Good evening and welcome to the City of Falcon Heights regular meeting of the City Council on Wednesday, 04/22/2026. I'll call this meeting to order at 07:03. Roll call. Gustafson. Here. May. Here. Logan. Present. Milke. Here. Wasenberg. Here. Lillehammer. Here. Johnson. Here. Here. Okay. Everybody's here. Any any changes to tonight's agenda other than the one the first one, it's been amended that, consent agenda three is,
not going to be considered. So any other changes to the agenda? Mayor, if I may. Yes. So I don't have any changes. I just wanna walk through a couple. We did a couple amendments, for the packet. So as the mayor mentioned, we removed, consent agenda item three, but we're continuing kind of we're keeping its number. So we'll keep Okay. This number as three just to keep our order. We added policy item h two, the request for out of state travel reimbursement. Okay. Yep. We also added a, sample of the purchase agreement for the playground equipment from Northland Recreation,
and then it was pointed out to us that there was a typo on the, change order or no. Sorry. Not the change order. The, the sanitary, awarding the bid. So item g nine, approval of resolution twenty six thirty five or in the bid for the sanitary sewer lining project. The bid date opening, it said February 2015, and it meant 04/09/2026. So that was a some holdover of an old resolution or old RCA. Okay. Those are the changes we have made. Those changes made. Updated on the website. Updated on the website and site and updated in the packets.
Yes. Correct. We don't need to adapt those as part of changing that. No. I just wanna cover them now. Good. Thank you. Any other, changes or brought out to attention? Okay. Hear a motion to approve the agenda. So moved. So moved by Wassenberg. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. All those opposed same sign. Motion carries five-zero. Tonight we have presentations. Our first is the, Saint Anthony Police Department annual report from Chiefs Space. And so without further ado,
I think we'll you want should I introduce this? Well, just welcome, Police Chief Jeff Spies of the, St. Anthony Police Department. Alright. And, we're anxious to hear from you. Thank you, Mayor. And, thank you to, Mayor and City Council, for having me here tonight. It's a it really is a privilege to present the 2025 annual report for our police department. And really before I start, I'd just like to say that I am the the I have the privilege of relaying information, but really as I as I speak through what we've accomplished in the last year, it really
the credit goes to all the great people that make up our really great police department. So all right, I'm going to get this going here. So our mission to improve the overall quality of life by preserving the peace and safety of the community, that's our commitment and it's our unwavering commitment. In addition to myself, we have two captains. One, Mike Huddle, who has been with our police department for twenty seven years. He oversees our administrative function. He also oversees our investigations. And we have Captain Mark Dokken, who's been with our department for twenty eight years,
and he oversees our patrol division. We also have an office manager, Kim Brazil, who oversees our front office, and we have two office support specialists. Our department is comprised of 25 full time police officers. And as I mentioned earlier, we have in May 2024, we had 17 police officers. And by the '5, we've risen, grown that number by 47%. And as of right now, we have 28 police officers, which is a 65% increase to our size.
We also have a full time community service officer. We have a cadet program that's comprised of approximately three to five cadets. Currently, we have three. They've been really instrumental in filling our police officer vacancies and giving us opportunity really to, vet and have a year long interview of people that we think might be a good fit for our department. We have three full time civilian support staff. Our department fleet is comprised of eight marked squad cars. We also have seven unmarked vehicles that are assigned to the chief,
our captains, and our detectives, and we have a marked, CSOCadet squad. Since 1930, the FBI has administered the Uniform Crime Reporting System, which defines crimes as either part one or part two. Every police department reports into this uniform crime reporting system. Part one crimes are viewed as the more serious crimes. Unfortunately, we don't have, because this is our first year being back in Falcon Heights, I don't have, crime numbers to report, in recent years past. But as I look at these numbers and I've compared them to what we see in St. Anthony and what we've seen in Lauderdale,
there's no numbers here that stand out as an outlier. We do know that we would love these numbers to be zero across the board. That's our goal when we're out and patrolling and investigating. But again, like I said, I don't think there's anything that stands out that is of specific concern. Part two crimes are considered, the lesser, serious crimes, although I really hesitate to say that because, we know, especially when we go out and take these reports from victims, that behind each one of these numbers is at least one victim. Again, I don't have comparables from years past, but the numbers themselves are relatively low.
As I talked about earlier, when we look at thefts or property damage crimes, those numbers being where they're at, being 18 property damage crimes, those significant numbers of those are vehicles that are damaged, something breaks a window or damages a lock or something like that. They're difficult to detect when they're happening. And if we do have a couple of concentrated incidents where there's a number of cars that are broken into, it can rise or lower that number quite easily. So a number of 18 over a year is not a significant amount.
Again, we strive for zero, but, we don't have anything that would really suggest that we have an epidemic or a crime trend that we need to be overly concerned about, and to change our patrol tactics. Our investigative division, like I said earlier, is led by Captain Mike Huddle. Mike Huddle wears a lot of hats. I don't know if you've met Mike, but he's just a great individual. I've had the privilege of working with him for my entire career. In addition to doing leading investigations, he also, handles our body worn camera program. He handles all of our fleet,
which from the outside doesn't seem like it's a big deal, but that I used to do that job. That's it's significant with all the different computers and hardware and software that goes into those cars. It seems like there's always some little glitch going on that he's gotta pay attention to. And he also, oversees our internal affairs, does a fantastic job. We have four detectives that he oversees. We have John Schlingman, who's been with our department for nineteen years, Tressa Sundae, who's been with us for twenty seven years, we have Mike Milbrandt, who's been with us for seven years, And then we also have a detective that's assigned to the Ramsey County VSET team,
the violent crime enforcement team. And that officer has been really instrumental in helping us deal with larger scale, crimes in our communities where there's maybe a deeper root cause to something. So if we've got disorderly conduct or other, types of crimes that are happening in a residence where maybe it's prompted by some drug drug use going on there or sales and things like that, that VSAT detective's got the resources available to him through the county, to really, really bolster our our abilities to tackle those types of more intricate crimes. In Falcon Heights,
we had two nineteen total criminal cases presented to our investigative team. They were able to close ninety two of those cases, sixty five were cleared by arrest, and twenty seven were cleared by other means. And that comes out to a 42% clearance rate in 2025, which is a high number, considering that we investigate all crimes. And so when we talk about damaged vehicles or, petty theft from a gas station, we that all those cases get presented to our detectives. And sometimes it's those are really little to no,
evidence that we have to really, open an investigation on that, but it's something that they do evaluate compared to other crimes and things like that to see if there's something that they can go on. And not every department does. Not every department looks at even those small crimes. But again, like I said earlier, behind each one of those crimes is a victim, and that's important to us. Our patrol division, again, is led by Captain Mark Dauken. In addition to leading our patrol, he also handles all of our training. He coordinates training, he documents our training, makes sure that all of our officers are getting their mandated training,
completed. He's also, plays a very important role in our recruitment team, and he's also leads our field training program. And our patrol division is the most visible part of our of our police department, and they have the most community interactions. So So some of the things that they do, they respond to all nine eleven calls. They're proactively patrolling. They're patrolling with a purpose is what we like to call it. They're not just out driving around. There are certain things, that we that they're looking for, and that might be patrolling areas where we know that we've gotten reports from community
members where there's concern of traffic safety or if there's been an area that has some vehicle break ins, or some other types of things like that. They're out doing community building. One of the things that we've been really proud of is all the interactions we've had in the community of in Falcon Heights since we've been back and since March 2025. They're visible in the community. They're detecting crime and deterring crime, and they're also committed to our traffic safety initiative. So every year since 2017, every police department in Ramsey County made a commitment to report on the reasons for
traffic stops, and they break breaking those down into four different reasons why a vehicle would be stopped. One could be for a moving violation or a vehicle violation, which would include headlight out, tail light out, missing a license plate, expired tabs, loud exhaust, a variety of things, investigative stops, a vehicle that's that you can articulate is involved in some suspicious activity, or where an officer may run a license plate and it comes back that the owner has a warrant or a revoked driver's license or suspended registration, or a traffic stop that's made as a result of a 911 call. So if somebody calls in and reports a theft that just occurred and gives a
license plate description and a traffic stop is made, that would fall into that 911 call for a category. So in 2025, in Falcon Heights, 80% of our traffic stops were as a result of a moving violation. And we're committed to addressing the concerns of the community, which gets reported to us as going through stoplights, stop signs, speeding, distracted driving, impaired driving, not wearing seatbelts. Those are important. We also know that those are the behaviors that cause the most number of crashes, injuries and deaths on our roadways, and that's why we pay the most attention to it.
