Welcome. This is the City of Northfield City Council meeting for Tuesday, 04/07/2026 at 6PM. I'm calling the meeting to order and requesting a roll call, please. Mayor Zweifel? Here. Councilor Beamer? Here. Councilor Dahlen? Here. Councilor Holmes? Here. Councilor Ness? Here. Councilor Peterson White? Here. Councilor Silke? Here. I'll note that we did not have any e comments for tonight, and our first item on the agenda is open public comment. If anyone would like to address the council, please fill out a card up on the table there.
I do not currently have any cards. Is there anyone here who would like to address the council this evening through the open public comment option. Alright. Seeing no one, I'll move on to the approval of the agenda. There are no supplemental items tonight, just the agenda as published. So looking for I'm I'm talking slowly so we can get make get some technical connections made up here. Okay. So now I am, looking for an approval of the agenda. A motion. Councilor Soukup? Move the agenda. And the second?
Councilor Ness? Second. Alright. Any discussion or changes to the agenda? Alright. All those in favor of the agenda, signify by saying aye. Aye. Those opposed? The agenda passes. We do have a presentation tonight, and it is from the Earth Day steering committee. And I believe we have Mary Jo and Sarah here tonight with us. You know how to turn that microphone on. Yes? It's a button at the base of the there you go. There. Well, thank you. Thank you, mayor mayors Weifel and members of the council and staff for supporting this proclamation of
Earth Day on April 25 this year. Thank you for that support. It's really important to us. So it's the seventeenth perennial Earth Day celebration here in Northfield, so that's really awesome. And we are excited to execute this event. So thank you. It's an honor to be here. I'm Mary Jo Cristoforo. I'm the chair of the event along with Carla Hansen, who is living in Duluth right now, with an amazing team of volunteers, team Lorax, we call them. Sarah is one of them, so thanks for her being here tonight.
Really thankful for all their hours of dedication to make this event possible. So before I get into the details of the event, I just wanted to share a little bit about who we are, what we've been doing these last seventeen years. Northfield Earth Day is a group of local volunteers committed to building awareness and skills and action in the face of climate change to strive for sustainability, resilience, and a healthier planet for all. Once a year, Northfield Earth Day celebrates community efforts and progress on sustainability and resiliency.
At our annual perennial celebration, we continue to work to inspire neighbors to think about the changing climate and to make healthy planetary choices by learning, engaging, and taking action with a variety of initiatives and organizations through hands on workshops, service opportunities, presentations, and one on one relational connections. So it it is really about bringing people together and making those connections and sharing projects, being inspired to figure out what everybody's doing out there and how people can plug
in to bring about change. We kick off the event every year with a contra dance on Friday night, April twenty fourth at 7PM, and that is always an amazing fun event that children, families, call it lots of college students attend. And so that kinda brings the energy up, and, it's a great way to start us off. So new this year, we have partnered with several, like, well, we've always partnered with Carlton, but with Saint Olaf this year and Salvaterra Farms, to provide several different service projects and tours happening outside the Saturday event.
So the Saturday event is happening from eleven to four at down at Armoury Square, and these are on Friday, Saturday, and then Sunday. So, also we partnered with Northfield Public Library and Saint Olaf students this year for this fun, environmentally engaging games for kids at the library on Saturday morning before the event starts from ten to eleven. So we're excited about that. And then again, from eleven to four, Armoury Square will be hopefully very busy. The street between 5th And 6th Streets are is closed.
We have live music down there. We have all kinds of market fair vendors that line the streets. And the booker will be there. In the green space, we'll be making a garden bed for free food help yourself. Bike maintenance and safety will be there. A rain barrel workshop provided by Clean River Partners, and a rain barrel will be given away at the end of that workshop, so we hope lots of folks come partake. And, just really popular kids activities that we have, indigo dyeing, children's yoga this year.
So we're excited about all of that. So we're hopeful a lot of folks will come down. So then inside the armory is where all of our amazing organizations and exhibitors are, tabling, tabling, talking to folks, lots of interactions, folks incorporating geothermal, if you're interested in incorporating geothermal into your homes, conversations about rainwear, natural lands, volunteer opportunities, and more. We still have room for folks to table. If anyone would like to table, please just email us at northfieldearthday@gmail.com.
