Based on the context provided for the City of Lakeville and the dialogue within the transcript, here is the speaker-attributed version of the townhall. **Note on Staff:** The transcript identifies the Finance Director as **Geralyn** (Geralyn Knight) and the Communications presenter as **Tierney** (Tierney Peters, Communications Manager), and includes **Chris Holberg** (Dakota County Commissioner). *** **[0:00] Mayor Luke Hellier:** Okay, I'll call this May 22nd Work Session to order. Join me for a moment of silence and Pledge of Allegiance. **[0:22] Mayor Luke Hellier:** I pledge to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty... all right. Mr. Miller—oh wait, we don't have to do roll call. All right, okay, Justin Miller, we do a roll call. Joshua Lee? **[0:36] Councilmember Joshua Lee:** Here. **[0:37] Mayor Luke Hellier:** Dan Wolter? **[0:38] Councilmember Dan Wolter (Remote):** Here. **[0:39] Mayor Luke Hellier:** John Bermel? **[0:40] Councilmember John Bermel:** Here. **[0:41] Mayor Luke Hellier:** Michelle Volk? **[0:42] Councilmember Michelle Volk:** Here. **[0:43] Mayor Luke Hellier:** Dan Wolter is remote. Here, here. Um, move on to item number three, citizens' comments. I don't think we have any citizens' comments. Moving on to item number four. **[1:07] City Administrator Justin Miller:** Communications overview or opportunity. Okay, real quick, just to frame this—just as a reminder, this is one of the things you identified during the goal-setting retreat, just to kind of get an overview of our communications. I’m sorry, slides please. **[1:43] Communications Manager Tierney:** I know that some of you are really familiar with communications just in general because some of you work in that area, so I apologize if there's some repetitiveness on things that you probably already know about us. But I did throw some stats in there as you probably saw in your packets. But I'll just hit the highlights and then we can talk about... I did get some questions over the weekend, so we'll talk about that in a little more detail. I have some new slides at the end. This is our mission; just to reiterate, accurate information is what we like to put out. We like to be transparent as much as possible, and we work with all the departments—we are the communications arm for all of the departments, so that gets to be pretty busy for us. And also, you know, we advance the strategic vision and crisis comms, get lots of media calls, and then create a favorable point of view in terms of our strategy. I have a three-fold strategy: the first piece of that is community engagement; second piece is to develop our brand; and the third is to tell our story. And that's what I always tell my team, that those are the three big rocks that we have. And to tell our story is really to focus on our exceptional services that we have. And I always say the stronger, more credible our image and brand identity, the less susceptible we are to be defined or undermined by outside influences or bad information. That's why our brand identity is so important. Our responsibilities are pretty straightforward, but we spend about 80 percent of our time on the resident communications piece of this. But it's all of the usual suspects that you can imagine, from identity—I put "Keeper of the Logo," so we get pretty adamant about that. There's a lot of users of our logo out there and we try to get after them as much as possible—there's still some users out there—and then of course media relations and crisis comms as we talked about. **[4:30] Mayor Luke Hellier:** Do you have any opinion if we got into the business of selling the logo for merchandise? From like... I mean, I know what staff do. I think years and years ago you could buy the Lakeville polo. Just wondering if you've ever thought about doing that or is it too much of a hassle? **[4:44] Tierney:** Well, we did have a Lakeville store for a while, and it didn't do a whole lot of business. But we have people out there—we had to... they were selling police merchandise for a while recently and it was the same group, I think, that was selling city merchandise recently. I sent a little note and all of a sudden the people vaporized. So somebody was trying to make some money off of it but couldn’t nail them down. So the tools that we use—this is the tools that we have in our toolbox: anything from our website, social media, video, cable marketing, traditional marketing, and publications. And then we have a lot of e-newsletters; all of the different departments have newsletters that people can sign up to. You have to opt into newsletters in Minnesota, so we have to have people sign up for them. We can't just automatically create lists and just sign people up to that. I thought this was kind of a good slide to put together to update you guys on our numbers lately. Facebook—that is all of our accounts combined. Thanks to the PD, they have a good Facebook following. So that's seven different Facebook accounts that we manage across the enterprise, if you will. Instagram, we have three different accounts; Twitter, for example, we have five; Pinterest, we just have two, so that's mostly the Art Center. Nextdoor, we just have one account and it's the city account, and that's our big push for things that are like events or ordinance information, that type of thing. And then you can see the rest. Then we'll talk more specifically about our website, but that gives you an idea of how many page views—unique page views—that we get in a quarter, which is pretty high. **[6:50] Councilmember Joshua Lee:** Yeah, for the Facebook pages, I'm guessing different people manage those pages depending on the department that they're representing? Sort of? Is there a policy or set of standards that they're all following to ensure that the voice is consistent with the brand? **[7:01] Tierney:** Um, yes. We kind of oversee that, and we do for the website as well. Different departments have access to those things and then we try to... with the website, for example, we review things before we hit publish on them. For Facebook, everybody sort of has... like the Police Department runs their own, and then we have some basic rules that we abide by. We do not hide comments; we don't block users because of First Amendment rights. So we do have sort of... in terms of speaking as one voice, we don't have too many rules around that, but we have some sort of basic how you speak language-wise just on social media. **[8:21] Councilmember Joshua Lee:** Yeah, because you can tell that, you know, sometimes police posts can be a little more... they have a sarcasm twist and I think it helps keep things lighter, especially with the type of work. **[8:32] Tierney:** Yeah, especially with the type of work. So yeah, I didn't know if that was just the tone of the author or if there was a set of standards people were modeling. I think Twitter we try to keep it... so you can kind of hear the different voices too. Our Facebook is a little more serious sometimes, and I think you can tell when I post versus when Barb posts. In terms of the website, we went through a complete redesign in 2022. I don't know if anybody noticed, but we cleaned up things a lot. We tried to make things a lot easier for people to find. So we went through a lot of Google analytics and tried to see what were people hunting for, what were they using, and we tried to make those "quick links" and tried to push those things to the top. So some things did shift down, like the department spotlights—they call them spotlights, but they're really what we call "header packages." So like the Art Center, Parks and Rec, Lakeville Liquors is a little bit different, but they all have their own kind of header packages. They look different, but they really belong to our website. So it looks like they're going to their own website page, but they really are all under one umbrella that we manage. So it looks like one brand, but they're different colors; they have control over those pages. But the quick links I think have helped a lot. And I also think our buttons at the top have improved. Our image goes all the way across the home page now, which is really nice. And we have some new photography—we used a freelance photographer that lives over on Orchard Lake and had a lot of nice nature pictures. We were able to request new pictures of our buildings, things like that, so that was really helpful. Our website does offer translations of every single language; when you go there, you just click on the