This transcript has been formatted with speaker names and estimated timestamps based on the context of the meeting and the provided list of officials. **[00:00:00] Mayor John Monge:** Thank you very much. We're going to start the January 21st Workshop. A roll call, please. **[00:00:05] Brian Frandle (City Manager):** Council Member McKenzie? **[00:00:07] Council Member Dave McKenzie:** Here. **[00:00:08] Brian Frandle:** Council Member Schweer? **[00:00:09] Brian Frandle:** Council Member Schweer is absent. Council Member Woods? **[00:00:11] Council Member Troy Woods:** Here. **[00:00:12] Brian Frandle:** Council Member Nordby? **[00:00:13] Council Member Jason Nordby:** Here. **[00:00:14] Brian Frandle:** And Mayor Monge? **[00:00:15] Mayor John Monge:** Here. Thank you. I please get a motion to adopt the agenda. **[00:00:18] Council Member Dave McKenzie:** I'll make the move. **[00:00:20] Council Member Troy Woods:** Second. **[00:00:22] Mayor John Monge:** All those in favor say aye. **[00:00:24] Group:** Aye. **[00:00:25] Brian Frandle:** Thank you, Mayor. There's one topic on the agenda tonight. I invited City Engineer Morgan Dawley to discuss this year's Street Utility Improvement Project. I think it'd be good to kind of go in more detail than we probably do, but it'd be good for the newer members to see how the process goes through and how we address things as we go along in the middle of the project. So, I will turn that over to Morgan. **[00:00:45] Morgan Dawley (City Engineer):** All right, thank you Brian. Mr. Mayor, members of the Council, thank you for the opportunity to present some information on this year's reconstruction project. Generally, we've been just naming these projects by the year of construction, and then "Street and Utility" is just a reference in terms of what is actually being improved. I'll provide more detail on that as we go through the slides. Hopefully, you will be able to see them on the front screen there in a little bit more detail. There are some graphics in the packet, but I do have a presentation slide deck here to run through. The slides that I've prepared for the overview here are a combination of a presentation that I gave to City Council in September, which was at the conclusion of our kind of preliminary engineering or feasibility study phase, and then also folding in some information that we shared with the public at our public informational meeting. So it's kind of non-technical in the sense that I wanted some of the newer council members and the Council to be reminded of some of the things—general things that we're telling residents and communicating with them so they can be prepared for construction. Even though that's not a technical portion of the project, it is very, very important: communicating with folks that actually are living out there every day through an entire summer of construction. We take that really seriously. I'm going to be... there might be too much information for those of you that have maybe lived through a project, but I'll just kind of run through it. If you think it's... you can tell me to hurry along, but also Brian told me to fill up the whole Workshop, so we'll see how I do on timing. But I should also back up just to let you guys know, for those that are maybe newer on the Council, that picking a project or picking the project area is certainly not random. It's something that is several years in the making. Especially for this project, it goes back to something that, you know, from an engineering perspective and then working hand-in-hand with Public Works and City Administration and Finance, is part of something that happens on an annual basis in the budgeting process—looking at the Capital Improvement Plan (CIP). We're looking at the quantitative data in terms of the quality of our roads, the quality of our utilities, how many water breaks we may be getting in specific areas of the city versus other areas of the city, places where Public Works know are becoming more expensive or more problematic from a maintenance standpoint to be able to take care of, like underground pipes or whatever, and trying to fold that into something that is giving the city and the public a generalized roadmap for the next 5 to 10 years in terms of where might the project be. Those Capital Improvement Plans or our pavement management plans where we identify neighborhoods or areas—they're not written in stone. They're subject to change. Sometimes the Council has some thoughts about changing them or changing the order; sometimes staff wants to reorganize things for priority reasons. For example, if we've got a water main break "hot spot," we might want to bump that up or fold that into a project. But it is a very involved, ongoing process that staff takes very seriously. Also, it is intended to fold into other Capital Improvement Plans by other agencies, such as Ramsey County, or maybe the Watershed District has some projects that they might be doing when we can. MNDOT would be another one. So where we can try to dovetail our efforts—or sometimes it's important that we come in and do our work before Ramsey County does an overlay project, for example—we try to do that and try to fold that into kind of that 5 to 10-year Capital Improvement Plan as well. It started back in 2012, I think, which was kind of the first part of the modern era of North St. Paul Capital Improvement planning. And this project that we're going to talk about here tonight was the last project on that list, and it even got broken into two projects over time. As we move on into the future, I think what you will see and what you'll be considering as the decision-makers for the city is a bit of a shift in kind of focus, right? Initially, this first 10 years or so of projects, a lot of them were underground utility full reconstructs—very invasive, time-intensive, takes the whole summer to do. What we're trying to do is get through the last of those projects and trend in a direction that is more focused, because we have addressed a lot of the worst underground utility areas, and focus more on pavement preservation and/or pavement replacement. You'll hear about overlays; you'll hear about maintenance overlays—things that Public Works does that doesn't really need an engineer, that they're able to do on an ongoing basis. I think that maybe if you followed along with the budget discussions last year and probably will get into it again this year too, Dan [the former] Finance Director has probably mentioned... well, not a pivot, but more focus on overlay or pavements as opposed to the underground utilities, which will make the projects a little bit smaller in financial size and more economically feasible. Potentially, some of those projects will not need to be bonded for; maybe they can be paid for from a cash standpoint. All that's kind of TBD as you move into the future. But I just want to point out that we are at a little bit of an inflection point in terms of what the last 10 years have been like and the focus for the last 10 years, and then maybe what the next 10 years might be like, right? And our hope is to, as we reallocate those dollars towards pavements, be able to cover more real estate and have a greater perceived impact, hopefully, with respect to the overall quality of North St. Paul's roads. That's kind of what we're trending towards or hopefully trying to trend towards. So back to this project... with this slide... **[00:06:40] Brian Frandle:** Morgan, can I ask one favor? Because I know I was confused the first time I met you. Can you introduce yourself and explain your relationship to the city? **[00:06:50] Morgan Dawley:** Ah shoot, yes absolutely! I apologize. My name is Morgan Dawley. I am the City Engineer of record for North St. Paul. I'm a consultant, so I'm a by-contract City Engineer. I've been working with the city of North St. Paul since 2009 and the Engineer of Record since about 2010 or so. The first full recon project that I was involved in as a part of this modern Capital Improvement Plan was 2014. There's been about half a dozen or so projects since then—more if you include overlays—and I've been working with several different city managers and several different Public Works directors. But yeah, it's been a great experience working with the city of North St. Paul since that time. Was that enough kind of background? **[00:07:45] Brian Frandle:** Yeah, thank you. That was a good reminder. Thank you. **[00:07:47] Morgan Dawley:** Okay, so into this slide. This slide shows project locations. I thought you may recall that I mentioned previously before that this project was split into two, and so we're showing two different colors here. Green is what is anticipated to happen in 2027 according to the Capital Improvement Plan, so that's on the bottom there—that's Chisholm and Mesabi. And