Everyone, I'm gonna call this meeting to order of city council on, Tuesday, March 11. I'm gonna be chairing tonight because mayor Zweifel has bronchitis, and so she's having a hard time speaking. So before we move on to our agenda, take role. Mayor Zweifel? Here. Councilor Peterson White? Here. Councilor Soukup? Here. Councilor Beamer? Here. Councilor Dahlen? Here. Councilor Holmes? Here. Councilor Ness? Here. Great. And then I think I'm just turning it over to mister Rapp. Is that is that correct? Mister Mardig,
did you wanna introduce him? Or Thank you, president Pro Tem Soakha, members of the council. Yes. This evening, we have, Craig Rapp here to give the, kind of a continuation of our strategic plan work. He's our facilitator and has been for the last two strategic plans that the city has done. And, he'll be giving the presentation, and then I'm integrated into the presentation, within some, local internal and external background information for the council as well. So Alright. Please turn it over to Mr. Rapp. Good evening, everyone. Hi, Craig. Just wanna make sure everybody's here. Alright. So as Ben mentioned,
we are in the midst of our strategic planning process. And if you look on the screen, you'll see the timeline. It, kicked off, I wanna say officially slash unofficially, back in October of, last year, October 18 to be exact, when we had a joint meeting of all the boards and commissions. At that time, the boards and commissions and many of you, maybe all of you, were in attendance. Jake and I sort of did a double team on that one. He presented the comprehensive plan and a summary of that, and,
that was their first opportunity to hear about the strategic plan. And I collected a great deal of information and facilitated a discussion with all of the boards and commission members who were there. We had a more or less official kickoff internally on December 4 when I met with the senior management team and went through the steps and the process that we will engage in and have been engaged in now for a couple of months, to go, through the process. That continued on January 14. All of you many of you were here,
and we did a official kickoff with the city council and the staff leadership team on effective governance. That was January 14. For the past couple of months, we've been engaged in stakeholder, discussions. We've been doing a community survey, which you'll hear about tonight, as well as focus groups, which we'll also report in on. And tonight is, in fact, that report. All that time from the kickoff through today, the staff has also been putting together an environmental scan, which we'll describe in a few minutes,
that that includes what we call an organizational profile, gives you a big picture not only of what your operations look like, but also what's going on in the environment in which you operate within. That will be followed on April 5 with our retreat. That will, mean the assembled senior management group. That is the city council and again the senior management team. Once that retreat is completed, you will have in place the priorities, the draft outcomes and targets that we hope to achieve over the performance period,
the following few years. Once those are drafted up, I will be meeting with the staff to work on specific initiatives and action plans which will make the plan real. So that's that's really what happens with a strategic plan. So tonight, we will present to you the environmental scan. Ben will be doing that, and then I will walk through the boards and commissions meeting summary, the community survey results, and the focus group summary. Wanna make sure that I mention up front here, that you,
in fact, will be hit with more or less a fire hose of information tonight. So even though we want you to feel free to ask questions and and, make sure you clarify we clarify anything you don't understand, you'll have plenty of time between now and the April 5 retreat to take this information. We'll be giving you access to all the details, in fact. And if you want any of the raw data, those will be made available to you as well so that you can, at your leisure, review this and think about it to formulate your own ideas going into the retreat.
That is, in fact, the way we want the process to work. We want you to receive input on your operating environment. That operating environment is really two components. It's how the staff, particularly the leadership team, sees the influences of the external environment, whether it's regulations, it's the political situation, it's the economic situation that's going on here is affecting how you deliver services or your ability to deliver services, as well as how you can move forward to improve quality of life within the
community. And then we've reached out to the community to ask their opinion and we'll be reflecting that back. So you'll hopefully be able to take that as a strong sense of what the environment is and what you ought to prioritize when we get into the retreat on April 5. I mentioned this at the effective governance session, but really it comes down to two mandates that every municipal organization has. One, to hopefully deliver great services and two, again, hopefully to create a great community.
And it really doesn't get much more complicated than that. Your your mandate is it's health, safety and welfare of the community. And you do policing, you do a variety of things, public safety, public works, you pay bills, you keep the water clean, all of the things that a city does to provide a good environment and enable the community to thrive. When we get into strategic planning, there are some discrete responsibilities for the city council and for the staff. The council, in fact, owns the big picture here.
What are our priorities? What are the outcomes we're seeking to achieve over the next few years? And how will we measure our success? The staff, once they know what the priorities are and the outcomes you desire, It's their job to identify the initiatives that they'll undertake and the actions that they'll pursue in order to make that real. And when we engage in that discussion in detail on April 5, you'll do a sharing of perspectives, creating that plan and the accountability structure that is in fact your strategic plan.
Strategic plans aren't that complicated. I'm not going to read all these little bubbles here but they are really two parts and four questions. You have the strategic plan and you have the implementation or business plan. And you ask four questions. Where are we now? Where are we going? How will we get there? And what will we do? Tonight, we're here to scan the environment and talk about the strategic profile of the organization. And in the next two weeks, in fact, you should be on the lookout. I believe we're sending it out on the twentieth to all the participants on April 5. We'll be sending you a a brief SWAT questionnaire for you to complete,
and that'll be factored into the retreat setting. So that's that's where we are in the process right now. We're at the, not quite the midpoint, but we are well into our process of gathering information and identifying where we are and what we're gonna do about that. So with that, I'll turn it over to Ben, and he'll present the environmental scan. Alright. Thank you. Alright. Just a couple of housekeeping items for the council and for the public's information to the the environmental scan document and the presentation from mister Rapp and myself will both
be posted tomorrow, including going out to all of you and available to the general public as well. The long version of the component of the environmental scan, is will be included. I'm not covering all of that. I've pulled some information out of this. There's a little bit of information that might be separate. Just a couple of things of thanks with that. Risi Karim, the assistant to the city administrator, really led, the development of this. The editing of it was staff at Craig's direction of the type of information to be included in the packet. And then the staff primarily being led by the what we call,
the department coordination team right now, which is a combination of our department directors as well as some administration staff that hit multiple departments, helped compile this information. I did take some administrative executive decision making on calling out some of the components. Part of that, I did not get input from the staff on that. Part of that was due to time limitations that all of us had. And so I just gleaned some of that. Certainly encourage you, as Craig said, throughout, after this evening as well, you could reach out directly to departments with questions or clarity that you might have on some of this,
but I'll rifle through, some of this information tonight. Mr. App provided the environmental strand description. Basically, it's got a little bit of demographic, environmental, and community information, and it's part of the process to understand kind of going into the retreat and and development of the strategic plan, some relevant information. A lot of what's in that document too would be trends, what what services are provided within each department, some of the trends within the industry and challenges within that area. Although there isn't a lot of data that's,
you know, included in with that, my guess is on the back end side, staff probably has a lot of, you know, information that might be able to help support, some of the trends and information, should there be interest in in getting some additional amount of that information. So we're I'll start off more internally. We at the back end, we'll have a little bit of external as well as some strategic plan items that I thought might be things to think about as carryover from the current plan into the new plan as the council might evaluate any of the things that maybe have some legs behind them from the current strategic plan.
Part of the process that Craig goes through is development of vision, mission and values. We've refined through the first strategic plan and second strategic plan, vision and mission. And then the last plan did add some strategic plan vision and mission. And then the last plan did add some values. We do have some detailed descriptions within those value statements, but that's included kind of big picture for the city and kind of where we want to go in the mission and vision with that. Certainly want to talk. Money drives mission in many ways and I did want to just call out some financial background information as well. We've had a continued growth and reliance on the property tax system within Minnesota.
It's our primary way of funding a couple of things that you've seen on some of these illustrations before. I will be working on updating some of the like numbers to get a little more current on some of those. I haven't had a chance to update some of the final levy comparative data but we've had some relatively large increases in property taxes in recent history driven by a combination of things we'll talk about a little bit in the in the coming slides. As you look at Northfield in comparison to our primary peer group that we've had despite these increases from just the city's component side of things, we are inching more to that middle point of our peer groups as it relates
to the total property tax levy. Our tax rate, though, is actually on the highest end on this peer group. And I'll talk about that in a little bit because the rate of taxes is a combination of the spending that we have in the property taxes and then the ability to pay the tax base is kind of an offsetting factor and it's the tax base that we've been a little bit challenged with. We started adding in with our comparison information as well through the finance director on the bottom right slide, on the image on the bottom right. Our property taxes that include both the county and the school district will sort that
a little bit differently to be able to see where Northfield kinda stands out in the total tax a little bit better on that. But certainly, we know with the school district referendum, there's gonna be some increased property tax pressures related to, some of the capital investments that are being made in our community for that as well, to be included with that. That tax base component again, we'll update this data, but my guess is it hasn't changed probably dramatically since 2022. We're about 23% below our peer group as it relates to total tax base of the community.
So again, industrial tax rates are double the typical residential rates, depending on homestead rates or not. And also the, so Northfield is, really been trying to focus on industrial growth, within the community to try and bring that tax rate down, with some of that as well. So as you look on the right on our ratio related to tax rates, we are on the high end both on cities smaller than us and larger and certainly on that peer group as well as an illustration. And again, it's primarily being driven not on the spending side or the property tax side.