button down at the bottom of the page and it'll flip to any language among anything—Somali, etc. ADA compliance—we're continuing to work on that, but we have a check built into our system to make sure that it is ADA compliant, and that means colors, and being able to use readers, that kind of thing. So that's really important. "Stacking"—54 percent of our users are coming from mobile devices. And so what stacking means is that when this page comes up, everything stacks on top of each other so you can read it very easily on mobile devices. And then we have a whole new section on interactive maps, and the GIS department has done marvelous kind of work on that. So now we have, like, art that you can go see in Lakeville and it's an interactive map. Our park system is all interactive now. What is underway: Liquor, when they moved to a new e-commerce site, it still looks like their old site but it's run by a different company now than Civic Plus, which is what we use. So when you click on it, it still goes to what it looks like the regular site. So that gave us an extra header package; so we have repurposed it for Community and Economic Development. So they will have a brand new page, probably at the end of July, and it will be really spiffy. It'll look like its own cool thing. We've already started content; Katie has been updating content as we've been going on. We went out today and we got brand new pictures, so it'll have all new photographs, new video, and it'll be its own cool page when it comes up and it'll have lots of extra pages underneath. So that's brand new. And then we're adding the Casperson boat launch live video link so now people will see how many boats are there in the queue. You know, is it a good time to go over and launch my boat? **[12:51] Mayor Luke Hellier:** Well, that'll be cool. **[12:53] Tierney:** Um, and then the most visited pages: of course our home page, because that's... you know, that makes sense from an organic standpoint. The Art Center and Attend Event, Utility Billing—so that's good to use all right. Calendars, permits, and then the council page comes up as number 18 in both organic searches and then direct searches. So that's kind of interesting too—that never used to be very high on that list. **[13:17] Mayor Luke Hellier:** It used to be higher on—no, I just was honored! Yeah, from 5 to 18... that's fine. **[13:24] Tierney:** You know, it never even showed up on your list before. So yeah, it comes up as 18. So that's like almost 3,000 views in a quarter. I thought it would be fun to look at a couple of our high-traffic posts. One that was contentious was our Antlers Park closure, and maybe it's because we used the great big picture "CLOSED"—I think that's part of it. It caught a lot of attention. It had a lot of reach, as you can see—a huge amount of reach for our post. Our cool little garbage truck though, we call him Luigi because he looks like the little Luigi from the movie *Cars*, but that also did very, very well, and that was last summer. And then the PD recruitment video is organically doing really well on YouTube. We did a Park and Rec takeover, and just on Nextdoor it did really, really well. Usually Nextdoor I don't get a lot of likes or the little hearts, but we do get a lot of impressions, so that's a good thing. And then our single snowstorm prep event got a huge amount. PD ride-alongs always do really well; those are really old but they still get a lot of follows, which is really interesting. And then of course turf tips with Kelly did really well last year, so we'll probably revive that again. And then just some highlights. We did the police recruitment campaign, so we did all brand new social media, a brochure, we did the full campaign, we did a brand new web page for it. And we probably didn't get a lot of recruits, but it did get a lot of attention, so it's a good start for us. We are working on the fire transition; the first piece of that is trying to explain this hybrid that we're going to, so we have a public piece that we're about ready to post. We're just agreeing on some of the final wording. We already talked about the economic development website, support of some of the surveys—we're supporting the pedestrian study right now, which is where you go out there on the map and you can actually put a little sticky note out there and talk about some of the areas that are troublesome. And that goes straight to the engineering department and their consultant, and that's got a ton of little notes on it. So we've been pushing that on Nextdoor. Jim is retiring after 33 years, so we have our first set of interviews on the 30th and 31st and we have 21 in our first batch. **[16:29] Mayor Luke Hellier:** You're going to interview 21? **[16:31] Tierney:** Yeah, they're going to be 20 minutes—short, very fast interviews. See how we do. So we'll be bleary-eyed, but yeah. **[16:42] Mayor Luke Hellier:** I was gonna say, I almost want to take pictures of them so I can remember... it's like doing half of a commission. **[16:51] Tierney:** Today, Biscay—Biscans—started. She’s an Eau Claire student and she was Lakeville South, so she's a Lakeville resident and she started today. So we're already really super happy. And then we have a number of partnerships, which I'm sure you're aware of—your Chamber of Commerce, obviously, Dakota County for recycling, and then Dakota Valley Recycling. And then recently the people from West Lake Marion Trails got a hold of me and want to share some marketing, which I was like, "Great, that's cool!" So we're going to be doing a bunch of stuff with them. And then I'm working with PD on a bunch of stuff for crisis communications. So we're doing a bunch of different things. That is a formal presentation, so moving on to tough questions—I got really hard questions. So the first one, which was from the task force: can you share some progress that we've made, and this is specific to the census information and maybe sharing that through social media, the web page, and the local paper? And I'll be honest with you, we haven't done a lot of that for a number of reasons. So first is specifically on the census stuff; some of it is a little old already, but I'm also struggling with finding ways to make those posts useful. Just coming out to say, for example—and I'm open to suggestions—but just coming out to say like, "you know, we have X percent of people of color in the community" is a post that kind of sets us up for failure because of how snarky social media can be and how many hits we kind of take through our social media. We do take some hits; we even get considered as "Edina-lite" kind of sometimes—kind of privileged, a little bit. We'll get comments like, "Oh, you're Lakeville." So these are some of the posts that we have been focusing on, which is some of the holidays and some of the... the first one is about kids with autism, and we've been pushing things like that. And big holidays, months of celebration like black history month or women's history month, that type of thing. So that's what we've been more focused on. Our intern—one of the reasons that I hired her, I asked this question of every one of the intern candidates: "If you were to do a diversity campaign, what would it look like?" She came back with a really cool idea and it was called "Portraits of Lakeville." Her background is graphics and photography. She goes, "Wouldn't it be cool if we let people in Lakeville tell their own story?" Whether it's somebody that has some sort of disability or a person that came from somewhere and they wanted to tell their story. So we take certain portraits of them—not them looking directly in the camera, but do something very artful—and then they go ahead and they tell their story and how they came to Lakeville. And I thought that would be a really cool... it takes time to develop that, it also takes resources in terms of who are these people, how do we go find them, and how do we convince them to tell their story. But we talked about it already today and she's really like fired up about it. **[21:11] Councilmember Joshua Lee:** Yeah, it's kind of like... there's a realtor out there that has a similar thing. And I like the idea of that, because after you do enough of these, maybe it kind of creates a mural of sorts of all of those art pieces on a big wall somewhere in Lakeville eventually. But I don't know, I know that we are interacting with more and more folks coming from all sorts of backgrounds. If you're looking for ideas, I think we could