This transcript features **Mayor Mary Fasbender**, members of the **Hastings City Council**, and various city staff. Please note that while your provided list is helpful, the transcript includes names like **Councilmember Jen Fox** (transcribed as "Brox"), **Councilmember Folch**, and **Councilmember Vaughan**, who are part of the proceedings. [0:00] **All:** I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. [0:14] **Mayor Mary Fasbender:** Welcome everyone and let the roll reflect all council members are here with the absence of Councilmember Leifeld. Determination of quorum has been established and tonight we have a proclamation to be read. Our Public Works Director, Nick Egger—his last day with us is tomorrow. Nick, you will be missed by many and you've been appreciated by all of us here. So with that, Councilmember Fox, if you would start the proclamation. [0:43] **Councilmember Jen Fox:** Whereas Nick Egger was first hired on as Assistant City Engineer in 2002, promoted to City Engineer in 2005, and then promoted to Public Works Director in 2015. Whereas Nick's leadership has been instrumental in making normal happen by systematically maintaining and upgrading the city's physical infrastructure: over 100 miles of streets, 13 bridges, 90 miles of water main, six wells, three water towers, one water treatment plant, 1300 fire hydrants, eight lift stations, and one hydroelectric generating plant project in 2013, and guided multiple projects for the Riverfront Renaissance. [1:47] **Councilmember Jen Fox:** Whereas Nick is appreciated as a great partner with other city departments, assisting with social media posts, getting drone photos for aerial views—which are very beautiful, by the way—providing traffic and speed counts, and coordinating detours. Whereas Nick has collaborated with partner agencies such as the Minnesota Department of Transportation, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, Dakota County, Metropolitan Council, and the Army Corps of Engineers. Whereas Nick has represented the profession serving on the board of the American Public Works Association Minnesota Chapter, and whereas Nick has consistently demonstrated the city's core values: communication, optimal service, respect for resources, and enthusiasm. [2:36] **Mayor Mary Fasbender:** Now therefore, Hastings, the Mayor and City Council commend and thank Nick Egger for his years of dedication and service and extend best wishes to him and his new role in Rosemount. [3:17] **Councilmember Tim Lawrence:** I'm gonna keep it pretty simple. Nick, congrats. Thanks for everything that you've done for us. And I think reading that first one, I was lucky enough to be on the committee that got to promote him to Public Works Director, and one of the best decisions I made. So keep up the good work. You'll be my neighbor here. Don't steal any of our employees; I got that memo definitely as well. [3:43] **Councilmember Angie Haus:** Thank you, Nick. You know, coming on as a council member five years ago, even though I myself, you know, come from city government, I've learned a lot in my interactions with you and how as an elected official to have a different perspective on how operations work, you know, within the city. And I think that you've given really good guidance and I've so appreciated your patience and understanding with us as we want to get involved sometimes in things that are a little too far in the weeds, but you've always shown a lot of grace. So thank you for that. [4:28] **Councilmember Mya Beck:** Nick, most of my experience with you is as a business owner and a member of the Downtown Business Association, and you've been a pleasure to work with and very, very excited to work with the businesses in Hastings and help grow on all of the other work that's happening in our wonderful city. We're going to miss you. I'm going to miss working with you on Council and I really am excited to keep growing and learning from each other. [4:50] **Mayor Mary Fasbender:** Thank you, Nick. I've told you before, I appreciate your patience with me being a newer mayor and had to learn a lot—and still learning—and you and the staff have always been very patient. So I appreciate all you've given to our community and I feel very fortunate that you're going to be our neighbor and I'm sure we'll be working together in the future as we grow. [5:10] **Councilmember Dave Pemble:** Well Nick, five years ago roughly started—had nothing to do with the city at all prior to that—and so I had a lot of learning to do. And you were instrumental in that and it was always very helpful to be on committee to know that, you know, we had some pretty strong expertise to lean on. And you're a straight shooter, so I appreciate that too. So good luck to you. Thank you. [5:37] **Councilmember DawnMarie Vihrachoff:** Thanks Nick for all your service. I looked up your LinkedIn profile today—that you've been with the city for 18 years and 11 months. So are you sure you can't stay for one more? We really appreciate you. I appreciate you both