Alright. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the Northfield City Council meeting for Tuesday, August 19. It is, just a little bit after 6PM, and I am calling this meeting to order and requesting a roll call. Mayor Zweifel? Here. Councilor Peterson White? Here. Councilor Sokup? Here. Councilor Beamer? Here. Councilor Dahlen? Here. Councilor Holmes? Here. Councilor Ness? Here. Fantastic. The first item on our agenda is the open public comment period, where members of the public are welcome to address the council for two minutes.
I have, two cards this evening. I have Rich and Jonathan. So, we will start with the first card I received, which was Rich. It is rich. So I just wanted to continue to not comment on what did not happen two weeks ago on the unusual Monday meeting. So what did not happen, which people are pretend to be upset about, is the city council did not give people the opportunity to comment on the open well, it was the sanctuary city thing. So this is not a teapot. This is a kettle. And I couldn't immediately find my Shakespeare,
but tempest is in the dictionary too. So there may be a tempest in a teapot. And I just wanted to say I continue to not oppose what did not happen last week, which was not, rep, something that didn't happen without representation. Thank you. Thank you. The next card I have is from Jonathan. And if anyone else would like to comment, please fill out a card and hand it up here to the city clerk. Thank you, Jonathan. Yeah. Well, good evening, mayor, city council members, city staff. My name is Jonathan Davis. I have lived in Northfield for just over ten years now.
And to begin, I just wanna say thank you for all the ways that you serve our city. I know that the work you do is not always easy, and it's not always appreciated. And just, thank you for, doing what you do for the rest of us. After speaking with my council representative Kathleen Holmes, I'm glad to see the issue of uncontrolled intersections being addressed this evening. For ten years, I have hated every uncontrolled intersection I have driven through in our city. Even when there are no cars around, there is something that just feels off and unsafe about them, and it feels like a car is going to come out of nowhere. My disdain for uncontrolled intersections was confirmed on July 7 when another vehicle and I
were involved in an accident at Ninth And Union just, over here, I think. The crash totaled my brand new, Subaru Crosstrek. It was no small accident. I'm extremely grateful that myself and the other driver and their young children were not injured, but change any one thing, one variable, and the outcome of the accident could have been very different. Since my accident, I've spoken with many Northfielders and not one person has said that they like the uncontrolled intersections or that they even make sense to them. A road biker has said it feels especially unsafe for them. So thank you for taking up this issue this evening my only request is that
you soon consider the uncontrolled intersections on the other side of town. Fourth Street and Poplar, Fourth Street and Plum, Fourth Street and Oddfellows, Highland Ave, Cray and Craywood, Juniper and Craywood, to name a few. It's only a matter of time before an accident happens there, and so let's not wait until then, please. Thank you. Thank you very much. Is there any other public comment this evening? Alright. Seeing none, I will request, approval of the agenda including the supplemental memo. Councillor Ness? I will move the agenda as amended.
Thank you. Councillor Beamer? I'll second. All right. Is there any discussion on the agenda? Seeing none, all those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Those opposed? Motion carries. Now we will have a presentation from the Northfield Historical Society. Mr. Allen? Okay. Thank you. There's no little light here. Well, thank you very much. My name is Sean Allen. I'm the executive director of the Northfield Historical Society or as we now call it the Northfield History Center. First of all, I really wanna thank you for your past support. We have had an ongoing relationship with the city and really appreciate the support.
For that, we provide a number of different programs, but also our, our archives contain the archives of the city. We maintain those, and we have a lot of people that access those. We also had the, library had all their kind of older, kind of documents moved over to our, organization here last year, I think, or the year before. And so we're continuing to take care of those, things. So I'm just gonna go through really quickly. I think I've got ten minutes, so I'll just go quickly. If there's any questions, please interrupt me. First of all, first Monday of every month,
we have history happy hour. I'd like to make sure everybody knows they're invited to that. It's from 05:30 to seven in our archives, and you can see we get a packed house every month. It's a lot of fun and we have so many, talented people in the community that come and do presentations about, things that they're very interested in. Oh, sorry. We've got, scope and the cemetery stories is something I think probably all of you have heard about before. We're continuing to to do that program. We have don't have the same support of the school system as we've had in the past. So So we're working on redesigning some of our youth programs this year to try
to make sure that we continue the programs that we have for our youth. One of those is the youth posse tour guides program. And so this is a program that we have, where we have eighteen seventh and eighth graders that go through, I think nine training sessions in the spring to learn the story of the, the bank raid and tell it to tourists. And it's really a fantastic program. It's pretty exemplary, I think, compared to other museums in the in the state. We have a summer intern program here. You can see some of our interns there, that were here this summer and also some of the new t shirts that are
gonna be available at Jesse James Days. One of the things we've been working on is these kind of external exhibits and so we did a little bit of help with the exhibit here at City Hall around Washington School and that was that was great and kind of served as a little bit of a model for us to do some other things. So we're currently working with Loon Liquors and so they're going to be installing boards there describing the history of, Northfield, the history of milling in Northfield, some some of those types of things. So it's kind of, I think also the Volstead Act and Prohibition. If you didn't know, the Volstead was actually a St.