come up with some names, plus folks that are stepping up to commission work and different committees. But yeah, maybe start with commission members. **[22:04] Tierney:** I think that's a great idea. Cool. Okay, the next one was a similar question but talking about partnering with the Arts Center about talking about our concert series, which I'm totally excited about. Joe and I have been working really hard at the... the first piece was to advertise for applicants, and we got 60 applicants. And he said they were extremely diverse—he went through the applications—very diverse in age, ethnicity, musical types. He got it down to 22. He selected 24; he contracted with two—one was a reggae band and I can't remember who the other one was. So he got a really good, robust series. Right now we're in the kind of awareness stage, so we've been advertising like crazy just this piece of it and branding that image. You probably have seen some of the banners and stuff around. And we're using just this piece of it just to kind of say we have this concert series. Then we're going to start talking about... the next step is like the individual performances. So he's waiting—he's got some TBD dates, so we're gonna fill those in. And then I had to give him credit for the picture on the front page of the newspaper. For the first year of the Art Crawl, he got this great big image on the front page of the paper with this great artist who I thought was just phenomenal, who does those beautiful pictures. And then there was this woman in this wheelchair and she was like... he goes, "He couldn't have staged this better!" And it wasn't staged, obviously, and it was a great photo. But they did really well for their first Lakeville Art Crawl. **[24:18] Mayor Luke Hellier:** The banner that's at Antlers right now, it's a nice look. Don't look outside now, but it's a great placement. That was a terrific placement. **[24:32] Tierney:** He said he stuck it out there and did it because he was like, "I don't feel like that one counts against the banner laws." Don't tell him I told you that, though. And then the last piece of this question was about the Lakeville Chamber. I know that our citizen has called this an "old document," but we spend a lot of time editing this document for the Chamber. We get this sent to us every year and we edit the heck out of it. This particular one still has Doug Anderson as the Mayor, but there is a new version of this out there because we just finished editing it a few weeks ago. So I know they'll be publishing another one, but this is the kind of... I don't think of this document as being old. I asked for the distribution model of this to find out how it's distributed to new residents, but this has everything that you'd ever need if you're moving to Lakeville, and they give this to every new resident. So that's one of the things that we do with the Chamber—we do quite a bit with them. But the other one is we're doing a new series with Tina and the Chamber and it's called "Find Yourself in Lakeville." It's a whole new video series and it's mostly focused on business, but the first video we did with them is really based on jobs and it's "Come work in Lakeville." So it's supposed to be—Tina's vision of this is supposed to be: as a CEO, bring your business to Lakeville; and as people that work at that business, come live in Lakeville and work at that business. So that's really what that's focused on. It's a little bit more business-oriented, but this first video is really resident-focused. **[26:30] Councilmember Joshua Lee:** Are you going to use those videos on Instagram too? **[26:34] Tierney:** Yeah, we could! Yep, and we have our other videos out there too, the business videos. Lastly, this is kind of a busy-looking chart, but it's how do we compare to our peer cities in terms of staffing. We're up there on the left, and then everybody else. And we kind of fall in the middle, which is where I expected us to kind of fall. Some cities are heavier with staff than others; part of that is a lot of cities will farm out their video groups. That's a pretty expensive thing to do. I think we're really fortunate having just a couple video people on staff because that saves us a lot of money, because just doing one video is really expensive. I can't imagine farming that out. Rosemount, Farmington, Apple Valley—they of course use one staff for all their video needs, but I don't know how much time they get of those folks. And then I didn't put Edina up there because they have 14 in communications. I'm not surprised. They actually have 18 people, but I think four of those are from the Art Center, so 14. **[27:56] Councilmember Joshua Lee:** Are there any positions that wouldn't technically fall under your purview but have a communications role that have dotted lines here? I mean, I'm thinking about the Facebook post from the Police Department. I'm guessing there's not a full communications role around that person, but what percentage of time are they doing communications type work that might be considered... you know, how much of those part-time roles are there? **[28:43] Tierney:** Yeah, that's a really hard question to answer. Tierney tunes in, reviews, and kind of watches everybody's Facebook posts just to kind of monitor it and keep Justin and I up to date on what everybody's doing out there. But we kind of leave it up to those departments that have their own Facebooks to responsibly post and do their own thing. It's hard to say how much time each of them do it—certainly a few hours a week sometimes, sometimes it's more depending on what they have going on. **[29:21] Councilmember Joshua Lee:** But the newsletter that you all put out or that the booklet—who did that for the Police Department, like the annual report? **[29:28] Police Chief Brad Paulson:** Yeah, that was Maura Thomas, one of our admin folks. **[29:32] Councilmember Joshua Lee:** Got it. **[29:33] Police Chief Brad Paulson:** Which is time-consuming. You know, that was a big project, obviously, and it's a chunk of time once a year. But she does our Facebook social media posts and it's sporadic. I mean, some weeks it’s several hours, some weeks it may not be much at all. It depends on what's going on. But she does work a lot with Tierney and her staff too to make sure we’re on the same page as far as messaging and things like that. **[29:56] Tierney:** Those big publications, we've pushed the departments to try to run everything through Communications. So Communications has their eye on it, looking through it from their point of view. We don't get heavy-handed on it, but we at least ask them to run everything through communications so it's reviewed that way. I laid it out so she did the content and I still did the design on it. **[30:18] Councilmember Joshua Lee:** Yeah, so just like with the recruitment video, all the recruitment stuff was a joint... we had people involved, obviously, but working a lot of times Communications is a silent partner. **[30:26] Tierney:** Yeah, that's why my staff wanted me to put "all departments" on the chart, because they were like, "We want them to know!" I'm like, "I think they know that." **[30:38] Mayor Luke Hellier:** Geralyn, in a report it said that the franchise fees are down on the $2,000. What's the total amount? Do you know? And you're talking cable franchise fees? **[30:52] Finance Director Geralyn:** Cable franchise, yeah. Annually so far? **[31:02] Mayor Luke Hellier:** Yeah, how much we've been doing the last couple of years. I know obviously it's dropping. **[31:08] Finance Director Geralyn:** It’s like $150,000 or something. Okay, so it's still, you know, it's going down, people are still cord-cutting. But it's around $150,000. **[31:23] Councilmember Dan Wolter (Remote):** With media interaction, how does this information... particularly social media, because I know we still do press releases, but the days of "well here's your press release and that's it"... people expect information like immediately. **[31:43] Tierney:** Yeah, um so we'll try to put information out there right away on social media. So like when these guys have something, they'll put it out on their social media and we'll share it. So we try to coordinate the best we can because I'll get a lot of inquiries. You know, KARE 11—I don't know why they have me on speed dial, but I'll get a lot of inquiries from them. And sometimes they'll have already gotten a call too, so they'll speed dial everybody. So we kind of have to coordinate when we