should be doing. Uh and they get tasks saturated in in a hurry. And so as we talk about this a little bit more of what our ask it it's something that um I think is extremely important that we haven't had the benefit of doing of being able to diversify what the sergeants do while they are here. And so to align with the best practices as the chief said we would like to add two additional sergeants. This would allow for a complete redundancy on every core shift that we have. We would have two sergeants on every single on each of our day shifts and two sergeants on each of our night shifts. In both 2023 and 2024, uh with some of the absences that we had each year, there were a thousand hours uh that we went without a supervisor on the street. Over a,000 hours each one of those years. And by having that redundancy of these of the sergeants here, it wouldn't be a 100% catchall, but it would certainly increase the odds of us having a supervisor here a lot more. Um, and like I said before, there's no substitute for formalized training. Uh, and we really shouldn't be, and the extol group touched on this, in the business of allowing a two-year officer to be in control of any dynamic situation that's unfolding at 2 a.m. when they're making that call on behalf of the entire city. It is a huge risk. I do believe that we have officers that can make that decision. Uh but even in the Axtel group when they pulled our officers over 80% I think it was just at 80% said I don't want to be a sergeant if I don't have to be. That's not my job. I would prefer that we have an actual supervisor on duty. And so it's not even a power struggle. We're saying that from the top with the chief and I all the way down to the officers also saying like I'm I'm not equipped to do this. So, all the benefits up here, uh, I mean, a lot of them are self-explanatory, uh, of why we should do this, but one piece that I did want to touch on is the increased mentorship. So, as we're hiring a lot of these younger officers, uh, like I said, half our department has 5 years or less, they they are yearning to be told how to do this job. They want to be led by our sergeants. And unfortunately, if our sergeants are gone or if they're tied up in a lot of those other ancillary duties, one of the most important aspects that we are that we want our sergeants to be doing, and that's training up our officers to stay here for as long as the chief and I have stayed here, uh that that piece is missing. That is one thing that we've seen time and time again though within our police department is our sergeants have done a great job. Everybody here feels like family and I think we are hitting the mark on that. However, we're we're getting close to not being able to address those needs of our officers, especially as we're hiring a lot of officers in their early 20s that are just looking for not only uh how to handle this job, but even just advice in life. And if our sergeants don't have way to do that, it really kind of it hurts all of us by not making them a a whole employee for for lack of a better term. And uh again as we go through some of these the reduced risk and liability is going to be absolutely huge. So this is the last slide on the topic but I think it's important to highlight what a what a typical day looks like between time off training various types of leave. This is what one of our one of our shifts can look like throughout the day. As it says here, there's no sergeant on this particular day. And again, we didn't try to pick ones that were doom and gloom. There are some that are that are much worse than this. This is just a typical day. We went 12 hours without a sergeant, but we had officers on vacation. They were on training. They were on leave. Um we very fortunately just had two officers that had children yesterday. Uh which is which is amazing. Uh but that's two more additional officers now that are going to be off. And so this all needs to get accounted for in here. And I honestly believe by adding sergeants and officers, it's really going to give us more time off, more consistent uh backup for our calls that our officers desperately need. The ability to take uninterrupted meal breaks, the ability to be uninterrupted when you're trying to work out. Uh all of those things, I think it it goes way beyond um just the the tangible, and it goes for the long-term intangible, too, by adding a lot of these different parts. And I'll jump back in uh just kind of talking about our our third staffing ask for 2026 and that really is a a missionritical uh need and that is with our record and property management. And I'll just kind of go through some of what we've seen. As noted in the Axel report, we've been staffed with two record staffs that process all of these reports coming in. That level has been the same since I started back in 1997. our records department is so much more complicated with just their mandates that they need to do. Um so it's just we have not kept up. This was just a quick snapshot of some of our comparables. It doesn't have all of them. Um but if you look at Roseville at two and you start looking at some of our other comparable cities, we're we're well below um the average. And it does get a little bit confusing because some agencies that records tech may also do other jobs as well. So I want to throw that as disclaimer. You might be like, well, does Burnsville really have nine? Some of those people may have absorbed other duties as well. So, not necessarily apples to apples, but without a doubt, no matter how you look at this, Roseville is the only one sitting with two people. And this becomes if one of our record techs went out on any kind of long-term um absence or was even gone for a couple weeks, it really does have significant uh impacts in our operations of reports getting to where they need to be. Um, I won't go through all this because I think the the slide kind of highlights um the the the different data, but I think we the main point is our operations have changed and especially with the records department, we just have not kept up. Um, as noted in the Axel report, 2024 was the highest call volume. Um, and that call volume generates work downstream for our record staff. And that's really where um this issue and this challenge has has created. This is just one example. I'm still kind of floored at this um when I see this data. I even asked, are we sure this data is right? Um this is calls for service at Rosedale Center. And I will tell you, just as a reminder, we had two officers that Rosedale is funding. Um they are doing phenomenal work over there. And if you talk to the stores, you talk to the loss prevention, they are seeing results. It's because they are making arrests. Word is getting out that you can't just go to Rosedale and clean out shelves. Um, it's great, but when you look at the call volume, it we just didn't anticipate that. We knew there was going to be some. I had no idea they would be making the number of arrests that they did. Arrest in 2023 was 26. Arrest the following year was 235. So that's after we started this. And we've already surpassed over 300 arrests so far this year just in year to date. So that work, which is wonderful. Word is getting out. We're making Rose Roseville safer. But again, it's the impacts that it's having on our property or in our evidence on our record staff. Transitioning a little bit to records. Um, just because this position that we're we're proposing would help not only records, but it also would help the property room. I will tell you, our property room is at capacity. It is when it was built 20 years ago, we filled it up really quickly and now we just continue to take things in and that person, it's really easy to get buried. You have a couple big cases come in, you have a busy weekend like we did this last weekend and next thing you know, you've got a pile of stuff that you just can't get to on top of doing all the other uh duties that you do. So, just wanted to highlight um kind of the need for that. So, transition a little bit to operational goals. And we're not going to go through all of these. It's in the the document that we attached. Happy to answer any specific questions. But this isn't all about adding people and adding more staff. We're really trying to look at how do we do things smarter. And I think I just want to highlight we're really looking at this being a five-year plan that not only looks at adding staff, but also looks at operationals, how operational efficiencies, how can we do things better? and we'll transition to phase two priorities which Joe is going to do and um we're not going to go as in as much depth. We'll kind of do more of a high overview but certainly if you guys have questions at the end happy to address those. So I'll turn it over to Joe to just kind of go over kind of 2027's recommendations. So our phase one that we just talked about focused primarily on patrol response, but as the chief kind of had mentioned, there's a lot of downstream things that happen when we really start to increase our case load. So phase two proposes an increase in investigative staffing for the most part and the dig digital evidence management. Uh but year-over-year our detectives case load continue to grow both in volume um and complexity. Unfortunately, this means some of the lower level crimes that we're receiving, they just don't have the capacity sometimes to investigate them, which is really unfortunate because a lot of times that involves directly our citizens um that that aren't receiving the service that we want to provide them. To help address this, um we're proposing an addition of one additional detective. And we do believe that one additional detective on that unit would help reduce the case load for everybody else and help them really start to be able to get to some of the cases that they need to get to that have been kind of getting shelved over the last couple of years. Um the next position is to expand digital evidence management. And so you already saw the the picture of our evidence room of all like the physical items, but as you guys can imagine over the last handful of years, the digital evidence is that exponentially. Everybody now has surveillance cameras which has the ability to email us and then we have to store them. We have body camera. We have squad camera. I mean, anything digital that you could think of that comes into us, we have to store. And not only do we have to store it, once it's stored, it has to get pushed out to attorneys that are prosecuting the case or it has to get pushed out to different areas. And that is all work. And as an example, our city attorney that covers the criminal side for us had to hire a whole new staff just to take on some of the discovery and some of the the items that we are continually pushing towards them because they ran out of capacity just due to Roseville and the amount of cases that that we've really been pushing towards them. some more operational enhancements. And these are just things like the chief had mentioned that that we've been trying to think of that that may have some money, but it might be a one-time thing. It's not a long-term staffing plan, but just trying to get smarter uh about some of the operations that that we do. And you guys can read these, but the one big piece uh as you all know is we did receive a grant for accreditation, which is now getting off the ground with with the Axtel group. in there. They're really going to help us try to make sure that a we're up to the best standards, but b try to find smarter ways to be doing some of the things that we've been doing over the years to make sure that that we're doing the best and the most with the current staffing model that we that we do have. Phase three priorities for 2028 now. So, now we're looking a little further into the future. Um, another huge piece that that we haven't really touched on too much here is our training. Roseville tape prides itself in the fact that we do a lot of our training inhouse and a lot of that training is in person. There's some departments that have gone pretty much all virtual with their training which has some great uh abilities for time efficiency and for like not having to be present in actual uh physical space. Uh but time and time again we're finding out that that digital training or web-based training doesn't really do what we need it to do. The post board who handles our license is every single year increasing some of the postmandates that we have to go through. Uh which is great. We are one of the the most professionalized states in the entire country. Uh but we need somebody to manage that. Currently, as on one of the first slides that I had shown, uh we have a lot of sergeants that are in charge of managing a crew that are also then doing a firearms range or also doing deescalation training or whatever it might be. It's best practice to have somebody who can physically do that training, who can run the academy, who can be at the driving school, who can do those things as opposed to having it be ancillary across multiple different employees. and that's what we're proposing for 2028. Additionally, uh we're proposing to ex expand our investigative support through an additional analyst. Uh we've been extremely fortunate to have an analyst position, but as the world has evolved, so too is that position. We're now asking our current analyst, it says that the exile group to do a lot of different things from uh body cams to cell phones, but to their real job of doing uh investigations work of analyzing some of the video, of getting out and talking to other metro agencies to try to solve crimes to ask uh getting crime trends and crime stats to the chief and I, those are truly two different spots. We really need a uh criminal analyst or an investigative analyst and an administrative analyst and really to operate at peak performance. That's what we're proposing for 2028. further things that we'll do. Again, these are just some more of the operational enhancements, but we want to continue to goal set for the chief and I and the administrative staff to continue to look down the the line at things that we think are achievable and tangible and things that'll make this place run smoother. And that's just everything from currently we have our sergeants when we have our minimum staffing as I showed uh are in the mix where best practice would be to pull them out. So, we always have to have a sergeant. they always have to have a minimum amount of officers and so they're not blended together. Um we want to develop further leadership programs and like the chief had mentioned conduct facility needs assessments uh to look into the future to make sure that if we're able to hire more we have a place to put them. And I'll jump into phase four and know we did not lose track of a year. Uh we skipped a year and the reason we built that in is kind of a gap year or a just catchup. We realize things happen. There might be some of these just because of budgetary uh challenges or just because of workload that we don't get to. In addition, I think it's really hard to project what we're going to need. I hard to even see where the world will be. My hope is maybe we have less police calls. That would be wonderful and we need less people. So phase 4 is kind of like a placeholder of some of the things that I think we need to do. Um, in the the document I did talk about adding two additional patrol officers to build kind of a retail unit, but that's kind of just a pencil in. I think we really need to in 2029 relook at where we're at um before we um come up with a firm ask. But these are kind of just the things that we penciled in for 2030 knowing that in 2029 kind of that gap year, we're going to re-evaluate where we're at, what's worked, can we do things smarter, um as Deputy Chief Adams talked about. So, this is kind of just a quick timeline that everything that we talked about in the last uh 20 minutes, a little bit longer than 20 minutes, this is kind of the overview of it. Probably should have just started with this and said, "Do you have any questions?" But since we had the full hour, we thought that's it. We're uh going. But no, this kind of just breaks it down. Again, 2029, we don't have anything penciled in for that right now. But um this is what we believe based on the data, based on the Axel group where we need to go. I know a big thing is what are the costs? It's still really early to get um concrete numbers, but we did reach out to finance and ask them to kind of build us what what the most likely scenario would be. Um I will note that this is for the 2026 the ask of one one patrol officer on each crew. So four patrol officers, two patrol sergeants, and a record supervisor. We also did just submit a grant application uh for the COPS grant um that we had on the um consent agenda a couple of weeks ago or about a month ago now. We did get that grant application in. We won't know about that until the fall and that's only partially helping to uh fund the four officers that we're asking for. So with that before I end I just wanted to throw this slide in. Um, you know, after the actual report came out, I met with every one of the crews. Um, and I thought one of the officers had a really good point. Don't forget about that were people. Um, and sometimes that gets lost. We talk about a lot of data and we talk about calls and we talk about all this these charts. So, I