then what's happening this year is in the red—that's Buell and Gerald and Shawnee. I'll show a little bit more detail in some future slides. One question that we get asked a lot is why did you kind of pick to break it into two like this? Because it looks like really there's not that many streets involved here in 2025. That's true, but we do have some work within the park for stormwater quality. So we have some ponding that's going to go on in there. We have a water main loop that I'll show later that goes through the park. We're going to be replacing part of the trail there because we need the trail for construction access at the bottom of the hill. And really, that breakpoint at Gerald and then taking care of the loop on Buell—if we do that in 2025, those are streets that will not need to be driven on by heavy construction traffic in 2027. The contractor in '27 will be able to get in and out of that green area off of Radatz without needing to drive on any of our new roads, which are in the red, which will protect that investment and lengthen the lifespan of those roads. And so that was intentional to break it as we have it here. We think that again in 2027, we can write those project specifications such that it prohibits the contractor from getting on those brand-new roads. So that's the break. There's also a significant amount of storm sewer infrastructure on Shawnee Drive—big pipe, very large pipe, that's very expensive. And so that has been driving kind of the offset of cost between the two projects. That's why it was split into two: because it was getting to be too much to construct in one construction season and too much from an economic feasibility standpoint to do in one year. So, back in 2020, I believe the decision was made to break it into two on the Capital Improvement Plan. This next slide again just shows a little bit more about some of the areas within the park that are going to be worked on. The northern portion of the park, areas that drain towards that water treatment pond—if you want to call it a pond—at the head of the creek there. We're also going to do some work in the parking lot for the park, so there'll be some improvements there which I'll show in a little bit more detail. Focusing in on the surface improvements and underground utilities on Gerald—a lot of these are the same, I won't go through every single bullet—but we're looking at full street reconstruction, brand new curb and gutter. We do have very poor soils throughout North St. Paul, so our experience has been on some of these roads that they were originally built, you know, asphalt just kind of over a very thin layer of gravel. Sometimes not much granular underneath that; sometimes we're seeing pavements that have been laid on top of black dirt, which is definitely not good, and is one of the reasons why some of our streets are just not in great condition. When we fully reconstruct the road, we're actually coring out all of that bad soil and replacing it with good granular material that's free-draining, that is well-compacted, and will hopefully be pushing us onto a road towards our streets lasting with good maintenance, with regular maintenance, 50, 60, 70 years and not being prone to a lot of potholes or other major distresses opening up in the pavement other than some normal cracking. Cracking is normal no matter what, but staying on top of that, sealing the cracks—that's generally kind of our approach from a maintenance standpoint to protect and lengthen the life of the new pavements that have been put in and the investment that the city has made in those roadways. **[00:11:45] Council Member Dave McKenzie:** When you're talking about the current state of the existing roads, I mean, how old are the roads that we're talking about? **[00:11:53] Morgan Dawley:** These are actually newer than you would think. So this is early '70s, late '60s, depending on what part of the neighborhood went in. The northern part of town—this is just anecdotally from my experience working on these different projects—soils tend to be very poor compared to the southern part of town or the older part of town. Some of the roads, even though they're not in great shape either, but in either north of 36 or south of 36... those could have been '50s, '60s vintage, and some of them are better, some of them are not as good. Certainly, some of the utilities that we're seeing in the northern part are not great. In fact, the sanitary sewer on Gerald Avenue, we actually had to advance some sewer lining to 2022. It was just getting so bad we were having some sewer backups along that road. It was intended to do that sewer lining with this project, but we couldn't wait, right? So some of it has been driven by utilities, not streets. But yeah, early '70s is kind of the short answer to your question there. **[00:13:00] Council Member Dave McKenzie:** Thank you. **[00:13:01] Morgan Dawley:** Okay. And then for underground: full replacement of the water main and water services. The sanitary sewer, as I mentioned, the main line is already lined, but we're going to be lining the services to the home—not all the way to the home, but just to the property line. That is something that we've been doing on all of our reconstruct projects to protect, again, the investment in the roads. We don't want to leave like an old clay tile service, for example, under a road that could be subject to breaking and then caving in, and then we've got to have a contractor dig the road even though the services are private responsibility. We think that that's a good investment. You know, if we're going to put millions of dollars into a road, some level of money into those older services seems to make sense. And they've performed fairly well; we've had very little problems with those on the past projects where we've utilized that. So that's a part of the strategy there. On Shawnee specifically, I mentioned a significant amount of storm sewer pipe. We're proposing a new—I'll show an additional slide on this—but some new sidewalk on the north side to connect some existing sidewalk to McKnight and also to connect the McKnight sidewalk to the park and the park trails itself. Similar roadway reconstruction and, where there are water and sewer services, same replacement as well. Buell again, that's kind of that isolated loop that we're trying to get in and get out to protect that from any impact with the future project in 2027. Same thing: full roadway reconstruction. There is sidewalk on both sides. Usually, on these projects where we've got existing sidewalk, we reconstruct the sidewalk at the same time to reset everything on the same infrastructure life cycle clock. Upgrade all of the pedestrian ramps to current ADA requirements; that's something that doesn't exist right now. So whenever we're touching a sidewalk, we've got to bring that up to ADA compliance. And again, same thing: sewer services lining. There is some sewer reconstruction there, main line reconstruction in this area specifically, because we do have some sanitary sewer force main that needs to be reconstructed. And so we kind of have to do everything all at the same time. So that's one area where we're not just lining the main line, but we're reconstructing it. Within the park itself, as I mentioned, there's a 2-inch overlay of the parking lot which will extend the life of that parking lot. It'll look like a brand new surface on the top; we'll re-stripe it. So it will look like a brand new lot, but we're not replacing any of the... well, there might be some spot replacement of the curb, but it's going to be as needed. Mostly just attending to the asphalt pavement in the parking lot. Again, there's a 6-foot sidewalk north of the parking lot from the bituminous trail—the asphalt trail that's in the park—as I mentioned, up Shawnee to connect to McKnight. We have some stormwater basin expansion going on in the park, and that is all driven by Ramsey-Washington Metro Watershed District rules. Every time that we disturb the subgrade for a roadway project, we are triggering Watershed rules that require us to build into the project some stormwater runoff treatment to improve the water quality of the water leaving the impervious surfaces that we are reconstructing. And so that basin was put in in 2014 for a project that was further to the east, and so the most economical approach here is just to provide some expansion around the outside. We do have a little bit of maintenance and some erosion on some of the slopes on the sides of that basin as it sits now. So it's a kind of a nice combination of being able to address that issue and provide that water quality treatment component that's required by the Watershed District all in one fell swoop. We'll take care of that all at the same time. Significantly, there is a new water main loop that does