And that's really the focus and the reason for making traffic stops. In 2020, we decided as a department, we wanted to make it take a deeper dive into the reasons for the stop. And so we broke down our movie violations category into 21 separate categories and those range from, how fast the vehicle is going over the speed limit, whether that was between five and nine miles an hour over the limit, 10 to 14 or 15 to 20 or faster than that, red light, stop sign violation, a violation of the distracted driving statute, not wearing your seatbelt, illegal passing,
a bunch of them. We broke down the vehicle violations down into 10 different categories, investigative stops into five different categories. And so we have a total of instead of four, we look at 37 different metrics. And we wanted to do that to be more transparent to our community members of why we're making traffic stops because we know it's a concern. But we also wanted to compare those across demographics to see if we have consistency in the people that we're stopping. And every year, we release our traffic report. And if you look back on that, we haven't had twenty twenty five released yet. But in the years past, across all of those metrics and across demographics,
there's a consistency in the reasons for the stop, which we think is important to our community members and is something that we're proud of as well. Education, all of our St. Anthony police officers meet and exceed mandated training by the Minnesota Post Board. These these mandated training include crisis intervention and mental illness, training, conflict, management and mediation, diversity and implicit bias, training on autism, training on crimes motivated by bias. And in 2025, we received training, that was facilitated by Sergeant Jim South, who trains with is a trainer for the Barber Schneider Foundation, and he was able to bring in live actors who acted out different individuals that
were in different types of crisis situations and our officers were would work through that scenario and try to come to a peaceful resolve. And watching our officers really handle as close to real situation as I think you could put ourselves in, it's different when you have some of your other police officer folks that are acting out a scenario versus somebody that's that you don't know that is actually an actor. And it was just phenomenal training, and that's something that we do above and beyond what's mandated by POLST.
In 2025, our officers trained for a total of two thousand seven hundred and six hours. All training that we approve for our folks is either approved and reviewed by the Minnesota Post Board and or by our St. Anthony Police Department Command staff to ensure that it adheres with the strategic plan with the types of things that we want our officers to be trained in. We also implemented a new training software to document our training. That's through a company called Vector Solutions, which helps streamline our record keeping and it also helps us to be compliant with Minnesota Post Board.
We also went through a Minnesota Post Board audit this year, and we were 100% compliant in our hiring practices and also in our training of all of our officers and documenting those things. And we utilize both virtual and in person platforms. During COVID, we had to go back to a lot of virtual training, which was it's good, but I don't think it's as good necessarily for all types of training. And so as we've come out of that and as we've been able to increase our staffing, that's given us the latitude to send our officers out and have more live and in person training. One of the things that is really important to us to do and it's one
of those things that contributes to retaining target employees and recruiting employees is giving them the opportunity to find things that within our this career field that is in line with our strategic plan of our department, and is of specific interest to them to be able to pursue those things, that maybe is a program that we're not currently doing. An example of that, and I'll talk about a little bit more later, was our drone program. That was a program that many departments around us had. We were the benefit we benefited from that technology of other police departments that would
come in and assist us with their with their drone. And we had two officers that put together a proposal, found a way to fund it, and got approval and led that program. We're also looking at a therapy dog program that's again, it's a program that one of our officers was one of our wellness officers that was thought it would be a good way to help not only our police officers with in our officer wellness but also community members and having that dog available at community events. We're really happy to find out that outside of vet and food and things like
that, the cost of the dog and the training of the dog is virtually free. But that was somebody that saw a need and, wanted to pursue it. You've all seen our social media program. Kyle Rushton is something that's near and dear to his heart to do social media and loves his cameras and he's walking around with those all this crazy technology that I was really unaware of. But, our social media wouldn't be where it's at if it wasn't for somebody that had a specific interest in it. We give them the time and the latitude to do it, and it's been a great way for us to reach our our community members. Our safety camp is another one. That was Sergeant Jim South about over ten years ago decided he wanted to start
the safety camp, and we got funding for it, and we've got more kids than we can handle every year from, from all of our communities that come together and learn over two days at our safety camp. So this is comparative to 2024 and 2025. Our Officer Wellness numbers were down a little bit. That was because in 2024, we sent four officers to training to be peer support officers, so that number went up a little bit. But it was a great addition to our wellness program. And our elective training was significantly higher in 2025.
And I think some of that comes down to officers feeling, the freedom to be able to suggest new ideas and getting support for those things and having more police officers on our team too is important. And something happened. It falls asleep. Okay. All right. Innovation and technology. So one of the big ticket items is our body worn camera program. And it's not just body worn cameras, but it's also squad car cameras and facility cameras. This program started six years ago, and we wanted to have the same technology in all those three different areas, squad cars, body cameras in our facilities. So when,
when an officer encountered someone out in the public, that entire encounter was captured on the same system, time stamped the same way, and the officers were familiar with that type of technology. And we've been 100% compliant every time that we've been subjected to our independent audit, which happens every two years. Our body worn cameras, we knew when we got this program that we needed three things: we needed technology that worked, we needed officers that knew how to work them, and we needed to make sure that when officers had the cameras, they were using the technology because we'd heard in other departments where they had cameras
and then a big incident would happen and cameras weren't on, and that was unacceptable. And I knowing if that ever happened to us and really any police department, you're given very little to no grace. If you have the technology, the officers know how to use them, they should be using them. So how do we ensure people are using them? Before we started our program in 2018, we wanted to develop a monthly internal compliance check program. To my surprise, there wasn't very many of those programs at the time. Some of the larger agencies had them, some of the smaller agencies didn't. So we adopted a few different parts of different programs when we put our own together.
And so the way that program works is that every month, a supervisor will review, random videos from the officers working their shift, and they're looking to make sure that the cameras are turned on when they're turned when they're supposed to be. They're turned off when they're supposed to be turned off, and that the officers were adhering to the values of our of our police department when they're out interacting with members of the public. If one of those videos falls outside of that, that, those categories, then that sergeant will watch two more videos of that officer to make sure that there's not a pattern developing. We've never had a pattern develop over the eight years we've had this,
or the six years we've had this program. In 2025, we had six twenty five videos reviewed with a 99% compliance rate. All videos are reviewed if there's use and force involved or if there's any allegation of officer misconduct. In 2025, as you know, we've explored and selected the Axon video recording system that we've been implementing here in 2026. So thank you to the council here for your support of that. We've got nothing but very positive feedback from our officers. The system is so much easier to use, and it's easier for the community members to submit videos to us as well when
they have pictures of damage to their vehicles or if they've got, video of a crime or something like that. It's just it really is a seamless, system. And we were also able to with our internal compliance check program, we were invited to be on a panel for the National Bodyworm Camera Conference a couple of years later, and we're able to share that same system that we have with others around the country. So we're very proud of that. In 2025, we also launched our drone program. This is a program that, again,
was started by two of our officers. We have, I believe, four or five pilots. It's, again, an example of an officer seeing a need and implementing that need. We've used these, to several different times. We've used them to help outside agencies for area searches. We use them for missing persons. We've used them to search large areas. We've had missing persons in 3 Rivers Park where we can send this drone out to search a very large area in a relatively short period of time. It's been really, really helpful for that. Again, aids in locating fleeing suspects, missing persons again is a really
important need for these. In 2025, it deployed at 31x. 28 of those are training flights. It's a new program for us, so when our officers have a chance to do training flights, they absolutely do that. They've located individuals that were suspected of copper wire thefts, again, assisted outside agencies with searching for an armed person. And the use of the drone is very specific. It can't be just used and sent out anywhere they want to go. There's guidelines on when it can be used. The default is it can be it's supposed to be used with a warrant unless there's there's certain there's nine different circumstances,
that exist for them to use it outside of that. And one of those examples like I talked about was missing person, searching parks, things like that or public spaces. Every year we report, every time that we use a drone is reported to the BCA and the BCA publishes that those reports on an annual basis as well. Recruitment. It feels like all we've been doing is recruitment for the last one point five years, but I'm really proud of the team that we compiled. When we we've been very fortunate to retain employees very well in the City Of St. Anthony. We went short because we had some retirements. And then now with the addition of our community in Falcon Heights,
we needed to act quick and we and be very proactive and strategic about how we were going to we were going to add new people to our team. And we again, we don't skimp on quality. We'll never skimp on quality. When you skimp on quality, you get bad results. I and all of our officers have told me, and again, I thought the same thing too, is we'd rather work short than work with people that aren't up to the standard of a St. Anthony police officer. So we put a team together. Our team is led by, one of our office support specialists, Beth Denzer, and Captain Mark Dauken.
Our approach was multifaceted. When someone brought in or sent in an application, we made quick contacts. We put them on ride alongs so that they were exposed to as many people in our police department as we could get them exposed to and interacting with. We scheduled interviews promptly. We were committed to going to different job fairs. There were some some colleges that would get frequented by many schools and there were some that I don't for whatever reason police departments didn't go to many of them, we went to all of them, and we had so many of our officers that wanted to do that,
they wanted to be a part of that selection process. They wanted to be able to interact with these students and find good people. We also took advantage of a program a grant through the state called the IC POET program, which stands for Intensive Comprehensive Peace Officer Education and Training Program. That's a program that allows us to find to hire people that don't have a degree in law enforcement. They have a degree in something else. It pays for them to be full time employees of the city while they go to school full time for six months. Months. At the end of the six months, they're eligible to be licensed as police officers, and then we hire them on and and train them.