Olaf graduate, which is kind of funny. But anyway, so we we have, here's another one of those. So the interns are the ones that are doing a lot of this work. They're actually doing a great job and it's great experience for them. Most of those are Northfield high school graduates that are home for the summer. This is the obviously the Washington School effort. The digital vision project we did last summer and that's been really great to see that kind of continue to evolve and adding more and more information to that that kind of,
digital exhibit. We're also now working with the Lyceum building to do an exhibit there, and then also, Tin Team. So we've got trying to get our we're trying to really get ourselves outside of our museum and try to make a bigger impact in the community around our our mission. During the Theo Jesse James days, we have the, Thursday night townie night. If you weren't down there last year for this, we have all the yearbooks and everything, from middle school, high school going all the way back. People can stop by and check that out, on Thursday night in a tent, in front of our building. We also have all of Maggie Lee's,
clippings from probably fifty years of working at the newspaper. We did a quick calculation. There's like 15,000 little files. I'm sure most of us have those little files in there, which is is pretty funny. And so we go down and we get those out for people and show them. We also do some seminars now. We're trying to make the the event a little bit more about the history, and so we're gonna have, I think, four different, presentations on Saturday. We also have a new VIP experience. If anybody's interested in that, they can find out about that on our on our website. So we're trying to add more, opportunities for people to experience the history of,
the raid in Northfield. We're also doing some, banners you'll see on our building during the raid, and during the the weekend, that will commemorate some of the people that have passed away recently that were very involved in the in the creation of of the defeated Jesse James days committee and the reenactment. We have a couple different exhibits that have changed. So we did have the Maggie Lee exhibit up, in our kind of notable Northfield exhibit series. This year, we've got mister Puppet Peterson exhibit who, if you didn't know, he was a guidance counselor in Northfield for many years.
He was my guidance counselor and he came in and he had some program that he had found, through his education using puppets to try to get children to kind of express their emotions. And, I think I'm a testament to, you know, I can really express my emotions probably because of Mr. Puppet Peterson. I learned learned that right here in this room as my kindergarten class. But anyway, so that that's, that's up until, the end of the year, and that's been really cool to work with him. He's, still around and still, using his puppet, so it's pretty exciting. We have a new exhibit now,
Rock and Roll Revival. It's the thirtieth anniversary of that exhibit. That's up and running. You can see one of our interns that was really big into designing and creating this exhibit, in the image there. Just invite everybody to come down and check that out as well. One of the other things we've done, these are just some pictures in our down in our archives. There's a lot of stuff down there and a lot of boxes, and it's over the years been hard to find stuff because our database was very out of date and you had to be in the building connected to our network to be able to access and it would take like two or three minutes sometimes
to go through and any query. We've actually we got a grant from the Minnesota Historical Society and we installed a new database called, Collective Access. And what that does is allows you to go on the Internet from anywhere in the world and actually search through our collection, and it makes it a lot more accessible to people. And so when they come in, they can say, I saw this in your collection. I wanna see that or I want this document. I wanna know more information about that. That's been really important for us. The next thing is really our our building. So this is the Scriber Building built in 1868,
and it's deteriorating. It's our most important asset that we have, as a organization, obviously, and it is, in in bad shape. Back when it was first purchased by the Historical Society founders, 1976, they undertook a collection and they did a restoration in 1982, of the First Floor of the, Division Street side. And you can see today, it still looks great. I mean, that that's been, what, forty five years or something like that. And it's really it's really held up well.
We need to do the same for the second story of this building. It's falling apart. Second story interior is also falling apart. This is one of the former bathrooms you can see there. There was a leak and it was right above one of our archive rooms when all the water went right down in there. Maybe Brad can attest to that. I wasn't around during that, but this was probably twelve years ago. So that that hasn't been rented for that amount of time, and it's just cost prohibitive to just do one bathroom. So the exterior of the building as well, you can see,
the bricks have been falling out off the building. I hope nobody has gotten hurt. The stucco has fallen apart, and that's not all original to the building. That's what was put on the nineteen thirties. So, it really needs to come off. So we've got a plan. It's a two phase plan. I'm gonna run through it really quickly. Happy to answer any questions. We have currently, two apartments that are are, rented in the building. Some storage for the olive oil store and for us as an organization. Got a small office and then it's vacant space. We recently and thank you for this. We recently received a $199,999
grant from, from the city of Northfield through Deed and Smith, for this project. And so we're working on a match, and we'll have that by the end of this month. And we have to have that completed by, next June, I believe. So this is the plan that we're planning to do there. We'll have, five apartments instead of just the two that have been rented. Every all the apartments, will have new kitchens and, bathrooms. There'll be insulation, that doesn't exist currently. Each unit will have its own HVAC, which currently is just a baseboard heating and and, it's just really out of date and falling apart. So this is a huge project for us,
obviously. We also got a grant for $52,000 from the state of Minnesota for design work for the exterior. So you can see all the red there are areas that will be removed as part of an exterior project, which is really kind of the phase two part of this project. We are hopeful that we will receive a grant from the state for that and we're working with some donors to help augment that project. And so there's two projects really kind of fit together. In order to get historic rehab tax credits, which is the way we're we're gonna fund a large part of the project,
we have to do the interior to change the revenue side of the project, and then that we can, get up to, what, 20% from the federal government, 20% from state state government to do the interior and exterior of the building. Here's just like a detail just to show you where we're at. We'll be coming to the HPC with this, hopefully shortly. So this is just more design work. You can see what is planned. Those are just two images I think are interesting. You can see the bottom right is I'm not sure what year this was exactly. You can see there was a metal staircase.
The windows were rounded and arched. The the roof was actually added to make it bigger for some reason after the raid. Our plan is to go back to kind of the 1876 version of the building. And, SHPO, the Minnesota, Historic Preservation Office has been supportive of this, and they have been kind of being aware and approving each one of the iterations of the design work that we've been doing, with that, that grant. So here's the two construction phases. I'm not gonna get into all the details because I don't have much time here, but you can see there's just we're gonna create a laundry room on the indoor.