not currently exist. I don't know if you can see my pointer... here we go. This right here is going to be... it's kind of illustrating, it's not exact, but there's a gap and an easement between the homes there. So we're going to directionally drill a water main without open cut, hopefully trying to preserve some of that side-yard aesthetic for the people that live there on either side. And there's no need to drill any services or anything; this is simply a connection or a loop. Because we have water quality—drinking water—complaints and issues at the end of the current dead-end line which is at Wellhouse number four, which is basically right at the entrance to the park. You can't really see it very well, but this is Wellhouse 4 right here, and the water main pretty much just ends right there. But we also have homes that feed off of that, and because it's a dead-end line, there's not a lot of water circulation. They might have, I don't know, brown water or they can smell it... basically taste and odor complaints. Jason knows all about that. That's right—on cul-de-sacs or dead-end lines, it's something that we have to address. So if we do have an opportunity to take care of that by providing a loop, this is an opportunity to do that. So we've built that into the project and hopefully help the drinking water quality for those folks that are connected off that line right now. And then there's also a lift station, which is also hard to see, but that's kind of down in this area. And so that lift station was rehabilitated in 2016-ish or '17. So the station—the pump station, the lift station itself—is not really included in this project, but the force main—that's the pipe that the pump station pumps into—that is going to be rehabilitated and replaced where necessary so that, again, that doesn't need to be attended to at some point in the future. So, just taking care of that all at the same time. This next slide is another graphic that basically shows a little bit more exact detail for the water main. Where's my pointer here? Yeah, so the teal here—this is all new water main. **[00:19:15] Council Member Dave McKenzie:** Now, will you have to go into McKnight Road at all when you do the replacement under piping underneath there? Or is it on just...? **[00:19:23] Morgan Dawley:** That's a good... yeah, we're at this point trying to operate without needing to go into their right-of-way even, right? And we don't have any plans to... you know, they just overlaid that, so we don't have any plans to go into the road. If we do need a permit, it'll just be for that kind of the very entrance there just to do some work, which will all be resurfaced anyways. Now, we have in 2014 or 2016, we did improve the pipes on the other side of McKnight. I think that replacing the pipes under McKnight is more of a project for when Ramsey County decides to reconstruct McKnight Road, which probably won't be for some time. We could have done it at this time, but it didn't seem like it was the right time, I guess, knowing that we've got everything on either side all teed up for when Ramsey County does reconstruct. So we're hopeful to minimize impact to travelers and traffic. **[00:20:15] Council Member Dave McKenzie:** But if they have an issue at the intersection, then it will have to be done at that point if there is some sort of unforeseen issue? **[00:20:21] Morgan Dawley:** Yeah, but we've designed it so that we're actually building a manhole at the tie-in point, so that should be a good place to transition without any sort of major issue with a construction joint outside of a manhole, I guess. And that pertains to not just water main, but that's a good question in terms of how that's going to work with the county. Fortunately, we do have multiple ways into this neighborhood. So if we are working right there off of Shawnee, we would want to make sure that hopefully access to the park parking lot and access to the other neighborhood areas are maintained by way of Radatz or some of the other streets. And we'll probably... I have a slide on phasing, but that's something that we do try to focus on: to have the contractor move from area to area to area as opposed to working on everything at the same time to hopefully maintain access. **[00:21:15] Council Member Dave McKenzie:** Well, that would make sense. You move your equipment once if you have to, right? **[00:21:18] Morgan Dawley:** Right. Now, I will mention... when you say "move it once," one question that we get from residents who live on these projects a lot is: "Why do they keep digging in the same place over and over and over again?" And that's because in these urban reconstruct projects, it's because of maintaining access. At the end of every day, the contractor's got to... mostly, not in every single situation on every day, but mostly the expectation is that they're going to get that road back to a temporary kind of gravel surface that people can drive through. And so, if it were in the middle of a farm field and nobody was living around, yes, they would probably dig one hole and they'd lay the water main and the sanitary sewer and storm sewer and everything in the same trench and then put it all back together. But because they have to kind of work in bits and pieces, people do see the contractor digging in the same area more than once. But that's because they have one crew put in the water main, and then they'll come with the sanitary sewer or whatever, right? So it does look inefficient, and then they have to build the road, and that's usually the last step. It would look more efficient if, again, if it wasn't fully built up with a lot of homes, but that's why it appears that way—to make sure that people can get in and out as good as possible. This next slide here is showing sanitary sewer and that force main, I guess, as well, off of Buell. And that orange section there, that's the area that's already been lined for sanitary sewer. I should explain lining of sanitary sewer: that's something that we've done very successfully in North St. Paul where it's CIPP lining—that's "Cured-In-Place Pipe" lining. Basically, what it is is they have a felt sock, if you will, that is sized exactly to the size of the pipe that they're going to line. That pipe might be cast iron; it could be a clay pipe. Usually, for sanitary sewer in North St. Paul, it's a clay pipe. Clay is great, lasts forever, but it's very prone to cracking. It's very brittle; it's prone to tree root intrusion. So what this CIPP lining does—it basically gives you, when you're all done, a new plastic pipe inside the original clay pipe. I've been told by some manufacturers it lasts for a hundred years. With the extra advantage: you don't have to dig a big trench to get to it. They do it all while the pipe is underground and they access it through existing manholes. So they don't have to do a lot of digging; it's kind of nice. There's a lot of robotic camera work and inspection by, you know, the little remote control vehicles that have cameras that you can kind of pan and tilt and look at things and plan out. Sometimes add adhesive or cut things off to make the pipes more amenable to the lining process. But the felt sock is measured perfectly, they pull it into the pipe, they inflate it with hot air, and that felt material is also soaked in like kind of an epoxy-like, heat-cured material. When the steam or hot air goes into the pipe liner and inflates it, it sticks against the inside of the existing clay pipe. The heat cures it, and it turns to like a rock-hard plastic kind of material, and it's very durable and very smooth on the inside. So the pipe does get a little tiny bit smaller, but not enough to really impact the capacity of these pipes in a residential neighborhood. It's good for saving trees, saving on excavation, saving to get in and out of here without people seeing one more hole dug in front of their house. Anyway, so, and actually recent costs have been tracking about the same as open-cut excavation. Open cut may be a little bit less expensive, but it seems to be good bang for the buck in terms of what we're trying to do and take care of the residents and be respectful for access. That's with the robotic camera, so they can actually kind of look at... when they line the main line, they can actually see the little dimples or divots where the service lines are, and then they have a little robot thing that opens up a little hole for each single one. They catalog that all beforehand, so they've got a plan going into it. They know exactly how many feet from manhole A to the house on the left, and so they're doing all of that on the fly as they're preparing it for service. As they open that up, that's all actually done segment by segment. People really only see a minor interruption of their sewer service. It could be as little