[00:00] **Mayor Myron Bailey:** All right, good morning. I am calling this special meeting to order for August 30th, 2024. Can the clerk please do the roll? [00:42] **Tammy Anderson (City Clerk):** Councilmember Clausen? [00:44] **Councilmember David Clausen:** [Inaudible/Present] [00:45] **Tammy Anderson (City Clerk):** Councilmember Olsen? [00:46] **Councilmember Justin Olsen:** Here. [00:47] **Tammy Anderson (City Clerk):** Councilmember Thiede? [00:48] **Councilmember Dave Thiede:** Here. [00:49] **Tammy Anderson (City Clerk):** Councilmember Garza? [00:50] **Councilmember Monique Garza:** Here. [00:51] **Tammy Anderson (City Clerk):** Mayor Bailey? [00:52] **Mayor Myron Bailey:** Here. Obviously, as this council is aware, we had a significant storm last evening that went through our community. And so, the first thing on our agenda is going to be declaring a state of emergency. Do you want us to do that first, and then you want to go to communication, or— [01:14] **Jennifer Levitt (City Administrator):** Mayor, we will provide you the update, and then after our presentation, you can pass the declaration. [01:19] **Mayor Myron Bailey:** All right. So at this point, our staff will give us an update. And I do know our County Commissioner, Carla Bingham, is here, and she also was going to update us from the county support of the cleanup in our community. So I'll turn it over, I guess, to our City Administrator, Jennifer Levitt. [01:29] **Jennifer Levitt (City Administrator):** Well, Mayor, members of the Council, last night you were notified that a storm had hit the city of Cottage Grove at approximately 5:15 p.m. At that time, initial reports had indicated that we had wind speeds over 45 miles an hour, and we had over two and a half to three inches of rain. I will let you know that the National Weather Service is still evaluating and assessing damage, and so we don't have all of the reports as to the significant events that did hit our community. But between the high winds, the rain, and hail, we did sustain significant damage. As a result of that, our resources were exhausted. And as you know, when our resources are exhausted, that means we have to declare a state of emergency to receive support from Washington County, the State, and the Federal government. And so at this time, we will provide you a situational update where we're at in those efforts and our partners that have brought us to this point. But do know that our resources last evening were exhausted, and we're anticipating that to carry forward into our cleanup efforts. So with that, I will turn it over to Captain Petersen to provide you that overview of last evening and our situational update. [02:23] **Brad Petersen (Acting Director of Public Safety):** Morning, honorable Mayor, Councilmembers, and staff. So as you know, it's been a long and stressful evening for residents and our team here, City staff. We had the severe thunderstorm roll through town at about 5:30 last evening causing severe damage. We know that it's been a stressful event, a stressful night for the public, but gratefully and thankfully, we can say that there were no injuries and none of our critical infrastructure was damaged. So that is some good news that I can report. Our Public Safety team and Public Works crews have been working diligently through the night in addition to the rest of our City staff to make sure that our services have been restored to the city, and cleanup measures are continuing. Here are some of the details that I can provide for you. At 5:30, the storm hit, causing localized flooding, down trees, down power lines, power outages, and other Public Works concerns. Several roads were blocked. There was a lot of wind damage to public and private properties, with most of the damage being centralized in the Grove Side and Thompson Grove neighborhoods. Our Public Safety team jumped into action and began assessing the damage and assisting our community members. We responded to 78 911 calls for service, including 29 calls for down live power lines and small fires. We quickly activated our Emergency Operation Center, which came online at about 6:40 last evening, and our Emergency Operation Center logged about 165 Public Safety and Public Works incidents. As our crews began to triage those incidents and mitigate the hazards and restore services, we recognized that those impacted neighborhoods were experiencing very dangerous conditions. So our Public Safety team cordoned off those neighborhoods just to make sure that the public wasn't endangered. So from about 6:30 until about 11:00 last night, those neighborhoods were closed to public access so that we could remove the down trees, mitigate the live down power lines, mitigate the flooding, etc. By 11:00 last night, both of those neighborhoods were opened up. I'll give you kind of a rundown on some of the damage as we know it at this moment. We had about 132 reports of down trees or broken trees. Many of those were blocking roadways or on power lines. At this moment, all the roadways have been opened and all of the power lines—excuse me, the trees that were on power lines—have been mediated at this point. There were about a dozen homes that we know of at this point that were damaged by falling trees and branches. There were many homes that lost power, and at this moment, there's still