We're creating five apartments, kitchens, bathrooms, plumbing. Right now, we have really old deteriorated galvanized pipes that leak. So the idea would be to get new piping so that wouldn't be a problem anymore. Just basically refurbishing the whole place and making it much more energy efficient. The second phase, the outdoor portion of that, you can see is we think it's gonna be a little over a million dollars according to our architect. It'll be cleaning all that stonework on the Second Floor and the east and north sides of the building, replacing the damaged stonework, tuck pointing windows that were are historic, etcetera. So this is, obviously a huge project for us and transformational.
Here's just the sources and uses for that project just if you're curious. Uses, they're about 1,670,000.00. Our organization has agreed to put in some of our own money. Some of our reserves for that. The deed project, deed program, dollars 200,000, that one that actually has been approved and we signed a contract on it. Historically, we have tax credits, and then the historical society and the donations. So that's a really quick wrap up, because I wanted to leave a little bit of time for questions if you guys have any. Thank you, Mr. Allen. Are there questions? Just, something on Mr.
Volstead. Everyone knows that nobody had seen all of drinks, so just wanted to go there first. And mister Peterson, the sixth grade teacher, I'm sure mister DeLong, who's sitting in the back row there, and I had as teacher in for sixth grade. Thank you. He did a couple years as a sixth grade teacher and then decided to go back to be a guidance counselor. So not sure if he had anything to do with that. That's a great question. Other thanks for the additional history. Councillor Beamer. Great presentation, Sean. Quick question for you in regards to the,
the digital division via QR codes. Do you have are you guys able to see how many people hit that? Yeah. We can track that. We can see how many people. The the building that gets the most, hits, I guess, are is the library. Hundreds of hits, you know, like, probably four or 500 in the last year or so. And then it just kind of it kinda varies by building, but we can see generally it's been it's been very active. And we're we've had a great reception from the business owners downtown. Almost everyone has allowed us to put one of those signs in the building.
And, I think our goal would be to expand it and go, you know, up and down Fourth Street and some of those other places that we haven't quite gotten to yet. Yeah. Thank you very much. Yep. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Alright. The next item for us is our consent agenda. I'm looking for a motion to Councillor Holmes. I move the consent agenda. Thank you. Second from Councillor Sohka. Second. All right. All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Those opposed? Motion carries. So we have passed all of the items on the consent agenda,
including the uncontrolled intersections. So moving on to, we do have a public hearing tonight. So our public hearing tonight is about our charter amendment. We heard about this previously, and we have, charter commission chair, mister Heisler, here to give us a previous presentation, for our public hearing tonight. And I am gonna declare the public meeting open. Thank you, madam mayor and council members. I am Lance Heisler, the chairman of the Northfield Charter Commission. And the amendment that's being proposed,
I'm referring to is a cleanup. There are currently we're dealing with Section 3.5 of the Charter and currently there are four dates that the resignation provisions of the charter don't cover, those being January 1, June 30, July 1, and December 31. If a council person resigns on any one of those days, the Charter Commission has no provision for filling that vacancy. And so we've just amended the proposed to amend the section to include those four days. So if you resign on any day of the year,
you're covered in terms of a succession plan. The other thing is that the current charter provides that if a member resigns and if and someone is appointed to fill that vacancy, the term ends at the end of the current year rather than when a successor is qualified. So there's the possibility now of having a brief period of time between the end of the year and when the person fulfilling that seat is actually qualified, which I understand to be the date
of the first meeting when the oath of office is taken by that new person. So we've just changed the language to indicate that an appointed person serves until a successor is qualified. So there's no gap between the time when the old person leaves and the new person begins. And so and that person could be the person appointed as well, but, so that there's no gap there. And then finally, the provision will just make sure that when the election is held, it's clear to the public that the election for the seat that's vacant is designed
to fill the vacancy so that it won't be it could be for a regular full term, but it might not be depending on when the vacancy occurs. So when it is not for a full term, the ballot will indicate the length of the term, that the person who is running will be filling so that that's clear to the public when they cast their ballot. And that's it. Great. Hope that you will, approve this to go forward. Thank you very much. The next, item according to my public hearing list is, public input. Is that correct? All right. Is there anyone from the public,
yes, who would like to comment on this item? David DeLauren, Northfield. All mayoral and council authority flows from the city charter. It's a very important governing document. It was adopted by a vote of the citizens of Northfield a long, long, long, long time ago. To modify a section of the charter without going to the citizens for approval takes the unanimous vote of the council, a very important document, a document which should be followed without fail. I would like to note for the record that the proposed changes to Charter Section
3.5 titled Vacancies does not change or modify any other sections of our charter. It does not change Section 3.8 concerning the duties of the Mayor. It does not change Section 3.9 concerning the duties and responsibilities of the President Pro Tem, who presides in the absence of the Mayor. This change does not affect when the Council has its first meeting of the year or the meaning and number needed to determine a quorum. It does not change the requirement to have taken an oath of office before assuming
their duties. The charter can only be changed by a unanimous vote of the council or a citywide election. City staff can't change it. City attorneys can't change it. They can misinterpret it, but they can't change it. Robert's Rules of Order can't change it. You can't wave a magic wand and make over one hundred years of local government history irrelevant. I support this change, but this only changes one little section. Respect the charter. Thank you. Thank you, mister DeLong. Is there anyone else who'd like to comment on this Charter public hearing?
All right. Seeing no one, are there, council comments on the amendment? Thank you. Once again, I'd like to thank the Charter Commission for bringing this forward. I'm sure I've read that a few times and would never have caught that the four days wouldn't be a good thing to, you know, back out of a term. So thank you for the catch, and thank you for the change request. Alright. And I am looking for a motion to close the hearing. Counselor Soka? Move to close the hearing.
Second, councilor Nunn? Second. Thank you. All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Those opposed? Alright. Motion carries. The public hearing is closed. So that takes us to our next agenda item, which is to consider the ordinance ten eighty four charter amendment to section 3.5 of the city charter. This is a first reading. Looking for a motion. Councilor Ness. I'll move ordinance one zero eight four. Charter amendment to 3.5 of the Charter First Reading. Thank you. And councilor Peterson White? Second.