It's more a reflection of the tax base within within the community. So there's two primary things that drive costs for local government and is true for Northfield as well. I would say capital assets and labor costs are the primary drivers because we're primarily heavily service oriented type of entity. And we're also very heavy on infrastructure costs covering things from roads and bridges, our utilities with our water towers, our our piping for wastewater collection and treatment,
large pieces of expensive equipment that we need to use to take care of all of that, land assets that we have to manage, and then parks and recreation type buildings and then municipal type buildings like the building we're in, police station, library, some of those other ones. So we do have a very heavy capital cost that drives some of those property tax impacts that we've had. Those two things have been primary drivers in the cost of the property tax increases that we've seen. This illustration that's in the environmental scan calls out some of those projects that are
over a million dollars within the five year capital plan. The full plan's available on our website. It was adopted last year. The first year that we're currently in in the capital plan oops. Excuse me. Have projects that are currently active when we're either building them or moving forward with them. So this was from the capital plan. We've got some updated numbers on some of these projects. You can see on that too that we have different sources of revenue. We might get grants. We might get, property tax supported funding. Might be if it's utility fund might be supported by utility funds. All of those are obviously born by taxpayers, whether it's a property tax or a fee for service related to utilities with that
as well. But our annual over that five year plan, the annual total capital projects range anywhere from 10,000,000 to 40,000,000, during that time period. On the labor side, as a major cost driver, we have 112 full time employees based on the time that this was put out and and developed in about 41, part time employees. Comparatively to other cities, we don't have quite as many seasonal employees that some cities have with, like, a larger park rec departments. We don't really have that in Northfield, but those are significant costs, for the city.
Our our pay philosophy as shown on the bottom screen shows about how many employees commute in from other communities about 70%. That also drives that our some of many of our employees, our specialty type positions obviously like police officers, engineers, might be the specific. We do have employees that might be coming from the private sector as well, but in particularly those more niche type positions that are unique wastewater operators, water operators that are really industry specific to cities. We do need to remain competitive and primarily a lot of our labor force comes
from the South Metro in particular. So the city council has invested. I came in 2016 and the city had been in the process. It had been probably over more than a decade since the city had done any wage analysis prior to that time. I would say that the city was in as of today if the council hadn't implemented the wage study and then multiple studies in between those to stay current on trends related to total compensation including benefits and pay, we would be in an absolute crisis currently related to retention and attracting new employees.
Came with a cost. That's part of what's been driving some of the cost increases that we've had in our property taxes over time, but particularly now as the labor force is much more competitive and we're still seeing acceleration and competition. That's a trend that we're still seeing for seeing forward. That has absolutely helped us and will help stabilize some of those costs and have already started to do that. So I think we've seen a better retention of employees, where we are struggling previously. And so there is an adopted policy that relates to that.
So that's one issue to think about as it relates to probably a growing focus related to financial management heading into our new strategic plan. I just showed one little clip. It's not all funds, but just out of the general fund. It's about 65 of our general fund operations, which is where our primary governmental services are provided. That's common would be common in some of our other, operational funds as well that really the labor cost in many ways are going to be a large portion of our cost in addition to just facilities and infrastructure related to that.
Other budget trends that we're seeing increased property valuation, which you know basically what I would say on that is it's a shifting around of who pays the property tax. So we are seeing values continue. Northfield historically has held their valuations very strong particularly in the residential market. That can be good. Later I'll talk a little bit more though about our housing demands and need for additional, market capacity to from basically all kinds of different housing, needs in the community. But so tax value can be a good thing,
but it can also create more pressures on people as it shifts, maybe from one type of user to another. Agricultural, since we are even though we're part of the metro, we are very much agricultural kind of driven out here. Even in the county taxes, you can sometimes see a shifting if ag values go up or property taxes go down. That's been stabilizing lately related to some of that. We have been doing regular adjustments to the annual cost of living as well as compensation plans and we do have on our labor contracts that we have, we have four labor unions that we also have to negotiate with.
We are locked in for two year contracts, so we'd be working within those agreements and restrictions, as it relates to financial planning in our new strategic plan as well. So we keep that in mind as it relates to collective bargaining. So if there are changes, within those labor units, they will be driven. We will be doing a deeper dive as part of the budget process as well for a refresher of existing council members as well as new ones on public labor law and how it relates to our compensation philosophy and work. We typically have done those timed with our labor negotiations,
but even those are wrapped up, I will be emphasizing that even more with the council. Partly, just as an educational process, going into the budget in the upcoming year as well as the strategic plan work. I'll go into now some of the detail that's in that environmental scan document of some of the department feedback that we received, received. And I'm focusing not so much on the services we provide. Hopefully, you've got a general sense of what that is, and you can look at it. But I'm gonna pull out some of the things that I I thought were particularly relevant related to trends and then challenges and some of those might be directly related
on the one column to the next. But might give you a general sense. Again, the the, five areas within when I talked about the department directors, the administrative services division, which I also serve as the director of that in addition to being the overall city administrator. Again, I always say this, we have very strong, division directors though. So, you know, like Michelle in HR and Brenda, in finance. Multiple Michelle, not just HR, but HR communications IT services. Community development planning, with Jake Riley who's here, public safety with Chief Shepfer, library information services with Natalie Draper and then David Bennett,
city engineer public works director overseeing that department. So administration services section, we're gonna have multiple slides within the administration division because we're a little higher achievers in filling up the details of this document. So I'm probably getting a little bit of a deeper dive in the administrative services based on the feedback we got on some of those, broadly. If you look at the packet though, it's much longer in the other departments partly because we kinda focused within that area as we are pulling that information together. So kind of at a high level administrative services,
you know, we're obviously focused at a highly polarized national political environment. We've seen in all levels of government probably growing distrust related to information and the kind of the validity of governments that we need to be aware of and considering that. We certainly have seen as technology as rapidly emerging investments versus trying to balance cost and investment opportunities related to efficiencies is an area that across probably all departments we're continuing to look at. We have had a focus in the last strategic plan related to some of the areas of good governance practices.
We have a very robust board and commission like as far as the number of boards and commissions and the number of volunteers we have. That takes a lot of time and energy if you want to do that well. You need to train both the board governance appointed officials that you all appoint to serve on the boards as well as the staff that help service them. It's kind of an ongoing continuing education. I think we've made progress. One of the things that we had in the last plan was to create a little more foundational structure related to more uniformity across our boards and commissions. But now the next steps would probably be getting into more training from that and
building off of that work. Both customized training for things like a planning commissions training very specific to their cases would be very different than, say, the library board's needs. So there might be value in broad governance, but also specific ones with that. Also working in within that more polarized national environment, stability and respect and cooperation will kind of continue to be a focus for us and challenge I think as well as we continue to do our work and then balancing some of our goals that we might have on the strategic plan
along with operational capacities both with our ability for staff to implement the work effectively as well as things like cost considerations as it relates to those policy options. Our city clerks department. So trends, electronic documents, data request and analysis is an issue not only in Northfield but continues to grow. I just heard it at the League of Minnesota Cities Conference are actually lobbying different changes in the law because of the heavy, time that's placed on staff to have to respond to data requests and information from the public. So Minnesota has a very robust, transparency laws related to information being available.
So that has continued to be an issue to kind of work with more information. We can just make available that we have publicly should reduce the amount of time and energy and processing the information for people. Absentee voting and in person voting has driven costs up locally. It certainly is expanding the democratic process for everybody to be able to vote if they choose to do so and encourage people to do that in our democracy, but as placed added cost and challenges with that, both in the investment in the technology and the time that we have for the
voting. Public trust in elections has been a challenge. I would say not as much in Northfield compared to some of my peers when I've talked to them related to challenges, but you don't have to go very far outside of our borders to see where there's been actual challenges in elections. Most not valid challenges, but in some cases there are limited fraud and issues that do get dealt with. Data requests and expectations related to being responsive in a timely manner, and being broad enough and clarifying the information. And then just, the item I mentioned earlier, it is getting we are seeing, more challenges on recruitment of volunteerism within the city being able to recruit and and
have people to fill spots. That is a pretty heavy, time commitment related to some of that as well. And I know the mayor will bring a fresh look to the table to as she explores the appointment responsibility and how that how that might be looked at to either continue or change. Some of that would fall largely on the mayor unless we were to change any of the details as a group. Human resources. So communications has certainly been a change that's been dramatically updating both by in Northfield and in other communities. Increased demands on the real time expectations of responding,
particularly with social media that happens immediately. The expectation is to be able to get accurate information out quickly when things can kind of ramp up, but it's really hard with its staffing and challenges that the government has hybrid work accommodations. In some areas of our work continue to be a trend to be able to recruit and retain people. And again, the challenges, I would say hyper competitive market, particularly in some particular work areas. We've had challenges in our police hiring engineers. There have been a couple of examples where we've had challenges recruitment
shortages in those areas have been a challenge trying. It's really a national challenge in some cases. And then changing labor laws and regulations have been a continuing, item. Communications. People are demanding more and more communications as I said in a timely manner. So short form video is, there's generational differences too in the ways that people get information. So, you know, I would say we're more heavily probably invested in things like Facebook as a social media platform for information, but younger generations aren't on that at all. So we're missing big segments. We are still communicating on those platforms,
but we're doing it in different ways. So trying to work within segment segmented media landscape and with traditional media sources going away, people maybe not being as reliable on information. I think you've seen more governments pick up roles to actually almost serve as, like, educating the public on almost more as a reporter in some cases, but there's always gonna be some bias within that. So that's a challenge, I think, with communication. So certainly seeing things like having a KYMN radio or Northfield news is great. And so if they can be successful, that helps us too because the media plays an important role in the democratic process
to have independent, coverage outside of, the government. Challenges comes with a cost. One of the issues we're working with, as I mentioned earlier on revenue diversification, property taxes is really the primary sources and you're seeing more and more reduction in other things. So cities, our fees have been decreasing because we're going away from fees, which is a trend. As it relates to our communication fund, we've been heavily reliant on the coaxial cable broadcasting fees that people pay. But as we know, on the new commune telecommunication, high speed Internet options that we currently don't have the legal authority to tax that
even though it's basically the same way people are getting information just through a different type of wire. They're still going through our right of ways using public space. At the federal level, we have some challenges there for support, but there is an active bill at the state level. We've been trying to get to modernize that fee, and, we're continuing to lobby that to hopefully allow that to to come in because that has been a source of funding, which if that goes away, we will either have to cut back on our communications or some other area within the city or increase on the other fees like property taxes to pick up the
burden because eventually you're seeing people cut the cord and go away from that alternative. Increasing costs, trying to respond to misinformation or different dis disinformation and emerging issues related to AI that can be a very powerful tool tool that might help us do work better, but also might lead to things like deep fake and further threats related to democratic processes and information that's out in the public. You might see more disinformation and misinformation coming as a result of that. So we're continuing to track that. And IT cybersecurity threats, continue to be very serious, which you've all,
been exposed to that on our testing within our system. And it leads to sometimes less convenient ways that we communicate with the the public by having to have, like, forms on our website to email versus actual emails because bots will capture that and try and violate systems. So high speed Internet, city solutions for services in need of high speed fiber as well as wireless technologies. More and more, the way our infrastructure and systems work rely on, reliable, and robust, communications, where in some remote areas, it can be cost prohibitive to actually run fiber lines.
