and we'll start the meeting uh thank everyone for showing up tonight we had talked about this for quite a while getting all the commissions and committees together the commission uh chairs and with the city attorney and our new city manager to try to talk in regards to if there's any concerns i think the attorney will he's got a little program that he's going to present to us but why don't we go around the table and just introduce ourselves for the new city manager here i think we all know each other but john is our new city manager here and kind of a new guy and so why don't we start with elaine why don't you go ahead and planning commission arts and culture scott thorson city council maddox city attorney terry ferling mayor tim cole city council we salong city council archie ada okay everybody welcome uh so i'm going to turn it over to city manager and why don't we go ahead and hopefully get this done wrapped up fairly soon i don't think it's going to be a long meeting but no i'd really like to make sure we finish absolutely no later than 15 is my hope um i heard i heard somebody's got a date at 6 15. so we gotta we gotta go um so the only thing i'm gonna ask is that you share what we talk about with your commission members you know takes notes and not everything will apply but there will be some things where you hear it and think yeah my commission needs to hear that um i'm just gonna talk about staffing a little bit pass it over to soren i think he might pass it back to me then at the end i just wanted to make a motion to adopt the agenda and everything because there is a uh a roll call and everything what else yeah why don't we just do that it is published as a council meeting i think it is yeah so uh we called the meeting order uh if we could take roll call somebody take roll call yeah i'll just do the roll call um city council mayor furlong here councilmember thorson uh councilman peterson councilmember wang and councilmember tim cole here um the um i need a motion to adopt the agenda by council member peterson second second by council member cole uh any questions if not all those in favor signify by saying aye aye opposed that uh jenna's adopted we have one uh topic and i'll turn it back over to you thank you um so i'm just gonna talk a little bit about staffing i shared this with the city council at their at the retreat we had with them and at the end of january um so i came from the city of ridgefield i was the community development director there i believe that the city of richfield has as many the exact same number of commissions as the city of north st paul the city of richfield has three times the population and about four times the staff and so we're staffing commissions at a much you know leaner way with staffing and so we we have limited staff resources you know attending your meetings you know this um and people are stretched pretty thin between um lisa richie and jill officer in particular attending a lot of a lot of meetings so we're limited in terms of the staffing numbers the other thing to keep in mind is that we can't really ask so the the employees i mentioned to you their position at the city is an administrative assistant and they're a certain pay grade we can't ask them to do you know parks and recreation director work and pay them administrative assistant pay and so that's just something to keep in mind when you're interacting with staff that you know to keep your expectations appropriate to kind of their their staffing level you know i'm in conversations with the city council about staffing we had a workshop last week and one of the things we discussed was adding a community development director or something along those lines that would help with staffing in particular the planning commission but and the eda and maybe to some extent the others as well and we're going to be evaluating how we staff all the commissions so that's just a word on staffing and i'm going to hand it over to soren perfect so i'm going to cover kind of four topics i did not prepare written materials but if at the end of it if you feel like hey i would like some of the written materials i can provide those for the council members this is going to be some of this is going to be a repetitive one we met about a month or two ago but i think you know i'll keep it high level and try and keep it moving but so the first item i'd like to touch on is open meeting law and the council understands that they're subject to the open meeting law we've gone over that i think the planning commission is well aware that you're also subject to the open meeting law as well as the eda where there can sometimes be a gray areas on other committees park rec art are you subject to the open meeting law are you just a committee or commission and we used to hold that look as long as there aren't city council members on these committees or commissions or at least not a majority or a quorum we didn't think they were subject to the open meeting law the state issued an opinion basically saying that any and all standing committees um so standing committee as opposed to ad hoc which i would consider all of you standing we form you at the beginning of the year you're not just created one off and has some level of authority or discretion or subject to the open meeting law and while i don't think most of you have spending authority there are other authority there's questions about is the ability to make a recommendation uh authority so we have erred on the side of saying your committee meetings are subject to the open meeting law so what does that mean that means that the public gets to attend your meetings does not necessarily mean they get to participate they get to participate basically however the agenda is set up if you have an agenda that says public comment then you need to honor that but it does not necessarily mean that it's a free-for-all in terms of if you have a topic or an item on your agenda you can recognize them but you have no legal obligation to recognize them it is the open meeting law is not a participatory at least verbally law it is a you get to sit and observe law you should be taking minutes of your meetings those minutes should be approved and there should be an agenda and we should be publishing that agenda ahead of the meeting so as it relates to the open meeting law i believe the the safest route is to operate as if you are subject to it there's absolutely no question about the council eda and planning commission arts um you know i there's potentially a question i would encourage you to operate under it um i don't think that that causes problems but i don't know i'll stand for any feedback on that so with that also keep in mind that what the open meeting law says is your decisions are made in the open in front of the public so where i've seen committees get in trouble is oh we get it you know public gets to come we've published our meeting but before the meeting there's a lot of email chatter about topics that are on that meeting keep in mind that if you are subject to the open meeting law it's the same things with the council in that you should not be engaging a quorum of members to do decision making before that meeting i would encourage you there's nothing that prohibits you from distributing emails with information hey take a look at it i just would really encourage folks to not get too active with the reply button on those things especially the reply all i've said this in other trainings if i could remove your reply all button from the computer i would it's the cause of a lot of problems um but to the extent you and i know it's hard if you're only meeting once every two months or once a month there's a lot of time in between there's ideas that come up you want to bounce them off there's nothing wrong with sharing ideas with one or two members but do not gain a consensus among the group that's a potential open meeting law violation [Music] i wasn't going to hit anything else on the open meeting law other than that i don't know if there's other questions the participatory what does it mean when the citizens show up i've touched on that i don't know if there's questions or if that's a problem that we