[0:01] Joe Wicklund: Foreign everybody my name is Joe Wicklund. I am the communications and Community engagement director for the city of Hermantown. I'm joined by David Boll, our city engineer, and today we'll walk you through the first meeting of a pretty significant road project that won't happen until 2024, but this gives us all a chance to begin the discussions. We'll have probably a few more of these meetings and we'll lay out kind of a calendar of events, but you'll get a taste of what David has planned for Hermantown Road from Highway 2 to Ugstad and Old Midway on the section that's Midway on both ends. We'll have time for questions and stuff at the end. We try and keep this pretty informal; this room isn't awesome for that. We've got a few folks online who I know will be patient with them and while I'm kind of running the tech there at the same time we're doing this meeting. But if you have a question or anything we'll definitely get it answered whether it's kind of in this public setting or if you have something you want to ask David or I afterwards. Sound good? So a little bit about today: this slide you'll see this come up again a little bit, but we're in the very beginning stages of a pretty significant process and we've done this on our other Road Improvement projects that will kind of give you a taste of how it's worked since 2020. [1:19] Joe Wicklund: We've done about one significant Road Project a summer, minus last year, which we'll tell you a little bit about. But know that we're kind of in the early stages involving you guys in the changes that'll happen on your road. A little bit of history on the road Improvement plan as a whole: so for the longest time, you know, big significant road projects in Hermantown were only on Municipal state aid roads because that was the only way to fund them was through state aid. So most of any kind of fixes on our city streets were done kind of here and there. In 2015, David will go deeper into this, but we did a city-wide inventory on all of our roads, grading them out from kind of worst to best, and David will get into how we split those out, what they look like, and then the type of Maintenance or construction plans that exist for each one of those. For us to be able to do any projects like that in Hermantown, we kind of had to change how we did financial management planning for the city as a whole. So in 2019, the city council approved the financial management plan—one of the, you know, kind of "alphabet soup" that you'll get used to hearing in these projects is the FMP. And that really lets our city council plan out big projects over multiple years so they can budget accordingly. Ironically, it's also super helpful if a curveball comes into play that you can deal with that's unexpected on the fly. So in 2019, mapping out the next 10 years was a pretty important and useful idea, but not with any idea that they'd have to scrap the entire project to some degree in 2020 and 2021 because of a global health pandemic. So the initial parts of those projects actually really served the community really, really well out of the blocks, and now in some ways, we're kind of returning to a degree of normalcy in that planning based on the impacts of those years. Multiple surveys—we'll do another one coming up this year—I would wager that it will tell us pretty much the same thing, is that there's really number one and number 1B issues that are kind of our sources of heartburn for our community, and Roads is usually one or 1B on that. As you can see in the last four surveys we've done, we can't quite get over the hump of getting 50 percent of folks to rate our roads good or excellent, and that makes sense when you consider our roads, which makes sense almost to why we've done these particular types of road projects. [3:36] Joe Wicklund: The other piece, in case you're wondering, is Parks. That would particularly come up and that usually has a little bit to do with why we've done what we've done at the community recreation initiative—separate total presentation on that, but again if folks have questions about that at the end, I can hang around and ask. At this point, I'll turn it over to David and let him kind of walk through some history on how we got to where we got before we take a look at Hermantown Road. [4:25] David Boll: Thanks Joe. Again, I'm David Boll from Hermantown city engineer. As I go through my slides and presentation, feel free to raise your hand or stop if you have any questions. If you don't understand the language or terminology of any of things, just feel free to speak up. So as Joe said, in 2015 I worked with the public works director and we inventoried all the roads in Hermantown and we put together a spreadsheet and ranked those roads. Those roads were ranked from one to five, one being a road that's a new condition and five is failing road. So the roads in Hermantown, if you can see on the right side of the screen there, there's 164 Road segments that were inventoried and they're broken down into different segments. One being gravel, the next being rural bituminous, and that rural bituminous means there's ditches, there's not curb, gutter, sidewalk, or storm sewer. Then the 20 Urban sections of bituminous segments—those are the sections that are curb, gutter, some of them have sidewalk and storm sewer. And then the last is the municipal state