Then at noon, everything will pause as we welcome our new sustainability coordinator, Sarah it's Pavec. And she's not here tonight, though. No. But, anyway, we're excited to welcome her to Northfield and have a lot of people meet her. And mayor's wife will be joining her. We're so glad to have them there speaking about city climate initiatives, community climate initiatives, as well as how to share concerns with the POC about our major grid congestion that's happening in our area. That's been such a hurdle.
So thank you, Sarah and Erica, for for that, for coming and sharing. And then at 12:30, we'll have a community action photo that we'll share far and wide. And then right across the street, b and l pizza is serving pizza slices for just $4 a slice, so that's exciting. Several workshops will be happening concurrently throughout the day. We're excited to have Cathy Zeman actually teaching on how to become a registered cottage food producer, as well as the Rain Barrel workshop and lots of others that you can check
out at wwwnorthfieldearthday.com. That's our website. Lastly, I just wanna take a minute to thank all our sponsors because without them, we would never be able to do this. So, let's go. So, of course, the city of Northfield has sponsored us for many years. So appreciative of your sponsorship. Clean River Partners, Homebody, Downtown, they're a new sponsor. We're super excited. Just Food, Carlton College, Armory Square, The Rotary Club of Northfield, Saint Olaf College.
And those are all platinum sponsors, our top sponsors, so we're really appreciative of all of all of those that support. Our silver sponsors are, MNL, Minnesota natural landscapes and native. I'm sorry. Minnesota native landscapes and then keepsake cidery. And then our bronze sponsors, curbside compost, league of women voters, deaf friendly biz, Sharing Our Roots, Imminent Brewery, and Citizens' Climate Lobby. So thank you so much again for your support, and I hope to see you there.
Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate the presentation and all the information about Earth Day that's happening on April 25. Alright. We'll put out another plug for it on the radio. Alright. Next up is our consent agenda. This is an agenda that where we, looking waiting for it to come up on the screens. This is an agenda where we approve, multiple items with one vote, and those items will be showing on your screen. So I'm looking for a motion to approve our consent agenda. Councillor Ness. Move the consent agenda. Thank you. And a second.
Councillor Beamer? I'll second. Thank you. All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Those opposed, the motion carries and our consent agenda items are approved. Next up is reports from the mayor and council members. So we'll start over here with councilor Holmes. Yes. Thank you. I don't believe I think the last planning commission meeting happened after our last meeting in March. So we had a public hearing on the bus stop move at Carlton,
and then the subsequent changes that that creates with with bus traffic. There was a packed house with a lot of residents, coming to share their their perspectives. Ultimately, we only had four we had a quorum, but there were only four four commissioners there. And there was the commissioners, after having some some good conversation about the the topic, had some questions still that they wanted to get information back from staff. So decided to postpone the vote to the April meeting. So April 5 sixteenth.
And that still gives enough time with the public hearing and the the timing with all of that. So, they should be coming back with a vote on April 16, and then we will be getting it will be coming to us on May 7. I would say it'd be good for you to review that conversation, but maybe you can if you if you want to, I'd encourage you to review review it. If you don't have the time and you wanna wait, then you can wait until the April 16 meeting. But I think that there was a lot of information there that is gonna be valuable for our conversation when it comes to us. Other than that, we had a hospital joint government city and joint,
city and hospital joint governance board meeting last Monday where we just discussed some of the updates that will be coming to us later this month. Thank you. Yeah. Councilor Dolan. Thank you, ma'am. Nothing to report. Thank you. Councilor Beamer. Thank you. I think the only meeting that I've had since our last council meeting was the EDA meeting on 03/23. We approved a micro grant for Aldana Painting LLC. So congratulations to them. We received an EDA financial update, and we also had a presentation and discussion,
for the financial assistance program as well. So that's all I have. Thank you. Councilor Soukup. I think the only thing I have to, I guess, plug is I got to be on the radio with our housing coordinator, Melissa Hanson, last week to talk about housing. So if you aren't sick of hearing me talk about housing, you can find that, at the KYMN, website. Counselor Peterson White. I too attended the EDA meeting, which counselor Beemer has reported on admirably. And other than that, I have nothing else to report. Thank you.