face but that is something sometimes committee meetings can get out of hand if we have residents that constantly kind of demand to be present or participate they get to be there the participation is not what's guaranteed in the past uh say uh parks and rec you're halfway through the meeting and somebody shows up yep you know and the open part's already been done they want to speak in the past you know i would allow them to talk but is that the discretion of the chair or once they're past that do they it's the discretion of the chair you're running the meeting it's up to the body what you've just described is what i typically see someone walks in they're late they've made the effort you want to recognize them you're giving them two or three minutes generally speaking it candidly if nothing else practically speaking it's a lot easier to take their comments after they've put in the effort than to shut them down and deal with the ramifications of that um so i've i've it's it's meant to be an open process to a point so i've encouraged to do exactly what you've said but that's more practical advice than legal you don't have to but i would other questions on that point okay conflict of interest oh sorry not on that point specifically but just questions about open meeting live i think the arts and culture commission we've been trying to follow and adhere very closely to open meeting law um but this is a very different group in that all of the work really happens in between the meetings and so what we're looking at and especially in light of not having staff support or not a lot of staff support it's that team of individuals that's really going to have to drive all those projects forward so we kind of look at ourselves as a group of project managers really so we're looking at you know all of these ideas that we want to try and implement we're trying to prioritize and select and then try and make progress all of that progress has to happen in between meetings it has to be a lot of like small decisions that are made in between meetings um or at least some meeting some decisions that have to be made and you know sometimes already i've had you know people from the commission who just reach out to me and say what do you think of this should we move forward and i'm like yeah yeah let's do that or whatever so it's just two of us making it you know coming to that conclusion to move something forward but um i wonder what advice you would have or guidance in given a situation like that where we're gonna we're just really gonna have to have individuals who are picking up the ball and running with it in order to make these things happen i don't have any problem with that one i don't think that's a violation of the open meeting law you haven't had a quorum assemble and you haven't played the and just so we're clear if even if it's a conversation between you and one other person i forget how many people are on your committee so if if somebody talks to you and you give the okay if they turn around and talk to another member and say hey talk to tom he said okay what do you think that is a violation um so we need to be conscious of that but the one-off i don't have a problem with and you're right you meet so infrequently some decisions have to be made now in my opinion you use the phrase small decision i don't want to be lawyerly on that but realistically those small decisions presumably are working to create some sort of work product that then holistically gets brought back to the whole to be decided on so i i don't mind that and i think it's fully appropriate um as long as again mindful of the quorum sharing but a bunch of individual work one off two people the whole product gets brought back to the commission for a holistic recommendation i have no problem with that from a practical standpoint maybe a thing to do at your meetings is you know oh we want to uh we're looking at uh the the arts and crafts wagon and so we're going to make a a sub committee of two people that are we're gonna have those two people work on this for the next month and then they'll report back to us next month and that's what we have been doing you know and that's a that's a good example another example is you know a mural on love ice cream so i have an idea for an artist that would work i reach out to that artist i reach out to susanna i bring those two together i haven't talked to anybody in the commission yet i come back to the meeting and say hey i did this right because we still haven't approved anything no you know nothing has gone forward but at least i can take make some decisions and make progress in between those meetings you'd get nothing done if you couldn't do that like john said we have little subcommittees as long as and they're not quorums they're just one or two two or three people on each committee and it seems to work really well so if those two people on the committee haven't have it make a decision they want to do something that's great just as long as neither of those two people call somebody else on the commission and say hey what do you think about this if i had five people at an e-bill i'd have a forum so i can't be doing that right well how big is your committee nine right so you get a little more flexibility than the five subcommittees yeah and i wouldn't go too much bigger no i'm going to remind um lisa and jill and we've never talked about this when they email out to the whole group to put everybody in the blind carbon copy so then there is no option to reply all yeah good idea i know you could do that yeah uh zoom after on zoom halfway at the meeting yeah so the bad news about zoom is we were it was kind of a free-for-all during the height of the pandemic i will say um once we got through the end of august what the state has ruled is there's really two situations in which you can use zoom one is i'll call the vacation situation so if candy decides to go down to alabama and do some golf wants to participate in the meeting she can do that as long as she's in a public place and it i this has driven me nuts but it's the status of the way it works is as long as she's in alabama and say in a hotel lobby and we've properly noticed it through jenny that's okay and we have to be able to hear her not necessarily see her but hear her and that is a acceptable way to participate remotely what we were doing during the height of the pandemic is everyone was staying home they were in their bedrooms we were logging on via zoom for all the obvious reasons to not spread to not contaminate all of that the state has said that doesn't work anymore unless we in essence find that gathering doesn't work so in essence basically the whole body would have to agree to appear remotely because of concerns of the pandemic some communities during february during the spike did do that but what what was happening is someone would come in and say you know look i won i've either tested positive or i think have it been exposed i don't think it's responsible to come into the group and the idea of i'll just appear via zoom that is not available to us do you need so for example because we had a similar situation i think it was like our january meeting where we inquired about well why don't we just do this one zoom we couldn't if we wanted to because everyone was concerned about the risk or something so the whole group did not want not from the state if if in fact for the art commission if you all wanted to appear via zoom and it's because of the pandemic it can't be convenient we would i would encourage us to take a look at adopting some findings saying look we're concerned about the pandemic the spread because of it and then we'd have to notice it accordingly what stinks is we've lost the ability to have because there's what the state has said is we want you to appear in person that's what we think is responsible government open transparent we don't know the nefarious things you're doing when you're remote what is counterintuitive is appear in person but if you're sick don't come in and even though you're physically able to participate but you just don't want to spread it and that is not what's open to us and you can't take advantage of the wall just