as one hour or a couple of hours. Usually, the contractor is out there knocking on doors asking them, "Hey, we're about to line through here, can you just not do a load of laundry or don't run your dishwasher for a couple of hours?" Normal kind of flush a toilet here or there—that's usually fine. And then when they're done, then everything's back open, then they're back online. I should mention also, when we're replacing water main, we do put in temporary above-ground water pipes. Can't do that in the winter when it's 20 below zero, but when the temperatures are normal, that is kind of the normal way to keep people on their water while we're replacing the pipes underground. So it's connected through hydrants; it's the exact same water, it's just running through different above-ground pipes. And usually connected house-by-house to either an outside hose spigot, or sometimes we have to dig down to their service and connect that way if they don't have a hose spigot. But generally, the interruption for water service on those folks is: you switch from regular water to temporary water, and then when we're all done putting the new pipe in the ground, switching from temporary back to the new pipe—usually just an hour or two. I mean, pretty minor. **[00:26:50] Council Member Dave McKenzie:** When you guys tear apart... when you're down in the ground and you're going up against the sewer that goes in and out of the home, do you inspect it at the resident side to make sure there's nothing jammed up in there or anything? Or is that a main drain service that has to be done from the inside out? **[00:27:08] Morgan Dawley:** Yeah, so our contractors typically will... sometimes they do depending on what they see from the street side. They start with the inspections from the street side with the televising of the main line and then also what's called a "lateral launch" camera of the sewer service, which might go from the main line up to the house. And because they're only lining to the property line, that's really primarily what they're focused on. So we are not hiring them to verify every linear foot... **[00:27:35] Council Member Dave McKenzie:** The resident has to understand it's his property, right? And his duty to do a main flush from his drain all the way out to the street to clean it all out? **[00:27:45] Morgan Dawley:** Right, yes. And I think that we... if we haven't... it's very... well, I know we have on some projects. As part of our kind of pre-construction communication, like a letter that would be sent out, we might encourage that or provide them like an address of a contractor that might do that for them if they haven't already. So that's something that I think I'd like to see us do. **[00:28:05] Ron Ritchie (Director of Public Works):** Yeah, and like Morgan said, when the connection to our main for the customer service... that's normally like when we're out camera-ing sewers, that's normally where we see the root walls or the root intrusion from the service lines. That's where a lot of the problems are. And let's say the homeowner resident has like an Orangeburg pipe or something like that... back in the day when they did this work and connected into our main, the contractors way back when, they'd knock a hole in that clay pipe with a hammer, stick the pipe in, grout around it, and then bury it back. And that's where we see... I mean, you can drive... or you know, when we're camera-ing those lines, you can see the roots that are in those service lines. And with what we're doing, when we line that connection, that's protecting us and that's really helping the homeowner out because normally that connection is where you really see the roots in there. So you know, depending where the property line is, we go 10 or 12 feet into the property. **[00:29:10] Mayor John Monge:** Are there any other questions? **[00:29:12] Morgan Dawley:** Okay, so this next slide is showing sidewalks. I know it's not showing the split between 2025 and 2027, but this is a pretty unique neighborhood in North St. Paul where there's sidewalks on both sides of the street. You don't see that very often. Basically, the approach since the beginning is: if there is an existing sidewalk, the commitment has been to reconstruct that. Sometimes they've been busted up over the years with tree root heaving, or so there might be some trip hazards there. I think over the years the city certainly has looked at replacing, you know, a panel here, a panel there throughout the city sidewalk system. This is an opportunity, if you're reconstructing the roads and replacing the curb and gutter, we can take care of that all at the same time. Now, even though we're showing some red on McKnight, we're not touching that. That's just showing that there is a connection there. The green is what doesn't exist here today. For whatever reason, when they were putting this development in, in the late '60s or early '70s, they just stopped that sidewalk very close to the park and very close to McKnight Road, but with no way to actually get there without walking on the road, basically. So, fairly minor cost in comparison with the overall project, but it's just a very easy connection we can make for those folks to get them right to the park going to the left, or right to McKnight Road to the right. Which, that sidewalk goes all the way up to almost the 694 bridge and it goes all the way down... you can walk south of I-94 on that sidewalk, which I did not know, but I kept following it and you can walk a long way on that sidewalk. So that's a viable connection. This next slide is design considerations. That's something that I like to talk about, which are just kind of unique things—every project is totally different. So the sidewalk thing is kind of a unique issue. The two graphics I copied in here are just for reference for you folks to know that we're not operating in a vacuum here. But the Comprehensive Plan, which is something that happens every 10 years, that was adopted by City Council in 2018. And so we're coming up on another Comprehensive Plan update cycle—that's something that's mandated by the Metropolitan Council, that all cities look at their land use planning, their infrastructure planning, their transportation planning, and combine it into a document that addresses current conditions and then out for the next, I think, 30 years or something like that. The last plan, which was adopted in 2018, is the 2040 plan. We're coming up here in a couple of years embarking on updating that plan to the 2050 plan. So there's a little bit more strategic discussions that you folks might be a part of, Planning Commission might be a part of. There's generally a lot of public engagement that goes along with that. One of the chapters in that plan is sidewalks, pedestrian, you know, trails, bicyclists, that sort of thing. And so the connection between the park and McKnight—that was an identified connection that was in the 2040 comp plan at that time. And so having built that into the project, we're using that as a reference. This other one to the right, that's a little lesser-known plan at this time, but it is referenced in the comp plan, so I don't think it's invalid. And that's the "Living Streets Plan" that was a document that was prepared in 2011 by our Watershed District, and I think they paid for it at the time. But there was a lot of public involvement; there's some talk about trails and sidewalks and complete streets, and not all of it has been implemented. No plan is intended to be implemented 100%, right? A lot of it is interpretation as we get to a project. But those are just two reference points, I guess, that do talk about... you know, if you do have sidewalks, trying to maintain them. If there are opportunities to fill gaps, that's another theme that shows up in these plans: if you can fill a gap, that's something the city should take a look at. And so those were all kind of reference points through the sidewalk construction or sidewalk design as it pertains to this project. **[00:33:15] Council Member Troy Woods:** Now with sidewalks throughout the city, are the homeowners responsible for cleaning each sidewalk? **[00:33:23] Morgan Dawley:** It's in another home... yeah. Ron, you can weigh in too, because I know we've looked at this and talked about it a lot too, but by ordinance generally—with some exceptions—sidewalks in front of homes are expected to be cleared from a snow standpoint by the homeowner, the adjacent homeowner. **[00:33:45] Ron Ritchie:** Yep. There are a couple of sidewalks that we do plow. The 2020 project—or was that 2018? The 2018 project, Lake Boulevard... that sidewalk got put right on the curb line. So at that time, I didn't make that decision, but the decision was made for us to plow that because the windrow from the plow would go right up on the