[Music] [Music] [Music] he's jab ring back good evening everyone and welcome tonight is Monday October 28th 2024 this is a regular meeting of the minona city council I will call this meeting to order and ask you to stand and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance 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 Miss Faulk would you please call R Shaq here Wilburn here Calbert here ra here kley here Foster Bolton here weon here next item is approval of the agenda and there is an agenda so uh Mr Funk thank you good evening mayor and city council I have two items for your consideration on tonight's agenda the first one is related to item 10A which is the 2 2025 general liability insurance and workers compensation renewals after the publication of the packet the final quote was received from the league of Minnesota City's Insurance trust which is commonly referred to as the LM CIT we received that as staff again after the distribution of packet last Thursday and so what happens is we uh received an initial quote and we had budgeted for that the staff report was written and then after we received the final quote we are happy to report that the premium is actually being reduced uh and really relates to some credits and the new uh premium is 1,222 752 which is 89,500 December we do bring all this back to you for final consideration at the final Levy and Adoption of next year's budget so this will be taken into consideration as there's lots of es and flows yet between now and the end of the year with those revenues and expenditures and then second is related to item 12a ordinances related to dogs at large and animals in Parks we did receive as staff public comment after the distribution of the packet and that is included in your denda so those are the two items for your consideration and I turn it back over to you thank you thank you Mr Funk um is there a motion to approve the agenda and agendum of council M Calbert thank you mayor I move approval of the agenda as amended and a second Council sha thank you mayor I'll second all right we've got a motion by council member Calbert and a second by council member Shaq Miss faul please call roll Shaq yes wurn yes Calbert yes Ry yes kley yes Foster Bolton yes weon yes motion carries next item is approval of minutes so we have one set it is the October 7th 2024 regular meeting minutes and councilor Calbert thank you mayor I move approval of the October 7th 2024 regular meeting minutes is there a second council member ra I'll second all right I've got a quick comment um I I I kind of dropped the ball on this today there was a missing word not in a section of the um of the minutes that I need I I noted it in my mind but I didn't Circle it and go back and I didn't mention it today so um with that adjustment I will reach back to staff tomorrow and make that clear so with that we've got a motion in a second I just wanted to it was just a little little tiny change but I wanted to acknowledge it and so U we've got a motion by Council M Calbert and a second by Council M meley um Miss faul please call roll sh back yes Wilburn yes kelbert yes ra yes kley yes Foster Bolton yes weome yes motion carries um next items on the agenda are special matters and we have three of those tonight and the first is um election judge Appreciation Day Proclamation so as we all know um next Tuesday November 5th is election day and um it's been very busy at um City Hall and many thousands of minona residents have already come in to vote I want to urge everyone in our city all eligible voters to vote but I also want to um I'm U pleased that we're doing this proclamation to recognize the important and hard work that election judges do um they have long hours they don't get paid a lot of money they get paid something but particularly at A T at a time when the Integrity of Elections have been called into question um I'm really proud of the work that our team does here in minona uh we take elections very seriously we take election security very seriously and I really like to believe and I do believe that our city does elections well so I'm pleased to read this Proclamation so this is a pro city of minona proclamation election judge Appreciation Day November 5 2024 whereas election judges with their training dedication and professionalism play a vital role in ensuring highquality elections in minetonka and whereas election judges uphold election laws with integrity and accuracy thereby maintaining public trust and confidence in elections and excuse me whereas over 250 election judges will work on or before November 5th to ensure that the 2024 election is conducted according to the principles of freedom and liberty and upon which our nation and state were founded excuse me now therefore be it resolved that the city of minetonka or that the Min tanka City Council hereby proclaims Tuesday November 5th 2024 to be election judge Appreciation Day in recognition of their valued service and contributions thank you so much all right I think I can make it through the meeting tonight we'll see um the next item is a ja um is a special matter regard regarding the joint Community Partnership program and um Chief borom I think you and Miss Washington have uh have that report I do thank you mayor and good evening Council uh as you you've heard the word community policing it's a word that's often used but really when you think about Community Poli community policing the most important part of that is the relationship the police have with the community and there's really two reasons for that one is we rely on the community to contact us when there's an issue a crime a problem in their neighborhood that's that's vitally important for the work that we do secondly it's equally as important for for people we serve to trust us and that trust is is built upon by daily interactions with an officer um or things like that and really it's about procedural Justice and legitimacy and since 2017 we have focus a lot of our effort on doing Outreach efforts uh we rely on our officers each and every day to have those interactions but we also knew that we were missing a large segment of our community and so we had a dedicated officer assigned to do that work and that has been going on since 2017 in fact it's it's worked so well and I'm so proud of our staff for embracing this concept that we last year attended over 200 events now we know there's more work that needs to be done and um I'm happy to say earlier this year we partnered with henpen County on a police partnership program that's been utilized in other communities and there's been a lot of success and really that was a the goal was really to really enhance our efforts double down and really get out there and and have a fresh set of eyes help us with the work that we're doing and that's why I'm so honored today to introduce Olivia Washington who's been with us for uh about three four months and she will describe the uh the program um I will say we don't leave it all up to Olivia uh we have our officers doing this work because I think it's also important in a in a non law enforcement encounter for folks to see our faces in uniform um and I think when you have a face you recognize and you have a strong relationship when things happen you can you can rely on those folks to to come and and and be of help to you and so even though she's here we have a lot of folks that are working with her closely so Olivia it's all yours thank you welcome thank you so much good evening um Council women and mayor my name is Olivia Washington um thank you for the introduction Scott and I'm going to tell you a little bit more about myself as well as what I do here at the menona PD so essentially I am part of the community engagement team um prior to coming here to um men tanka I was working in Corporate America for about 15 years and decided it was time for a change and um there was this position that came available and I jumped on it applied and very thankful that I was accepted for that so based upon my background I do come from a marketing um business Communications background which is um really great in regards to what I can bring to the table and and the insights that I'm able to see with um the community engagement team here so essentially prior to coming here um I must say the menaka PD um has had a very you know robust program already there are a lot of events that were happening um they did a really great job in regards to interacting engaging with the residents here at at minaka and one of the things that was very focused on was you know building that trust um so in regards to interacting with the residents um listening to um any sort of um you know listening to them essentially um regarding their needs their wants um for this community is really important and the team here um they were doing a really great job job um and also you know what is very fundamental to policing is you know not only building that trust but also to when there's a strong Community engagement team here it prevents um crime prevention and it provides that space for all to collaborate together in creating um solutions for um sometimes everyday problems or um criminal issues um and I will say too transparency is really big when it comes to how the manka police department conducts themselves I was really amazed Honestly by the number of training that um the police officers here um go through on a yearly basis and then also to how open and transparent they are regarding records or if a resident has a question regarding um policing issue or incidents um that information is readily available and then you know leveraging the relationships that are already there um to you know to help promote more engagement by the residents um that's really important too and then overall all these actions help to improve the relationships and to provide different perspectives as well as to addressing concerns that may come up by the residents and by others so the vision for the community engagement department is to allow officers and like myself to broaden our reach um I I you know support the the officers in the different activities and programs that are in existence here and then also to that I'm planning for the future um you know each officer brings a you know their own interests and their own background to the table it's really interesting because there's so many different events and programs that are available and officers are able to tap into um programs and events that um they resonate with so essentially I'm a henin County employee um however um the county pays 70% of my um of my pay in the in the city pays 30% and I'm part of uh a program called um joint Community Police partnership essentially it's to it's to help bridge a a bridge between um diverse communities um and law enforcement um also to is to encourage dialogue and conversations between law enforcement as well as the resident here in um in hening County um the work includes evaluating or evaluating the voice of the community in relationships with police understanding that um that Dynamic um supporting police um the police department efforts to understand and to reflect um the community that they're serving um you know I would say that minaka as of right now I refer to it as a more um homogeneous um City however it's definitely as growing as is becoming um you know becoming a whole lot more diverse than what it was previously and um I think the city understands that as well as the um Police Department understands that and why um you know efforts such as Dei and even my role um you know it's why I'm here essentially as well too um and through these different engagements um that we're you know that we're creating um we're we're hoping that it continues to foster a positive relationship between the residents and the police department and overall the city um so I'm Olivia Washington you see that gray picture over there that's me um I essentially you know mention exactly like what I do um and I really don't need to go over this but I'll talk a little bit more about my Approach and some of the upcoming events and programs that I'm working on right now so when I initially started here at the at the city you know my first couple weeks were a little bit slow but I took the time to understand about the city uh took the time to understand about what sort of situations or cases are coming up that I may be you know to help improve and one of the things that I noticed um was that there's a a real need for more youth engagement um and you know therefore at least my my um I would like to be more focused on um creating programs and initiatives that are are aimed at Youth Development um through collaborative efforts with both internal and external departments um so I've been involved in the um National Night Out that was really fun I've also been involved in smaller um events and efforts um some larger events that are coming up um is an Interfaith dinner that is that will be held on November 12th um and essentially we invited all of the faith groups in Min tanka to come together Bak bread learn about each other um learn about the initiatives that each Faith group is working on and see how we can collaborate together and support each other and then also too there's a another event that's coming up in around the Thanksgiving holiday where I um they've been very generous to donate 25 um Turkey um where we can do a a turkey giveaway here on site and then of course too I'm sure you all are aware of the shop with cops um I'm expanding that even further to include um both Target here so the one at ridill and one at 101 and then of course um um dicks also too um they've been a really generous partner of ours in the past and we'll continue that partnership with them um and then for the coming summer their safety camp and um this this coming year I will be um helping to lead um that effort and then a new but kind of um Twist on Park and adventure program so essentially we all know um minaka rec department has the parks and adventure program um I thought it would be a really great opportunity to partner with one of the larger newer apartment complex here it's called The Preserves at Shady o um The Preserves at Shady Oak is a predominantly Somali population um lower income and there's a real need for um engagement programs and after school programs for the kids there so I thought well we already have the parking and adventure program why not partner with them um and they were really interested and they um are on board to do that and then looking at the space that's there too eag Ridge Academy which is a charter school that's located here in minetonka um and it's also within walking distance with um walking distance with the preserves um you know they've extended an invitation for us to um host the park and park and Advent interest program there on site due to the facility that they have there too so I kind of see myself as a conduit um to you know building different relationships with people and providing um providing that pathway and that connection to people who are in need of Assistance or help because vaka has a lot of resources and um you know why not um provide more awareness um to these programs um and connect them with people who may not be aware of it or who are in uh maybe greater need of those Services too and then um also there's a Youth Academy in partnership with the FBI I'm working on that but there's already a lot of interest um with the henin county sheriff office and then the Metropolitan Council too they're willing to to insist in um whatever um means that we would you know would have them um and then um something that we recently started at the Hopkins High School is the student Multicultural advisory Council so essentially it's about 10 to 12 students that are part of that Council and we meet on a monthly basis with the police officers here to hear um in regards to to hear about like their needs their wants and just to build a better partnership and relationship with the school there too and then of course too last but not least um there is uh um working on getting committee members I extend invitation to all of you members here um to be part of the Multicultural advisory Council um applications um are open until the end of November and um we're looking to start um fiscal year um one quarter one of of next year um January actually so um please um fill out the application apply if you know of anyone who might be interested I extend an invitation to them as well too um do you have any questions thank you m Washington um Council any questions councilor R just a comment um I think this is exactly what is needed to have somebody to kind of bring Direction and management to these efforts I I think we've had a lot going on already since 2017 as the chief has said but um just wanted to welcome you and and thank you and looking forward to kind of seeing you be able to help shape and grow these initiatives thank you um Council um member raly Remy close enough thank you and mayor of course well and and I will just add um you know we we talk about motanka being um you know we know we're a changing community and we we historically have not been a particularly diverse Community but increasingly we're diverse and increasingly as we look at our school districts uh the great the the younger you go in our city the more diverse our city is and so I think that's our opportunity our future is a much more diverse future so I think that we we talk about being a welcoming Community I believe we are a welcoming Community but I think I think to make everyone in our community feel welcome we have to have these connections we have to have these programs that um create opportunities for everybody to be involved in our city in some way so I really wish you well and I I think um I'm it's great to have you in our Police Department I'm I'm really glad that um hen county is paying 70% of your uh your salary but but I'd be glad um even if they weren't and and I just want you to feel welcome and we look forward to working with you oh thank you for your kind words thank you council members and thank you mayor have a good evening thank you Miss Washington all right the next item is um a recognition of a um very important long-term um um member of our staff uh city planner Lauren Gordon and Miss wishnack I believe you have that thank you mayor I'll just read from the staff report um that'll keep me focused and on track here uh Lauren Gordon uh who is a member of the American Institute of certified planners began as minetonka city planner in May of 2008 in his role he reviewed developments he did zoning code Administration planning studies sustainability efforts and also prepared the comprehensive plan and its implementation sustainable placemaking and appropriate architecture were always his top interests here at minetonka and prior to minetonka he was the wetta city planner we stole him from there and he also was a planning consultant with Hoisington ker group and a company called woolpert out of Dayton Ohio Lauren also started his career at the city anony in Iowa he graduated from in community and Regional planning from the College of design at Iowa State University if you didn't know this about Lauren he also was a trained mediator which was used very often in his position when it came to planning commission and projects that were being reviewed when he arrived at minetonka the country was really in an economic downturn locally the housing market was crashing yet large projects like the United Health group's Towers on data Park Drive were being planned and they needed intense planning and collaboration for the road improvements that were required also that same year we were finishing the 2008 comprehensive plan by the way that's three Cycles ago and it was finalized with Lauren's help during his tenure over 4,000 units of frontal housing were built of which 950 of those were affordable all of those units were built while Lauren was keeping an eye on community Aesthetics connectivity and transformational spaces the highlight of his work culminated during the Redevelopment of Ridgedale when the vision he helped create started to evolve into projects one piece at a time while numerous team members were involved and I'm going to point to all of my fellow staff members here um they were all involved in that Redevelopment his Steady Hand his detailed design advice and his measured approach with developers really made that Vision come to life in terms of sustainability Lauren understood and embraced sustainability as menot tanka's fabric bringing the city from what had always been important its natural resources to a place where sustainability now is part of everyday life in the city had a lot to do with his leadership he was able to create a foundation for the sustainability commission and he also mentored other staff members that were needed to do the work on climate action during his time at City Council meetings Lauren's approach to presenting information on complex topics to the city council was appreciated even in the face of crowds of people on some evenings Lauren was able to calmly and professionally address the details of her project he was sincere in the way he approached his work and deeply respected other points of view and during his tenure this is always a hard um stat to share he attended over 700 75 official city meetings he also attended countless uh special meetings neighborhood meetings events and often had weekend City commitments Lauren was always engaged and happy to be a part of the city's Planning and Development decision-making process and a more internal comment about his mentorship to others in in his fellow employee group he had a lot of Duties and projects and meetings but Lauren often informally mentored many many planners and staff in other departments who were younger in their careers he provided guidance and support in challenging projects and situations while ensuring these younger colleagues knew their work was important and their contributions were valuable Lauren was an excellent sounding board when collaborating with other more tenured employees and he was engaged and a thoughtful listener and was willing to brainstorm brainstorm through any of these issues while Lauren was with the city and his his wife Deb raised two children who are minaka School alums they are now grown and unfortunately over the last 5 months Lauren has had some life-changing medical issues which caused him to resign from his beloved position at the [Applause] city I'm gonna make it we've got confidence in you Julie thank you and we've got your back thank you the city is a better place to having him been the city planner for so many years we are forever indebted we know this type of job takes sacrifice and time away from his family his style his approachable demeanor and genuine care for all things Beena thank you thank you Miss wishnack um and uh Council I don't know if you have anything that you'd like to add I know that we've all worked closely with uh with laen and uh what an outstanding human being so um U councilor Calbert it's hard to keep it brief I feel your pain Julie um I know Rebecca and I at council member sha and I um served with Lauren I was on the Planning Commission for I think six years and um uh I was vice chair when I stepped down and all I can say is I look around the city and every single project that we have approved was made better was made more attractive that man has incredible taste um and patience and professionalism there were some very ugly meetings um sometimes people's characters are impune um by people who really don't understand how things work and that the city is just carrying out policies that we up here uh make and that um that they're you know they do what they do to make the city a better place and um I can attest to the fact and I see I I I see it with so many people in this room we have an incredible