appear remotely and use the vacation exception because you have to be in a public place well if if you've been exposed or have test positive you should not be going to a public place so it is it is available but not readily for the group individuals vacation as long as you give us enough time because if you don't notice if it's just a call-in day of and say you know i forgot i'm on vacation you're not going to be participating or you could participate but you can't well yeah i mean it depends right yes i mean you can still watch i think there's a question of we we've decided participation equals you can't vote i mean if you're sitting there at the dice talking and engaging i mean even though you don't vote that isn't a right that the normal citizens would have so if you can't be there in your capacity do you get any more clearance than an average citizen so that's been my concern about the i'll participate talk suggest but not vote well i think we're well it needs to be enough for jenny to do like a special meeting so if your meeting's on a tuesday she should probably have it by friday you mean for everybody for remo well no no are you talking about the vacation situation are you i'm talking about like an example that well that would take a little more time we'd need i would need to understand the look this is because of the pandemic there's a resolution that either the committee or the council would need to adopt that would not be a next day thing right well that's what i was thinking because we're not under any emergency type there is no state of there's no state of emergency and no local yeah that's correct okay so can we make decisions i wouldn't recommend it should if you don't have a quorum you can't do any business you're not taking minutes no i think you just you declare that there's not enough for i don't the thing is if you don't have a quorum how do you even call the meeting to order there's no votes to be taken and that's come up before oh should we sit here and talk about it i think that's misleading that you don't have the bot the body has not assembled to make any decisions questions on open meeting well i actually have a question that was a good question i thought so let's say some folks showed up because there was some topic that was going to be discussed so they've all showed up that's that's my recommendation i mean if you've got a five-member body and only two of you are there i mean what what are you going to be able to tell them and i think that to the extent they're there and they think well we've been informed no they haven't yeah no i'm just trying to clarify that because that could it could and there are some folks well the anger should be that look as a commission you've you've committed showing up in presence as part of that commitment i agree i don't disagree with you at all i'm just yep and i mean we want to be helpful now that you're here let us talk to you i i guess if you want to go out into the hallway and have some conversations maybe you can um but i wouldn't do an inform well this isn't the meeting but let's sit around and talk about it i think that's misleading okay so if we don't have the quorum you're done you don't have a quorum it's not a meeting you have every right to go to newman's and sit and talk all you want i mean i can't say that you're legally prohibited from sitting here and talking to them if i was asked what's my opinion and advice i'd say don't do it we'll name them all after the during the meeting next one's going to be uh roddy's yeah but archie's here so we're going where do you want to go polar or what there's no meeting there's no meeting it's done we just say the meeting's canceled because we don't have a quorum we're logging off yeah yeah and yeah i mean look we it was properly noticed we thought we were going to have a quorum we don't as such we're not able to conduct any business there's no motion to i mean there's just nothing you can't make a motion you can't even call it to order i would say though if you know you're not going to if you know anybody on your commission knows that they're not going to be there let the staff person know and we can head off some problems i think that's what we've asked um if you're not going to be there please send an email letting the group know or not if you let you know you and jill or maybe even just be jill know that you're not gonna be present and then you'll kind of have a running tally um who's gonna who's gonna be there and if it looks light can jill need to get on the phone and say hey is your conflict really a conflict or she can't okay yeah yeah i imagine people are calling jill up and saying ah jill uh i'm in florida i can't make the meeting somebody says well jill um you know i've got a doctor's appointment that's that might overlap and so i probably won't be there you know then i think if jill knows that that one person's going to be the linchpin she can call him back and say is there any way you can you know move things around but she can't do that if she doesn't know just for her um should she send it out singly singularly to each person say are you going to be there or are we going to send it out hey everybody the meetings here please respond just to me yeah yeah you don't need to do a single email you can do it's i mean if you think about back when people used to actually write letters i mean email's the same thing it's just one letter to all of you it's the reply that gets us in trouble so if you're you know please let me know if you're not going to be there that's just a reply not a reply all they just reply all right not reply all right or reply okay and that's a good question too you probably might touch on later but to to just circumvent that reply all and just single it or just you know everyone responding back individually that's a serial meaning it's the same thing you're not you're not accomplishing anything by just individually having a conversation you know i emailed lisa and then i emailed terry and then i emailed him we can't be doing that well but to commissioner thorson's point i mean the the bcc will will help on the sending it out that there won't be the ability to reply all if you do it that way but yeah if you if people are communicating individually um you know once they've individually communicated with a quorum then it's a serial meeting i was just thinking about that if you're not going to be there you know that you could but the rest of the bbc's the rest of the commission doesn't need to know that right yeah it's someone it's staff sending out tell me if you're not going to be here it's not tell the group now when all of that is assembled if if staff assembles it and says okay these two people aren't going to be here and the email goes out from staff saying look it's going to be these three folks these two won't be there i don't have a problem with that um and in the end yeah i mean somebody's going to have to like in the instance where lisa sends out an email to everybody and says are you are you going to be able to make the meeting and everybody replies reply all i mean the only way a problem is if somebody you know comes in with a data practices act request and says oh this is a problem because and then it falls back to the issue at hand and is it really a problem that people are talking about whether they're going to be attending or not probably not just don't reply all yeah now in december we have the storm and at least jill is concerned she let me know this is concerned about a quorum but we were concerned that we weren't going to have before because of the storm yeah so just roll with it yeah i yeah i mean there's there's so many little if this then that we know that the idea behind the open meeting law is to prevent behind-the-scenes communication there's going to be coordination on storms on do we have enough people play that straight up work through staff and we won't have any problems yeah okay all right um conflict of interest candidly this is an issue that comes up more for the city council i haven't really seen it come up a lot with say an art commission i suppose it could if tom starts making sure that all of his various family members