We have two individuals that are currently in the field training program. They're in phase two right now of of four phases of training. One was a professor at the University of Minnesota, and another one, was in business, and he was used to be a Division one baseball coach. So just kind of a different variety of individuals, which I really think brings good diversity to our team. We've also grown our cadet program. We've got three cadets right now. They're all aspiring police officers, and they help us, with certain assignments that don't take the don't necessarily require the attention of a police
officer. They were active during the state fair in addressing parking issues, being visible in the community. So just a great addition to our team and really backfills, upcoming openings for police officer positions. Wellness. When I became the police chief, there was a few things that I thought I need to do really well. One of them is great public safety, excellent service delivery and officer wellness because if we don't have well folks, we're not going to have a healthy police department. And I think and I know, that our police officers expect it, their families expect it, and our communities expect well balanced police officers to come to them when they're in
crisis or in a time of need. When they call 911, they need well balanced and healthy cops showing up. So what do we do? So we had we've had a really good wellness program, but I think there's always room to improve on those things. We have we focus on three things: the mind, body and spirit. So mind all of our officers and actually even our civilian staff as well, they all participate in an annual check up from the neck up. So they meet with a licensed mental health professional. And they also have the opportunity to meet multiple times a year if they want
to, but they have to meet at least once. Those are all private meetings. I all I know is that everybody went to it. I don't know names if they go to extra ones, or who they meet with specifically. We have a chaplain program. We have an internal chaplain. He also works with the Minneapolis Police Department. He comes in, at least once a week. He'll sit he'll come in during roll calls or during lunch, and meet with our officers. We have a workout on duty program where if we have enough staffing, an officer can go in and get a workout in. We also provide family support and one of the ways that we do that is we have a all encompassing Cortical Wellness app where all of our wellness resources are
housed inside this app. It also gives, different updated information on different wellness topics. It's also something that is available to all of our our family of our officers and to our retired folks as well. And last year, we started an internal peer support program, and so we had officers that were interested in being peer support officers. So we sent four of them to training for that. And there's many departments that also have programs such as this, and we've been able to be a resource to those officers with our peer support, and they've been resources to us as well. And so and I spoke earlier about the therapy dog program,
and that was another one that really is very inexpensive to pursue that really can yield some really high rewards. And that again comes from the creativity and officers seeing the need and pursuing those things. I'm not going to go too deep in the strategic plan, but just to say that one of the things that we were very focused on in addition to several other things this year was community engagement. We wanted to focus on enhancing our social media. We wanted to be timely in our responses to our community members. We wanted to send out information that the community wanted to hear.
It's it's funny. The things that we think are important are not always that important. Obviously, if there's a crisis situation, we've been that's important information that people want to hear and they want to hear directly from us. And so we want to be timely and send that information out. But also things we're doing Selfie Sunday. That was something that Officer Rushton came up with, and we tried to, really picture, us with the community. We wanted to increase outreach to underrepresented groups in our communities as well. We wanted to focus on youth and high school reach out, and one of the ways we do that is through our our, cops versus kids basketball program. Our safety camp is another way.
We're looking at ways to get more involved in our in our school districts through, you know, one of the programs we're looking at is a mentorship program or reading with some of the younger kids, just getting kids to, interact with some of the police officers that are in their communities. And I also think when you look at wellness, I taught DARE for a number of years. That was one of the best ways for me to really reset is to go into the classroom, and be around folks that were really interested in me being there, it seemed like, and, really growing those relationships, and not only with the kids, but with the families and the staff at the schools.
It was really a good opportunity. So finding ways that we can do that, do more of that, looking for different opportunities for new events. So one of the things that, Officer Sam Schafer came up with was he wanted to do truck or treat. And so we partner with our public works and fire department and things like that. But we're always looking for opportunities to do something that's a little bit different, maybe a little bit outside the box that we haven't done already. And again, I mentioned mentorship programs. So social media, we are really, really happy with how those platforms have grown.
We had a 60% increase in Facebook followers. Our followers with Instagram, 2,705 and on X, 5,870. Those are the three main platforms that we use. Again, this is a way that we can we can't reach everybody, unfortunately, but through social media, we're hoping that people get an insight to, you know, who we are as individuals. We're really, really good at public safety, but we're also we're not robots. We're people we're part of the community, and that's why we try to highlight those opportunities that we have when we're out with our community members as well.
And we know that when we grow this, this isn't something we brag about because we just want to say we have more followers than somebody else. That's not about that at all. We want to be able to especially in moments of crisis, we want to be able to reach as many people as we can at once. We had an incident in St. Anthony a couple of incidents, that were one was a homicide, one was a shooting outside the City Hall during, when school was letting out. And, officer Russian was able to go live on video and say, I'm I'm here right now. Things nobody's hurt. Things are calm, and give live information out. And we got such positive feedback on that.
But if we only had six followers, nobody would see us. And so it's important that we grow that followership as much as we possibly can. And these are just some of the examples that we of the videos or the pictures we posted throughout the year. The speedway at 1350 Larpenter does a theme Friday. Every Friday, they do they have a theme. So on the top right, it was a clown theme. So all the employees dress up. And I happened to go in there to eat a coffee that day and somehow ended up with a clown bow tie around my neck. But they have it's kind of a fun deal that they do. I've never seen another service station do that.
But, and then some of the National In Out, we made it to all the National In Out events in Falcon Heights in 2025. Snow events are a big one. We hate writing parking tickets during snow events or parking tickets at all. So that's why you'll see on social media, it's, Hey, it's going to snow. Hey, guess what, it's going to snow again. And we keep trying to let people know because we'd love it if all the cars were off the street. Community engagement. So every police department has a community engagement program. It's one of those buzzwords, but and it kind of bothers me a little bit that that's become such a buzzword. But really, we look at it in our department is that every police officer is a community
engagement officer because really community engagement happens when you're out patrolling the streets. We do have programs just like every other police department has where we go out and we do, seminars, safety seminars, we do Coffee of the Cop, we do events at the schools and things like that, and those are absolutely 100% important. But if we're not doing the community engagement when we're out in the community, even on a traffic stop, those are community engagement opportunities on a medical call, community engagement opportunities, theft calls, they're all very, very important. In 2025, our officers documented two sixty community engagement opportunities while on patrol in Falcon Heights.
It's more than that. Those are the two sixty times that people took the time to go into their computer and document that they talked to someone. And again, that's something that we got such incredible feedback on stopping in at the lemonade stand, 1530 Larpendure at, I can't remember, Falcon Falcon Heights Got it. El Square. El Square. Right? So they on Saturdays, they have a coffee thing at ten in the morning, and they invited us to go there. So the officers that were working over there, if they had the time to do it, they'd stop in and have coffee with the residents there at ten in the morning. So, a few of us stopped in there. We had a coffee at a coffee at the COP event there one time too.
But we do have a dedicated team. So Jim Saltz on that team, John Schlingman is on that team, and we have a few other folks that are part of that that team as well, officer Rushton. They meet quarterly to plan, so we're strategic in how we plan our events. They organize community events and they present to the public. They've developed youth programs and other programs as a form of engagement and education. These are just some of the things we did. The summer safety camp, we had 30 incoming fourth graders. And that's a really great program that just keeps growing and growing and growing. They talk about firearm safety,
CPR, how to use nine eleven. We have a dispatcher come in and meet with them. We have the water patrol come in. We've had a canine demo. We have the safe patrol helicopter fly in. And so the kids that it's entertaining, but they also learn a lot of really important things. And we had Officer Braden McNair, Officer or Sergeant Brandon Hess, Beth Denzer, our Officer Support Specialist was part of that. And then they had Brandon Hess' wife volunteer and was part of that team. I think Braden McNair's mom was there. So it's people just enjoy being a part of it, and we don't turn down the volunteers that want to help.
Coffee to the Cop, we went to the Hendrickson, Curtis Fields spring together event, ice cream social, Falcon Knights Elementary Back to School event. We were there for their open house. We had a Scamp Prevention seminars, and we made it to all the Night to Unite block parties as well. Anybody that invited us, we went. We had to be quick, though, because we had a lot of them. So hopefully, you get a good idea of how important that engagement piece is to us. And as I've said many times in the past, when you're coming into a community that you've been away from for eight years, there's a lot of new people. There's a lot of people that were here when we were here before,
and we wanted to make sure that they saw us and we had an opportunity to reengage. And I think that we did I think we got such great feedback from the community in Falcon Heights, and our officers really enjoyed that. And that's I always tell I think that too is when you get out of your squad car and you get to see I just I was driving through last weekend, and I had a surprise. It was like 07:30 in the morning on the weekend or no, maybe it was during the week. But this kid's he's got a brand new car, an electric car he's driving on the block. And he's with his I think it was with his mom, and his birthday was the next day. So I asked him to give me a tour of his new electric car,
then he got a tour of my car. And then I did a little race on the street with him. And his birthday was the next day, too. He was turning five years old. And his mom said, you made his day. And I said, you made my day. We need that. As police officers, we need those interactions, and I think our community needs those interactions to really know and trust their police department. So these are just some of the as I kind of wrap up here, some of our work plan accomplishments from the year, our bold recruitment and retention plan, that really has worked incredibly well. And it's the people that are part of that program that were intentional and they really devoted so much time to it.
We conducted a promotional process for a new detective position, hired and trained four new police officers, we promoted a captain to oversee our patrol division, and we worked through that the grant program, through the state. We were awarded that grant twice, actually. We applied for it twice, and we were able to hire two different police officers for that. Just really happy with how that worked. The drone program, we passed our biannual external audit of the body worn camera program. The new Axon body worn camera program that we got, that was a heavy lift to explore the right platform and the right software to
use and hardware. Our integration to the Falcon Heights, I I don't know how much better that could have gone from from our perspective as a police department, and I hope and we're not perfect. We have we have by far, we're not perfect. Nobody's perfect, but, I hope that the same sentiment that you get the same response from your community as that I've heard from our police officers. We're able to provide patrol coverage for major events during at the State Fairground, including back to the '50s, the State Fair itself and street machine nationals. And all of our communities documented over five fourteen community engagement contacts.