aid segments, and those are the larger volume roads that draw our state aid dollars. For an example, those would be Stebner Road, Ugstad, parts of Lindahl, Hermantown Road—some of our larger volume roads. These are not to be confused with the county roads like Maple Grove, Morris Thomas, Haynes Road, and Midway. [6:00] David Boll: So as we looked at the ranking of each of these roads, we looked at what method could we use to restore these roads, enhance the longevity of these roads, or if they're so far gone that you have to reconstruct them. So with that, you know, we were really focused on the roads that were three, four, and five, which are the roads that have failed or are getting close to failing. There's different Improvement strategies that we can implement for each of those different rankings of Roads. From the ranking three, four, and five, we have these different strategies. A mill and overlay would be an improvement strategy that we would implement for a road that was ranked a three. That's where they grind up the blacktop, they put it in a truck, they remove it, and then they repave it. That's what the county is going to be doing on Haynes Road this year. A reclaim and overlay—let me back up—Hermantown Road and Old Midway were ranked four and five depending on the segments that we're looking at. So as we put together a feasibility study and we are looking at the improvement strategies, there's two different improvement strategies that we're planning to implement on these sections of the road. One is a reclaim and overlay, where they grind the blacktop up with the underlying base, we spread it out, compact it, then we bring in more class five and pave it, and we do some ditch work and new driveway culverts. A full reconstruction is where the pavement is shot, the subgrade is shot, and we go and we excavate down two feet, remove all that bad material and build a complete brand new road. Our estimates right now is about 25% or one mile of Hermantown Road and Old Midway will have full reconstruction; the remaining three miles will be a reclaim and overlay. As we get into the design, that will change, but that's what we're estimating right now. [9:07] David Boll: Hermantown has two road standards: a Rural Road standard and an Urban. The difference between those standards are the Rural has shoulders, ditches, and driveway culverts. Typically we don't have the utilities, you know, water and sewer. And then the Urban standard is where we have curb and gutter, sidewalk, and storm sewer. So those are the kind of the different standards we have, and depending where we are in the city and the proximity to other utilities is how we determine the standard that we're going to apply. On this project, it is more of a rural setting. We don't have water and sewer, so we are proposing to apply the rural standard. So similar to what's out there now—a little wider, smoother, and then we'll fix the underlying base. Okay, I'll turn back over to Joe. [10:38] Joe Wicklund: Thank you. I talked a little bit before David about the financial management plan that kind of allows us to do projects of this size and all the other projects we do across the entire city year over year and budget appropriately. For the longest time, I wouldn't say we went year to year or fought fires as they came, but we weren't designed financially to be able to manage large projects that could be linked together over multiple years the way that Hermantown did budgeting before 2019. So this plan particularly allows us to leverage existing debts and future debts—big time Capital Improvement plans, things like this building, the wellness center on the community recreation initiative pieces that are coming into play. It allows us to leverage future growth rather than wait for it to appear before we can make amenities changes. And then most importantly, it allows us to not only know what we're going to do year to year, but if something comes up that's catastrophic, it allows us to pivot in a way that during the pandemic we were able to still do everything that we needed to do as a city without any kind of massive handoff to taxpayers or any massive cuts in resources. We bring this up because obviously these road projects—like 1.5 million and more now for doing a mile of full reconstruction—isn't something that is just going to get covered with traditional tax dollars. Projects like this have a couple of different ways they can get paid. [12:08] Joe Wicklund: It's always really helpful to know what buckets of money and different things can go to this. We'll talk about assessments soon, which certainly is part of the reason why everyone's here. The general tax levy—this road project and other road projects are funded by everyone who uses the road, not just the residents. Municipal state aid allocation—like David mentioned, those are a specific set of roads that we can tap into. Local government Aid is something that our peers Duluth and Proctor receive significant funding from the state on, and the City of Hermantown receives zero dollars. If you're plugged into the legislature, that might change—both Representative Zeleznikar and Senator Hauschild have worked hard to potentially make some changes where Hermantown would receive local government aid, but at this point, that's a zero dollar amount. Sales tax is something that often comes up in these meetings