Side note in Northfield two, we have historically through those cable franchise agreements had very competitive, negotiated agreements with our providers to get very discounted rates for us as a government. But now those are going away as they're moving to the telecommunication lines. That leverage that we had in negotiations has gone away. So we've seen, I think in some cases, I don't remember the exact number for Kurt Wolf. I think we've seen, like, a 400% increase proposal on some of our rates for Internet. So it might mean we might start exploring things,
like, maybe we invest in our own dark fiber, connecting some of our facilities where before it didn't make financial sense. That might be an emerging thing that we might be talking to the council about to bring costs down in the future. It might mean an initial upfront investment that might be some issue we look at. Integration of AI solutions and data analysts. It seems like every day there's new technologies and software, and you gotta kinda sort through. Does this one make sense? Doesn't it? Be willing to be entrepreneurial. Try some out. And if it doesn't work, maybe you drop it and move on to something else. So that's gonna be continuing to be a trend and a challenge as we as
we look at information technology. There was a point when I would say IT when I first got here was probably on the higher end of the number of employees we had, as for our organizational size. But I would say since that time, technology has caught up with us and now we're probably more than norm on our current level and needing maybe a little extra support, within staffing on that. Liquor store, I won't get too much into the liquor store or DMV services. They're kind smaller components of our operation. But non liquor store online and curbside options that also ensure, valid legal adults are buying consumer interest and brand types are continuing to grow.
We're monitoring growing interest in hemp derived THC and CBD. So those are allowed in liquor stores. You're seeing liquor stores add at that to meet the consumer demands, but that's also available in non, monopolized systems as well. And cannabis is a bit of an unknown how much that might be impacting liquor usage from the public as well, in the future. So that's a trend we're tracking. The challenge is a commitment to the control of alcohol through city regulation. We'll be working with all of you again to talk about why we're in the business. Have some policy discussions on that coming up related to some project exploration again on
the liquor store. We don't have an accessible store currently. So as you all know, we've been looking at integrating a mixed use project potentially for where the liquor store could help drive some multiple benefits for the community. Service customer expectations on service and product offerings is continuing to be a challenge too, particularly in the facility we have currently. Oh, finance department. Limited revenue diversification and it's dwindling. I mentioned fees, property tax reliance. I was on the policy committee with the League of Cities this last year and raised diversification as it is a problem and that Minnesota might need to start looking
to expand delegating authorities to cities to have other revenue sources. We're very different than other states. They all do it differently, but I can get into more detail later on that. But there's a growing reliance on property tax, which isn't there has been a trend of growing property taxes in other communities. Northfield, certainly, because of some of the projects and things that we've been doing, has probably exceeded some of our peers across the state. But there has been almost double digit increases that many communities have realized on property taxes because of cost increases on infrastructure,
on labor. And the state did step up and provide more local government aid, but it's now stabilized. And if you look historically, it has not kept up anywhere close to inflation from what it was created originally. That cybersecurity, it goes beyond cybersecurity and risks. Some of you might have seen some horror stories on fraud that the cities have been subject to. So we've internally been changing practices and sometimes there's a head between transparency of public information and, security as well. So we've seen some things that there's a very sophisticated fraud going on just as
an example, like where our bills and information that might be out and be able to get fairly easily access from the public. There's been fraud cases in cities where they've almost mirrored the billing statements and emails to try and make it seem like it's the same vendors we're working with, but maybe adding a different number related to the account that it gets sent to, like the bank account and things. So we already had internal controls that should have dealt with that issue anyway, but I would say we're taking even further precautions to try and deal with the
growing sophistication of fraud that can also be happening overseas. So it might not even be people here in The United States that we're dealing with on that. So there's that balance of financial transparency and analysis, but also we have weird things like that that we have to be taking care of with that as well. Rapidly rising costs of capital cost, whether that's buildings and infrastructure or equipment, that we'll be talking even more about this upcoming budget year. And then also labor costs, pressures are driving that. Some of that has to do with the type of government system we have too,
where we have pay equity laws in Minnesota where basically we're mandated to have a pointing system for all of our positions in a scale, and it's based on your duties and things too. So there isn't as much flexibility in government too that if in private sector some positions maybe the market can be lower, for certain types of positions. When you have a pay equity law, it requires a little bit more of uniformity and equity across, all position types. The goals are there's valuable goals on why Minnesota has that. But it does create,
rises, costs on all labor across all of our positions. Typically, when you have some groups that might have rising investments we have to make, for example, like police departments, if you raise their wages to keep up because the supply is lower on labor, it will end up impacting other positions as well. Stronger, long term financial planning and short term financial planning and information available. Certainly another challenge, particularly with some, restrictions on staff. We do have a new we're gonna be posting soon a new budget analyst position, though, that should help, some of our ability to do more financial analysis internally.
We're a little unusual with Department of Motor Vehicles with that. We have that as a city service. Mainly, that's just to make sure that it's local and available in Northfield. So I think the general philosophy is as long as it pays its way and we can have it here in Northfield, that's the general and provide good customer service, I would say, on top of that, which I think we've definitely seen an improvement, on that. But we are seeing more online services being people are using more online services. There are technology changes. We have had some challenges of unpredictable customer service trends where there might be wait times that are hard. So we're trying to evaluate if there's anything we can do with that.
Another thing that we probably are gonna continue to see shifts and challenges on is more people wanting to do online, but those people who want the in person, might there come a point where the cost of that might get to the point where we not I might not be able to afford it. Good news. The finance director just the other day gave me information that the state ended up passing along more. They increased fees recently and also are sharing on some of their, innovative online services that they're providing and sharing that locally with the different, DMBs. So we are seeing an increase in revenue based on some short term analysis the finance director gave us.
Library services, you wanted and some of these on library, again, in public works and community services, I'm not getting as deep, but there's a lot more information in the document to take a look at. But libraries really are more than libraries. They're really a vital hub of connection connection, learning, digital access, free services for people. So although a lot of people might have Internet, the library has free Internet. It's getting more costly, so we have that available. Digital resource demands have to be very creative to find ways that these digital service providers allow us to use it.
But then sometimes the amount of demand can impact the cost to that we're looking at it too. So it really is a an art that our professional librarians have to kind of work through that. Increased demands on diverse programming including early literacy, workforce development and lifelong learning. So again, we do have some workforce development partners, but we are actually a workforce development location and people are regularly using it. I would say we've also seen things like as remote kind of things happen, we even have people using our building for court case,
in, meetings that they might have. So if they have a digital online court, they'll be using our library and some of our limited meeting room space to do that. So our library director has been exploring, as you know, some ways that we maybe can modify our limited space to be able to deal with that. That's a challenge. Our physical lace, space requirements, including the exterior, as we're looking to make the exterior of the building more usable and, deal with our erosion problems is another issue. Balancing that traditional service expectation with the digital, and and then, experience for some people is another one.
And then staffing needs, particularly the need for more full time if we're gonna have some expanded program and outreach in some cases. Police department, continuing to nationwide shortage of police officers, going into the profession. So hiring and retaining police officers is a difficult growing reliance on, oops, law enforcement for mental health challenges, that are facing. And that's probably a result of a number of things. But part of that would be is a lack of investment in other areas to maybe deal with it upstream as our police are kind of the last, people that are responding to people in crisis.