as a colleague and as a friend. I think your expertise and your knowledge and the knowledge of the history of projects in the City of Hastings is going to be very missed. And I just want to say that you do a job that is often criticized and not often thanked. So it's sad that I haven't had the opportunity till now, but just thank you for all that you've done and thank you for leading our Public Works department through some sticky, tricky things and taking a lot of heat sometimes for that. But we know that you have served the city with the best interest at heart and that you care about the City of Hastings and we just want you to know that we care about you and want to wish you all the best. [6:23] **Nick Egger:** Thank you so much. I didn't come with anything prepared to say; this is a very pleasant surprise. So kudos to all of you for keeping this a secret till the last second. This is—I'll cherish that forever. You know, coming into my career all those years ago, I was so excited about the technical aspects of things and getting to apply what I learned in college and get that put to use. But this career here has brought me so much more than that. I've gotten to participate in such a wide variety of things and, of course, all of that with the greater good in mind all the while. And you can cite all kinds of numbers about this, and that's the engineer in me really enjoys thinking about it that way, but the intangible parts of it are the parts that I'm going to miss the most. Especially just working with people and working with my teammates like John, like Dave, like all of my staff, like Chris who I've gotten to know over the last year, and Corey and Dan and Kelly. It's just that's what makes things happen. [7:51] **Nick Egger:** And you know, I've been so fortunate and blessed to have a lot of cool opportunities to bring my abilities to the forefront. And I think the most gratifying part is that I can see it all around just in my travels around the city, coming in and out day by day and having to experience it kind of as an end user myself. So that stuff will be there, I hope, a long, long time and continues to get taken care of by our excellent staff that we have. But none of us get to these sorts of accolades alone. It's a lot of folks behind the scenes that help lift you up there and you just get to maybe savor in the more public eye part of it, but I have every one of them to thank for anything that I've achieved. So thank you. Thank you all, appreciate it. [8:46] **Mayor Mary Fasbender:** And we will see Nick later in our agenda. Council members, are there any corrections to the minutes from the meetings and workshop on July 9th or the workshop of July 21st? Seeing none, they are approved. Comments from the audience: today we have public comments that we could take with options for comments that had been emailed prior to the meeting as well as interactive features during the meeting. For the email comments, they have been forwarded to City Council and they have been received. Please recognize that items not on the agenda will not be discussed this evening. For live comments, they may either be through Zoom link or in person. We ask that the attendees raise their hand in the person feature in the Zoom and they will be invited to speak one at a time. I also want to remind everyone that the public comment period is not extended for a dialogue. Is there anyone who would like to speak to the Council at this time? [10:14] **Mayor Mary Fasbender:** Okay, seeing none. Council members, are there any Council items to be considered? Okay, I would accept a motion to approve the consent agenda. [10:18] **Councilmember Folch:** So moved. [10:19] **Councilmember Jen Fox:** Second. [10:21] **Mayor Mary Fasbender:** Councilmember Folch and Councilmember Fox. Any discussion? Okay, all those in favor say aye. (Aye). All opposed say nay. This motion prevails. Tonight we have a resolution for the bond sale, General Obligation Bonds Series 2021A. And for this item, we have the introduction of Finance Manager Chris Eitemiller, and we also have Tammy Omdahl of Northland Securities with us. [10:53] **Tammy Omdahl:** Thank you. Mayor, City Council, Tammy Omdahl from Northland Securities. Chris asked me to get up and speak directly to this item. So you have the resolution related to the bond sale. I'm going to give a little background on what got us to tonight, but first I will let you know it was a great day in the market for Hastings, so I'll get to that in a moment. The city is considering tonight a resolution awarding the sale of bonds to finance street and utility improvements for your 2021 projects. The bonds as proposed were structured over 10 years with relatively level annual debt service. It was a public sale, so this morning Northland Securities on behalf of the city took bids. There were five bids that were received. It was a very competitive process. It was a great day to be selling bonds and you're going to benefit from that subject to your approval tonight. The low bid was from Piper