[0:01] [Music] [0:10] [Music] [0:22] [Music] [0:39] [Music] [0:51] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Good evening and welcome to the January 6 city council meeting. And before we start, we will do the oath of office to our Council members if you guys want to [head] down there and Ann will swear you in. [1:20] **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** All right. I solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the United States... [1:31] **Councilmembers:** ...that I will support the Constitution of the United States... [1:34] **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** ...and the constitution of the state of Minnesota... [1:37] **Councilmembers:** ...and the constitution of the state of Minnesota... [1:40] **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** ...and I will Faithfully discharge the duties of city council... [1:44] **Councilmembers:** ...and I will Faithfully discharge the duties of city council... [1:47] **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** ...for the city of Lakeville... [1:49] **Councilmembers:** ...for the city of Lakeville... [1:51] **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** ...in the county of Dakota... [1:53] **Councilmembers:** ...in the county of Dakota... [1:55] **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** ...and the state of Minnesota... [1:57] **Councilmembers:** ...and the state of Minnesota... [1:59] **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** ...to the best of my judgment ability... [2:02] **Councilmembers:** ...to the best of my judgment and ability... [2:05] **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** ...so help me God. [2:07] **Councilmembers:** ...so help me God. [2:09] **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** All right, congrats. Thank you. [2:22] **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** Raise your right hand. I, Dan Wolter... [2:25] **Councilmember Dan Wolter:** I, Dan Wolter... [2:26] **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** ...do solemnly swear... [2:28] **Councilmember Dan Wolter:** ...do solemnly swear... [2:29] **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** ...that I will support the Constitution of the United States... [2:33] **Councilmember Dan Wolter:** ...that I will support the Constitution of the United States... [2:36] **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** ...and the constitution of the state of Minnesota... [2:39] **Councilmember Dan Wolter:** ...and the constitution of the state of Minnesota... [2:42] **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** ...and I will Faithfully discharge... [2:44] **Councilmember Dan Wolter:** ...and I will Faithfully discharge... [2:46] **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** ...the duties of city council... [2:48] **Councilmember Dan Wolter:** ...the duties of city council... [2:50] **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** ...for the city of Lakeville... [2:52] **Councilmember Dan Wolter:** ...for the city of Lakeville... [2:54] **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** ...in the county of Dakota... [2:56] **Councilmember Dan Wolter:** ...in the county of Dakota... [2:58] **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** ...the state of Minnesota... [3:00] **Councilmember Dan Wolter:** ...in the state of Minnesota... [3:02] **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** ...to the best of my judgment ability... [3:05] **Councilmember Dan Wolter:** ...to the best of my judgment and ability... [3:07] **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** ...so help me God. [3:09] **Councilmember Dan Wolter:** ...so help me God. [Applause] [3:12] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Welcome back gentlemen. You now join me for a moment of silence and the Pledge of Allegiance. [3:32] **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. [3:55] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Okay. Ann, roll call please. [3:57] **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** Volk? **Councilmember Michelle Volk:** Here. **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** Luke Hellier? **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Here. **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** John Bermel? **Councilmember John Bermel:** Here. **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** Dan Wolter? **Councilmember Dan Wolter:** Here. **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** Joshua Lee? **Councilmember Joshua Lee:** Here. [4:05] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Moving on to item number three, citizens comments. This is an opportunity for anybody to address the council for up to three minutes if there's an issue. Okay. Moving on, item number four, additional agenda information. Mr. Miller? [4:15] **City Administrator Justin Miller:** Mayor and Council, there was a slight revision to item 6B on the agenda that was remittance. Councilmember Wolter's name was inadvertently left out as those being present, but those have been reflected in the record. [4:25] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Very good. Moving on to item five, our Public Works quarterly report, and we'll turn it over to our Public Works Director Mr. Oehme. Good evening. [4:48] **Public Works Director Paul Oehme:** Good evening Mayor, city council members, and happy New Year. This is our fourth quarter report for Public Works. So I'd like to start off with a couple projects that we're having in the works right now. The I-35 and County Road 50 interchange improvements—we did hold a neighborhood meeting open house for that project on December 19th and had about 40 property owners attend that. Had some great comments we received for the preferred layout. Now that we received those comments, we're looking at moving the preferred layout forward and finalizing the alignment and sending that to MnDOT