And, they are trained in those areas, but it it the burden is definitely growing there. And then, balancing the visibility of community policing, which is definitely a value in Northfield and the strength of our police department while also having to deal with call responsibility duties as well. So continuing to, address officer shortages to maintain our service levels, investing in our wellness initiatives for a holistic officer ability to deal, effectively in their job. So that might mean their physical health or mental health. So we've made some investments in, both of those areas within our police department and then training,
needs within crime trends. I talked about cyber security. We certainly have a lot more investigations going on related to cyber crimes that are happening that we have victims of crime. That's a growing sophistication for our department to have to deal with things that with people from around the world. Public works, climate change impacts related to our reliability and our resilience as a community. So looking at infrastructure being on on these storm systems as an example that we're
seeing, you know, more volatility on these storm events, advancing infrastructure projects that prioritize some of our pedestrian and cycling that does have ties to the climate. With some of that energy savings within our facilities projects, also in an environment where the grid can't handle it. A lot of times where we've been trying to put it on some facilities to save money as well as to be good for the environment. We've had challenges there And then just ongoing regulatory challenges with utilities, to stay on top of the state regulations anywhere from storm sewer, drinking water,
sanitary sewer. So securing, probably money is one of the biggest issues in the public works realm, of course. So securing funding to implement infrastructure projects and equipment needs where we've seen this rapid acceleration in costs, limited staffing. We did a staffing study that we'll be focusing on again, which we know with our financial challenges, that's gonna be hard to do that. But it might mean just right sizing expectations if we're not able to make some investments, particularly in our parks area. And I mentioned the Xcel Energy grid issue. Community development, electronic permitting, growing interest in cooperative and business ownership models,
is a trend and opportunity. Integrating more equitable outcomes as well as processes that reach all people, maybe traditionally underserved people. How do we get people involved within, some areas of community development in all of the city related to policy feedback processes and where investments go? And then emphasizing green business processes, climate adaptation and sustainability and constantly looking to change that. I just had another conversation with our community development director today that some of the things have changed related to the state's energy code that maybe it was relevant to
the sustainable building policy, might need changes. It just seems like yesterday that we adopted that policy, but might need might need to look to see if some of that change to see if if it needs some modification in the future. So I think you're we are there has been an added focus on guidance on residential, commercial and building projects. It might be things like new housing subdivisions, might be a development project to more clearly part of that would be more clearly articulating the city's goals and regulations on the front end. So hopefully that creates more predictability and certainty on the development process for developers coming
in. Greater training and sophistication on our different codes and even things like the heritage preservation commission. We've been going through additional training that I think has helped, and will continue to help us in those areas. Managing community expectation and discord on development projects where we know we've engaged community and certainly generates a lot of interest. How How do we set expectations? How can we make sure that we maybe look at process changes to have the ability for influence to be clearly understood at the different phases and to hit, the public early if if the goal is to get input that can influence it?
How do we work across departments to, educate people on that? Certainly, staffing needs depending on expectations are another one we have to continue to evaluate. Alright. External. It's probably a little bit shorter piece here. So, Northfield's population growth has been generally stable. We have I think I might have the slightly wrong on the slide here on the population growth. I think it might be in the slightly broader range, but, you know, we actually have a younger generation of growth in our housing population that people might not realize.
The people moving here is in the younger generational age. That we're seeing some of that shift. Northfield does have a median household income of 92,000 in comparison to Rice County at 78,000. Again, I have another slide though that does show that we do have some disparities that create unique challenges probably for a community where you have to serve all of your community with different expectations with different types of populations. So our race and ethnicity, we haven't seen a lot of changes there, but you can see the white only 90 or 73%. So we've been seeing some growth in our,
people of color within the community. Primarily Hispanic population is the primary minority group within the community. And as you can see, partly a college town, but the population by age group distribution. This is the right slide. The 25 to 45 year old category is the highest growth of people moving to Northfield, currently in our population growth based on information in our comp plan draft, has about a 5.2% growth over this time period that's currently shown. Again, some of the things that make Northfield maybe a little unique is we do have
some very high level of educational attainment, but we have many people that don't have higher levels. And we need to service all of the people's meet people where they are depending on that. So whether it's communicating, you gotta be able to communicate in a kind of common language. Maybe understand that there's gonna be different levels of analysis that people have interests that might have. And you might also, again, based on people's incomes and abilities, might not have as much discretionary time on their hands, in some cases for for different issues. Annual household income as well. We,
you know, if you look at the community overall, we're probably higher on the annual household income category, but we also have, many who aren't in this community. So you have disparities of income across the community. And again, how does that relate to government services and expectations and the cost of that? You all help to set the priorities on spending and service level needs, but with a constituent group that's, can be very diverse based on incomes, educational attainment, and many other things. Alright. To wrap up, these are just a few of the things that I, was thinking about. This is certainly not comprehensive,
but these are the current six strategic priority areas. Craig will be talking more about this when we get into our retreat. But I would say we have a very robust plan. And one challenge I might have is to say, can we condense and maybe focus our priorities a little bit more? Maybe an area of focus in the upcoming strategic plan. All of these things are important. But also if everything's important, nothing's important as the saying goes. So the more we can really get more laser focused of the goal with the council, have measurable, goals and outcomes that we have to be able to actually show data driven results could be qualitative or quantitative with that,
but those would certainly be goals. A few things that I'm thinking of that might have some legs that would carry through doesn't mean they have to be your priorities, but realize they are kind of continuations that might be pieces that that there's been either investments and time and energy on that we'll be having some more discussions or things to think about. Economic vitality, I think of tax based growth as being the top priority in the current strategic plan. Again, to address that tax rate challenge, that's primarily through buildings. So if you look at what does that mean, commercial and industrial buildings,
so that'd be expanding building footprints or new buildings would typically be what that would be. Infill would be a priority under our strategic or comprehensive plan with redevelopment, second and then new growth, kind of the last area. So we want to be a smart growth driven community. We do have very few properties left. So the Armstrong Road has some the former right way site and the contiguous property to that on the other side of the road is one available site. We're trying to work with the owner to be available there. South Highway 3 down by where the new ice arena is planned has a little bit left. But beyond that,
there really isn't too much for infill within the city. I was kind of on the fence whether Fifth And Washington is technically an infill or redevelopment. You know, whether you look at the parking I look at a parking lot probably more as an infill to intensify the use. So I moved it into the infill category. But that's a city led project. Your property owners. But we have been exploring and will be in the next couple EDA meetings as we try and reactivate that mixed use potential and working with all of you and the new members to see if this is still a priority to work on that. But that definitely has had investments. We actually acquired a property on Water Street.
So the redevelopment category, the existing liquor store and former Ameriprise building that we did make an investment in is an area, where we did some internal borrowing temporarily on the Ameriprise building. And the idea is we move out of the liquor store site for future redevelopment would open up a redevelopment opportunity on a prime site, just off of the river in the downtown. So there is a sunk cost investment of that building, that we're looking at with those two projects. Highway 3, I would say that some I think it's very exciting what the planning commission has
been looking at with some comprehensive plan and leading into a recodification process that might look at ways that we can increase the flexibility of the, commercial zoning district along the highway to maybe allow for more mixed types of uses that still complement one another. So you think of, you know, maybe like Aurora Pharmaceutical, which is integrated in the commercial district. Are there ways that they can coexist where you don't have to separate what I would call traditional kind of retail commercial from light industrial where they might function very well together? So they're having some discussions about might the new code be able to allow more
encouragement of that that we might see more intensification and activation of some of that area that could spur maybe even some redevelopment or expanded use along that corridor. I think is an interesting one that's, might be on the horizon here. And then, of course, the new growth area trying to open up new areas. The Northwest Area has made tremendous movement recently and should now give a new portfolio for the city. We've seen a dramatic increase in interest, Although we haven't had any successes yet, we are getting way more interest from outside business to locate the city,
which, by the way, if it doesn't work in the Northwest area, we can find somewhere else in town, whether it's redevelopment or one of these other infills. We're getting more leads than we used to from external business opportunities that we think hopefully will be landing something soon. So the rezoning, the, infrastructure investments that we've been making in that area have been very helpful. The major code changes that have been done to make sure it's it's the right type of development and that we're not overextending ourselves in infrastructure costs, because again, that's very expensive. So we wanna be smart in our growth and development. Housing availability, I think the bottom line on this one is the city has a certain the
market has a lot to do with housing development that we might not be able to control, but you're gonna see it probably a continued need to both find ways to encourage the private market to help solve some of our shortages that we have in our market across many types of both owner, ownership and rental, units. And we also have a housing and redevelopment authority that's been very active in recent history and trying to prioritize for them what's the most important things for them to work on, to try and have a variety of type size and ownership models to accommodate residents in all stages of life. And so we want to do affordable housing projects,
but we also are gonna have to have market rate, to meet the market conditions too. And if we can fill some some of those people that are in homes that maybe are larger homes, if there's ways we can find more products that they could maybe move out of, that might allow more for those families to move into in Northfield. That can also help be the workers of tomorrow as well as to serve to fill the school district as well that has capacity within the building facilities we have. So, I think Northfield is a great community for families to come to. It's the probably the number one reason I came to Northfield with my family and
probably many other people was the school district, and I thought it was a great place to raise a family. And, so continuing to focus on that, I think, is it gonna be a carryover likely carryover to think about in our new strategic plan. Quality facilities. This was kind of looking at taking care and being good stewards of the assets that we had. We had a substandard ice arena project and a lot of different opinions on that. Ultimately, the decision was to move forward to replace it with a new one. So that will be something that we have actions coming forward and within this strategic
plan time period one way or the other likely will be, continuing. The NCRC building has been a challenge that I I feel like finally we have enough background information that, we're gonna be getting leases updated and probably some updates on the, some of the aging issues with the building. It's still Got a lot of great attributes to it, but things like the HVAC system as we've recently toured the council on some of the building. Those are just due to to be completed. And I feel like the relationships with the tenants have really been strengthened in the recent history as we worked with them, in recent history with,
with our public works staff. Municipal liquor store was one that was left on kind of uncompleted as well. Whether that continues as a priority within the mixed use downtown, that building is does have some challenges again where if we want to be an age friendly community where we have access if we're in that business, we think there's a commitment for everybody that's of age to be able to use that building. And right now, again, with the raised floor, in in limited space with the aisles, it really isn't, meeting accessibility standards. Diversity, equity, and inclusion. So, again, I think looking at process changes,
making sure that everybody's voice is brought to the table on public policy. How do we do that? How do we do that? Well, many communities are facing that challenge. And then also with some of the recent executive federal level pressures around DEI, Mr. Rapp has said some communities actually have backed out of putting DEI in their documents because of concerns that it might threaten local funding, at the executive level at the federal branch. Where they're tying potential financial ramifications to some of that. So we're certainly monitoring that issue, and how we might think about that. Climate action. So prioritization of carbon reduction has been a priority in building and vehicles.
