[0:00] Speaker Name: [Music] [0:56] Mayor Luke Hellier: Good evening and welcome to the October 7th city council meeting. If you'll join me for a moment of silence in the pledge of— [1:15] Mayor Luke Hellier: 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. All right, Ms. Orlofsky, roll call please. [1:20] City Clerk Ann Orlofsky: Michelle Volk? Here. Luke Hellier? Here. John Bermel? Here. Dan Wolter? Here. Joshua Lee? Here. [1:25] Mayor Luke Hellier: Okay, we'll now move on to item number three, citizens' comments. Is there anybody from the audience who'd like to address the council? Okay. And moving on to item four, additional agenda information. Mr. Miller? [1:45] City Administrator Justin Miller: Nothing at this time, Mayor. [1:55] Mayor Luke Hellier: Okay, and we will dive right into our Public Works quarterly report, and I'll turn it over to our Public Works Director, Mr. Paul Oehme. [2:09] Public Works Director Paul Oehme: Good evening, Mayor and City Council members. This is the third quarter report for Public Works. I'd like to start off with some improvement projects that are wrapping up this year. On Dodd Boulevard street improvements, this is a joint project with Dakota County on a turnback project on Dodd Boulevard. The segment one, as shown here, that's been open since about the end of July, and stage two is ready to be opened here in October 18th—we're projecting right now, weather permitting. They are finishing up the restoration of that section of roadway right now, and they will be putting down the wear course here pretty quick, so it'll be nice to have that section of road open up here shortly. We did hold an open house for the County Road 50 and I-35 interchange study. About 150 people attended that open house on September 9th. We did get some good feedback and some good comments that we will try to incorporate into the design. We are going to try to nail down an alignment here early next year and then have another open house shortly thereafter to let the public know about some improvements that hopefully will be shortly coming. The street reconstruction project for this year is wrapping up as well. We're about 85% complete with that project. Only segments of the project that are left are 205th Street and Italy, 102nd and 101st Street. Those two sections of road are anticipated to be completed by the first week of November. The Well 23 project off of 190th Street, the drilling work is now complete with that project. We are looking at cleaning the site work shortly, hopefully we'll start that up at the end of the month. That project—the electrical building, pipe work, and installing the pump—will take place at that time, and then the project will be substantially complete in the spring of 2025. For utilities, repainting of central maintenance on the water tower is now complete. That tower was down for about 8 weeks for recoating, interior and exterior, and I'm glad to have that tower back operational. The water efficiency grant that we did receive this year has been underway since July. We did receive a bunch of residents requesting rebates, and you can see the totals here. We are looking at maybe making modifications to the grant program next year to include some other aspects of rebates for water efficiency, so stay tuned for that. Also in utilities, water use for the year through September 30th is down compared to what it was in 2023. We're down about 23% from 2023 numbers. This can be attributed mainly to the wet summer that we had. Then, utility locates is way up this year, about up 11% from 2023. This is due to the fact that we have two fiber optic companies in town now installing fiber optic in residential neighborhoods, so we are busy working on that project right now. For the Streets Division updates: we are in full swing with our fall activities—tree removals, patching potholes as need be before the snow flies, street sweeping as need be as well, getting our equipment ready for the snow and ice season. Moving on to environmental resources: a quick update on East Lake. As you know, this has been a couple-year project we've been working on to remove as much of the invasive fish from the lake as possible, mainly carp and goldfish that are in East Lake that are hampering the water quality. This is a joint project between Vermillion Watershed and Dakota County through a Bowser grant that we received. Just this year alone, we've removed almost 2,800 lbs of invasive species fish from the lake, and we're going to do another seining next year as well to try to get more of the fish out of the lake. Once