staff in minona they are incredibly professional uh incredibly uh well-educated bright and Incredibly committed and they are here tonight this is not regular work hours they're at this meeting Lauren would be at neighborhood meetings City events and I mean always a smile on his face answering questions being professional and when they say countless meetings it is countless so um and just so much creativity and I know that that it was such a hard decision for Lauren to leave and I have a fantasy that he will get well and uh there will be a job opening and we will snatch him back up and that is my hope and I mean I could say the same thing about so many members of our staff but really there's a soft spot in my heart for Lauren just because um he came to so many City Council meetings and he was on you know the staffer at at planning commissions before that so all I can say is Lauren we love you we're really going to miss you we're going to hold Julie up because it's not going to be easy but we we have your back Julie and um I know the whole staff is you know pulling for your uh Division and um and your department so uh you'll be missed and um don't be a stranger is there anyone else cosber Shack thank you mayor as a former planning commissioner uh um I can say well first I don't I'm I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be here today if it weren't for Lauren he was my first introduction into the city my connection with this wonderful staff and I remember you know um Brian Kirk used to talk about his mom watching the meetings and my mom definitely watches watched all the meetings she's probably watching tonight um and after the first Planning Commission meeting she sent me a text and she said oh that Lauren seems like such a kind man and you know it's so true and I you know every interaction that I've had with Lauren has been positive and he's funny and just such a kind person and I see the longstanding chair of the Planning Commission came tonight chair who has been the chair for I believe over six years um and that's a testiment to the connection that Lauren has with the folks that he works with so um we're so indebted to all of the service to the city and I'm grateful for the friendship and work relationship that I was able to for Forge with Lauren over the years so we deeply missed and we in my view he'd be welcome back any time but we don't make those decisions and Lauren I think I have your favorite book on parking at my house very good any other council members would like to comment um you know I'll just add I'm probably as no surprise but I've um I've been here even longer than Lauren has been and Lauren is the consumate professional um he is passionate about his work um Council M Calbert just mentioned in um um in some justest that she has his uh book on parking but uh Lauren actually reads these books and uh and takes instructions and is always looking for better ways to do his job to the benefit of our city and you know I challenge any of us to look around our city and if we like what we're seeing a lot of it has to do with the outstanding work that Lauren has done but you know whatever we say about his professionalism and the great work he did for the city the true thing is that his character and his kindness and his decency shown through and and he was in tough meetings and and you know he was unfl flappable and um and I don't like to I'm not saying in in my experience with him but he is unflappable and he is not he's no longer working for the city at this point in time but I'm an optimist and I'm a believer that um that we have not seen the last of Lauren Gordon and I just hope and pray that he gets his health back so that he's focusing on the right things getting his health back so that he can come back and contribute to another city but hopefully to minaka because he's made a difference here and I am I'm very grateful for that so thank you so much mayor H Sons his regards via text he is watching so he's happy to hear all your comments great thank you well thank you thank you got to put my glasses on because I have to clear my eyes here a little bit so um next item is uh reports from city manager and council members uh Mr Funk again thank you mayor and councel just from a staff perspective thank you for the recognition of Mr Gordon and for all your kind words um I it's not worth it is worth repeating but for the sake of time we will certainly Miss Lauren and wish him all the best uh moving through some of my staff reports uh for you this evening one just want to go back to our election staff and our election judges and certainly appreciate uh the council's recognition of our election judges as uh noted earlier in our Proclamation just to give you an update on the activity uh this last month from September 20th through October 24th which was last Thursday mail and inperson voting uh there were approximately 10,800 not approximately there were 10,813 votes cast and approximately 27% of those or about 3,000 were in person so it's been busy uh again it's very we're proud to see those number of uh votes cast in early voting and mailin voting as I noted there are also um extended hours uh coming up this election season I'll just quickly mention those Tuesday October 29th we're open from 8:00 a.m. till 700 p.m. here at City Hall also Saturday and Sunday this upcoming weekend November 2nd so Saturday November 2nd from 9:00 a.m. to 300 p.m. also then on Sunday November 3rd 9:00 a.m. to 300 p.m. the day before elections on November 4th we're open 8: a.m. till 5:00 p.m. and then again election day is 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. and so certainly want to make note of that and also want to thank our election staff and our again our election judges for all the work they're doing leading up to the election uh and just to give you a flavor just uh since last Friday Friday we had close to 800 inperson votes voters Saturday a little over 400 and then again today over 700 so certainly we're seeing um a lot of interest in in voting and early voting so we again appreciate everyone uh in the public coming to uh City Hall for for that um for for casting their vote also I want to mention motanka matters is currently collecting Fe feedback on the proposed 2025 budget so our Communications team along with Mr Nelson has that out on minaka matters so we look for that feedback as we again get into November and then December for the final budget and Levy we do have public engagement opportunities on minetonka matters also then want to talk about um a little bit of a pivot talking about budgets then talking about salt use uh every year I want to give a a special appreciation to will Manchester and his team we talk about salt use sometimes we get questions about how much salt the city uses during the winter time we go in preparation for that and we do prepare for that and our Public Works and other City staff participate in a series of internal workshops where we focus on landscape design practices that can reduce winter salt usage and help protect our lakes and wetlands here in minaka these workshops uh are funded through a grant that the city received from 9mile Creek Watershed District so we appreciate their uh support of the city and looking at ways that we always look to reduce salt usage during our winter months and then Birdwell Spooktacular just took place I know Halloween's coming up this uh this week but we did have our Spooktacular that grew a big crowd as usual so we want to thank Kelly oday our rec director and all of our staff and many other staff members that participated in that annual event it's always such a fun thing for our kids and for our families and then today is National First Responders day and so we want to say thank you to those who serve in the line first line in service to our community so our police and fire professionals uh here at the city we give them great gratitud ude for today and certainly many others that work in the field that are First Responders here helping our community and then last I just want to mention that uh we had our annual book in piie sale I say we and it was really F hosted and funded uh by our senior Advisory Board and they work in coordination with menaka senior services our finance department also volunteers and helps in that great event and as always just a wonderful event with great pies and food and they collect donations uh for for their activities and then last our next meeting is a study session next Monday November 4th 6:30 here at City Hall in the minihaha room so with that mayor and Council turn it back to you thank you thank you Mr Funk um council members any things that you would like to report tonight anyone councilor thank you mayor um just one followup to Mr funk's remarks just wanted to uh remind folks that um early voting up to election day not including election day is here at the community center and then on Election Day um it will be at your regular polling place just didn't want anybody to make the mistake of coming here on Election Day instead but anytime up to then it's it's it's very easy thank you Council anyone else and I will oops Council Calbert I just want to say something about elections so minaka has a a long tradition of voter participation and um I'm very heartened by the large numbers of people participating and we often are at the very top not just in the state but nationally in terms of percentage of Voters that participate in our elections and this is a particularly important election for many many reasons and so I just want to express my appreciation to the staff and and um election judges um who put so much uh effort into making our elections free and very fair and um there's nothing more important it's literally the Bedrock of our democracy and so I'm just want to say how proud I am of minaka for already what is it about onethird of our voters have already voted and so I really hope that we get as close to 100% as we possibly can so thank you thank you Council BG Calbert and and I will also add that if you come here on Election Day and this is not where you're supposed to vote there are people here who can tell you where you need to go so don't don't give up um it's important to vote and the only thing I want to report today is um um as mayor I get to participate in a group called The Regional Council of Mayors and we have monthly meetings and we had a meeting today that was particularly robust and the the topic was how in and if you're an elected official um or a staff person in in government you care about housing um you you care that we there's a housing shortage we need market rate housing we need affordable housing we need housing of all kinds and there is Broad agreement on that however as the last legislative um session indicated and as the coming legislative session will indicate um we all agree on the goal but we have a lot of different concerns and ideas about how to get there and cities have a perspective that's fairly uniform but not totally um but different segments of our um of our elected leadership have different perspectives on that and so we brought intentionally people together to talk about housing and hear about different perspectives on how we can solve this problem that affects all of us and when I think about housing um somebody pointed out to me a while ago that um during the pandemic when uh there was a moratorium on evictions understand that when someone gets evicted from a home from an apartment they then join the status of the homeless now think about that if you don't have a place to live you don't have much of a chance in our society and people need places to live and that's something that we all have a stake in it's very important so that's why cities care about it so today we had very interesting speakers and interesting conversations but we had um excuse me I got to drink a little water we had representing the Met Council the chair um board chair Charlie zelli we had um representing the Twin City housing Alliance uh Kathy Bennett and then we had alen shurov who is with the Minneapolis fed so PE people bringing um very interesting and diverse perspectives and then we had a panel that was made up of Daniel Lightfoot from the league of Minnesota cities um Tom Paul who is part of the um leadership of the municipal Municipal legislative commission and Ana odonnell oconnell who is with Metro cities and so it was a very robust discussion I'm not going to say that we solved problems but getting people at the table in front of the upcoming legislative session gives me um gives me encouragement to say that we can work together to find solutions to this problem that we all agree that we have but we still have a lot of work to do to find out okay how can we solve it but it's an important issue it's an important issue that doesn't just affect people across town or in other cities it affects us right here um we need people need housing to have a chance in our society and so housing is important and affects all of us so it was very um informative and helpful meeting so I just wanted to share that with you all um so then that brings us to the next item on the agenda which is Citizens wishing to discuss matters not on the agenda and so this is an open mic opportunity if somebody wants to share something with us please come forward to the podium state your name and address and tell us what you want us to know I will tell you that no action will be taken tonight we will take in the information we will refer it to staff and we will will follow up but tonight um if you have something for us tell us and and we will make a note and we will follow up with staff so is there anyone who would like to address us tonight I would please come forward state your name and address welcome so thank you mayor council members my name is Christine Davis I live at 13111 Greenwood Road in motanka and I'm here on behalf of my husband and Neighbors from six homes that have been impacted by a neutral wire energization in 2021 and again another power surge again a couple of weeks ago I'll give a little bit more background on that tell you that um we appreciate uh council member Foster Bolton has been very responsive to uh some of the inquiries that we've made I'd also like to acknowledge Excel for getting back to us via email however we need a solution we cannot have energy surging through through our houses again it's happened a couple of times it cannot happen again I'm not talking about outages I'm talking about power coming through our houses so um first of all before I get into that I want to acknowledge you and thank you for your service um it is incredible what you all do staff thank you also um other staff that are here today uh it was driven home to me as I listen to all the issues that you have to handle I can't imagine what it's like to have to run for office and then roll up your sleeves and deal with so many different issues so um you have my gratitude for your service and and all the things that you do for this community that we really love to live in so as a bit of background um the first time this happened was on a beautiful day in October of 2021 and if you've ever experienced a power search don't we have it's wild it's like Poltergeist um you can feel it in your chest the Reverb you can feel the kind of Spidey tingles electricity in the air you can hear the crackling in your walls you can see the light bulbs bursting and my neighbor Morgan was with two one-year-old twins when it was happening Fire coming out of the light bulbs glasses shattering my other neighbor Bill back there had it happen we turned a light on it blows up lights that are on lights that are off you can also smell that electrical burning smell so that happened in 201 21 um you could my other neighbor um Jeff saw the flame going across the wire that wire the coating was burnt off and it hasn't been replaced in 2023 we had another issue it wasn't a power surge but um what happened then Jeff lost power to their house and a line was run across the street down his tree across the sidewalk Jeff has three children under the age of eight that had to walk across it every every day when they went to school or preschool most recently this year we've had a number of power outages and power outages are one thing they're inconvenient when you lose power for 30 hours as we did earlier this year you lose food you don't have Services it's a thing but a power surge is completely different and that happened again on October 18th so far um from the first time around we had about Just sh $112,000 wor a damaged to our home this time we're looking at about 8 right now where we stand Excel does reimburse you for it but you are out of pocket until that reimbursement takes place so what we're looking for and you're wondering what's the ask here the ask is that we wanted to at least put this on the public record so that you are aware that this is taking place we um appreciate the fact that Excel has told us that they are going to work on a solution in December we want to make sure that whatever that solution is it doesn't happen again again it's a power surge it's not an outage it's not just flickering of Lights that's how it starts but that's not what it is so um our hope is we're not asking for any direct action from the council at this time if we don't get resolution um we probably will be back because it is unsettling at best to live in a home where you don't know what if it's going to happen again and like I said it's six homes it's not just one it's the six of us that have had this happen on those times so um thank you again for your service and if you have any questions I'd be happy to answer him and I don't know if anyone else miss anything okay I would also say please come up and say your name say your name and address if you have anything to add um my name is Morgan asil and my address is 13107 Greenwood Road um and and in addition to the fact that we have to have the the outof pocket ability to like I need to get a new boiler I have no heat in my house right now and you know it's starting to get cold out they'll reimburse you but they'll reimburse you what they think it's worth so last time everything that I had you know was it would uh my stove top was $10 something like that they don't give you the money that you need to actually place it so um it's kind of where I I I'm a municipal law attorney so I was reluctant to even come here tonight because I I am working on a case against Excel right now for the solar garden stuff I I draft the franchise agreements between cities and and Excel and I know that you're I don't actually know what minitonas is but um it's probably this probably isn't addressed in there um I don't know that the city City I I just know that the city can you know help us at least moving forward to uh get those wires buried or whatever it is that has to happen I I I know that before this last surge happened my electricity in my whole house was flickering for like 72 hours and I made multiple contacts to excel nobody ever said anything and then it just there's there's no there's no answer with Excel um so you know I guess from my perspective there's the longterm there's the getting the wires fixed but there's the short term of like what do citizens do in this situation when you don't have the money to replace your heat and it's October um you know and Excel doesn't care so um I guess our ask is just mainly to just get the city informed and see what resources you guys might have to be able to make sure that it's safe and that um you know excels not um ruining all of our lives very good well thank you for that report and and one I will say that um I'm really sorry that you're having this experience um I you know I think that um the the city does a lot of work with Excel but we don't have we have in influence not authority over them and I talked to Mr Funk about this and and I did speak to somebody with Excel today as well and um you know the I mean the Public Utilities Commission does have authority over Excel and so I'd strongly urge you to be in touch with their um their Omid people or the the way that the Pu um handles complaints but I think it's good that you're here as well because while we we can't tell Excel what to do and expect them to do it uh we have influence and we represent 55,000 uh um uh people that are all customers of excel so that gives us influence but it does not give us authority over them but again the Public Utilities Commission does have authority over them and and your complaints are are absolutely legitimate and so we want to be supportive to the degree that we can but I also um don't want to sit here and make promises that I can't keep either but I I think it's great that that you're here you're telling us we will use our influence and we'll work with staff to use the influence that we have with with Excel and um and we'll uh we'll hope for the best but but urge you to um also uh contact the Pu most definitely will thank you mayor um Our intention was primarily to bring the issue to your attention because if we're not here talking about you might not even know what's going on and we know that it's happening in our sixth home homes there are children under the age of eight and three of the six homes most of it are you know we've been able to withstand this but as as Morgan said it was not great to not have hot water to not have heat to not have all the things right so thank you very much for your time for listening and um hopefully we'll come to resolution with Excel on this that there'll be a permanent solution but we just don't want to have power surging through our homes again so thank you very much for your time and attention mayor and council members oh question good luck council member calary just want to encourage you to keep us informed you don't necessarily have to come to a meeting you can always send an email to staff they can send it to us peace please feel free I'm we have two atlarge council members we and the mayor we represent the entire city and Patty's literally a uh council member Foster Bolton is is a is a neighbor of mine and um so and I live in Ward one as well so I just want to make sure that I stay informed because there is power in numbers and what the mayor said is true we have influence not Authority but if it really is a persistent problem and it sounds like it has been for several years the Excel was here uh very recently and while they do many wonderful things for you know most of their customers we did have a a list of things that didn't work terribly well and one of them is like having a person actually respond and you know the the problems aren't always completely addressed I talked about solar Gardens um and H the fact that you know they're not built out but people have signed up uh for their agreements for solar garden so um you know I just think there's strength and numbers and like you said we keep track of a lot of things but this is this is one of those things where it's it's it's a basic need now to have electricity this you know we don't live in farmhouses you don't have a wood stove that you can use instead of your heater and so if you are if you don't have heat in your house and especially if you have children you know that's really uh not acceptable living conditions so just let don't don't be a stranger let us know you know you can find us on the website and um I I would love to stay informed so that I can better support you we appreciate that it does take time too I might just say that you know not only is that the the safety concern which is huge it's a lot of time you got to have all your receipts you can't just like hey you know you have to have your original receipts digging up I've gotten to be a better record keeper and some of this and my husband's very good but um you know that's an important part of it too and so we appreciate um you guys attention so and then um Council mayor