One of our big challenges that we've had, though, is we don't have control over the grid. So Excel Energy Northfield has had a huge amount of demand for residential and commercial applications of solar, which has congested the grid where we basically have a lot more people, including us, the government, wanting to do projects where we aren't able to get them off the ground because the grid isn't able to handle it. So trying to encourage the legislative process, working with the PUC, and Excel Energy to come up with solutions is probably going to have to continue to be a focus.
And then, vehicle emissions is another huge cost we've been investing in, charging stations within our city facilities and been integrating, electric and hybrid vehicles where we can. We have had challenges with production in some cases, though, because some electric vehicles have been very high demand. That has been hard to get things like pickup trucks and certain types of, electric vehicles that we'd like to have that we just haven't been able to buy because they haven't been available. A reduction in federal financial support of grants. So again, with some of these executive orders pulling back, climate related,
funding that has been a recent opening now appears to be closing. So is that gonna be a limitation in our current strategic plan to get federal funds yet to be determined? I think there are some issues to think about. Service excellence, I feel like we've made some advancements, probably haven't been seen as much yet. So I kinda feel like the foundation's been set on some of the reset related to some of our standardization. But I think if whether it's in the strategic plan or not, I think we're gonna need to have continued ways to do training and integration of staff and board investments. So we'll be looking at how we might be able to do some training both
customized and broadly. And then also, integration of two way communications into projects that I talked about as well. There's definitely been an interest by the council and the public about projects. How do we make sure that we are trying to get people early and understand where they can influence projects or not throughout that? And might we even change some of our processes, to better be able to respond, to the public's interest in those areas? And then financial management, certainly I think there's with the increasing property tax burden and feedback related to that, financial management information. So better, you know, in continuing to evolve on our financial management,
the information we provide and transparency around that and then also tying the types of things that we're working on with the reality of the cost of those, I think is another area probably that wasn't as much as a focus on that. Not that it isn't important, but wasn't at the time as big of a priority that likely will be an emerging issue currently. So with that, that wraps it up. Oh, I will turn it back to Mr. Rapp. While thinking about that, madam mayor, mayor Pro Tem, do you wanna take a break at this point or not? Everybody good? Keep going.
Alright. So look, I might need help here. I think I push is it on there? Okay. Alright. We're good. Alright. Let's get it down for the short guy here. The, okay. Now it's not hang on a minute. I'll switch it. It's not going to full play. Did it lock up? Oh, just wait. That's one slideshow here. Why is that not working? Jared? Yes, that's not working. Did you give me some new? It's not going back to presentation Was it moved? Tenants. So I want you to as you review this information tonight, I want you to think about the whole strategic planning process for a second.
Just assume that you are a business owner, and this is the municipal business that you're running. You've never done this before. It's a business. What would you need to know and why would you need to know it? And of what value is the information that you're looking at? You've heard about the labor situation. You've heard about your capital investment situation. What else do you need to know if you're in business? Well, what do your customers want? How are you gonna serve them? If you're in private business, it's where you're gonna price it. What kind of approach are you gonna take? Are you a low cost provider?
Are you a luxury provider? Who are you? And what does that mean in developing a strategy for being successful? If you're in private business, it's really no different. You have a different motivation. You need to make money. You need to get a return on investment. There's a variety of things that you're doing if you're if you run a company. But they're largely the same here. You have capital investment. You have people that provide the services that you give to stakeholders, your consumers. Those are citizens. Those are visitors.
Those are people that interact with the service packages that you have. So what we're doing tonight is giving you the raw material that you need as the leadership group so that in a few weeks when you come back together in a retreat, you can chart a course forward to reconcile all of that. So what are the priorities? What is it that our consumers, our citizens, our businesses, the colleges, the various stakeholders that either want and or demand something from you.
So hopefully tonight as I cycle through the different types of information that we've collected recently you can see the trends. You can see the through line of much of what's going on. And that's how I would ask you to think about what you're about to see in different forms. There's a board and commission summary. There's a community survey summary, and there's a focus group summary. But it's all meant to be collected in support of your strategic plan.
No other reason. That's why we're doing this. So I would ask you to think about that. And if you have questions and and I can clarify anything, please feel free to ask me. The boards and commissions were invited to a meeting on October 18. As I mentioned earlier, we did both a comprehensive plan review and a strategic plan, informational session, and I employed a kind of SWAT like approach to gathering feedback. It started with asking the assembled group what are the strengths of the community or the unique advantages that Northfield has.
And summarized in front of you is is what they said. And I'm not gonna read every bullet point, but you can see that, and I I think you'll recognize much of that. An engaged community, high quality schools, the colleges certainly, the downtown, strong health care, proximity to the Twin Cities, good parks, natural space. Interestingly, when you ask for areas that need improvement or growth, some of the same categories come up. Downtown nightlife, riverfront activation, and downtown densification, even though people thought that one of the strengths and one of your positive attributes
was the downtown. More mixed use community spaces, public or indoor and outdoor recreation, mental and chemical health support, rethinking downtown traffic flow, improved lighting and infrastructure maintenance generally, transit and green initiatives, and some radical childcare solutions. Limitations that the community has, tax based constraints, you've heard about that already tonight, competition with nonprofits, presence of the two colleges, the impact on the economy in the community, which is a I think you'll see a through line here, and I and I'm not probably telling you anything you don't know. You live here and work here.
But the reality is that's a two edged sword. It's it's very much a positive, but there's also some things that it does as an impact to the community. A false sense of reality, what was constituted as or we thought was status quo bias, affordable housing focus, single family affordable housing focus, specifically, shrinking school district, lack of clear processes, and underutilized strength. So interestingly, again, the college dichotomy comes up. Challenges over the next ten years. Oh, we have a colorful slide here. What does that mean, Craig? What I tried to do for this is I put in green what I felt
were things that were fully within your control and that were more or less specific things that you could deal with for expanding and diversifying your tax base. Climate change and insurance concerns, balancing the budget realities versus community wants and needs, aging infrastructure, safe and accessible transportation. Now you may see some of those as maybe not a %, but from my perspective, those are things you could, you know, really dig in on and do something about. The blue were seen as sort of things that you needed to address and wanted
to address and maybe had some control over but not complete. Lack of career, growth industries, reliable local news sources. You know, as Ben mentioned, maybe you're a news source from this point forward. Who knows? And then the orangish or whatever color that is, childcare shortages, retention of young people, and demographic changes, important things, important challenges, but you don't control that. And so, again, I I put them in some buckets only for ease of reviewing that. Again, you'll do with it as you wish,
but that's what your boards and commissions said. When we asked them about priorities moving forward, big idea here was let's have an implementation and an action oriented approach. I think that was almost the concluding thing that Ben mentioned, which is, look. You know, if everything's a priority, nothing's a priority. So let's get focused on what we can do, and let's do it well. But the other things, transit and transportation, strengthening collaborations, building resilience and sustainability, and enhanced communication and engagement. Many of these are holdovers or are things that you you have talked about.
In fact, in the last two strategic planning cycles, frankly, a lot of them. But probably, again, not a big surprise to you. Questions there? Okay. I will keep moving. Conclusion and next steps from the boards and commissions. Let's encourage community involvement. Let's identify key projects for immediate action. Let's keep monitoring and adapting to the changing needs of the community. And, again, creating a forward thinking, inclusive, and sustainable future. So I think you're seeing some trends here or some common statements. Community survey. I wanna pause here and explain what this is.
This is not a scientifically designed, statistically valid survey. When when we originally proposed doing a survey, initially, the staff was saying, well, we're gonna do something like the national citizen survey, which had been done in the past. And it and it may end up being done at some point. But we did wanna take the temperature. We had talked about doing just a very limited internal survey of employees. So that's sort of what I scoped out. But I agreed to expand that with the staff's concurrence to design something a little
bit more robust, but not too robust. I have a very specific belief about this type of thing. I I want it in service of your strategic planning effort and your strategic planning retreat. But it does give you a somewhat expanded view of of things from the community. And, frankly, you had great response for a very short time span, a couple of weeks, six hundred and fifty three responses, and you had almost a % response to every question. So that's pretty unique. Speaks well of that. First question, the people answering this were primarily residents,
but there were two other categories, business owner or they work but don't live in Northfield, and that breaks down as just about 93% resident, not quite 6% business owner, and a little over six percent work but not live in Northfield. On a scale of one to 10, and they were given a little slider to move here. So on a scale of one to 10, how would you rate quality of life? And that's an eight out of 10. And so you had 653 responses. That was very good. And,
also, I think you can pat yourself on the back there. How safe do you feel in Northfield? Very safe or somewhat safe? So very safe, 75%. Another 19% somewhat safe. I would say, generally speaking, for any city looking at these statistics, they would feel pretty good about that. And I talked to a lot of cities in my line of work. How likely are you to recommend Northfield as a place to live? Again, one to 10. This was a seven, and, it was 10 being extremely likely. So you can kinda gauge your one to 10 from there.