And those aren't events, those are just officers that documented that they met with somebody or spoke with someone while they're on patrol. Looking ahead, continuing with the Falcon Heights integration, increasing involvement with youth and underrepresented populations, implementing our new body worn camera program, a long term strategy for recruitment and retention. That long term strategy looks at or looks like having a pipeline through our cadet program of very highly qualified individuals that we've had a year or so to vet to make sure they're a good fit and high quality for our team. Continuing to look at exploring our public safety facility and renovations.
When you add that many police officers, the building gets smaller really quick. And so we are making some renovations there right now and looking at some bonding possibilities to fund a public safety facility. Expanding our peer to peer support team with surrounding agencies, researching the fitness rewards program, the therapy dog program, and then training a new office support specialist who started with us just about a month ago and doing very well. These are ways to stay connected with us, email, phone. And our annual report is online on our website as well. And I dropped off some copies of some leaflets,
and I can certainly get you more of those as well. And with that, I will stand for any questions. Thank you, Chief. It's quite informative. You've been doing a lot of stuff. It's been a full year. I know that we had the advantage of a conversation as a group earlier. But are there questions that counsel would like to pose to Georgiana? Well, the first one I had was who won the race with the five year old? He won. That's good. I had some other questions, but I'll have to dig through here. One thing I wondered, and we can't do it right here is, but I would love you said that we could have the results from 2025 and
they're not released yet. But I'd like to get those results on the traffic stops and including all the details in the demographic data. So you'll just let us know when that's available. Yes, absolutely. Appreciate you doing that work. I don't have any questions, Mr. Mayor. I don't have really any questions. I just want to comment that, I appreciate, I've talked to you a couple of times, at the Fall Fest and some other times that what I, I know from talking to you that you care about the things that are concerning
to the Falcon Heights residents given some of the past. And it just has been very I mean, it's not something that just, like, pops up only when you're on camera. It is it's it's core in the way you think about your job and your duties, about that you are proud of your people, and you're even more proud because they do it the right way. And it's just I just I the people that are on watching on TV, I just want them to understand, that this isn't a show. This is definitely something that I feel every time I hear you come in and
talk, whether it's informal or formal, I very much appreciate that. So thanks. Thank you. Yep. Your officers are doing great work here. Absolutely. And really enjoy seeing a squad car rolling down my street in the morning every now and then when I happen to time it out. Right? But, for for looking out the window. But it's really great to see and and to watch it happen, throughout the community and the interactions. And, I like the way the cars light up so that when you are stopped that
nobody's going to run into you. Those are exemplary warning lights that your squad cars have. So I was just kind of like, I went, wow, where's all that and able to stay out of the way when I've seen it happen. So it's great. Good work. Thank you. Okay. Thanks, Jeff. We can we hope to continue our relationship a long time. Absolutely. Us as well. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You can come by anytime. You don't have to do this just once a year.
I'll come whenever you want to invite me. I'll Okay. I'd be happy to. Or if you want to invite yourself, you're welcome. Thanks. So next we have another presentation tonight. Another big move in the city, and I'll have, administrator Linehan, introduce, our city website redesign update. Yeah. Thanks, mayor, council. So we're gonna play a little bit of musical chairs, but I'll introduce, administrative and communications coordinator, Elke Johnson, and our administrative and communications intern, Ainsley Brown. So they're gonna present a little bit of the upcoming website, give you a preview of what we're working on,
get some feedback, and, prepare for the next steps. We're gonna shift chairs for a minute. Okay. Official with intakes and everything. Yes. Thank you. Alright. Oops. Sorry. I don't send this very often. Okay. Thank you, mayor and council. As previously mentioned, we are here to provide you an update with the, of the city website redesign that we have been working on. It's still a working draft, and we are at a moment where we are welcome to or we're ready to welcome some feedback from the council as well as, staff, as we continue to refine the site.
So for some context, we, awarded a contract with Civic Plus to help us redesign the city website and move us over to their hosting system. And we have been working with them, on the new design, migrating content, working on layout, color schemes, all that good stuff. And so I'll briefly walk us through some of the, key goals and, objectives that we had laid out initially for this project, and so we can show you how we have been meeting those goals and objectives. So I think the primary goal of this was to,
make it easier for residents to find services and information, on our city website and really be have it become almost an extension of city staff. And I think another important goal of this was to ensure full compliance with the, accessibility guidelines that have been laid out by the Department of Justice. There was recently a change. They have ruled to actually extend the deadline for to meet these guidelines. And so what that means for our city is that we actually now have until April 2028 to meet these guidelines.
Nevertheless, we have transitioned the website, which is already a big part. But I think this will come in really handy with transitioning, ensuring that some of the documents are, following these guidelines, which is probably an even bigger project than the website is itself. And so we also really aimed at just creating a cleaner and more modern layout, that really reflects the city's, identity, making it easier to navigate on both computer and mobile devices. And so we also really wanted to look for a system that was just easier
for staff to use, and allowed them to make timely updates to the website. And I will transition this over to, Ansley, who will be going over some of the example pages of the website. Yeah. So, before we kinda go over some specific pages, there are a couple key design changes on this, new website that aren't present on our current one. One of the biggest changes is an updated site map. So something that we really wanted To make sure, on this new website was that residents would be able to find information easily. And so we kind of updated and adjusted our site map,
to make sure that, it was user friendly and that the navigation on the website, flowed well. And, this kind of adjustment, the site map can also be changed depending on the kind of feedback we get from council, staff, residents. If something doesn't make sense that, like, permits shouldn't go in this section, we can change that. So it's kind of, malleable in that way. The other big thing was we changed the font, and website colors. The colors are actually pretty similar to what we have now, but they were, utilized and, in a different way.
And the font that we're using, is the Poppins font, and it is, basically consistent with pretty much everything that we put out as a city. It's a font that's available on all of our platforms we use from Canva to, our Microsoft Office. And it also is a font that is, compatible with the ADA requirements for the website. And then finally, the other big change is our updated home page, which we'll show in a second. Yeah. So this is our current home page. It's pretty basic. There's not really much scrolling room from here. It's just the search and then the menu headers and then each of those buttons
down at the bottom to take you to different pages. And then this is the new, homepage. So as you can see, it's pretty similar in setup. The top menu is a little bit different, which I'll go over in a sec, but, has those similar menu buttons, but now there's a news, page as well as a, how do I section to allow residents to quickly get to things that they may need, whether that's, you know, requesting public records or finding out where they apply for permits, as well as the city calendar that is accessible straight from the home page. So like I mentioned before, that, top menu has changed a lot from our current website.
So it's part of that, navigation shift. I don't know if the video started. It's okay. And so now we have government departments, residents, business and visitors, and how do I. Currently, our website is just government, residents, visitors, and, find. So this is just hopefully a little bit clearer for residents when they are residents or visitors when they're looking for, different resources in the city. Alright. And there's a couple, example pages I wanted to point out. So this is our current, city council website, or a city council page on our website, and it's pretty basic.
It, it's consistent with a lot of the other pages on our current website, and it uses a pretty simple drop down menu system for identifying council members and the mayor. But overall, it would it's not quite fitting with, current requirements, and also could be updated. And so in the new council page, it is congruent with all the other, kind of font choices and colors throughout the entire website, as well as just kind of an updated look. The biggest change being to now, like, learn about a city council member's information.
You would click on their, link, and it would take you to our city staff directory. Alright. And then the next page I wanted to point out is a page that I didn't really know existed. It's the local attractions page, and, it's a pretty basic one. It's just kind of listing what things are available in the city for, people to go to. So this mostly just points out Minnesota State Fair, University of Minnesota is on there, Gibbs Farm, and isn't a very welcoming site or a very welcoming page for any of the, visitors who might wanna know what they can do,
in the city. So for the new website, kind of what we did is, kind of first of all, gave it more of a welcome to Falcon Heights, and then expanded some of the information that was on the previous site while also changing some of the layout visually. So, that included adding some photos and then also expanding it to include the Raptor Center and, all of our, public parks in the city. It is a house. That's okay. And then finally, the other page that I wanted to point out was our resources for residents. So as it exists now, our resources page is,
a little limited. So new residents are kinda directly, sent to a PDF we have of a lot of important resources they may need when they move to the city. And then it also lists some other resources for renters or homeowners or seniors in the city. And so for the new website, we brought a lot of that information over, but, we also expanded some of the information for new residents. So we created a new resident checklist, and that includes information they can find on, you know, who do they pay their utility bills to? How do they figure out their Internet? Where can they get a library card?