All right. Thank you. Is there, discussion? Great. We kind of already had it. I'm not glossing this over. All right. All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Those opposed? Motion carries. We have our first reading completed. Thank you. Next up thank you, Mr. Heisler. Next up is, reports from mayor and council members. We will start with Councillor Beamer this week. I have nothing new to report. Counselor Dahlen. Nothing new. Counselor Holmes. I also have nothing new. Mhmm. Counselor Sokob has a counselor Sokob has,
like, two or three pages here. So I I don't. I promise. It's all just from one HRA meeting. I'll keep it brief. There was an HRA meeting. Dana Norvold from Habitat came to request funds for a house at 315 Poplar, which is used to be a Habitat home, but then kind of went out of the program in, like, 1993, but that house is online again for sale. It's a four bedroom, two bath house that needs significant work. So Habitat is hoping
to rehab it, and came to the HRA for a request for rehab money and some down payment assistance dollars. So the and and that passed for the for the rehab funds, and then they'll come back later in the future for down payment assistance. But the it was a good discussion because they're what they're trying to do is get their funding stack, which would only qualify a family in around 80% of area median income, to qualify for that home.
With the help of the HRA, they're hoping to serve a family more toward the 60% of AMI, scale, which is really notable because finding a four bedroom, two bathroom home at that level of income in Northfield is is incredibly difficult. So, that was good news. And then there was the other thing to note was there was a presentation by one of the community development interns, on an ADU tax abatement program idea, which would basically, is to incentivize homeowners in town to,
build ADUs on their properties. And that would, for five years, take any, I guess, when your home value increases because you've built an ADU, it would take that amount that your home value has increased and, I guess, make it irrelevant for five years to try to incentivize, it not, costing quite as much to build an ADU. So that was super interesting. If anyone's curious about that, it was a great presentation and discussion, but that's all I've got. Thank you. Councilor Peterson White. Thank you. I, along with the mayor,
attended the third quarter transportation advisory committee meeting for Hiawatha And Transit that involved a lot of the usual agenda items like financial review. But one update is that, I think I reported probably about a year ago that Hiawatha Land had started doing their own bus maintenance in house of kind of a trial and it turned out they saved tens of thousands of dollars by doing that I believe. And so this year they are initiating, building a maintenance bay at their Plainview facility in order to facilitate that, and it's, saving the organization a lot of money.
It's great. Counselor Ness. Thank you. There was an age friendly Northfield meeting last week, and Cece Linsroth was kind enough to send me a whole synopsis of what happened. So I am quoting from her email. The, Age Friendly Northfield transportation team now has three drivers that are ready to start driving with Lyft. So that's a very important thing for the older populations. And age friendly is paying to have the cars inspected to get Lyft certified.
So, also, the board voted unanimously to support start of discussion on special service district in the downtown area, primarily for removal of snow and ice and make walking safer for everyone. And also Age Friendly has been working with Mr. Bruce Jacobson, who is in the audience and will give a presentation later in this meeting, on the design for Dresden Hills and Riverside just to make transition areas, easier to for those with mobility concerns,
smooth surfaces, etcetera. So that's all I have. Thank you. Thank you. So I as a, climate mayor, I attended the I'm on the Extreme Heat Task force, and we had our quarterly meeting. This quarterly meeting was focused on data. And so, I'm thinking about how we can help better prepare Northfield to deal with extreme heat in the future in terms of cooling centers and shade and tree planting. And there are lots of cities doing lots of things that deal with extreme heat more frequently than we do.
So, I'm really happy to be part of this task force and getting this information from, and from other cities and other mayors. The other thing I attended was an all aboard presentation, and the council will be getting more information about this. They have requested us to sign on to a resolution supporting, two train lines, this year. So, that will be coming back to us. So and we did that at the depot, and they were very, admiring of our depot. And the trains were coming by and, you know, of the things that they look for in a partnership city,
we had many of those things. So it was kind of nice to be like, Yeah, we we did that already. Check. Check. Transit center, depot, ridership. We're all we're we're all there. So that was also a fun meeting, and that will be coming back to all of us later. Okay. That's all I have. So that brings us to our regular agenda. What time is it? It's not even time for a break. Okay. Let's I know. The last meeting was pretty long, so I'm feeling good. All right. Let's see. First up is consider a resolution approving appointment of Mikaela Schmidt as interim community development
director, and that is, mister Martig is going to take the lead on that. Thank you, mayor, members, city council. As you all know, it has been officially, noticed out, I believe, at our last regular meeting that our community development director, Jake Riley, has taken another position, and will be leaving Northfield on the September 11 will be his last day. So we wish him well. He's got some personal and professional reasons for that. And, this won't be about Jake really tonight, but I do wanna call out a couple of things that I think, he got accomplished in a relatively short period of time,
in his role. And I would say two of those. One was the comprehensive plan update was one primary goal and he was hired that was specifically recruitment and he had a tremendous amount of experience and background, including working for the Met Council that we think put him in a good position for that. That was completed and adopted, so we have that completed. Another one I think is economic development that we focus on. One big challenge since I got here in our ability to attract new business and grow our existing business was the lack of actual property in town that was within city limits,
including supportive land owners in new growth areas for the city and through Mr. Riley's leadership in a number of years of the prior directors and councils and staff doing work to put it in that position. At the end of last year, the city, rezoned, I believe, somewhere around 300 acres of new property for new growth in the Northwest part of the city and did a full rewrite right of some pretty substantial sections of the zoning for that area, working closely with the planning commission. That was a really big lift and I don't think those appreciated as the importance
of the lack of property that we had available really meant you had nothing to sell as a community to bring and grow your existing businesses. So that was a huge, work lift on the planning side. We're doing other things on public works, and I think there'll be more conversations about what we can now do to do better job of recruitment, and marketing in the future. But we'll save more of that for another day. Time moves very quickly, so there's obviously things move into motion. So, this is one position, that that is an appointment of the city administrator but requires confirmation by the city
council, so department directors, city clerk, financer director fall into that. And the interpretation that we've honored too is that even on an interim situation, we honor that process to come to the city council as well. I've had them. We've had a couple of transitions of the community development director since I've been here, and, I've used outside, brought in outside, two different outside people on interim situations in the past. So every situation I look at and evaluate differently, I really feel based on our current conditions, and department that we have, that this was the right time to bring forward Mikaela Schmidt,
who is our city planner, who has worked her way up for about twelve years working for the city and the department in different roles. She's really grown and her leadership, has grown within the department and organization as well. She has been a recipient of the employee of the year award too that are nominated by her peers and counselors. Bring that forward. She's leading some of the major rezoning work that's on the table for the planning commission and council ahead of us. And so just felt on this interim period that she would fit a good role with that. I'm happy to ask questions if you have any detailed questions you want into that.