Counselor Ness. I have not been around for quite some time, so I have nothing. Thank you. And I also attended the hospital joint governance, meeting where we, just discussed the timing of the materials that would be coming to the council for, the Northfield Hospital and Clinics and Allina progress on that project. So that's what I was up to. So that takes us to our regular agenda. And the first item on our regular agenda is considering accepting the bids and awarding
the contracts for the 2026 Park Improvements project, which is resolution twenty twenty six-forty two. Is there, we're looking to the staff report and introduction from Mr. Tassin and Mr. Jacobson. Yeah. Thank you, Mayor, members of council. Tonight, we're seeking approval for the site work and landscaping bid for the 2026 park improvement projects. We reviewed all submitted bids and, equipment quotes found that the total cost did exceed the overall allocated CIP budget.
The design team and staff did review various value engineering options that we could help reduce cost, but keep the overall design and functionality of each park as designed. Tonight, we have Bruce Jacobson here to give a presentation on the final amenities that we have and overall budget. Thank you. I'm told from council member Nest that I have three minutes tonight. Let me make a couple of kind of overarching comments just to set the stage of the process that we've been through, and we've been in front of this this group several times as we've followed along
here. But item one is that this is part of a multiyear initiative to look at many, not all, of your existing parks and playgrounds. Most of the playgrounds were installed at about the same time in the nineteen nineties, which amazingly enough, it doesn't seem like it, but that's 30 years old. And that tends to be the end of the lifespan of of much of the equipment that we're looking at. The second thing is that this initiative is grounded in several planning and policy documents, that promote or at least support phased approach to park improvements. Most often as budget allows, we're not getting beyond what we can afford.
And that's a cautionary tale for many things that we're working on. Item three, and this is really important, is all three of the parks we're presenting tonight had significant public participation, meaning in short sentences here that Northfield citizens did in fact influence the planning and design outcomes that you're looking at and that we've been tracking all along. And it's really gratifying that when we actually cut the ribbon on these things, many of the people that participated along the way will recognize their input in the actual final product. And then four, we began each project with an evaluation of the existing playground equipment,
its condition, and then also a little bit of a of an assessment of its likely lifespan. So it might be serviceable at the moment, but are we looking that we probably have to replace it in a couple of years? Well, we're not gonna come back to some of these parks for another ten or twenty or thirty years. So, but the emphasis was on keeping as much of the existing equipment in place as possible with minor repairs, paint up, fix up kinds of kinds of initiatives. And tagging on to that, we're really lucky to have a person here, in the area named, Matt Bauer whose
business is focused on the careful salvage and careful removal and repair and finding a good home for the equipment that we're we're we're removing from these play containers. And so I think it's a huge thing that none of this to my knowledge of the things that we're removing are going to a landfill. So with that, as I mentioned, city plans and consistency with the kinds of direction that we've received all along the way, I would like to direct you to look at the 2022 Park CIP plan.
If you haven't read it, it's a fairly quick read, but it gives you a good sense of where we are overall in thinking about the Park System planning and how we're trying to phase and prioritize. We obviously can't do everything at once. So I would encourage you to look at that document. Now I'm gonna breeze through this because a lot of this you've seen before. The quick timeline, we are city council except bid. We're the second bubble from the right at four seven, where we are now getting teed up to get into the construction season this spring,
which is very, very exciting. I'll begin with Central Park. You're familiar with this as an existing condition. Like I said, we spent time here doing an inventory of what exists and what we could keep. This is a great example. This is the concept plan where we kept almost everything. We moved a few things around, but we are, for the most part, able to keep what was there. There's some repairs and paint up fix up, but we are adding upper right, a large climber spinner. Supposed to be for the older kids, but I realized that all the kids that come up here from the day care center, they climb on everything. So it's, when you're saying it's the five to 12 year olds,
that was the intent. The middle lower image, there's some additions for the little kids. We're moving the slide around. So that it really is kind of an area within the play container that's mostly geared toward the two to five year olds. And then this is just one sheet of the construction documents just to give you a sense of, the level of documentation, in terms of site design and detail and so forth. This was part of the bid package that we'll talk about in a minute. Moving ahead to Dresden Hill Park. In this case, we were able to keep a few things, but we removed, probably two thirds of the existing equipment that didn't meet safety standards.
Some of the parts and pieces, they don't even make anymore. So we couldn't do replacement. But you can see that a lot of this park and playground design was about accessibility and connecting. Coming up the hill, and we actually have had a meeting with the manager of, Viking Terrace Terrace here in the last couple weeks where to the top of the of the drawing here, you're seeing a sidewalk that's heading into Viking Terrace. And there is discussion now about making that official rather than a dirt path that goes through the fence, that we could actually connect to to Viking Terrace, which I think is a very important move.