Foster Bolton I think you want I just wanted to say thank you to all of you and your neighbors for taking time out tonight to come and um Express this and my guess is it's not just happening to your six homes that now it's on the record and maybe other families can see that wait it's not about us you know what I mean and just get more people so thanks a lot for for coming well thank you very much and and one other I'll ask one other comment too um you know staff will go we will'll take your comments and take this conversation back and the city does have some programs that that help with housing repairs and things like that now a lot of them are income based and so forth and people may or may not qualify for them but but there are some resources available for emergency repairs I mean when I think of going into you know Halloween's next week and November 1st is next Friday um going into the winter season and not having a furnace and not having an Outlook of getting a furnace there might be some resources that through through our city staff and so forth may be able to help you with that I I don't want to make any promises because I don't know what your exact situation is but but I would encourage you to to look for some of the some of that help because it may be there all right thank you so much all right next item on the agenda is bids and purchases and we have none of those tonight um so that brings us to item 10 which is the consent agenda and the consent agenda items are items that are typically routine so rather than uh voting on each item individually I will read it into the record and then if anyone would like to pull an item for further consideration um please indicate that whether you're in the audience or um a council member um we will vote on all of the items that have not been pulled and then we will um anything that has been pulled we will consider separately so I will Begin by reading these items into the record item 10A is the 2025 general liability insurance and workers compensation renewals and we and uh Mr Funk reviewed the good news we got um from the LMC on that with a savings of $89,000 item 10B is a strategic profile quarter 3 report um item 10c is the 2025 minaka city council calendar and item 10d is an assignment and Assumption of the elev formerly 1 Acres Oaks development agreement would anyone like to um u pull any of these or is there um would somebody like to make a motion C sha thank you mayor can I just make a com briefly I spoke with um Mr Funk this morning about the last item I don't intend to to pull it but he did mention with the new developer that there may be some re-examination of some of the the tree removal and I just want to say on the record that any reduction in tree removal and I recognize that the you know that there's significant ash trees on that site so even if they just took ash trees out visibly it would look very very different but you know any of these old hules or anything that that this developer can find a way to keep we would really appreciate as a council so um with that I will let council member Foster Bolton council member Foster Bolton yeah I'd like to briefly pull 10 C okay very good so um would someone like to make a motion on the remaining items Council M Calbert thank you mayor I I concur with council member sha and thank you staff um I'd like to make the motion to approve uh agenda items 10 a b and d is there a second council member Wilber Wilburn thank you I'll second thank you Council Wilburn takes sometimes it takes me a minute as you all know um so we've got um a motion by council member Calbert and a second by council member Wilburn um Miss Faulk uh please call roll Shaq yes Wilburn yes Calver yes R yes kley yes Foster Bolton yes weome yes motion carries so then uh going back to item 10 C the minaka city uh Council calendar uh council member Foster Bolton thank you mayor I was just wondering if we could talk about changing when I as I looked over the calendar for 2025 I saw that I was there's a um I Have a scheduling conf and I was wondering if we could move the March 3rd council meeting to March 10 otherwise I would miss two Council meetings um it's not something that I would we can figure it out if that's not possible but I just was thought if it's possible that's yeah that's the national league of cities okay okay well that ends that okay well and and I would would comment and I think um you know I I we we established the the city council calendar that doesn't mean there are never any changes to it and so there might be some opportunities out there that could be considered more creatively even if we pass this tonight so I'd encourage you to you know talk with staff and see you know if there is I don't know if there is and I'm not promising that there is but maybe there's some opportunities to work around some of those things so with that is there would would you like to make the M yeah I'll make a motion to um approve item 10 C all right and is there a second Council mber Calbert thank you mayor I will second all right we've got a motion on item 10c from council member Foster Bolton and a second by council member Calbert Miss faul please call Ro Shaq yes Wilburn yes Calbert yes ra yes kley yes Foster Bolton yes weome yes motion carries item 11 is consent agenda items that require five votes and we only have one of those tonight and 10A is an intensive comprehensive police officer Education and Training Grant agreement um and uh is there someone would like to make a motion on that or would somebody like to pull that council member sha thank you mayor I will make the motion to approve consent agenda item 11a is there a second council member council member kley I'll second all all right we've got a motion by Council M sha and a second by Council M kley um Miss faul please call rooll Shaq yes Wilburn yes Calbert yes ra yes kley yes Foster Bolton yes weome yes motion carries item 12 is Introduction of ordinances and we have several items that will be introduced tonight and I want to just make a quick comment in front of those that um introduction of ordinances are typically you know first readings of the ordinance and the objective with the introduction is to see if there are any issues that we want considered between now and then before the item comes back so while we take public comment on most items before they pass we do not take public comment on introductions of ordinances so um that's that's been past practice and we will continue that so I just want to make that clear because I know the first item uh regarding um dog regulations is going to be one that will get some public comment but that will be at the next um at the next meeting this is just the introduction so um item 12a is ordinances um regulating dogs at large and animals in parks and I believe Mr kka that is you that's me thank you mayor thank you Council so a little brief background the Purgatory Park master plan was adopted by the city Council on June 24th of this year the master plan identified the use of this particular Park as a PO popular Regional destination for folks to have their dogs off leash um we heard a variety of public feedback on this matter um they seem to divide evenly um generally speaking on those that feel that offleash dogs limit their enjoyment of the park and those that see that current usage as an appropriate and valuable quality of life improvement in our Park system BAS based on the feedback that we received from the city council on the park board at recent meetings City staff has prepared two ordinances that amend existing regulations related to offleash dogs throughout the city and specifically dogs in the Parks minetonka city code section 92585 this one uh refers to dogs at large throughout the city so a dog at large a bit of a definition uh refers to an animal being off the property of a person who owns them and that applies Citywide the current language differs from most cities locally um ordinate our ordinance currently allows for dogs to be off leash so long as the dog is at heel or under voice command um it's well documented that this has led to some potential enforcement issues the new ordinance as written requires dogs to be on leash currently it's written to include language related to a 20ft retract a leash and that dogs would be required to be brought into 6 feet when near others this is similar to other cities in our area and is considered enforcable due to the common use of this leash type the proposed effective date of this change would be January 1st 2025 manona city code section 11352 this one refers to animals in the park broadly the current language allows for dogs in quote unquote unmaintained areas enforcement issues have been documented related to these what these unmaintained areas refer to the new ordinance as written in our report requires dogs to be on leash or allowed to run off leash in designated areas again referring to this 20 foot retractable leash the designated areas would be defined by signage and or fencing the proposed effective date of this um being enacted would be April 1st 2025 and this would follow a community work group recommendations which I'll refer to um following feedback from city council and Park Board um we coordinated this concept of developing a resident community workg group the mission would be to develop recommendations regarding Citywide dog strategy including a number of location options for these designated areas this work group would be comprised of nine to 15 residents Council potentially Park board members and City staff it would be a cross-section of appointed individuals that have an interest in this particular topic um ideally there would be a city council or Park Park Board member serving as a chairperson on this committee or work group representatives from the city staff would include parks and Public Safety we would also receive assistance from a consultant in this area that has um experien an inclusive and effective community Community engagement on on topics that are um sometimes prickly I would say um and that ultimately this group would provide input on the designated areas within the park system for offleash offleash dogs so um after tonight if the ordinance introduction is adopted the minetonka matters page will be open to collect resident feedback um regarding these introduced ordinances a summary of the feedback would then be provided at the November 18th meeting see council meeting and ultimately recommended actions from staff tonight would be motion to introduce the ordinances and refer the ordinance amending section 1135 of minona city code to the park board for review and comment and a motion to direct staff to form this work group to review and recommend designated offleash areas and I am now happy to answer questions or feedback we also have Captain Mian tonight to to support uh the conversation thank you so much very good Mr kka thank you very much for your report it was uh complete and concise um very nice much appreciated uh Council any questions for Mr K kka um based on what he presented any questions councelor wurn oh sorry I was anticipating I so um oh well here I wasn't calling on you but if you I mean like I always always have something to say thank you for that even if it's to myself um so I guess I I'm I'm wondering like how much feedback you want now as opposed to waiting till you know so um I think we're at a point where as much feedback as you'd be willing to provide would help us you know draft or amend this this language as written certain that to the public um so I will say um there we got the the letter from from Dr Hol um after the packet went out and um I didn't me mention this to city manager Funk but it one of the points she raised I did strike me that the Staggering the dates for the different ordinances is maybe not the best plan um if they were both enacted in January then there would be what 4 months where there wouldn't be an offleash area but I think that might be less confusing than having that sort of in between time where they can be off leash but not be off leash in the Parks but not in the city and and anyway so um that would be my feedback on that particular point Thank You Council R other comments from Council Members C Shack thank you mayor um yeah I mean my general I I certainly understand and can app appreciate the intent I think there's been a fair amount of confusion around this and so when I was reading the staff report my perspective was how can we limit the confusion as much as possible and so I'm not you know I I'm not going to live and die by this but that was one of the things in contemplating the changes that came to mind for me as well and I I think kind of ripping off the Band-Aid might be the best approach thank you you other other comments council members um council member R thank you mayor I just have a question and uh yeah a couple of questions I was just wondering um if we if you could discuss the other cities or you know kind of our situation Visa other cities both in terms of the leash law in general and um I'm kind of curious about the retractable leash length if you could touch on that please help me understand that a little bit so our background research we looked at all our neighboring cities and cities within the the Twin Cities metro area and um for the most part most cities have designated fenced in offleash areas either Municipal run or run through the Three Rivers Park District which are very popular amenities otherwise most cities tend to have a 6foot leash but there are a variety of outliers that do have this 20ft retractable leash namely Golden Valley Bloomington and St Louis Park all have this modern retractable leash written into their city code um seeing that as being a a fairly common thing we see these days um we decided to include it for discussion at this point at least thank you um just a comment follow-up comment I mean 20 ft seems like a really long distance so I think I I noted in my conversation with the city manager Mr Funk today that um I'm I'm looking forward to hearing what the park board says about that personally I'm kind of in the camp of you know 15 um and also having a shorter leash when you're within people cuz 6 feet you know when you're on a crowded Trail or a crowded street is actually still quite long in my view um but you know again I'm not ready to live or die on that Hill um but am looking forward to um Park Board kind of consideration of that um and then my question is um the work group and there were questions brought up about this and I think I asked what the presidents are for having kind of this kind of Resident you know work group in other you know like the mountain bite Trail or or other things like this I just you know haven't been here long enough to know so I know there were some you know kind of comments or you know eyebrows raised about doing that and I can see the point both ways um you know this could put these particular residents it's in a very uncomfortable position um so anyway if you could comment on that I'd appreciate it um while talking with staff we didn't quite identify a Min tanka example of a work group to this effect um there wasn't one for the mountain bike trails best we could tell um that that was driven by the staff um but with that said we have spoken to a variety of Consultants who do this work and uh it's very common for them to assemble work groups like this on I'd say controversial issues or issues where you'd want to bring people together to Foster that conversation as much as possible so not within our city necessarily but certainly within our region and addressing topics of this type for the most part thank you for that and then just one final question how um what is the time frame what would the time frame be for kind of doing this and and getting this done then so related to that April 1st kickoff of the 20 April 1st 2025 of the park related designated areas the idea would be this working group would wrap up their work and issue a recommendation prior to that April 1st date so we could have those areas in place very good councelor Calbert thank you mayor so I understand people's concern about uh retractable leashes I you know my parents have a a little dog and they have a retractable Ean I prefer to walk that dog on a regular leash but I can walk a lot faster than my parents and I can walk a lot further than my parents and I think about older residents who can't run their dogs they're losing what was their dog park and I feel like we need to toss a proverbial bone in their Direction I you know it is a way of keeping control of your dog they're on a tether they cannot get away and um you know that one of our residents did write in about um you know possible conflicts with ebikes and so on and the you know that that is a whole other issue so if an ebike is not announcing their approach to begin with we have a whole other problem which is a problem but it's a separate problem and um so again I'm not going to you know I'm not going to live or die on that high hill about about you know 15t 20t but I do think that for uh residents with possible mobility issues for older residents um you know keeping their dog on a tether that can run back and forth and they're still under control because they are on a Long Leash is is a decent compromise and so you know just to muddy the waters for you because that's really what you're looking for that's sort of that's sort of my my perspective Ive on that council member Wilburn and just throw a little more Mud In The Water um so having myself almost taken out a small dog that wasn't on a retractable leash and I wasn't on an ebike but the people were stretched all the way across the trail people stroller leash dog and I came up a hill going you know had come down was going up about 20 M hour and almost it was almost the end of that dog um so I mean that is a possibility but that I'm not going to I'm not going to argue for against retractable leashes on but I think that that was the point is that like yeah and it and it doesn't have to be an ebike in all in all honesty anyone like if but that's I mean it's it's Trail etiquette on both on both Point both parts so if people yeah have their their leash stretched across the trail that you shouldn't be doing that um but also bikes need to be paying attention to their surroundings so um you know I don't think there's not a perfect solution I don't think in in this case so yeah anything else Council any other questions um you know I've got I'll just share the kind of the rhetorical question I shared with um Mr Funk and it had to do with the retractable leash and I said you know retractable leash that can be sometimes 20 feet and sometimes 6 feet is that from a you know one of the reasons we think at heel um is not enforcable is because you know it's kind of in the eye of the beholder and things like that and I also think that the retractable leash thing could be very much in the eye of the beholder so it suffer it may suffer from the same issues that our current ordinance does and I think being as clear as possible is is important that said um you know um we've said it from here before that we uh we cannot necessarily legislate etiquette or good behavior we would like to but some people are going to behave properly with whatever leash they have and some people are probably not going to and so we want our ordin to be enforcable but we also want them to be realistic so I'm not going to take a position on retractable leashes here tonight I would look to the working group and to the next steps but I think it's definitely one that deserves some further consideration to make a decision my view is that the simpler we can make it the better um but you know just as we were talking about um you know um the um dog poop bags and things like that you know we can you can have all of the infrastructure in place if people are not going to follow the rules and dispose of things properly um you know we have the same problems with the leash so my view is we want people to keep their dogs under control and there are some people who have six foot leashes or even four foot leashes whose dogs are not under control and we also have people who have retractable leashes and their dogs can be out the whole distance and they're under control and so again there's a lot of gray area in all of this and so I think we just want to work to be as clear and as simple as possible we want to respect people we want to respect dogs but I also think that we want to uh respect our um uh the people in our city who are going to be called on to enforce this from time to time to have you know clear criteria so that um if an if there is an Enforcement issue that it can deed um the rules can be enforced so that's probably a lot saying a lot of nothing really but um you know I think that Clarity is important and I think that's what I would look to as we consider this going forward so that we can come come up with as clear and simple and understandable ordinance as possible so that if there are people who are not going to follow the rules that we have an enforcement mechanism in place anyone else all right so um we need to introduce these ordinances or introduce the ordinances refer the ordinance amending section 11 35 um to the park board for review and comment and also um I've been told and and staff correct me if I'm wrong that there will not the P the opportunity for public comment on these changes will come back to when be with the city council there will not be public hearings at the park board as they work on this so um uh the next time people have opportunity to comment on this is when it comes back to the city council is that indeed correct yeah thank you mayor and Council that that is correct and so just to reaffirm what the mayor has mentioned so if the council does introduce the ordinances as presented here this evening the next step is then for staff to solicit public feedback through menaka matters so that will occur and then yeah you are correct that the park board does not intend on taking public comment that has already occurred through the Purgatory Park Master planning process so I think they feel they have the information they need so they're going to re excuse me review these ordinances provide recommendations and considerations for you and then when this comes back and we're anticipating November 18th you will have information from manat Tonka matters as well as recommendation from the park board very good thank you Mr Funk and then um the other motion we need is to a motion to direct staff to form the workg group to review and recommend designated offleash areas so first of all that's our that's what we need to do are there does council have any further comments they would like to make before we we ask for a motion all right I just didn't want to jump too far ahead so with that um Council M Wilburn um I move the introduction of the ordinance uh and and refer the ordinance amending section 135 of the minaka city code to the park board for review and comment and can I do this all together and the motion to I move to direct staff to form a work group to review and recommended recommend designated off leash areas thank you Council m is there a second Council M kley second I'll second all right we've got a motion by council member Wilburn and a second by council member kley um Miss Faulk please call roll sha yes Wilburn yes Calbert yes ra yes kley yes Foster Bolton yes woron yes motion carries um item 12b is an ordinance amending section 1.010 relating to the ter to the terms of the diversity equity and inclusion commission members and establishing transitional terms and Miss dond I believe that is your report it is thank you mayor and Council so since May the Dei commission has been actively meeting and they currently have two young adult members the existing ordinance ordinance which sets three-year terms for young adult members