thought it was really important to end with we have some amazing amazing men and women that continue to answer the call. And really what this is about is providing them the support and the resources that we believe that they need based on the data that we've analyzed. But I just thought it was a fitting to not end with a chart or a title or budget stuff, but to end with the people because that really is what makes our department. It is the people. It's the men men and women that come in day after day whether we're short or not. They're coming in and they're going to get the the job done. So with that, both uh Deputy Chief Adams and I are happy to answer any questions that you might have. I know I was pleased by the report that the Excel group provided and hopefully you were too. It was just really thorough. Um we've gotten many reports since I've been on council and I don't know it felt very 360 compared to some of them that we received. It felt really um 3D like we could see all sides of it. So hopefully you felt that as well. Couple things I the HR director and me is talking. So, um, as you talk about coverage, um, understanding that, um, maybe you didn't notice, but in January 1st, 2026, there's a required halfhour unpaid meal break. Um, and so that may be different from how for any eight or hour shift. So, I mean, you probably work through your meals kind of thing. And so then having this requirement suddenly that really does bring another the need for another human to be present to be really important because how else do you fulfill um that aspect if you don't have that other human and then um bridging that big gap between the the zero to one year and the 20 plus years. there's a lot in between and that's in a lot of fields but clearly in policing that's been really a big deal and so I think that importance of that training supervisor who's kind of I'm taking the time to identify like replacement planning um building and growing internal staff like yourselves who is identifying the high potential individuals and not only um mentoring and coaching but really building and growing and seeing that opportunity And so, um, I think that's where you see a really strong need. It may seem like a a a pie in the sky wish, but that's what those are the kind of things that feed retention in any uh field and especially in a high stress um field. You know, I was appreciative that you were looking eventually at the shift length um because I know that can be really challenging. We talked about, you know, if you get 60 hours or whatever, you get six days a year of vacation time when you have a 12-h hour shift. So, can be really challenging for all these people who are having babies. They're they're at the, you know, go to T-ball kind of phase in life. They're not at the get a call from the kid at college once a month. So, um I just I really appreciate how those kind of fit into these uh and other requirements, but I do think it's really important for everyone else to recognize that some of that is not even just wishful thinking, but it's really statemandated that we have to we're a union shop, but we're also an employer that has to abide by the state state of Minnesota rules. And those are some that um these would help us fulfill. Uh, Council Member Grath. Oh, thank you for the report and and I certainly echo what Council Member Stron said. Some of the reports aren't as thorough as this and it was really informative and I like I'm appreciate you being here because the information is out there, but residents probably don't wade through those reports like we do. And uh, having it spoken and said here is is important even if it's just a brief overview. I think all of the uh, things you've gone over are very necessary, very required. Um, I never hear from residents that we want fewer police in Roseville. Um, of course everyone wants us to pay attention to taxes, but but they do want to be safe. I mean, that's number one in and what they want with the city. So, uh, I think your program I appreciate you breaking it down into different phases because it's hard as a a person who doesn't work in policing to know what would be the most important prior prioritizing things is is diff more difficult. So that was helpful for me to see the the breakdown and uh I fully support everything you brought forth tonight. Great. Other questions or comments from council members? Council member Schroeder. Uh yes, thank you for everything and I have to say I appreciate getting these reports earlier so we have time to go through them because when you have a 90page report, it's nice to have more than like a weekend to go through it. So greatly appreciated that. Um, and I'll echo some things that um, Council Member Gra said that when talking to residents, uh, safety is priority and people in Roseville really really appreciate the police department. And so, so I think I think it's easy to be able to support the resources in this area. you know, the um the report talked about how great you guys are doing with such short resources, but that's that's not doable. And so for you guys to continue to do your job, you're going to need the resources. So, I absolutely get that. But I I have to say one of the things I was surprised about was how um software and it was such a detriment to you guys getting your jobs done. And so, um, you know, any way to get some of that banged out, I think would be good because I think that that shouldn't be a bottleneck for you, you know, and that it's causing more more and more um time spent on something that it shouldn't be. So, so I would I would say maybe trying to figure out a way to get some of that banged out. And um I think one things people forget and I thank you for showing some of the um I know we're not picking on developments and things but what what you're saying is when we um add housing which is something we've always wanted to do people sometimes forget about the infrastructure under that which includes your department. And so we want to make sure when we add housing that part of that equation is we are going to provide a safe place for people to live. So so I think that's really important and um yeah I was the one who brought up the space space needs and I I don't know how much I'd wait on that one either as we are discussing some of this campus development thing and reusing spaces and trying to decide what should go where. I I would say raise your voice a little bit because I've been over to the police station and I can't imagine you guys can put one more pencil in that place. So, so, so yeah, that's space needs. I think if you can, you know, especially when you look at the um records area and locker room and all that, those I mean people think, oh, you know, it's no big deal, but those are important areas, too. So, so again, all of these pieces. So, let's let's make sure we can get the resources that are needed and um and I think most residents would consider prioritizing this in our upcoming budget. So, um so again um appreciate everything and and again make sure you ask for what is necessary so you guys can get your jobs done. Any other questions, feedback? Council member Bower. Again, I will second with Council Member Sharter. I was surprised at the IT needs and the difficulty that the RMS system as it stands right now. I know there's other ones. I'd be curious to see going forward if you know what the costs are associated with that to alleviate some of that pain um from you. Hopefully find some more efficiencies there. um you know I don't know what the number is and I don't don't expect you to have that number now but I would be curious to know that because uh I agree those should not be the things that we are having our um patrols working on and I do hope with these numbers here uh what you're asking for 2026 we'll allow um uh officers to take the time off that they desperately need uh to attend their child's uh T-ball games and whatnot as well. So I think that will be a great improvement. And my uh final question is uh with the ask that you have here do you foresee any challenges filling those roles besides the you know ongoing challenges there are but feel comfortable that you'll be able to fill uh these in this case six uh officer roles in 2026. I do we've been um we've had great support from the city manager. We've um we're nearly fully staffed. I expect us to be fully staffed by the end of the summer. Um, and so I I think that we will be able to I think um, and just one other thing I just wanted to do with both of you, uh, bringing it up with it. Kudos to the city manager because he recognized that that was after reading this report as well, we've already set up several meetings with Metro Inet to see what can we do with our current, you know, agreements. There's been a number of meetings, a number of improvements already being made. So just another example, we're not just sitting hoping like someday this will fix itself. But I know although there's a lot of room to go, we've um been able to work with Metro Inet get some things in place and to get a little bit more um the the workflow working better so that support is happening quicker and it it really is making a difference. And just note on the regarding the space also when you think about then discussing that about you know designing a space or asking for a space that would allow training to be here. I know that there's a lot of travel involved right now with the training that you do having to go to ranges elsewhere um and facilities elsewhere and I know other departments don't have that kind of burden. Right. And I I will echo virtually everything that was was said here and and appreciate uh likewise the report from Axel Group and this followup from the department because this is this is really the department's uh baby here in terms of putting together okay how do we take that recommend those recommendations and put them into a plan. So I really do appreciate that and the thought and the work that went into it. Uh especially thinking about it in terms of phasing uh you know budget decision makers love phasing. It's it's a it's a it's a wonderful thing from the point of view of trying to make sure we get the highest priority things first and then not miss the the things that are still maybe not as high but aren't like not priorities. So I think that that's appreciated. And I I I was thinking as we were talking about the example of the developments. I think the point probably wasn't so much that a development leads to a bunch of calls or even that a certain type of development leads to a bunch of calls. I think the point was more people leads to more calls. And we see that on the fire and and emergency medical as well. Um obviously we have our our demographics weigh into that somewhat on the medical side of things. But um but you know I think our average household size probably in 1972 was maybe four or something like that. You know now our average household size you know hovers below two. Um so even if we just took the houses we had have and put more people in them we're still going to have more people. We're going to have more calls. And so I think that's the important thing to think about is it's really just when you have more people in your community, even when you have more people coming into your community to shop or to do business or whatever, all those things are what adds up to more calls because just by the nature of people, people get into things and situations and whatever it might be. Um, so I just wanted to note that for folks that are are looking at those, you know, developments. Obviously developments is a quick way to add people. There's no question about that. But there's other factors, you know, that that that can enter into that. And it's really about the count of of folks that that kind of creates the some of the issues. And I uh the other thing on the IT side of it, I think we we have the things we can do with our Metro Inet partners and internally and then we have the things that are sort of imposed upon us by uh countywide standard for this or that. and and there's not much we can do about it other than I know we've worked hard over the years to have good relationships with all the other uh entities in the county that are, you know, working through this the same things. And I think probably that's that's a part of this as well is keeping those connections going and working together with everybody to try to resolve the issues that probably everybody is facing. And maybe the standard for the next goound will be, you know, a different one based on the experience that everybody's had with this one. um because I don't know that the the likelihood of us going out on our own in some of these areas can happen either just because of the fact that the the way the county kind of works these things. So, wanted to note that. But, uh really do appreciate this. uh and you know thinking about uh you know we the the number of calls at Rosedale is probably because they realized okay we've got this agreement we've got these officers and it seems like the the retail establishments there are paying more attention to these issues and those things are going hand inand it's not like things weren't happening at Rosedale in those prior years when the level of calls and arrests were lower that those things were happening and nothing was being done about about it. So I think that's the that seems to be the change. But the point that we take from that is that when you do something about it, it creates workload, it creates all these these records that have to be managed and all those sorts of things. Um so it goes hand in hand and you know hopefully hopefully maybe with the deterrent deterrent effect of of the enforcement at Rosedale, maybe that will will uh inspire other parts of the retail community in Roseville to uh to look at how they can they can address some of these things too. And maybe overall we can we can have some decrease in in those numbers. It's not probably going to be enough to think that that we won't have a general increase over the years just because of the way things go. But uh but if we can if we can have some of those deterrent effects that can hopefully you know help the situation in the longer run. So just noting that I didn't have any specific other questions uh or or uh requests at this time, but uh just looking forward to the discussions as we get into the 2026 budget discussion and going forward. Um and I would just echo the the space side of it as well. Um you know, if we've got something that we've got now that might potentially go away as part of a future plan, maybe we want to think about hanging on to it a little longer or something like that. I, you know, want to keep that part of the equation. So, uh, always want to be creative in that area. Um, so thank you again. Are there any other questions or comments from the council? Just a quick comment about the technology. I think that, um, in a way we're sort of lucky that we have so many younger technology. Some of us had to learn that as we went through our careers and it was a different process. Um, but also that will I I I mean, I don't think that's the reason they became police officers. So looking at it and having that taken off of their plate and let them do what they came into this this job to do I think is really important because it gives you better job satisfaction. So I think there's a couple pluses there for us on that part. So I do want to just provide an opportunity if there is anyone from the public who wishes to speak on this particular report this evening and uh the sort of five-year implementation plan now is the opportunity just to get my attention and let me know and we can open up a mic for you. Is there anyone from the public who wishes to speak to this item? it doesn't appear to be the case. Uh certainly we'll be having many more discussions as we move forward with all of this and uh opportunities for public input as well. So thank you again both chief and deputy chief for being here this evening uh and sharing this with us. Thank you. Right. Uh that uh brings us then to our second uh extensive business item this evening of of the ones we have here and that is to continue discussions as it relates to the license and passport center and dance studio uh as that relates to the implementation of our maintenance facility uh construction plan going forward. Uh so I believe I'll turn it over to Mr. Trean to kick off the conversation and as we need uh assistance from others and expertise that may come into play. Mr. Trean. Thank you Mr. Mayor, uh just as a quick recap, as you recall, June 16th, which is the last time we met, uh we looked at various options and cost estimates for the maintenance operations center and the license uh passport uh license and passport center and dance studio. Um in the end, after uh receiving all that information, the council generally speaking uh preferred option C or concept C as shown up on the screen. And what this would do would uh utilize both sides of Woodhill for the maintenance operations center. So, a little bit different from what um we originally envisioned. Uh fill in that uh yard space on the south side of Woodill with additional building for um all of our activities. Then primarily move the yard across the way out north of Woodhill where the Lexington shops currently sits and where we would have our fuel station, our storage bins for salt and sand