So this includes all kinds of really fun things, a lot of two to five year age group kinds of play experience that you you see in the middle. A new climber and then this idea of the hillside play, which is really this fun idea of kind of shoots and ladders. You've seen this drawing before the climbing walls are tilted and flush with the ground, and same way the slides coming down. And this sort of idea of a stumpery going up the middle, these sort of stepping stumps going up the middle. Lot of access and lots of circuits that kids can take advantage of.
Kids of all ages, actually. And then here's a piece of the construction drawings again for this park, part of the bid package. And then last but not least, the discovery zone where we, indelicately put, we squeegeed the playground. There wasn't enough there to keep. It still will be salvaged. It still will be carefully removed and, going into the finding a good home for it, kind of a category. So you've seen this sketch before, but this is all about discovery zone, the nature based play spaces, the loop walkways, central picnic and patio kind of area,
and these different play pods that have more of the natural elements of stones and and, stumps and stages and all this other kind of creative play that you don't have anywhere in your city at the moment. But, and there is one drawing. This is actually the landscape plan for this park, and it it looks a little more complicated than it actually is, and a little bit fussier. But this is this is going to be a real headliner for you guys, when we get there. So starting with this, we'll talk with, talk budgets on a couple slides here, and I'll go through this fairly quickly.
The three parks and playgrounds, the CIP budget was 935,000. The initial contractor bids were 1.095, and after going through a vetting process, which we're still looking at, but $9.94, $2.99 is, is a whole number, in terms of where we are with, the different bid packages and that's what this adds to the mix. The way we chose to approach this were four different bid packages. The first one that I mentioned was the existing equipment salvage and some site prep.
He would also be responsible for moving all the wood chips in the containers and the old timber edges and all that stuff would be the wood chips chips would go to the compost site here in town, which is great. And the timbers, if they're not treated, could be recycled as well. But if they're treated, we have to do something different with that. So a very modest contract for him to do all three parks for that number. Site work for all three parks all in is another bid package, that you're you guys are considering for tonight's approval. 517549. Aldridge
company is a family owned business. They've done parks and playgrounds all over the place, and we've met with them a couple times. And they are so excited to do this work in this town that they're literally jumping out of their chairs, and I'm not kidding. They are really they just can't wait to get started. Excited about Dresden in particular and what that means and they're really excited about the discoveries and all and they have some really great ideas about that park as well. And then the tougher slide, but the last, is that the so the contract project cost vetted bids is the number on the
right hand side. Let's see. Get a laser pointer. That's this number right here. Right? There is a 1% art for art that is based on the overall, vetted bid number. So the 9941% of that is 9,943. And then there's project overhead that's to support the project during the construction process. And then there's a 10% construction contingency, which is fairly standard. That number is based just on the site work. That's not on the total project cost. So the $5.17, $5.49,
10% of that, that's that number. So the total project cost is 1,095,997. Last slide, and then I'll go back to the other one, is that this is what you get. So for $1.00 $9.05 plus, you get three what I don't hesitate to characterize as being exceptional parks for your park system. I can't wait to see them happen. So I'll go back to this, turn it back to describing what the ask is, why we're here tonight, and we'll go from here. Yeah. Are there any questions? Questions from the council?
Councilor Beamer. Thank you. Just so I'm understanding making sure that I understand everything properly. 935,000 is kind of what we were estimating the total project to cost. And we're we're now at, 1,950,000.00 or 1,095,000.000. Yeah. Sorry. That's alright. That's a lot of extra number there. But, and we take you did some value engineering from what I saw in the staff memo that dropped another 63,000
and change off. So the number is actually lower than the million million 95,000. Is that is that correct? Do you wanna take that one? I think you should take that one. Okay. This is the number that we put together for tonight. So that represents that value engineering exercise that we've gone through. There are still some items that we're looking at is, different kind of detail for a bridge or things like that. So the number, in my view, in my professional estimation, could still come down. But in terms of awarding a contract and so forth and then vetting that,
that that's kind of where we are tonight is this is a realistic number that we're asking you guys to approve, but I believe that it's gonna go down yet as we get into the into the detail with the actual contracts. Alright. A quick follow-up with that then. Do we so with that being said, I guess, what what I saw that most of the cuts looked like they came out of the, site work and landscaping. Is that is that stuff that we're sure we're okay cutting? Or is it things that are Yep.