get those types of things. And then we try to get that release information—what we consider an old-fashioned press release. We still do those, but it's in the social media type of context where they pick up their information and they'll pick up leads on Twitter. They'll be snooping around on Twitter and then they'll go, "Hey, this is about you," and they'll send us a thing about it. **[32:51] City Administrator Justin Miller:** They also get the weekly updates sometimes. **[32:53] Tierney:** Yeah, they find stories in there too. One of them called me today after—or they watched our agenda—they emailed me last week about rental licensing while we were looking at that. **[32:56] Councilmember Dan Wolter (Remote):** It’s okay, good for stories! But as a former journalist... **[33:10] Councilmember Michelle Volk:** Oh, yeah. I just have one more comment. I had passed this once... it might have passed along to me, even though I just want everyone else to hear. I was at an event talking with the communications person in another city, and they learned that I was from Lakeville and they go, "Oh really? We follow Lakeville's social media because that's the standard that we want to get ours up to." I thought that was really great. **[33:45] Tierney:** Yeah, fun. Thank you. **[33:47] Councilmember Joshua Lee:** Thank you for putting this together so quickly. I think I gave you each about a week to come up with this list and appreciate that because it's really interesting to see what people are putting resources in. I don't know, as I'm looking—just personal judgment-wise—it seems like there's some maybe too many resources in certain positions in other cities, but you've got a really nice balance of roles in the communications department. I mean, I think the product is great. I love the technical different types of technical work they can do with drones and video and photos, and it seems like we cover all sorts of avenues within the city in terms of what we do, from trash picker-upper to... you know. So yeah, it's neat to see. I mean, as you're looking for this new Jim—asking, "Are you award-winning?" as part of that interview question, because I feel like there's some big shoes to fill with this role in terms of quality. But this is really helpful, so thank you for doing that. **[34:41] Tierney:** One thing that I forgot to mention too on the social media stuff is—and I won't get into the weeds of it—but there's algorithms that each media has. If you post, like, Facebook, the algorithm is you pay if you post once a day but never more than once a day or you'll fall down in people's timelines. But if you don't post enough, you will also fall. And Instagram is the same way; you can post as many reels and stories as you want, but if you post too many times on people's timelines, there’s also the problem that you don't want to be unfriended or blocked or muted either. Where we lost some people in the first quarter, we were trying to examine "why?"—trying to figure out people's minds. But you want to post just the right amount. So dialing that in is hard. And Twitter's Twitter right now, so you can... you know, we lost our blue checkmark. We might get a grey checkmark for government, so you don't know. We'll see what happens there. But that was kind of a loss because it's nice to be verified, that people know that you are a government entity and that what you're talking about is truth. So there's some weird things going on right now, but we'll kind of go with the flow and see how we do. The other thing that's really cool is it's all very interactive too, especially on the website. I think the camera is going to be really cool, and the plowing maps and the development maps are getting results. **[37:00] Councilmember Michelle Volk:** From your meeting with the Youth Advisory Council back in March or April—I can't remember which one—but you were asking for some of their input, etc., and then they were asking you for your input. Where are you at with the council and working with them? **[37:25] Tierney:** Um, Jim was there last night, so he interviewed some of them. We want to get some messages out about what they are and what they do, what their function is. Because they're so new, we want to kind of introduce them to the community, so that will be kind of our first step. So he did that interview last night with Courtney's help. So that's sort of our first step. And then we worked on some of the questions, but we'll wait till fall before we roll out that survey. **[38:15] Councilmember Michelle Volk:** Mostly, will those videos be ready before the recruitment phase for next year? **[38:23] Tierney:** Oh yeah, yeah. They should be done in the next week. **[38:27] Councilmember Michelle Volk:** And since they're also working on the mental health issues, are they going to use you and Lakeville for some of their communications needs on that? **[38:33] City Administrator Justin Miller:** I haven't heard yet. I think we—the group or myself—have a lot to talk with Communications and Tierney on that, but I think they would like to utilize the city website to push that one out. They want to finalize the mental health flyer by the end of June, so I know they wanted to post it on the library or the city website potentially. And schools come next school year. **[38:58] Councilmember Michelle Volk:** Okay, good questions. Thank you for the update. Appreciate it. **[39:03] City Administrator Justin Miller:** If I may, I just want to say a few things about Tierney and the internal services. She's in one of those groups that don't get a lot of light of day but they do a ton of work behind the scenes. And so I just want to tell Tierney I appreciate the work that she does. She’s been here six years, and prior to her being here, we had very little social media, very little anything out there on the web. So with her background in corporate media, coming here and picking up where the previous manager left off has been night and day. I know Justin and I both appreciate it very much. So thank you. **[39:56] Mayor Luke Hellier:** Very good. Thank you. Okay, moving on to Geralyn with the first quarter financial report. **[40:04] Finance Director Geralyn:** Preview of a few of the funds, starting with the general fund. Property taxes: first of all, our biggest, one of our largest funding sources in the general fund—we don't receive those until June and July and then the end of the year, so I won't see any numbers there. Building permits are slightly down first quarter as compared to a year ago, especially in the single family—about 85 compared to 120. So we're seeing a slight decline in those revenues. **[40:48] Mayor Luke Hellier:** If I have one request from you—when you do the next one, or you will do one more financial report—I’ll make sure whatever you say in this application shows the trend for more than just one year on the permits. You know, maybe going back five years. **[41:04] Finance Director Geralyn:** On just the single family or just the overall building? **[41:06] Mayor Luke Hellier:** Just overall. Thank you. **[41:08] Finance Director Geralyn:** As far as some of the other revenues, I do want to point out it's more in the expenses that we're watching personnel. They are about 24 percent of budget, so they're running pretty close, but we will see in some of the areas that they're coming in under budget in different departments due to vacancies. Other expenditures: utilities—we are running higher with natural gas costs. Motor fuels are a little higher, but we do have a contract for those. Jumping into some of the specific departments, I'll call out the Finance Department; we are starting to see... last year we had some ERP costs and consultants and so forth. Those are just starting now, so you'll see more comparative information starting in second quarter. Police personnel services are below budget due to some employee vacancies. And I guess one general comment I want to make about the personnel also that I noted here is that our workers' comp insurance came in significantly higher—our experience modification changed quite a bit and of course we got that information after we had prepared the budget. So it will be about $300,000 higher this year. The Streets Department—they are also seeing their personnel... actually, the flip, they have higher costs compared to budget primarily due to overtime for all the snow events and so forth that we had. **[42:55] Mayor Luke Hellier:** Any other questions on general fund? **[42:58] Finance Director