and some other uh material as well as another building kind of that light uh brownish color up there on the top. And there are a couple different configurations, but generally the concept is the same amongst those configurations. We would also uh as part of that look at constructing a license and passport center on the first floor and a second story of the dance studio uh as a replacement uh on uh city land uh that's currently park and it's the green strip um west of the parking lot that's currently in existence. And the idea behind this was to utilize the land uh for uh those replacement um uses uh that would be uh displaced by Lexian shops being torn down. Uh construct a slightly bigger parking lot over the current one and actually had additional parking uh north of the VFW to accommodate all those different uses. the BFW would stay in the same location um and the uh ball field uh primarily would stay in in in place. Uh there might be some adjustments to that. That was the general concept. And as I mentioned, the council felt uh this was maybe a preferred option to pursue, but there was a lot of um conversation that wanted to be brought back uh especially about the license and passport center and studio. So, first I would mention that, you know, we're bringing back three different things today. Just more information about the parks and recreation dance program and facility needs. Information about leasing space uh within Roseville or some place in Roseville for the license and passport center and dance studio. And then information about the financing uh if we were to build uh a new building on city land for the license, passport uh center, and dance studio. So, in your packet, uh, parks and recreation director Matt Johnson has written a memo about the dance program, the need for space to relocate once, uh, Lexin shops go down, and that has attachment two, and he's here to answer any questions that you may have. In regards to the leasing space, the city, uh, in, uh, leasing space in the city for the license and passport center and dance studio, I have the following to report back. I met with Steve Cherheart and Ron Moss of Tanka Real Estate Advisors, both Mr. Cheerart and Mr. Moss are commercial real estate brokers with decades of experience generally in the market but also specifically in Roseville and they have leased tons of buildings here in Roseville. Uh they were really a great resource answering some questions about the Roseville market in specific. Uh so attachment three in the packet is a memo from them that outlines some details about the Roseville market and also about commercial leasing in general. So a couple things I want to point out from that memo and I have a slide for this. Um so for the license uh center uh if we were to lease space in existing retail space and the retail space was chosen because you need a high visibility place that's compatible with other uses has parking and easy access. Uh there rents from anywhere from $13 per square foot to $28 per square foot plus another $745 per square foot up to $1321 per square foot for CAM which is common area maintenance and taxes for a dance studio. Uh they we believe could be located in a different location in a more uh industrial area, a larger warehouse for instance that is much cheaper. on that existing industrial warehouse space in Roseville goes from $68 per square foot for rent and 350 to $450 per square foot for the CAM and taxes. So with those numbers in mind uh for licensed and passport center we would see a range of uh $212,000 to $428 annually. Obviously it's all negotiated so that's but that's kind of gives you a sense of that. And for the retail existing, that's a 10,400 square foot building, which was indicated as needed for our space. Now, it's probably not exactly 10,400 foot building, so you may have to go a little less, a little bit more, but that gives you a baseline there. Uh, for the dance studio, uh, I would note that um, the previous uh, option C is showing 8,500 square ft. That's primarily a function of being on the second story of uh the first story of uh the license and passport center, but certainly would be wellused space. Uh in talking to director Johnson about what's the minimum space we would need to have a functional warehouse, I'm sorry, dance studio, uh that would be about 5,000 uh square feet. It could be more certainly, but that would be kind of the minimum. And just uh for comparison, currently over at the Lexington shops, we have about 2200 square feet. And if you ever peaked in there, it's uh it's well used, but it's pretty tight. So those were the comparables uh that we use. And so as you can see, uh for the dance studio, uh the range could be anywhere from 47,500 to 72,500. The other thing uh that I think is important to factor in and consider is tenant improvements. I think that was always a concern if we release how we would how would that work. Uh according to Datonka um that is a typically a negotiated um uh part of the lease and most landlords will grant the tenant improvement allowance and in Roseville or for these type of uses at least retail and kind of industrial they range from $2.50 to $3.50 per square foot per year of the lease. So I gave an example because that's hard to translate. Um, so if you had a 5-year lease of 10,000 square ft, just to use round numbers, it could range anywhere between $125,000 to $250,000 in tenant improvements that the landlord would pay for. That's all negotiable. It could be higher or less um depending on the property, but that that's kind of the range. So, uh, that's some basic information about the market. Um, while there's some properties out there that might be a potential fit, we haven't gone to that step yet. I first wanted to bring back the information just to to get um everybody a sense of what the market looks like and I would suggest if we do pursue leasing we should uh work with Batona to help us u find some property certainly commercial real estate broker. Couple uh uh final things. I I do reference this in the report. Uh but uh in regarding leasing the license and passport center, as you know, we have $200,000 that we transfer from the license center fund to the general fund for property tax relief as we own the building and aren't paying any rent. Uh currently, uh these dollars will most likely need to be reapplied uh to the lease payment and even then, as you can see, would not necessarily cover all of that. uh that would mean you would you would need to instead of transferring it from the general fund or to the general fund would not transfer those dollars into the general fund. So that's 200,000 less that goes into the general fund which certainly has an impact. We would have to uh make that up with additional levy andor cuts um proportionally on there. When we originally purchased the property in 2018, it was really predicated on the fact that we were paying lease payments and had significant um improvements that we needed to make uh to expand um and the fact that it was a shortterm lease. We couldn't get a longer term lease as we look back at it. Uh that uh the council felt at the time uh we needed to purchase it. So, we get out of that that cycle. that fortunately allowed us to transfer that money we're paying for uh rent into the general fund and we've built on that um in as we move forward here. So that that that gives us some ability to do that. Obviously with uh paying a lease, we would need some of that revenue to come in because we don't want to be paying um property taxes on that. And um just looking at the past couple years, the revenue that we make above and beyond covering our expenditures would not be enough to both pay a full lease, whether it's $250,000 or 400, and still put $200,000 dollars into the general fund. So it's just a point of reference. It doesn't mean you shouldn't do it either way, but just a point of reference. Just I want to make sure everybody's aware of on that. Pat, can I ask a question? So you're talking about the lease, but if we built, we'd still have a debt payment to pay to build. So that 200 would go towards that as well. We because if we build, we'd have like a million dollar debt on the bond payment. So So basically, we would add that additional expense as well. So more than likely, unless we expanded our income, either option, you're probably not going to get, at least if it stayed at where it's at, you're not going to get the money. Yeah, that's that's certainly a a possibility, Council Member Sharter. And the only reason I say it's a possibility is because there's you could pay uh without using license center funds, uh using some existing debt levy, which we'll talk about here lately or uh shortly. Uh but certainly uh if it's coming from the program, it would make some sense to do that. So, so either way you're going to be using that money. Um, you know, it could be a blended approach where you use license center revenue. Um, then the rest from some existing that that levy source, but yes. Um, and then uh the license, I'm sorry, the dance studio. Obviously, we don't uh pay anything for rent at this point. Um, so any any dollars uh or any cost for uh leasing space would need to uh find a source of funding. I don't really have any particular option for you to consider beyond um um you know additional levy dollars unless we can find some other sources of fund that brings in some revenue but that covers the program cost uh as it is and does not have a surplus. So, uh, shifting then to, uh, funding if we were to build the building on campus, uh, as you you would note that, uh, in the last report, it's about 14.5 million for the license and passport and dance studio on city campus. 11.1 million of that is in hard cost and $3.4 million is in soft costs. If we were issued to issue debt at $14.7 million, which is a couple hundred thousand more just to cover some issuing cost, a 15-year bond would have a debt service slightly under the amount of $1.4 million a year. To your point, Council Member Sharter, for a 20-year bond, it's $1.2 million. Uh, as as you all know, we currently are paying about $2.4 million annually in debt service for the fire station and park buildings. that last payment um will be done and we would uh in in 2728 but we would have the ability in 28 uh to repurpose u that debt levy that can mean a lot of things that can go in a lot of different direction including right back to the taxpayers if you so choose here but that is a certain avenue to cover that and that's why I answer it the way I did council member Sharter there is capacity there but you know most likely you would want to look at some type of hybrid of using some of those sources u as I as I just said that the other ways to fund the building if you didn't want to do that would be a combination of license center revenues which obviously would not be enough and a new tax le if we didn't use any of that. And then lastly, I just want to mention that we do have some comments uh from residents in the packet. I just want to make sure we call those out uh as attachment five and we received some over the holiday weekend which are at your desk as well that hopefully you've seen already. So tonight, uh, we're really, uh, going to turn the ball over to the council to, uh, have a conversation. Uh, and what staff is looking for is making a decision whether the license and passport center and dance studio should be in a city-owned and city constructed building or um, those operations should be lease space in some place in the city. Once a decision is ma made, either way, we can then move forward with uh, getting the RFP ready to issue. Uh we know we're doing the maintenance operations center uh and get that in front of the council to uh issue and then get that process started uh to both do the final design of uh any the projects we're doing and the construction management. Obviously there's a lot to consider here and I know it may take a lot of conversation and it's okay if we can't come to a decision tonight um that this means there we're just delayed but this is a pretty important decision. So, while we're looking and hope you can come to a decision tonight so we know what our next steps are, we understand if there needs to be additional conversation or additional information brought back, we're happy to do that. But, uh, this is kind of at the point where we're kind of done presenting the information now for you to have some discussions about what the next step should be. Right. I did want to clarify two things before I open up the rest of the council discussion. uh a couple of the the uh information or the couple of the emails we got from members of the public referenced a cost for the license center and and passport center and dance studio of 19 million or more. Um I don't think we've been at that number. I think the the number you said with the hard costs plus soft cost was 11 million something for the hard costs and about 3.4 for the soft cost totaling about 14 a.5. Not that that's not still a big number, but it's not the $19 million that I'm not sure where that was coming from. Uh for just clarifying for that for the public. Uh the other thing I just wanted to also do was follow up with you on a little bit of an email exchange and conversation we had today in terms of sort of comparing building costs with uh what we had in the Tatonica memo, which was something like $250 to $300 a square foot. Uh, and as I understand it, if you take what appears to be apples to apples with what they tend to include in that, if I'm not mistaken, you had communicated that our our comparable construction costs for that building would be about 6.2 or 6.4 million or something like that. And if you divide that out, it's something like $330 a square foot. So, it seems more in line with um with what that uh that memo was talking about. So, I just wanted to clarify that. Yeah. If I could just yeah address that a little bit more thoroughly. So uh in the memo from Titanka they uh talk about a build to suit cost of $250 to $300 square foot cost. And if you do the math on what our total costs on the $14 million uh that would um that would get you um well 94155. Right. Right. So so let me back up. I I jumped ahead of myself. So that that amount is only reflective of the con part of construction costs of number of the Tatonka number does not include land acquisition does not include site work, design fees, furniture and fixtures or contingencies. Um if we were to strip all the costs uh for our license center uh and dance studio uh we would get um that building just the construction cost of the building is $6.2 $2 million. Okay. And everything else around that is contingencies, site work, and all that stuff. That goes to $330 per square foot. So, just better have apples to apples. 250 to 300 uh per square foot is just the construction cost. Our projects coming in at $330 per square foot passport center. Apples to apples. Yeah. And and if I remember correctly, in our 14 million number, obviously 3.4 four is what's known as soft costs, which is the furniture and fixtures, design costs, and some of those other types of things. And even the 11.1 million of of what is called hard costs in the Krauss Anderson report is inclusive of design contingencies, construction contingencies, and inflation factors on the price. So, I think the 6.2 2 million is probably the 2025 price to be apples to apples with a 2025 $250 to $300 per square foot current cost of construction as I understand it and correct me if I'm wrong. No, that's correct. Okay, thank you for for that clarification. Um and then I did also just from a process point of view and then I promise I will open it up for the council. Um, as to the financing of building with bonds, my understanding is that we don't issue the bonds based on this early concept estimate that Krauss Anderson has done. We issue the bonds on a much more firm number that comes farther down the road. And so I just wanted to talk a little bit about the timing of that. Is it based on the actual bid construction pro costs or the final construction costs? When are we issuing those bonds? and when do we start paying on those bonds on this project as it relates to that 2728 time frame when the existing city hall or uh fire station and parks bonds come off might need to have finance director Petri help me a little bit but generally speaking right now for conversation we're we're we're expecting that we'll get if we move forward here get the final design done and get that bid out and so we would know what that amount would be at some point in 2026 six and I believe we would issue the bond based on the contracted amount uh that we would we would u award. So whatever that number is was what the bond would actually be. So it be reflective of the actual cost to cover that. Kind of aggressive to do all that in 2026, but that's what we're thinking of right now. So if we do issue the bonds some point in 26, the first bond payment would probably be due in 27. 