Where's the closest DMV? So we wanted to make sure that information along with the other information that was present on the pages that exists now was available for residents. And, yeah. With that, I'll turn it back over to Elka. Thank you. I wanted to highlight some of the ways that Civic Plus can help, staff put out city news. There is additional ways that they are really helpful in that. And so, we would be able to provide different ways of providing updates to residents, and so we can, do it in a timely manner. It's all integrated within the website,
and then there's so many different topics that we could create with that we could think that residents would be interested in learning about. They can sign up for it if they think that they wanna learn about it. And they can sign up for up to receive updates either through email or, through text, which I think is, just another way that people can stay informed about, city happenings. And so I will show some of the ways that they do that. So, as Ainsley already showed, there is a news carousel, is what Civic Plus calls this,
on the homepage of the website. And so right now, it's just kind of it's the standard news, flashes that they put up there. But as we continue to work with this site, this will get updated. And so we can share updates about, upcoming events, just reminders about, the sustainability fair, reminders about Highway 280 closure. We can ask for feedback on things, and just really it just provides another way to provide updates to, residents and those that are interested in that.
And then through, they call it notify me, is kind of the way that we would be able to create the topics, and so people can actually also sign up for the agenda center, so they can get updates on when city council agendas get posted, when the city commission opens up, when there is a press release, and they can also sign up for the weekly newsletter. And so the other nice thing about Civic Plus is they have the addition of what they call Civic Sent, which is basically the city newsletter, but integrated within the website.
And so I ended up creating a sample, newsletter, but it's it can be it lives in the website. You built it through the website, and so you don't have to go and build it in another platform. Currently, we use Canva to make our website or newsletter. And so you it creates a PDF that we then upload and then send out, whereas this is integrated, and there's templates that you can use. And these are just kind of building blocks that are built in and that you can put information in. It can be as long or as short as you would like. And then the links that are put in there actually do allow you to go
it opens a new tab, so you don't have to go back to, the previous page that you were on. And it's when I was trying when I was making the template, it was pretty self explanatory to build. And the nice thing, is, I guess, with this site too is that there is what they have is the accessibility tool that they use is called AudioEye, and it's a front facing tool, but it's also on the back end of the website. And so on every page that we create or every news item that we put
out, this little guy is available for us to use to check for accessibility. And so it can it runs it audits the page that you create, and then it tells you if there's anything that's out of compliance. But it also does have a lot of guardrails built in, and so we can't change the font. The font will always be the same. And there's a lot of it's very monotone in that it only uses, like, I think, five to six colors, but that's all we can use. And so I think that just creates cohesion,
but it also really helps with the accessibility part. And then on the front facing site, so when people use this site, they will see this icon at the bottom, and they can use, that to make the site work for them and their experience. So they can change the contrast, change the font, make any changes that they need. And this is built into the site. However, it will be available once the website launches. It's currently not on there yet. And then, additionally, we recently decided to move our city code to Munich code, which is actually also part of Civic Plus.
And so, this also actually helps with the transparency and the, accessibility guidelines that the city will have to comply with because it makes the entire code compliant, whereas right now it lives in a PDF document on the website. And it also provides faster and more accurate updates following any ordinance adoptions. They're transitioning our city code currently. It's about a three to four month transition period. And so most likely, we will launch the website before they're done with this transition,
but it will then be added on to the the website. And, Pacific Plus will actually take care of keeping that code up to date. And so because it's not ready yet, I decided to pull an example, but Roseville uses Muneco too, and so this is kinda what it would look like. It's kind of just a website on its own with the city code specifically to our website or to our city. And then kind of the things that we're still working on is continuing to migrate content and documents because as we are currently updating our current website,
we also have to keep up with the new website even though it's not live. And we're continuing to do testing, and updating the website. We wanna do some staff training, continuing to migrate documents. Additionally, we also have to move to a .gov domain, but that's currently on pause because they don't have their fund their federal funding is paused right now, and so I don't know when that will be restored. But I, will keep my eye out for that. But, basically, you apply to get a .gov domain, and they will provide that to you if it matches their needs or if it
matches their requirements. And then, additionally, we'll be transitioning the codes to, Unicode. And so at this point, we're kind of looking to collect feedback from both the council and staff, and then we'll continue to take in that feedback, work on migrating the site, work with Munich code, do some more testing, and then hopefully launch the website. And I think I'm we're ready to welcome questions from the council. Thank you. Welcome. Questions from council? Could I think I lost track of that. Which page was the new homepage? Yeah. Yeah.
I can go back. No. This is a very slow laptop. I'm sorry. Oh, it's up right now. Yeah. And we can play the video again too if you wanna see the whole page because it doesn't fit in a single screenshot. Well, I yeah. I do saw that many city websites in our Nine North have moved away from having consuballos or anything, just keep it simple, just the contact info. I would go to that. Mhmm. You don't have to have the pain of keeping them current. I don't think people wanna see who's representing them. What, how do you have how do people put in a suggestion?
Hey, Yeah. The permit should be here. How do so what our plan is for, so there is I mean, people can there's a contact form on there, but I think once the site site has launched, I would very quickly, put out, like, a short survey where people can provide input that way. And then additionally, there is I haven't shown this, but there is once it's launched, they will input, through Google Analytics. It will run through Google Analytics, and that label to provide site clicks, page clicks. How how long does someone spend on the site?
How like, what's the most visited page? What is not the most visited page? And so that is also a way where you can steer, change the website to make, like, the, how do I part that was on there. And then there's also, like, kind of a little below the main banner, there is also additional, what they call quick links where you they you can change those out too to match the needs of residents. But I think, initially, I would host or launch, like, a short survey looking for feedback.
If there's any way to have an easy screen grab and send it to an email or something Mhmm. It it might be if there's a way to do that, that would be helpful. I know that when I see a new website and it has a problem, if I have to click a couple of times to go to a contact page and then they try and describe what my problem is, I give up. Yeah. I mean, that's that's a way that people can provide feedback if they know how to do that. Right.
But, yeah, that's I'm open to that. Is there a way we can look at what you have so far and provide feedback that way? I mean, I'm the kind of person that wants to sit down with this and fiddle around with it. Is that the kind of feedback you want right now? Yeah. I yeah. I'll have to see what a good way is to share it because it's it's all back end right now. Right. And I don't know if it's helpful to go through 200 pages. Probably not. Probably not. Are we looking to do?
Well, maybe when it becomes more live then. Yeah. Or, I mean, once the website launches, it will be it will be public facing. Right. And you would be able to go through and see. Because at some point I mean, we have discussed this. At some point, we're just gonna have to launch the website. Like, because we can fine tune it and perfect it and Yeah. You know, all we want. But at some point, we just have to launch it because then we can also get the feedback from the residents and Right. Get some of those analytics going and use those as well. Sounds good.
Yeah. But happy to take in more feedback, always. Yeah. This is hard looking at the screen versus in front of you. Yeah. No. I know. We were trying to find a good way to present this, without going through each page, of the website. So do you find this easier to update through this platform than what we're using before? And who knows how to do it so far? Both of you probably. Yeah. All of the staff besides Jack has gone through the training that Civic Plus provides. But then I think it's because it's so, like,
guardrailed, it's very easy to make the updates. Like, there isn't a whole lot of, I guess, different ways to create a page, because it's just so I mean, it's kind of almost over standardized, but in a good way, I think. It's hard to mess up. Like, it's hard to, like, make a mistake that is undoable. Like, it's Yeah. Yeah. And I think what Civic Plus also is they have a really good, their support is very accessible. They have tons of guidelines and videos and tutorials that you can go through.
And then there's also, like, a contact person that you could reach out to. So I initially went to some of the training with staff, but then after we took on Ainsley, she ended up going through a training as well that we added on to. So she is familiar with how to update the website. Yeah. Do you plan on doing, like, a standard update, like, going at least once a week and updating what needs to be updated or and then I tend to update the website almost daily. Okay. Yeah. Because there because there's always just things that I find that need to be updated
or that just need to be refreshed. But, yeah, I almost I tend to almost do it. At least weekly, but almost daily. Yeah. Yeah. I like the news section because a lot of times when people come to the website, they're coming for the same reason that 10 other people came to the website that day, and they shouldn't have to search. Right. It should be right there. Yeah. And and that's where I think some of the analytics will be very helpful because it can show you how like what's the most frequented page. And if that's something completely different, then we can change that and make sure that it lives right there. Yeah. Yeah. Analytics looking at your analytics when you get them will be important.
Mhmm. How excellent questions. In your experience, how well does the the search function work? And what does it how how does it return things? There are a lot of bad websites out there with regard to searching. You type in some things, and it brings back, a news article from five years ago. Well, that's probably not what I was looking for. Yeah. Use that? I have. I would say it's so it's keyword based. So, the unfortunate thing about it I don't know. I haven't tested how well it works if you don't know the exact, like, phrasing for whatever page you're looking for.
I imagine it works fine with that. I haven't tested that. But it is very good about bringing up specific pages when you like if you Google police, it'll bring up our public safety page, because the word police is used all throughout there. So it doesn't use, like, it doesn't search just generic Google. It kinda keeps it to Right. Right. Our site. And then it also, it it's separate from document search. So it's when you search just the web page, you're just searching the web page. If you wanna look for certain documents, that's like a separate, part of it. Okay. That's something I'm curious about when it comes out.
Yeah. That's good. Sometimes It's a good question. Some people don't like to navigate websites. They just wanna be like city code. Yeah. And like if you were to type city code, it would bring up what right now we just have the document city code on there, but then eventually it'll bring up Unicode for you. So yeah. Which also is searchable. Yes. I think we can use that for testing. Yeah. For sure. Can we eliminate the horticulture society from attractions page, please? Sure. Because it it used to be located here, but it hasn't for twenty years. And it's not a doesn't not a library or venue that you can go to anymore.