sidewalk. **[00:34:05] Council Member Troy Woods:** Now the sidewalk on County Road C, 17th Avenue... was that a City plow or is that a residential plow? **[00:34:12] Ron Ritchie:** That's residential, and that's a County Road. **[00:34:14] Council Member Troy Woods:** All right, okay. **[00:34:15] Ron Ritchie:** Yep, yep. McKnight also, yeah. **[00:34:17] Morgan Dawley:** Couple other bullet points here. I guess trees is another one—I'm going totally out of order—but Josh Bond, who's the city's Forester in Public Works, has been through the whole project area, taken out some diseased and Emerald Ash Borer trees, or trees that would be at risk of dying, right? **[00:34:40] Ron Ritchie:** Or they already had. I think most of the trees are removed in that in this project area, and I believe the 2027 project... I think they're pretty much out. **[00:34:50] Morgan Dawley:** Mostly things have been taken care of. But I guess, you know, we know through having done several of these projects that sometimes things underground are... we don't know their exact location, sometimes something's in the way, there's some conflict. We do expect there might be a some tree removals. There's one that's kind of right where the sidewalk ends, where the sidewalk would go through—it doesn't make much sense to kind of go all the way around it on somebody's private property. And so, you know, there's a tree here or there that will need to come down. There's some trees in the park. But we do build in some budget for reforestation, if you will. And so we have the opportunity, under the guidance of Public Works and Josh as the Forester, to do some tree planting at the end when all the underground and road stuff is done. Hopefully, we can either work with a resident or work within the park to find some good locations where they won't be subject to damaging a sidewalk in the future, or they won't be planted right on top of a water shutoff, which we've seen before, right? It's not... they're not really always thinking about what's underground when they're planting the trees in the first place, but we have an opportunity to hopefully do our best to mitigate that where we can, where it makes sense. So that's something that City staff and Public Works works on with the project staff kind of at the very end. Likely this will... that'll be in 2026, the first part of 2026. And then also the first bullet here, Watershed requirements. I mentioned those are Watershed rules that are kind of mandated on us. They do add cost. It all goes back to the Clean Water Act of 1974, which is a federal thing, and it's taken generations to kind of trickle down and get to this point. The intent being that it cleans the water flowing into our waters and streams and wetlands. And so, you know, there's an environmental stewardship component to that. The downside, or the offset to that, is it does cost money on our projects to do that. And so our approach here is to hopefully combat inflation—things just keep getting more expensive every single year—and also economies of scale and efficiency of being all in the same place. That pond expansion or enhancement that we were talking about right there in Casey Park by the head of the creek... we're going to do everything that's necessary to be able to meet the requirements for both the '25 and the '27 project in the future ahead of time. So when we come back for the 2027 project, that part will be done. We won't have to spend any money on it. We're spending a little bit of money ahead, but it'll be less expensive in '25 than it would be in '27. Plus, we'd be monkeying up grass and things that were just planted in the park. So we're trying to do things... **[00:37:35] Council Member Dave McKenzie:** Will this shut down the ball fields down at McKnight then for the summer? **[00:37:40] Morgan Dawley:** No, not as a... it will not. The parking lot... I don't know if that's going to be a staging area. But as far as ball fields or anything, there's really not much going on down at Casey number one. The main parking lot by the building... there are ball games there, that mostly gets used. This back parking lot... there's not a lot of people that use that because there's no ball fields that get used... well, there's a ball field right there but it really doesn't get used. But I think for the most part... I mean, that may be a staging area for some of our equipment, so we'll have to see how things go. **[00:38:15] Ron Ritchie:** Yeah, we don't in the project documents... we don't want to give away the farm too early. The contractor will likely ask; they'll tour the project, they'll see that as an opportunity. It's up to the city whether they want to grant that. But I will tell you, and I think Ron's thinking this exact same thing, is that if the contractor does have a staging area where they can park equipment and lay out some pipe or lay out some pallets or things that are going into the streets, it cleans up the streets and it makes it much easier from a housekeeping standpoint. They have to store their stuff somewhere, and if they don't have a staging area outside of like the rights-of-way, it winds up being the rights-of-way. And that's technically, legally okay, but if that's your house and you've got like a bunch of pipe stacked in front of it for a big chunk of the summer, it is kind of annoying. When we do have an opportunity to let them use an area, it might be beneficial in a non-obvious way. It might be better for everybody that lives on the project to do without the parking lot for the summer if we can live with that, right? And we'll work that out and talk with the contractor, find out what we think they'll need or what they think they'll need. Because like Morgan just said, a lot of times residents will come home and then all of a sudden we'll get a call and they're like, "Hey, we have a 10-foot high pile of concrete curb that just ended up in our front yard." And the contractor's like, "Well, we need a place to store this and put this and this is the closest place." It just might still be within the right-of-way, but the people—rightly so—they perceive it as their front yard, like they've been mowing that for the last 30 years, right? **[00:39:50] Council Member Dave McKenzie:** That's why I'm kind of watching, because we've got some kids in St. Peter's that need ball fields because Colin's going to be up this year. So they need some places to play ball this summer. **[00:40:02] Ron Ritchie:** Yeah, and if we have that information or know that that's going to happen, I'll definitely take that into consideration. Like I said, I don't automatically say, "Hey, you can use this parking lot or use whatever." We have to see what's going on. But I know the past few years those fields were not... that field wasn't used. So my initial thought was, "Well, they're going to come and ask for a staging area or some place." And like Morgan said, if it's not a place that we give them, it ends up being everyone's front yards unless they can work a deal out with somebody else, like a church or somebody. If that's going to be... if we have that information, it's definitely good for us to know that so we can go about planning when we do this. Because we do try to work with the residents as best as we can. We're usually out there with these projects every day. We usually end up knowing all the people in the neighborhood one way or another, just because there's a lot going on and we really pride ourselves on making sure that our residents are taken care of as well as they can be with a big undertaking that's happening in front of their house. **[00:41:00] Morgan Dawley:** Yeah, I always say in neighborhood meetings or when I'm talking to residents: there's just no way to candy-coat a full summer of reconstruction. It's noisy and it's dusty and, you know, sometimes you feel the vibrations. But the specifications we're using, the practices that contractors who do this kind of work—and that are familiar with what I call an urban retrofit project where you're trying to retrofit the streets and utilities while people are living all around you—usually, especially if everybody is being communicative and fair with one another, they can go well. And that's one of my slides: communication. Before I get to that though, I do want to mention the phasing. So as I mentioned before, we're not going to let the contractor blow everything up and then just work in one corner here while the people have no streets to drive on and they don't see any activity for two months or something like that. We like to see the contractor only remove the pavement when they're getting to a specific situation, and we haven't gotten to the point where we've dictated that out in the plans and specifications yet, but again, we'll look for logical breaks or logical ways to make that