Do you feel a strong sense of community? So here we had a little bit less, but still, 58% said, yeah. Strong sense of community. No. About 21% and unsure about 21%. So what do you love most about living in Northfield? And we gave them an open ended here. And small town atmosphere by a mile, 30% saying that it was the small town atmosphere. A little over 15% said downtown development, and right at 15%, the educational institutions. Again, probably not,
you know, very surprising, but proximity to the cities, green spaces, local businesses, a lot of these start to trail off less than 10%. But, again, small town, downtown, colleges, proximity, all things that you've heard before. When you think of quality of life, what things are missing? Now I wanna make sure you see this. This was a scale where 30% is here. This scale is much more condensed. So the tax concerns are at, the top, and it's about 17%, Affordable housing at 16,
community amenities and infrastructure between twelve and fourteen, public safety at 12, and then it drops off from there. Local economy, transportation, diversity, recreation, and health care. What types of development should the city prioritize? The staff offered up, five categories. Affordable housing was the number one selected with commercial retail and infrastructure a close second. Let me tell you how that breaks down. Almost 69% said affordable housing where and,
again, this was all they don't add to a hundred because you could select more than one. But the second place was commercial retail and infrastructure basically the same. Green space and parks and public transportation last. What types of amenities would you like to see more of? Retail and dining options. And, again, if you live here or you work here, I'm sure this isn't the first time someone has not hasn't said that to you. So that was 70% by far the largest. Public transportation, number two.
Green space, number three. Arts and culture, walking and biking trails. So, again, that's 71% to be specific. Public transportation, 38%. Really, retail and dining options by far. How affordable do you consider housing in Northfield? Very unaffordable, over 30% and somewhat unaffordable, 40%. Let me show you the details there. So, really, you have 70% of the respondents saying it's either somewhat or very unaffordable. Again, sort of in line with what Ben was talking about. Again, probably not something you're unfamiliar with.
Neutral, about 15%. Only less than 2% said it was very affordable, but you did get more than zero. So there you go. There's hope. There's hope. What housing challenges do you or people you know experience in Northfield? Housing costs, affordable housing, high cost of living, housing availability. These are all different things that people said, specifically, they're themes of of their detailed comments. Housing for young families. But really, it's the cost and the availability of affordable housing that is really driving all of
this. Are there environmental concerns in Northfield that you think need more attention? Urban planning. And, again, let me just say one thing about the themes. This the system used, an AI to aggregate and and create the themes that are expressed here. So, these were done when it said urban planning, that could have been everything from, single family design to, poorly, organized or, you know, there could be a variety of things under one theme of urban planning. But I don't think it tailed off too far into disparate things that wouldn't legitimately
be called urban planning. Environmental concerns, waste management, water quality and safety. I dug into that water quality and safety thing. It's not safety generally. It's the safety of water. It's the two things were mentioned many times, the water quality and the safety of the water. Infrastructure development, green energy initiatives, climate awareness, climate change awareness, public transportation, and flood management. We transitioned into talking about the service package, and we let them know what that meant, public safety, road maintenance, park recreation,
etcetera. How satisfied were people with that? Satisfied and very satisfied if you roll them up together. You're looking at over 60%. So I think that's, generally speaking, pretty good. 45% of them at the satisfied level. But you did have, you know, 17% dissatisfied with about a fifth of the respondents not expressing a preference one side of that or the other. A little bit similar to the previous one, what types of businesses would you like to see more of in Northfield? Restaurants and cafes
with industrial and entertainment coming in. And, actually, entertainment two, industrial three, and retail stores four generally. Let's see what that looks like. Restaurants and cafes, 68%. Entertainment, almost 50. Industrial manufacturing, 48. Retail stores, 38. Technology and innovation, not quite 30. What types of transportation improvements do you believe Northfield needs the most? Road repairs. Two thirds of the respondents said that. More public transit, over 40%. And then between 2030% for sidewalks and better traffic management with bike lanes,
a little over 10. Let's look at those in detail. Yeah. Road repair is 63 and a half. Pardon me. Public transit, 44, and sidewalks and traffic management, not quite 25. We identified the existing priorities and asked people to rank them in the order of importance. This is a little bit like ranked choice voting, so I'll show you the details here because people were able to identify them as one, two, or three, and and so it played out this way with affordable housing at 4.51
and economic development four four nine. However, affordable housing had more first place votes and economic development had more second place votes. Again, I don't I think that's a little too arcane for what we're talking about here. The point is economic development and affordable housing, were the top two followed by virtually the same ranking of infrastructure operational effectiveness and almost the same ranking for diversity and climate change. So in those sort of order for the current priorities.
Additional priorities or other priorities that people thought the city should consider in the next strategic plan, taxation and spending, city planning, the top two by a large margin, 20%, with community engagement coming in between 1015%, and then everything else less than 10%. But economic development, business growth, affordable housing, public transportation. It's interesting here where, this doesn't necessarily correlate with the expression of the priorities in the previous question, but people were pretty clear about what they thought was important.
So I think that's worth taking a look at and considering as you move forward. Okay. We'll go to focus groups. Maria Solano from my organization did the four focus groups. She unfortunately wasn't able to be here tonight, so I am I have the information and the backstory if you've got any, detailed questions. There were four focus groups conducted. There the four were residents, generally, youth, business, which included a variety of things, a a variety of businesses, representatives from Carleton College,
Saint Olaf, also from Rice County, Dakota County, members of Northfield's advisory board. So you had a a broad swath of folks even though a small number with 22 participants overall. Just to be clear about what a focus group is, it's a small group discussion guided by a trained facilitator. Meetings run about ninety minutes. The discussion topics and we try to limit these because what we wanna do is throw something out there and then have the group talk to each other about that,
and the facilitator prompts them, to gather, their opinion. So we we wanted to have this related again to your strategic plan. So we were asking them, what are the greatest assets the community has, and what are the greatest needs that we have, and what what should we be focusing on over the next three to five years? So when we asked that question about strengths and greatest assets, there were lots of prompts that we use, things that are on this list here. Not every prompt was used every time, but it's, you know, what do you think about,
and what do you like best? What drew you here? If you own a business, why is this a good place to do a business? If you think about Northfield compared to other places, what comes to mind? It's things that get people talking so that they can talk to each other and that the facilitator can then explore the details of of that conversation. When we talk about greatest needs, what do you like least about it? If you own a business, what could we do to make it a better business environment? When you think of quality of life, what's missing? What are the disadvantages compared to other places you've lived,
things like that. We get the facilitator gets folks talking about that. And then we concluded with what are the top priorities. And if you had to choose the priorities to focus efforts and resources for the next three to five years, what would that be? And how how would you describe that? So here's a summary of the major themes that came out from, the four focus groups. Again, I think you'll see a lot of commonality with what we've heard already tonight, strong sense of community, Downtown Northfield, transportation, sustainability, housing,
commercial and economic vitality, public safety, parks, schools, and general. So I'm gonna pop these up one at a time and give you a summary of that. Strong sense of community. This is the one thing that was a major theme of all four groups, so I'm I wanna call that out right up front. The residents are engaged in the community and are often involved in civic participation and volunteerism. People feel welcome and have a strong sense of belonging here. People go out of their way to make others feel connected to the community.
The downtown. Lots of positives here. Vibrant, unique, walkable, opportunities for the future, a sense of safety, people enjoy the things that are here, opportunities for increasing housing options and density and affordability they feel exist here. Some thoughtful development planning should go forward as you think about the downtown parking solutions to support that development and connecting Highway 3 Corridor to the downtown. Transportation. An overall satisfaction with planning and maintenance and strong support by all the participants for
bike lanes, sidewalks, and multimodal. The bike lanes project plans were not communicated by the city according to the feedback we got. Some participated some participants noted there were too many plans. And public transportation needs better connectivity. I think that's something that city council is certainly aware of, and we've heard a lot about strong interest for accessible ride sharing options. Sustainability. Lots of comments here. Some detailed, some general strong support for the city's sustainability efforts, desire for progress update on the climate action plan,
support for non car transportation options like bike lanes and transit. Let's do rain gardens or more rain gardens, preservation of trees, resilient plantings, native species, EV, maintaining natural resources with a focus on protecting the Cannon River. Housing. No surprise, desire for more options. Participants noted the high cost of housing in Northfield compared to surrounding areas. Support for density, exploring innovation, ADUs, container homes, other kinds of models. Participants worry about property taxes and the burden it places on homeowners.
Commercial and economic vitality, strong sort strong support for Northfield's business community. That was pretty much across the board in every group. Strong interest in attracting more business, business campus, warehouse, industrial area, data centers, lots of ideas about how to expand in those areas. Desire for the city to do more to retain current businesses, and participants highlighted the importance of make maintaining strong relationships with the colleges and the hospital. Public safety. Very high marks for police and fire. People feel safe here.