Like, super advantageous to have? Or We've lost nothing in the design intent. I can cite a couple different examples where there are a couple of very small bridge crossings of the rain garden in the discovery zone, where the detail in the construction drawings actually showed a frost footing. And so the contractor bid $20,000 for each one of those. So instead of 20,000, they're now more like 15 total for both. So that kind of thing, there are a couple of other places where we might have streamlined the landscape a
little bit at Dresden. We didn't wanna completely block the view from the street, so we reduced the number of ornamental trees on the hillside from 10 to five or something. So there's a few more detailed things in there than that, and it was really just checking their math as much as as against the drawings that we had. There were some things, and I'm gonna take responsibility for this. Some of the numbers that got lower were from the playground equipment supplier, is that they added a few things. And I like the rep really well,
and I'm not throwing him under the bus, but they added a few things that probably gave him a little bit more of, commission that I didn't see initially that aren't aren't part of the design need. And so that really amounted to a pretty significant amount of of money. And then we're still kind of vetting. It mostly, it was Dresden Hill. We're not losing any of the ingredients, none of the main pieces or whatever, but there's some additions in there that are not not needed. Thank you. Other questions from the council? Councilor Soaker.
Can can you talk or whoever, can address where the, extra funding comes from and how that works? Mayor, members of council. So the the funding for the improvements comes from the park fund. So a portion of the levy over the last few years has been building the park fund the capital park fund to do these park improvements. After these even with these projects, there still be about 1,300,000.0 fund balance remaining after all these projects are still completed. So we still have fund balance there to continue to move forward with some projects in the future.
I think, we haven't did park projects in in many, many years of this, but I think this does inform us in some of our planning and playground equipment. So when we're looking at our future planning for capital, when when we're getting into a full playground that's you know, that we're not being able to salvage, you know, we're gonna need to make sure that some of those forecasted numbers are are probably higher in our forecasted CIP. But we do have fund balance there, and, that's that's where the funding's coming from. Yeah. Councilor Soka. I just wanna make sure that we're not talking about this as a,
because it costs more than expected that then we'll need to increase the property tax levy next year. I just wanna make sure that's not a confusing, assumption that comes out of any action taken tonight. Mayor, mayor's council, that that is correct. Thank you. Other questions? Okay. Great. Is there anyone from the public who would like to comment on this on these, park additions? Fine. Last assignment. I'm just kidding. I'm not. Alright. Seeing no public comment, I'm requesting a motion for resolution 20 26Dash042.
Councilor Peterson White oh, councilor Holmes. Oh, thank you. I move resolution 20 26Dash042, accepting the bids and awarding contract for the 2026 park improvements project. Thank you. And the second to counselor Peterson White. I will second. Thank you. Would you like to kick off the discussion? Thank you. I appreciate all the work that has gone into this, both just preparing for tonight with mister Jacobson, mister Tussing, mister Bennett staff, but also the couple years worth of work that this this project has taken with the parks board,
community engagement. This has definitely been very heavily in heavily involved as as mister Jacobson mentioned. I am very excited to move this forward. I've talked about this before, but I'll bring it up again. We have not updated a park since I've my family and I moved here. My son was five months old. He just turned 11 today, and one of these parks, Central Park, happens to be our neighborhood park. So I think it's an important investment in our community. We moved here from Seattle without having any tie to Northfield.
We don't have any family. We had no real reason to move here. We could have moved anywhere. In fact, we looked at 30 plus towns, around in in Southern Wisconsin, Southern Minnesota, and everywhere we went, we looked at the parks that were in that community, and we chose we actively chose to not pursue living in certain towns because their parks were not we didn't feel like they were investing in their parks, so that's where we wanted to raise our family because you can tell a lot about a community by the parks that they have. So I think investing in these parks,
even if it is a little over budget, it is way overdue. And I think it's just good information for us to have, and I think we are getting an incredible value for the price tag that we do have for these three parks. But investing in these parks is actually an investment in expanding our tax base. We wouldn't have moved here if the parks were subpar. And it's been ten years, and I will not say that the parks are subpar yet. But if we don't invest, we we we can make this community better for that. So I I sincerely hope that that my colleagues agree and that we can get these
parks completed this this year. Even my 11 year old will probably still be playing at the parks, but for all the the other kids and and future kids that will be here in Northfield that we're, we're taking a stand for them, and we're investing in them. Thank you. Councilor Peterson White. Well, I couldn't possibly say it better than that. But I'm I'm very excited, about these park improvements. They, have been a long time coming. I my family my children, who are gonna play in these parks, will tell you that they remember the night I came home from the meeting where we first kinda hatched this idea of a of a nature play area in Riverside Lions,
and I was just, like, lit up. I was so excited. And, you know, that's we're kind of that's one of our neighborhood parks, and my kids and I have been eagerly anticipating this ever since. I'm so grateful to, members of the parks board and staff and the many community members who have contributed to refining and making these ideas, a reality to be for kids and families in the neighborhoods that benefit from these parks. It's gonna be really exciting to see this see this happen. And I I think it's a really wise investment.