simply because we've done a good job of leveraging that on different projects over the last few years, like the trunk sewer, the wellness center, and fickner Park. Sales tax can't be pulled into a road project; it can only be used for those particular things. We've got four Utilities in Hermantown: the water utility, storm water utility fund (that's the seven dollars a month folks see on their bill), sanitary sewer, and street lights. There will be a couple of different things that we can access here for funding this type of project, but as you can see, there's certainly some things we can't access when we fund a road. [14:26] Joe Wicklund: Let's get into the nuts and bolts of how this feels at the individual level. Across the last four years when we've done these Road Improvement projects, we have proposed assessments to the homeowners and landowners that are bordering those properties at $9,750. We worked very hard on the beginning part of this process to keep that number under 10,000 because we felt like that was slightly more palatable. We won't do any assessments until the project is complete; you're paying for the product at the end. Most folks will push it onto their property taxes; you'll see that happen once a year, spread out over 15 years. The city is able to finance right now at 5.5 percent, so your annual payment is $971.35, give or take a penny. If you say "I don't have $9,750 when it comes assessment time," that doesn't mean that you have to turn around and write a check. It can be rolled onto your property taxes. We do have folks who come in traditionally in November or December after the project is complete and write a check for $9,750 if they prefer. There's a degree of savings in there because you're not taking out the loan, so to speak. [16:16] Resident: Is that number constant regardless of the project? [16:21] Joe Wicklund: For these types of road projects, this has always been 97.50, and thus far yes, that's been the case. On the slide in front of you now, the previous iterations of this—we started this in 2020 where we did the neighborhood in the Southeast corner of Hermantown with Johnson, Portland, Carlson, Alexander, and those series of roads. Every property owner in that received an assessment for $9,750. 2021, we redid Levick Junction. Despite some artists in your neighborhoods' paint job that they did on the road when I first got hired, the folks at Levick Junction thought their road was worse. I think you guys have a pretty compelling argument that you might have the worst road in Hermantown. But those folks got a similar project at $9,750 for each resident. In 2022/23, we'll do Ugstad Road from Highway 53 to the ballpark at $9,750. The logic behind that: our neighbors to the south and downhill do it on linear footage. That's not a particularly appealing way for us to do it because especially where you've got large parcels, it doesn't feel like a lot of equity. We've decided to go with keeping that assessment the same because inevitably these projects not only improve the value of the road and the houses, but a lot of folks who aren't just y'all use those roads. [18:35] David Boll: I have one more thing to add to your question. In regards to the 9,750 assessment, that's for the road portion only. If the neighborhood filed a petition to extend water and sewer, that would be an assessment above and beyond the 9,750. This is for Road only, not utilities. [19:21] Resident: Does Swan Lake and Sunby have city sewer and water? [20:10] David Boll: No, Swan Lake and Sunby over by the jail on Hayes Road, nope. And future iterations won't all have City sewer and water either. We're working on Lindahl Road north of Highway 53 the same. [20:54] Joe Wicklund: It's interesting, I know on Anderson on the Duluth side they do, and it's at least a comparable road. They do it on linear footage. Those assessments for those road improvements were there. It's not very unique to Hermantown in terms of that. [20:54] Resident: Is it $9,750 per parcel? [22:12] David Boll: Well, let's be clear: the parcels are defined by the county. Each parcel of land has a PID (Parcel Identification Number). That's how we prepare the assessment roll. An example of a past project is we had one owner that had three lots—three different parcel identification numbers. Per the state statutes and our assessment, we could have assessed 9,750 on all three parcels. We worked with them and we combined those three parcels into one parcel—one assessment for 9,750. There's unique scenarios and we're willing to work with the property owners to do what's best for your individual circumstance. [23:43] Joe Wicklund: At this point early in the game, what's really important is we want to open up dialogue because that's going to be a conversation with me and David as your touchpoints to help figure that out. If one assessment is appropriate, in most cases that we've been able to work to that, that's the goal. But there are folks who own their parents' property right next door and it's two separate homes. We really want that to be on a case-by-case basis. Again, a reminder that this project is slated for 2024, so we have a ton of time to get to know each other on these parcels and pieces of property. [25:45] Resident: [Inaudible question about drainage/water] [26:53] Joe Wicklund: For all of those definitely folks online and definitely