get the art contracts but if you have right so the the the easiest conflict of interest is if tom's on the art commission and says you know we should start doing murals and by the way i've got a company that does mural painting we would be the best can't do it you cannot use your position for financial gain and you can't do it through a straw person well it's not my company it's my wife's company no tom you can't do it that way either don't worry it's just my kids you cannot do anything to financially enhance yourself based on the position you hold if you have a conflict you need to declare it in my opinion as soon as you know about it and at that point because you have a conflict it eliminates you from participation and the vote the vote is the obvious one but in my opinion once you have a conflict because you can't vote again that goes to the participation piece you should not be participating it doesn't prevent you as a member of the citizen from perhaps coming to the podium and speaking you haven't lost your rights to do that but it's it's deceptive to say i can't vote on it but i will still try and influence the council from a council seat or from a commissioned seat my absolute advice on that to play it straight up is to remove yourself from the situation and declare that conflict immediately that is not how it's always been done but it is my advice as we sit here in 2022 what i will tell you is i know of at this point two different situations where folks have been prosecuted for conflicts it is something that both at a state and a federal level they are starting to play a lot tighter and a lot more firm on i would not play with it and i'll tell you my personal advice when it comes to conflict of interest is pretty conservative i try and steer away from it because at the end of the day what we are is we're all a governmental entity spending tax dollars and there has to be a level of trust in terms of how that works and if we start playing fast and loose or it seems like they're self-dealing or picking favorites based on relationships those conflicts can cause problems we have to steer away from that and on the issue of trust i would say you know you can nitpick about whether you have a conflict of interest or not even if there's the appearance of a conflict to the outside world even if you say well it doesn't check all the boxes it's you'd be better off we'd be better off if with somebody recusing themselves there was a subject that came up that dealt with your neighbor now the meeting had several items and when that item came up you stated i'm going to recuse myself because i don't even think he said because there's a neighbor because then they come up and they state your dress but you just he said i'm going gonna refuse myself he got up and you walked out of the room then the discussion took place and that one was over you came back so that's like to me and then other instances recently there's someone on the eda that states i'm going to recuse myself from voting but they stay in the room and participate in the conversation and that's where i think it can create issues with you know not necessarily anything wrong but just like violating the public trust like if this individual has to recuse themselves from voting they're in the room they're having conversations they're giving their opinions it could potentially influence decisions commission members make so like in that instance it's you know if we're going to talk about the thing that i have a potential conflict and i don't even know if he can make an argument that he doesn't stand to make any financial gain from a transaction that could happen it's just a relationship but still just to be because we don't want to violate the trust of the public just i got to accuse myself and i'm not going to participate in the discussion steps out of the room then comes back and i think that is the gold standard i don't think that you have to remove yourself from the room you can i don't think candidly you have to step away from the diocese you can i do think you should turn off your microphone and not try and influence your fellow members because if you have a conflict you do not have a participatory role on that item pure and simple show no reaction [Laughter] well not when you receive all those compliments elaine yeah um not giving the appearance yeah of a conflict to get at what you were saying even if there isn't one right you know but you can there can be that impression and that does tend to erode trust if it's an issue not everybody is going to agree on well you really have to kind of work that through and say how it looks if it looks questionable and you're fighting back to say well no but i don't have a conflict because i really want to participate i mean it almost becomes one of those wait a minute how does that work i've never seen you so excited about an item so okay i will move on from that unless there are other questions data practice act you guys are subject to it one of the things i would remind you about again going back to emails don't forget that emails may be the subject of a data practice request um so be careful what you're writing them relating to city business and nothing is ever deleted no ever yeah even if you think you've deleted it you have not and candidly have legal obligations to keep some of that data so i i just my standard pointer is if you can if the email you sent is suitable for the top pay or top of the fold on a newspaper to the extent we still have newspapers feel free to write it if not i would think again before you press send um i will look into that i don't know the answer no i thought that you know i think i still have mine they said they weren't going to do it with the new platform or something okay let me look into it yeah that gets hard so and i don't know is there an extra cost for that or do you know i think that's what we have discussed previously that there was some cost implications and then some commissioners didn't really use because ultimately if the city gets a data practice request if if there's gamesmanship going by a commission well it's my personal email i mean let's be clear about something it's not what the email address that governs the data practice act it's the content of the email so we used to have to do the training well this is my personal phone you don't get that yeah you do if it's a city email it doesn't matter if it went to your work it doesn't matter if it went to your personal account so get in the habit of using your city email because ultimately there's potential city liability if we don't turn over documents or try and hide them or destroy them right now i have my coordinated business email for my company right so all of a sudden my company would be in part as well correct yeah potentially i mean we've we've had that situation i don't want to necessarily lay out all of the worst case scarier scenarios but we had someone who's just like i'm not doing two emails well the data practice request came in they blew it off and the next thing you know the subpoena came in and they've got it for a computer forensic going in on their work email it was not pleasing to this employer that their commission member one was using the employer's email address because it violated their own policy there too but now they're scouring the system and that's not a system they want it scoured so keep them separate so what does the subpoena reach out to just city yeah issues yeah i can't reach any further than that they can't but how do you know unless you read them well yeah so someone's going through yeah 31 years of you know where good example of victoria yeah say victoria the city of victoria that if you want to read up on that i think it was dealing with the council and that's the same thing text message you really see you know their i'm texting terry then you know they went to the minnesota supreme court if you did it they'll find it if they get curious well i mean it happened that not that long ago i think one of the recent lawsuits regarding the 7th street [Music] you know all the planning commissioners got the email from staff you know don't you know let me know what you have on your own