I'm very impressed with where we've landed with the price tag. I think we're getting a tremendous amount of value for those dollars, and I'm just I'm so grateful to all of you who have made that the reality. So thank you. Thank you. Other comments? Counselor Beamer. Thank you. First of all, thanks, Bruce. Thanks, staff. These plans are really cool. I, like counselor Peterson White and counselor Holmes, think that parks are good investments for our community. I like the I love the fact that people had the forethought to to start building a fund to do this,
over years. So it doesn't so we can slowly start working to improve these and and update the parks and and things along those lines. Parks do set communities apart from other communities, being somebody that works in many other communities, I see parks in some other communities. I don't even see some parks in other communities. So I recognize the investment. I agree with counselor Holmes that, yes. It is it is, a good way to help lure people to help our tax base.
So thank you, everybody. Looking forward to seeing these improvements going forward. Thank you. Councilor Ness. Thank you. Again, thanks, Bruce, for all the time you've put in staff. Thank you for putting this together. It's the first park improvement plan I have voted on in my nine years. So Wow. Thank you. And I think it's worth saying again. It's been said three times or four times already. We have the money in a special fund. It will not be added to the levy. We'll be able to pay cash for this. So thank you for establishing those funds and and supporting our efforts
because we always wanna cut the cut that price that goes into that. But seeing this is kinda neat. So thank you. Counselor Dolan. My grandchildren will appreciate all of this. Thank you. Thank you. Counselor Soukup. I just wanna say thanks to Bruce and staff for all of the hard work that you put into this. I'm, in particular, really excited about Dresden Park. Yeah. It you it's really easy to miss, and I think after this, it, will actually stand out. And I'm super excited about Riverside.
That was my park growing up. And I still remember the, really terrifying and totally unsafe double clown swing that was there, if anyone remembers that. I loved it and actually cried when it was removed. But it would have been way cooler to have these pod nature areas. So, anyway, I just wanted to say thank you for all your work. I'm excited to vote yes for this. Bruce's recycling guy can get you one of those. Yeah. He probably has one in the backyard along with the metal rod.
Thank you. I'll bring it back to the dais here. I just have a few comments to add. I'll also offer my gratitude, and I especially want to call out some sustainability aspects that we've heard about tonight with the way that you separated out the bids allowed for reclamation of park materials and to have the wood chips sent to our own, composting site and, the value engineering done to really look at it in that level of detail and bring the cost down even lower looking at with your expertise of knowing what is
engaging to children and not. You were able to look at the parts that were brought forward and bring us the most engaging and delightful composition of items for for the park and also want to thank everyone involved for the community engagement. It was really, really a special community engagement process. And, I'll just call out, for me being a Westsider, getting an improvement to a park on the Westside is especially special. So I just wanted to call that out. So any other comments?
Are we ready to vote? Good? All right. All those in favor of Resolution twenty twenty six-forty two, the park improvement projects for 2026, signified by saying aye. Aye. Those opposed, congratulations, everyone. We have some new park improvements. I know I always break, protocol, but I forgot to mention something. There was a support team as part of this design, and it you see their name all over the plans. It's Boltman Mank, Jonathan Nelson, and his team. And they're going to be back again for our next round that we're gonna bring
start bringing to the table for twenty twenty seven projects and so on. But they were fantastic to work with. And so I he was supposed to be here tonight so I could at least introduce him. But he had been ill for a couple days and I said stay away. Thank you for that. Anyway so I wanted to make mention that they're- they're really good at what they do too. Alright thank you all. Yeah thank you very much. Alright. We'll move on to our next agenda item, which is a discussion item only. So we'll be discussing the establishment of an ad hoc City Investment Policy and Cash
Management Advisory Committee. So, I'll kick this one off. So, I have been thinking about this for a while, thinking about my previous service on the on the council and, the working groups that we had. And I think I started off working on a couple working groups. One was the liquor store, and we brought in a combination of staff and community members to give us some second pair of eyes, give us a look at some of the projects and policies that we had in the city.