starting February 1st and and ending January 1st does not fully consider the scheduling needs of young young adult members who are students which we have two right now resulting in challenges for consistent participation throughout the academic year one is currently looking at colleges next fall and isn't sure if they're going to be around to keep continuing on the DI commission so to address this the proposed ordinance shortens the term length for young young adult members to one year beginning on July 1st and ending on June 30th this adjustment aligns with the school calendar supporting more reliable and sustained involvement Additionally the amendment introduces trans transitional guidelines to ensure Clarity and structure as new student members join these guidelines will help integrate current and incoming student members smoothly maintaining continuity and minimizing disruption to the commission's work the recommendation this evening is for a motion to introduce the ordinance and with that mayor I turn it back to you thank you Miss damond um Council any questions um Council M Wilburn um so I discuss this with uh Mr Funk this afternoon I guess yeah it was afternoon um so in looking at the wording of this it's it's not clear to me um let me go back so my desire is that uh if if someone is appointed as a as a young adult member and want to serve a three-year term that they don't have to reapply after a year if they want to continue in that role and um to me the wording doesn't say that so I I'm just wondering if that's uh something that can be included take that one oh yeah mayor and counil Wilburn yes that is the intent and we ask them if they want to continue on for another year we bring that forward to council for a reappointment we can clarify that in ordinance but that is the intent of it and how it's handled currently very good and this is an introduction so we can make those tweaks between now and then are there any other comments or questions counc Calbert thank you mayor I a couple uh so in the actual ordinance the wording just says young adult members serve one-year terms that on July 1st and end on June 30th and that that is all in one that is Allin One Year everyone else um vac can sh should be for the everybody else begins in February 1st yes okay never mind I was just confusing myself it just seemed um because it's all in one year but it is it it it it is July no it ends on the next year so I'm just wondering if we need to clarify that it's you know begins on July 1st of one year and ends in on June 30th of the following year I think we know that it's just it it's not spelled out it's oneyear term so I it it it's implied so maybe we don't need to qu to uh clarify um because it's implied because it's a one-year term but um council member uh Willl bur's question about reapplying was a good one so any other questions or comments Council you know I would I would just again it's an introduction I would say maybe some clarifying language that makes that point um I think two points are appropriate um I think it's probably somewhat intuitive that it starts in one year and ends in another but um saying that um um terms can be extended um by the council if um the C the um student or young adult um so chooses or request an extension um might be clarifying language that would that would help because I think you know a lot a lot of times we get um young adults who are you know Juniors and seniors in high school and they it's only a one-year deal but theoretically we could get somebody who's a freshman likes it wants to continue is passionate about the issues and would like to continue for up to three years and I think we should just make sure that it's clear that that option exists for for students who would be so inclined so that's my comment for what it's worth and Miss heiney I don't know if you have any comments you'd like make mayor and members of the council we'll take a look at it but I don't believe that any change in the ordinance is required because it's sort of standard practice at the end of a term and I think there's another code provision that addresses reappointments and um we always ask the existing ones do you want reappointment and it's not opened up for application to others if the sitting member wants reappointment so it would be handled in the same manner as all other commission appointments and reappointments very good thank you are there any other comments or a motion from Council C for sha thank you mayor I would make the motion to introduce the ordinance amending Section 1 uh 010 relating to the Dei commission members and is there a second councilor Calbert thank you mayor I'll second all right we've got a motion by Council M sha and a second by Council M Calbert Miss faul please call roll Shaq yes Wilburn yes Calbert yes ra yes kley yes Foster Bolton yes weome yes motion carries so um next item uh 12C is the Villas at chaswood housing Improvement area um and um Miss wishnack that's you thank you mayor and council members um it's been a while since we've done a housing Improvement area but we've been done a few of these before uh for those of you who weren't on the council when we did the last ones I'll take a little bit more time and explain to you how it works um what the parameters are and hopefully it'll make sense to you this is too just a um uh an introduction of an ordinance to establish the housing Improvement area so if you're not familiar with the location the bills of chaswood are it's kind of down south um in the southern part of the city uh right as you hit um 62 cross town just north of the cross town you can see it the policy that the city has was adopted in 2011 and the legislation approved this by Statute in 428a and really what it does is allow cities to finance the rehab of common areas or owner occupied buildings such as condominiums or town homes the city has the authority to finance the improvements by either issuing bonds or doing loan funds we've done it both ways in the past so we've we've done it depends on the amount and and that usually dictates how we go about the financing um it really allows the city to finance improvements through a housing fee that's paid on the homeowner's tax statement a lot of times we're a little loose with that language sometimes we say the word assessment it's really not an assessment it's a fee for the housing Improvement uh area a little history about this particular development it was built in 1989 there's 188 units of housing in the area they sit within 21 buildings 147 of them are considered owner occupied and there are 41 of them that are occupied by renters and there are a variety of one and two-bedroom homes in this area um sometimes they're as small as 800 square ft but they do go up to about 1,00 Square ft in size the values of these homes range from 101,000 up to 275,000 so a very uh modest uh price for a home in this area for the rental units we did some research we talked to the edac about this we want to make sure we understood when people are renting the units what rates are they renting at and we were able to look at our rental registry and found that about 1,400 for a one-bedroom and about 1,800 for a TW bedroom if if you're not familiar uh this is this is going to fall into 70 to 80% Ami if that helps you um kind of cross tabulate with other projects that you've worked on um it says 60 to 70 but it depends on if you have a one-bedroom or two-bedroom so just have to use the uh percentages a little bit Loosely um it does qualify itself as naturally occurring affordable housing so when you talk about Noah housing that's what this is um it exists and it's affordable uh both from a rental situation and a ownership situation then the um square footage uh rent is just noted on the um table below so really the issue that happened at the buildings is you know there's constant review of maintenance issues when you have a Home Owners Association if you haven't lived in a homeowners association this is a pretty common thing that happens you go through the list of things that you have to repair the um association dues typically pay for those repairs uh unfortunately when they hired the engineering company they found extensive damage to the sheathing and the framing of the building so you can kind of see some of the pictures that were in the engineering report and they also talked about is there any other way to finance this are there banks that would lend us the money um they weren't able to acquire financing that way and so they did then contact the city in 2022 to talk about the financing um there was a a note that they are not able to get Fanny May or Freddy m uh mortgages due to the condition of the property this does sometimes happen when there's too many issues with the building and so they aren't able to get any of those uh financing um packages for potential homeowners which then obviously reduces the amount of um of options for people who want to sell their property so this is a list of items that need attention there's concrete work the building facades need to be replaced all the siding in the trim this is one of the bigger ticket items obviously masonry tuck pointing th those sorts of things um also need to be addressed attics there's a lot of ceiling and roof bents that need replacement and then other building costs like the windows and the doors all the decks need to be replaced and the balconies need renovation so that's almost 5 million of that $12 million figure there's also Al quite a bit of contingency in the budget um in case there are other things that are unknown at this time maybe that the report didn't uncover so it's pretty strong contingency if you're wondering why that amount is what it is um we typically do that when we do these sorts of um hiia funding um so that the homeowner kind of has that worst case scenario situation as they move into the notification and the information um so uh the association preferred to finance the improvements initially with a construction loan and then the city would be the takeout financing some people might ask why do they do that and the reason is so that the construction is all managed by the homeowners association their representatives and the city isn't approving all of those um uh construction approvals Etc so it's a much easier way for the city to handle it and then we're just the end uh Finance for the construction the city would use General obligation housing Improvement bonds um there would be an allow allow allowance for prepayment prior to the bond issuance this is kind of a a sticky thing when you issue bonds for a project like this you can allow that prepayment to occur once that prepayment prepayment period is done then uh that prepayment allowance is gone and they have to then continue that assessment over the life of the assessment or the fee um that needs to be paid um it's also important to note this does not count against the city's Bank qualification of $10 million so there's a kind of a ceiling where you have um kind of a ceiling for what the city can do for bonding uh at a certain rate this does not affect that at all because it's secured through the fees that are being paid by the homeowners So based on a 20-year Bond estimate each fee um each unit would be uh determined by the ownership interest or their percent of interest in the unit and then um the fees are collected to pay the bonds and then the hi a fees are established so for instance on a one-bedroom unit $57,000 uh would be the assessment which is $71 58 per square foot that's an 800t unit and then there's another example for 1,000 squ ft unit and then on the bottom um it kind of shows you what the existing association dues are and then what the projected hiia dues are so that you get to an all-inclusive number at the end so you can kind of see what those numbers are again on a one and two bedroom situation again very strong numbers but if you're one of those homeowners that really can't sell their unit or nobody wants to buy your unit because there's not um uh the building isn't uh in good shape then obviously you're looking to do um the assessment so uh when somebody applies the city does not do this so we we're not contacting homeowners we're not saying hey come into the city get the city's financing the homeowners themselves actually petition the city so uh the requirement is that they have at least 113 people signed the petitions in this case you can see there's an overwhelming support they had 84% of the homeowners asking for this petition and so um what we do though is we do a little bit of quality control and we make sure that the petitioners and we just went through about 10% of them make sure they understood what the project details were and all the associated fees all the respondents that we contacted actually indicated they were fully aware of the requirements and also understood the fees that were being proposed so again it's just a cross check for us to make sure that there wasn't kind of a quick oh here's your fee and that's the only extent of information that they get um we want to make sure that people are fully knowledgeable so the timeline would be that in July they did give us that petition for the application and then if you go go ahead and accept the petition you would be really just initiating that process we'd have a public hearing and those homeowners again can come in at that time uh in November or December we'd have a hearing I think we have it scheduled for the 18 um and then the effective date of the ordinance would be in December now that's not the end of it you'd have to then do a development agreement in early 25 and then there's an issuance of the bonds and probably that will just follow whatever the path of the um project is but typically that would be in February of 25 so this is not the end of the line for this project this is just the beginning and obviously the construction itself has to take place and that's going to be um a long period to do all of the work so with that uh mayor I'm going to recommend that you adopt the resolution which would schedule the public hearing for November 18th and then introduce the ordinance establishing the hiia again just to let you know there is um a veto effect so if a certain percentage of the homeowners change their mind let's say you adopt it and they change their minds there is a way for the homeowners to do uh what we call the veto so um that's another safeguard for the homeowners with that mayor I'll turn it back to you for any questions great thank you Mr wishnack and Council um questions councilor kley thank you mayor I had asked U Mike earlier about um I was reading the report and I saw that um one of the members from the edac had mentioned um the upkeep of the property why um wasn't the upkeep kept and um I was wondering about um how does this impact the city I know that um it said that the city doesn't take any risk but I'm like if if a bond is like money that you're loaning this um apartment folks or condominium um agency um what if they decide they don't want to pay it if they wasn't keeping up the property at to this extent where you need so much money then um how do we keep from taking that risk um if they decide they can't pay it or don't want to pay it so M wish thank you uh mayor and council member kley there are kind of two safeguards that were described to the edac one is that when you do a bond there's a safeguard in the amount of money you're collecting so there's an overage already built into the bond so that you make sure you have um enough money to cover the bond payment uh even if not all the payments are made so I just call it an overage there's a there's a term for it that I'm not thinking of right at the moment um the second kind of thing to think about is when you have a fee that is paid by property taxes the likelihood of the city not getting the property tax revenue at some point is pretty small um let's think about a foreclosure for instance a foreclosure happens a bank forecloses on a property eventually that money still gets paid to the city the property taxes need to be cleared before the next owner is able to to take possession so they will go ahead and take care of the property taxes it's very very rare to have tax forfeiture happen which would be kind of the worst case scenario in a if a unit does go into tax forfeiture again that's what that Bond overage is um designed to handle is any misp payments lack of payment delay in payment um those sorts of things so hopefully that helps um it does I just have another question too um how often um do we do something like this for um I guess guess owners who own a property like this um I just think it's I don't know I just think it's odd that a property can go this long without really investing money and they're collecting money from owners and um renters and not keep up a property at this size and and then come and ask for money this to me it's a large amount of money to invest in someone else's property where they didn't do the work to maintain it so I'm just curious like um how and why okay Miss wishnack thank you U mayor and Council M cley um well I think one thing that they had uh happened to them is they were not aware of the extent of the issues here so so again they're going along maintaining the building as they normally would within a homeowners association and when they got this report and they did some of the investigative work um through the engineering company they found uh the water water infiltration into the uh behind the sighting and so forth so I think some of this is a surprise to them and so you might be going along thinking you're making your payments to get your windows done and all of that and then all of a sudden you have um a much larger Bill than you were expecting so um I think that is part of it on this particular project have we done it before yes um and at the city in the EIP um forecasts we will be doing more of this financing again it's important to point out to the public too that this is not city funding um the city is the financing agent for the hi um the people who live here are paying for the uh improvements it's not that they aren not it's not a um a grant if you will so um hopefully that helps um make it clear that uh again the Home Association I just think got to into a u pretty difficult position another case would be like Cloud9 they had four $4.5 million dollar of infrastructure they needed to invest in as a result of some of the unanticipated um office to condo conversion issues that they were experien ing mostly with their HVAC and their windows and sort that sort of thing um a lot of and I'll say one last thing sorry a long answered your question but um a lot of these 1970s to 1990s um associations probably didn't have the best most detailed maintenance reports uh done for their home homeowners association dues today that's a requirement that's a law that HOAs now have a maintenance requirement and they are doing the homework to make sure their um fees are up to speed with what they have to do from a maintenance perspective but that law is not very old so the older the project is the more likely this is to happen where the city needs to step in and provide some relief um not through a grant but through a financing mechanism other questions councilor Wilburn so sorry I mean you've mostly answered my question but I'll just ask it anyway in case there's like more information so my initial question was was sort of how did how did we get here um and without like trying to point fingers and say it's such and so's fault or or anything like that but um you know it's what's my understanding that the point of the HOA is to do maintenance and so was this um you know uh poor construction to begin with um you you mentioned something about a water leak or something that went undetected so I'm just and and new rules and so like just how how did we get to this point yeah um mayor and Excuse me yes okay council member wurn uh I think that it's probably a number of factors I think probably the building was built um very affordably let's put it that way um meeting the minimums but not anything beyond the minimum requirements I think that has a lot to do with it the that probably means some of these things didn't last as long as maybe people would have wanted them to I also think that when you again look at the price point that we're in um you know 100 to 275 and you look at the resources that people have um you know trying to manage those association dues with that kind of um income that you need to have that kind of mortgage I think there's a a little bit of a balancing act um that goes on with the association and the tolerance you know for how much maintenance and how much investment are they going to do in a a building every year so I I think it's a a combination of a lot of things why it ended up like this but I I do think that um a lot of it had to do is just kind of the minimum being done and then kind of some of the um damage that happened that they just weren't aware of council other questions Council mayor Calbert thank you mayor so there were questions sort of uh so far about sort of the the the the the bonds being paid you know through these fees my question really has to do with you know thinking about the fact that this is really in in an effort to preserve affordable housing which has been a focus of the city for quite some time so to me this is an investment in the kind of housing that is sorely needed all over the country and you know it's too bad it got to this point but it's this is a wonderful mechanism for making sure that we can address an the issue that the the management of that property couldn't do through other financial institutions so we're basically the the the financial conduit for this my question and I don't know if you know the answer is for the residents it this is this is a big increase um in basically their dues or their fees or whatever what happens if you know if if res if the what happens to the resident if they can't make I mean this is really you know is it just I mean literally what happens so they're basically not paying paying what becomes sort of part of their HOA fees um what happens to them because it's a it's a big jump and I imagine because these are affordable homes some people might be on um fixed incomes or limited income so I'm just curious if you know Miss wishnack thank you mayor and Council mayor Calbert so I think when you're thinking about this you're looking at the bottom line right it's 848 or $1,000 depending on where you're at with the um bedroom count try not to mix and mingle those numbers though so their association dues are still their association dues and they'll continue to have those as they do today right their payment of the fee comes with their property taxes if they failed to pay their property taxes that's the whole property tax um process so if you don't pay your property taxes on a homesteaded property it's the normal procedure that uh is dealt with for that non-payment but it goes right with the property taxes so it's not like that's a good clarification yeah it's not like you have now the association collecting 848 that's not what happens the association's collecting 362 we're collecting the 486 on the taxes and that's so the default is on taxes not on their dues now an association has a default on their assessed dues um there are procedures for HOAs to deal with that none of them very good end results so um and that brings up another question so just having looked recently for housing for people in my family and uh become becoming familiar with a lot of HOAs and you know they're all different they cover different things they're for different amounts and as you pointed out depending on the association they have different tolerances for what what it pays for so it might be you know Utilities in snow plowing and maintenance and you know million things so it might be very