account if you have any emails you know regarding this issue so you i mean then you even have to spend time and go back and look did i send anything regarding this even to staff so it's just a pain when that happens it is so with that do we mention it to our commission members to make sure they're all appropriate with having your own private emails yep yeah i mean i would i would john said he'll look into emails if that's made available to you via the city i would take advantage of that day one suggest we do that at our next meeting just mention that as part of the agenda uh who wants the world well john has to figure out the emails and i think like i said at the beginning uh at your next commission meeting i think an uh agenda item should be this retreat and oh here's some things i learned at this retreat it's like an audit we're doing an audit right now you know so i think that's a huge thing i i didn't realize that you guys didn't have emails well i guess we never did in park and rec so i think we might still have them technically but i just haven't used it because everything's been coming from staff to my personal email i think that might have been one of the reasons that most people didn't want to deal with them well that could be i think it was at first it was difficult to use that wasn't working quite right initially but by the same token i'm kind of a believer in use it that's your business city business email and almost new ones at the very least hopefully we'll figure this out and get you city emails at the very least you could create a distinct email that's you know john stark planning commission member at gmail.com and so then there's no question that that's the address you're using and as a council member my personal email is out there because when you campaign you can't use a city email and i still get people emailing my personal you know all i do is forward it to my city email and i respond to them i don't think that protects me from a debt request because if someone wants to say well here look here's this thorson's conducting personal business through his email find the attorney comes in to look through my personal email but that practice helps connect with us yeah yeah that's a good practice the other thing i'd encourage you not to do and i've tried to talk some folks out of is well i want to give you all of my information here's my city email here's my personal email here's my work email just use the one get disciplined on that because it if you give them all three or all two whatever you got the same problem that practice act any other questions you should basically assume that any and all documents you get are public very few of what you guys deal with there might be some eda documents that aren't but planning commission i can't think of anything that's going to be not public arts commission same thing [Music] it's just it's all going to be public the last thing i have is just i will say is generalized advice the we we presume planning commission's a little different we have to have one eda a little different don't have to have one but there's strictly you know there's a statutory rules and regulations that govern it and then the other commissions candidly are a function of the city says this is something we're interested in we want people to look at it and give us advice my my first note on that is i would encourage you to remember your your basically advisory to the city council they are free to take your advice they're free to say thanks but no thanks um ultimately that's that's how that goes from an advisory capacity to the extent you see some planning commission or an eda doing something different we when we've created these bodies and i have not studied everyone's bylaws or everyone's operating rules there are differences between these bodies and by definition the planning commission is going to have one set of rules the eda because it's in a different statute is going to have something different i think i was working on the arts commission they may have completely different rules than the planning commission there's nothing that says all of these have to operate the same you guys have different calls to duty you may have different number of members things of that nature and there just may be look this is an arts commission we're not going to function the same as an eda that would make sense to me so to the extent we see well they do it differently that's okay and it's just a matter of following the rules that you've basically self-imposed on yourself so i just encourage you to remember advisory there will be and probably are some differences that's good and that's okay um and that just if you're on the planning commission or you're on the eda i kind of stay in that lane so to speak and operate within the bumper rails of what you've been called to do there there may at times be overlap but candidly the idea is to is to not have overlap we don't need that redundancy it's hard enough at times to pump stuff through government we don't need a bunch of extra commissions on it that is what i planned on covering and then leaving time for questions role of liaisons yes yep well i will now is that a suggestion liaisons my starting point on liaisons is especially for a council member liaison is you are there to listen to take the information back to the council i think when a council member liaison gets overly involved in the commission there is a perceived you know higher authority because they're on the council it can dominate the commission and i feel like it takes away from the effectiveness of that commission being able to do their job develop ideas now if the bylaws and i didn't study before i came here on the liaison position says no they're an active member participatory voting well then ignore what i just said but generally speaking the very nature of a liaison is to sit listen and report accurately back to the council it's not to dominate it's not to sit and say well i don't think the council will ever do that that's a bad idea that isn't the role of the liaison so planning commission i think right [Music] he voted against a project at the planning commission and then when it moved forward he voted for it as a council member so it created a lot of confusion and i think that's when we kind of looked in them and they changed that to say no liaison should be voting to avoid something like that right but if you see terry or tim voting at the eda that's different um the ada legally is not part of the city it's its own entity and they're voting members of that and they're titles reflect that yep i agree and that's where the there are differences between the bodies am i done now so i think it would be helpful you know to go back to our commissions if you have the handouts that you could provide that would be great i mean i don't want you to have to create something i don't know what i'm going to do is strip down the ver what i the materials i sent the council and i will send out the open meeting lock conflict of interest and data practice materials perfect so i had a few more things are you um just after soren got done saying uh you know avoid overlap you know each each of you have a separate thing to do there are a lot of things you do that overlap um and i'll just give you a recent example um there's way finding signs there's park signs there's the sign ordinance there are all these things related to signs that each commission is looking at a little differently and i want to make sure we're always rowing in the same direction we don't want the wayfinding signs to have one font on it and a different kind of snow oh let's do the olaf snowman that looks more up to date and then the park signs have the the traditional north saint paul snowman so and that's the job of staff um that are at these meetings to say well wait a minute um you know uh parks commission i know we're doing park signs but there there is this greater way finding sign plan and let's take a step back and make sure we're all um like i said rowing in the same direction and so again that's a staff's job there are a lot of us that are new and so we don't always have the institutional knowledge that um would be