happen. Generally, it saves the contractor cost if they do it that way because it's their responsibility to maintain these roads through the summer. If they're rutting and they have to constantly be putting down gravel to try to take care of it, even though they're not actively working there, that just costs them money. And that's their responsibility—we're not paying them to maintain the roads. We say you've got to maintain the roads and the cost for that is incidental to the project. They don't get paid every time they put gravel down on the road. They've got to make sure that people can get in and out of the project area and, to the best of their ability, they try to stay on top of the roads. But you know, you get a rainy year and it's all muddy... **[00:42:50] Mayor John Monge:** Oh yeah, there'll be some unhappy residents. **[00:42:53] Morgan Dawley:** Rain is not our friend with these kinds of projects. **[00:42:55] Council Member Troy Woods:** Has there been a bid put out yet, or is that...? **[00:42:58] Morgan Dawley:** No, that might be next here... yeah, it's one slide after this. So, construction schedule: anticipated, subject to change certainly. But usually, we see the construction start after road restrictions come off. Could be mid-May is usually when I think that's going to happen, but it could be earlier again if MNDOT lifts road restrictions earlier like they did last year—it was like in April, I think, right? Because last year was warm. And so if they can get going earlier so they can finish earlier, we'll let them. And so it could be April, but usually it's May. Substantial completion is most things are done by October or sometimes November of the same year. That means that we've got at least one lift of asphalt on the roads, so the roads are paved, all the underground work is done. And some of the maybe last things that might happen in the spring of the next year, like you see June 2026, would be the final paving. The final layer of asphalt, maybe some tree planting, maybe some grass growing, maybe some landscaping, little kind of miscellaneous cleanup items—that's usually what happens in the year following. As far as to get to the bidding schedule as you were asking about earlier: what we're shooting for right now is to request permission from the Council to authorize advertisement for bids at the second meeting in February. So we're getting there—about a month away. That doesn't mean... that just means that we're getting your authorization to place an ad for the bidding process to occur. Then the plans are uploaded to a virtual plan room basically where contractors can download that and they can review it and they can put together their prices. We've been using electronic bidding the last several projects very successfully. Contractors love that; they don't have to fill out things with paper and use white-out and whatever, it's all done online in the computer. So the bid opening we're thinking would be March 25th thereabouts, and then we'd be bringing the bid results to the Council on April 1st with a recommendation. Presumably, with a recommended low bidder per Minnesota state statute—for at least for contracting work over $350,000 I think is the threshold—cities are obligated to award the contract to the low bidder, to the lowest responsible and responsive bidder. And "responsible and responsive," that's a whole discussion Jack can get into from an attorney standpoint; those are legal terms. But sometimes we get asked like, "Hey, you know, we've got a good contractor right here in town or whatever, can they do the work?" There are rules that we have to follow, unfortunately. We can't just give work; it has to go through a process, and we do follow that in accordance with the annual financial audit that the city goes through, right? So, generally, if everything is regular with respect to the bids received, we are recommending to you the low bidder. Generally, it's a contractor that we've worked with before, or if not, we're getting references from other cities. But generally, we've had pretty good luck with our publicly bid, sealed-bid projects like that and the contractors that have been selected. Okay, so just a... right now where we are... the plan and the design is still... there's a little bit left to go here, but we're getting close to the end of estimating the costs and itemizing all the line items and all the pay items and the specifications and everything that goes into the bid package, the contract documents. But what I've represented here is showing how the entire project, which is estimated at just over $6.5 million, breaks into different components. Those different components are funded by different funds, if you will. So at the very top: streets and surface improvement. That's what you might imagine—it's the roads, the curb and gutter, the sidewalks. Surface improvements also includes a lot of the like turf establishment or protecting things from erosion and runoff. And so that's the majority of the project, or that's the biggest component at just over $2.3 million. The water main—that's just over 1.3. And the funding mechanism for that would be the Water Utility Fund. Sanitary sewer—that's the Wastewater Fund, that's just over a million dollars. And then storm sewer is the Surface Water Fund, and you can see the $1.8 million—that's a big component. Two things with that: we're including the water quality treatment for the 2027 project, so we're doing a little ahead there. And then also these pipes that are under Shawnee are very big. It actually conveys a pretty big chunk of the city east of McKnight through into Casey Park, and so the big pipe is more expensive than an average project because we've got a fair amount of that. So again, all together, $6.5 million. What I would say is that in the Capital Improvement Plan, it's stated that the project is to be funded by bond funds and then the bond payments. So it's just like taking out a loan, right? But the loan payments or the bond payments by the city for the next whatever the period of the bond is—20 years, for example, is pretty typical—those principal and interest payments are made by contributing amounts from each one of these funds. And the streets and surface improvements... that would generally be... that's levy, that's from the general levy—so the general property tax levy. I don't know that we have... do we have a street fund? I don't know if there's a street fund, but pavement preservation is one, and I think there is a street fund. But those are what's paying off the bond payment over 20 years for that component. And then a little bit simpler because these are enterprise funds, they have their own revenue-generating ability through the utility billing, right? And so they're not only taking in money from existing customers but then also responsible for making these bond payments over 20 years for the individual projects. And there's existing bonds for past projects that are still being paid off; this would be proposed to be another one of those as well. I think that may have been part of Finance Director Jason Zimmerman's presentations to you in the past. I mentioned communication is super important, and this is a slide that was shared in past presentations on several past projects, but including this project. The city has set up a dedicated phone line—like a hotline—and also a dedicated email address that is communicated out to all the folks that live on the project. And I think the phone line... I mean, it may be answered during the day, but generally goes into a monitored voicemail box. Ava Griemert—is that how you say your last name? Griemert. So our communications director, Ava, is generally responsible kind of for the first cut, although she will triage and redirect questions from the public to, for example, our construction observer out in the field who has a lot of home-to-home and resident-to-resident contact during these projects. Or maybe the question needs to come to me, or maybe the question needs to go to Public Works. Everything's coming into City Hall first. Sometimes she's able to answer those questions and or at least say, "Yep, I'll have somebody come out and meet with you or I'll get somebody on the job." But then that's being transferred to people that can hopefully address their concerns in the most timely fashion. Mostly they are things that are kind of in the moment and construction-related, like "Hey, there's a pile of stuff in front of my house, is that going to stay?" But sometimes they're longer-range things we try to flesh out by asking these questions ahead of time, like: "Do you have a grad party coming up in June that we need to be prepared for?" Because we can make those accommodations if we know about them to make sure that people can get to the house even if the roads maybe a little bit dinged