the fish are out, we hope we'll see some good benefits: improved habitat for native species, less phosphorous loading in the lake quality, and enhancing the recreational value of the park and the lake. "Imagine a Day Without Water" is scheduled for October 18th over MEA week. This is open to all ages. We're going to be talking about where Lakeville's water comes from, how it's treated, how much water a typical house would use in their landscaping, and tips on how to conserve water as well. Also, people can take a tour of the water treatment plant. If anyone's interested in getting involved, they can go to the city's website and pre-register for that event. Just a quick update on the MS4 permit process: we did add a software package to our MS4 inspection for this year. It's been a great tool for us for inspection and working with developers and contractors and the ability to submit and correct site issues as they come up. This program just started up in July, and we've had over 100 inspections already on development sites and other projects. We have been working on a storm sewer maintenance joint project between Environmental Services and Facilities to fill some unneeded manholes within our storm sewer system that are less than 3 feet deep and have little water quality benefits. So we've been removing the sediment from those basins and filling them with concrete through our different departments. This will help streamline our MS4 permitting and basically help with less maintenance for our systems. We did about 60 some manholes this year, and then next year we'll probably try to do about the same amount. Our environmental educator for the summer did a great job with leading the Explorer program at Ritter Farm. We did have a bunch of educational events scheduled on Fridays through the Parks and Recreation Department at our Mooers Environmental Learning Center, educating all ages on different aspects of environmental stewardship. She also provided assistance with vegetation management inspections when she wasn't working on outreach projects. Moving on to the Forestry Division: EAB and our Shade Tree Ordinance. Through the fall inspection, we are anticipating removing another 130 ash trees from the right-of-way over the winter months. We did inject 841 trees that we would like to keep for EAB management within our rights-of-way and parks. For private ash trees, we did work with 240 private property owners to remove trees that are infested with EAB under this year's ordinance work. We did finish up our 2024-2025 private ash tree inspections, and we did find another 640 properties that have infested trees, so we're going to be working with those property owners. We still partner with Rainbow Tree Care if property owners want to save their ash trees at a bulk rate through the city. For our EAB Grant: as Council knows, we did receive almost $340,000 for removal of infested ash trees within our parks. This fall, we're going to be removing 58 trees from our park system and then replacing them with about 116 trees of various varieties throughout our parks. It's about a 2-to-1 replacement ratio. In the Forestry Division, we did add additional staff. Grace Benson started with us in September as our new Forestry Tech; she comes to us from the city of Minnetonka. Michelle Tyberg is our new Climate Impact Coordinator. Remember, this is a one-year term through the AmeriCorps program, and she will be assisting forestry and environmental staff. Additional outreach: we had our first annual tree identification walk at Ritter Farm Park in September. That was a great event, and we're going to plan to have that again next year. Real quickly, Facilities assisted the Liquor Department with installing and bidding out a sign for the Keokuk liquor store that faces I-35 for better exposure to traffic. Then just highlighting some upcoming events: Paper Shredding on October 19th from 9:00 a.m. to noon at the Central Maintenance Facility. Pumpkin Composting at the police station on November 2nd and 3rd. Shoe Recycling at Fire Station 1 on November 11th through the 18th. Holiday Lighting recycling at City Hall and all our liquor stores from November to January. Ongoing recycling of furniture and mattresses; we have a grant or rebate through Dakota County for mattress drop-off at the Burnsville site that ends on December 20th. Sports equipment drop-off at Ames Arena all year long, pharmaceutical disposal at the police station, and food scrap drop-off at the water treatment plant. With that, that's my update for Public Works, and I stand for any