I won't get into a lot of details, more than that, but I just think she'll be a good good fit. Consulted a number of, people internally to make that decision, but I felt it was pretty clear in this case. I might need to explore some backfilling support for her as well. I think that conversation is continuing, and I don't have all of that figured out. But if there's some need to provide some resources, I'd work within the financial dollars that we have within the budgets to see if there might be some ways to assist as well because there's a large workload within that area. I outlined, so your actual action to consider would be the resolution to,
appoint the interim position. I did think I would use the opportunity. Generally, since we've been down this path before, all of our department directors to a certain degree are really important. They work with the council, the public, internally with staff. This is no different. So I've, fairly expansive, I think, a recruitment process that we'd be looking at doing. So the intention is to do an external, open process to look at candidates that might be good internally, look at candidates that'd be good externally, to get that ball rolling, hopefully, here maybe by the end of the week to get that, posted and rolling. I've got some documents for for review that the HR directors provided me that I
need to take a look at before finalizing. But, generally, we're looking at kind of a multi, process step that would be engaging in different interview panels that wouldn't be decided completely yet, but I'd be working some of that detail out. And then, we do some prescreening interviews that I would be involved in with the HR director. And then, ultimately, in the end, we'd have finalists, that would be engaged with the public for greater opportunity with boards, commissions, members of the public that we would do it as well. So some of you have been around for some of the other directors. We've used this process kinda similar to the even the most recent one of the
police chief hiring. Although you don't although, the council, I'm not looking for a formal adoption on this process, You are the ultimate confirmation authority on that as well, so I want you to be comfortable. So I would if you wanted to have any input now, I this isn't set in stone, but I think it's a general guideline that's worked pretty well. I haven't heard a lot of any big concerns on it. And I think people have appreciated, different opportunities for feedback along the way. So with that, I'll turn it back to the mayor, but hope you'll support my nomination of the interim community development director of Mikaela. She's very excited and honored to be in the position.
I didn't ask her to be here tonight, but she's probably watching and paying attention as well, as I'm guessing Jake is, this evening as well. So I'll turn it back to you, mayor, for questions or input. Yeah. Thank you, and thank you for including the process. So, are there council questions? Alright. Seeing none, is there anyone from the public that would like to comment on this item and also say now is an opportune time if you plan to comment on something, a future agenda item, that you fill out a yellow card, please. I don't see anyone coming forward to comment on this,
so I'm requesting a motion. Councilor Holmes. I move resolution twenty twenty five dash zero eight four, approving the appointment of Mikaela Schmidt as the interim community direct community development director. Thank you. Councilor Peterson White? Second. Thank you. Any discussion from the council? I would just say since she might be watching, I think this is great, and I look forward to continuing to work with you, Ms. Schmidt, in this role and keep advancing some of our biggest priorities come out of community development. And so keep advancing those things as we come out of community development. And so keep advancing those things as we work on on getting the long term
fill for that position. Thank you. Councilor Peterson White. I would just thank Administrator Marty for bringing this forward and say, it's wonderful to have someone who is so, well prepared, to step into this role and, someone who knows the community so well. It's very exciting. It's great. Thank you. Other comments? Councilor Soukup. Yeah. I guess I did have a question, but we can talk about this later too. But, hopefully, we'll have time to say goodbye to mister Riley before he leaves, because I've really enjoyed getting to know him and see, what he's been able to do in such a short time.
I'm really excited for miss Schmidt to step into this role even just in an interim basis. I got to work with her mostly when I was on the planning commission, and I was always just super impressed by her knowledge and professionalism. And, she's just a super nice person too, which is great. So thanks. Thank you. Alright. Looks like we're ready to vote on this. So all those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Those opposed? Motion carries. So congratulations to miss Schmidt. We look forward to you working in your role as interim community development director.
Next up is considering a motion, approving the Riverside Park playground improvement plan. And we have a presentation from Mr. Tassing and Mr. Jacobson. Yeah. Maybe before they start, I think I'd just like to take the opportunity to to introduce Andrew Tussing. He is our new streets and parks manager. Not new to the city. He's been with the city for thirteen years, worked his way up through the utilities department, and has now moved over to the streets and parks. So glad to have him on board. He hit the ground running and is doing a fantastic job.