And so I was thinking about that and thinking also you all know I love to do pilots. So I would like to, for us to discuss and consider thinking about a temporary actionable pilot. It's really well defined here in the memo. It's got, focus it's focused in scope and scale. I consulted administrator Martig and director Anglstedt as we put this together, and I wanna thank them for a lot of for the language in here and the the laid out plan. If this is something that the council is interested in,
the next steps would be that it would come back in April 21 with named community members for the ad hoc working group and, for a vote then on the twenty first. And I just want to read, one sentence here that I think really is about really exemplifies what we're looking for here is as financial markets, regulatory frameworks and public finance best practices continue to evolve, there's an opportunity to review the city's existing investment and cash asset management policies and
practices to ensure they remain current, effective and aligned with the city's financial goals. So that is really the heart of the matter here tonight to discuss. So, and administrator Martig, would you like to add anything to that? Thank you, mayor. Nothing to add. Happy to answer any technical questions you might have on process or anything with the resolution. Yeah. Great. So if folks wanna weigh in with, start with questions or weigh right in with, comments, suggestions. Councilor Beamer. Thank you. I actually really like the idea of this. I think it it really
kind of takes out some of the some of the transparency discussions that you hear people talking about. It also opens the door for more community engagement. It also takes away some of that, you know well, I I guess that it it opens up the transparency. It was basically the same thing. I I so I guess I I guess I I'm I'm good with it. I read through the I read through the memo. I like the I like the idea of it. So I I would be willing to support something like this. Mhmm. Thank you.
Counselor Holmes. Yeah. Thanks. I appreciate you pulling this together and giving this thought, you and along with staff. I too love pilots, and so let's see what we can we can learn. I agree with counselor Beamer on this, but it I feel like it takes out a lot of the redundancy of other conversations that we've had about what a group could do and should do and how that is just can be redundant to what we actually do. And also I feel like this is a much better use of skill set from people in the community and in areas that they could contribute probably
more effectively than, what is a much more confusing process in municipality budgets. Right? And and the and the the intricacies of those things. So I think that, not only is a better use of their time, energy, and skills, but I feel like they won't necessarily be as frustrated as they might be if we had instituted another sort of group in terms of what we had have discussed before that I feel like there would just be more frustration, confusion, people not really being able to contribute in a way they want to. So to me, I feel like this is, really interesting and seems like it would work.
So let's see what happens. I I guess I have one question. Might be kind of two questions. Do we already have people in the community that we have in mind for this? And if not, if so, if this is coming and we're having people named by April 21, how how can we best surface names or or get that inform like, who and where and how can we Sure. As people. Yeah. That's a that's a great question. So I was thinking a small group, three to five members. I have talked to a few people who are interested in serving. Members would have finance and or investment experience,
and I am open to suggestions. So you can send them to me, and we can go from there. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Is there was that that was the both of them wrapped together. Okay. Great. Thank you. Councilor Soka. I think I have a question about the I have a question about the duration and termination section. It says that a date would be determined by the city council. Would that be after the ad hoc committee is is approved and moves forward that we would discuss again
what the scope of not the scope of work, but the timeline of work for a date we'd like a report. How does that come forward to us afterward, and then how do we give feedback about timing? Great. Let administrator Marjig handle that one. Thank you, mayor. Councilor Soukup. I think as we're looking at framing this, it was a bit of an estimation of, like, the finance director has been doing a lot of thinking about presenters coming in and how to present the policy. We've got a couple of different investment groups that help manage our investment.
She would provide some cash flow information as part of the background. So probably depending on if they think they're gonna want more follow-up is a little bit of a guess of, like, how many meetings might this be. You probably get two meetings of download of information. And then depending on if we need to make amendments or kind of how formal some of the recommendations, if there are any to change administrative changes or policy, it's a little bit of a guess. We're kind of guessing two to four meetings to start. I think the council action on being able to change the dates more written or at least it's intended to be more of a stop gap that if it drags
out and it gets long, you are the authority to say, okay. This is going on too long. We'd find a way to come back to you or refine maybe the scope. And we're also a little bit we're a little bit thinking of if this might be a format to use for if there's other similar things that might come up in the future. We wanted to kind of structure this in a way where it maybe could be replicated too. So we're kind of we were thinking a little bit beyond just this particular group a little bit in case there's other ideas on other projects or policies in the future related to finance to look at. Councillor Neff? Thank you. I didn't even have my hand up.