27. Yeah. and the debt service runs that we had Ellers's run for us do have do assume issuing the debt later in 26. So we did factor in a potential interest adjustment. Um we don't know what the bond market will be doing obviously. So we had to factor in um some additional interest points into those debt service numbers. Uh but yes, the assumption is you you wouldn't issue the debt now based on high estimates. You would issue the debt based on your firm bids for construction and the other costs. Do we still usually at that point include some contingency in in the issuance of the the amount that we issue for the bonds? Because I'm thinking sometimes in construction projects there might be some overages, those types of things or changes. Yeah. I just don't I'm trying to remember back to when we did it for the fire station and parks and I don't remember. So and I wasn't here then. Right. Exactly. Exactly. But you're still the expert in the subject matter for sure. But and us that's why if you'll recall we didn't sweep the excess cash reserves out of the license fund license fund. So there will be reserves there to handle some of these contingencies potentially. Um but yes, sometimes when you get your quotes, there's usually a 5 to 10% contingency built in. And even even with the timing we've talked about, as I understand it, in 27, there may be some overlap of debt service on these bonds and the remaining debt service on the last year of the of the park. There can be or We can also build in capitalized interest if the council chooses to wait until the existing debt is done rather than having a slight overlap. Okay. um you would end up paying a little more interest. That is one of the things that you can potentially do is have a no principal payment due that first year and a half and then build your principal chart through the remaining remaining years. Got it. Okay. No, thank you for that. Appreciate it. You may want to stay handy depending on other question. I don't know if that means sitting at the table for sure, but uh um all right. Now we'll open up for council questions. Uh, council member Strong. Um, so I believe I read in the information that we would expect of a new construction 30 your 30y year use. Is that correct? That would be the goal certainly for 30 years of very viable building use. Okay. And so and that would be a fairly um steady cost at that point then as opposed to relying on um someone else's landlord tenant relationship. um throughout that as kind of the mortgage holder or whatever. I'm not sure. I'm not I'm used to being a homeowner now. The lease holder. Lease holder. Yeah. Well, certainly if you own something, I mean, there's costs that you're going to have to do and you can fairly predict it. Obviously, things break unexpectedly and stuff, but we have a lot of experience operating our facilities and um so, you know, there's some sense of that. I suppose maybe what you're getting at there might be some variability on on the leasing market. Um, even if you have a good lease over the years, the dynamics could change, the cost could change. Um, it's hard to say what that would look like. Really couldn't speculate that, but that it's hard to say if it would happen or not. I would think we would be a pretty good tenant um for any user. Uh, we're pretty solid. We're not going to go out of business in a couple years. when we figured out this um this uh leasing costs um were we considering I think in some of the design C uh there was something about facility storage for the parks and wreck as well as some offices were those com included in the um estimates for the passport and design dance studio so uh that was primarily for the dance studio uh the parks and rec storage and for from office staff. That's not figured in. The 5,000 square feet is just kind of just for the dance center. So, um the storage uh may be able to be accommodated in the maintenance operations center and we would have to look for um creatively for some way to um have some office staff. Uh and that's primarily our seasonals right now. We have space over there. So, we would have to once again may look at the maintenance operations center if there's some space carve out there. But, we would have to solve for that. Uh we I don't have a particular answer for you tonight, but that those things were not included in that 5,000 foot estimate. Okay. And then I I pretty sure I know the answer, but if you could just kind of reiterate for the public um you know, was there a an intention at any point if this did not pass that the dance studio or the license center would be shuttered because of not getting the um the referendum passed? That was never my understanding and others may have some different thoughts. So I don't want to speak for everybody, but my understanding was that um due to the m needs of the maintenance operations center, we were going to relocate the license and passport center and everything else in Lexington shops, including the events and as a result, we needed to find some alternatives. So obviously the original plan was to construct a new building using sales tax proceeds. Uh that obviously failed. So we're at this decision decision point um whether or not to continue building a new building or or look at some other alternatives. But I believe it was always the intention of the council as we led up to this this this uh referendum was to keep all those functions and services and operations moving forward. Great. Um, and then just the last thing, um, I know there was there's been a lot of consternation about the per the future of license and passports, and we've talked as a council a lot about how we address many of the more um, unusual, we're not really like run-of-the-mill tab renewal, but there I think for the foreseeable future, there'll be a need for an in-person option for some of the more in-depth things. And obviously we don't get paid as well if they're a little bit more challenging. But um I I've had many people tell me what we could repurpose this for if down the road we didn't need it. A blackbox theater, an art studio. But I think as long as it were city space, we would have the option to potentially utilize that space for something future um in the future based on uh the needs of the city at that time. Certainly, you can repurpose any building. Uh obviously the more improvements you make in and specify it the more costly it is but certainly it can it can be re repurposed. I look at it this way and I this is just my approach is that in five say flash forward five years I think uh especially for the license and passport center there's still be very same type of operation still a need for that uh there's technology always going to be evolving and we've constantly changed our model we offer uh drivers testing not behind the wheel but people testing uh and we also do dealer licenses and tabs so we try to diversify that so not always just walking in for the typical uh tab renewal. Um so that's going to change both 20 years from now. I don't know. It's really hard to say. I think I think it is very realistic that something's completely different. Who knows how we're registering vehicles and it may not just be cars. Who knows? So so that's the way I look at. I think in the short term I think certainly uh the the need will continue and that includes the passport side as well. Uh longer down the road, yeah, it could change and that's something that we could adapt a building to. We've done it a lot of times in the city. Um, rechanging uses and moving stuff around. So, that's always possible. Other questions? Uh, council member Sher? Yes. Um, yeah, you know, a lot of lot of moving parts on this. Um, and you know, when I looked at it and actually um I think leasing is still a really good option on this piece. And I have some points I want to make about why we should consider leasing. Um, if I may, we might want to just make sure we get questions answered before we get into the because I think that may lend itself to discussion if that's all right. Okay. Well, that's because yeah, some of these questions were kind of at, you know, kind of if you definitely if you have questions I don't want to Okay. Well, I can wait. Yeah. Okay. If you I appreciate that. Other questions from council members? I did have one question about the concept C and I just couldn't remember. Um I believe the discussion was that the the newest portion of the sort of office and conference room and some other things in the existing maintenance facility on the souththeast southwest corner go away as part of the concept C at least how it's been proposed. I don't know that that's maintained, but I couldn't remember for sure. So, I wanted to double check on that as to what the plan because I noticed it's kind of a pink color as opposed to some of the other colors. And I I couldn't find the the key on that. So, I was trying to remember what the I might need some help, Jesse, here, but uh this red area is kind of a current color. Salmon. Yeah. So the the option they shown and the cost estimate that was included in basically re redid that entire area um because it would be expanded uh the locker room configurations most of part of the facility but but now reconstructed essentially reconstructed yeah it's basically because it's an expansion um the uses a lot of that building's already been redone twice it could certainly be remodeled potentially but um there probably wouldn't be that significant of a cost savings because you do have to expand the footprint based on on the usage and the type because there's just really lack of office space. Okay. No, I appreciate that clarification. I just couldn't remember for sure on that. And Jesse, this purple area down there, is that u right next to this red here? Is that um additional work space? I'm trying to remember. Yeah, so the purple are basically like workshop areas. So like a meter shop um a parks and recck small engine. I can't remember the other ones. So they didn't really identify them since this is concept what it would be, but more or less that would be some sort of workshop space. And even the footprint of the the northern building that that's would be taken out as part of the plan here looks like it's being used for some of those types of spaces if I mean exactly. So the the north the existing north building um that's going away but yeah there basically a new building is getting built on top of it as an extension of the the current building. All right that was that was fairly late in our 16th meeting so I can't remember all those details so thanks for refreshing us on that. Um and then just u and I don't think this is for Mr. Fry hammer. But um were we to pursue the the the um the building on the site um I noticed that the just on the same slide the the count of the parking spaces doesn't necessarily jive with the information from Titanka as far as the parking estimates that they came up with for the similar spaces. So I think just our general perspective as a council historically has been try not to overpark facilities. So just that I wanted to just note that as part of the this since the plan was up on the screen there. Other questions from council members uh council member Ver one question they didn't get answered last time doesn't need to be answered. I' I'd be curious to know if um concept C uh with the existing maintenance you know reusing the existing maintenance facility was done because we asked them to reuse the building. I wonder if there is cost savings or uh speed enhancements if we were to just raise what's up there um or not. I don't know if they explored that option or not because we didn't tell them to. But that's something I think we could figure out. Not now, but going forward when they come up with the final proposal. Council member Bower, just so if I understand. Um, so you're talking about this middle part, the the newest part, just re not not reusing anything that's turn te turn everything down. Possibly the models cost more than new construction also at given time. Yeah. Not looking for an answer, but I just didn't know if they were directed not to explore such an option. Um, I can answer real quickly, but but it's probably more more conversation. Um, so uh we did have a first of all, we had some options that tore everything down that some of the cost. Um if you remember that condition facility report uh this section was the best uh of there and had the least amount of costs to keep up in operation. The biggest cost for the central building is the roof. Right. Right. Uh the north building, the south building needed tuck point tons of stuff that it was worth. So I think it was the we went along with the belief that this was worth saving if we're going to keep stuff on the south side here. Uh just because it already serves very well. also only a 20 year old building and has the right clearance heights and this does not need a lot of work beyond the roof. So, so generally speaking, that would be kind of the quick answer to that. Thank you. And just maybe to expand a little bit on that, I would imagine that as we if we went forward, well, when we go forward with this part of the project, conceivably one could ask biders to bid an option to tear it down and replace it versus reusing and if we wanted to look at that. So that would be one way to get more information about that too and and actually consider it as part of a construction package especially with the phasing with a C approach. Y exactly. Uh council member GR refresh my memory on um how this was going to work as far as we have to clear the land on the north side. So where does the dance studio and the license center go in the meantime? So it's it's a really good question. So the first things as I look at it at least since we need to start filling in this central part and start working on that is we need to create space to relocate the fuel pumps and the storage bins and also most likely to relocate some of our staff across the way which means we have to start on the north side meaning that we need to take down shops one of the first things which displaces um license uh uh passport center and the dance studio. So, we need to find a solution for that first. If that is leasing, that is leasing and you deal with that timing. Uh, if it's about building a new building, um, this would need to be constructed first before you would tear that down. Once they would move, everybody would move over there, then you tear down and do that. This is about phasing. If you recall the previous plan when we used that whole site, we were going to we had the luxury I guess um to use the park land to start building part of the maintenance center without the need to tear down the vaccine shop until much later in the process. Now it's kind of flipped a little bit because so we could build that building and have it moved there directly is one of the options. Build build the uh license and passport center. Yes. Yes. You would if you built that you would need to build that first. move all the operations to know. Thank you. Unless you did something short-term in the interim y as an option. Okay. Other questions. All right. Uh then I do want to do one more thing before we go to council discussion and that is just to do a check-in with members of the public. There's anyone from the public who wished wished to make comments uh at this point on this item, this would be our opportunity. Is there anyone from the public who wishes to speak uh to this item at this time? does not appear to be the case. Now to council consideration. Uh I believe council member Schroeder, you have dibs on the first comments under this part. So uh appreciate your patience on the question. No, that's what you know because I do want us to consider all these different options and and with the um you know I didn't want to go into this automatically assuming we're going to build something where I think um seriously needed to look at this leasing. So, I wanted to put some points out there to consider um as we're considering these things. Um you know, so I got uh um seven points that I just want to make and they're I they are um uh the first one is the public voted the building of the license center down. And I know we the argument is that the referendum was for the funding of the project um with sales tax, but the public did not see it that way. And even with some of the emails we just got recently, um, you know, I assumed it meant the, uh, plan to construct a building was no longer an option. And I asked a few neighbors and they made the some same assumption. So, I just want to make sure that the perception out there about us actually building it um, the the public does not um, see it that way. And then um I know we talked about that the license center passport is you know will it be a viable enterprise going forward. Well, you know, the passport renewals are already online. And so I I I wonder if, you know, even five years, and so I'm I'm not so sure, you know, that is is a for sure um thing because I know um the um passport renewal software is actually improved and doing really well and it came out really fast. So So I'm a little concerned about that. And I actually wanted to make the point that I think the dance studio should be decoupled from the license center and have its own place. Um I think it should be part of the parks and wrecks and not tied into the license center. So I think we should think about possibly is there a better place for that versus having it on top of a on top of a building like that. And then um for you know this this million million4 expense to pay down the debt each year if we build this um it will put the if you consider that that's an expense that's really part of the license center. So it puts it in the red if you actually put the expense where it belongs. And so um instead of you know having those additional funds um we're going