Desire for enforcement of speed limits, especially downtown. Residents would like public safety to get feedback from racially diverse residents. Parks. People enjoy the parks. Some parks have better amenities and maintenance by the city. Schools. Northfield's a great place to raise a family. Schools are a big part of that. Concern about declining enrollment and budget cuts, and we need more families to move to Northfield. Housing and employment opportunities are the key according to the focus groups. And then general, strong support for communication, more communication when implementing plans,
for example, bike lanes, desire for the city to take a proactive role in economic development and housing. Top priorities coming from the oh, again, we got a colorful slide here. Top priorities from the focus groups. Green, again, was kind of the things you can grab onto and do, like economic development, environmental sustainability, climate action plan, diversification of the tax base, although that could be a long term, community engagement and improved communication strategies, sustainable planning, Highway 3 corridor, and dam replacement. The, blue was things that you don't completely control but have an influence over and and
interest in, affordable housing, attracting families to support the schools, transportation options to reduce the reliance on cars, and keeping downtown unique and charming while thoughtfully planning future development. And there you have it. As I mentioned, I'll stand for questions. Certainly, I guess Ben would and and the staff here, but you're gonna be given all of this data. And, hopefully, at your leisure, you will be able to absorb it and use that wisely on the fifth when we have our retreat. And that's the entire point of tonight's presentation is to start to give you that
forward momentum so that when we're together, you have a fairly good sense of what the priorities ought to be and what the challenges are in front of you so that we can work collaboratively to come to some manageable set of priorities and outcomes. If you have any questions, I am here. Sure. Go ahead. Thanks. Thanks for the presentation, Craig. Quick question just regarding the focus groups. How how were the participants in the focus groups chosen, selected? Did they volunteer? How can you give us a little bit of feedback as to who might have
been in there? Or I was gonna I'll turn that back to the city because I we identified collaboratively the focus groups to hold, but then it was up to the city to do the recruitment. So I don't know if Ben or Rizzi. Thank you. Thank you, councilor. Mister Applies. Yeah. So, Craig kinda gave the framework of the types of groups that input might be helpful from. You saw the example of, like, business community youth, that kind of a thing. We did kind of an internal initial brainstorm, and then, we were a little compressed for time. Then the mayor gave some feedback, thinking about some diverse,
you know, groups of different perspectives. And so she gave some feedback. Didn't get quite the turnout we were hoping for on the folk on the focus group side. There's a number of reasons that that came about. But, yeah, that was generally the process we went through on it. I don't know, Mayor, if you wanted to add anything to the detail of the feedback you gave or not, but Happy to entertain a follow-up question if you have one. What did mister Martej, maybe you can let us when did they meet? What what time of day what day of the week, that kind of thing? I just maybe that will have some insight on the availability of who is there
or not there. Can Reese, can you help me with that one? I I think I generally know, but that that might have been part of the challenge. It's just people's schedules and difficulty with that. But maybe you can say when we schedule. We had a focus group every Monday, in the month of February from six to eight. We had a focus group specifically for the youth, a focus group specifically for advisory board members, a focus group specifically for business, members, which included people from post, cardinal glass, etcetera. And then we had a mixed use teams, which was just people that weren't able to make any of the three groups or
just additional names that were provided by the mayor and other city staff. So every Monday in the month of February, there was a different focus group. They met one time those two hours with a facilitator, that from Craig's team that was able to facilitate that group. No city staff members or elected officials were a part of those focus groups just to, again, preserve this the feedback that we were receiving from that group. Do we know roughly how many people per group? So I can give you the details if you'd like. The, youth group had five members from the high school,
eleventh and twelfth graders. The mixed group had six, post Northfield Hospital, Rebound Partners, Rice County, Dakota County, Carlton College. Board And Commission, 7 members. And the mixed group, four members. Business owners from downtown, Saint Olaf, Clean Rivers partner, and HPC. Mhmm. And, one other thing. I I think the invite was it Reese, do you know roughly how many we had on each group on invite? Was it around 15 or so or something? Something like that. Varied. I think the youth was probably the lowest at 10, but somewhere between eight and fifteen were on each list.
And, Craig just went over who was able to participate. Well, I mean, the youth one went to the entire Northfield Union of Youth youth board and the entire mayor's youth council and all boards. So that's more than 10. I guess I'm wondering, Craig. I know you touched on this when you introduced the survey portion of your presentation. Yes. But I'm hoping that you could talk a little bit more about this was I I think this was a topic of some discussion and inquiry the last time we did this. And, I thought it was really helpful then to hear from you more about kind of
the role of these qualitative methods, if you will, in strategic planning and why you choose these methods, why we should take the information seriously, but also not consider it really scientific data, I guess, which I think is a that's a that's a space we can occupy personally. And, and why you choose those methods and and how you think they should inform our process as elected leaders. Let me back up and start with how we scope this and what we proposed to do. So we propose focus groups,
which we like to do because we think that's direct feedback from your customer base or your stakeholder base. The survey using a nonscientific statistically valid approach is not something that that we do, and it was initially the city's intent to do the national citizens or the national community survey, which is statistically valid and and scientifically based. The city didn't have a chance to pull that together in time because it's a very long process. They approached me.
I had said I would do an internal survey just of the staff, which is almost more like an expanded SWOT analysis, really. It wasn't meant to be a detailed survey, and it would it clearly wouldn't have been, developed in the way that this one was. And, the staff approached me and said, could we do something of a community nature since we aren't gonna get to the NCS? And I don't wanna say reluctantly, but hesitantly, I I said, yeah. But, you know, I wanna make sure that everyone understands that the limitations are this is a qualitative
survey. It's just gathering the information as we presented it to you tonight. In terms of its value, you were able to get 653 residents to provide you input. I would say given the limitations of the focus groups because I would have preferred to have more people in each of those focus groups. I think they were still valuable, and and they were very lively conversations. I think having 653 people give you feedback,
and we did have narrative commentary, and we have 27 pages single spaced of their information. So it's I think, it speaks to the kinds of things that you would need to know as you formulate the priorities. I like to tell people that I'm working with, my clients, that I don't like you to fall in love with detailed surveys in advance of a strategic planning, retreat. I I think you should be knowledgeable about what your stakeholder base is saying in
a general way. But you should be laser focused on what information do I need about our strengths and weaknesses, about about what we're doing and why we're doing it, and help us understand the challenges that we're dealing with so that we can make informed choices about the priorities that we need to express in that strategy session. And so that's why I like it to be a smaller, more focused questionnaire. And the staff, you know,
spread that out a little bit because we did this kind of hybrid community survey. I know this is a long explanation, but it's it's how we got to where we are. And I think it probably gives you a little bit of of that, with what you needed on, you know, these here's what we think about your current priorities. Here's what we think you need to do more of and supplemented by the other things that we talked about. I think you've got the the foundation for good information. Yes, Mayor? Thank you. So I was part of the first strategic planning process that you did.
And so my one question I have is, if we want the next plan to be more focused and more leading toward implementation and action oriented approach, could you give us an example of that level of detail? And could you share with us how you might how we might achieve that at the work session? Because in the first strategic plan, the council orders were broken up. Like, if you you could go and work on the climate action items, or you could go work on the housing action items, but you couldn't do both.
Right. So I I would love to be able to comment on all the items, action items of all the buckets Sure. Or things, whatever. Yeah. I I'll give you a brief preview of what you what you can expect at the retreat. For some who haven't been there before and others, it's a refresher. The way I like to move through this is to say and in fact, I can probably help you by just going back to the maybe the first slide we did, and I wish there was a faster way to do this.
But, anyway, I'll talk while I do this. The council's responsibility, in my opinion, is to say here's what's important, here's what we expect to achieve, and here's the here's what success looks like. Okay? So if you go back to right here, the council's job in that retreat is to say, here are the priorities. And then if I can identify four to six priorities, then each of those priorities should have very specific outcomes that we seek to achieve
in the next three years. So we give you the opportunity to identify three big outcomes. And and what that means is if, redevelopment or DEI or climate action are the priorities, then what are the what are the very specific outcomes that we are trying to achieve? And and these are the, you know, these are the after condition of that. You're you're trying to identify measurable outcomes. Once you've identified that, then it becomes the staff's job
to figure out how to get there, put those initiatives, those actions, those detailed work plans in place. So what you're remembering, mayor, is that in the in the actual retreat, we move through a process of calling out the, you know, the challenges and the information that you've all just received. And you'll come there and say, okay. This is that long list of stuff that we wanna consider. And now let's get to four to six of the top, you know, the top four to six. And we we decide that.
And then what what you described in my council members or seven of you and disperse you into different council members or seven of you and disperse you into different areas with the areas that you're interested in ideally, coupled with a subject matter expert from the staff so that you can do some very specific brainstorming about that area to come up with those outcomes. And then I bring yours your subgroup back to the main group, and then the main group,
meaning all of you, get a chance to take shots at that and refine it even further. So to your point, you might not get a chance to do the detailed work on the other four or five priorities, but you get a final say over what it looks like during the presentation phase of it at the end. So it's about it's about saying if everybody did everything, we would have a much longer retreat. And so we try to divide up the work first for time's sake, but also because people who are very interested and accomplished in each of those areas
or have an interest in those areas are probably better suited to really dig in on those. And and I I have found over the course of time that that works pretty well. So that's how it works. Yeah. That that was super helpful. And, a follow-up question is, is it possible even through how we name the priorities, like instead of naming a priority housing, more specifically naming it something related to housing that the city has the most control over in terms of impact? Can we can we start to I really would like to focus on some high
level things, that we can do and do well. I'll give you now that you've asked that question, I will send out to you a little memorandum here in the next week so that you can see, how that process works, and I'll prompt you with some of those so that you can be thinking about it in your own head. There's a there's a process of the kind of wording that you might wanna use for a priority versus how do you express an outcome. And I think it benefits both you and me if I can give you that. I'm trying not to load you down too much ahead of time.
And and, but for all of you eager beavers who want to do all this reading and and be prepped ahead, I'm more than happy to send it to you. Yes. Counselor Horace. Follow-up to a couple of follow-up questions to that. One, I heard you say, you know, we get to four to six, but also I know we've talked about Right. I don't wanna, like, get to a number or nail them, but knowing that we had two we have too many right now. Right? Like, what how do we get to I guess, how do you envision that and and and and helping us simplify and get more focused.