out of Minneapolis. [12:00] **Tammy Omdahl:** Since I was last before you, I commented that as part of this process we had recommended that the city seek a rating on these bonds—so your bonds are rated, not the city itself. Standard & Poor's Global did affirm that Double-A rating. A few stats on that: there are 319 cities in Minnesota that have a rating from Standard & Poor's. There are 65 cities with that rating of Double-A, the same as Hastings. There are 67 cities with a higher rating out of that 319. So higher would be the Double-A Plus and then the Triple-A. The Double-A rating that Hastings has is a very strong rating that is reflected in the results that you receive today. The true interest cost that was bid, low bid from Piper, is 0.95%. So it was below 1%. On July 6, the estimated rate at that time was 1.47%. So rates—and if you've been following the market—markets were down and you also had a very competitive bidding environment this morning. [13:09] **Tammy Omdahl:** Mayor, Council, I believe there were some handouts provided for you. If there are questions I can address those; otherwise I would stand and recommend approval of the resolution awarding the sale of bonds. And one last comment: the final paramount is 2,235,000. That is less than the resolution that was in your council packet because these bonds were bid with premium. The underwriter is paying you more than the paramount because the coupons on these bonds will be higher. That premium was used to reduce the power amount; you did not need it and staff did not recommend that it be used for construction costs. With that, Mayor and Council, I would be happy to answer any questions that you may have. Thank you. [13:57] **Councilmember Jen Fox:** Thank you, Tammy. Is this like as low as it possibly gets, pretty much? Because it seems pretty amazing to me. [14:04] **Tammy Omdahl:** Bonds are structured cereal, so each maturity—every year you pay off principal—has a different interest rate. When you look in the market and you compare yourself to another city that issued bonds, you have to understand a little bit more what they were issuing in the terms. Yours were 10 years; that's a relatively short term. The city amortizes its debt rapidly; that's reflected in your rating. That's a credit positive. And so over that 10 years, it's a shorter term. A lot of times cities will go 20, in some cases 25. You benefit from that shorter term because the rates are lower. So can it go lower? It depends on the structure of the bond. But this is—we're at historic lows. In your packet, there were a couple charts that I gave you showing where 2021 bond rates are year to date. We use the Bond Buyer Index as an example. And then there is a second chart that shows from 2000 to today where rates are at. Each year I think I'm saying we're at the historic low, and as you will see on that chart, we are at historic lows. [15:15] **Councilmember Jen Fox:** Oh my god. Yeah, now I see it. Yes, you have that chart there. Thank you for the good news. [15:23] **Mayor Mary Fasbender:** Any other discussion, Council? Okay, at this point, for this item, I'd look for a motion to accept approval of the resolution providing issuance and sale of $2,235,000 General Obligation Bonds Series 2021A. [15:47] **Councilmember Vaughan:** So moved. [15:48] **Councilmember Jen Fox:** Second. [16:10] **Mayor Mary Fasbender:** Councilmember Vaughan, Councilmember Fox. Any other additional discussion? All those in favor say aye. (Aye). Opposed say nay. That motion prevails. Next, we have a resolution for limitation of water usage, and for this item we have a brief introduction by City Administrator Dan Wietecha. [16:35] **Dan Wietecha:** At our last meeting, following some guidance from the Department of Natural Resources as well as obviously everybody's experience with the heat and dryness and pumping records with the Public Works department, we recommended, like many municipalities in the area, putting in place some limitations on water usage. Particularly during the daytime hours from 11:00 AM to 6:00 PM in the evening. With that also was maintaining the existing odd-even address irrigation system. The intent was that any enforcement would take an education approach first before levying any sort of citation, and that's what the Council adopted two weeks ago. Subsequently, Councilmember Folch recognized that a number of nonprofits—particularly associated with school athletics—had previously scheduled car wash fundraisers, and she asked that this be brought back to the agenda tonight. [18:00] **Mayor Mary Fasbender:** Thank you, Dan. Councilmember Folch. [18:15] **Councilmember Folch:** Thank you, Your Honor. Here this evening are representatives from the Hastings Football Boosters, and could I ask for a moment for them to be recognized so they could speak? [18:28] **Mayor Mary Fasbender:** Sure, Council. [18:35] **Bob Hartman:** Mayor, Council, my name is Bob Hartman, Hastings Football Connection. Like mentioned, for many years we've done a car wash as a