So I'll turn it over to Andrew, and let him kick this item off. Thanks, mayor, members of council. Tonight, we have Bruce Jacobson who's gonna do a presentation on the proposed improvements for Riverside Park. This this item is part of the Park and Recreation capital investment plan that was approved by City Council back in 2023. I could talk about the history center. Okay. I shouldn't have said that out loud. Okay. Hello, everyone. Alright. So let me start here and say that I hope most of you recognize what
this is. Is it on your screen? If we're seeing a blank screen right now. Should be up. Is it on now? We're still seeing a blank screen. I'm so good with computers. This is really Oh, there we go. Wow. Good. So the riverfront enhancement action plan that was adopted by mayor and council in 2020, but one of the primary recommendations that came out of that plan was to activate your riverfront parks. Knowing that we can't do them all at the same time, the first one in the queue was Riverside Lions Park, and we began master planning in,
early twenty twenty three. And I I have to do a shout out here is that we didn't appoint a a working group as they came to be called, but because we reached out to Lions Club and the Northfield, area veterans memorial folks and the Village on the Cannon and the Garden Club. And I don't want to leave anybody out, but the group came together through the entire process and spent a lot of time, a lot of volunteer time at the table. And really, they informed this plan as much as anyone else. Working with that group was really critical.
We did not create a document, a report. It wasn't really necessary. And really, the discussion was around what you see in front of you is what kind of plan are we generating for this park. And I'd like to say when you squint at the plan, you can see that just the colored areas are the areas we touched. There are so many pieces of the park that we protected and preserved and didn't touch, and that was really as important a consideration as anything else in the planning process. What came out of the discussion with the working group are these two green circles are the most important, for the discussion tonight that these were the two highest priority areas within the park.
So, you know, Riverside Lions, it's a long linear park, and it's really made up of of several connected rooms that all have their own personality and their own uses and their own kind of character. So for the Veterans Memorial area, we did nothing or very little. The regional trail goes through there now and so forth. But moving then to the north, you have the the Lions Pavilion built in the sixties, playground and so forth. That's a high priority area for this group for future improvements. The area around the pickleball courts and the open play field,
not doing much there in the short term. Then moving further to the north, we have the area around Seventh Street existing playground and where the farmers market is. But that's what we're keying in on tonight. It's close to the river. It's adjacent to the Pollinator Gardens. The Garden Club has done so many great things there, the existing Arbor Memorial, and so on and so forth. So that's the focus of for tonight. Both of those projects are important. I wanna say that out loud that we haven't forgotten what's gonna happen in,
hopefully, the near future related to one b on this aerial photo, but 1A is what we're looking at tonight. As part of the master planning process, these were some of the early images. So we're zeroing in on the playground, the existing playground, at 1A At Seventh Street and the notion that we have in this park two existing playgrounds that are kind of similar. That's much scaled down, the one by the Lions Pavilion, but they both have kind of traditional playground equipment and so forth. And this group,
a lot of discussion around we have an opportunity here next to the river and so forth to do something different, which became what we call the discovery zone, this idea of nature based play. And everywhere we went after that, every meeting we had, all of the outreach, all of the discussion and so forth was based on this idea of creating a different kind of play area in this part of the park. So we went through a number of different iterations as we needed to be more specific about describing what we mean by nature based play, ultimately getting to a refined still concept plan that led us to here.
So I'll spend time with this one very quickly to suggest that this is Seventh Street down here at the bottom. Can you see my cursor? And this is the existing arbor over here. This is the existing trail that runs along the river, and this is the river up here. Adjacent neighbor here, the porta potty right here. So the characteristics, the components of this plan is that there is a loop walkway that not only is an experience for people of all ages to be able to walk in here
and kind of have this nice walk in the park, this sort of loop and so forth, but it also forms the play container. So you can see this loop walk and the access to existing trails and existing walkways and so forth. I will make note of this little footprint down here is that we have made provisions for a future restroom building as part of this design. We don't have funding for it. I'll come to that in a few moments. But this is the location we're talking about. Past mayor and council, you guys were part of that discussion. We where the directive was to provide universally accessible restrooms at both locations,
both at the Lions Pavilion and at this location at Seventh Street. Alright. So moving forward with so you have a loop walkway. In the center, you have kind of a courtyard space with picnic tables and so forth, be able to see into all these other little spaces. So what I call them play pods, so we have four play areas as part of this this design, some stormwater feature that I'll come back to in a minute, and then a landscape that kind of pulls all of it together. So talking about each of the play pods, stones and sand. In the first one,
talking about climbing and digging. It's not just a random pile of rocks. It's more fixed than that. It's more of a solid core filling in the cracks and crevices, so safety first. We're not creating places where kids can get stuck or get foot stuck or whatever. But also integrating a slide into this into this design and so forth. But this is all about climbing and digging, very active kind of space. The next space, branches and burlap. I have a lot of experience with this, more of a kind of the component parts. Everything's not fixed. That there is an opportunity for builders to build and hide and be more creative.
This got some feedback through the process that where we move forward with a design that was a little more fixed than that. There were some concerns about having maybe too many kind of things that might even end up in the river or whatever. But the idea that this kind of idea is what's emerged out of that. I think in in the yellow box there, it suggests that, the final layout and design would still include some movable creative play elements similar to these examples, but a lot more of it would be fixed like you see in the image on the left.
The third play pod called stage and stomps, is this performing and pretending kind of area where you provide the space and you provide these really kind of flexible ingredients, these cuts and stumps and what we call kind of pancakes or whatever, these slices of trees and so forth. Kids know what to do. So it's this sort of, location where they can get on stage or they a it's a fort or it's a castle or it's a whatever. So it's that kind of creative play is what we're after here.