questions. [14:15] Mayor Luke Hellier: Okay, thank you very much. Any questions or comments? Okay, thank you, Paul. Have a great evening. Moving on to item six, our consent agenda. Is there anything you'd like to highlight, Mr. Miller? [14:32] City Administrator Justin Miller: Thank you, Mayor and Council. A few items: Item 6G is the appointment to the Youth Advisory Commission. You interviewed these candidates I believe last week or two weeks ago. Item 6H is a donation of just over $24,000 from the Lakeville Public Safety Foundation to the Fire Department for an adult-sized training mannequin. Also with the Fire Department, item 6R is a $5 million grant from the Department of Homeland Security for a SAFER grant. This is going to help pay for 15 new full-time firefighters in the city, so we're very thankful for that. Lastly, item 6T is a master agreement with the Lakeville Baseball Association for facility use and sponsorships, specifically for improvements at Grand Park. [15:19] Mayor Luke Hellier: Okay, very good. Council, any item you want to discuss further? If not, I'll take a motion to approve the consent agenda. [15:30] Councilmember John Bermel: I move to approve the consent agenda. [15:32] Councilmember Dan Wolter: Second. [15:33] Mayor Luke Hellier: Any further discussion about the consent agenda? I see none. All those in favor say aye. (Ayes). Opposed? We have passed the consent agenda. We'll now move on to item 7A, public hearing for the proposed 2025-2029 Capital Improvement Plan, Street Reconstruction Plan, and the intent to issue GEO Street Reconstruction bonds and GEO Capital Improvement bonds. I don't know which one of you gets to go first. [16:06] Finance Director Julie Stahl: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'm going to start us off. We're going to do a little tag team here with Zach and I. This is part of our public hearing process for adopting our CIP, the street reconstruction plan, and then the official intent to reimburse when we do issue bonds. First off, I want to thank City staff and the council. This is a long process and a lot of work goes into it. We start in May and go all the way through now in October. Just a reminder: the CIP is a planning document; it's not our budget. We still bring projects and equipment requests to council for feasibility reports and approval. The 2025 projects in the CIP document are pretty firm, but they still require budget approval, and our future years are an indicator of what's coming up, but those can certainly change in timeline or cost. We brought the preliminary draft to the council at the August 26th work session, and then it went to the Planning Commission on September 19th. What we're showing here is the complete project summary of the entire CIP for the five years—$316 million. What we focus on right now is the 2025 projects at $66.8 million. This includes the street reconstruction plan and street collector rehabilitations. These are the pieces we plan to bond for in 2025. There are special assessments that also come into play. With that, I'm going to let Zach jump in here. [19:44] City Engineer Zach Johnson: All right, my apologies. Mayor and council members, this is a story map that we created that shares the story about the 2025-2029 City of Lakeville CIP. It's been shared with you at the work session and at the Planning Commission. I'll just highlight a few of the projects here. As Director Stahl said, this is very much a living document. We have our annual street reconstruction projects scheduled for construction in 2025. The expansion of 185th Street between Kenwood Trail and Ipava Avenue is still on schedule for construction starting next spring—going from two lanes to four. We received a Safe Routes to School grant for this. The county has programmed a roundabout at the intersection of Hamburg and County Road 50. We had it programmed for 2026, but in the last 7 to 10 days, we're feeling a higher level of confidence that this will actually be constructed next year. The freight rail car storage and transload facility is a carryover; we did push this project back. This is a city-county partnership with the extension of County Road 9 from 179th Street to Berkshire, pushed to 2026. Another project we pushed back one year is the Holyoke Avenue modernization from City Hall to the water tower at 190th Street. This will urbanize the roadway, get rid of ditches, and add trails and a pedestrian underpass. Dodd Boulevard modernization is scheduled for 2027—that's the piece south of 50 and 210th Street. We'd also look at the intersection of County Road 