ideal but just bear with us how soon are we looking at getting these signs into place and the reason i ask is that they were brought up at the meeting last night and there's a grant with the person that brought it up for a rotary park i'm just going to say so rotary park is looking at what no assignment sap and the discussion was decided with the commission members is we get back to them next month with what we've got based on what jill researches he needs to know by july late early july at the latest otherwise it loses his grant yeah so again i'd say there's i think there's a great deal of value in having our branding be consistent throughout the city uh all that imagery uh so i think that's a a huge value to it um what i would hate to see is you know the kind of the first sign dictates for everything forevermore if it's a sign at rotary park and it ends up being a little different than other signs we could probably live with that if it's if there were good reasons for it you know we've got to spend this money there's a grant so to the extent it's practical let's make sure we're we're all together um we as a staff we just discussed this after the parks and recreation after last night's meeting and said oh wait a minute there's this wayfinding plan that's got signage standards let's try to marry these things and so we're hoping that we can keep moving quickly on this okay so continue it for next month yeah okay um all park science park designation signs casey lake park whatever do they that all falls underway by the way i don't think it falls under wayfinding so because this is rotary park so river park falls under a city park yeah i think that there's value in a consistent pallet you got all everybody's not in their head in here on that but it's just you know i think that council approved um based on the recommendations from park and rec to move forward with replacing half of the signs in the in city parks and doing the other half in a year or two years that's all the further it's gotten there's been no color decision no font decision no and rotary park kind of falls in a s is my my understanding is it falls under the city park kind of rules where do we go who do we talk to what i i think that um like i said this is an emerging topic that just kind of came to my attention today um i think that if we're talking about replacing half the park signs and we go forward with that and i don't want to slow anything down if we go forward with that that's going to to some extent dictate what the wayfinding signs are going to look like so something's going to come first right and so just we have to know that that if we start investing heavily in something like signs in one location that that's going to spill over into other things and so to keep in mind that there are other commissions working on similar things and the more we can communicate um the better in appropriate open meeting law ways and it was our intention once we get these signs to uh down to two or three because it's such a visual thing that we were going to send it to city council anyways and say hey this is what we want to do in rotary park you're okay with this yeah um one thing that happened last year was the design and review commission was absorbed by the writing commission and so i'm trying to understand what the process is there and then as a council we've also directed arts and council to take on banners for the 130 135 so i think there's definitely some clarity that would help yeah yeah and i'm not trying to put roadblocks uh i'm just saying you know it's it's in our of our best interest to uh have as much standardization in these kinds of things as we can my ideal process would be on the front end to have some agreement on what the standards are and then once the standards are established everybody can just charge forward on their own and i haven't looked enough at the wayfinding plan to know if that establishes those standards or not because you're talking only about rotary i do know there was also a rotary park master plan and that had a sign section in it so that's another little wrinkle just specific to rotary that uh i remember that i i mentioned the jill and maybe we just need to sit down three of us set up a meeting or something and figure out how we're gonna move forward with this yeah and we can bring lisa into because she's got some involvement so we can do that and you know and i i'm sensitive to the fact that i think uh between the pandemic and um changeover in the city manager position there were a lot of things that were just put on hold and are just bursting to happen and i don't want to hold back any of that energy but the grant the grant's a big deal for them but the grant's a big deal for them because that's the funding another question that's come up to me um is about spending like well you know what can the arts and culture commission spend money on um and i would say generally keep a couple of things in mind anything over 25 000 has got to be considered at the city council anything under 25 000 is well so let me rephrase it 24 9 90. so anything we're going to build we're going to build that building we're not done yet the pieces doesn't work this is cumulative spending um [Music] anything under ten thousand dollars um [Music] well let me rephrase it anything under 25 000 can be approved by at the staff level with some conditions has to be in the budget and so if somebody if the arts and culture commission came to us and said well we want to spend you know three thousand dollars renovating the uh arts and crafts wagon if there's somewhere that that fits in the budget and a staffer person can say yeah that makes sense staff can approve things under 25 000 um within staff anything between 10 and 25 000 is me uh anything under 10 000 is a department director this is probably more than you need to know but um so that's just some general guidance um you should work with your staff um liaison on seeing what your budget looks like you know if you don't know what your budget looks like for your commission arts and culture might not have one i'm not sure um they do i couldn't remember when it was created in relation to the budget but if you don't know what that budget looks like ask the staff liaison they'll work with me they'll bring a copy of your budget to the next meeting and you can talk about it as an agenda item just a review of the budget oh okay yeah how would that work in terms of just like again like we have people who are like project managers to make things happen so if we have the the art cart i think that's the working name now of the craft way and we need to get supplies for that because we're going to have the art cart down at the car show so that kids can make a thing those resources that would be needed could someone from the commission go and buy those and be reimbursed by the city or how would we need to make that work it would be best for city staff to purchase the things i mean we could look into it you can do reimbursement but it assumes there's authorization received before the purchase occurs i think for park and rec can we when we had positions those positions made all the purchases those positions made the purchases would go out correct definitely you know if we needed to do a project we'd make the list and they would the staff would go out and buy it yeah it made it much simpler yeah yeah and i couldn't can donations be made to the arts commission set up for that okay on the website but the donations have to be accepted through the city council you say i want to donate 100 bucks to the art commission it still gets routed through the city the city statutorily has to accept the donation it's been earmarked so it goes to the art commission so it's not the lawyer it's not to the art commissions to the city with the designation right but it's probably a consent agenda type of thing yeah yeah yeah it's not debated and you can designate too if you wanted to like character most people do yeah yeah it's okay no i was waiting i have nothing to my hands back down i'm not volunteering for anything sorry i literally recommend it that's the reason you showed up i could spend money on the city council or