your neighbors who aren't here, if there's a one-on-one "my property question," absolutely come connect with David and I again at the end of this meeting or as we go. We can take a look on the GIS. [27:40] Joe Wicklund: This is kind of the road map to our road map. Today, April 6, 2023, is our first public information meeting. Either at the end of April or the first meeting in May, we'll have a public hearing before one of our City Council meetings about selecting a consultant and authorizing plans. All of those meetings are first and third Mondays. The agendas are posted online the Wednesday before. You can also always call me and say, "Hey, is there anything related to this project on the menu?" We'll have a second public information meeting for this project at the 30% plan stage this summer. December of '23 will be approval for plans and specs. February of '24 is where the project bids will be reviewed, and then you can see the construction schedule into 2024. David and I and the eventually chosen contractor will do weekly meetings on site once the project starts. You'll be able to know what it looks like this week and what's happening. [29:13] David Boll: I've been doing these assessed projects since 1997. The purpose of this meeting is to get the information out. The next time you see us, it'll be at a public hearing and that's when you'll have an opportunity to talk to the councilors. The city council has the ultimate authority; they're going to be directing me as a city engineer either to prepare the plans and specifications or the project is dead. There's no voting and no decision making here tonight. [30:47] Resident: Is there any thought into putting sidewalk on Old Midway? [31:38] Joe Wicklund: At this point, it's not part of the plan. Traditionally that means sidewalk doesn't usually come these days without curb and gutter, and that upgrade to an Urban section is a pretty considerable change and cost. It doesn't mean it's not possible, but currently isn't part of the plan. [32:24] David Boll: In regards to the bridge over Midway River—the city of Hermantown last year hired LHB to design us a new bridge. We were hoping to get some bridge bonding to replace that bridge this year, but the money was not available. We are hopeful that the bridge bonding dollars will be available for next year. So the plan right now is yes, we are going to replace that bridge on Hermantown Road. Hermantown Road will be closed when we put the bridge in. At the earliest, it would probably be June 1st of 2024. Because it's a trout stream, we have a June 1st to September 1st timeframe to do the work. [33:44] Resident: [Inaudible question about cost per foot] [33:59] David Boll: The question is, is there an opportunity to put sidewalks or build an urban section? The short answer is yes. The long answer is it would be a recommendation from me, the public works director, and the city administrator to the city council. I'm not there right now. Utilities are not close right now. It would be a very big system upgrade. A project like that would probably be about a thousand dollars a foot if you had curb, gutter, sidewalk, and utilities. So you have 2,000 feet of road—that's two million. The assessment would just scratch the surface of a project of that magnitude. A thousand dollars a foot is about 5.2 million a mile. [36:44] David Boll: Regarding the Highway 2 and Hermantown Road intersection—I don't have an answer right now. We will reach out to the traffic engineer from MnDOT. I would like to provide an answer at our public hearing. I know that I would support a right angle to clean that up. [38:17] David Boll: So we've talked a lot about history, let's talk about the project itself. It's four miles of Road rehabilitation or reconstruction. The segments are: Hermantown Road from Highway 2 east three miles to Ugstad Road, and then the one-mile section of Old Midway from Midway to Midway. We have to prepare a feasibility study. On the screen is an engineer's estimate—what we feel the costs are going to be. At the bottom, it's 4.3 million dollars. There's about 3.4 million in construction costs, then there's contingency, engineering, testing, Geotech, Wetland permitting, and easement acquisitions. [40:35] David Boll: As you can see, the assessment is just under 25% of the cost of the project. That has fallen right in that 20% to 25% range on previous projects. [41:21] David Boll: These are cross sections—like taking a slice of the road vertically. The top section is reclaim and overlay. We grind it up, put class five down, recut ditches, repave it, new shoulders. The bottom one is full reconstruction. We go two feet deep and build that in new construction. We estimated 75% reclaim and 25% full reconstruction. Once we get our geotechnical report and 30% plans, we'll fine-tune that. [44:20] Joe Wicklund: I'll post all these slides on that website tomorrow. [44:38] Resident: [Question about the gap between construction costs and the total estimate] [44:51] Joe Wicklund: The gap you're talking about is essentially the remainder in non-construction costs such as contingency, design, engineering, and testing. If we're in a spot where we can make it less, certainly that's not an issue. [46:54] David Boll: I've seen probably from the low 20s to mid-35% of the cost of the project go toward administration, engineering, staff time, legal, wetlands, and