to have to add more. And so I know, you know, um city manager said we may not make enough to um cover it, but a million four is very different from um um a lease payment. And and actually versus um this is five. if we were leasing in an area that we could the EDA could help us determine where we could put put this uh license center and actually that would give us an opportunity to expand the days and the hours and um I think it could then possibly even combine or do um contribution to the G general fund and at the same time do economic development. you know, there's so many places in Roseville that that that might be a really good um thing for us to be able to do. And um and then, you know, number six is um budgeting is going to be really tight this year. And you know, with the ask and resources needed with the fire and the police, you know, they all need resources. you know, if we're leasing, let's just be be between 200 and 400,000 versus paying a million4 on a debt payment, that additional money could go towards these other resources that we have, you know, um that we're needed for, you know, it's kind of that priority thing. And actually, my last point is then we don't have to negotiate with the VFW on the parking spaces or anything else. That's just wouldn't have to be done. But again, I think um just just things we need to think about as we are deciding which way to go with this. And we're going to be going into the priorities at after we get through this. And I want us to also think about that if you're going to put a million forward towards debt service versus can you actually use that in some a higher priority um area. This is something to think about. So those are just some points I wanted to make. Right. Thank you, Council Member Sharter. Council member Bower. Yes. Um I guess echering some of those points, I too received many phone calls and emails regarding the um licensed passport center dance studio and I too from those calls residents where I heard where was it was a referendum on should we build it or not. Even though that you know wasn't the ask that was written seem it does appear from the calls and emails I received that's how they interpreted. Uh, I would also note that um I guess going to point um your third point um the dance studio was never part of that referendum question as well. So I'd also be in favor of decoupling the dance studio from these discussions and putting that into um a discussion of park budget. Um in regarding the passport renewals, I believe the passports are one of the more profitable parts of the license center and um I do have concerns with that going away. I think you know if you can do passports online it's going to be hard to argue other things can't be done online as well. Granted there will always be cases where you need to go in person and emergency passports and whatnot but there are facilities that currently uh exist for that. Uh and same day proports I don't believe we can do um I I do believe also that uh leasing is probably the way we should go for the licensed passport center. I agree that we would be a fantastic tenant good financial sounding. We also provide a large number of a huge amount of foot traffic to wherever we end up uh going. This is very attractive for um people renting or leasing property because we would be if you will an anchor there and that will spur other developments and other leases in that area. So I think we would be able to get um very advantageous leasing terms uh possibly better than what we see presented here. Um and again I would argue we just talked about uh you know budgeting is definitely will be difficult. Um and we just had the police discussion. We talked about their space needs. It's challenging to um pay over a million dollar you know that kind of levy dollars for a licensed passport center when we are facing space needs right now with the police department. And again, uh, leasing it also removes, uh, the parking need that we see here in concept C, um, and removes all that parking, puts that back to, uh, green space as well. Not all, some of the existing is existing parking, but, you know, it does remove that need. Great. Other uh, comments or thoughts from council members? Council member Strong, thank you. Um I think I I I I feel like I don't have sufficient information because I feel like we're still not comparing things um correctly. If we are adding if this space that we could add as a owned asset of our organization would have storage and um offices. I think we need to be clear on what renting that space would be and make sure that we're actually taking the full costs in before we would make a decision. In addition, um I recently have had staff who have gone out to several locations where they have same day driver's licenses. I passed that along to Mr. Trean and Oh, your your staff, right? Not my staff. Yeah, I just wanted to call that. Yeah, I'm going to need my staff have been utilizing the same day license. a driver's license and there's two beta testing locations for that. Um and AB asked if that's something that we could consider. Um I just you know that if we are able to stay on the cutting edge of some of the things um I think that's a great idea. One concern you're mentioning a lot of things about this lease space but one of the potential sites was noted as Gulf Galaxy that certainly lies in the face of um which is no longer available. Right. But um that certainly flies in the face of some of the discussions we had before about accessibility. That's not near a bus. It's not near I don't even think there's places that you could walk on a sidewalk near there. So while there may be lease spaces, I also don't want to be in a shopping center that has been unsuccessful for 10 years or longer to have anyone stay longer than um just a couple months. and especially shopping center that has told tenants that they won't renew leases. I just want to make sure we're in a viable spot that would actually have a longer term um tenure to potentially because to build the specialized dance floor, mirrors, all the things that it takes. It's not just going and having an open space. It's a whole set of things. I've also been told by some of the dance parents that they wait um on the day of because there's such limited space. If we had the opportunity to have double the space, the parents and the people involved could increase greatly. When my kids were in dance, it was on the stage at Fair View um community center and it was not a desirable space. It was hotter than blazes back there. You had to trapes through the whole building to get there. that's not making it accessible or usable um for people. And um and I guess a lot of the people are saying, well, you know, they can just go to a private um facility or a nonprofit. And I again, we don't build the the uh the ball fields or the tennis courts um only for people who will put in a quarter on their way or $2 on their way in. we were they're a part of um what we have as a park amenity and I realize we're going to have budget issues but we will always have budget issues and I don't think that the people of the city think that this is the time when we're going to take away things that people are paying to participate in in getting an opportunity. Our city as we know continues to become more diverse um ethnically every possible way you could slice diversity and I I think that means we have opportunities for more things not for less people to be involved in the the things that we have and I really want to see exactly what it would cost because over a 30-year term I I want to make sure that that's we know what we're looking at for pricing because yes in the short run. Yes, I'm sure it's more expensive to build, but in the in the long run, over the life of the building, and again, this is Miss Petri's area and not my own, but to say, let's make sure we're looking at it for a long run and not just there are people calling all the time asking why we don't have a community center. We can't always think two months ahead of us. We have to think longer, bigger, because our our people have an expectation that they're going to have some of these amenities part of our city. And I just am not willing to take it away because we're thinking too shortsighted. Yes, we need safety. We need other things. But safety is also community peace of mind, believing your city has your best interests in when you're setting things up. Council member Grath. So, I see this as um two different things going on here. Uh in real estate, buying something is very different than leasing something. There there different reasons to do that. People who lease uh if if they're I'm talking about residential mostly here. They're doing it because they have can leave that lease usually in 60 days or a year, whatever that is. They're looking at something as short-term so they can get out of it. It's not that it's usually a long-term thing that's an advantage in their portfolio or something. If they're buying a house, they're building equity. It's the sort of the same with the building. We would have something at the end of it. Otherwise, when we do this on a lease basis and and we've done that if we have it for 10 years or or whatever the lifetime is, we've paid out that money and maybe it's a little less, but we don't have anything at the end of that time period. We don't have a building. We don't have any other investment. that's just like money out the window. So, um those are the two ways I'm looking at this. Um and also I don't think IDs and licenses are going to go away by some magic thing and that we're all going to be doing everything online. They've been telling us that for 30 years and it hasn't happened. So, I might be wrong this time. I don't know. But when I go to the licensing center, there's a line out the door. I think we're missing business by not having a efficient building that is designed for that space and could accommodate the people that come to it. So, um, those are the two ways I look at it. I I don't have a a strong opinion one way or the other. Um, perhaps this is where we'd have to put police department in the future. I don't know, but I don't have a crystal ball to see that sort of thing. So, I'm trying to analyze what's in front of us right now. Um, and we have by having the building, we have control of it. When you're leasing, you don't have control of it. We would be a good tenant. Do you know what happens with good tenants? They raise the rate raise the rate on them after their lease is up because they know they're not going to move. So, uh, our lease would go up. If we make a 5-year lease or a seven-year lease, it would go up. As well, all leases go up when they expire. Yep. So, good tenant or bad tenant or you raise need to factor that in. It's all I'm saying. If you have uh built the building, you are pretty much on a fixed amount. True. Just as repairs to buildings increase over time as well, that can all be factored in. You can figure out a life of a roof. You can figure out a life of an H track system. And just as you figure that out when you're leasing uh a facility or a building uh as a business, you factor that in. The same calculations can be done. One of the reasons you end up leasing is because that's not the focus of your business. you know, if your focus is, you know, shipping, making widgets, your focus isn't, you know, running buildings or things like that. So, but we already have setups to run buildings here. It's not like we're starting out with nothing. And in regarding your point, uh, as far as um, leasing or owning the assets, you know, leasing provides you opportunities with cash flow and things like that. Here, we're talking about um, paying for this building. uh as referred, you know, over a million dollar bond that we're going to have to pay for with the levy. If we're able to cash flow it by leasing it, then you don't incur that. You still maintain the space open, just as you mentioned, maybe a possible location for something for police or something else. We don't lose the ability to have a building there. What we do is give us options in the future for a building that maybe is more appropriate for our needs. So, it's easy enough for a licensed passport center to find a location. um that's suitable for it as a lease a little bit more difficult for finding the location and building say for police picking on that district as we talked about it whereas now we have the space here you could do something like that so this policing gives us some I look at it a lot more optionality for us in the future reduces some of our financial uh constraints that we have going forward as well and so that's why I'm kind of in favor it just lends itself very well at least in Other thoughts from council members? Council member Strong. Again, I'd like to know where these great potential leases are because I've been told by many residents that we lack good spaces for um for easy rental that aren't haven't been sitting vacant for a long period of time. Um yeah, there are some that are open. Um, there's a fine shopping center that is mostly empty, but it's because I've been told by the past tenants and some of the current tenants that it's not a great place to be because they don't have that reliability of what's going to be there. And so, I've never once leased car because I don't see the value of giving you my money and not having that um owning something of it, not having any equity at the end of it. Um obviously you take a risk but um at the same thing at the same time I concur with uh council member Grath in that you you do have something at the end and if we're saying conservatively that a building would last 30 years um I mean I think most homes in the city are twice that if not older and they most of them are going to be around for a lot longer. So to say that um at the end of 30 years it's just going to like magically explode and be gone, I think that's inaccurate and we have this opportunity right now while we're building that we maybe wouldn't have in the future to um bring this up. It's going to be less expensive to be part of a larger project than to do it as a one-off later on. So it's easy to say that well oh well it's just there. But I think we need to realize we once we divest of some of these things and I get that you maybe want to put it into parks but parks also has to still have a home for this. Parks doesn't just have a magic place. You can't put it in a a park building and for two hours a week. This is a all week business every day six days a week that is happening. It can't be shut up, folded up, and put it away. Put away for the next rental that happens. This is something that needs its own space. And so I I appreciate that it's been coupled together so that the spaces can be dual use and that there's an opportunity to to have this stay together and I appreciate the commitment to the dance group and to just the arts in general that it's an important piece and I I really I like I said I would like to see where we look at it long term not just four years or five years but 20 years. Tell me what that looks like over cost. If the dance studio is still around and we're paying all this time, where might we be at the end of that time? It's all a guess, but I'd like to have a a longer trajectory. Would you like a guess? No, I don't want to guess. Oh, well, I was I was just going to It was a nice segue to what I one of the topics I wanted to bring up. So, um I did look at sort of the range of lease costs that was in the memo. Um and then I tried to project that out over time. Good for you. um and looked at you know presuming I don't know if it's a good presumption about a 3% increase per year um so over 15 years assuming you were able to lease for multiple leases over that time frame um because I don't think you could necessarily sign a 15-year lease these days in this environment um but I could be wrong uh you would be talking about between five and $10 million of lease payments over that time frame as compared to 15 million or 14 point something million of investment in a in a owned property. If it was a 20-year time frame and you were leasing for 20 years, uh at those uh rates, the range would be something like 7 to 13 million very, you know, starting to approach the total that you would spend, you know, for your for your uh your building basically. Um and at the end of it, you wouldn't have an asset. you would have just paid that money. Um, now that was based on the 5,000 foot. If we started saying, well, we do need a little more space for the the dance center and the other things. You know, potentially if we went to the 8,500 square ft, now at 15 years, you're 5 5.5 million to 10 million and at 20 years you're almost 8 million to about 14.8 million depending on where that lease, you know, falls in that range that we were given. So we're talking about, you know, millions of dollars of of expenditures for something that essentially at the end you don't have an asset. And so that definitely enters into the equation for me. One of the things that also enters into it in terms of looking at the cost of of borrowing the money, um the principle is essentially an exchange of dollars for an asset. Um the interest that you're paying is the is the out of you know that you're paying the cost of borrowing the money. That's the thing you don't get anything back for. And under the 15-year bonds uh analysis that was