up. Access is there, hopefully there's parking available adjacent on the streets or whatever. We'll try to work with those people as long as we know about them. So it's everything from the minute to maybe something more long-range that we need to plan on. We've even done a wedding—there was a backyard wedding in the middle of a project, and we pulled that off successfully. So we just always encourage people to, if you have a problem, please let somebody know about it. And sometimes—there's nothing wrong with this—they may come to you folks. We do try to encourage them to use the proper tools—email, phone—to get them in that habit. I mean, they certainly can CC you or you guys can pass information along; there's nothing wrong with that. But if we do start those dialogues and those one-on-ones between staff—project staff, whether it's City staff or WSB consultant staff, whatever—then we can hopefully be successful in solving their issue. And maybe it gets you guys out of the middle or hopefully maybe cuts the time in terms of being able to address their issue. But usually, there's a little bit of a learning period in the first part of the project. It takes a little bit to get folks used to what's going on, and then hopefully, after the first couple weeks, it tends to go a little bit more smoothly once people are used to it. We will probably do another... like an outside, I think, like in the parking lot in the park, like an open house in person. That was one of the comments we got is: "Does it have to be Zoom and online?" And that has worked well in the past because we can record it and anybody who can't make the virtual open house can just watch all the info and pick it up on their own time. But we want to be respectful of that, and so we might... come March or April, like before construction, we might hold another one like out there. Hopefully the weather's nice. We can even have the contractor out there so they can meet some of the residents who are interested in learning more if they've got questions. I'm just going to blow through these because we're running out of time, but these are frequently asked questions that we present on every project because they're questions that get asked on every project. Access to my driveway: if I live on the project, generally, unless the contractor is digging or replacing a pipe or coring out the road, building the road right in front of the home, generally there should be a drivable surface for people to get in and out, certainly at the end of the day and the beginning of the day—so for folks to get out to work or if they need to come back from work so they can come into their driveway. That's what we hold the contractor to. And the contractor knows also—we get this question a lot—if there's an emergency, like if there's a house fire or there's a medical call or something like that, they know that it's their job to backfill whatever hole they've got going on and allow for the fire truck to go around the hole or whatever it is. That's pretty standard practice on these projects. And thankfully, we're not working on an endless amount of cul-de-sacs; there are multiple ways in and out of this particular neighborhood, so that's good. And so that's for the excavation or digging right in front of the driveway. When we get towards the end of the project, we are replacing the ends of the driveways—like we put in a new concrete apron and we maybe do a little bit of driveway work to match that in. Pouring concrete is not an overnight "it's ready to drive on," as you might imagine. People like to put their handprints and stuff, and that's a whole another issue where we try to protect that from happening. But generally, it takes concrete five to seven days to cure. And so at that point, most of the road is done; we've got ample room for people hopefully to park their cars outside of the driveway and on the street right in front of their house. And then the contractor will put a ribbon across the driveway and let that concrete cure out. As soon as the contractor pulls the ribbon, then people can drive on that brand-new concrete. Now, if we're pressured for time—we have some really urgent matters to attend to—we can use what's called "High Early" concrete, which costs a little bit more. But in special circumstances, we've used that downtown, we'll use it in certain situations where if we really need to get those driveways poured and people driving on them right away because, for example, they don't have a lot of places to park on the street in one particular part of the neighborhood, we will do that. It's not a significant additional cost. We tend to get a better product with normal concrete, so we only like to use that if we have to, but it's always there as a tool. "Can entire driveways be replaced as part of the project?" So sometimes folks will be thinking, "I've been meaning to replace my whole driveway, the city's just doing the end of it, maybe I should get the whole thing done. Can the city do that?" As practice, generally no. We don't do that. Sometimes contractors don't want to get into the liability of working on private property; they'd like to stick within the right-of-way, which is City area for them to work in. Sometimes they'll do that. What we tell folks is that we will share with you our concrete subcontractor and our asphalt contractor, and if you would like to contact them and if they're interested or willing to get into a relationship with private property owners, that would be perfectly fine. Once in a while that happens. Some contractors don't want to have anything to do with it; sometimes they're like, "Yeah, sure, no problem." And if they do wind up going with somebody else, we just ask them to let us know so we can coordinate. We'd prefer that they come in and do their stuff after we're done, but maybe it makes sense to do it the other way. We just need to kind of talk about it, look at it, think about what's the right way and then coordinate with their contractor. It's still achievable, but it's just not something that the city has historically taken. I don't know of too many cities that do it that way, right? But we always do get the question asked. How much of the driveway is replaced? It depends on the driveway and the slope. Usually, it's only a couple of feet beyond that apron. If we can snap and saw cut a nice clean line in an asphalt driveway and create a nice joint there, we will. If they have an existing concrete driveway, we'll replace the concrete; we'll probably go to the next logical joint where it makes sense to just kind of cut it there. I don't think we have too many gravel driveways, but basically the policy is to replace behind the apron in kind whatever they have now: gravel for gravel, asphalt for asphalt, concrete for concrete. That's the approach. So it might be 3 to 5 feet behind the apron, and the aprons are 3 to 5 feet I think also. Generally, the right-of-way is... it's actually the next one... the right-of-way is usually 60 to 66 feet wide. And depending on how wide the road is, that's anywhere from like 10 to 14 feet off of the back of the curb as an imaginary line, right? And so we try to stay within that. **[00:58:30] Council Member Dave McKenzie:** Are they still going to be the same widths? They're not narrowing your roads at all, are they? **[00:58:34] Morgan Dawley:** Correct. No, these are all... that's a good question. I should have said that. Yeah, on this particular project, no change. **[00:58:40] Council Member Dave McKenzie:** There's not going to be no cutouts or anything for the plow guys to be able to make a dip-do? **[00:58:44] Morgan Dawley:** No, I don't think so. **[00:58:45] Council Member Dave McKenzie:** Yeah, I'll argue that all the time, but that's part of our... out on Charles Street and all that, too. **[00:58:50] Morgan Dawley:** Right. **[00:58:51] Council Member Dave McKenzie:** Whoever did that was... yeah. Was that me? No, okay. That was done before. **[00:58:56] Morgan Dawley:** Yeah. I mean, the only time where I can think of—and it wouldn't be necessarily a bump-out, but we might change the curb line a little bit—would be like for ADA purposes where the pedestrian ramps touch down and cross the road. Sometimes it makes sense to do something a little bit different just because of the current regulations, but it shouldn't be anything substantial. And these guys always... that's one of their number-one comments is: "How am I going to plow this?" right? And so I think if we need to adjust, we can always adjust and we try to do something that works best for everybody. Basic curb line and that's it, right? **[00:59:30] Ron Ritchie:** Right. Yeah, we would like WSB... they'll give us 30% plans. We'll sit down with Morgan, another one of their engineers, and then we'll take some of our guys that actually are out in