50 and Dodd Boulevard; that traffic signal is aging and requires replacement. Then finishing out Dodd Boulevard south of 210th to County Road 70 is programmed for 2028. Regarding the County Road 50 and I-35 interchange: we're making good progress. Based upon our current engineering design, we're looking at a 2028-2029 build. We're still trying to secure dollars for this. Within the next four to six weeks, we should have a good idea of what the layout would look like. For Parks and Rec, we have the completion of two collaborative Greenways with the county: the North Creek branch and Farm. This will complete a trail segment all the way to County Road 46 over 2025 and 2026. This will complete the segment between the Minnesota Zoo and Farmington. Also scheduled for 2026 is the extension of the Lake Marion Greenway going east, crossing Kendrick Avenue, and connecting to Holyoke Avenue and downtown. For utilities: lift station 26 should be operable in 2025. We have the painting of Dakota Heights water tower in 2026. Based upon anticipated growth, we expect to construct Wells 24 and 25 in 2028. For facilities: the Fleet Center is actively in design and programmed for 25-26 construction. We also have the Central Maintenance Facility expansion and the Water Treatment Facility expansion scheduled for 2027. [28:15] Finance Director Julie Stahl: Thank you. I just wanted to explain the pieces that are going to be levied in addition to the bonding. These are incorporated into the preliminary levy. We had some changes with Council's direction to bring the levy down. We backed $200,000 in equipment and $100,000 in facilities out of the preliminary levy to get the overall levy underneath 10% when we took out the park referendum. There is fund balance available for those projects in 2025 and 2026. With the bonding we're looking at for 2025: street reconstruction would be $4.1 million, street collector roadways $83,000, and the Fleet Center at $17.8 million. The total bonding for 2025 would be $22,620,000. I wanted to lay out that the total project for the Fleet training facility is roughly $24.7 million. Taking out the state grant of $7.2 million and the federal grant of $800,000 leaves the City contribution at $17.8 million. We are looking at bidding after the first of the year and starting construction in April. I'll open up for public comment and questions. [31:25] Mayor Luke Hellier: Okay, Council, any questions or comments before we move on? This is a public hearing, so if anybody in the public has a comment, please offer your name and address. [31:35] Troy Fort: My name's Troy Fort, 20699 Hazelwood Trail. I applaud your improvements. Move that Hamburg intersection to the top. If you could allow higher speeds on 205th Street while that's going on, that'd be perfect—I'm kidding. This is my first time talking to the city council. Good to see you all. Part of what I wanted to comment on is your use of my money. Great use of federal money—also my money. Try to keep it to a minimum; I don't like my property taxes going up too high. One thing I wanted to address: all of these expenditures are audited on a super regular basis, right? Hardcore audits by someone outside? Do you know if there's any section of the government that we don't audit? Do you know about the elections? The elections are almost completely unaudited. How much of your city budget do you audit? [33:15] Mayor Luke Hellier: I'm happy to have the conversation, but the public hearing is specifically for the Capital Improvement stuff. We had our public comment at the beginning of the meeting at six o'clock. I'm happy to talk to you about election stuff after the meeting. If you hang out to the end of the meeting, we'll connect. [33:55] Troy Fort: Absolutely. Great on the Capital Improvements. Thank you, being my first meeting here, I'm stoked. [34:00] Mayor Luke Hellier: Thank you. Any other Capital Improvement public hearing comments? Okay, I will entertain a motion to close the public hearing. [34:10] Councilmember Dan Wolter: So moved. [34:12] Councilmember Michelle Volk: Second. [34:15] Mayor Luke Hellier: All those in favor say aye. (Ayes). All opposed? The public hearing is now closed. We need three separate motions, please. [34:37] Councilmember John Bermel: I move to approve the resolution adopting the five-year Capital Improvement plan 2025-2029 and approving the issuance of General Obligation Capital Improvement bonds. [35:05] Councilmember Michelle Volk: Second. [35:07] Mayor Luke Hellier: Any further discussion? Joshua? [35:10] Councilmember Joshua Lee: Just a comment