not correct i mean eventually a invoice is going to come across my desk because along those lines that was kind of where i was looking for clarity as well southwood is a perfect example they present every year and they spend six thousand dollars every year that we that the park funds whether it's new mulch whether it's spring for evasive weeds whether it's whatever and i believe we've always brought that in front of council for approval just to keep everyone in the loop but now what i'm understanding is staff can approve based on its under a financial threshold and in the budget and in the budget which we it's in there every year is staff me or staff jill because it's not to the level of yours staff is um full time so it's just jill and jill doesn't have the authority either okay so that's sorry for me for spending for spending the only can i make a suggestion that we get connect back with the southwood director yeah and make her aware of how this process is supposed to move forward in the future sure because i think there may be some confusion as to you got the money then they go out and they just spend it make some money and get the reimbursements but they might want to do some education and she hasn't been gaining she hasn't been asking for reimbursement unless that's just something very recent she's had public works go make the purchases on her behalf perfect and then they're submitting it where the issue came was once the receipts were submitted did they track back to the proper point in the budget perfect yeah so again though anything over 25 000 no question goes through the council has to get pre-approved by the council not approved after the fact pre-approved anything under 25 000 it's got to be me or a department director and it has to be in the budget uh if somebody came through it was twenty thousand dollars and i looked at the budget and said i ain't not seeing it then really what we have to do is go to the city council and say we'd like you to amend the budget to allow for this expenditure so she can only spend up to what we approve as a parking recommendation with pre-authorization just so for example on the spending item if you if you budget ten thousand dollars for paint yes it's in the budget and it's crystal clear technically if she is not the staff person she's still the staff person has to go out and make that purchase or decide that we can go do it she can say we're ready to paint the boards are here i'd like to go buy the paint and the brushes contact whoever has the authority to spend the money and say we'd like to go do this yep it's in the budget we're on budget everything's okay go do it does not mean that she gets to go out and do it swipe the card and hand the city a receipt there always needs to be some level of communication before that expense occurs so she used to come in with a six thousand dollar budget it was wood chips it was uh trouble it was she had a list yep she's done really good as long as she was in that within that six thousand dollars yeah that was but it's still from my position it's all budgeted she's got her list don't show up with a receipt show up with the list and say i want to go buy this yes no problem yes so if she wanted more for the park commission come to us okay it doesn't have to be that complicated though she could email jill email me say here's the stuff could you could you make could you purchase it no over and above the six thousand for example she won the goal in about six thousand and it's not in the budget then it wouldn't be considered in the budget then correct right question so uh the art stuff is real different so first of all i mean we have a budget but not enough to fund hardly anything and art costs a lot of money um so but generally speaking we're expecting that it's not going to come from the city the funding to paying for things a lot of the uh money that's available out there they will not give it to government entities but they will give it to artists so what i need is a little bit of guidance on so i'll give you an example here so we have an artist who is uh very interested in doing a mural for susannah at love ice cream so what we want to do with this artist is get a request request for proposal what would it cost and then we helped find the funding that would pay the artist to do the mural so the city is almost not involved aside from approving what's painted on the side of the building as long as that fits within the design and review i guess i don't know the problem and then and then the the arts commission just coordinating the activity yeah so i mean what i hear you saying is you you kind of have someone you want to do it you kind of have an idea of what they're going to paint or maybe you don't i don't know and it's make it up but it's you know two thousand dollars to do it and you know that roughly you need making up numbers a thousand bucks a paint and a thousand bucks for their their time if you have people you contact and say look we want to do this mural our budget allotment for this is zero we need two grand um we'd ask that you not necessarily route the money to through the city but maybe you want to buy the supplies or give the artist the money for the supplies i don't have a problem with that because that's not going to show up on any audit trail whatsoever right i mean because basically it could be more in the neighborhood it was like 20 000 right or say if there's a say if there's something that's more than 25 000 it's still irrelevant to this spending because it's not coming from the city right so as long as it's so we're coordinating external non-profit organizations that make grants to this type of thing and so we we're just coordinating that exchange of money between that entity and an artist not the city would there be a time that a grant would go into could you can you apply for grants i think there may be some but you know just from you know this is some of the early conversations that we've had with some of these different places it's like they don't give the money to the city government so even the places that have the legacy funds you know so they're not doling out money to arts commissions at cities even if it's earmarked um i don't know so well so so if it's earmarked what are you so like if we had some development i will donate no like you're yeah i don't know who the gifting folks are but if they say look i want to give i don't trust government but i want would they be willing to donate five grand to north st paul upon the condition that they use for the mural because once that condition comes in we're handcuffed it can only be used for that maybe the only concern i have with the scenario you've drawn out where city property city done we encourage and then money flows to the person in a normal world you would engage this artist and say in exchange for two thousand dollars you'll give us a mural here we don't necessarily have that contract because what we're saying is you're gonna paint us a mural good luck we may help you get some funds you know and so it's easier if we control the funds now if we don't we don't but it as it develops it might be good to just check in on how that process is yeah i think yeah i think so because the way i see it is we're really acting as coordinators liaisons between these different entities so we're in between three entities for example okay the artist the location and then the funder well you're facilitating relationships yeah and in a lot of ways i look at our arts commission and say i'm fine with that yeah you know yeah unless there is i mean if we get some so say somebody from the city or another thing i want to talk about was trying to get some some dollars earmarked from development you know so we have you know to start to get that pipeline going so any new development has to put some percentage toward the arts which would be great because then that's for uh city property and things like that right so because this like the mural thing is a private property we'd have to talk about the authority to charge that back to the developer but um is it doesn't that ex other cities do that though already there's a park dedication yeah like the park but