high and then for other associations it might just be say you know a few utilities or services and maybe not so much repairs and that the individual homeowners might be uh responsible for some of the repairs so that's a big I mean we got here because the dues may not have been enough I don't know what what their Arrangement was how much the individual homeowners were responsible for but those are pretty low dues uh for around here which makes it affordable which is a good thing but also um are we sure that the actual HOA dues are going to be covering the ongoing maintenance once the repairs happen mayor and council member Calbert the um when you go through an hia process with the city of vatanka you are required to um basically open your books as City and let us look at how you're preparing for kind of this next iteration of improvements that you have to make so it definitely um is something that our financial advisers comb through and we look at how are they preparing what are their fees now how are they ramping them up over time and does it get to a point at which they can um then afford to do their future improvements and we make sure that happens and that's a requirement so when you see that development agreement in February that will look for the language on that there's a bunch of language that talks about their existing um du structure and how the city is able to make recommendations if they we don't think it's adequate so and I appreciate it I also appreciate your comments about how it's a balancing act because you know think repairs and maintenance for for anybody is expensive and um we're trying to keep a housing affordable so it is so I appreciate everything you just said so thank you for the good explanation counc council member ra thank you mayor um yeah I have a couple of questions first of all start with a comment um it sounds like there was you know some definitely some design and construction flaws and some of these earlier um buildings like this and and I just appreciate the fact that the city is uh able to come in and do this because it's much cheaper and more sustainable than tearing down and rebuilding this is a building that you know could become blighted quite easily it sounds like it's teetering on the point of potentially could go that direction so I think this is a very good thing that you know we're able to do in order to you know again preserve that um naturally occurring affordable housing um um but getting on that uh the topic of uh sustainability and also affordability I was wondering if um an hiia and forgive me for not knowing this already if there is um kind of conditions that can be kind of imposed both in terms of quality you know control um a Sustainable Building en envelope and very energy efficient building envelope is does the city have any ability to influence that piece of it as we're going forward and providing the financial instrument to do this um you know kind of playing into our our climate action adaptation planning we don't have codes yet but you know in situations like this um and then following up on that would be um affordable housing um this is naturally occurring but I know with new developments or developments that we um approve for redevelopment and that city has funding that was in the affordable housing report that we're I think going to hit after this um we can you know I don't want to say impose but you know have some requirements for when City financing or you know other gives are provided and so I didn't know if this is an instance where we could do something like that Miss wishnack thank you mayor and council member R melee um the first question you had was about can the city require certain sustainability parts of of the design I think I think in the past we have not required that um typically the improvements that we're seeing will um do better if you will by the environment by having better insulation better Windows better treatments Etc so um I think in the past I think this happened to on the um town homes that we had improvements on where we were looking for those energy improvements and that was going to then benefit on the backside uh the homeowner so I think um just by default some of these get there not maybe to the extent that you uh were thinking but we have not added those conditions in the past and in fact your policy does not call that out so your hia policy that we follow does not um outline that as a um a condition by which you would issue this financing the second thing is about affordability um I think that in the last two projects that we've done so Cloud9 for instance already had conditions of affordability set in to the original development so that already had um covenants on certain units uh the one prior to that was Cedar Ridge if you remember that I'm looking at the mayor because he probably remembers that project the average price in that was about 101,000 for acquisition so again I think the city felt like that wasn't going to grow to 500,000 with these improvements it would probably sit somewhere in the 150 or 200,000 after the improvements were done again the policy does not call that out um and I would maybe make the disting distinction between this is a housing Improvement financing tool this is not City funds being contributed toward which is the difference in all the other affordable housing that you do you're usually ending up giving some kind of Grant tax increment something to the project so again your policy doesn't call that out it is a little bit different what we're doing here so you kind of have to weigh that as well thank you um other questions Council um I've got I've got a couple and I've I've been around long enough that this is my third hia that's how many we've done I believe correct and um you know and I think they are a creative tool to help um support housing affordability and housing for resid but I also think they're a last resort tool I mean this is this is something where if we didn't do this the ship is going to sink I mean it's pretty pretty close to that and so it's it's kind of an emergency housing aid and um so my question is what thoughts does staff have and how can we prevent getting to this point with our homeowners associations particularly um you know rent but well just different homeowners associations and then do I know that the state excuse me I know that the state has done some work on um condom I mean there's a one of the reasons Condominiums are not being built right now excuse me is because there's this condominium warranty law that really makes it onerous um on developers of condominium um the more likely scenario is we're seeing all these apartments being built in the last 5 to 10 years I wouldn't be surprised that 5 to 10 years from now we see a lot of them being converted to Condominiums that's I don't know if that's going to happen but they're not B building them originally because as I understand the law there's a 10-year requirement for the developer to take responsibility for any repairs and so forth that are needed and that's a rough interpretation miss wishnack you can correct me if I'm wrong but you know we're not getting you know as we look at affordable housing um we're not getting Condominiums and there's a reason for that because um developers can't make money on Condominiums based upon the way the laws are in Minnesota right now whether they're good laws or bad laws it's the reality so as I look at this it's not a win to be doing an hiia it's it's it's really salvaging a sinking ship and that's worthy work that's important we are providing homes for a lot of people who would lose their homes that's that's worthwhile effort on our our part but is there anything that the city should be or could be doing appropriately to help prevent these situations and do we do we have any idea about Homeowner Association require reserve requirements No I um I mean that's that's I'm I don't really want to go there but I do think that homeowners associations that are underfunded are more likely to run into these situations than ones that aren't so is there anything that the city does on that whole issue of HOA reserve requirements so those are my two questions mayor um always difficult questions that you ask I think the preventative work is something that we've been working on the last probably four years and maybe even five uh since we've been starting to do these hias um if you remember when we did the rental registry we all or not the rental registry but the rental um kind of dashboard we also started documenting town homes and condominium associations the year it was built and then we have gone through and sifted through and um tried to contact people to try to have conversations about where they're at as an association I would say uh we probably average every other month where we're talking to an association about either a project like this or where we have concern that perhaps maybe there are some issues or challenges or maybe we've heard from a resident so I would say that Outreach has helped um the state law has also helped to make uh the the maintenance plans that are required um part of the existence of AAS today um again that wasn't there years ago and so that is now a thing that is requiring um Homer associations to wake up if they weren't already awake um and so I think all of those things are helping um what was your second question was about state of Minnesota and the um no I I think you did a nice job of answering it I mean it's it's really kind of you know are there any preventive um actions that we can take and I don't want to get into it tonight but but I think you know having an eye on this I mean I've somewhat cynically watched different housing developments get developed you know Condominiums tone homes and you go in they're brand new and gee the assoc iation fee is only $100 a month well how do they get away with that well the answer is because they're brand new and um you know in reality to look at the long-term anticipated life of uh the the unit you probably they should be $500 a month realistically so you build up the reserves so that you have them when you need them but you know developers don't like to do that and I'm not saying bad things about developers it's just that they want to keep their they want to keep their costs as low as possible to make it to make their Market larger and so you know I'm just wonder you know my again I don't want to push this too far but but I'm just wondering if there is a role as we consider these types of developments coming forward to understand what their reserve requirements are and and lean into them to to avoid problems in the future because I mean I of prevention is worth a pound of cure and I I support this tonight um but I also think that um and and this is um this is an introduction correct but I I I think that um I do have a few stats for you mayor okay and then we'll go there and then we'll then we'll move on but I I just think it's um if to the extent that we can prevent these circumstances I think um both the homeowners and the city benefit so the stats on so there's 4,799 condos and town homes in the city that's out of 24,000 households entirely um half of those about are condos half of them are town homes and I just picked 1984 or older um 2500 of those units are that old which consists of 33 developments W so that gives you perspective of who might be in that um target audience and again those are the people that we look for to have contact with so well thank thank you for that um I'll leave it at that I think um I mean this is an introduction I I think that this is affordable housing we want to do everything we can to preserve affordable housing as long as what we're doing makes sense and uh I think there are challenges here but um anyway so if anyone has any further comments or a motion Council M Wilburn I move that we adopt the resolution which will schedule a public hearing for November 18th 2024 and introduce the ordinance establish in the hiia thank you and do there a second Council M Calbert thank you mayor I'll second very good so we've got a motion by council member Wilburn and a second by council member Calbert please call roll sha yes Wilburn yes Calbert yes ra yes kley yes Foster Bolton yes weon yes motion carries so we've been we've going for a little about right around two hours I think we're going to take a 5 to seven minute break and then we'll come back and I don't think the remaining items on the on the agenda will take too much time but I think a little break could be in order so thanks very much well done mayor e e e e e e e e for for e for for for for e all right we'll get started here in just a few seconds all right so the next item is um item 13 which is public hearings and 13A is an off sale intoxicating liquor license for Sundial Wine and Spirits located at 5757 santel Drive site for in m wishnack still your turn it is my turn um let me get to my next can you get there oh whatever we don't have a slide that's all right I can go without slides um so the Sund uh wine and spirit store is just uh doing an internal kind of family exchange with their ownership uh so uh in 2005 if you want some history catly Inc was granted the offsale liquor license um and the sole proprietor was catly nigin and then uh she sold that to her husband and then now the husband is retiring and selling it back to his wife and so that's what uh the change is all about so the uh Police Department investigation is pending and we will bring this back to the city council on December 2nd if you have any questions I'd be happy to answer all right thank you Miss wishnack Council are there any questions that you have all right um I have none either so but this is a public hearing so um Miss wishnack we open this public hearing and then continue it is that correct that is correct mayor all right so um I will open the public hearing and I'll ask if anyone would like to come forward and comment on this item it's not required but you're certainly welcome to if there's anyone like to comment is there anyone okay I'm not seeing anyone who would like to comment so um I'm not going to close a public hearing I will leave it open and I will bring it back to the council so that um that um we can make a motion to continue the public hearing um to December 2 2024 for final consideration is there a motion council member Calbert thank you mayor I'll make the motion to continue the public hearing to December 2nd for final consideration and Council ra I'll second all right we've got a we've got a motion by council member Calbert and a second by Council M ra Miss Faulk please call R Shaq yes Wilburn yes Calbert yes ra yes kley yes Foster Bolton yes weon yes motion carries um next item is other business and U third 14a is the 2024 for Tiff management report and miss wishnack again thank you I'll just kick it off um if you're not familiar with what a tiff management report is uh our consultant from uh ERS and Associates will fully describe what that means uh we do it this time of year to kind of prepare for anything that needs to be amended or dealt with before the end of the year um Miss uh K kiling will explain some of those strategies in her report as to what uh she feels is appropriate um in terms of their advice on tax increment financing um if you look at the report you'll see a lot of the history you can um figure out when a district started when it ends that sort of thing so hopefully it's a good reference tool for you and um as you learn more about how these districts work and what they were set up for I think it's um enlightening so at this point I'd invite Stacy up to to the podium to kind of give a good overview of what's going on in our management report this year good evening and welcome thank you mayor members of the council Stacy quiling with Ellers and Associates your fiscal adviser so as Julie brings up the presentation so that we can get started on this just a little bit of an overview we're going to talk a little bit about why reinvestment is important talk about why would you even provide assistance um to anyone and then we're going to talk about tax increment the basics so that's a lot cuz there's new faces up here that probably haven't been through this process or know a lot and then hopefully you have some good nuggets for your Thanksgiving dinners with friends and family that you can talk about tax increment and then we'll get into the nuts and bolts of the the Tiff districts that you have and then we'll talk a little bit about the recommendations that we have at the end of the day so why do reinvestment why is a community do you do it well one one of those factors right is tax base right you're always Reinventing Your tax base right as things age and they decline you're reinvesting to make sure that you're bringing those values up and and having things happen that you want to see in a positive effort and why do we do that well it's about your brand right you know so every city has a brand whether you like it or not everything does and how you present yourself or decide what your brand is going to be is a good thing that you want to do because otherwise people are going to pick your own brand and say what you are right what you what you look like you know how you want to be and how you act to others that are out there it's about housing diversification right that's been a big Focus uh for this city for for many many years um you're fortunate that you're fortunate or unfortunate you're fortunate in a place that you've got a great housing stock right and but your land's expensive right so it's hard to develop affordable housing or keep affordable housing as you talked about it's about developing public infrastructure needs that you have in a lot of your Redevelopment so changing roads streets or utilities that make more sense for today because they may be a little bit Antiquated from what you had before it's about stability and that's really getting around the public safety issue of things as well so what I can tell you you know in any Community if you have an area in your city um that starts to decline or have a lot of public safety issues you get you know a bad reputation for that and once you have that for everyone it's really hard to come out of that right so you can all think of places that you may drive throughout the Twin Cities or any states and you hear that and you go oh I I maybe have a negative connotation or I have a positive connotation but to come back from that negative is really really hard so you want to reinvest in making sure you're putting your strategies in place to make sure that those issues don't arise or don't happen and sustainability that's a lot what you guys are talking about right what can we do to be better stewards of our environment right so is it solar is it gray water what are all those things that you want to invest in uh to have less of a carbon uh footprint um in your community or within the region as a whole and finally any Redevelopment that you do that extends to other areas of the city for private investment so I always say if you're a resident or business and if you're looking around the city and like the city's not doing anything right if you're not redoing roads or you're not reinvesting in things why should should I as a homeowner do that why do I want to do that so if it's important to you then I can see that value and then it becomes more important to me so why I use Tiff well one of the big reasons is to further your strategic priorities right you guys come together annually and you talk about what you want to do and you measure against those goals like you had your third quarter report on tonight so again it's just a tool in the toolbox because sometimes your goals of what you want to do or your priorities take funding so it's one of those tools that you can bring to the table to actually get some things done that will support that so why consider providing assistance at all and really it's about filling a gap right that you wouldn't get this development but for giving the assistance you're encouraging something that you want to get at the end of the day and so that's why you're bringing your dollars to the table we'll talk a little bit about how you look at bringing those dollars to the actual table as we go forward so Julie this one kind of comes in a time you got to just start clicking there so we always say the the big you know purpose of government is really to remove the barriers for the private market to in reinvest right and so I go through a lot of cities and a lot of cities like oh well the private Market should take care of it private Market should take care of it well they always can't can they sometimes yes a lot of times can they yes but there's times where they can't because there's certain barriers that there may be so one could be complex land assembly right where you've got to go and get multiple parties multiple Parcels there's um owners that may not want to sell so it's a little bit hard so so sometimes you got to give assistance to do that it can be contaminated land or blighted uh properties that you have again with existing properties um that have buildings on it and may have site issues that you're dealing with a high infrastructure costs um or development fees so again everything's getting more expensive as we call it per door or per business that they got to pay fees for I got to pay Park dedication I got to pay you know sewer AES I got to pay water access and other things plus I got utilities I got to put in so it gets expensive at the end of the day affordable housing and our sustainability requirements so again as a lot of these new housing developments have come forward your affordable housing policy has come into play so if you're going to come in and develop and if you're going to do something that requires Council approv it be it a PUD a change in the ordinance or something else or you're asking for assistance then you're going to have to put in some affordability but that comes at a cost that they just can't necessarily do on their own and finally there's times where your vision may be incompatible with what the market wants to do um I don't know if that's been the case for you guys but for other cities it's a real thing uh for certain things that they they want to have that they just can't get for example I would say a lot of council chambers I go in for development Redevelopment everyone says we want to sit down restaurants right you know but they may not be able to get that market right because of the demographics the location or the competing entities of cities that they're around right so they're willing to pay or put their money where their mouth is to try and get that not always with success but they're willing to do that so there's a lot of tools uh for redevelopment that are listed up here I would say all the ones in Orange are ones that you as a city has used right you've been open and flexible to get the goals or do your accomplishments or meet your strategic priorities that you have wanted to actually do so let's talk a little bit about tax increment um so tax increment is the ability to capture the increased value of development on either specific parcel or Parcels in a defined area over a defined period perod of time so if we go and look at the building blocks of tax increment essentially what you have is that base valuation or that original tax capacity so when the Tiff law was created back in the 1970s they said well you know the city the county then the school district are getting taxes from this property and we don't want to hurt them right in the future or be an impediment as to why anyone would want to do tax increment so they said well that existing value in taxes what you're getting today you're going to get tomorrow through the term of the district okay but what we're going to give you as a tool is we're going to give you that increased value