provided, assuming that our cost was the 14.7 million, you're talking about you're paying about six over $6 million of interest over that time frame. That's what you don't get back. But at the end of it, once again, you have this asset. Now, at that same time, you might have spent $6 million on rent to kind of divide the range that I gave before, but you don't have an asset at that point. and then for 20 years it's about $9 million of interest and that's also right in that range of what you might be paying for rent over 20 years. I think that uh from the my experience on the council when the decision was made to buy the license center at the time or the strip center with the license center in it at the time we were having real challenges getting anything longer than maybe a three-year lease if I remember right. That's right. And um the problem was is that there were a lot of of capital improvements needed to match the service because it was really kind of a a put together not terribly thoughtfully design at the time because we had to move out of the space that it had been the license center had been in before and the council was really concerned about putting I think it was somewhere over over half million dollars of or maybe a quarter to a half million dollars of of improvements into a space that we weren't sure we were going to have three years later. Um, and so that sort of colors my thinking in this regard. I think that there is a lot to be said for having a city facility at the end of this process that if the model for license and passport goes away. Um, you know, like we were just talking about, there might be there might be more need for seasonal staff for parks, there might be more need for storage for something, there might be more need for uh police training opportunities or something like that. Um, you know, and I I liked some of the notion that was mentioned in the memo from parks, even though it wasn't and isn't part of the plan right now of of, you know, having that facility potentially provide a bit more amenity towards the Veterans Park area as well, the neighborhood. Um, that would be interesting to explore. Uh so in the end for me you know I completely understand you know the point of view that uh that you know some people thought and I don't know that it's all the no voters that thought that they were voting down doing anything with the license center. I certainly know that there was a lot of chatter about that at the time that uh you know why does the city need this facility? Why doesn't the state pay for it? I'm going to vote against it because of that. That was because of some misunderstandings of information about the project. Um, and I don't necessarily want to make our decisions on a not terribly well-informed electorate. And that that's on us, I think, in terms of our outreach efforts that we might have done at the time. But at the same time, I don't want to hang my hat on on that necessarily because I don't know that that's that's an completely accurate portrayal of where the community may have been u in that regard. Um, but I do think it's important to also keep in mind that um, all of our facilities are subsidized by the taxpayers. All of our recreation facilities um, you know, on average about half of the cost of our recreation programs is paid by taxpayers. The other half roughly is paid by, you know, the fee payers for those various activities. Um, I think all of the parks and wreck facilities and improvements that we did in that $19 million park renewal program, uh, 10-15 years ago now, um, 15 plus years ago, um, you know, those were all paid for by taxpayers. That was that was 100% taxfunded, uh, project for the recreational needs of the community. And so I look at this very similar to that. Now on the license center certainly there is a notion that it is an enterpriseish operation uh and we benefited from that transfer of you know operating funds to the to the other city operations uh each year. I guess arguably if if we do the timing of the financing right with the debt service coming offline for uh the fire station and parks renewal and you know some debt service for this uh you know even at the 1.4 4 million per year. Um u you know that's still a million roughly less than what the debt service is now. Um either that can be used for tax relief for the taxpayers or uh some portion of it or or all of it could be used for other city you know needs that we have including some of our public safety needs. Um so I'm supportive of looking at that. I think from from my perspective, I'm I'm just very concerned about uh that the notion of the leasing just not getting anything out of it and spending a lot of dollars um for something that we don't get anything out of. That's just my perspective. And a lot of staff time because when you lease it's very different than when you have control of a a situation. You have to be renegotiating that lease. You have to have someone on staff handling all that or or a broker all the time. Uh, Council Member Shore, actually, um, my family, we actually did own property and lease it. So, I'm very familiar with how and actually you don't renegotiate very often. Um, you can get longer term leases and a lot of times you can use a broker, so you don't need the staff for that. Um, and actually, um, I I know you said you had a bad experience. How long did they rent before this short-term thing came up? Was it I think it was probably an order of magnitude of maybe 10 or 15 years in that site prior to that. So maybe it was longer than that. So they had a long-term lease up until that point. There were a series of I mean it was up for renewal say every three to five years. Every five years. I think we started renting there in 2000. Okay. Thank So anyway, so you but so I I I see the other side where you can actually have some very good um leases with people that you actually and how you you can negotiate how often the rent goes up. It may not be every year. So I think a lot of times it's it's in in in different chunks that way on that part. But again, the part that I'm I'm really struggling with is again, the residents feel that they voted this down. And I am not comfortable saying, "Yep, we're going to build it no matter what people think." I I really think if we would have to have, you know, especially if we're using bonds to do this, I think we would have to really because when we did the fire station, my understanding is that was a long process. We got people involved. you got people to be able to talk about it. I I just don't think um it's almost like people didn't get an opportunity. They think they voted it down and now we're just going to build it anyways. I just don't feel comfortable unless we spent more time letting people um especially if we're going to use bonds to do it. I think they should have more of an input on that. It wasn't a 100% of the population that voted. No, I'm I'm just saying. But I still think a lot enough of them voted it down that but a lot of people voted it down because they got misinformation by someone who spent a lot of money to send a citywide mailer with the dual purpose of voting it down and defaming someone they weren't interested in on council. So they had a nefarious alternative, but the maintenance center had voted up. A, but they confused people and this is definitely on us to have done a better job. But you sat here too as we also sat and talked about what we wanted our very limited language to say. And yes, it could have been better. But but I, as I just confirmed with with Mr. Trean, we did not the goal was never if it didn't get voted down that the process and the program would no longer exist. And so sometimes we're not going to please all of the people, but if the goal was to keep these programs operable, we've heard from several loud people and but there are others who are in support of this. We've had other people who live adjacent who are um Council Member Sher. Yes. Yes. Well, as I was saying, um, please give me the courtesy just to finish my what I was trying to say was again, when you're using bonds at for the residents, and you're talking 15, you know, 14 15 million, I I think we should give our residents the courtesy at least the under not a lot of people watch this meeting and not a lot of people hear it and and so I do think we need to do more it is on us to communicate it but I I think if um you know it's one thing to add a program or keep a program going it's another thing to want to spend you know 14 15 million to build something that people a lot of people felt that and even if you know even if you say it's only part of the population how many people actually know now we're going to do bonds to pay for this I think that's even a very small percentage of people that understand that that's what we're going to do. And so I I think if if you we're even thinking about doing this, I would want to make sure we have enough um the open house, the public, you know, information on this so then they feel that they're part of the process. People were part of the process on the maintenance center and they had input and all that. I think we should we owe that to so they can have the process for this too. So that's that's my thought. Council member Bower, you mentioned an asset and I'm not opposed to having assets. I would question the allocation of you know you know increasing the levy for a licensed passport center when that for a bus passport center building. uh when we have other maybe things that would be better assets you know going back to the conversation we just had space for police or something you know there may be a better use of you know if we're talking building there may be a better building to be constructed if you're looking for allocating funds to an asset you know and I think this is an opportunity for us to by leasing out the pass or leasing the licensed passport center to be able to do mult you know possibly both those things depending on what the the final lease cost is that we have again going back to my earlier comment leasing this gives us options in the future whereas if we build this and we make it a licensed passport center you're now you know you've lost some options and ability in the future and if I'm looking at the needs that Roseville has you know licensed passport center is not as high of a need as for residents as maybe some of the other things that we u you know should be building and as you mentioned allocating funds towards an asset And I would echo that, you know, leasing in business is uh is just the normal thing. And I've had fantastic leases with fantastic and I actually can't in my friends that are in business too. I think it's more of the it's the rarity that you end up with a bad lease. It's unfortunate that happened here with this, but you know, with using the right broker um and I've used multiple ones, you will be able to find that great and as council member shortages, you can build in uh into the lease contracts what the increases are and those things and put limits and ceilings and tie them to come up, you know, various different cost. There's all kinds of different ways, but that's what you get with a good broker and they will do all that work. Right. Um, and I do just want to say I the notion of better assets bother me a little bit. Um, because essentially it's a rectangle building that has a first floor that could be pretty much anything office type related. Um, and then the upstairs dance studio slash, you know, other other components. Um, I think all of that space has a lot of flexibility for the city. So, I don't think we're tied into having a license center for the next 30 years. We're tied into having a building, but I don't think we've ever in the time I've been on the council had a case where uh you know, staff has said, "Wow, we've got all of our space needs met for the next 20 years, um, we're good." I think that, you know, if a model changes, if if if dance programs don't end up being offered 10 years from now, we still have a a a a building that can be used for a lot of different things um that we own and have. And I think the difference between the city of Roseville or a city and a public entity and a business is that business is very much about cash flow. And it's not to say that we aren't concerned about that necessarily as a city, but at the same time, we're concerned about providing services and providing benefits to the community. And there's a lot of benefit to having something that we own and control, uh, as opposed to, you know, not having that. So, that's where I'm coming from on that. Uh, Council Member Girl, I wanted to thank the mayor for figuring those numbers. I I was trying to do that myself, but I was not as complete as you were. And I thought that was very very important information for me to have in in with balancing this out. Uh I think also I look at it as it is a building and it is stability. And I think as far as the city goes, I look more to it that way than than a lease. Um you probably have had good experiences with leases. We have not. Uh, I have many friends who have leased spaces and after their lease was up, they were basically kicked out of the space because they raised the rent so high they could not afford it anymore. So, that's been my experience with it. I think it's great that YouTube had 100% of positive stuff with leases, but I'm looking for the residents and for what could happen in the future, and that's how I'm I'm viewing this. So, that's why I think we have to look carefully and responsibly on this. Council member Schroer. Yeah. And I I think I think maybe what I might only put words in your mouth, but when he's talking about this, you may need to be facing the mic a little better. So you may need to uh um I think it's more the short-term space need too. So if the police could you know need the space, I don't think we're talking 10 years down the road for that too. I think I mean not so much what a you know may not so much I think that definition of better is more more urgent need of space would be a better way of saying that versus what's a better asset um because uh again you know I I think we do need to consider how where we're going to put this the lease u space too and do do we need to consider some of that in this and I think the um the thought is you could shortterm or long-term lease to give you time to try to figure it out. I feel this this is just kind of like rushing into just this is the only option versus thinking about a more longer term um approach to it. So I guess I'm not I'm not um not sure about that. um um why uh even rent, you know, leasing for um a number of years um would not be a a thought to give us more time to figure it out, too. So, Council Strong, it's hard not to smile because I've definitely felt these same things in my time since I've been here. A lot of these things had already been decided. And it's hard when you're not part of that initial decision making and you feel like you want to start over. But I do know that we are on a time frame now. The time is ticking where we have to we have already started collecting um the taxes for this maintenance building. And so this piece needs to be determined in order for us to start the project that we have gotten full approval from the well, it was a very close vote either way, but we got a majority vote to move forward. And so we as much as starting over with the public opinion and everything um and boy I have been very difficult in the last four and a half years saying why can't we start over but things have moved down the road and a lot of decisions have been made and I don't see that we can start at at the beginning um because we now have signs saying we are starting to collect tax and we are using it for a purpose so we don't have infinite time. And I think again it goes back to yes, we could release for a short period of time, a couple years, but there are the buildout costs for any of these things that are going to happen. It would be much nicer to do it once in a permanent facility than to do it once. You can't just pick up the things and repurpose them in the new space one for one. You are going to have a a loss of of many dollars worth of things. And so I just, you know, I I I understand the concern, but we own this land. This is ours and there's pieces of it and we've had neighbors who've been opposed and who are ready to say, "Yep, we could do that." And I think that's really important, too, because they've been part of this process and frustrated and they had questions all along and now they're ready to say, "Yeah, we're we're okay with this particular plan. the ones who have come forward and the others we haven't heard from and if they were unhappy we would hear from them a lot. So, um I I just I I think it's silly that we would try to find a short-term solution because so much of the cost is at the front end of a of a lease. That's where the buildout, that's where the getting ready part happens. And so you've already dumped that money basically just down the drain because you aren't going to be able to repurpose that in a short period of time. You're going to have to start over from zero when you finally decide that you're ready to move forward with something. We prepared to have a motion uh before us at this point to try to move the conversation forward given that we're at about 8:20 here. Well, the motion would be to proceed with concept C, I suppose, and get