for consideration. Once that's completed, we're going to be actively looking for funding for the project. It is a $50 million project estimate right now, but hopefully we can secure some of that funding in the near term here. And then if funding does come through, we're looking at construction maybe starting in 2028. [5:50] **Public Works Director Paul Oehme:** Next project is the 185th Street project from Kenwood Trail to Ipava Avenue. That project is slated to be constructed this summer. Bidding is going to be taking place early February. We are expanding the two-lane rural section roadway to a four-lane divided highway roadway consistent with the other sections of 185th Street. We are adding trail improvements and pedestrian trail improvements to both sides of the road and then also adding some turn lanes as well. So safe room for that project. [6:28] **Public Works Director Paul Oehme:** And then County Road 50 down by Hamburg—the County is looking at putting in a roundabout at that intersection this summer. That project will be let or bid out later this spring, but construction is still anticipated to take place this summer. [6:45] **Public Works Director Paul Oehme:** Moving on to the Street Division, just some highlights there. We have had a pretty slow snow and ice control operation season so far. We did have nine calls, mainly for icy road conditions, but kind of consistent with the other years in the past, but just less snow that we have to deal with. Street operations: we did meet our goals of our street sweeping areas in the city this year. Street patching has completed this fall as well and our culvert inspections were completed as we had anticipated. We are continuing our tree removal and tree trimming, especially with Emerald Ash Borer trees within our right-of-way. We have a lot of backed up demand there, so we're going to be working on that all winter long. [7:34] **Public Works Director Paul Oehme:** We did complete our fall pavement condition inventory as well. We inventory about 25% of our streets every year. I'd like to highlight that our overall condition of our roads are in fairly good condition right now. Our local roads and our collector roads are between 70 and 80, which is our goal. And again, we'll continue to have those inspections annually and monitor where our OCI is at. [8:03] **Public Works Director Paul Oehme:** For 2024, we did add a little over four miles of new streets to our system. These are new developments that we added in, and those streets are—once the developer and the city agree that they're constructed correctly—they turn them back to the city for maintenance and operations. This year we did add in a turnback for Dodd Boulevard from Cedar Avenue to Pilot Knob Road. That was a County road previously, and now the city is going to be maintaining that in the future now that the road is completed. [8:40] **Public Works Director Paul Oehme:** Moving on to the Utility Division, we did see a drop in our water production for 2024, about a 20% dip from what we saw in 2023. We did pump a little over 2.5 billion gallons this year, though. Moving on: Lead and Copper inventory was completed in October. This is a new requirement through the EPA and the Department of Health. All communities need to have an inventory of their service lines within the community completed. We did complete that again before October 16th and submitted that information to the Department of Health. [9:21] **Public Works Director Paul Oehme:** We do have a little over 23,000 services within our community. We did find that we do have unknown service materials—there are 2,600 of them, a little bit over, that we don't know the materials. So right now we have mailed out notices to those property owners and have done some door knocking too. So we knocked that 2,600 number down to about 2,300 or 2,400 service properties now. And we did find six galvanized services that were identified through that process. [10:04] **Public Works Director Paul Oehme:** Next stage is, we're going through this inventory by November of 2027. All those service unknown material service lines have to be inventoried. We're anticipating to have that inventory completed by the end of 2026, though, a little earlier than the required rules. Once that's completed, we will need to replace those galvanized lines—about 10% per year starting in 2027. They all have to be completed by 2037. But we anticipate there will be some grant dollars through the Department of Health and through the state available to help offset some of the costs for those service line replacements in the future. So stay tuned for that program. [10:55] **Public Works Director Paul Oehme:** We did finish up the Wellhead Protection Plan. That was approved by the Department of Health in October. This plan helps to reduce the potential contamination path from surface contaminants down to our aquifer, and also provides education for residents that may have wells or septic systems on how to properly maintain those. Or if they're not using the well, there are some grant dollars that are available to cap those wells. We also work with our surrounding communities that our DWSMA or Drinking Water Supply Management Area are in to make sure that we're all on the same page of how to best manage those areas. [11:34] **Public Works Director Paul Oehme:** And then we do have two grants available for property owners. One is through the Met Council—it is a water efficiency grant for irrigation controllers, sprinkler system heads, and toilets if those are inefficient items that the residents would like to replace. There's a grant up to 50% for replacement of those items. And then the new private service grant that's actually on your agenda for tonight—this would fund 50% of repair or rehabilitation of your sewer service lines to your property. So it's lining or replacement of that service. This is to try to reduce the amount of groundwater getting into the service lines and eventually into our system. [12:15] **Public