of taxes over the base for a defined period of time when that defined period of time is done then everything comes back the taxing jurisdictions get everything that they want so to give you a little context we'll talk about the Burke um so there was an original tax capacity of about 34 ,000 okay this is not dollars this is tax capacity and for those that are learning all the new nuances about taxes and everything else your tax capacity is the ability for you to Levy taxes on a parcel so apartments are taxed at 1 and a qu% so it's that market value times that tax rate gives you a tax capacity that we apply to something else we'll talk about in the next slide and then now they've gone in and they developed right and so that new tax capacity is 643,000 so it's a significant increase okay well what does that mean in the form of taxes so you see there we got that new tax capacity of 643 we deduct out that 34,000 gives us a taxt captured tax capacity of about 69,000 then we take that times your local rate so that's your local tax rate for everything City County School District miscellaneous districts of about 104% if you multiply that you get 635,000 roughly is what the tax increment that's generated from this project from those increased taxes but when we look at it if we go up top and Julie if you click the button um their total property taxes that the Burke is paying is about $74 $3,000 a year and we have to deduct certain things out of tax increment because we can't collect it so the main things that we can't collect are market value taxes so those are taxes that are for voter approved Bond referals could be the school the county or your guys right so those dollars are already dedicated to something else so we can't collect those right the county collects them to pay on whatever bonds the other one is those base value taxes that we talked about that goes to the taxing jurisdictions that they were getting before that's getting distributed back so so that annual gross tip then that's where you see that number it's about $730 or $635,000 we also have to pay the office of the state auditor they get a fee uh for auditing the districts and then likewise you as an Eda as you put your Eda hats on or city you get to retain 10% of the tax increment and you can use that for administrative costs so that's cost of doing your annual Tiff reports it can be staff time it can be consultant time so my time and legal time as well that you're able to retain so the net Tiff that's available on this um project happens to be about $569,000 okay so everyone looks they go well wow you know that's a that's a lot of dollars but the thing to remember is that you know when we have um Tiff agreements and we say that we're going to give you 90% of the Tiff doesn't mean you get 90 cents on the dollar so for this Housing Development they're getting 76 cents on the dollar for every tax dollar that they pay and that's pretty typical so housing we will see it's probably 70 uh to 80 cents on the dollar depends on where located um in the Metro or in the state of Minnesota what other tax rates and other um issues that are coming into play but when we flip it to commercial right they get a lot less so if it's a commercial development say a new office building a hotel or retail area is that they only get like 32 to 42 cents on the dollar and the reason being is because if you see on this you see the two zeros by the Statewide taxes and the fiscal varies adjustment so commercial industrial properties pay Statewide property tax and that was instituted in 2001 as part of the property tax reform and it really went to support the State education system at that time no longer goes to that it just goes to the state general fund but again they pay that residential units do not pay that the second thing is the fiscal disparities adjustment so commercial properties pay up to 40% into the Statewide pool that gets redistributed back again Residential Properties do not have to pay that so that's why if this was a commercial example that would 76 would be 32 to 42 cents on the dollar so there are three types of districts that are most commonly used and that you have used so the first two are renewal on renovation and a Redevelopment District now renewal and renovation district has a term of 16 years this is a maximum term and a Redevelopment district has a term of 26 years so Opus business park for example is a renovation and renewal um but Applewood point and marshman 2 are Redevelopment districts okay so the goal of those District is to clean up blighted property so there's a process and a testing that we have to go through and have inspections done to see if they actually qualify that and then also you have coverage and um that you have to meet with that test as well but at the end of the day if you have a renewal and renovation District or Redevelopment District you can build anything you can build affordable housing you can build market rate housing you can build office you can build Hotel you're not restricted because the goal is clean up of blighted property the second one is housing um that's most commonly used this is for 26 years of Maximum term and the goal is obviously to create affordable housing be it renter or owner occupied housing that you have and so the requirements that we have for this is that you'll routinely hear things that we say that the Tiff law requires that if you're building an apartment project in a housing Tiff District you have certain minimum thresholds so either 20% of those units have to be affordable at 50% of the area meeting income or 40% have to be affordable at 60% the air Med income and it can be anywhere in between you can have 100% affordability 80% as long as it meets those minimum thresholds that you have now for the rental it's an annual um requirement so any of the projects that have affordability in them uh especially for the housing Tiff districts they have to report annually so they're reporting annually to you so those reports are coming to staff so we're reviewing to make sure that they're Meeting those but then also for ones that are 100% affordable where they may have gotten funding from Minnesota housing they're going to the state as well that they're reviewing those as well so what can we use tax increment for well we always say it's kind of limited for most things to the ground under so I would say acquisition of property in buildings that you have to demolish but otherwise it's everything at ground and under right so it's site improvements it's digging it's excavation it might be underground parking um it might be utilities it might be roads sidewalks things of that nature now the only caveat is in Orange when it comes to affordable housing you can use Tiff for anything you can use it for the vertical building itself okay so that's the one difference difference that we actually have so let's talk a little bit about what the law says so anytime someone comes in and makes an application for tax increment financing we have to do what's called the butt for test right and there are two statutory requirements for that we're going to use the Burk as an example here so the first one is that will you have the increased market value less the amount of assistance that you could provide or Tiff that's generated over the term that's greater than the existing value and as you can see here is that the value that would occur with our tax increment is 28 million it's higher than what it is today so it works it meets it it's not hard to meet that portion of the test to be quite Frank because otherwise why would anyone be doing it you're not going to do it to build less value the second test is called the squishy test right so that's the one that is the reasonable foreseeable future and what that means is this development that just came in in the reasonable foreseeable future would you get that exact same thing without any assistance and so that's really looked at and you work in concert with staff and you guys may know as well right so you have site history information you know other people are coming in but to be quite Frank is if you're going to require affordable housing it's going to need assistance at the end of the day so one of the things that the city does is we do do performa reviews so every development that comes in asking for assistance we do a third party review so we're looking at their development performance to make sure well are all your construction costs in line with industry standards um are your rents where they should be within industry standards and meeting the affordability requirements and are all your financing parameters in place and so we look at that and we can tell well yes it can it needs assistance to get certain returns they're not guaranteed those but we're providing assistance to get them to the market returns because there's some higher costs there so again that's not a statutory requirement that's something that you as a city do and really most of the cities in the Metro uh do complete that now so what are the pros and cons right of using tax increment well the pros are someone's asking you for money or something so you can tell them what you want they have to they necessarily have to give it to you right it's a negotiation but you can ask for more things than if if you're not giving any assistance um it's really limited risk to the city so how tax increment works is you'll often hear pay as you go and and what that means is that say someone comes in and asks you for $2 million in Tiff so they have to go out to the bank and they still have to get a loan that covers that 2 million for all their costs and what you're doing is you're giving them a note to say well we will pay on that cost over time so they're going out capitalizing it they're having to put their name on the line and then essentially when they pay their property taxes like we all do in May and October then they'll get a tiff settlement or repayment in August and then February the following year so again it's their risk they have to pay their taxes then they get a portion back over time and then also helps to advance whatever strategic priorities you as a community are doing so what's the con well it's the big one right you are not capturing that value right that tax capacity for a period of time and that can be anywhere from one year to 26 years it depends on the term of the assistance that you have to provide but what I say is that it's it's a short-term investment for a longer term gain and I think for most of your districts most of yours don't go and most cities don't go the statutory uh term of 26 years A lot of times it's a much shorter uh term in duration uh that you see for these districts and then you're able to bring them back on the tax R so you can get the benefit of that for your Levy purposes so when we look at banka um your return on investment has been high and we'll talk about the parameters of how we look at that so you're doing well with what your Investments are that you have in your tax increment districts uh you have two districts that will be decertified in the next few years so that's going to give you some new capacity that you can either choose to Levy or choose to decrease your Levy we'll talk about that a little bit later um you have some special legislation for affordable housing for pooling through 2026 um so the first report just went to the legislature last year we'll have another report that's uh coming forward so it's a great tool that you got um Richfield got and St Louis Park not everybody else did you guys are kind of the pilot program for this so it's a way for you to Garner some additional resources so that you could Advance your affordable housing goals and then I would say that you really have used a balanced approach to tax increment you're not big users of that and we'll talk a little bit about that so since 1977 you've created 15 districts you have four housing districts three Redevelopment districts and two renovation and renewal districts that are currently active so you have nine that are active and what I would say six of those districts six of those nine were created in the last 10 years okay three probably in the Last 5 Years and another three in the prior three 5 years to that so again you guys don't use tax increment a lot it's really for those projects that matter that come forward that seem to make sense uh to advance some of those priorities that you have as we look at this and Julie you can click the bar a couple more times is that you know your biggest developments all have been residential okay so you've created about 3,200 units in these tip districts of which 1200 are affordable 38% affordability that's pretty good that's Bing pretty good average with those and if you look down below we have the number of units that are in the categories from 30% um up to 100% And The 100 and 115% of Ami those are really owner occupied okay the 30 to the 80% are falling within your rental properties so what we look at again tax base that's what we talked about it's one of the reasons that you do this uh when we look at that and Julie you can click a couple sorry to put all these Flyin for you if you look you know your U market value has increased about 335 million on these projects so that's what you want to see because you're going to have the future benefit of that and that's a 1 1600% increase in your market value so that's significant so you're having a good re return on your investment from a tax-based perspective even though it's being captured uh for a short period of time short to Mid period of time the big one I want to highlight here is typically what we see which is not atypical is the housing the housing districts are the ones that tend to drive the biggest valuation changes uh cuz they're usually going in on uh properties that are a little bit more obsolete um or valuations that are not as high for certain property so that's where you see those biggest increase so like Roland um which is actually um the 9 Mile Creek is that what it's called Julia yeah uh is 7,300 pretty significant so the big thing we always ask is again so you're investing for a short period of time what's our value proposition back to us um over time so Julie if you click the first one as I said in 2029 you got two uh districts that would be coming off if you make an election to keep uh them open for affordable housing so when we look at that is that for apple woodpoint and Glen Haven when they come off if everything stays the same values today the tax rate you have today fiscal disparities is that essentially if you chose to Levy for that capacity that's coming off you'd have about another $360,000 in in taxes that you could use to put to other services programs needs that you have the next one comes in when Opus comes off that's only a 16-year district um that will be pretty significant so that is going to bring in about another um total you up to million three so it's about a million bucks again if you choose to Levy when that actually comes on or or how you try to address that in the future times that you have so again that's your that's your value proposition right you'll have future tax dollars if you choose to Levy them to do some other things within your city and community so we look at the special legislation that you have um this chart it's a lot of small numbers but let me highlight a few things here the numbers in Gray are ones districts that you already made that um election to contribute an additional 10% for affordable housing we're done collecting they're just shown here because they're part of the P or the piece of the puzzle that we have for this the ones in green are your housing districts and so those are ones that traditionally you will always keep open right because that's going to be dollars that are affordable housing for future developments or uses or purposes that you want to do the ones that are highlighted in the blue those are ones that you can make that decision to continue to get that additional 10% so you're going to keep those districts open a little bit longer even after the obligations are paid off because the legislation allows you to do that so what we highlight is that the orange line that goes across is 2026 is your last year that you can transfer to your affordable housing uh districts or your your fund once the legislation is done we can talk if that gets renewed or not but at the end of the day what we're estimating if if you make the election especially in the three districts in blue is that you're going to have about a cumulative amount of $10.4 million that you've collected now if you're able to keep those districts open longer your big contributors that you're going to have in the future are your green housing districts and so then that number goes from the 10 million and it brings you in an additional $18 million from those districts that you can have for affordable housing so all told if you go down the cumulative one is 10 million for the affordable housing trust fund plus the $18 million is going to give you about $28 million that you can potentially have okay so now the decision and and part of the recommendations that we'll have will be especially for uh related to Applewood point but all the districts in blue and so when we look at what you guys have done to date um through 2023 you've got just about $5 million that you've collected um you've spent just under $2 billion for four developments for $198 uh affordable units so you got a remaining balance right now of about $3 million again we'll have a transfer that happens in 24 and through 26 but we just highlighted the projects that were actually done and the amount of assistance that was provided to those so we talk about how you been balanced with using tax increment right in your tax capacity so if you look out of 45 cities in hin County you have the seventh highest tax capacity so you're sitting in a pretty good place right um as far as your valuations and developments that you have and when we look at one of the benchmarks councils like to know is how much of our tax capaity is captured in Tiff right and we say don't have a you know it's not necessary to have a policy but just have a guide post because every city is different right every city has different things and how they pay for things their size their valuation what they're willing to do so if we look at um motanka currently for 2024 you have about 2.26% of your tax capacity capture and Tiff which is pretty low and when we project that out to 2029 and Julie can hit it a couple more times it's going to go up to about 3 and 1 12% um that's with a pretty conservative estimate on on future value growth so you're still you know pretty pretty low in the thresholds that we see out there so as I say is don't compare yourself with your neighbors or others but everybody likes to so we'll give you the comparisons that we have um for cities that are out there and these were really selective because they're either your neighbors they're similar in size similar maybe um uh in what you have for demographics within your community and as you can see for aanka you got 2.26 um and you're probably right in the middle right with some of these we got St Louis Park at the highest um and then you got other cities such as um Burnsville or Plymouth that may be in the much lower percentage but those change every year because they have developments that are coming in um as well at the end of the day but overall you know your market value has almost doubled in the last 10 years which is pretty pretty significant to see so even with your small investment in tax increment which has helped to bring up that valuation right um I don't say that it's been overused right so you've had some of that appreciable market value that you want to see from other things happening and you've stepped in or stepped up to the plate to meet some strategic priorities and do other things within your community that you wanted to do so our recommendation we just have one um this is the same recommendation we had back in 2022 is that for Apple point is the main one but also we have Shady Oak and Glen Haven Tiff districts that you should make that election to have the additional 10% available for affordable housing and so what that does uh for these districts in the case of Applewood it extends the term by four years okay that's so we had these numbers in the charts when we looked at the affordable housing and for shady o it would extend it by eight years when that obligation is done but it doesn't extend the term for Glenn Haven because that has to stay open because you have bonds that are outstanding so that does it provides you approximately 1.5 million more in Tiff through 2026 so you get that ability to capture that so you could choose after 26 not to do it anymore and send things back but at least through 26 you're going to capture that but if you leave it open um the rest of the term that we recommend that's an additional 3 million so you get a total of 4.6 million coming to your affordable housing trust fund but what what does that mean right to use so that's always the discussion that we have so when we look at appwood point to give you a little perspective and this was in your report so that tax capacity that's captured right in that district is about $242,000 and what that equates to you know for you is that if you chose right to reduce your tax levy by that 242,000 because you want to be able to Spread spread the wealth and the value over everyone else it's about a 006 reduction in your tax rate which would be a tax savings about two just under three bucks for your average value home of 495,000 so that's you know essentially what your decision points are would you rather have that capacity right to lower taxes for everyone or do you want to keep the dollars in the districts or for the affordable housing trust fund so that you can advance some more of your strategic priorities so with that I'm happy to answer any questions thank you very much um very interesting I'm not sure I got everything um but um Council any questions councilor Sha thank you mayor I just want to clarify I think I understand if the if if we retain the 10% and keep it open we're retaining the increase on our portion plus the County's portion for 10% for more than 10% it's a technicality of the 10% that we say you're basically able to keep that District open and collect all the tax increment after the obligation is paid off up until you get to that threshold got it but if we were to take it off the rules then the county would get theirs and it would go just as any other non Tiff property great thank you cmer Wilburn following more clarification um so if we keep the the district open I'm like I'm where does that where does that money go so like with with normal Tiff the the the property taxes are paid they go to the county we get the city gets their portion and then we give the amount agreed upon to the developer that we made the Tiff agreement with so if we keep the T Tiff District open is that money still going to them to keep affordable units in their in the housing or what where where's that money going yeah mayor council member so a technicality is the you know once we get the tax ta increment from the county it goes into the tax increment fund and out of that fund then we pay the developer obligation that we may have now when you're keeping these districts open to collect that additional 10% that means that the obligations are paid off so traditionally under state law you would have to desertify that district and be done but the law allows you to keep it open until you collect that additional increment for your affordable housing so where it goes it first comes back into the Tiff funds right but then through the end of 2026 we can then transfer those dollars to your affordable housing trust fund other questions well thank you very much it's getting