So it's it's not an attraction. Cool. I will remove it. Thank you. Mhmm. And I know that you the three areas that they wanna promote for community building are, of course, the Belle, then Raptor, and then the Goldstein. Oh, okay. Yeah. I'll just switch out the Horticulture for Goldstein. Just a moment. I just had it give you put in that place. There you go. K. So once that it goes live, then that's really when we have the opportunity to really look at it and make suggestions. Yeah. I think too late at that process or No. Because it's
No. Adaptable. It's very adaptable and easy to update. I can't change the colors and the fonts at this point or a lot of the there is some things that are baked into the website, but it's pretty changeable. I can we can delete all the pages and start fresh if we want to. We won't, but, but So you can make alterations to the site. If you can make alterations to it Yeah. Within the confines. So Yeah. It's very easy to adjust the site map. It's very easy to create and delete web pages. Yeah. And move them around between,
like, the different department headers. Like, we have multiples. Some of, like, I think, permits is in almost all of them because it fits in all of the categories. And so there is a lot of ways where there is just, like, five ways to get to one page. And I think that's what's really nice about civic bosses web layout is that you can get to one place various ways. And as soon as it goes live, we'll almost be at that, ADA compliant point? Or will we have a lot of work to do to get to get there?
Or is it already will we be a year or two ahead of schedule? The website will be. It will be compliant. It's just the documents that live on there. Okay. And, one thing that they also look at is the images, and every time you upload an image, you have to add an alt text. And so Yep. With the newsletter that I showed, like, when I uploaded oh, the the top banner, I had to provide an alt text of what it is that you're actually looking at. In case people use screen readers, or other tools, they don't they have to explain the image to them.
Okay. And so that's something that they do, but the documents is something that will need to be done. Okay. Yeah. So that still and with that extra year would we're should not be a problem. Oh, that this comes in very handy. And I think that's also why they made that ruling because they just they I think they had a, like, a feedback period where they were looking for feedback, and I think it just was it's a very, like, larger cities, I'm sure it's also not an easy task. But especially for smaller cities of our size,
it's they were fearful that they were gonna move away from having a city website and, like, it in general to begin with because of the task it would take. And, I mean, like, staff time and cost to make that compliant. And so I think that they were understanding of that and extended that deadline by a year. And who knows? Maybe they'll extend it again. I don't know. But we'll be more compliant than we are today. Yeah. But, I mean, I know with, like, the broadcasting of these these meetings too,
they are not they need transcribing. Like, they need captions. And so Okay. That's also something that would need to be done. And there's so many little things that need to be done. But, yeah, this is one step towards the right direction. Step one. Yeah. We're safe positive. Sounds daunting. Yeah. It's quite a task. And, thank you for undertaking it and continuing on and doing the work that you've done so far. We look I look forward to, seeing it so that Yeah. You can kinda really see it. Yeah. It's hard to just show it in three videos,
but I also didn't wanna take up. There's a lot of pages. That you guys are through. We definitely deleted a lot of them. But, yeah, there's still a ton of them that are out there and yeah. Mhmm. It will be a work in progress. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And we'll continue to look for ways that maybe we can get counsel, you know, a week or two ahead of launch if there's some way that we can get you a little bit of a demo, see. We'll explore and see what Civic Plus may have available. Yeah. Because, you know, I know that you can't really see from here, and so we wanna make sure you can Yeah.
See it. But, like, if we could, come in here and and see it on a, on a computer screen. I think the link is shareable because we just this is just accessible through a web link. It's just not live Okay. To the public. Yeah. But there might be a way that we can Mhmm. Share. Can kinda take a look. Cool. Thank you. Any anything else? Do you anticipate a kind of a guesstimate on when the public will be able to share in this? I would say sometime May, Not a specific date. We'll have to work with Civic Plus and then our previous web provider as well
because I'm trying to get the subscriber list from the city, like this news data. The news data and golf Yeah. Because I don't have access to that data right now. And so I'm trying to get that list to see if I can just copy it over. But I just want to make sure that that once we launch this website, that everything is good, and then we'll transition away from the old website. Okay. Yeah. Cool. Good. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Alright. Okay. Those are our presentations. That was a lot of stuff.
A lot of stuff. Thank you. So let's see. We got ten minutes to pregame and forty until the puck drops. Let's see. By the time it hits, penguins came in. Approval of minutes is next on our agenda. We have three minutes in the packet. 03/25/2026, our City Council workshop meeting minutes, the April 8 City Council workshop meeting minutes, and the April 8 City Council meeting minutes. Has everybody had a chance to do those,
make any typographical, grammatical changes there? I didn't find anything. I didn't either. But make a motion to approve. All right. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Motion carries five-zero by Melkie. Public hearings don't have any tonight. Tonight we have a consent agenda consisting of 10 items, but we'll go. First is general disbursements through April 17 85,000 and $11.91 payroll through April 9 $21,955.79
wire payments through April 17, dollars 15,571.04. Dollars Number two, approval of city licenses as outlined in the packet. Three, remains but is being deferred. Four, approval of Resolution 2,631, reappointing Jacob Brooks to the Planning Commission. Five, approval of Resolution 20 six-thirty two, approving a contract with Electro Watchmen for the expansion of current lentil S2 net box system for added access at Community Park 6,
approval of Resolution 2,633, authorizing the budget amendments to transfer funds and for the purchase of 1407 Larbinger Avenue West, the Gitprest Building and the land. Seven, approval of Resolution 2,634, authorizing a change order for twenty twenty six sanitary sewers, CTV and cleanup project 2,602 with American Environmental, LLC. Eight, consideration of City Hall operating hours under summer hours nine, approval of Resolution 2,635,
awarding a bid for the twenty twenty six sanitary sewer lining project FH25-three, Tavisto Sewer. 10, approval of Resolution 2636, authorizing the city to enter into a grant agreement with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources Outdoor Recreation Grant Program. And 11, approval of Resolution 2,637, authorizing the purchase agreement for playground equipment from Northland Recreation at Community Park. It's a consent agenda. I will move the consent agenda.
All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, same sign. Motion carries. Next, we have policy items. We have the approval of the Resolution 20 six-thirty eight, appointing members to the Les Bolstad Golf Course Redevelopment Community Advisory Committee, otherwise known by our Ackerman of CAC. On this, I'll turn this over to Administrator Linehan. Thank you, Mayor and Council. So I'll just give a brief overview, real quick. You're very familiar with this process. You know, back in February,
we determined, that we should make up a CAC of nine voting members. Council, knowing that this would be a large process, a lot of interviews, had kind of directed that council members, Jim Lawsonberg and Georgiana May, would be our interviewees. Council provided feedback on the 24 applicants we received, identified 20 or 14 for further interviews. And then the council members interviewed the candidates, have provided their recommendations for appointment. And I, you know, would turn it over to them for kind of questions or commentary on the individuals. So we have a resolution here tonight that would start this process,
and then also the, a little bit of clarification that they would provide the per meeting stipend as part of this. So that's the recommendation approval, and, you know, I would defer to the council members in the interviews for further information on the candidates. Okay. Council members, Watsonburg and me. Oh, well, what what do you need, actually? I mean Yeah. Oh, we've we've laid out the process, and I if you have any questions on that, that would be great. I mean, please ask them. I will say it was an extensive process and we
one thing that was impressed upon both of us was the wealth of experience and willingness to take part in your community, can contribute to your community, which impresses with every candidate. It was really difficult making the decisions who to choose from. So embarrassment of riches. Okay. Council members have questions? I do. Okay. Jim? First of all, I very much want to thank you guys for putting in all of that work and effort. It's clear that you did do a very thorough job.