Works Director Paul Oehme:** Utility did have a very busy year with locates last year. We did locate or had requests for over 15,000 locates throughout the community. A lot of these locates are associated with the new fiber optic infrastructure that's going into town right now. And then in December, we did give plant tours to sixth-grade students at the Lakeville Public Schools—360 students. They learned about how the plant operates and then water conservation as well. So it was a fun little tour that we gave them. [12:56] **Public Works Director Paul Oehme:** Moving on to Environmental Services. Environmental Services was busy this year with the vegetation management and we did manage over 100 acres of land in the city throughout the community for different varieties of native plants, prescribed burns, and just try to get removal of Buckthorn in some native areas. This is just to try to help the diversity of the plant life within our community. A lot of these improvements took place at Valley Park, Ritter Farm, and then Pinnacle Reserve as well. [13:34] **Public Works Director Paul Oehme:** And our MS4 permit: we did meet our goals for inspections. We did inspect 216 ponds this year. Our annual sump and manhole inspections are on track as well, and 287 construction site inspections. We did do an internal audit with updating compliance for our procedures in standard method of operations for storm water and training. And then we also did update our coordination between staff for development reviews for storm water issues as well. [14:08] **Public Works Director Paul Oehme:** Environmental Services also led the effort for recycling throughout the community. You can see some of these numbers here. We didn't have a record year for pumpkin composting this year, but it was pretty close—over 33,000 pounds of pumpkins were composted this year. So everything that you see on this list here potentially would end up in the landfill. We're working through these programs to reduce the amount of material that ends up in our landfills and for reuse as well. [14:42] **Public Works Director Paul Oehme:** Then moving on to Forestry. We did complete our private ash tree survey this year in this summer and we did send out letters to 604 property owners identifying, just visually, ash trees that are infected on their properties. Those letters went out in October and we have worked with about half the property owners on removal of trees. We're going to send a second letter out in January here for the rest of the property owners that we still need to work with to try to bring those properties or those trees back into compliance. [15:19] **Public Works Director Paul Oehme:** For ash tree injections, we did see a downtick in the amount of trees that we injected for this year, and we'll see that number continue to go down as we remove some of the ash trees throughout the community. Residents did take advantage of the partnership that we have with Rainbow Tree Care—there were 1,353 ash trees that were injected this year through that partnership program that we have. And then we do have a grant, as you may be aware, through the DNR. This is a three-year grant for replacement of ash trees in our public spaces and specifically city parks. We did receive almost $340,000 for tree replacement. This is the first year's work shown here on the list, and we'll have more trees to be removed and then replaced in the next two years. [16:21] **Public Works Director Paul Oehme:** And then I have to report that electric vehicle public charging stations are now operational. We do have five sites throughout the community: Heritage Center, City Hall, Market Street parking lot, the Arts Center, and then the Ames Arena all have public charging facilities now. The city did partner with a private company, Carbon Solutions Group, for the EV charging stations. The company funded the capital improvements and their ongoing operational cost, and the users that hook up or use the charging stations pay a fee for the use of those stations. Those are online and that's my update. If there's any questions, I'd be happy to [answer]. [17:10] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Okay, very good. Thank you. Any questions? Michelle? [17:15] **Councilmember Michelle Volk:** Question. The lead copper pipe—you sent out 2,600 notices, right? Was the citizen supposed to contact you? [17:21] **Public Works Director Paul Oehme:** Well, in the letter it stated that basically the gist of the letter was, "We don't know what type of material of service line we have in your house. If you can send us a picture of what that service line is, or if you have any questions about it, please contact us and we can help you identify what type of material your service line is." [17:48] **Councilmember Michelle Volk:** So there is—you only had 300 responses, right? So okay, so we have a lot of work to do there. Okay, I just wasn't sure. I seem to remember seeing a letter, but I don't remember that it was very clear on what the recipient was supposed to do. [18:02] **Public Works Director Paul Oehme:** We've had that response. There is certain language that was required by the Department of Health that we had to include in that letter. So we'll definitely be reconnecting with those property owners that we haven't heard from yet and see if we can figure out what material they have in their service line. [18:24] **Councilmember Michelle Volk:** Thank you. I'm assuming it's kind of identified in older parts of the city? [18:28] **Public Works Director Paul Oehme:** Exactly. So anything it's really pre-like-1980 that we don't have records for, and most cities don't have records for those type of service lines. [18:38] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Okay. Any other questions? Thank you, appreciate it. Okay, moving on to item six, the consent agenda. Any items you wanted to highlight, Mr. Miller? [18:43] **City Administrator Justin Miller:** Thank you, Mayor. Just two tonight. Item 6D