late there's there's a lot of um things to chew on there but it's it's very interesting and you know um I mean it's interesting from my perspective that you know Tiff is really an important tool for us and we've used it for a lot of affordable housing but relative to our other cities and I know we're supposed to compare but we always do um we're not particularly heavy user of Tiff so I think that's I think that's interesting a good perspective any other comments Council thank you so much good to see you all do we have a motion on that no motion just information okay that's good 14b is excuse me Public Safety drones and I believe um deputy chief Tate has that presentation welcome thanks for uh hanging with us um all evening my good to see [Music] you raise I I didn't see your nose grow at all when you said that but we'll just go with it uh mayor council thanks for having us here tonight to talk about uh Public Safety drones so just you know why why drones right why do we want to implement a drone program well there's a lot of different benefits that drones have some of them you see here that's it's really going to help us search for missing people and children and for different subjects drones are much faster to deploy so the only other tool that we have available to perform a the job that a drone can do is the helicopter that's a state patrol helicopter it's not always in the air the availability of that depending on weather is is very hit or miss so a drone allows us to fastly deploy something into the air to help us in these situations and it doesn't cost as much as a helicopter does to a fly it's also much less of an impact on the community than a helicopter is I mean we've all seen the situations in the city when the helicopter is up how many inquiries we get or how much concern that that can generate so the use of a drone is just less of an impact to the community and like our body cams and our Squad cameras drones are equipped with cameras as well that record and they would help provide an unbiased account of actually what's happening out there that we can review You've all seen the headlines I'm sure this was just a quick Google search and the just from the the past couple of months about when drones have been used locally here in Minnesota to have positive outcomes um from helping in a mental health crisis to fining a person in the lake a child in a corn field to most recently just here a couple of days ago uh helping find two lost hikers up in northern Minnesota and in addition to all that drones uh help us in our community engagement efforts you know just like we utilize our canine unit or our Traffic Unit or other different units that we have to highlight engagement this is just another tool that we can use to help connect um our residents with our officers and in doing that I I really think it's going to help just kind of demystify that drone use having the public come to be able to see how the Drone is used what its capabilities are um is really going to help with that as well so drones and Public Safety um It's relatively new but growing so the Minnesota state statute that um really governs the use of drones was enacted in May of 2020 since then um through the reporting that the Department of Public Safety requires you can see how it's grown so in 2021 there are about 76 police agencies with drones and uh the the last report in 2023 it's grown up to 99 in the United States there's over 1,500 police departments using drones so it's becoming a pretty popular tool and it the whole drones and law enforcement and our policy and how it was developed is all Guided by State Statute so State Statute is very specific on how drones can and cannot be used and how the data is protected and all of that so what the statute says and when we can use drones are during an aftermath and emergency that involves the risk of death or bodily harm to a person over a public event where there's a heightened risk of safety to the participants or bystanders to counter the risk of a terrorist attack to prevent the loss of life in or in property in a natural man-made disaster and to facilitate the planning rescue and Recovery operations to conduct threat assessments and anticipation of a specific event to collect information from a public area if there's a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity to collect information for crash reconstruction so fly over a public area for officer training at public and for public relations and for purposes unrelated to law enforcement at the request of a government entity provided that they make the request in writing to us what does that mean that's kind of an outlier right what does that one mean well I look at it let's say um maybe the minihaha Creek Watershed District needs a drone to fly over minihaha Creek for something that they're doing they could write a request to us and we could authorize our drones to be used for that purpose so it's a government entity it's not related to law enforcement um it could even be maybe another city department needs a drone to do you know forestry has been looking at drones to do help with tree counts maybe that's a use for that so that's what I see when I how I interpret that piece of that statutory language in addition to what it can be used for the the statute says what it can't be used for so it can't be used to conduct random surveillance we need to comply with constitutional and privacy rights drones can cannot be used to Target People based on their individual characteristics like their race ethnicity national origin religion disability gender or sexual orientation we cannot use drones to harass intimidate or discriminate any individual or group and we cannot use drones for any personal business the statute also limits the use saying that drones must comply with all FAA requirements and guidelines we cannot equip our drone with any facial recognition or other biometric technology unless we have a warrant to do so we also cannot equip drones with weapons and we cannot use a drone to collect data on protest unless there's a warrant or there's an exception that we've already mentioned it earlier on when they're authorized so for privacy that's governed um by the statute as well so it says that the data has to be deleted as soon as possible and no later than 7 days after its collection unless it's part of an active criminal investigation and with that as well we also have to buy by the fa regulations which say that uh we can't we have to be cognizant of where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy so when our operators are flying the drones they need to take precautions to avoid inadvertently placing our drones within view or someone has an expectation of privacy so that could just be turning it away from Windows or flying it in a different path so that we're avoiding those different uh things from happening so in addition to this we covered a lot of Statute which really guided what our policy will look like but overall what this the Drone team and the police department will look like it's going to be overseen by that captain of Patrol services with that there'll be a team leader that'll facilitate the training they'll be responsible for a lot of the reporting a lot of compliance with statute then there'll be two assistant team leaders that will really help that team leader kind of perform those functions and do a lot of the maintenance on our on our drones and then we'll have team members about seven to eight of them these are the actual officers that'll be flying the drones if there's a y 7 to8 that's to hopefully get drones available for flying 24/7 so spreading those officers on different shifts at different times of day so that they're always available to us in addition to Flying the drones they're going to be responsible for doing all the reporting doing all the maintenance and doing all the training and for that Community engagement piece too they'll be tasked with that the Drone will consist of uh two drones as our goal we would like to have a drone mainly for exterior so that's a little bit of a larger drone and then we're also looking at a smaller drone that we can use to fly into buildings if we need to if there's a need for that there's uh been a lot of concern lately about uh where you acquire a drone from specifically you know Chinese companies um we are tracking that as the federal government is poised to ban any Chinese made drones for for Public Safety use so we will not be acquiring anything that's not americanmade and there are several companies out there that will be able to reach our goals that uh to help with that that piece of it so in addition to the equipment there's a lot of training it's all governed by the FAA it's it's called part 107 it's the uh fa rules that they implemented in 2016 it's the same thing that if you have a drone today that you would have to go through to fly your drone it applies to law enforcement just as it does to the general public in addition to the training and the equipment and all the policy there's a lot of reporting in that we have to do on this so anytime this uh drone flies in the air we have to write a police report it's got to have its own unique case number we have to provide a factual basis why it was used in accordance with statute and then what we do with all that information is every year by January 15th we have to report that to the Department of Public Safety we have to tell them exactly each use that it was why we did it um and then we also have to report to them the cost of our drone program so all that data is collected and it's and it's later once agencies submit that they put out a legislative report every single year that documents all this and it's all on their website it's available for public consumption so anybody who's curious of what we're actually doing they can go on that and view that report and it's broken down by Agency on how many times they flew it and why they did that and uh for anybody online or in the audience that's curious about drones in in Minnesota and how they're being used this will bring you to that legislative report from 2023 the most recent one where you can really see what's happening with drones in Minnesota in public safety with that mayor I will turn it back to you and Council if you have any questions or comments and then I would just ask that we open it for up for any public comment that there might be in the audience great thanks deputy chief appreciate it um Council questions about drone use in motanka council member Wilburn just really quick um am I remembering correctly that this is something that could be tracked with the new system that right okay so um mayor council Wilburn um with that reporting and accountability piece of this it all integrates in with axon air is what it's called this the product that's part of that axon Suite that you heard about recently so that will track the flight's path it'll track the flight time who the operator was it'll be the video will be integrated with that so that really helps with that whole accountability piece of it that there's actual software that is tracking every single time that a drone goes into the air so great thank you other questions counc coward did you have one yeah and I'm not I'm not quite sure if this is for Deputy Chief or for Miss heiney or if it's even something that we can answer so I'm I'm sort of thinking about unintended consequences and how we have a lot of technology in our lives right now um that may have gotten out ahead of the law so we have state statute that govern governs I don't know how well it's tested um so you think about um say protests you know you're not supposed to you know it has to be an authorized use and it's not supposed to be used against peaceful protesters we have strong opinions among you know various powerful leaders about um protesters and um you know one man's protesters another man terrorist Etc and so um one of the things I'm wondering is is is in the statute Is there further sort of definition or clarification around those definitions and you know it just says it can't be used against protesters to surveil Pro you know peaceful protesters It also says that it can used to prevent a terrorist attack and that can get kind of gray yeah I think uh mayor council m c I'll do my best to answer this for you um first of all it doesn't really go into further definition of what a protest is you know I think when you look at public order and that whole realm of policing you know it's a pretty fine line sometimes on what is first Amendment protected activity versus what is something that's now turning into an illegal activity so when I when I look at the use of drones in those situations I don't look at that as a using a drone to monitor someone who's exercising the First Amendment rights um of free speech and that's constitutionally protected activity you know if that activity were to start deviating towards that to something that is now brightly a violation of the law that's something where a drone would go up to try and monitor that large group because laws are being broken there's a threat to life and safety happening and that's now turned from First Amendment protected activity to there's a problem occurring that we need to launch the drone over a protest group or a large group to to try and resolve that and figure out who's causing the problem so that we can stop it thank you deputy chief other questions from Council council member ra yeah um thank you for the presentation and I I think I sent an email uh about this that probably um got to you about the concerns and I don't think the concern that council member calber expressed was about Minot tonka's use of this or your particular use it's about warrantless you know requests um without warrant to do that from outside government entities now you brought up 9mile creek or you know inra departmental things I think what at least one resident and you know what council member Calbert was um getting at and you know may be a legitimate concern is outside entities what is the Authority or what is the obligation of motanka to whoever feds whatever come in and say we want to use your drone for XY and Z we don't have a warrant um and we want you to do this what is what would be the obligation for us to do so you know whether it's you know a a a demonstration of of undocumented immig whatever it is or yeah so that's I think that's the concern yeah and uh mayor council member r i I would um say that they don't have jurisdiction over us to direct us to do that first of all second of all I would say that um you know we have moral and ethical obligations that we have sworn our duty to uphold as well as we've all taken the oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States so I think you know we have an obligation as as a department to to stand by that and follow through with those obligations so um there's a lot of a lot of wh ifs out there that that could could happen but um they they no jurisdiction to come over and commment deer any of our equipment or do anything like that or or we you know we have our own ethical obligations that we need to uphold as well too so I hope that helps answer I'm not I'm not really sure how to how yeah no I I understand I appreciate it I thank you it's it's just in this moment um in our in our country um you know there's concern about looking forward and what could be and um yeah I think you know the any anything we can do in our policy to kind of affirm that um would be welcome from my point of view and I don't know if I can speak for other council members as well thank you thank you so um any other questions Council all right so what we'll do is um deputy chief thank you um we will um is there anyone in the audience who' like to address this issue we don't have a lot of audience here um but you know if if if you want to say something this is your opportunity and if not that's fine we'll keep moving so um I I'll bring it back to the council then saying that there is no one who wants to um com and any comments from Council about this I mean this is not an action item tonight it's um it's uh to receive the information um but if anyone like to make a comment we'll do that before we move on counc Calbert thank you mayor first of all um you know I know even in our city that there have been some tremendous benefits to the use of drones they're you know vulnerable people who have been found so uh and and you know this is one of those things it's double-edged sword it can be a wonderful tool um and I think can can be lowcost high return on investment in terms of you know Public Safety you know finding those vulnerable people um preventing crime um keeping people safe I do think that um there have been a lot of examples of um laws some of which are quite old and and were you know written at the time of our constitution where there was a certain um ethos um around it so that people understood what was intended and meant by the laws and so there but it was sort of honor System that you expected people to behave in a certain way and honor the spirit of the law and this is one of those times where I don't think we can count on that and um and so you know making sure that you know people take Oaths and people understand our founding documents differently and I think we've seen a lot of that over the last 4 to8 years um and so I just think the more definition we can get around our own policy for use making sure that other government entities cannot misuse it for U unethical unconstitutional nefarious reasons uh would you know make some of our residents feel more confident about it and you know this is like anything else that law enforcement does I think there's a certain amount of public trust that has to be built around it I think this might require some kind of education so you know you shared some really good things about you know what the intent is how it would be used how it shouldn't be used and I think um that can go a long way to building public trust but I also think that a lot of this technology really relies on the character of the people that are using it and as much of that as we can take out of the policy and make sure that it is it is articulated is is a really really important thing for us to do because I love our Police Department we have an incredibly ethical police department but things change and the same people aren't always in place and I truly hope that you know our our law enforcement stays as wonderful as it is now um but but things change and you know we look at at what happens in other peaceful countries and stuff happens and it's sort of out of your control you know countries get invaded public you know leadership changes so I just want to make sure that we articulate really what we want out of our drone policy if we adopt it um keeping in mind that I really understand um and that I'm sure we all understand what a useful tool it is and think that there is a lot of transparency sort of built in because you can see the video just like you can with the body cam so I I think you know some some of it might take care of itself but I really want to make sure we do articulate our intentions with this to make sure that we're not just relying on the honor System which doesn't always work thank you Council m c are there any other comments um quickly um yes Y come up and um provide your name and address my name is Scott Moss I live on Oakland Road in minaka um and I came to the meeting tonight just for this uh because I do believe that the drones are an invaluable tool in search and rescue I mean I understand there are some other things with it that can go out can could get out of hand and but then you brought up another department asking the police department for if they can borrow the Drone or borrow the Personnel the one thing that you do have to remember and this may or may not scare you a little bit but the Drone that they buy is going to has a lot of added things for their benefit on it if Watershed wanted to do the same thing and just go out and buy one they could probably do it for 10% of the cost they aren't going to have the same regulations that the police department's going to have um I really doubt if anybody is going to start uh using it nefariously um other departments or anything like that because of the cost difference between the police department and a civilian would have I mean I've been I've been using drones probably longer than anybody here I mean I've had them for probably about 16 years and um it I don't know if anybody if anybody has ever seen video or photos off a drone they for the most part until you start to get into very very expensive ones uh you it's difficult to see uh facial features or anything like that until you start getting very very low um and I know that a number of departments Plymouth being one of them has a tethered drone which falls under different different actually it's not even considered a drone because it is Tethered um and it's used for mainly for things like concerts um and watching uh large areas uh and it can stay a FL can stay a loft for many many hours but there are things that will come from the use of this drone um I mean you mentioned I think three uh search and rescues that have happened I can probably pull up aund hundreds of them where where they're just the absolute best thing in the world and most of those have happened from not by law enforcement but by civilians using their own drones looking for lost children hikers things of that nature but that was all I had to say all right well thank you and we'll we'll wrap this up but I just I want to add a couple of comments I mean I I agree that um and as the policy that was laid out by Chief Tate um deputy chief Tate um indicated that you know there's there's a lot of reporting requirements and I'm thankful that we've got our new technology system because as he was presenting I was thinking wow okay that's a lot of reporting to do who gets to do that and and having a system that that essentially um manufactures the report along with the utilization I think is really important or I could see a lot of um of Staff time getting tied up into just reporting so that's one but I also see it as I think there are many benefits I think there's some risks but I also think with anything that offers a lot of benefits you have to put up you have to you have to deal with some risk and make sure that your policies um cover that and your procedures cover that um and I also see it as at at a time when um we're all struggling with Staffing I mean this is this is a force magnification tool and I think that will enable our officers to do more with perhaps less Manpower or do more with the same amount of Manpower and I think that's really an important consideration for um for a police agency um like anything with technology like body cams like um um just any technology and information capturing device we need to be cautious and have good policies in place but I think our history as a city has been that we've done that and as technology changes it may requ ire us to to run a little faster in some of those areas but but I think that's all necessary and that's consistent with the way we've done things historically so I want to just thank you all for hanging in there as long as you have for tonight and um and I appreciate I think it's um I think it's a good opportunity for the for the city so it's a non action item so we're going to go to our last action item tonight and that is um and it's really an information item too it's um um item 14 C is the Highway 7 Corridor update and Mr funk I believe you have that report thank you all tonight for being here thank you mayor and councel I'll try to make this as brief as as possible as the mayor teed it up uh this is mainly informational but there is a resolution for your consideration uh here this evening uh and I'll talk about that here in a second really just