I one thing that I'm and I and I and I also recognize that there's a lot of, fresh voices, people that, are new to serving the city and to help out with the city, And I think that's that's great. The, the one thing that I note in the list was that we we are there there there is really only one candidate, that has kind of the speaking, the knowledge, the language of planning, in their experience. I think, Council Member Milke will agree with me that
we go that we see these strong towns and things like that. And there's a language about planning that is learned, and I think it'd be helpful for there to be, some more. The the thought I have, is I have a proposal. I'd like to add in, Scott Wilson, who has a history, with the planning commission and a long, long history of doing so. The two options that I have to propose, Wilson is to either replace one of the two at large with members,
or, and I think maybe a little bit more palatable, would be to expand the committee to 10 members, to just add in one more voice that can help the group talk the language of planning. I do think it's going to be important. I know there was some discussion before about, that this is not the planning commission, that the planning commission is going to do their work and this is separate from that. I comment that it still is about planning and there needs to be,
an ability for this committee to quickly get up to speed on that. The things that they're going to talk about is all about planning. And so I think that's, it would be useful to have one more person on the committee that can help Jake, sort of communicate that. I have a question for our city. Sure. Won't there be someone from Bolton Minsk also that would be attending these meetings as well? Yes. Correct. Our from our staff side, we will provide it'll be myself,
community development, coordinator, Hannah Lynch, and then Bolton and Mink will provide their team to the CAC. So Hannah would bring that planning commission back around and same with Bolton Mink. Yeah. And I mean I will say, the St. Anthony Park representative is not a planning person in the sense of zoning codes and things like that, but was very well versed in the types of developments that are gone in and that are going in different places and some of the maybe more aspirational aspects that we would like to find in,
in sort of more communities of the future. So that is another item. And when we did this, we were really trying to find balance and to not really double down on any one set of capabilities, but to try and capture as many different aspects, perspectives and skill sets as possible. I'm a really process oriented person because I think it's the only way to be fair. And since we had 24 applicants, all of whom would have loved to do this, and we created a process under council's guidance where we narrowed that down to 14
to interview. And then we talked about our process for the interviews, and we gave opportunity to comment on the questions that we are asking every candidate in the statements we have made. I would really, just on the basis of fairness, really, I don't see how we can have one councilperson add who they want to this list of CAC committee members. I don't see how that can happen. I appreciate that. I will say I didn't envision this as being a set list that was going
to be put in front of us. I had envisioned that this was going and and and in our conversations, there was a lot of talk about how the council was still going to make the appointment. And I think that's what I'm doing is that I'm making exercising my position as on the council to suggest a membership or a a a a a combination of skills. And this isn't the first time I've mentioned it. This is something that I've been concerned about since the beginning that,
the almost intentional desire to avoid having, I mean, the structure that we had in here of using the commissions to identify, who we're going to use, to me, they always had a little bit of weakness in that it wasn't focusing on what the project was. It was this almost, almost false equality that really wasn't looking at what we're doing. We're trying to put together the most the best development,
that's going to change the face of Falcon Heights for the next forty years. And, we are needing people that have that kind of background and skill in it. So I think that this, again, I don't think I don't see this having any issue about fairness or nothing. We got 24 applicants. They were all very, very good. Mr. Wilson is one of them. He interviewed well. He had I mean, I I assume he interviewed well. I don't know. But, I know him, and I know the experience that was that, you know, of the people that applied,
I do know that he had, a lot of the background experience that I think is necessary for this body. So, you know, my proposal is to, increase the number to 10, to add Scott Wilson as an additional at large. The, I know we had again made this number be nine because we needed to have some not no ties and this body isn't going to make any decisions. Anything that they recommend, I certainly hope, is going to be by consensus.
It's gonna be by, you know, by by general agreement. So it's not gonna be a situation where it's a five-five vote. So that's what my recommendation is here. I propose to amend the recommendation by doing that. Well, I just can't agree. I really can't. We have the expertise for the planning. As we've articulated here, we have Jake Anderson, who's on the Planning Commission, and we have staff, Hannah and Jack, who are well who have degrees in planning. And we have the expertise of the Bolton and Mink consultant who will be at
every meeting. So I think we have the expertise we need. And as far as this even comment about the commissions, This was the process we agreed on. We did. We agreed on this process, and we used this process and sort of secondarily criticizing it as overly even in representation. This committee is not envisioned, and this is why I pushed for as much the best description we could of the charge to this committee.
I mean, that probably needs more work. But this committee is not only dealing with planning, okay? It's not. And we need people who can communicate with their community and bring ideas back. We need people who understand other aspects, schools. We have educators here. We have people who are in communication and are really good at that. So we were looking and we stated from the start that we needed a diverse
group of people to be represented on this committee. And we sort of followed that protocol. And we could have set it up if we had been instructed by council to say, here's a list of 12, And we're going to pick nine here in the council, but we also didn't set that process up. And Jim and I did all the interviews. I didn't do any of the park interviews, that's true. But that doesn't affect this particular decision. So I just don't think we can undo all the work we just did. And that's what this would be because if you have the right to suggest somebody,
then everybody else does, and we'll do the whole process all over again. Really, I think that's what we'd have to do. Well, I absolutely say. I mean, I'm a council member, and I have a right. So I'm not I I don't wanna get into that. But, so if anybody has a hard a strong position, I certainly hope you'll speak up. I mean, I hope if if if if you disagree with it, I mean, obviously, you put together the list, but I don't think that any of us would be doing our jobs if we were making a comment. If if this
I don't believe, miss May, that you are suggesting Council member Mint I'm sorry. I apologize. I I I was going to call you Georgiana. I didn't want to just show you respect. That that if the that if the that use that your recommendation is the only recommendation, right? We sent out this to everybody and told them that these are the recommendations of this subcommittee and but that they had to recognize that the council may make changes. And that is the change that I am suggesting
that this happened. The idea and I think that there does appear to be a disagreement as to what the purpose of this committee is. The committee isn't going to be doing the communication on behalf of the city. They're not going to be making an educational policy and they are not going to be doing outreach. They are to speak as representatives of the community to provide the viewpoints of the community in putting together a very good plan.
That's what we're hoping for. And then to do that, I think that there's value for them to have some knowledge about past planning, current planning and just the idea of urban planning. I don't disagree with you that you did a very, very good job of a diverse group of people. And I appreciate the viewpoints that you want. I am asking for a single adjustment, one additional, person to provide a little bit more input into the committee.
Well, if I may. So thank you very much for your, for your suggestion. And as it is a council decision, I think we've probably set our viewpoints. If anyone, if any of the other council members or mayor would like to to add to that, that would be great. Otherwise, I think we should just consider that addition and do what council does and vote on things. Oh, or council member Milke. Yes. My understanding too is that we have the tech group that is giving guidance on the development and these are residents that we asked to
bring the viewpoint and also to seek feedback from within their circles, their neighborhoods, etcetera. So, I support the the list that's been compiled. I mean, it would be really hard for me to add someone without saying, well, what about him? What about this person? Because there's others that also brought depth of experience that aren't on this list. But this was the recommendations that brought forth from the two who did the interviewing. I do have one more more and more comment. So Councilmember Milke, what are we missing from this then? Do you believe that this committee is missing a skill?
No, I think no. I just, I didn't, no. I missed it would just be hard for me to to have the other 18 to say this one should also be added without reopening the whole process. So Thanks. The as we looked at in my opinion on this, these are all very good candidates. We had 24 really good candidates. We narrowed it down. It was difficult to get it down to 14 to interview, I think. And then to find
R7, right, or R6. We have six from Falcon Heights on this. And we've got one from each one of our neighboring communities. And to narrow it down from the 24 to six is, involved all of us to, to do that. Did the waitings and then got got the interviews. And, it would have been fun to have sit in on all of all of these interviews and do that. And I want to commend Council Member May and Council Member Wattenberg for the hours
put in and the help. I think that if we keep it as it is with these recommendations is probably our best, would be the transparent thing to do and would be following our policy and would be the way to fit. There's always a challenge with every decision that one makes. And, yeah, would I like to see somebody else on here as well? Probably. You know? Or would I would I but I didn't talk to them, and I didn't do that. I made my recommendations as part of the rating so that those thoughts could be
brought into the, to the questions. So I'm content or I can support this resolution and this recommendation on on the CAC. Alright. Thanks. I will withdraw my request. Okay. Thank you, Council Member Morgan. But thank you for bringing it up. And, because I think that many people are wondering about that and how we were gonna put this committee together and, and make it happen. And we will, and I think that the process is was followed.
So thank you. So any further comments? No. Thank you. We move Resolution 2,638 to appoint membership to the Les Paulstead Golf Course Redevelopment Community Advisory Committee as put forth in the request for council action. So moved. So moved by Wattenberg. Further discussion? All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. All those opposed, same sign. Motion carries five-zero. Thank you all very much,
and thank you, Council Member Morgan, for prompting more discussion. Next, we have policy item, H2, the request of out of state travel reimbursement for an elected official. Administrator Linehan. Thanks, mayor and council. So high pass overview of this. State legislature requires, that we adopt a policy for out of state travel. We adopted one in 2,005. We've been doing this annually, kind of readopting this. It allows out of state travel, but you just have to pass a resolution, the cost of the travel,
making sure it's not affiliated with the parties, etcetera. So kinda create some standards. Council member Milke in 2025 had requested to attend the, Strong Towns National Gathering. This year is requesting to do so again. Due to timing, we added this on as a, amendment to the policy items just to follow protocol and other procedures, because, you know, they we would need to, or she would need to book and provide that. So that's kind of the overview of the, proposal, the cost. You know, I I will say from a budget impact, it's not a specific against this.
You know, we are going to go over budget in the council travel line item regardless of this or not. It's kind of where we're projected this year. We've had a lot of good attendance at different events. We budget 2,500 annually. We will be exceeding that with, you know, the league conference and other events, league training. So that's okay. We can amend. I don't want that to be something that I'm using as a reason to or not to consider. We can amend that, but I also it is my duty to kinda share that, that we will be over this line item. Next year, we should increase it if council's interested in attending.
We've had so many years of, not spending a lot of these funds, and so we use kinda historical trends, but we probably should also foresaw too that, you know, little bit of a different year, new council members coming on training etcetera. So that's just a little bit of the budget overview. The lead training always is they are a little expensive as well. So that's my mile high overview and And I just wanna add that what I did last year and this year is I estimated what it would cost for me to attend the League of Minnesota Cities local and here in Minnesota, and I just asked for that amount and then I just covered the balance.
