[music] [music] [music] [music] [music] Good evening and welcome to the January 20th city council meeting. If you join me for a moment of silence in the pledge of allegiance. Okay, roll call, please. [clears throat] >> Shell Vulk >> here. >> Luke Helier
>> here. >> Dan Walter >> here. >> Joshua Lee >> here. >> Okay, very good. We'll move on to citizens comments. This is opportunity for anybody to address the council for up to three minutes. Okay, seeing none, we'll move on to additional agenda information. Mr. Miller,
>> nothing tonight, Mayor. >> Very good. Now, move on to item number five, our 2025 annual liquor operations report. And I'll turn it over to our liquor operations director, Tana Wald, >> just in case.
>> That's right. Mayor and council members, thank you so much for the opportunity tonight to present the liquor operations 2025 review. We will start off with sales metrics. In 2025, we ended slightly below 2024 and
adopted budget metrics. The plus side is that we increased our gross profit, which means that we made over $43,000 more in 2025 than we did in 2024, even with the reduction in sales. The liquor fund contributions, we
contributed a total of $1.74 million in 2025. The big winners were the equipment replacement for the equipment fund and the police station debt service funds. And without these contributions, [clears throat] these services would be covered by property taxes.
The emporium room remains to be a very popular site out at our Kia Cook location. Our rentals have increased almost 10% over 2024. And our promot promotional events are just as popular and they produced a $57,000 increase in
sales at the Kia Cook location. >> Door Dash was a new thing for us this year. We started at the end of October. We didn't really know what to expect. From October 29th to December 31st, we had orders totaling over $25,000. And in
December alone, we had $17,000 in sales. So that was a nice surprise for us. And it's still growing. So ecommerce continues to grow for us as well. We're 10% um almost 10% increase over 2024 in sales. Um and we continue
to focus on expanding our marketing for e-commerce, our community engagement. Uh this year we raised over $100,000 for valuable services benefiting our community. In March we held our annual fundraiser to
benefit our local food shelves. Um July we helped defay the cost to replace two retired canines for our police department. And then in November we did our regular Lakeville yellow ribbon fundraiser as well which I just went over and took the picture with them. So they were very happy. Um, we also worked
with the Rotarians in their taste of Lakeville and we partnered with College City Beverage and Mick Ultra to hold our second annual 5K fun run and walk um to bring more awareness to breast cancer. So,
achievements for the fourth year in a row we were named a top 100 retailer by Beverage Dynamics magazine and we are also voted the number one liquor store by readers of the Sun This Week publication. and we completed our perpetual inventory
counts with a 02 shrink. Our goal every year is 75. So, it's um a huge uh thumbs up to my staff to be well under that goal. Staffing developments. We've had a few open positions this year and we've been
lucky enough to be able to fill those positions with internal candidates. We do have full-time assistant manager position that's open currently at KIA Cook. It was just posted today. So, we're excited to get that position filled soon.
Our upcoming events. So, every January, all of our managers get together for a goal setting meeting. We just had that last week. Um, we discuss operational and personal goals and kind of our strategies for the upcoming year. In March, we do our annual safe server training. That's for our entire staff.
That's so everybody's properly trained on how to check IDs and to identify intoxicated customers. And then in March, we'll be doing our food shelf fundraiser once again for the Open Door Pantry and 360 communities. That is all I have tonight. I now stand
for questions. >> Council questions. >> Joshua. >> Uh thank you. I had two questions. one related to delivery. Um, so with Door Dash coming in, it you're still offering
the in-house delivery. Is that planned to phase out in >> with the success of Door Dash or what's the plan with that? >> It's a totally different clientele that uses our delivery compared to Door Dash. >> Gotcha. >> Um, so it's more of a target market for
Door Dash. Um, we still have a lot of regular customers that use our in-house delivery, so we'll continue to do that. We only do it out of one store, so it's not an inconvenience for us. >> Gotcha. And is there still a minimum for Door Dash orders that there is for >> No, there's no minimum on Door Dash.
>> I can see how the CL clientele could be different with that. >> Yep. >> Um and then the the other question I had was having gross profits increase even amidst some of the sales challenges that we're just seeing. I know that's a national trend. Um how how do you do that? Uh what were some of the ways that
you were able to accomplish that? We've had a lot of strategic buying changes. We have bimonthly meetings with all of our buyers. Um we've been buying really smart, so we're saving a lot of cost on our buys. Um we also have watched our
inventory levels closely and at the end of the year we have a benchmark of 10% of our sales and all of four stores hit under that benchmark. So that helps our gross profit immensely at the end of the year. So well, >> congrats. Thank you. Council, any questions? Okay, thank you very much.
>> Thank you. >> Okay, we'll now move on to item [clears throat] six, our consent agenda. These are more routine items for the council. Is there anything you'd like to highlight, Mr. Miller? >> Thank you, mayor. Three items tonight. Item 6H is an agreement with Pyro for
the July 4th fireworks display. Yes, it will be summer. I [laughter] wonder um and I bring this up because this um along with our contract uh contribution, the Lions contribute $8,000 toward this and so we're appreciative of that. >> Item 6N is labeled as North Ryan second
edition. This is going to be the Dakota County Recycling Facility. That'll be off of 70 and Jquard. So we're um thankful for their investment in that project. And then item 6P is an approval of a pay equity filing. This is a report that the city has to provide to the state every three years. And uh we
passed once again. >> Very good. Council, any items you want to discuss further or pull from the consent agenda? I'll take a motion to approve. >> I move approval of the consent agenda. >> Second. >> Second. >> Any further discussion? All those in
favor say I. >> I. >> I. >> Oppos. Consent agenda passes. With that, no action items, any unfinish or new business. Okay. Announcements. Uh, next city council work session is Monday, January 26th. Our next city council meeting is
Monday, February 2nd. And with that, I'll take a motion to adjurnn. >> Move to adjurnn. >> There a second. >> Second. >> All those in favor say I. >> I. >> I. >> Oppos. >> Close.