there's i think it's guided by state statute that allows my understanding is if there was a development that was coming in on their own dollar doing things um maybe not if there's a development coming in saying we want tax increment financing that the eda could say one of our rules is if you get tax increment financing we're expecting you to do some public art on your site if you can't do it on your site we're expecting you to donate to do it elsewhere in the community as a condition of getting this money that's not a um entitlement yeah the the fee that everyone's familiar with is park dedication there's a specific statutory provision for that and that says when you do a development cities can charge park dedication where cities have gotten in trouble with that woodbury egan is they said well we want a street access fee and here's our formula what the court has said is you can't charge that show me the statute where it says street access fee and they can't they just say well it just makes sense because it's going to you know there's going to be more traffic so we want to start recouping those dollars and the court has said unless it's explicitly listed in the statute you can't make up a fee and so along the idea with the art stuff if you just want to tag it on as part of the development the concern i would have is i know of no statutory provision that says city you can charge an art fee so you can't just tag it on but in the quid pro quo of tax increment financing different deal so there's these two in that phone there's a statute for parks for park dedication there is but the park dedication limits on what we can spend it on so then that would fall back on the eea if there was a project that asked for tiff funding the dea could tag that yeah and then it falls within the guidelines that's the argument yes okay i mean you still don't have statutory authority but because you are giving them money the way the law is written is there's a quid pro quo okay so this doesn't look like a good potential pipeline for us rather not have more tiff fundraising right probably the best yeah and i was just going to say too you know what you're talking about just the city acting as an intermediary because i'd imagine that that's set up that way where they want to avoid council approving an art project because art is so subjective and that potentially three votes could shut down something that the building owner wants the arts commission wants the artist is willing to do it but because it exceeds that threshold now it's got more of the council now i'm saying well can you put a walleye in there or something yep this is this will be the third time i've said this today a camel is a horse that was designed by a committee on private structures or just city structures or is it all as wide open both yeah so like as we think about murals for example right that was among the planet or but it'd be public where's the park dedication money x whose fund is that you know cities everything it's a specific earmarked fund that the city collects there's limits on what you can use it for for example you can't use it on routine maintenance right it used to be that you could only use it for land acquisition broadened a bit but you can use it for some of the other infrastructure but it is a city council control so eda eda or park commission or you can make a recommendation any of those commissions could sure okay yeah i'll fill them in on that because they understand that it was all in the park commission funding okay as opposed to the park the park commission can make the recommendation the council still has to approve it and it has to fall with you so think we're just switching the guidelines commissions could make recommendations to make money out of that out of the world dedication they could whereas with the park fund we're the ones that get to wake the recommendations but the park dedication money any commission could make a recommendation i mean if that's one of the things you're asked to do i suppose i don't know if the city council is looking to have recommendations on spending park dedication money right i think the recommendation would come out apart from or the part commission for both of those funds right right yeah just a quick question aside from the cost but um arts commission you know again i mean we serve at the pleasure of the city council so i mean any anything that would be installed on city property is still going to have to be approved by the council is that correct i think so i mean i guess unless the authority's been granted before that i mean john as the manager has the ability to control any and all staffing issues i think that depending where we go with the murals i would encourage the council to at least discuss what they're willing to delegate because we've had murals go sideways yeah i mean an easy example is we want to do a mural on the side of the public works building and the arts commission has a little idea and we have to do the thing and we find funding for it and then boom it's done and the council didn't even know that that'd go well yeah i mean it's because i think that's one there's a concern among some members on the arts commission that there would be time and effort put into coming up with an idea or some kind of art installation on public property somewhere city property somewhere presented to the council and gets shut down and i suppose that's just the reality that it is it's back to the advisory nature of the community so i mean you know there's and depending how you want to manage meetings and i don't think anyone's looking to have city council meetings go longer but you know it's the whole thing if you don't want to wait till the end to get an idea shot down presented a little sooner and see what's going on you know one of the things i've talked to our electric utilities director about i don't know if it's realistic is some wraps like shrink wraps on utility boxes you know that's the kind of thing where i think you know um a representative from the parks and recreation committee could come to the city council the city council could say yes we um you know we're gonna approve ten thousand dollars of doing these wraps and they could say and we're going to delegate the authority to design you know to accept the design to the parks you don't have to come back to us so they could say that or we can we're going to delegate it to staff or whatever that they don't have to be involved in all those decisions arts sorry sorry yeah i was misspoke so the last thing on my agenda is that i want to mention is just you know watch what you say uh and i'm gonna give a specific example and if it was any of you in this room don't feel bad i don't remember who did it so uh there was a commission meeting at which a couple of commissioners were talking um i think the mics were hot about oh i heard old republic bank is going to close down uh that that branch is going to close down that got around the community um we called the branch manager they said no we're going to be expanding we're really excited so watch what you say with gossip or any you know it's a hot mic um and people you have people put a lot of value in you um and if you say something it holds greater weight than if you know just the average person says it so just remember that that's all i have so this meeting was great i mean i think it served a purpose uh is there anything else from any of you that since we have everyone here elaine with questions or john this is the time to do it if you got any thing that you really wanna thank you to jill and lisa from the park commissioner and i work for all of you so call me if there's questions thank you for meeting last week that was that was very helpful i will always meet yeah i haven't gotten my first paycheck yet is that yeah oh you get 100 over here i get 100 years did they stop giving you the council check yes all right if there's nothing else uh motion to adjourn like councilmember peterson second taken by councilmember thorson any other questions if not all those in favor signify by saying aye aye aye opposed we are joined very much thanks everybody yeah yeah thank you really good thanks appreciate