That's all. So I'm not asking for more beyond what would have been spent for me otherwise. That makes sense. It sounds like Fayetteville, Arkansas is high in my business. I just tell you the programming offered by strong tongues. Yes. That makes sense. And appreciate that you keep it at the cost of the lead. Keep it in line there. Further, any other counsel input? I do appreciate the opportunities to attend these kind of events. I've taken advantage of a couple of my So far this year. So yes, we may need to look at that budget since we have a very education hungry
council compared to in the past, which is good. I would I just had a question of how we set the $800,000,000 that's allowed if we're going over budget anyway. Just what I said, I estimated what it would cost between the registration fee for the leave mileage and hotel. Right. But that's bigger than the $800 And you're going to cover the balance. Sorry, maybe I missed something. Yes. I estimated the cost for attending this will be roughly $1,400 So if I asked for $800 to put towards that, I mean, so it would cover the balance. Okay. I'm just yes.
Do we have to ask you to cover the balance as well? Thanks, Doreen. I don't know. I was just trying to make it I was trying to fit it in due to the out of state travel. Appreciate that on your willingness to incur personal cost on behalf of the city. I think that, that's something that we should look at next year to do to cover the whole thing or we could. We'd have to make the budget change at this time then, wouldn't would we not for the if we were to go from eight to 14?
No. It would be no. It's a good question. So the most important part for the budget is each individual fund for this. So in the legislative fund one one two, that's where we put all of our legislative expenditures. It's all fungible inside there. Right? The goal is generally for the general fund that the general fund is balanced. That's our legal obligation. So no. What we do is the auditors wanna see if it's material or substantive. So it's basically if it's going to be something that's going to dramatically change our budget projections, other stuff, they do want budget amendments.
And so we like to clean those up. For this, I would say it's likely not, but it might be something that we look at if it's, you know, for 2500 and we're at $1,015,000 at the end of the year. It might be. Right? And there are some things that we'll have to consider, you know, in this line. We'll we'll monitor it. One you know, traditionally, in one area, we've over budgeted for commission stipends. We budget all of our commissions that they're gonna get a stipend, that they're gonna take it. They have not. So not everybody. It's kind of a fifty fifty mix, but we are gonna now be paying the CAC. So there's just some different considerations we'll have for there.
Long way of saying, it won't be substantial enough at this point, but at the end of the year, we'll monitor if we think we need to do a budget roundup to clean up everything. But we go over individual lines and have the ability to, it's the broader scope and how far out it is that concerns the auditors. But you've not yet received my request for two weeks in Barcelona to attend an international cities conference? No, we have not received it. I'm joking. The so we have, Ocean on well, we have the $800,000,000 to stay there and then visit maybe another time to
cover that as goes as actual expenses. Come in, we could place something for that because we've authorized the travel. I don't know. Well, I would say let okay. I'm in favor of granting Paula's request here. Right. Because I think that it it's fitting and it and it meets our, our city, city needs and objectives. Yes. Do I have a motion to to approve Resolution 20 six-thirty nine? So moved. So moved by Wasserberg. Further discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor signify by saying aye.
Aye. All those opposed, same sign. Motion carries five-zero. Thank you, Paula. The information and announcements, anybody want to start the discussion off? I'll start since I don't have any announcements, but I am excited to see that our grant funding is moving along for the playground, so we can get that playground built and have our kids playing on it soon. So thank you for staff's diligence in pursuing. Yes. No announcements. Georgiana? Yes. Sorry. I was lost in thought. I do have some yes. First of all, I do appreciate everybody's support for the process that we use for the Community Advisory
Committee. As we've said here, we had a lot of good candidates, and we spent a fair amount of time in the selection process. We actually to come up with the list that we just approved. Jim and I actually spent two sessions so that we made sure that we weren't just so we made sure we were making good decisions. That said, what we might want to do is well, we might want to figure out some way of incorporating the other talent that we have in this city,
which is quite extensive. Let's see here. And then we just had the Sustainability Fair, which was organized by the Environment Commission. And I think it was once again a big success. And I especially want to thank the Environment Commission that put a lot of time and energy into it and the staff, especially Hannah, and who drafted her children to help. I thought that was pretty amazing. And council members who stood out in the cold and directed traffic like Randy and
Jim. Anyways, and Paula, everybody, yes. So I really we really did appreciate that help. And I think it's a big success and something that really is unique for our city and something that helps us attain our Climate Action Plan goals. Okay. Paul? Community Engagement Commission met on Monday. We now have a full commission with seven members, which is great. And opted not to meet in May because they will be busy in May. We have the, spring togethers we've been talking about.
That's on May '5. And where the Falcon Heights Orchestra, maybe as many as 10 members will be performing and they're doing, pop orchestra songs. So Ainsley Brown, our intern, has been putting that together. And then also we've been working on our mission and just strengthening what is the focus of the CEC and member Sarah Kaflish has been working with Oka and Ainsley to put together pilot listening sessions. We'll be holding two listening sessions in May as well.
Busy. I went to, the Metro Cities annual meeting, last week, and, it was it was good to network, I will tell you. If anybody, needs a speaker, get the, executive director of the, Guthrie Theater, to speak. The the story of the Guthrie, she she spoke to the group, is, is it it's an incredible story, to make make you very, very proud of Minnesota and the Twin Cities and, what we've done to support arts and the reputation that we have, nationwide, in art support. So it was very, it was a cool, cool presentation. The planning commission will be meeting next Tuesday.
They're re returning to the review of the city, code, changes or pro pro proposed changes. So, doing that. And, I wanna say thanks to the, sustainability fair that was very well run. I apologize that I didn't, volunteer. I didn't, know that there was, any need to. I I was prepared to, but my son and I very much enjoyed, walking around and seeing, all the, presentations. We're gonna have to find a new place because there was too many too many great tables, to that filled up the space. So thanks. Thanks. The Sustainability Fair was looked to be really,
really good. I got to drop off some stuff before I stood out there. I was thinking seven days earlier, it would have been a great assignment. But anyway but it was it was still fun because it was great fun to talk to the people as they were, coming out because I was at the exit point and, telling people they had to go in the main entrance and not, not the side entrance. So our food scrap program works really well. There were quite a few people participating in that during the day.
And, the comments that I heard from people who walked the extra 50 yards to talk to me at the gate instead of cutting through the lot were all very, very happy that they had attended and learned lots of things. And, I want to thank Lauderdale council members for helping out to end their their environment commission and everybody. It was, well done. Had a great chat with, with Hannah's daughter. She came out to make certain I was doing okay. You learn a lot from 10 year olds. It's wonderful. And it was that that was the bright spot of my day.
I'm looking forward to that happening again on the sixteenth on that Saturday at Curtis Field with the, spring together. It's, going to be great. And then July, we'll have the, on the July 16 as well. Right? Is that the, third third Thursday? And we'll have our ice cream social. And, so remember, Mark the sixteenth for your, city events. And then the lawn and garden tour, I found out about that at the sustainability fair that looks, that should be fun too. And, We need host cities.
Host gardens. So Host gardens are needed. Sign ups available. Talk to people on the Environment Commission on that one. And, yeah. So that's kind of going on. The fun things in the city that, that are happening. People ask me what's happening in Falcon Heights, and I've always got something to tell them. They go, oh, I thought you'd not have anything happening there. So I'll stop babbling and, ask for further, announcements and information from our, administrator, Mr. Linehan. Thank you, mayor and council. So most of staff, what we're working on was in the packet and other areas there.
I will comment the community park. Appreciate the support for the grant agreement. We've been working on that. Kudos to Kelly and kind of her work with that one. We tried three times to get this grant. Right? First time failed, second time failed. I thought for sure the second time, I I didn't think they'd reject us three time or two times, and they didn't reject us a third time, which was great. So happy to get that together. This step is the next step in getting the playground. The park, progress is going fantastic. They have if you go up there now, they have they're getting ready to pour concrete,
so they have all the survey markings for that. They're still on track to finish most of the improvements by late May or early June, including the parking lot, everything. The delay is gonna be the playground. So we'll be able to open the park. It'll be exciting, but we will we're working to keep the existing playground up as long as possible, and so working kinda through that with the vendors, trying to see what our best option for that is. But it looks like, August 1 would be the start date of the install of the playground and finishing it up sometime in September.
It's kinda where the playground's looking just with the the grant delays. So a little bit of a bummer there, but we have a good vendor partner at Northland Rec. They've been working with us throughout this, and so that's been fantastic, and that'll help support, the the playground, fencing, and other other contracts that'll be coming forward as well. So appreciate that. And if you haven't been up to the park, go check it out, and respect the construction spots, but we'll try to designate a tour at some point before open, just so you guys can see the inside and see what they've been working on. So staining coming next too,
so they're gonna stain all the, exterior and interior wood. So Yeah. Street sweeping is underway, and pretty much first pass is done, and our First pass has been completed. Same as a lot of hail. The street? Yeah. Yep. Hopefully, it doesn't snow again because we all of our free salt is gone. So Sounds good. Any further announcements, follow ups? I'll open it up to community forum. It's disappointing we don't see anybody here, but I imagine you're all sitting at home, floggering back and forth on the wild game. So So the I don't have it on play here. The so,
thank you all for coming out on a beautiful spring night and attending the council. And thank you to Chief Spies for coming here, and Elka for showing us what the new website could look like. So who wants to do item K? Let's make a motion. Milke makes a motion to adjourn. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. A