Geralyn:** Otherwise I'll jump to the community... Mayor Hellier, you brought up the franchise fees, and of course I was thinking lease revenues because we've been talking about those with the auditors. But the franchise fees—as we've discussed this fund over the last couple of years, we've projected in a few years that we're going to have to add property tax levy as those revenues are declining and the expenses are increasing. We're going to have to support it with some property taxes. But that's a few years out. I don't have the exact year, but just to bring that to your attention again. In the Liquor fund, sales are up over last year about 4.8 percent. On the expense side, now we're seeing more of that full debt payment associated with the Keokuk where it was partial debt payments last year. And you still have all of the transfers scheduled for equipment fund and debt service and police stations and so forth, and some capital light for some improvements at the other locations. In the Water fund, you'll recall that the Council approved the new structure that went into effect February 1st of this year. Surprisingly, the amount of gallons that we billed are within 7,000 compared to last year. So the revenues are pretty close—slightly under. It all depends on what tier that they fell into, but with the new rate structure, it was not meant to increase the revenues; it's supposed to keep it at a constant amount, so it's pretty close to last year. And I list out all the projects that are listed there—there are quite a few projects specifically in the Water fund. Most of those costs will start coming through in second quarter and future quarters. In the Sewer fund, we did not have a change in the fee, and same with the Street Lighting fund—no change in those fees, so nothing really to report in those two funds. When we get to the Environmental Resources fund, you'll recall that we made a change at the end of the year moving the Forestry division from the Environmental Resources fund to the General fund. So that was actually one change I should have mentioned in the General fund, that now we have that division to report on. And we did transfer, I think it was about $160,000 or $180,000 at the beginning of this year to transfer some of those residual funds from the Environmental Resources fund over to the General fund. And for the Environmental Resources fund, you'll also recall that because we were moving that forestry component to the general fund, we reduced that environmental resources fee as well. So there was not a lot of activity in the first quarter. Any questions? **[45:44] Mayor Luke Hellier:** No. Thank you. Let's move on to the next item: Opioid Settlements. **[45:51] City Administrator Justin Miller:** I think you guys are tied to Geralyn on that, and Chris Holberg came to just talk about it or answer questions from what the county is engaging on from opioids. I don't know if you wanted to let them give a presentation and you want to chime in after that? **[46:17] Mayor Luke Hellier:** Okay, I'll let them give a presentation first. I'll let you chime in. **[46:30] Finance Director Geralyn:** All right. So I tried to highlight the three opioid class action lawsuits that impact the city. There's a lot of information out there, and I will say it's challenging to understand exactly what the magnitude of the funds is going to be. So I estimated based on what documents I came across—don't hold me to it, hopefully there'll be more. We have received some funds on some of the lawsuits. On the Johnson and Johnson, we've received actually years one and two, about $41,000. I just received notification that the third payment of $21,000 will be coming in in June. And the next one, the Teva/Allergan/Walgreens and so forth—we actually haven't received any payments on that one yet. I couldn't determine what that estimated amount that the city would be receiving is, but I did see that it should be over 15 years. The first one was about $627,000 over 18 years. Then the third one, the Janssen—looking at and this again is just an estimate—I think about $116,000 over 11 years. We had received the first actually all five of them at one time, so that was kind of surprising. But I think there are some incentives with some of those payments. And then the fourth one is the National Opioid Abatement Trust, of which we received one payment of $4,200, and really I did not see any information about the length of time that we would receive payment or the amount. **[48:01] Police Chief Brad Paulson:** Yeah, so I think in your packet is the entire Memorandum of Agreement—several pages. We highlighted a few proposed uses that are more closely tied to kind of the public safety area. So "Connecting people to the help that they need"—that's one category. This is working with those that currently have opioid use disorder or substance abuse disorder coupled with mental health, which is a lot of folks. And sometimes we don't always know when we're dealing with folks, but they suffer from it. And so that's connecting those people to the care, making sure they're aligned with the proper resources, which we are doing in a couple of different ways with some of our Dakota County partnerships—our crisis response and then our embedded social worker. "Addressing the needs of Criminal Justice involved persons"—those are people that are kind of tangled up with the criminal justice system: committing crimes, arrests, things like that that kind of have underlying causes or issues of substance abuse, opioid abuse and use. And some of those highlight the co-responder or alternate respondent models. So again, that's some of the things that we're doing with Dakota County. On the prevention side, that's more of your marketing campaigns, public awareness things like that. And I would envision, if we went that route, partnering with certainly our city communication staff but also possibly schools and things like that. And then on the prevention side again, it talks about supporting mobile units that offer or provide referrals for harm reduction treatment recovery. Again, that circles back to kind of that embedded social worker, aligning these folks with the resources that could truly help with their addiction. And then the last one we highlighted here was First Responders. There's some very basic language in there, such as law enforcement expenditures related to the opioid epidemic, but then also education of law enforcement and first responders—training, most likely—but then also wellness and support services for first responders who have been exposed to trauma related to opioid abuse and use. And so with all of those kind of parameters in place on use, we highlighted some areas where we anticipate working regardless of the funds coming in, especially since we don't have a great grasp of how much and when and how long this will go on. Our drug task force agent, from an enforcement standpoint, is our point person on tackling this from intercepting drugs that are coming into our communities—cartel related, the influx of opioids and fentanyl. We have a full-time agent that's a city of Lakeville detective assigned to that team. His salary is included there; overtime is relatively high, it fluctuates a little bit year-to-year—it’s about $25,000 estimated this year for 2023. So that's a fairly significant expense. And then within the last couple of years, participating members of the drug task force have been contributing an annual amount; for 2023 it was around $15,000. We're expecting that to drop closer to about $4,000 next year. Historically, the task force was funded more through forfeitures, and they've gone away from that model, which I think is a good thing. But to kind of bridge that gap in the meantime, every participating agency kicked in some annual dues, so to speak. And then moving outside of the drug task force, I talked about the embedded social worker. We would like to move our patrol officers full-time to pair with that social worker and kind of be that liaison. And so obviously we're paying that officer a salary; I believe that would possibly fall under this Memorandum of Agreement of how these funds are used. And internally, our wellness program—for the last handful of years, we've mandated mental health check-ins for all of our staff, and that's about a $15,000 annual expense. Can't really delineate whether officers were exposed to trauma related to opioids or whether it was natural, but I think we could make a pretty good argument that a