about 4,000 homes without power. Numerous other Public Works concerns: damaged streetlights, displaced manhole covers, etc. All the flooding seemed to resolve itself for the most part as time passed, so we don't have any flooding concerns at this moment. Like I said, by 11:00 last night, the roadways were opened, critical services were restored, and we felt like it was a good time to close the EOC and send staff home for the evening, knowing that today would be a long day of cleanup. I just wanted to thank City staff and our mutual partners for the long work that they put in last night. Of note, I want to thank the Washington County Sheriff's Office and their Emergency Management, Woodbury Police Department, fire departments from St. Paul Park, Newport, Woodbury, and Lake Elmo. And I also want to thank Public Works crews from Washington County for their assistance. We would have been here all night and probably still would be working to mitigate some of the damage that I've briefed to you. So I'm going to turn it over to Director Burfeind to give you an update on the ongoing cleanup crews, and then I'll stand by for your questions. Thank you. [04:47] **Ryan Burfeind (Public Works Director):** Thanks, Brad. Good morning, Mayor and Council. So on the screen here, we have our Emergency Management tracking app that we use to report and track all the situations that we have, and as we go through the cleanup process, it's a sufficient way for us to do that. So you can see on here, mostly trees, right? With the 132 trees that Brad had mentioned. And these are really trees blocking a road in some manner—private tree, boulevard tree, whatever it may be. Also the flooding and the down power lines. Yesterday evening, we had a full call-out of our whole department with Parks as well. All staff, non-union staff, and our JTS staff were in helping to deal with the issues last night. That went really well. Our main focus last night was just making roads passable. So you really saw us cutting trees off and pushing them off to the side; that was our main goal is to get that done. As Brad mentioned, you know, we opened neighborhoods around 11:00 and our crews were here till about midnight last night wrapping up, and they were back in before 7:00 a.m. this morning and we are hard at it again. We also have four additional Washington County crews this morning, so a huge thank you to them. With the equipment that they have and the dump trucks, that's going to be a huge time saver today to get our efforts done. Today we're really focusing on cleaning up those roadway corridors. All the stuff that we just pushed off to the side last night, we want to make all the roads safe and passable. As we go into the weekend, we'll also be clearing off driveways where we have a lot of boulevard trees that were blocking driveways last night that we could not get to. So that's our main focus today. You can kind of see the two areas on here that have the most reports of damage; we're starting in those and then we'll be working our way out to the remainder of the city. Kind of the north part of town, the east part of town wasn't hit so bad, but there's periodic reports of damage, so you'll probably see us there later in the day as we can get to those areas and get them cleared. In terms of what we're doing with the trees, you know, we are hauling everything down to the Rumpel's compost site. We have an area of City-owned land that we've opened up and kind of created a pad to dump everything. We've talked some about private debris, so we are going to be doing curbside pickup of private tree debris that residents can place at their curb line through October 1st. You don't need to schedule anything with Public Works; we're just going to be making periodic work throughout the town to get after that. So if you see it sitting for a day or two, it is an effort for us to go around. There's no need to call it in and report that; we will continue to go through the city through October 1st and pick up that debris. But we do need it moved out to the front; we won't be doing any work on private property at all. If you do have a situation where there's a City-owned boulevard tree that's fallen on your house, on your shed, on your car, in that situation they do have to work with their insurance. It's important that they do that for their own liability reasons to get that cleared off. If they do have a contractor do that, that contractor doesn't have to haul it away; they can stack it by the curb and we will then haul that away as we would all the other tree debris. The compost site—if this works—is kind of right down here off of 95th Street and Jamaica Avenue. If residents do want to bring it there themselves just to get it done and get it off their property, they can do so and there will be no charge. They just need to indicate that it is from storm damage cleanup and they'll be directed to where they can drop it, and there'll be no charge to them for that debris to be picked up. I think that's where we're sitting today. Our goal is really to get all this done today if we can from a road standpoint, and then kind of move into the weekend. If folks are seeing a couple things that we weren't able to catch last night—leaning trees—there's a lot of leaning trees out there that are going to have to be evaluated on the risk, and they