Thank you for your input on putting all this together. Thank you, mayor. I know there's a whole lot of work goes into just creating a document like this. So whoever was involved, thank you, and I think it's a good step forward. And as councilor Beamer said, it just adds to the transparency issue, so I am in favor of it. Thank you. Yeah. It just came from a whole lot of listening, honestly. So, kind of, you know, how that happens. You're listening, listening, and then all of things sudden things coalesce around something that makes sense to try.
So yeah. Councilor Dolan. You, Mayor. I want to pick up on the city administrator's use of the word replica. So it could be in your thoughts on this that there'd be a second pilot that would deal with another financial issue such as borrowing? Because borrowing is probably what I hear most from in terms of just the citizen because it all relates to having a future generation pay on the debt. So and that's where I think citizen input would be really useful. So replica would apply in that situation that if this is successful,
this model is successful, it would be considered in a second iteration? Thank you, counselor. Yeah. I don't know that we brainstormed every idea or certainly you could tweak this depending on what other reviews there could be, but, you know, that could be an example or if there's some type of a project or something that needs to be taken a look at or a policy. We did disband the policy committee of the council. So if there were specific committees, if we bring you a policy amendment recommended from the financial policy and you wanted to have a citizen group look at it first, if you had further questions,
maybe the structure could be replicated. So yeah, that was the intent of it is thinking through process wise in case we the council had interest in doing something similar to this in the future. Yeah. And think I'll answer to that. I definitely thought of that as I was thinking of things that were manageable, and I thought this was a more manageable, focused, focused, actionable pilot to start with. But I am also interested in borrowing and debt capacity to look at in the future. But this felt to me like the, best place to start and start building those relationships and the transparency with through this
process. Alright. Then if I am hearing consensus that it's, we'll bring this back on the twenty first for actionable item. All right, great. Thank you so much for the discussion and the questions. I really appreciate it. Next item is the administrator's update. Thank you, Mayor. Just a couple of updates. Legislatively, we do have a hearing on our local sales tax on the seventh side on Thursday morning. So along with senator Liski, who's supporting it, I'll be testifying, on that. There's a there's been a number of cities that have already gone through this, and then there's another host on Thursday morning. And so I'm guessing it'll probably be a probably not a lot of time.
It'll be fast and furious, I'm guessing, with the session kind of moving towards the end. We do have active, you know, we're monitoring multiple bills, but a couple of finance related ones, the bonding bill and then the sales tax one I'm also working on. We have active we're active. There's been filings on committees on both of those, but I'm doing some additional due diligence just to see if we need to get any more steps taken care of to hopefully end up in omnibus bills, as they start to come forward at the end of session. So I'll probably learn more as I'm up at the legislature this weekend. Communication I'll be having with our senator and representative in particular.
They've been very supportive and gracious to their support on both political aisles, on our legislative some of our legislative priorities. So I'll share more on that. And then as you know, I think we're set up for some site tours with the city council. I'm not sure who all was available, but hopefully that's ready to go. Is that tomorrow night, I believe, that we're set up? And, also the, Dundas Council, the school board, and I'm not sure who all else, if we have any NHLA groups or not. Jason's helping to manage all of that, so thank you to him for,
giving some of those site tours. And we'll probably be offering some other staff follow-up ones later because we know staff are interested too, but we want to kind of get the elected folks through first, and then we'll find time for other people to take a look at as that goes and still on schedule. So hopefully also later this year, we'll be having a lot of ribbon cutting ones. But so this will probably be our primary one before kinda getting close to final construction that we'll be having on that. So I asked Dave before he left earlier today if there was any construction updates of any kind, seeing if we could integrate some of those into these reports or maybe even call
him out on that. But he said this weather is delaying some things. I mean, it is still April in Minnesota. So he said, getting ready to ramp up on some of those, but nothing yet specifically. But we'll work on more of that to come. So that's all I have for tonight. Thank you very much for that report. Councillor Ness? Move to adjourn. Thank you. Councillor Beamer? Second. All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Those opposed, we are adjourned. Thank you all very