plow trucks and plowing and we look at stuff. We have some pretty candid conversations sometimes, because the guys are like, "Well, I would have this," or "What is that?" We do definitely try to look at the maintenance part of it, you know. But with some of these living streets plans that were put in place, you know, where there's medians and plantings and whatever... obviously those aren't my first choice. It's maintenance, it's more stuff to go around. But we've got to kind of work... there's always those balances, right? Like aesthetics versus maintenance versus cost. And so we do try to deliver the best product that everybody's in agreement with. One maintenance thing that we're building in—it's kind of a minor detail, but I mentioned that lift station in Casey Lake Park—we're having the contractor access that area by the asphalt trail that's on the north end of the park there that people use for walking now. So, you know, that's going to get scuffed up, and we're already planning to repave that. But at the end of that area, there's an opportunity to kind of redo how that trail fits around the lift station for access to the pumps, access to the hatches. And so we're trying to do a minor improvement there—it's not for plowing purposes, but to hopefully make it a little bit easier for the guys to get at the lift station and maintain the lift station. **[01:00:50] Ron Ritchie:** Yep, just to get our jetter truck in there and be able to turn around and go in and come out the same way that we went in, just because it's such a big truck, you know. We'll over-build that path a little bit so it'll handle that truck, just for a maintenance standpoint, yeah. **[01:01:05] Morgan Dawley:** Mail and trash. I mean, the short answer of that version is—or short version of that answer is—that if there... now I can't remember this neighborhood if it's home service if they've got mailboxes. But if there are mailboxes, those get pulled out at the front end of the project and we put in kind of a group mailbox in a location that's usually dictated by the Postmaster. Sometimes we get into arguments with the Postmaster about where it should go, but they have to make that location work with their routing and where the mail carrier is going to drop all the mail. So people will have to pick up their mail in a different location, usually for the majority of the summer. And then when everything's done, we will either put their originally salvaged mailbox back if they want to keep it, or sometimes if we need to put a new post in and put their old mailbox... or if it's totally busted up, we can give them a standard mailbox to replace the one that was there before. And for trash, usually things are supposed to operate on trash day like they normally do. People should just leave their bins out at the end of the driveway or wherever they normally do, but it's the contractor's responsibility, because sometimes the trash hauler can't get in the same way. So there's a point of coordination. Usually, this is one of the bumps in the road at the early part of the project; usually, we figure it out. Trash hauler might need to come in and turn around, like at the parking lot at Shawnee. Contractor's responsibility is to come and pick up all the trash bins at the ends of the driveways. Usually, we ask people to put a piece of duct tape with their address number on the bin so they come back to the same place, and the contractor will run those bins up to the trash hauler with a skid steer or something, empty them out, and then bring the empty bins back. Trying to make it, hopefully, as close to similar as normal, just sometimes the trash hauling truck isn't actually able to come right to the end of the driveway. And again, those are other things that the contractor's not getting paid extra for; they know it's written into the specifications that's what you've got to do. It's incidental to the project. Work hours: 7:00 to 7:00, Monday through Friday, and Saturday 9:00 to 5:00. Not always do we see the contractor working on Saturdays; usually, they're not interested in paying their folks overtime unless they're really getting pinched on schedule. So usually we don't see them work on Saturdays. They have to ask permission for Sunday or holiday or overnight work—once in a great while that makes sense. I don't foresee it happening on this project, but sometimes you see that because of, you know, like if it were McKnight Road and it's a busy road and sometimes it makes sense to do some night work. But for this, I think we'll probably have a pretty standard Monday through Friday, 7:00 to 7:00. Sometimes contractors can cheat that, and they like to show up at 5:00 in the morning and maybe they'll start their diesels warming up at 6:00 in the morning, and that's not okay. And so we tell them: "You don't start your trucks until 7:00." That's what it says. Sometimes they cheat that and we've got to yell at them. And so, anyway, you know, if we do hear that, yeah, we know they're not supposed to. They get told at the pre-construction conference that's not acceptable. Sometimes they have subcontractors and people that aren't underneath the prime contractor's thumb that need to be reminded. So once in a great while that's another blip in the road that we need to address. And then areas of lawn—so that's kind of been a big one. Right now, the best approach is to replace any disturbed lawn area with sod. Industry standard for sod is that the contractor waters it and maintains it for 30 days, and then after that time, it's the homeowner's responsibility to take care of it. And we give them a flyer that says: "Do not cut your brand new sod short. You will kill it, and then there's nothing we can do about it." And we tell them, mowing short is one of them... oh, and then if it gets really dry or hot after the sod goes in, water it. Especially if people are still on their temporary water—that bypasses their water meter, and so water is free. So hopefully, people generally want to make sure that the grass takes as well as it can. Once in a while, we have to go back the next spring and maybe replace a couple of areas that might have died, and we've made some minor exceptions. But we do try to stick with that, knowing that we have communicated with everybody to say, "Hey, 30 days, this is when you guys have got to take it over. Here's all of the best ways to take care of it. Don't cut it too short, make sure you're watering it." So we're trying to give them all the best information and it's worked pretty well. Minor issues once in a while, we have to replace a little bit here, a little bit there, and that might have to be at cost, but to try to keep folks happy and keep them as calm as can be after having lived through an entire summer of a lot of heavy construction. I think again those are some of the exceptions that if we think it's justified, we'll try to take care of that. We don't want to be too undue with the burden here. And growing grass is one of the last things to happen. **[01:05:40] Mayor John Monge:** It's 6:28. If we can take a couple seconds before we start the 6:30, that'd be great. **[01:05:45] Ron Ritchie:** I think I've already mentioned the other things here about storage, changes to the road, you know, irrigation and landscaping... I mean, we try to protect that where we can and if they do need to come out or be repaired, again, we work with the contractor to take care of that. **[01:06:00] Morgan Dawley:** Oh, go ahead... **[01:06:01] Ron Ritchie:** Just one thing quick: once this project gets going, we have weekly meetings with the contractors out there on site. So if there's stuff that you guys hear—questions—I mean, we meet with them weekly. So, you know, like the starting early or if they're starting their trucks early, we meet with them on a weekly basis to go over things, to try to keep things on track. **[01:06:20] Morgan Dawley:** Yep. That is something we do throughout the project until we deem that we're at a spot where that doesn't need to be done anymore. And on these projects really, we usually have to have those weekly meetings all the way until the season ends, right? I mean, just in case something comes up. **[01:06:35] Mayor John Monge:** Sure. All right, well thank you. **[01:06:37] Morgan Dawley:** Yeah, thank you guys for listening. Thank you. All right, you guys can call me any time or if you have other follow-up questions, I'm always available. **[01:06:42] Mayor John Monge:** All right, okay thanks. Thank you. All right, call for adjournment. **[01:06:45] Council Member Jason Nordby:** So moved. **[01:06:46] Council Member Dave McKenzie:** Second. **[01:06:47] Mayor John Monge:** All in favor say aye. **[01:06:48] Group:** Aye. **[01:06:49] Mayor John Monge:** All right, come back at 6:35, give us five minutes. **[End of Transcript]**