our request for proposals started. Is that what we're looking at tonight? I believe it would be I mean, it would be a motion either to either to lease or to buy basically, I think, is kind of the the direction that I think staff is looking for or bill. I'm sorry. I would like to make a motion to build the twostory passport license uh dance studio and the facility as our first step of concept C1. I'll second that motion. All right. It's been moved by council member Stron uh to use the build approach, seconded by council member Grath. Uh discussion on the motion. Council member Stron is the maker of the motion. I know we've said a lot already. I I don't have anything else. All right. Council member Grath has the second. I think we've covered it. All right. Other discussion on the motion. Council member Bower. I do think when we're talking about building this building going forward, uh you're building a building for it purpose is a dance studio and licensed passport. While you can reuse it and repurpose it, you know, it's, you know, it would make more the longevity. I'm concerned about the time frame and the duration at which a dance studio and license passport center can exist and be functional. Um, and I also ignoring the fact that we're now selling an enterprise fund with debt. uh even though it is a building, I don't see that timeline for the licensed passport center to in that entity to exist at the same length and span as it's going to take for this building to be paid off for and we'll be left with a building while maybe reconfigured, we'll have also challenges uh to be reconfigured and we're isolating ourselves and limiting ourselves what we can do with that space in the future. So for that I'm against this idea along with a number of other reasons. Right. And council member Sher. Yeah. And I think actually if we had decided to lease this, it would be faster because the maintenance center could go ahead and and still go ahead. So we aren't starting over with the whole project. We would actually be able to get that moving. Um and now since we're building since if someone thinks they should build this first now, the maintenance center um will be um I think also delayed. So, so either way, I think if we it would be very quick to also I don't think we'd be starting over on it. So, I guess that that that I don't think that's that's a truth on that side. But again, um um the the sales tax will be spent on the maintenance center and we just have to be very careful that you're making sure that this project has nothing to do with the sales tax because you can't combine the two of them. and you have to make sure that they're very separate projects anyways from that standpoint. So, yes, which would definitely be the case no matter how we proceeded for sure. Um, and I did want to just double check on the uh the license center. I'm not sure that we truly uh think of the license center as an enterprise fund. Um, and I don't believe that it's appropriate to tie the entire cost of the debt service to the license center. I think this would be a city facility and it's the city of Roseville, the taxpayers of Roseville that are purchasing this facility. One of the functions within the facility will be a license center much as uh when we originally established the fire station on the site of our current fire station many years ago and for a period of time the license center operated out of there. Um you know it was a city facility. It was paid for by the taxpayers and it was used as a license center. I don't necessarily see this as being terribly different from that. Uh the other piece of it is is that uh from my point of view, the um you know, the the cash flow still works, especially if we're looking at uh the potential to repurpose debt or the debt levy that we're currently paying for our our parks and wreck and fire station debt. Um for this type of debt, um I don't think that affects the cash flow necessarily from a cash flow perspective of the uh of the license center. or if the license center still operates on an operating profit, then that could be contributed to the operating costs of the other departments of the city um because we're paying the debt service from debt levy essentially. Um so that's my perspective on that. I don't know if there's any other discussion on the motion hearing none. All those in favor signify by saying I opposed. Nay. That passes three to two with council members Bower and Schroeder in opposition. Um, and I would just note, um, it's okay to have 3-2 decisions. Um, sometimes it happens even on the best councils. Um, and there are many, many more steps to either process, either path forward that will still have to happen. Uh, certainly not the least of which is to get the final information about our costs and so we know what our debt service costs will be. Once again, we've been very conservative on all these numbers. Uh and so uh and also I should note that any of those steps will involve opportunities for public comment and and certainly we would expect to hear from the public on those. With that, I think it might be appropriate since we're about 25 minutes past our time. Uh unless the council just wants to wrap up the remaining items. We do have another uh half hour item. I would encourage a small break. Okay, let's go ahead and take about a fivem minute break then. Thanks everyone. We're back from a short break here. Are we you hearing us out in the room here now? Can you hear us? Okay. All right. I just wanted to be sure. I I wasn't hearing myself back as I was speaking, so I wanted to make sure uh it was going out over the sound system here. Uh we're back from our short break as I said and we're uh to our third business item already this evening believe it or not and that is item 7 C uh which is to review information on uh related to our 2026 budget discussion and tax levy discussion uh as it relates to uh taxbased changes in the city legislative uh changes and other uh uh impacts as well as then to talk a little bit about city council goals as they might be for the 2026 budget. and we have our finance director, Michelle Petri, with us uh this evening to uh bring this item before us. And so I'll turn it over to Miss Petrich. Thank you. So I'll start off with some of the changes in property values. Um the Ramsey County Assessor's Office posts an annual report on their website. It's no longer in print um format and it's preliminary assess market valuations. Those valuations will change throughout the year. They'll change if people tax petition uh to have their values reassessed. And it's the first valuations that we're able to obtain. The ones that are really important to assessing our levy, determining the impact on our single family home will occur later in August. For 2026 budget, the single family homesteaded home is increasing by $18,200 or 5.05%. From $360,400 to $378,600. Other properties are listed on this chart where you can see that other residential increases um depending on the type of housing. Commercial went up in the retail and industrial but it has decreased in the office valuation area. And one would think, well, maybe that overall our property value for all types of property increased 4.61%. And since the residential slightly higher than that, one would think that maybe there's going to be a swing to the residential side of the equation. However, 40% of our tax capacity is for residential homesteaded properties. 60% of our tax capacity is for all other property classes. So, we really won't see that swing residential versus commercial industrial. I think commercial industrial if anything it's going to be a balancing act um there are so many property classifications for apartments, town houses uh the commercial sector that you can't be precise in how budgets and levies will impact individual properties. But as a whole um our valuation did go up 4.61 61% and that's better than the valuation increases that we had in 24 which were used for the 25 budget. All properties all property types totaled a 1.1% increase in value. So that's what we have at this time for valuations with regard to legislative actions. Uh there are very few bills that we're aware of that may have a significant impact on the city and the League of Minnesota Cities does a wonderful job of issuing a law summary that'll be coming by the end of the month we believe. Um, we do know that we did not get our state bonding for the oval and have submitted those capital improvement requests into the next bonding bill. So with that um our 26 budget um we are building in um standard cost of living adjustments at 3% for non-union which is what's currently in settled union contracts. Wage steps are factored in. Healthc care increases are factored in. There are contra contractual obligations and professional services and other general inflationary costs that will be included in the budget. Um, we have two union contracts that the city manager is currently negotiating and we're hopeful that we'll be able to include those contracts in the 2026 budget. Um, and with that, I guess I will turn it over to Pat to continue. Yeah. Or beginning stages building the budget. So, it would be interesting um to look at that aggregate change, you know, single family total versus all the other classes total just to see because that probably tells us the shift more than these numbers can. Is that part of the August information or is that even later than that? Um, it's actually part of our uh preliminary official statement um that we're issuing for the fire engine debt. Um, so I can get you that chart. Okay. No, I think that would be helpful to the council and the public. Thank you. Other questions. All right, Mr. Treasure. Yeah. Uh, just real briefly, uh, in the RCA, we talk about just some things to frame up a conversation. And this is really for you to discuss anything and everything you want about the budget as far as any guidance you want to give me, some uh, things you want us to pursue. So, we just framed up a couple things that um we thought might be helpful for a conversation. You can take it or leave it. Uh one, obviously, we know public safety uh staffing requests are huge in this budget. We've talked a lot about them, so we don't need to rehash all that, but just if you have any guidance on that or any thoughts on that, uh would be helpful. uh just very generally speaking, service level prioritization. Is there things that uh are important for us to keep and maintain and or approve or things that maybe we don't uh need to uh maintain or continue to do and would love to hear any of that uh feedback on that? I know this is maybe hard for um uh everyone to decide on a number, but if there's a certain percent levy increase uh you have in mind, um uh that' be helpful for me just to be aware of it. Um, as with everything, it's no guarantee that we can get there, but it'd be helpful to know kind of maybe where you're thinking of and then, you know, if there's anything coming from the strategic plan. We're still in the development of the work plan. So, we're really planning to incorporate that into the next budget cycle, but certainly if there's anything uh that comes to mind at this point, uh you would want to bring up uh on that. I would just end uh with uh we have the um cash reserve. That's something that we always want to take a look at. Uh you can see where we were at the end of 2024. So uh that's just a snapshot in time. I would mention that um we do have a cash reserve fund uh balance of $840,000. I am expecting that's going to come into play as far as assisting us in the budget. Um so still sorting out kind of where that would land, but I think uh part of the reason that fund was created was to provide tax relief in the future. And I think um to be honest, I'm looking at uh using all of that uh to help us uh with this budget cycle. So that's onetime money. It's not ongoing money. So you have to be thoughtful on how you use it, of course, but uh nevertheless, um that's something that will come into play. So with that, I'll just maybe um uh turn it over to you, Mr. Mayor, for u conversation and and take notes. All right. Uh well, we'll open up for council questions and thoughts. Uh, Council Member Strong, could we continue to project um that cash reserve information that I don't think the public saw that on the Oh, put it up on the screen. You We lost that on the screen. Yeah. Uh, that was right from the request for council action. Yeah, Mr. Mr. Tre will bring it up. I don't think public saw that if they were Just right there. Thank you. Great questions uh from the council or any feedback or thoughts. Council member Bower, just a quick question. Uh can you clarify roughly was you projecting a 1% levy increase equating to dollar-wise? Is that roughly? I think it's about 300,000. Okay. I just want that's what I had as well. I just want to check. We have about $30 million. So like a million is roughly a little over 3%. Yeah. Yes. Other questions or feedback? I guess one of the questions you had is what do we feel comfortable with? And I I don't feel comfortable giving you a number yet. I need no information because um I want us to have the services we that the residents want. So for me to just pick a number is too arbitrary at this point. I I need more information. I need us to go down the road and have a little more input from all the department heads as we go along. Uh council member Power. Yeah. And in here you also asked a prioritization. Um I think I bring what Council Member Gra said. It's hard for me to prioritize when I don't have a list of things to prioritize. I might have like personal things or things I have from residents emailing me, but um it's difficult to prioritize in a vacuum. I would like to see more from each department and maybe you know knowing what their lists are and what their prioritization. I think it would be beneficial to understand the cuts. I know some departments were uh you know are tight and cut harder maybe than other departments and to see that full list would be beneficial. Um and I don't know if that's possible but that's a challenge I have in trying to prioritize this. I do realize that, you know, we're facing a difficult budget situation here. Um, we there are some things that we in Roseville that we don't do that other cities do. Franchise taxes and things like that on for capital improvement plans. We do use a lot of uh in current along those lines. We prepay for a lot of our CIP items here. It may make sense while this is just a temporary somewhat a temporary relief. Um, but it does have long-term good long-term consequences of maybe looking at using debt instead for that as the finance commission uh noted in our joint meeting. That may alleviate some dollars for you to for this challenging uh situation we have with now the licensed passport center and dance studio along with um the police and fire asks as well. Um, I can't say right now that's a good thing for it to do, but I would be interested in seeing some financial modeling done to evaluate uh transferring over some of that. It does make sense for some of that long-term um infrastructure cost, I think, for to use debt for that instead, but again, you would have to see the full I would have to see the full financial model to fully evaluate that. Right. Other thoughts, questions? Uh, council member, I would just echo that. Um, but I would want to see what it was because it would need to be a long-term something that would make sense to to uh Yes. that way. Pipes and water manes. Exactly. These not our annual police car purchase that is the same every year. No, not that. Maybe we can just lease our police cars. Oh dear. All right. I don't think you'll like the I don't think you'll like the terms. Time to stop. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, Council Member Schroeder. Uh, actually, I had that um on my list as well. I wanted to see because of the um ever since the finance commission talked about that um they thought we were being too conservative and not using um debt for the long term. I too was thinking that it made sense just to see what the modeling around it would look like because it's like it's if you're going to buy a house, you get a mortgage and so if you're going to invest in a long-term um asset of the city that that would make sense that you could match it that way and then use some of that cash um for more current things. And so yeah, that was that was one thing. Um, and I I do, you know, from the prioritizing standpoint, I'll I'll have to say, you know, the public safety piece, I I know I want to see it all, but, you know, I do think we want to make sure and and um realizing that that that that's needs to be up there in the mix as as that piece of it, too. So, um, you know, it we're bursting at the seams in some ways with especially at the police department and stuff. So, I it would be good to u we now we've seen a couple of pieces, but to see more would uh would make sense. And um I think the other part that um I think people residents are are are a bit nervous about property taxes. I've gotten a lot of calls about that and because of the uncertainty with some of the funding I think the counties and the which we can't control and some of these other things are are probably going to go up and so and and again that's something we can't control but I think we need to be aware of that. So, we want to make, you know, I've had a number of people make that comment, you know, don't tax me out of my house because I, you know, we have a number of senior citizens have called me on that. And so I just want to make sure as we go along sometimes this the list is big, but sometimes we might have to make choices to make it reasonable for people because I don't want um you you can see that in in some other communities where people get priced out of their homes and I just don't think that's something we want to be known for. So I think we want to just be u you know having that that um balance there. Obviously, we want to get um um our our community, you know, the services they want, but then making sure that it's, you know, not going to um you know, be this and this and this and this. So, then the um we may have to make some choices. So, again, that's where, you know, talking commissioner or council member Bower talked about seeing the list of things. I think that would be helpful too cuz we yeah we want to make things reasonable but still have things get done. Other thoughts from council members, council member Strong? I would just echo I think it's important to see what the priorities are um of the staff members and um we did a great job of keeping our um budget substantially uh less high than others or less increased than others. And I think we have to realize that as the state has less funding and the federal government has less funding, there'll be things shifting in our impressing on us. So I think that we just um it's probably going to be a moving target all summer long as we learn more about the impact of some of the things that are happening outside of our control. So, I think I I would say at first, you know, dream bigger because it's probably just going to get paired and cut and and reduced from there as we prioritize. But it's good to know. It's always helpful to uh we have no idea shifting fortunes, but at the moment, it appears that we're going to have to be pretty conservative, but especially if we want to try to bring into some of the public safety things. Council member Grath, and I know you I have done this in the past and when you bring the budget, some things can be moved from one year to the next. So I I know I'm sure you'll bring that to us again, but that's helpful for me when I'm looking at the big picture. Maybe we can move things down the road a little. Some of the departments were able to do that. You can't do it forever, but but I always appreciate that, especially with capital, right? Look at that. I did want to just uh kind of tie into the the the thought about considering or looking at potentially uh the franchise fee uh model. I know that that has been talked about in the city in the past and I think one of the concerns that people had was it was just sort of a shift from from my left pocket to my right pocket for the taxpayer. Um and and I certainly understand that. Uh, one of the the advantages of a franchise fee um that we could we could consider is especially if we look at it for our street maintenance funding because that fund is slowly depleting and we continue to have to add more current tax levy into it into that to pay for those activities. That might be a situation where we say, you know, we're using this much levy for, you know, we're keeping adding more levy and we've already got this much going towards those street repairs. if we if we, you know, use a a franchise fee system to to pay for street repairs, you know, maybe that levy funding can be used for other things that mean we don't have to add for for other expenses where we're not necessarily just doing the old shift the pockets thing. The other thing that I think is would be interesting in that analysis would be because the franchise utility franchise fees are paid by all utility payers in the city. um that's a different pool of of a source of funds, right? Bigger pool than the property tax. So to the point about people getting taxed out of their homes, it may be a situation where if somebody has relatively low utility bills, a small home, you know, their share of the shift from property tax to um um utility franchise fees might actually be a more advantageous share for that household than uh continuing to pay for things through the property tax. So, I I appreciate you bringing that up, Council Member Bower, and uh that was something that actually I think Pat and I talked a little bit about earlier, so it was a convenient timing for all that. And maybe maybe there was method to that madness on Pat's part, but uh but I I I I think that is something maybe it's time to to look a little more closely at. Um there was one other thing, but I can't remember what it is, so I'm going to recommend. And actually the franchise fee, I brought that up with Pat earlier because that when I was up at the uh League of Minnesota cities up in Duth, there was a workshop on that and I attended that and um in that workshop they asked how many of you cities are using a franchise fees. Everyone but me raised. So just about every city and I think Pat you can collaborate this that all our neighboring cities are already doing this and so it's not a a radical idea and that all all you're right uh mayor that it's a different pool because you get everyone then you got you know um everyone pays for that not just you know the residents. So um and and you got people in um that are exempt from property tax that also have to um contribute because especially when you're talking about streets that's only reasonable that everyone has to do a share of that. So anyway, so I I think you have a number of us that have been thinking about that and I appreciate that council member Brower actually brought it to the forefront for something to discuss. So I think that that is an opportunity for us as well. And I did have a comment on on the use of bonding for some of the capital things. I think where we've used it before is where we like have a sudden increase in need like a water tower project moves ahead two years from where we had planned it and we we can't set aside enough money to pay cash so it makes more sense to borrow for it. I think when we did some of the analysis early on in in our studies of capital stuff, if it's sort of the ongoing kind of things, all that happens is instead of saving up for it, you're just paying for it down the road. It's the same amount of money in and out. So, it doesn't necessarily have that advantage. But I think where those there are those shifts where something comes up that we need to it's a long-term asset and there is, you know, we haven't saved up for it, it makes sense like a fire engine to to do that that sort of debt service for it. So I that's that's what sort of is in my mind in terms of that. I know there are entities out there that do just sort of rotating borrowing every year. They they cycle off X dollars of debt and they cycle on X dollars of new debt and so they just kind of always have a churn of debt service. I don't know that we're in that model necessarily. Maybe we get there at some point maybe. But uh but I think that with the past person I think there is there is uh there is um there is um you know some possibility to to look at certain things in that regard. So I I appreciate that advice from the finance commission and I think it does make some sense. Yeah. Something to look at. Sure. Other thoughts, feedback? So we'll look for that 1% increase in the levy then. You got it. You got the point with the 3% cola. Yes. All right. That'd be interesting. Yes, it would be the magic wand. Have you got your magic wand handy? No, I left it at home. Ah, darn. All right. Well, thanks for that discussion. First of all, I don't know if it's the first, second, or third maybe of many budget discussions over the course of this year. Um, that then does bring us to a non-b businessiness item, uh, which is consideration of the city council minutes from our June 16th meeting. Uh we did have a draft brought to the council uh for our consideration uh in the past uh days here and the that has that feedback has been incorporated into what we received recently from staff. Uh are there any additional changes or corrections to the June 16th minutes uh as presented or a motion to approve as presented? Move approval. Second. All right. It's been moved by Council Member Gra, second by Council Member Bower uh to approve the minutes of our June 16th meeting as presented. If there's no discussion, uh hearing none, all those in favor signify by saying I I opposed. That passes unanimously. Those minutes are approved. That brings us then to the consent agenda minus item 10E, which we took up earlier this evening. Mr. Trean. Yes. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Item 10 A approves payments in the amount of $2,891,545.77. Item 10B approves awarding a contract to WSB to provide survey services to show the elevations of pond bottoms and pond inlets and to provide recommended maintenance activities and estimates for 20 storm water ponds that will be worked on over the next three years. Agenda item 10 C approves a final payment of $4,974.77 to the contractor for the 2023 drainage improvement project which made improvements to several storm water facilities throughout the city. Item 10D approves entering enter entering into a grant agreement with Metropolitan Council to receive $9,000 in grant funds to provide for water efficiency rebates as part of the Metropolitan Council's equity focused water efficiency rebate program. There's no matching requirement by the city as part of receiving these funds. Item 10E was already dealt with. Item 10F declares commission midterm vacancies. This year we only have one vacancy. Um the public works, environment, and transportation commission. Uh the city council will interview candidates for this opening, I believe, on the evening of I'm sorry, August 20th, uh coming up. We'll find notice for that, but uh we just have one vacancy, so that's should not take the whole night. Uh agenda item 10g approves enter into an agreement with um uh uh capital city's uh capital city regional firefighters association to provide mutual aid to surrounding communities. This agreement formalizes a working relationship amongst the fire departments that have existed for for numerous decades. Item 10H approves entering into an agreement with the American Parkinson Disease Association to provide standby EMS services during an event hosted by the association in Central Park. The department will be reimbursed uh for staff costs for any services provided under that agreement. And finally, item 10 I approves the Ramsey County hazard mitigation plan. Ramsey County is asking all local jurisdictions to approve this plan. Adoption of the plan will allow the city to access disaster mitigation funds if a major disaster occurs. And that is the consent agenda. All right. Thank you, Mr. Trojan. Is there a motion on the consent items minus E? Some moved. Second. All right. It's been moved by council member Straw. second by council member Schroeder. Uh any discussion on the motion? I just wanted to add that hazard mitigation plan is pretty intense, but um as we can see from the news every day, it's actually really helpful that um there is such a thorough um thoughtful process in place. Um as everyone knows, when they're actual in time of trauma, it's hard to come up with a whole new plan. So, it's really nice to know it's there and and that it's part of the whole county and we can work together. So, I I was very supportive of how in depth that was and what it provided. And I'm sure everybody uh on the council did the same thing I did, which was to go search for the word Roseville throughout the report and make sure we were covered adequately. Right. Highlighted it. Right. Right. Uh is there any other discussion on the motion? All right. Hearing none. All those in favor of approving the consent agenda items minus E, which was already dealt with, uh, signify by saying I. I. I. Opposed. That passes unanimously. Uh, that brings us then to our future agenda review. Mr. Trean. All right. So, uh, we're back in the regular swing of things here. So, next Monday, we'll have a meeting. I'll start off with the EDA meeting. Uh, we have a discussion the EDA's preliminary budget and tax levy. That's a much smaller and easier budget to package up. So, you'll be seeing that information um, pretty complete. Um at that meeting we also uh asked the council to consider a resolution of support regard regarding Oate LCA grant application the met council uh Oete I'm not sure if I'm saying that correctly is a Native American um organization that is looking to um acquire the New Life Presbyterian Church on 965 Liner. Apparently uh that um that church is consolidating with another church in St. Paul. Um they are looking as I understand it to provide uh the the group the organization is looking to provide uh kind of community center uh food bank and daycare um for focus around Native Americans but also open for all. In any case uh more information to come on all that but what they're asking for is a resolution of support. So there's no commitment on the city for any dollars uh for Metro Health and Council as part of the next uh grant funding cycle. And then uh we also have another resolution of support uh for high development for development of the pick property. Miss Gunlack sent uh a communication several weeks ago that provides some more background on that. They're looking to build a spec industrial uh office building um office building. Um and uh they are asking for a resolution of support uh for a de deed redevelopment grant to help uh with the contamination. They're also uh asking for uh some financial assistance uh for the city from the city primarily our tiff district or HSS which is covers environmental costs which we have a existing balance of. So we'll go through that conversation on that. So quite a quite a lot of interesting things at that EDA meeting. We'll then shift to the city council meeting. We'll have a joint meeting with equity and inclusion commission discuss street light policy discuss close proximity building regulations uh andor policies. This came up as from one of the asks from the Enclave subdivision if you remember they were here uh a couple months ago and also received the preliminary uh CIP that shows all the different expenditures on that. On the 21st we do have another uh lencom meeting it looks like. Uh we would have presentation by Mary Joe Magcguire not because she's presenting necessarily but this is first off first. uh joint meeting with the pew commission. Uh we have the Aldine rightaway vacation coming back. I know uh you've all been getting emails. Uh as I mentioned previous communications, we are doing a survey which should be done this week that I'll provide some uh good information and we do have a petition in front of us right now. So that does change the the dynamics of the vote. Um u just a simple majority versus a supermajority. We also uh will be bringing back county C County Road C crosswalks. the Ramsey County is further along in their planning and they are showing um some crosswalks um that they have determined is needed and so we have asked the county to come here to discuss that with the council. Um remember in January uh we uh as a council did not approve any pathways or midblock crossings. Um uh and looking at that they have some thoughts on some need for crossings that are better marked with islands in the middle. Will residents be notified? Yes, we will be notifying them. I expect you will all be getting some communication in the next couple days from Bryhammer, but we'll be sending out notices by the end of the week. But uh as you know that we had a lot of people show up for that. So we should expect the same for that. And I asked Mr. Fryhammer to make sure this easement vacation was a simple one. He assures me that it is the last one on the pick parcel. We've been having some challenges lately with these vacations, but my understanding this is a pretty straightforward one. Uh no no necessary controversy. So as you can see in July we have some busy meetings here or two meetings in August or August 11th and 25th. And the 25th is when I will be presenting the city management budget. And that's what I have. Right. And you had just mentioned that the interview date uh for August 20th. August 20th. Okay. Yeah. I'll make sure that's on the next next slide. Okay. Questions on the upcoming future agenda. Council member Strong. I was just curious if we had confirmed that we have a quorum for all of these since it is summer. Might be worth checking. Yeah. Especially on the 21st. Just making sure we had a quorum. Will we have a quorum on the 21st? That's an easy hopefully an easy question to to ask unless I mean it's on my calendar. I'm scheduled to be here, but you know, I may be gone on August 11th, but I don't anticipate being gone in July. Okay. Sounds like we'll have more. All right. Uh are there any uh council member initiated items for future meetings uh or council uh reports or leazison reports or anything along those lines? Otherwise, the only other item on our agenda at this point is a motion to adjurnn. So moved. Second. It's been moved by Council Member Straw and seconded by Council Member Sher to adjurnn. There is no discussion on a motion to adjurnn. All those in favor signify by saying I. I. I opposed. We are adjourned by unanimous vote at 9:05 p.m. Thank you everyone.