and an acknowledgement to our committees. Even though this is not a budget, it did have an impact on the financial long-term planning that is simultaneously happening. For residents following along, you may want to tune into the work session where we talked about that long-term financial plan. Many of us were pleased to see where we're headed long-term even amidst these substantial improvements. [36:15] Mayor Luke Hellier: Thank you. Any other comments? Ms. Orlofsky, roll call please. [36:20] City Clerk Ann Orlofsky: Michelle Volk? Aye. Luke Hellier? Aye. John Bermel? Aye. Dan Wolter? Aye. Joshua Lee? Aye. [36:30] Mayor Luke Hellier: Okay, now I will take a motion on the five-year Street Reconstruction plan. [36:38] Councilmember John Bermel: I don't want to hog the motion, but I move to approve the resolution adopting the five-year Street Reconstruction plan 2025-2029 and approving the issuance of General Obligation Street Reconstruction bonds. [36:50] Councilmember Dan Wolter: Second. [36:52] Mayor Luke Hellier: Any further discussion? Seeing none, roll call please. [37:00] City Clerk Ann Orlofsky: Luke Hellier? Aye. John Bermel? Aye. Dan Wolter? Aye. Joshua Lee? Aye. Michelle Volk? Aye. [37:10] Mayor Luke Hellier: And finally, I'll entertain a motion on the resolution declaring the official intent of the city on certain expenditures. [37:15] Councilmember Joshua Lee: Move to approve the resolution declaring the official intent of the City of Lakeville to reimburse certain expenditures from the proceeds of bonds to be issued by the city. [37:30] Councilmember Michelle Volk: Second. [37:32] Mayor Luke Hellier: Any further discussion? Seeing none, roll call please. [37:40] City Clerk Ann Orlofsky: John Bermel? Aye. Dan Wolter? Aye. Joshua Lee? Aye. Michelle Volk? Aye. Luke Hellier? Aye. [37:50] Mayor Luke Hellier: Very good. Moving on to Item B, the Cedar Hills North comprehensive plan and zoning map amendments. Mr. Troskey, good evening. [38:10] Steve Troskey: Good evening. Steve Troskey with Lennar Homes. Happy to be back in Lakeville. We're excited for the opportunity to provide more housing options. You're probably going to see a lot of me in the coming months. Tonight I would just ask for your support for a comprehensive plan amendment and a rezoning. After Ms. Goodroad gives more details, I'm happy to answer questions. [38:35] Mayor Luke Hellier: Very good, thank you. Ms. Goodroad. [38:40] Community Development Director Tina Goodroad: Good evening. As Mr. Troskey stated, Lennar has applied for comprehensive plan and zoning text amendments. We've been working on a preliminary plat named Cedar Hills North. This will be in front of the Planning Commission in November. This application involves minor changes to the land use and underlying zoning. On the map, the west side is medium-high density residential (RM3) and the east side is low-medium density residential (RST2). Because of a pipeline and channel realignment, we wanted to minimize crossings. So, this area is being changed from medium-high density to low density residential, and this other portion is going from low-medium to medium-high density where townhomes are located. The Met Council gets very precise in density calculations, and these modifications shifted the density. The plan includes 89 single-family lots and 144 townhome lots. The Planning Commission held a public hearing on September 5th; there was no public comment and they unanimously recommended approval. [41:40] Mayor Luke Hellier: Okay, Council, any questions? It seems like a pretty reasonable request to do a swap. I will take a motion—we need four-fifths on this. [42:00] Councilmember John Bermel: I move to approve number one, a resolution amending the 2040 comprehensive land use map, and number two, an ordinance amending a zoning map and adoption of findings of fact for Cedar Hills North. [42:25] Councilmember Dan Wolter: Second. [42:27] Mayor Luke Hellier: Any further discussion? Roll call please. [42:35] City Clerk Ann Orlofsky: Dan Wolter? Aye. Joshua Lee? Aye. Michelle Volk? Aye. Luke Hellier? Aye. John Bermel? Aye. [42:45] Mayor Luke Hellier: Very good, we look forward to seeing more. Unfinished and new business, seeing none. Our next city council meeting is October 21st, and the next work session is Monday, October 28th, in the new Marion Conference Room. I will take a motion to adjourn. [43:04] Councilmember Dan Wolter: So moved. [43:06] Councilmember Michelle Volk: Second. [43:10] Mayor Luke Hellier: All those in favor say aye. (Ayes). Opposed? We are adjourned. [43:23] Speaker Name: [Music]