fundraiser. Last year it was postponed due to COVID, and now this year possibly postponed due to weather. We're looking for a variance on Sunday, August 22nd from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM to do a car wash for a fundraiser for the Hastings Football Connections, which helps out the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th-grade football teams. It'll be held at the Green Mill parking lot. It's players, like I said, from 9th grade to 12th grade interacting all together, volunteer parents, and the parking lot is donated by the Green Mill. So I would entertain any questions. Thank you. [19:35] **Councilmember Jen Fox:** My question is just for the time frame. Is it a normal amount of time to do it for—I thought I heard you say 10 to 10—but 10 to 4? I recall them being kind of in the morning hours. Has this changed recently? Do you need more time because you need to raise more money, or is this typically the time that you would do it? [20:00] **Bob Hartman:** I think our club is a little bit different because we have more players that volunteer. Volleyball, soccer, cross country—they have a smaller amount of participants. So to get that many players for 10:00 to 4:00, it's a little difficult. But like I said, we pull in the 9th graders, 10th graders, 11th graders, 12th graders, mix them all together, and freshmen get to meet the upperclassmen during this. It's kind of a social benefit also. [20:30] **Councilmember Jen Fox:** That was going to be my next question—is it an opportunity to do some team building for the different grades to interact? And so, yeah, you answered that. Thank you. [20:45] **Bob Hartman:** I thought I said 10 to 10, sorry. I misspoke. 10:00 to 4:00. [20:55] **Mayor Mary Fasbender:** Approximately how much water is used during the event? Do you have like huge fire hoses out there? Is it just a couple garden hoses? [21:10] **Bob Hartman:** No, we just go off the building spigot from the Green Mill. We split it into a bunch of different hoses. Depending on the weather—if it's raining, which maybe this will bring rain—it depends on the flow of the people. Sometimes we have to break into two groups because the traffic is coming through, but it all depends on how many people show up. But we usually have one to two stations set up coming off one spigot from the building. [21:35] **Mayor Mary Fasbender:** Okay, thank you. So it's not a huge amount of water. [21:38] **Bob Hartman:** It's not. No, the water's not running constantly. We have the spray nozzles on there. [21:41] **Councilmember Vaughan:** Thank you, Your Honor. Have we heard from any other organizations, and is this resolution for any nonprofit that wants to do one during this window of time? I just want to make sure that we understand that there could be many. [22:15] **Dan Wietecha:** Your Honor, members of the Council, this was drafted so that it would allow any other nonprofits to also be able to have the exemption for fundraising efforts during this time. We know that fall fundraising is kind of important to the schools and, like you said, last year you weren't able to do anything. We felt like it was a limited enough exception that it should be available to all nonprofits and not just the football boosters. [22:35] **Councilmember Folch:** Thank you. That's what I was just going to say—that I had asked for it to be for all nonprofits. In conversation, I think a couple of the other teams are having car washes as well in other locations sometime in August. I don't know what all the details are of that, but if there's no other questions then I'd accept a motion. [23:05] **Councilmember Jen Fox:** I just have one point of clarification. Will other nonprofits or organizations need to come forward in front of Council? Okay, this just clears it up. The language is generic because it just basically says that there's an amendment to the resolution that we already passed that says this resolution does not prohibit car wash fundraisers conducted by a nonprofit organization. [23:22] **Mayor Mary Fasbender:** Mr. Hartman, thank you for being here. I hope we can all make it to it. [23:35] **Councilmember Folch:** Your Honor, I'd like to move the resolution to approve the nonprofit car washes. [23:40] **Councilmember Jen Fox:** Second. [23:55] **Mayor Mary Fasbender:** Any additional new discussion? All those in favor signify by saying aye. (Aye). Opposed? And that motion prevails. Tonight, thank you Bob and good luck. Let's hope the weather is not raining so you can make lots of money, but we need rain. Okay, for this item, we will have an introduction by Deputy Chief Dave Wilske, and he will go over our resolution for an Emergency Operation Plan. Welcome, Dave. [24:15] **Dave Wilske:** Thank you Mayor, City Council, city leaders. Tonight I come to you in my role as the Emergency Manager, but I don't have an Emergency Manager shirt, so I went with my police shirt; I apologize for that. I do have a brief PowerPoint that I'd like to go through just to explain what the resolution