lot of the stuff that we see out there has some basis for opioid-related issues. And then again, touching on the public awareness, media campaigns or community awareness listening sessions, presentations, things like that. We just did one with the schools about a month ago. Sometimes there's not a huge cost that goes with that, but if there is, certainly that money could be used in that direction as well. So I think as far as staff, we're just looking for some direction and priorities on where you'd like us to steer these dollars. **[53:49] Mayor Luke Hellier:** Is there equipment to purchase also, like to protect officers? Whether it's... well, the Narcan I think would be part of it, but then is there equipment related to fentanyl that we need to buy that can be specific to the fentanyl or opioids? **[54:09] Police Chief Brad Paulson:** So, the Narcan—we do have Narcan. It's in all of our squads and in our building. We received all of that through a grant—I think it's a state grant—so we didn't pay for that. And then also... sorry to interrupt, one of the newest grants, I think is the one that's Teva, Allergan, CVS—part of that is they're supposed to provide some of that. And so really we... medical gloves, masks, they have multiple uses, not just there, but it's not a huge big-ticket expense for us. But I mean, you could make the argument some of those, if we do continue to pay for those out of our budget, some of those expenses could be covered. I just think about all the stuff we used COVID money for that was like... yeah. **[55:00] Councilmember John Bermel:** A couple thoughts, comments. One of the things that strikes me is this still seems pretty fuzzy in terms of how much money, how frequently, and in the end how's that going to look. So it just strikes me that's kind of hard to plan: "Hey we want to do this, but we really don't know..." So I think whatever we choose to do, however we choose to spend that, there's this balance of long-term and one-time. So I think there are some things that we could just commit to. And then the other thing is, you know, we mentioned the street piece and the drug task force, and that is very, very real. I think there's a whole side of this that isn't criminal... I get a wisdom tooth out and I get 10 pills of Oxycodone; I have a hernia surgery and I got 10 pills of Oxycodone that I don't want to touch because number one, I get better results with Tylenol and Ibuprofen, but they're sitting there. So I think some of this isn't going to be the criminal on the street that's selling it and using it; it's going to be a household where there's addiction problems because somebody got started. And I think it's important to address both folks. I mean, from my experience, I really would like to see some of those expenses from enforcing drug incidents which are resolved with the problem—this would be a great way to help that. But I would really love to find some way to hit... I know a few years ago in Dakota County—and maybe it's getting on more like 10 or 12 years—there is a startup to try to work with healthcare on this whole addiction piece. Because people like me, I'm the kid of two doctors, I have access... all under the radar. So that's just one piece. So I look at this and I see what you want to do with the schools and that's really encouraging. I think there's some real potential there to hit the people that aren't going to necessarily... I mean if you told me to go buy some opioids right now on the street, I might have a couple of clues, but just as a normal citizen I wouldn't have a clue where to go. But I do know what my parents keep in their medicine cabinet. So that's one angle to look at. I think the education piece at the schools is great. I do think though that it would be good to use some of this money to help us—you're in the middle, your police officers are in the middle of an issue and a problem, and it'd be great to have a way to help combat that and keep that off to the side. So for me, if we could do something with the community where we're going to hit people that aren't necessarily seeing that street use and the drug culture... so I think maybe this officer liaison with a social worker and the schools are a great place to do that, and then using some of the drug task force to equip them. **[58:15] Mayor Luke Hellier:** Mr. Holberg, do you want to just give your thoughts from a county perspective where you're focusing your efforts to make sure we're not overlapping? **[58:30] Dakota County Commissioner Chris Holberg:** The county is going to probably end up over the life of this somewhere in the half a million dollars a year on average. Again, we've gotten a big hunk of money up front and you know, it seems a little fluffy as far as plugging in exact numbers and exact years, so we're struggling with that same piece. We've had a number of community meetings looking for input—the Chief has attended. One of our problems that we're grappling with is that small cities, 30,000 and under, I think didn't get any money. And so there's going to be a state board with state money, but the small cities are coming to the county and saying, "Hey, we want some of your money." And we don't know if the state's going to take care of them or whatever. But I think they're looking for us just initially to fund the drug task force yearly amount. I'm guessing that's going to happen in some way, shape, or form in the interim until we kind of get this all sorted out. And of course, over the last couple years, plenty of new programs that have been started and staff have said, "Oh, when we get the opioid money you could use opioid money to fund this." So, having to kind of look at that piece as well. The social worker program, currently funded with COVID dollars—it doesn't have money. Things that are already in the budgets that people seem to like and are effective could easily eat up... oh my gosh. So we're kind of swirling as far as how to do this. There is a lot of interest in the prevention piece. You know, they're basically saying you got to get to kids—and this is the public health realm, where law enforcement joins public health and the county being the public health authority for the county. But you need to get kids in the fourth, fifth, sixth grade realm. Parents need help learning how to talk about this. And then some of the early interventions that may in fact save money in other areas the county is responsible for—in other words, early involvement with families with addiction so we avoid out-of-home placement for kids. Is there some kind of early family drug intervention kind of thing? Then there has also been discussion of putting together some kind of information piece that could be replicated across the school districts so that we would kind of do a "pack and play" kind of thing where we can set up the basic information: information flyers, community resources in Dakota County to help address some of these concerns, where to get help, etc., that could then be distributed through the schools. And to the point about the drugs in people's homes, I know a couple years ago we talked about like having it with EMS or even funeral directors—so when they go into these homes of people that have passed, they could leave a kit to say, "Hey, grandma or grandpa had a bunch of drugs in their cupboard, you don't know what to do with them? You put them in here, they'll make them all inert." You know, so nobody's snooping around the old farmstead finding them. **[1:02:46] Mayor Luke Hellier:** The biggest is open houses, right? **[1:02:48] Chris Holberg:** The biggest is open houses, seriously. And so realtors are starting to carry the bags and they give them to homeowners so they can dispose of their medication before they have an open house. **[1:03:11] Police Chief Brad Paulson:** And we do have the prescription drug dropbox at the Police Department and it gets used a lot. I was there last week. It's not a huge expense to us other than some bags and a little bit of staff time emptying it, but it does get utilized. We try to publicize that. **[1:03:32] Councilmember Dan Wolter (Remote):** Would it make sense to maybe have a conversation with some of the pharmacies in the community about expanding that a little bit and see if they're willing to do some drug take-back in partnership with us? Whether they... maybe use some of the funds to help promote that. I think when I went to HyVee, they started doing take-back, but I don't know if CVS or Walmart does. **[1:04:18] Chris Holberg:** Walmart