will all be coming down. And then hangers too; if you're seeing like a branch that looks like a real problem, make sure to call those into Public Works at 651-458-2808. We can make that evaluation then on the need—does it come down today or can it wait till a later day? Okay. All right, awesome. With that, I think I'll turn it over to Commissioner Bingham. [08:01] **Carla Bingham (Washington County Commissioner):** Good morning, Mayor and Council. County Commissioner Carla Bingham. I just wanted to—well, thank you for the opportunity to be here today. I wanted to let you know that the county is providing a lot of staff, but also three skid loaders, a front-end loader, and about eight to nine tandem trucks to help. And you know, I just really appreciate the partnership and collaboration that we have with Cottage Grove. During these times, this is just really important to be able to do this with the community and the strength that we have together. I just really want to appreciate your Public Works staff, our Public Works staff, our Emergency Services staff, dispatch in and throughout the county. Cottage Grove wasn't the only community hit; it was hit very, very hard. I know our staff at the county level is evaluating the level of damage throughout the county to see about an emergency declaration ourselves. But I just wanted to come and say that we're here to help and be a partner. I can answer any questions, but just really wanted to thank your staff and obviously our county staff too for the extra work that they have to go through. But you know, our communities are resilient and this is what we train for, right? And this is what we do, and we come together during these times and we'll get through this. [09:36] **Mayor Myron Bailey:** Absolutely. First of all, thank you, Commissioner. I know I was chatting with you last evening too. And being at the Emergency Operation Center, the Emergency Management person from Washington County was there coordinating with your county officials, so I wanted to say thank you for that. From a council standpoint, does the council have any questions for staff at this point or the County Commissioner? Councilmember Olsen. [10:04] **Councilmember Justin Olsen:** Thank you. First of all, thanks everybody for all of the hard work and effort last night. Our County Commissioner knows that we have a former County Commissioner who used to describe South Washington County as the heart of the county, and I think that proved to be true last night. It certainly proved to be true in the past when we face situations like this. I want to give great thanks to City staff. I know that we had Public Works, Public Safety, we had building officials—I see our inspector Andy McLain is here this morning. They were out checking to make sure that buildings were safe and everybody really came together and held hands, including the county, to make sure that our residents were being well taken care of and that we could create a safe environment for people to move around town after such a devastating storm. So we're very grateful for all of the help and support. My question is this: Last night we had a direction that we put out for the public about if they had issues to dial 911 so that those could all be logged. I saw when Captain Petersen was presenting that we had over a hundred different items listed that came in through dispatch. I'm just wondering, are we still asking residents to do that this morning? And the reason I ask is I personally have had several text messages, phone calls, etc.—as I'm sure the rest of the council has as well—from people that we know in the community who are waking up in sunlight and seeing things that they didn't see last night, including trees down on people's homes and garages. So how would you like that best communicated? [11:27] **Brad Petersen (Acting Director of Public Safety):** Speak to that—so at this point, operations have returned to normal across the county. So I'm not concerned that 911 operations are going to be overtaxed. So they can call 911 as they normally would. But if they don't want to call 911, they can feel free to call our front office and those calls get directed to us. Really, any way they get a hold of us, whether it's 911, our non-emergency number at the front office, social media—call the cop, you know—we'll take care of it. [11:51] **Councilmember Justin Olsen:** Okay, great. And I know, Ryan, you mentioned you wanted calls to Public Works to go through the Public Works switchboard. Is that true throughout the weekend, or how do you want that to proceed? [12:03] **Ryan Burfeind (Public Works Director):** Yep, that's a good question. So I think if it's a non-emergency situation—if it's like a tree down, reporting that type of issue—definitely call Public Works at 651-458-2808. We have extra staff on the phones today and we do have the ability to have them answered throughout the weekend. So they can call that and then it evaluates if it's something that's an emergency or not. And we have staff on call throughout the entire weekend who can address that. So that's definitely a number they can call 24/7 throughout the weekend. [12:28] **Councilmember Justin Olsen:** Okay, perfect. Great, thank you very much. Because I'm sure there will be people who maybe have been on vacation who come home to discover something and