entails and what it is for. Every couple years we update our Emergency Operations Plan, and we would like approval based off of the plan and the PowerPoint today. [24:53] **Dave Wilske:** First of all, the reason for the plan: pretty self-explanatory, but there's tornadoes, floods, blizzards. In the last couple years, we've pulled this plan out. Right now we're in a drought—probably things that we haven't really thought about in the past. In addition: major disasters such as transportation or man-made type disasters, explosions, hazardous materials, pipeline leaks, disease outbreaks, terrorist attacks, etc. This plan is really needed to ensure the protection of the public. [25:39] **Dave Wilske:** The City of Hastings has a lot of capabilities and resources at our disposal. Oftentimes in times of disaster, we can handle those within our own group of employees; sometimes we have to go outside. The purpose of this plan is to ensure the effective, coordinated use of these resources to maximize and protect life and property, prepare for and respond to emergencies, and recover to a state of normalcy and ensure the continuity of government. When we look at the organization, existing government is the basis of emergency operations. That is, government agencies will perform the emergency activities they perform on a day-to-day basis. [26:26] **Dave Wilske:** Looking at the organizational chart, we'd have the Mayor at the top, and then we have our emergency management coordination, which generally is led by the Police and Fire Chief. We have our community relations coordinator and then City Administrator to assist in running day-to-day functions. Everyone on here has a role. In terms of hazard analysis, situations include natural disasters like tornadoes and straight-line winds. Severe hail, thunderstorms, ice storms, large rainfalls, drought, earthquake—and then mayfly hatch. Now, mayfly hatch we do laugh about, but would we enact the plan? We might. This year we had to call out the plows and plow the bridge. [27:57] **Dave Wilske:** Regarding human-created situations: transportation, trains, trucks, bridges. Large structure collapses, utility failure—water, sewer, gas, electric. If we have a situation like that, Public Works would likely be the incident commander. If we have a large structure fire, Fire would be the incident commander. Then we have national security, terrorism, and man-made situations which include bombs, mass homicide, hostages. For the most part, the Police Department would be the incident commander for those. [28:42] **Dave Wilske:** We look at probabilities. Most likely to occur: tornado, straight-line winds, thunderstorms, winter storms, utility failures, mayfly hatch. Less likely: wildfires, prolonged fog, earthquakes, enemy military invasion. In terms of direction and control, the Mayor would be responsible for providing overall direction and control of city government resources. In addition, the Mayor or designee will brief City Council members on incident details. The response will be carried out at the EOC (Emergency Operations Center). This is currently at the Police Department; it was at the Fire Department as our primary, but we moved it to the Police Department because it's technologically more advanced. Fire is now our secondary. [31:00] **Dave Wilske:** Each agency must keep their own records in regards to hours worked and equipment used. For state and federal support, the team is responsible for obtaining county, state, and federal resources. Emergency assistance usually is through the State Duty Officer. The National Guard can only be called in by the Governor, and we'd rely on the Mayor to make that call. This plan is reviewed and updated biannually. It was ready to go last year, but because of COVID, we waited until this year. I am requesting that the Hastings City Council approve the updated Emergency Operations Plan and resolution. [33:22] **Councilmember Jen Fox:** Is the Emergency Operations Plan considered a public document that anybody can see? My understanding is there is information in there that is confidential in nature. Is this something someone could just come and say, "Can I see your plan?" or do we have certain information inside that needs to be protected? [33:45] **Dave Wilske:** It is not a public document. I don't want to speak on behalf of the attorney, but I can say that it is not available to the public. If somebody were to come and request it, we would not give that plan to them. [34:08] **Councilmember Folch:** Thank you, Your Honor. I've never seen the Emergency Operations Plan and I'd love to see it. I had some questions looking at your slides. Your organizational chart for the incident command—I was a little concerned because it didn't follow the traditional ICS/NIMS organizational chart. It looks like the incident commander is the Mayor. I know enough to know that if you're the incident commander, you should also be having to go through the various training requirements like IS-100, 200, 700, 800. I'm concerned about that if