easements. There is a significant portion that's not construction related. [47:40] Resident: [Question about commercial properties like the gas station/McDonald's] [48:28] David Boll: That is a very good question. Up until this point, all road improvement projects have been residential only. We have not had a commercial property. We are aware that we need to address that, but we don't have an answer for it right now. We need a little guidance from our elected officials on that. [50:38] Resident: What is the life expectancy of the road? [50:45] David Boll: Life expectancy is somewhere between 20 and 25 years. I'm guessing this was last done sometime in the 80s. People ask for insurance that it's not going to fall apart in five years—I've been designing roads for quite a while in this climate, and I've never seen one fall apart in five years that we've rebuilt. Those bumps you see now are often utility trenches or cross culverts that move differently than the rest of the road. We do a "culvert treatment" taper so instead of a hard thud, it's more of a lull. [56:44] David Boll: I have an inspector that's out on the job near full-time seeing everything that goes down. We have a testing company that tests the sand, the class five, and the bituminous. There are checks and balances. At the end of the job, I have to certify to the city council that the contractor built the project according to the plans. Sometimes things happen—like on Levick Junction two years ago. We were excavating and the trucks were getting stuck. We had to collectively decide to go deeper and take that muck out. We are the eyes and ears representing the city. [1:00:28] Joe Wicklund: Regarding maintenance until the project starts: if there's a major fix that needs to be done in the interim, it'll be done like it always is. We're not going to do nothing for a year. [1:02:10] Resident: [Question about speed limits and people driving 60 mph] [1:03:20] Joe Wicklund: Let's be honest about how this works. Oftentimes, some of the 60 mile an hour drivers are your neighbors. We'll make a nicer road, and if neighbors commit to using it at the speed limit, that's a big deterrent. But if our neighborhood is using it at 60, then it's even tougher. [1:04:05] David Boll: If the posted speed limit is 40, I design for 40. If there's a strong feeling that the speed limit should be adjusted, the police chief and I would have to study this. There would have to be compelling factors—multiple accidents or blind spots—for us to justify changing it. [1:05:43] David Boll: Regarding construction access: we've done this many times. The expectation is that at the end of every construction day, residents should be able to get in their driveway. That doesn't mean during the course of the workday that you'll be able to come and go freely. If you have wedding events or graduation parties, let us know ahead of time. We're not going to block you out of your driveway for a week at a time. [1:10:20] David Boll: We are going to replace all the driveway culverts. Everybody will get a new mailbox and a new fire number. [1:12:08] David Boll: Regarding driveways: if you have a gravel driveway, we're putting that back. If you have concrete or pavers, we're putting those back. Our standard width is 24 feet of blacktop—two 12-foot lanes—and two-foot gravel shoulders. The city has a 66-foot right of way. If a tree is in that 66 feet, it's technically the city's. There may be instances where we need an easement to go wider than the 66 feet to get our ditch and culvert in. [1:16:22] David Boll: We use the "lowest responsible bidder." We publicly advertise plans. We recently had six bidders on a project. We want to have these plans complete in December so we get aggressive pricing from contractors looking for work for the next year. [1:19:25] Joe Wicklund: On Local Government Aid (LGA): one of the heaviest factors the state uses is the age of housing stock. Because Hermantown has younger houses, it hurts us in that equation. Representative Zeleznikar is leading a change that might open that up. Currently, zero percent of our budget is LGA, whereas a significant portion of Duluth's is. Any freeing up of that funding would be a boon, but it likely would not change individual assessments for road projects. [1:23:20] Joe Wicklund: On Broadband access: Hermantown does not have another grant coming currently. Mediacom may spill into this neck of the woods with a different project, but that isn't certain yet. [1:25:27] Joe Wicklund: Reach out and ask questions whenever. The next official meeting will be either the 17th of April or the first of May. We post the agenda the Wednesday before the Monday at hermantownmn.com/agenda. [1:28:11] David Boll: Regarding Water and Sewer assessments: the breaking point where I've seen a project succeed or fail is about $20,000 per parcel, per utility. So it would be $20,000 for water and $20,000 for sewer. That's still just a fraction of the cost, but it's in the ballpark of a new mound system or well. [1:29:47] David Boll: One more thing: the next meeting will be the public hearing. That's where you voice your opinion to the council. After that, we'll get into the specifics of design—driveway looks, ditching, etc. We'll have another formal meeting once we have 30% plans. We need to be aware of drainage problems or sump pumps as we're designing this.