it'll be Saturday or Sunday afternoon and they're not going to be quite sure what to do. So maybe we need to put that out via social media as well, just to give people that little bit of extra reassurance that we'll be there for them all weekend long. Thank you. And then Mayor, I just wanted to end with comments of saying thank you to the residents for their patience. During times like this, this is when neighbors shine, and just really appreciate their patience during these times too. So thank you. [12:52] **Mayor Myron Bailey:** County Commissioner Bingham. Monique Garza, City Councilmember, I think had a question. [12:58] **Councilmember Monique Garza:** I just had a quick question. If there are residents in our community that would like to volunteer and help clean up anything, are you guys looking for any of that, or do you want people just to stay away so that you can get it cleaned up? Because I'm sure there's a lot of people that want to help. [13:16] **Ryan Burfeind (Public Works Director):** That's a good question, Councilmember Garza. I think in terms of all the work that we are doing, with our staff and all the county staff, I think we have a good handle on that. I haven't heard of any other kind of private groups, you know, starting up for volunteers—that's more of a grassroots kind of effort. But in terms of all of our work, I think we're staffed appropriately where we wouldn't need volunteers. Thank you. [13:41] **Mayor Myron Bailey:** Yeah, and I would just share—especially last evening when the roads were all blocked—having people going through and checking things out wasn't the best of things to do because there was significant road blockage over there. But I mean, now that the roads are all open, if you know of people that live in Cottage Grove... I did see social media can be good and bad, but the good side—you know, people are checking on other people that live in other parts of our community. So in those kind of situations, I think it would be good to check on your friends and family maybe in other parts of the community to make sure that they're okay and if they need any help with cleanup or tree removal or whatever, that there's an option and ability there. With that being said, I just—and it's been said already—but I want to just reiterate it: Very, very proud of our Public Safety team, Public Works, and City staff. When I showed up last evening after going and looking at some of the damage, they were hard at it here in City Hall. They worked late last night, back in here again this morning. But at the same time, I also want to thank the citizens. When I was out looking at the damage, the number of people that were checking on their family members or neighbors... I did an interview just a little bit ago with Channel 5 and one of the things I thought was interesting is that we had one home that's been condemned, and I happened to drive by that shortly after the storm. Thank goodness they were not home, because the tree was so significant that went through the house. I'm sure if they would have been in their kitchen or their living room, they probably would have died. But there were neighbors immediately going over to that home, and myself getting out of the car ready to call for help from Cottage Grove if they were in there, to find out that they weren't and they had just left—they were just not in the home. And that's amazing. I saw that time and time again where there was people walking the neighborhoods, not to gawp, but to check to make sure everybody was okay and if anybody needed help. The chainsaws were already out. I even saw—and I know Public Works was out clearing the streets—but I literally saw citizens with their chainsaws clearing the streets. They were trying to get some of the trees and branches off the street knowing that our safety teams would need to get through in the event that something were to happen. So I just wanted to again reiterate what's being said up here and by the rest of the community: Thank you to our staff, thank you to the citizens. It makes me proud, and I'm sure I can say that for our Council up here—proud of our staff, but also proud of our community coming together when something like this happens. So with that, any other questions for staff at this point? All right. So what I'm looking for at this point is just for a motion and a second to officially declare a state of emergency in the city of Cottage Grove. [16:11] **Councilmember David Clausen:** I would move to declare a state of emergency in Cottage Grove. [16:14] **Councilmember Dave Thiede:** Second. [16:15] **Mayor Myron Bailey:** Okay, so I have a motion by Councilmember Clausen, second by Councilmember Thiede. Any discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor signify by saying aye. [16:25] **Councilmembers:** Aye. [16:26] **Mayor Myron Bailey:** Opposed? Motion carries. So that is it for our business this morning. Boy, I'm doing it too now—these poor guys. Do we have a motion to adjourn? [16:32] **Councilmember Justin Olsen:** Motion to adjourn. [16:34] **Councilmember Monique Garza:** Second. [16:35] **Mayor Myron Bailey:** Motion to adjourn by Councilmember Olsen and Councilmember Garza. All those in favor signify by saying aye. [16:39] **Councilmembers:** Aye. [16:40] **Mayor Myron Bailey:** Opposed? We're adjourned. Thank you, everyone.