wanted to bring forward to you an update on the activity and really this stems back this last year and really if you're re rewinding the clock a little bit Highway 7's been an interest of the cities and certainly our interest on safety along Highway 7 uh we're not alone in our concerns for Highway 7 in fact there are other cities along Highway 7 that share our concern over the safety along this Corridor another city that I'll just speak to is the city of Shorewood uh their mayor Jennifer labid and their City administrator uh have worked with mayor weim and I and I'll also speak to the role of the engineers in a second uh this last year really trying to uplift this discussion and and get more traction on potential improvements to Highway 7 one of the things that we've learned um and it's not surprising to any of you when I mentioned this is that one of the challenges is you know to go to the state and say hey we want money for this or we want money for this part of any stretch of highway is is really often a big lift and what we what we realize is that when you build strength and numbers you can gain a lot more traction so really that's been the effort this last year uh as there's been now a number of meetings between uh the Mayors and city managers and administrators from the corridor cities along Highway 7 that's really stretching from in essence Hopkins or the St Louis Park Hopkins border Westerly to the edge of henan County so just uh really on the other side of St bonifacius so there are roughly 10 10 to 12 cities that either touch Highway 7 or have an adjacent interest uh to Highway 7 including our school districts and so we've had again just a few meetings uh this last number of months and we're at a point of really trying to provide an update to you and then uh taking a look at what those some of these next steps look like so I do have a few slides just to share with you thank you uh the first one is relates um to really some statute uh and this last legislative session uh the city of shwood was awarded $200,000 from uh the state uh mayor wome and mayor labid and then there might have been another mayor uh present who testified earlier this year just with the concerns related to Highway 7 in response to that uh the legislature did again award $200,000 to Shorewood one of those legislative requirements was to do a comprehensive study and financial plan to establish what's called a TMO which is a traffic management organization um so that was the requirements and since then uh again sh I'd say mainly Shorewood and minak and our partnership in this is really trying to understand what that means and so part of our our meetings have been really taking a look at how do how does a TMO get lifted off the ground or how do other organizations around the state really um spend their time coalescing around the similar issue uh one of my next slides here if you maybe just go to the next slide is taking a look at I9 I94 Coalition and really um myself and I think the mayor have learned more about the I94 Coalition is probably one of our more closest coalitions and there are others around the state uh Highway 5 I believe has a coalition U 65 which is Northern Metro have a coalition and there's other coalitions around the metro and around the state that are doing this very same thing so we're learning from experiences from these other coalitions on how do cities come together what's the mechanisms that cities come together and what does this really look like in terms of advocating for a common interest around improved safety just to give you a couple um information points about for example the I94 Coalition and and really why we looked at them is they've been very successful and mayor W and I were exposed to them probably more recently a year ago when we went to the transportation Flyin in Washington DC and um mayor won can can add to that here in a few minutes uh this past year we attended for a second year in a row mayor wome and Public Works director Manchester went to the DC Flyin really start laying that foundational work for seeking more federal funds when when it comes to Highway 7 but a little bit more uh about Highway N or excuse me not Highway Interstate 94 I94 Coalition is they they spend about H 100,000 a year on their Coalition activities so when you drive that stretch of roadway between the Twin Cities and St Cloud and often times you see those orange cones uh in that stretch you you get St Michael and Albertville and the other monel and some of those other communities that is a direct result of their efforts uh dating back almost 15 to 20 years now on how those cities have gotten together and their efforts over the last decade and a half of achieving not only uh State funding but more importantly that Federal funding because really State dollars and mindat dollars flow from the federal government and so really that's that's an important relationship and establishment is really looking at how a coalition can get formed how we as a city can work with other cities along Highway 7 and do the same uh but for the I94 as I mentioned they spend about $100,000 a year um it's noted there mainly the biggest piece of that is on Consultants uh they look at public relations and Communications and marketing they have their own website presence there's literature there's brochures digital B Billboards so there's just a really a lot of activity that's established by that group they also spend 20 to 40,000 a year on lobbying efforts and so I mentioned the Washington DC and the federal Flyin or the annual federal Flyin uh those lobing dollars again are important to I94 with their dollars and how they've been able to again capture money for Highway improvements and then again they they do spend lastly just a $10,000 for dollars a year on special events so whenever they have a win whether it's big or small they try to do uh special events really celebrating uh their successes uh some other probably some things that might come to your mind when I mentioned spending $100,000 where does that money come from and so uh on I94 again uh they looked at either doing like a traditional jpa and that's usually pretty common method uh with cities where you have like a joint Powers Arrangement where you get cities together and you sign more of a jpa joint Powers agreement kind of route in their situation they went to a 501c3 nonprofit and primarily because with the business interests that are along I94 uh there there was a way for the businesses to also donate Monies to um that cause and so when you have a jpa type agreement businesses W weren't able to really give money to then the city and so they established more of a 51 C3 route we're not suggesting here tonight that that's where this will go um but we do think that's as we continue to explore these options looking at either a jpa whether it's a or a 51 C3 route that again certainly we need to vet out in terms of membership each City pays annual dues there's some 50 cents per capita and I think eventually that's that'll be part of this conversation tonight's conversation though is more about the resolution ution and really our commitment to studying this further there are no Financial considerations for you this evening but I think eventually that will be a discussion as we get into likely 2025 and and Beyond um again every I think the other lessons that we learned in talking to the I94 Coalition is that really and I said this already it's a collective voice and so just more success comes from um cities coming together banding together and again that's the conversation that we've had with Shorewood the other cities along our stretch um next slide please uh this is where again I'll I'll pause here in just a second if Mr Manchester or the mayor won wants to chime in there's also an engineering perspective of this and to give you a sense I think you're aware that this uh there's a Highway 7 study that's happening uh mot is leading that study and it it is underway and you've perhaps seen earlier social media post where mindat has been soliciting input along Highway 7 so that's undergoing right now and there's really a group that's part of that which is called the technical advisory committee and so U Mr Manchester is part of that process the engineers are also part of that process is mad is going through that study uh we're expected to see those results in June of 2025 and those will be shared with not only our city but as we again kind of get this Coalition pulled together that will also be presented I assume to that group as well and then aside from mindat study uh there's an active engineers group uh that is meeting and also coalescing around this issue Mr Manchester and Engineering professionals from along the stretch are also involved we're one of the I think the only city that has our own in-house Engineers so other cities along the stretch of corridor have Consulting Engineers either from usually bolt and mink or WSB so those cities representative Engineers have been part of this conversation and they're really working on uh identifying the transport Transportation needs along the corridor again working with mind on that current study looking for what those opportunities for improvements are in different intersections creating a shared vision and then ultimately this will will this will lead and transend to more public engagement as we discuss it further as a community we work with our neighboring cities really looking at the long-term needs of what Highway 7 will look like next slide please and then proposed next steps again this was highlighted in the staff report so there's a lot of things happening uh right now uh again I've already mentioned that we're looking for the city Council to pass a resolution there that's in your packet really what that does is obligate the city to exploring the Highway 7 TMO and I'll come back to that here in a second the difference between a TMO and as I mentioned the other mechanisms of forming of a group which is either through a jpa or some type of 501c3 nonprofit uh there's a lot of things that need to happen quickly because with the legislation that Shorewood received or that $200,000 in legislation the city of shorwood received that needs to be spent in a one-year increment and so there's some pressure on the city of shorwood to utilize those funds um I mentioned TMO and as we're learning and as I've learned uh TMO is much different than a coalition and so we're seeking Clarity yet around what that means for Shorewood because they do have that $200,000 and we're looking to use that for Consultants but again kind of the next steps in this process is further identifying what a TMO actually does because that's different from a Coalition in a couple things and I'll turn to council member Shaq as she's aware of what a TMO looks like and uh she is the chair of the I 494 TMO organization and they meet and have been in existence for many years and that is a TMO and tmos are different than like a coalition like an I94 that I spoke of there's a lot more statutory requirements in terms of creating a TMO and we're not quite sure that was the intent of what the legislature approved last year so again some things that we need to sort out as we look at tmos because there are only five tmos in the state but there are many more coalitions and so it's really kind of that um the creation of this Coalition is what we again need to vet out and likely come back to you with in terms of once that gets finalized and then some other um timelines in the process um understanding that we've got to look at that $200,000 getting a consultant on board looking at getting this group established getting a coalition established so certainly some activities coming up in terms terms of fa Phil facilitating a process for uh great getting a consultant on board because we do think a consultant would be beneficial as we get this group formed so that activity we anticipate to incur November if you go to the next slide then certainly as we get into November December and early next year really kind of as the as the slide talks about here um look at that establishment getting our um getting our plan in place for what this organization is going to look like um because this is brand new this is brand new for minat in terms of getting again these cities together so really that's the work coming up in the next few months and then likely by next spring which is Quarter Two is really having a consultant on board and really a better game plan in place as again we as a city work with our other cities on where this all goes so with that I think the next slide is probably questions uh mayor wome or I turn to Mayor wome if anything to add or also will Manchester for any kind of engineering perspectives happy to answer any other questions otherwise we do have a resolution for your consideration again the resolution is is really meant to then obligate or commit the city to continue to to study this matter and as we've talked I think this last year Highway 7 is important to the city I'm really pleased with the progress we've made to really get this off the ground it's it's a kind of a heavy lift it feels like a heavy lift of really focusing our efforts on Highway 7 and as we look to either um looking at different intersections along our stretch of corridor whether it's around the school district at 100 or one excuse me 101 um we've communicated the school district on where we're at in this process they will be further at the table and certainly as as you know as council members we do hear from residents with safety concerns on seven and Williston and the timing of the lights and we also had our own couple serious accidents this last year and so as we look at Highway 7 and coming up with requests on future projects we're at the very infancy here this evening and so with that I will pause and see if mayor where some Oregon Mr Manchester have anything to add that I already have spoken to um Mr Manchester do you have anything you want to add quickly I I don't Mr Funk covered it very well happy to answer any questions so all right and and I I I agree that I think Mr Funk did a great job um but just a couple of comments um quickly because I I am mindful of time although it doesn't always seem that way um the um I mean this is really a lift um of all the cities along Highway 7 and it is um I mean having shared vision and clearly Highway 7 in minaka is different than Highway 7 in St bonifacious and so working together and making sure that everyone is heard because Highway 7 is important to every city along the line um Mr Funk mentioned uh that um I went to the capital along with mayor labid and there's another mayor there Tom Fletcher of um of Greenwood well I um Tom came to the um Regional Council of Mayors meeting today but he was late and um he shared with me and and that was what I was reading when I was supposed to um when I got caught um reading my phone rather than um directing the meeting he shared with me that well um I'm sorry I was late at the meeting today but um I was on Highway 7 uh by um Christmas Lake Road and I was rear ended and um so here's another accident of one of us going to a mayor uh going to a meeting where we're going to participate but it speaks to the challenges that Highway 7 faces and how important it is um and it's important to all the cities along the line um it's um it's important clearly for the mitaka school district because mitaka High School is right on Highway 7 but but the tragic accident that occurred at Willison Highway 7 that didn't involve the Min high school student it involved um uh Hopkins High School student I mean the we're talking about the safety of our residents in our and it's really important so having a shared Vision collaborating um this resolution that we're going to ask for passage tonight is really important it's a first step to say we're on the same page we're in this together so I'll leave it at that I think I think um Mr Funk covered everything from the details but I also think as we work on this um there are stories and there are human stories that we need to share when we go to Washington and talk about what we need here these these issues affect the lives of people that we all represent and I think that's the most important message that we can deliver and it is interesting we talk to our legislators when you mentioned Highway 7 no one said oh I I don't you're wasting my time I don't think there's a problem I mean everyone says oh yeah Highway 7 needs improvements um it you you don't have to convince anybody of that it's just let's get a shared Vision we're playing the mot play um Playbook they said um get together and create a create a coalition and work together and collaborate and you and the path will be open to you so I'm optimistic about it I think it's important work so with that if someone would like to make a motion on the resolution I'd like to make a couple comments if I could please do thank you um I apologize I know people want to leave but I think this is important I agree that this makes complete sense I think the vision makes complete sense hearing the presentation tonight I mean this resolution talks solely about TMO and I get it I mean I get there's Nuance regarding the money uh I think we're Heming ourselves in a little bit with the resolution because it doesn't reference the Coalition idea um I think there's political reasons why wanting to get that 200,000 and use it and have it be a resource I don't think probably a TMO is going to be the right dire especially hearing the presentation tonight and so I'm concerned that we're going to try to just spend the 200,000 because it's there but then end up with a coalition anyway so I I think that I think it maybe Bears some flushing out or even just some reference to the idea that we're going to explore all options and that may be a coalition it may be a commission it may be whatever um because this resolution really focuses on TMO and the other thing I just noticed and it's a small thing but I think it's important um from a future perspective maybe this resolution is is probably a shorter has a shorter lifespan but in section 2.01 it authorizes the mayor and city manager or staff to participate and I would probably just to be on the safe side and we don't know what changes are coming down line um One Way or Another but to just reference mayor or council member so we have the flexibility if somebody's not available or or whatever to have representation of a you know one of us um in the discussion so those were my comments and I'm happy to go move forward with this tonight I just I get I think you're going to be coming back and asking for a resolution to explore other options as well and this really only talks about the TMO Council sha thank you um counc or Mr Funk yeah thank thank you mayor we're some council member sha those are really good comments and just for more background so this resolution was uh created joint effort between again city of minona and city of shorwood and the premise of it was to kind of that first step of getting support behind it so I think there's flexibility in it it was that resolution was sent to all the cities just asking for City councils to again start showing their support um and so that was that's the intent of it is I think for all of us just want to know what cities are interested and keep going on it and which cities perhaps might not be interested and so I think we if you're interested in there support for the resolution um defer to the City attorney but I think we could if you're interested in the resolution because I know the city of shorwood is looking for which cities are on board with this next steps that we could modify the language to include what you just mentioned that uh we can reference further um I think you mentioned Council Representatives because it's that it's not intending to um make it specific to the mayor or to the city manager the idea is that we'll have representatives from the city that will be part of the journey and so we can certainly modify that language and I think we certainly want to make reference to Teo is not I agree Teo is not necessarily the the only solution and I think preferably we look at a coalition so we could modify the language that allows that flexibility absolutely so um any other comments anyone has to make I mean the question that I have is um clearly the interest is getting um a resolution agreed to to demonstrate a level of support at the same time you know if we have if we have improvements or we need to broaden the language to be a bit more inclusive um are we better off saying well let's bring it back on the on uh the next meeting November 18th or are we better off passing this indicating our support with the thought that we may want to modify it at some point in the not too distant future what is there a pref a preferred uh recommendation either from Mr Funk or the or Miss heiney yeah certain I'll jump in first if Miss heiny has anything to add she certainly can do that I would there is no specific timeline on that I think for the city of Shorewood they were looking to get um kind of acknowledgement from the 10 or 12 cities by the end of October our next meeting is the uh November 18th so I I think we're okay I'm bringing the resolution back if you're more comfortable with us tweaking the language we can bring it back and then I could certainly uh communicate our intent to the city of shorwood that it's our intent to approve it we're just going to um modify the language in a way but um certainly I can let to know that our the council's intent is to approve something and I to be clear thinkk mayor I don't want to muck it up I mean I think this is fine I just think it I think it's too narrow and you're just going to want to do more and then we can amend it down the line um my main comment is let's not get Tunnel Vision on spending the 200,000 because that's what the legislature said for the TMO when what we really want is a coalition probably right well and and I'd say I mean I think my preference would be to um to uh pass it tonight um and and then say you know um our Council raised some um some had some suggestions for modifications and you know we could read we could redo it downline but I think it's I think in my reading of shwood it's pretty important for them to know that they've got the support and I I think it's really important for us to be supportive I'd rather pass something tonight and say we have a few tweaks and these are the nature of them and if you're okay but but we wanted to pass it because we want to move this forward I I don't know if anyone has any other thoughts but if that works um Miss heiney what do you think well if I may uh what it says is um in 2.01 supports the exploration of forming a TMO and I would think that exploration includes consideration of Alternatives so I don't think it out overrules other looking at other options while you're exploring the TMO um and it would certainly be EAS easy to add authorizes um the mayor city manager and other City Representatives right should we make do we want to make that change in the fly or should we just do this now and and and well it's just one word yeah changing staff to Representatives okay let's do that I'd say all right so I'll make that motion with that change all good councelor Calbert second all all right we've got a motion by Council M Shack second by Council M Calbert is there any other discussion all right Miss faul please call R sha yes wurn yes kber yes ra yes kley yes Foster Bolton yes where some yes motion carries um item 15 is appointments to reappointments we have none and item 16 is adjournment is there a motion to adjourn council member Wilburn I move adjournment is there a second council member calary I'll second all right we got a motion by Council a second by Council Cal Calbert all in favor say I I I we are adjourned okay [Music] oh [Music]