The fourth pod then is swings. We can't have a playground without swings in this town, for crying out loud. I've heard, like, about a thousand times. But there would be two kinds of swings here, one for older kids, and one for younger kids. So this idea that bucket swing is a must and then there was lots of other products now where parent and child can be in the same swing at the same time. So those kinds of things are what we're what we're providing here. If you watch kids play, a lot of it is run-in chase and so forth. So it's really important where these red circles are,
the connections in between in Moon Gate or an Arbor or even Dave Bennett's favorite, which he hates to hear me say, is the concrete pipe. But it doesn't take much for kids to get a lot of a lot of play out of some of these things. So this idea that run and chase and and being able to have access to all these things at the same time that, if the police officer was in the room, he would appreciate the fact that a lot of visual surveillance from the street. So it's not this idea that parents could sit in the middle and watch all four play pods and be able to see all this activity going on around them.
That's really important consideration. So this gives you an idea of kind of that center court. It's an old base map and I didn't redo it, but the point of this diagram is that we are insisting on having a stormwater management component to this that really reflects how you can integrate that kind of idea in a project at every single scale in your city. And so whether we can actually take some some of the, stormwater off of the street through a catchment and bring it into the park and interpret that. But also it's, it's part of the play experience.
So these are very shallow. We're not talking about deep basins, probably a couple feet or or maybe three at the most. I'm probably exaggerating. But it would also if the river does come up and touch this area again, we would have a way to accommodate that, which it has done in the past, is that these basins would take on that role as well. And as a comparison to a lot of your other play containers in most of your parks where it's usually a rectangle of wood chips and out in the middle of the sunny, you know, sunny field and so forth, we are suggesting that there is a landscape here.
And a lot of the comment we've got is how are we gonna take care of it. And that's why we have Andrew, is that he's gonna be out there every day pulling weeds and but the idea that it's a layered landscape and it's it also because of the context for this, the adjacency to the pollinator gardens and to the river and to the river shoreline restoration work that's happened and all these things is that's that we work with the existing tree canopy. There are places for shade. There's places to sit in the sun and so on and so forth. So all of those things are really important ingredients. This we know.
This is part of a budget that's already been established for year one, which is now 2026, a 2026 project. $4.50 ks have been allocated for this work. We have taken this plan and we have done a more detailed cost estimate, which all the detail isn't reflected here, but just in round numbers, we are under the $4.50 ks mark. I believe that we can even, be a lot more efficient with some of the things that we're talking about here and really be very budget conscious. I think it's really a critical thing.
It does not include the restroom bill. I'll talk about that in a minute, about where we're going with all of that. I do want to say since it was raised by Brad and there was a age friendly Northfield person in the audience at one time, we have met with CC a couple of different times. Well, I've actually met with her a lot over a number of different parts that we've worked on. And, there's some really great things that they bring to the table. So the idea it's relatively flat out here. So we're not talking about level changes and everything, but cautious about when we're changing materials and so forth. We're not creating trip steps and everything.
Falling down is a huge thing. And so the places that we design, we need to be really conscious of that. The other thing is all my designs forevermore are going to have places where it's not just one bench. It's this idea that she keeps insisting on, I think it's a great idea, is that we have a big enough pad where we have benches facing each other. So you can have a conversation with somebody. So the idea a couple of places in here that will have benches like that or swinging benches or whatever. So there's variety of places for people to sit and really enjoy this whole landscape.
Okay. We reconvened the working group in June. It was lightly attended, I'll give them that, but it was still really important information. We presented at the Park and Recreation Advisory Board, where they approved moving forward with this design. We're sitting in here tonight, August 2025. Most recently, we did have a presentation at one of the Lions Club luncheons. They just asked for an update. So we did kind of a quick preview. We weren't the main speaker at their luncheon, but we did give them an update. And last week, Andrew and I met with a full house over at Village On The Cannon in
their community room. And it was really very well received. They mostly kind of put his feet to the fire about how we're going to take care of this, how is it going to be maintained and so on and so forth. But it was really good information. So that's where we are for this evening. This is the plan that you're being asked to approve so we can move it forward into detailed design and so on. Well, I should stop here. The next steps after tonight is to complete detailed design through the fall and winter of this year. We want to come out of the blocks first thing next year just to get
the best through the bid process and everything to get the best numbers we can get to get a contractor all set up and to really first thing next spring is to get this thing going. So that's the plan. If you'll bear with me before we come back for discussion on this, I have a few slides just to update you as an information piece around the restroom situation. So I'll personalize this a bit, which is dangerous, but I thought I had it figured out. But everything is expensive. But one thought was certainly, at the Lions Pavilion, we could take the existing restrooms, which is this drawing on this side right here,
and you can see that there's this weird kind of kink in the entry and everything, which makes it not universally accessible. It's not hard to figure that out. So the idea in the right hand drawing is you peel off the front, you move the fixtures around and so forth, and the circle obviously represents that you have turning radius for wheelchairs and people with walkers and a lot of other things that this makes it universally accessible. This preliminary planning and design, ATS and R is really good architectural firm and the numbers around this are north of $250,000
which might be surprising and I have gotten a reaction of saying, well, give me a sledgehammer and a weekend, and I'll take care of it myself. It's not that simple. There's a lot more to this, and we're gonna take another look at this and just make sure that we're confirming the numbers. But I'm just gonna put that number out there that it's it's in that ballpark. Alright? I thought we could do prefab. So the prefab on the right is a very well known company. Romtek has been used by lots of different parts and so forth. The building, it's a two holer. It's two stalls next to each other,
unisex bathrooms, fully accessible. It comes as a kit for around 132 ks. They deliver it to the site and you have a contractor. There are several around that do this kind of work, but the multiplier is one to one and a half times. So all in, city making the pipe connection, just all those things. It's 300,000. Yeah. I've gotten that reaction all over the place, Brad. This one on the left is one that we just installed up in the little town of Ramsey at a little neighborhood park. This is what came off the truck. It wasn't a kit. It came entire.