Well, I I mean, we actually struggled with this the last time, and I will tell you that it's a simple matter of you having the will you having the will to do it. And you you heard your staff say, we bit off more than we could chew, and we wanna be good at what we're doing. But if we have too much to do, it's hard to be excellent at this much stuff. And one of the pieces in fact, more than one of the pieces of feedback you got tonight that I shared with you was get focused and get on with it.
And and I think you should take that seriously. So I would argue maybe from the get go, maybe starting tonight, if six was too many, maybe five is better. Maybe four or five. I I will tell you my bias, and it is that you need four. Six is the outer edge. So in that sweet spot is, you know, four or five if you're trying to be razor focused. Those who believe in a balanced scorecard approach would actually have four things, And they would say one of them has to be around finance,
and one of them has to be around operations, and one of them has to be around workforce. And, you know, it's, you know, so you there's a lot of ways of slicing and dicing this. I think a good takeoff point is where are we now? What have we been working on? And either dispense with one or more of those. And and if there's a continuing need to stay focused on, you know, these three, is there a fourth or there is there a fourth and fifth that come from what we've learned in the recent past,
that's important? Okay. Yeah. Go ahead. Can I add? Sorry. Mister I don't know if in a work session, I'm just seems like we're being informal with questions, so go for it. I was just gonna add. I just wanna share one thing that Craig shared. I think it was probably with Rishi and I might have been a different group. But as we're heading into the third iteration of it, I heard Craig say, he's seen it for other communities like some of my concerns too was that it's a as you go through kind of a continuous improvement process, we're now we're on our third time. Some of the staff and some of the counselors have been around.
Some of you have gone and then come back again too with the council. But I think he said you you've he's seen it often where it kinda goes from a theme, like, where the first time around, you're kind of along for the ride. It's kinda new. Right. The second time, you get refined and a little bit better. And then the third time around, you get a lot more focused. I would say from a staff standpoint, you know, like mister Bennett and, Michelle Mahold have been here as well as I have from the three versions that Craig has helped lead. And I think we're probably better and more comfortable now also to help with guiding
where there might need to be more refinement or specifics. Another area besides just maybe the level of initiatives or when you say as an example on climate, let's adopt the entire climate plan as a strategic initiative and the climate plan has, you know, 200, this might not be right, but, you know, 200 action items in it. It's just not realistic. We need to refine that right. I think another area is the performance measurements, I think, got a little bit better the second time around. I wasn't comfortable, and I would I would say I probably deferred to some of the
Things I thought at the time weren't maybe good or a little ambiguous where I think I'm also more motivated with better metrics to be done. And I'm gonna be more insistent with staff too that there are things that we can actually measure in data that's available and readily available for us. Probably let it go a little loosey goosey the second time around. So I just wanted to emphasize too, I think that Yeah. We'll I think through the process, I'm not saying it's ever perfect, but I feel like You get better every time. I think we'll get better and help I think we'll be able to help more
narrow that. And I think some of you that have gone through it from a different perspective, from the governance seat might have some perspectives to share too, and maybe even things like I'm not saying it happens at the retreat, but as a follow-up too, I think another area probably is sharing and doing check ins on the initiatives and if we're headed in the right direction or if we need to change based on your representative governance to us, is another area probably that we can help. So I'm I'm kinda optimistic that Yeah. I think these are all great questions, and I think staff's feeling some of the same things heading into it.
And, you know, again, the good for the perfect too is ultimately the No. I I I, as Ben said, that I feel for sure in working with the staff, they know what to expect this this go around much more. And even the fact that the mayor remembers the details and and had that, you know, very insightful question. I would tell you if I if I was gonna give you one piece of advice or one thing to think about that will help me as your facilitator and help this process that I use, it's to look at this slide and remember that it's built
it's built this way on purpose. It's built for you to clearly think about that highest level. It's to say your job is to set direction. Here's what's important. These four or five things are the most important. And then within that within those four categories, five categories, we want these outcomes to occur in the next three years and be thinking about it as outcomes. If a good outcome is x, think about what a good outcome looks like in the area of of downtown development.
What what would be you know? And I'm I'm a big believer in let's declare victory. If we know something's potentially coming down the pipeline, let's jump on that as we want this to be successful in the next three years. Let's name that as one of those outcomes. And and so that's it isn't about your human beings are, I think it seems to me anyway, are programmed to think about projects instead of about priorities and outcomes. So what what I struggle with most of my groups on when I'm facilitating is
everybody wants to say, well, we should do it this way. And I'm I'm not asking you to do that. I'm asking you to identify the outcome, the big picture. Let the staff figure out how to get there and bring it back to you. And if you wanna, after the fact, say, I think this these are two or three ideas I have about some initiatives or actions, that's fine too. But it's you you don't wanna get ahead of that ahead of that process. If we were just gonna list the 62 things that we needed to do and and you're asking me to,
prioritize the top 20, which are the only things that we could actually accomplish, we could do that in an hour, and we'd be out of there. And that wouldn't get you very much in the way of the strategic thinking. So I'm asking you to be strategic about this and say, let's look at the importance. Let's look at the outcomes. Let's make impact. Think about the impact you wanna make. That's a good segue into the second, follow-up question I had. And I don't know Question slash just things for us to think about because we look at priorities and outcomes in the measures, and,
this strategic planning process is unique from others in that we are building our comp plan at the same time. Yeah. We are working double time on that. Right? We just spent two and a half hours yesterday in a special meeting Yeah. Getting that where there are very there are many, established outcomes, priorities and and actions. So I guess what I want to emphasize is and what I keep grappling with and trying to reconcile in my head as as we're sitting through this presentation and thinking about the retreat is that we will have that document in a good enough
state that shows the those outcomes, those priorities based on the, you know, different policy chapters that we have. And that I think it's critically important for us to look at those those outcomes that have been defined at that higher level. Right? So, like, some of that work has already been done for us. So I think that we just need to be, like, being able to reconcile that and use that and not recreate the wheel and think that we have to create something unique and valuable that, like, we have something that can hopefully really inform us. And my hope is that we just we can bring that together in advance.
Yeah. No. That's a really great insight. And and thank you for bringing that up because I do think in the category of declaring victory, it's not victory, but it's it's if you already have some specific things that you said are important and you've roughed out some outcomes or some targets or whatever that you're calling them in the comp plan, porting them over or adjusting them for implementation in this performance period, great. I mean, the comprehensive plan takes up most but not all of the space that you need.
They they don't really talk about your services specifically or the staffing or the operation stuff, but it's about quality of life and what's the community going to look like and all of the kinds of things that it does deal with, which is a significant portion of this. So I would say absolutely you should spend some time thinking about that and and seeing how you can capture that for this implementation process. That's a great point. Just another quick question circling back to the survey. Comments? I know there was a section in there for comments.
Will we get to see what those were? Yeah. We'll we'll give you a link to I mean, if you wanna look at all 27 pages, single spaced, you you'll have it at your fingertips. So, they'll be there. It's a dataset. I just think it's a valuable feature because it was kind of the one spot in the whole survey where they could actually say what they wanted to say without asking Right. Answering their question. Right. And and we do have that. So everything that we I'm trying to figure out. Yeah. So this, even though that's 10 themes let's see if it says that now on some of
these. There there's literally five to seven pages for each of these questions that were narrative based, so you'll get all of that detailed information. Sure. I have a question about other, things before the retreat. You said can you repeat what you said about something an email we'll be getting around the twentieth? And is that Right. So the last the last piece of information that we collect prior to the retreat is we do a SWAT questionnaire. What can we do better?
What can we do more? You know, it's the it's the typical SWAT. It's five questions, and that's it. But it gives you the opportunity to identify that. And then we use that in addition to all of this. We bring that to the retreat, the summarization. And it's everybody in this room or it's the it's the city council and the leadership staff leadership team that answers it. One of the interesting things that we try to do there is we show you what the council has said and what the staff says on the same question.
And it provides you an opportunity to say, oh, you know, we're aligned or we see things much differently. What does that mean? And then you can have some dialogue about that during the retreat because often you don't often get an unguarded opportunity with, you know, the all the leadership, elected and appointed leadership together and have those kinds of discussions. So this is an important opportunity for that. And it'll that's coming out the twentieth, and it'll shut down on the thirty first.
So we'll give you plenty of time to answer five questions. And then a quick follow-up to that. Is there, will we be also getting the most updated draft of the comp plan that will help us prep for the retreat as well? Or is it is it the current draft is what we should be looking at? Because I know there was a planning commission meeting last night. I don't know if they're, like mayor, mayor Pro Tem, that's all how it sound. I would say that the draft from last night is not going to change substantially between now and next
Thursday's meeting. However, next Thursday's meeting will take place before the retreat. And so, fundamentally, you should have what you need. I've already sort of sketched it out, so I think we're good. Thank you. Any other questions? Okay. Sorry. One last question. Will that have the maps and the included? It will have what has been defined as the most important maps to inform this So a future land use map will be? So a future land use map, bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure map that shows a rational approach to that,
a potential rational approach to that. And then the, what are we calling it? Thank you. The interventions maps. But from, like, a we'll be focusing on the places that will be intervened rather than the general future Landis approach, which is more of a kind of a conversation or narrative with with you all. Thank you. Does that help answer the question? Okay. Mister App, do you have any other comments or I do not. Mister Martin. Anything else? No. Thank you. Okay. Motion to adjourn. Counselor now. Why not? Move to adjourn. Second, councilor Peterson Waite. All those in favor,
say aye. Aye. All those opposed, say nay. Alright. We're adjourned. Thank you.