what you're showing us is just for illustration purposes or if there's really a true incident command structure that's going to be used. [35:15] **Dave Wilske:** Well, what I can say is since the Mayor would be the one to declare an emergency—and generally emergencies are three days or less in length—she would be at the top of the podium. As far as the incident command itself, although the Mayor would obviously be invited into that room, chances are it's either going to be Police or Fire or somebody else that would be it. It'd be more of a unified command concept, but the decisions that were made would be run by the Mayor. [35:42] **Councilmember Folch:** Well, in my experience, the Mayor is typically not the incident commander for an emergency situation. I have a lot of concern about whoever the Mayor would be not just you, Mary, but whoever it would be—that they would be qualified to run an incident. I have seen charts where elected officials are a policy arm leading into who the incident commander is in an advisory role, but I have angst about thinking of the Mayor as incident commander because the Mayor doesn't have authority amongst themselves, besides declaring the emergency, to actually allocate resources in that technical way. This doesn't follow NIMS protocol. [37:15] **Councilmember Folch:** When an event is actually triggered—like a pandemic—it should be an appendix. When we had the E. coli scare a couple years ago, I asked why the plan wasn't enacted. I was told the City Administrator consulted the Fire Chief and the Chief decided it didn't rise to the occasion. I thought that was troublesome. I think it's a good idea to have the City Council looped into the decision-making process as to really what warrants the triggering of the all-incident hazard plan. We were notified, but we weren't involved. I would love to see a training exercise where the Council is actually incorporated, like a tabletop exercise, so we know how we would work with the true incident commander. [40:50] **Dave Wilske:** In regards to the pandemic plan, that is now an annex in there. Regarding training, there is some training that will be coming up hopefully this year through Dakota County Emergency Management. In regards to a tabletop, we can talk about that. If we bring you together in a room, the incident commander will be speaking to the Mayor, and the Mayor will brief City Council. We do that because we don't want all the City Council members in the incident command room; it just gets too convoluted. We only can have a select group of people in there. [41:52] **Councilmember Folch:** I'm not sure if Mayor Fasbender has taken actually any of the incident command training. Mayor, have you taken any? [42:10] **Mayor Mary Fasbender:** No. [42:12] **Councilmember Folch:** See, there you go. It seems to me that whoever that person is should be fully prepared and staff should be required to take the core classes. I just think there's some room to strengthen our plan and our response. [43:26] **Councilmember Vaughan:** Thank you, Your Honor. It's been a few years, but the Fire Department put on like a two-night training where we actually got a binder and it kind of went through the command. Council was more to approve the money if we needed it. That training was really well done; I think that was good for me. [44:06] **Councilmember Jen Fox:** I was trying to recall if I had been in any training sessions; I've been in at least two in my tenure. Maybe the takeaway is just that we could have a workshop. My question really is: does that kind of gathering trigger data practices problems? If we have the whole council together, doesn't it need to be a public meeting? [44:52] **Dan Wietecha:** Your Honor, members of the Council, as the Deputy Chief mentioned, this is private data. It's only on a need-to-know basis. It can be discussed by the Council as a whole in a closed session. There is an exception under the Open Meeting Law for security data. I think it's a good idea to put this on pause, hold a work session in a closed meeting, and kind of sink your teeth into it a little bit. [46:15] **Dave Wilske:** It's a little over 500 pages long, but to get an accurate snapshot, I would assume we need at least an hour. [46:25] **Mayor Mary Fasbender:** Okay, we will put it on a workshop in our future. We don't need a motion because we're not accepting the plan yet. Is that okay, Dan? [46:50] **Dan Wietecha:** I would recommend just for clarification purposes, because it's on the agenda, to just continue it to a work session. [47:13] **Mayor Mary Fasbender:** Okay. Next under Administration, we have Dan Wietecha going over our IT Manager wage scale. [47:25] **Dan Wietecha:** Thank you, Mayor. The city's adopted policy for decades is to base our wage scale on the average paid by cities with a population between 15,000 and 35,000 in the seven-county metro area. We have a vacancy as of this weekend in our IT Manager position. As we were looking at updating that job description, we also looked at the wages. There's a