is a purchase agreement. As you may recall, the city has some excess property next to our Keokuk Lakeville Liquor store and the city council reviewed this purchase agreement and staff is recommending approval. And then this time of year, this meeting is always an organizational meeting for the city and several organizational items on there. One of those is item 6F and that's the designation of the legal newspaper for 2025, and that'll once again be the Sun Thisweek. [19:15] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Okay. Any items the Council would want to discuss further or pull? If not, I'll take a motion to approve. [19:24] **Councilmember Dan Wolter:** So moved. [19:25] **Councilmember John Bermel:** Second. [19:26] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Okay. Is there a second—[we have a] second. Further discussion about the consent agenda? Seeing none, all those in favor say Aye. **Councilmembers:** Aye. **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Opposed? Okay, consent agenda passes. We'll now move on to 7A: public hearing on application for Farmers Grandson Eatery for an on-sale liquor license. And I believe the applicant is here if you want to come and talk about your business and we'll open the public hearing. [19:47] **Tony Donatell:** Good evening. It's been a while since I've been in front of some of you. Congratulations to all the new council members. I'm Tony Donatell. I'm actually the brother of the applicant; my brother is Paul Donatell. He's the finance guy behind our Hospitality Group. We are before you seeking a liquor license for 8333 210th Street. It's currently the Amoco gas station, or "The Outpost" is what it has been referred to. We are in the process of remodeling the convenience store. We made a few changes to the menu in the kitchen, so we're bringing in our food programs that are offered kind of quick-casual style—order at the counter and either leave or very limited seating area. And then next door we're building out a bar, and so we're seeking a liquor license to be able to serve on-site or on-sale liquor. [20:49] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Okay. Do you have an expected opening date? [20:53] **Tony Donatell:** Well, we're hoping for sometime in March. [20:55] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Okay. All right, if you want to just take a seat. So this is a public hearing. I'll open the public hearing if anybody has any comments about the liquor license. Seeing none, I'll take a motion to close the public hearing. [21:14] **Councilmember Michelle Volk:** Motion. **Councilmember Joshua Lee:** Second. **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Is there a second—second. All in favor say Aye. **Councilmembers:** Aye. **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Opposed? Okay, the public hearing is closed. Any further comment from the Council about the liquor license? If not, I'll entertain a motion. [21:26] **Councilmember Dan Wolter:** [Microphone off] I'll move approval of the liquor license. [21:30] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Dan, your microphone's off. [21:32] **Councilmember Dan Wolter:** Sorry. I move approval of the liquor license. [21:34] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Right. Is there a second? [21:36] **Councilmember Joshua Lee:** Second. [21:37] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Okay. Any further discussion about the liquor license? Okay, seeing none, roll call please. [21:42] **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** Volk? **Councilmember Michelle Volk:** Aye. **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** Hellier? **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Aye. **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** Bermel? **Councilmember John Bermel:** Aye. **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** Wolter? **Councilmember Dan Wolter:** Aye. **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** Lee? **Councilmember Joshua Lee:** Aye. [21:49] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Okay, very good. Congratulations, look forward to your opening. Moving on to the next item, it's the appointment of the acting mayor for this year. That is somebody that would fill in if I, or whoever is the mayor, is absent. So with that, I'll take nominations for acting mayor. [22:04] **Councilmember Joshua Lee:** Well, I had the privilege to do this this past year, but I would love to nominate this year Councilmember Volk to take on that role. [22:15] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Do you accept? [22:18] **Councilmember Michelle Volk:** I do, thank you. [22:20] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Any other nominations? Seeing none, I'll close nominations and now I will open up to vote. All those in favor of Councilmember Volk serving as acting mayor say Aye. **Councilmembers:** Aye. **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Opposed? Congratulations. [22:31] **Councilmember Michelle Volk:** Thank you. [22:32] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** That was very easy. Thank you everybody for that. Moving on to items eight and nine, unfinished and new business for the council. Anything? Okay, nothing. Announcements: our next regular city council meeting is Tuesday, January 21st, right here at City Hall. Our next work session is Monday, January 27th, here at City Hall in the Marion Conference Room. And with that, I'll take a motion to adjourn. [23:01] **Councilmember Joshua Lee:** I'll make a motion to adjourn. [23:03] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Is there a second? [23:04] **Councilmember Dan Wolter:** Second. [23:05] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Okay, all those in favor say Aye. **Councilmembers:** Aye. **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Opposed? We are adjourned. Don't get up, we have our HRA meeting. I will move out of my spot for that. [23:27] [Music]