does, right at the front of the pharmacy. We also have a survey effort that's live now—we're asking for input from the community as to what they'd like to see us spend the money on in Dakota County. And back to the drug task force, everybody but Inver Grove Heights is in the drug task force. So we've asked our other Chiefs—it would be a lot easier to make county investments in that operation if everybody was a part of it. Which, the irony is that it's in their house in the SMART center. **[1:04:45] Councilmember Dan Wolter (Remote):** Sorry, go ahead. I was just going to follow up on your point—we do have those drop boxes in all of our pharmacies. I think you probably do see that with a lot of the chain stores. **[1:05:04] Councilmember Michelle Volk:** Chief, I got a really dumb question. I really don't know much about opioids, but you're talking about prescription drugs... aren't they created too? Aren't they man-made, meaning that they're not coming out of a pharmaceutical? So I guess my point is, and that's usually where the fentanyl overdoses are taking place—putting the fentanyl into the man-made drugs rather than... I mean, I realize I would hate to encourage kids to suddenly look into their parents' medicine cabinet. I would like to see us move in the direction where we're educating them on man-made products that are not made from a drug company and the dangers that come from that. Because just because you bought it the week before doesn't mean the next week it's not deadly. I'd like to see them scared to death—I mean, that's the point. But educated that way, so they realize that these products that are being created are not regulated and that they're coming from bad people. If we could make the point of how wicked cartels are, and that even though it doesn't sound like a very good business model that they're killing off their customers, they really don't care. They're more interested in selling as much product as they possibly can. If we could just get more into the evils of what is behind the sources of these things that are killing the youth, just even the first time they try it. There's all kinds of parent groups out there that have been formed across the nation to try to bring forth some of the education, and I don't know if being able to take some of these funds and bring those speakers in—those moms and dads are very effective when they're talking about their families and how it's destroyed them. **[1:07:34] Police Chief Brad Paulson:** Yeah, and there are national programs like "One Pill Can Kill." So the other part of this is, as we get a year or two into it—remember, this money's going nationwide, so we're not going to have to reinvent everything. There's going to be a whole industry or market. There's more state grant money for Naloxone or Narcan, so I think that's kind of licked as far as grants and state money. I think as this evolves, that's what we're finding from a training standpoint—there's training out there but it's not costing us anything because it's all funded through the same pool of money. So in some ways, it's hard to spend the money at times. Councilmember Volk, to your point, I think really the answer is attacking it from all these angles. Because the cartel piece is really our drug task force—that's really their approach, to go after that source of this synthetically made opioids and fentanyl that's being manufactured south of the border and shipped up here. But there is a big need on the awareness side from pill bottles in the home and kids starting there and then getting addicted and then graduating to the stuff where they don't know what they're taking. So I really think getting it from different angles is important and not neglecting any one of those. **[1:09:33] Mayor Luke Hellier:** Have you had a conversation with the school districts, all three of them? Has there been an event you wanted to do that you haven't been able to pay for? **[1:09:38] Police Chief Brad Paulson:** More so, we've had it with Lakeville schools, and we did the forum a month ago. We did have a mother on our panel who lost a child to an opioid overdose. It was a powerful story; she's a really good speaker, able to share her story publicly. I think those stories are important. But we've worked with schools after to say, "What's next? Let's not just leave it at this. What are our next steps?" And it's just like any kind of marketing—how can we target the people that really... you know, we have people showing up, but a lot of times it's the people that are already on top of the stuff, they're aware. So how do we get to those people that are really struggling with this? We're all trying to ask those questions. **[1:10:15] Councilmember John Bermel:** I think education about take-back is just so important because to your point, so many people have an opioid from three, four years ago sitting in the closet. I think too, I know the University of Minnesota has stopped prescribing opioids for dental procedures, so some education with our healthcare community would be helpful too. **[1:10:45] Mayor Luke Hellier:** Tracking our internal efforts on this—or tracking a time, I should say. Because you know, if we put together a communications campaign, however much time Tierney puts on that or the cable guys, we need to figure out a way to be able to track that so we can justify it. **[1:11:00] Chris Holberg:** I mean, I've been doing these meetings for so many different variety of reasons and at the meeting last month, 80 percent of the people there were what I would call "The Usual Suspects"—people that have been coming to these things for years. The few faces that were new... I mean, the one overdose in the school came from St. Paul. There's... I don't know. Part of the thing is that you know, this has been the case for decades. I think a lot of parents don't realize that it's here, or they don't want to know it's here, or "it will never be their child." And I think that... I don't know how you get past that hurdle. There's still a level of stigma. **[1:12:04] Mayor Luke Hellier:** Are programs like DARE still happening in schools? **[1:12:10] Police Chief Brad Paulson:** Not in Lakeville, not for quite a number of years. I think it still exists in some places, but not very many anymore. It was proved to be not effective in stopping drug use. It was really good for developing good relationships with law enforcement, but in a statistical analysis, it was maybe even counterproductive to reducing drug use because they learned so much about it and were curious. **[1:12:45] Mayor Luke Hellier:** It's half my point though, I'm trying to figure out a way to get them beyond the curious and to the point where they're scared to be curious. I think—and these are great, we can keep talking—the one thing from my parent perspective that I always thought was eye-opening was the trailer that's set up like a bedroom to understand where kids can hide drugs and those types of things. Identifying all the resources Dakota County is going to be really big. There was a whole write-up about a woman in the paper, I think it was Mother's Day weekend, about what she's accomplishing and how you talk to kids in a non-confrontational way to keep the dialogue open. I mean, there's so much confusing stuff out there, it's no surprise that people don't know what to do. It would be good to use our resources for education, but I also think focusing on at least part of the salary requirements for the drug task force makes a ton of sense to me. **[1:14:41] Councilmember Joshua Lee:** Yeah, I don't disagree with any of your recommendations. I mean, if we could fund all of them with this money, that'd be great. If not, though, I mean youth prevention is what I think I'm hearing from a lot of folks is kind of one of the bigger priorities. You know, you start looking at academics and you start looking at what my future is... some of it is "I just gotta get past this week" and if I have a friend that has a couple pills that are going to help me do that, that's where it starts. So whatever we can do for education is huge. The other thing is, I'm concerned about the safety of our officers too. As it keeps increasing, they're at risk every time they come across this stuff. It's just scary to see some of the videos an officer opens up the back of a vehicle and suddenly collapses because they just breathed in the dust of fentanyl. So whatever we can do to help with... you mentioned equipment, but I don't know, there has to be a way to keep