typo in the memo, but the numbers in the chart are correct: we're about $20,000 low. Rather than advertising a non-competitive wage, I recommend that we adjust the wage scale tonight so that we can advertise that position at a higher range. It is possible it would be within the 2021 budget depending on how long the position is vacant. [50:00] **Councilmember Jen Fox:** I would move to approve the adjustment in wage scale for the IT Manager position. I think it's critical to hire people at the wage that they should earn. [50:18] **Councilmember Folch:** Second. [50:37] **Mayor Mary Fasbender:** All those in favor signify by saying aye. (Aye). Opposed? And that motion prevails. Dan, you may continue for the compensation and classification study. [51:00] **Dan Wietecha:** Thank you. As Councilmember Vaughan pointed out, this is an important one. The last time we formally, comprehensively looked across all our positions was over 20 years ago, and the last significant review was 15 years ago. We're certainly seeing examples where our wage scale appears to be off. We don't want to keep doing "one-offs" because they potentially set up disparities internally and pay equity issues. We have seen departing employees saying wage differences were a factor. I think it does have a real impact on our ability to recruit and retain. I recommend that this be referred to the Administration Committee—Councilmembers Lund, Fox, and Leifeld—to discuss and bring back a recommendation. [53:42] **Councilmember Vaughan:** I just want to make sure the committee looks at the tax income that's able to compensate. One of the concerns I have is where a resident-based tax is heavier than commercial. I want to make sure we do a full study and look at all compensation—overtime, hazard pay, etc.—and not just compare this city to other cities that are comparable in size. [55:17] **Councilmember Folch:** Thank you, Your Honor. I just have to say, I have recently gone through this where my employer did a compensation study. It is a whole can of worms you're about to open up. It is awful. It gives the staff a lot of angst. I'd highly recommend making sure that you use a reputable firm that has experience with Minnesota cities. In the end, the Council has to make a policy decision. Are you aiming for the 50th percentile or the 90th? You have to be ready for the fact that some staff get their salary frozen for years until the rest of the staff catches up. It's so much angst among the staff and it'll be considerable with union negotiations. It's not an answer to everything. [58:22] **Councilmember Jen Fox:** I guess my position here is that more data is better than less data. If we know where we're fairly compensating and where we aren't, that gives us an opportunity to do something about it. I recognize this is different from the private sector, but there are other benefits—like flexible working from home—that aren't monetarily taxing to the employer. I would challenge the committee to think creatively about what we might be able to offer. [59:57] **Mayor Mary Fasbender:** I’ll ask for a motion to refer the matter to the Administration Committee. [1:00:10] **Councilmember Jen Fox:** So moved. [1:00:15] **Councilmember Vaughan:** Second. [1:00:20] **Councilmember Jen Fox:** Your Honor, I appreciate the insight. I believe Councilmember Lund, Councilmember Leifeld, and myself can come to this with many different perspectives. We will work closely with Kelly and Dan to ease any anxiety because that is very real. But I'm excited for the conversation because it is really critical to retain talented workers. [1:01:25] **Mayor Mary Fasbender:** All those in favor signify by saying aye. (Aye). And opposed? That motion prevails. We will do reports and announcements at this time. [1:01:50] **Councilmember Folch:** Thank your Honor. I had a council concern. I was hoping that on the next agenda we could be given an update on the status of the Hastings landmark signs—the "Welcome to Hastings" signs on Highway 55 and 61. They're quite outdated and there's three feet of weeds growing around them. I would personally like to have them removed if possible; I think they're unsightly. [1:03:04] **Mayor Mary Fasbender:** Thank you, Councilmember Folch. Tomorrow night is National Night Out, starting at 5:30 to 7:30. There's a community event at Lions Park. Thursday, August 5th is Music in the Park. Tuesday, August 10th is Performance in the Park. Friday, August 13th is Movie in the Park—the movie is "Babe." Saturday, August 14th is Bike with the Ranger. Meetings coming up: Monday, August 9th is Planning Commission; Tuesday, August 10th is Park and Rec; Monday, August 16th is City Council; and Tuesday, August 17th is Finance Committee. [1:04:15] **Mayor Mary Fasbender:** We will be closing the meeting as authorized by Minnesota Statute 13D.05, subdivision 3a, to discuss the performance evaluation of the City Administrator. I will therefore seek a motion to move into a closed-door meeting on that basis. [1:04:36] **Councilmember Fox:** So moved.