it safer because you're coming across this more and more. If there were something developed besides Narcan to help prevent the accident from happening, I'd certainly want to make sure that our Police Department had access to that. **[1:16:15] Police Chief Brad Paulson:** And I don't disagree there. I mean, they do train a lot on proper evidence procedures. We have Narcan right where we package evidence. I'm not aware of any preventative equipment that's out there to completely take that risk out of it 100 percent, but I know they try to search in ventilated areas and do what they can with that in mind. Sometimes you just don't know when that moment is where you open something up. It is dangerous. **[1:17:15] Mayor Luke Hellier:** All right. Thank you for that input. We'll now move on. Allyn, with your update on Envision Lakeville. **[1:17:20] Assistant City Administrator Allyn Kuennen:** I'll do the first part and I'll throw it over to Courtney on the survey. If you remember back in March, you appointed the task force, and since then we have scheduled the first task force meeting to be on May 30th—it's next Tuesday. The next step in the process then after that is City Council. Craig Rapp will be contacting you to interview each of you between June 2nd and June 9th. So if you get a call from Craig Rapp, that's what it's about. He wants to take a few moments to just ask a few questions about what you guys envisioned for the future of Lakeville. After that, we will do a Department Directors Workshop; that'll be on June 12th. Craig Rapp will come in and facilitate that workshop with our department directors. And then the main item I wanted to discuss today with City Council was the Joint Advisory Commission Workshop. There are five Mondays in July and we felt that perhaps the July 31st Monday we would schedule that Joint Boards and Commissions with Council—everyone would attend that. And again, that would be facilitated by Craig Rapp that Monday night, July 31st, starting at the normal time of 6:30. We’d probably do that in the city council chambers just because it's a larger group. **[1:19:15] Mayor Luke Hellier:** Is that only existing commissions, not the appointed task force? **[1:19:25] Allyn Kuennen:** Well, that would be a question for you. Does City Council... would you mind if the task force attended that? **[1:19:35] Councilmember John Bermel:** No, I think they should. **[1:19:38] Mayor Luke Hellier:** Do you want them to participate or to listen? **[1:19:40] Allyn Kuennen:** That was the discussion I had with Craig Rapp today, the possibility of the task force attending that joint meeting. But then they can go back and that's part of the information that they can discuss at the next task force meeting. **[1:19:54] Mayor Luke Hellier:** Yeah, you'll record that then too, in case some of those... I mean then they can reference that material later. They can actually go back to the recording of the meeting itself. **[1:20:10] Allyn Kuennen:** Yep. So we'll invite them as guests and we'll have guest seats set up for them. It’s going to be very similar to like we did when we did the EEC and PC and Council—set up in a huge U-shape. There’ll be a little bit of a lull between the first task force meeting next Monday and the next one in August. From Monday until that task force meeting in August will be the data collection phase. So we are looking at creating some kind of homework or something for the task force to do during that period just to keep them engaged. It'll be some kind of survey that they could take back to their individual groups that they represent and give some input directly which they can then bring back to the task force. I'll hand it over to Courtney for the survey. **[1:21:13] Staff (Courtney):** So the survey timeline got pushed back just a little bit. The most updated one that I have is that the data collection would begin on May 19th—so obviously we're past that a little bit. Where they're at right now is they have sent all the materials over to be printed. And then they're going to be sent out; the first postcard is going to be sent out to 3,000 households. The reason for the bit of delay was tracking zip codes—they were able to do that without asking a question on the survey. And then they finalized all of the custom questions as well. I've been working with Tierney and Barb on pushing that out on social media so folks know when to look for that. **[1:22:04] Mayor Luke Hellier:** Okay. Any other questions? And there's a business survey that's going to go along with that too. Tina is in that effort. Very good job, guys. All right, moving on to updates. **[1:22:25] Councilmember John Bermel:** I’ll start off. Cedar Lake Airport: our next advisory commission meeting is June 8th. This will actually be out at Cedar Lake Airport at their new building, the Loft Aviation building, so we're excited about that. And then Dakota 911 (DCC) met on Thursday. The big thing we did there was we approved the budget for 2024. A couple highlights: it's a 9.3 percent increase, mostly personnel, which is not surprising. The county pays 50 percent of the fixed costs. We also had some conversations about capital—how do we best start saving for replacements? **[1:24:16] Mayor Luke Hellier:** From a staff standpoint, do they have... I know at one point they were so short-staffed. **[1:24:25] Councilmember John Bermel:** Yes, they're authorized for 53 and they're at 45 now. It's a constant struggle. And it takes six months to train somebody. You hire somebody and you really don't gain them for six months, then they get four months down and say, "Yeah, this isn't for me." It's a tough job. **[1:25:20] Mayor Luke Hellier:** Other updates? **[1:25:25] Councilmember Joshua Lee:** You know, for as busy as it feels like events and ribbon cuttings have been, I haven't had any committee meetings since our last work session. The only one that I had was the Arenas, and we had a great groundbreaking ceremony. I'm excited to have that project get going here. After the budget was approved at the school district, we approved the budget. Probably the only other thing that they're looking into is that there are some change orders for the project that are quite large—roughly between two change orders, about $60,000. So that's a chunk of change. The project will keep moving forward, but just be aware of that. And then there's still some more investigative work to be done on the energy savings, because the amount of energy savings is what's going to be applied to the arenas' debt. There’s some questions on the accuracy of the company’s data and our data. **[1:27:50] Mayor Luke Hellier:** Yeah, I remember that conversation years ago. It was supposed to be pretty robust, about $60,000 a year. **[1:28:05] Councilmember Joshua Lee:** It's hard to... I don't know if we did a good enough job on a baseline, plus we changed the systems in a couple ways that are really going to skew it. **[1:28:15] Councilmember Dan Wolter (Remote):** I just had an EDC meeting get canceled last month, so I don't have an update there either. We're meeting tomorrow. **[1:28:25] Mayor Luke Hellier:** Regional Council of Mayors last month, we talked a lot about the census and how we are not growing as a state. There's some alarm from the people who pay attention to that on a daily basis. Interesting conversation. Any other updates? **[1:28:54] City Administrator Justin Miller:** Real quick, a couple items that were going to be on this agenda: we were going to be discussing a proposal from the county taking over absentee voting operations. That got pulled last minute and still needs some work, so that'll be a discussion coming later. And then we're going to bring another discussion about the use of the ALC. We are probably going to go into a closed session after your meeting on the 5th to talk about the real estate acquisition on that. The Finance Director posting did close a week ago. We are in the process of offering 10 candidates a chance to do a semi-final interview—that'll be a video interview. We’ll bring that down to a smaller number. Personnel Committee agreed they would sit in on those interviews. We'll have a staff panel as well as external members to give an outside perspective. **[1:30:27] Mayor Luke Hellier:** Wow. That's a lot! All right, I will then take a motion to adjourn. **[1:30:33] Councilmember Joshua Lee:** Motion. **[1:30:34] Councilmember John Bermel:** Second. **[1:30:35] Mayor Luke Hellier:** All those in favor? Thank you, everybody.