They just plopped it on the ground and hooked it up to the sewer and water and so forth, all in one bathroom, a 100,000. But it's pretty ugly. Sorry. That's anecdotal, but there you are. So you could go that route. We are exploring. What if we just got a plain box with not even a roof on it, which we've explored with the contractor or with the vendor, and then we could do improvements ourselves locally. So we can get a two holder off the back of the truck, no roof,
just plain for close to $80. Dollars So we are exploring what might we do with that to make it look more contemporary and nice and something that we'd be proud of to have in our parks. What would that look like and what would that cost? So that's one of the options. At one point, we are talking about is it easier just to squeegee the whole Lions Pavilion and start over again? It was built in 1966. We're gonna redo the bathrooms anyway. Romtek had these as part of their catalog. So if you look at the upper middle or the upper right image,
it bathroom is integrated with a pavilion. Well, it looks pretty much like we have. All in, that's $500,000 I think that's pretty serious money for replacing something that is still pretty functional. Maybe we're going to explore a little bit. Could we take the roof off the existing pavilion? Maybe add more of a contemporary roof line? Maybe box the columns or whatever. So we're exploring what's possible with what we have. Last resort is to tear anything down in my view and see what we can work with. So but $500,000
is a big price tag. So the last slide really is talking about what if we just started from scratch and built one out on the site, what would that cost. So we're asking for ATS and AR again to take a look and say what it's not going to look like any of these. That's pretty plain kind of shed roof kind of deal. The one on the lower right, I'm kind of intrigued by because it is a box of the prefab building and then they did sort of a contemporary take on that by adding something to it. So something very simple, but it's something like that is what we're going to cost out and see if
that makes any sense. If the goal is to get away from porta potties and get to fixed three season flush toilet restrooms in some of your parks, particularly in the downtown area at this point, Those are the options. Just a very quick look. We're looking at lots of different ways for funding. It's on our list to look at various grants that we're already pursuing. That's really my last slide is that there are things that we're already I mentioned to Peter ahead of time, you know, the outdoor recreation grant program with DNR and so forth.
There's a lot out there even in these trying times, what's going on in DC and everything, there's still money. LCCMR is a great one. It's not touched by feds. It's really the local. It's the it's the lottery money and and so on and so forth. So that's a we just have to get in the door. I will mention the the thing that says BWSR, the Habitat Enhancement Landscape Program is HELP is the acronym. But it BWSR is an organization that I've worked with a lot, and they looked at this plan and they liked it a lot as even a pilot for one of their grant programs because it fits so many of the categories.
So we just have to get more aggressive really about where we're heading. So that's kind of the update. There's no conclusion to this part. We need to bring more detailed information from all these things and what are the things we can put big access through and say, that's not going to happen, what are the things that we're trying to track. So I'm going to go back to this plan somewhere, and that's all I have. Thank you. Is this 1A or 1B? This is 1A. 1A, okay. 1B would be a similar kind of look ultimately as long as you brought it up that we would want to do playground improvements and then whatever enhancements we would
do to restrooms and to the pavilion at some time. It's not in the immediate queue in terms of the CIP budget or anything, but we want to make sure it's still on the radar. Okay. Thank you. Any additional from staff? No? All right. Questions from counsel. Councillor Nes? So you're saying now that the park plan is approximately $400,000,000 and the restroom part is 300, so we're just south of 3 quarters of a million? Yeah. At the estimate, I realized that.
Yeah. I think taking them separately to get the playground done all in and so forth is somewhere around that number of $400,000 which is in the budget. The restroom building, we just want to be really strategic about how we get roll out the first one because we're going to want to repeat it in other places. And I think it's fair to say that it's in the 200 to 300 range no matter what we do. That's where we're heading. Thank you. Other questions? Councillor Dolan? Bruce, do you have longevity or how long you would expect something like this project to
serve its citizens? It's comparable to or better than traditional playground equipment off the shelf. And that's one of the assurances that we wanted. One of the contractors I've worked with a lot, just as a specific example, uses tamarack, large logs, peeled bark, and they last twenty five, thirty years. And so when we talk about this branches and burlap kind of thing, that's what we're proposing. That would be the spec. So the life of what we're looking at right now to replace out in the other playgrounds, most of your playgrounds were installed in 1996 or 2007 or 02/2008.
Here we are at 2025. So things like I'll just mention them out loud, Sibley Swale, the one we're looking at at Dresden Hill, they don't make the parts anymore. So even if we wanted to just replace them, we couldn't. Some of it doesn't meet code. They're not safe anymore. So there's growing liability for the city. So, there are some places like Central Park where we are just gonna do paint up fix up and a few parts replacements for a few thousands of dollars versus replacement. But the assurance that this is we looked at fake rocks off the shelf instead of real boulders and so forth.
And obviously, real granite boulders are going to have a lifespan that's far greater than any kind of fiberglass whatever you buy off the shelf. So this idea that we're using real materials in this case is what we're after here. Thank you. Councilor Holmes. This is a question for mister Bennett. Just just so everyone's clear on council, but then anyone who might be watching or listening, the funding for this is coming from money that we've levied over the past two years in the park maintenance fund.
Right? This is not coming this does not impact the 2026 levy. Correct. Mayor, members of council, we've been building fund balance through the levies, and that goes goes into our park fund. So now we're able to start implementing some capital projects. We'll be using these funds, to build that project. Thank you. Additional questions? I have, two questions. They're both about bathrooms. That's the number one thing I hear about our downtown area and 1A is closer to downtown than 1B. I think it would serve a different population of folks. So one thing is about would it give us,
would all the options that you presented have a way to do automatic locking? So it wouldn't have staff going around and having to lock things. Are those is that part of the of the cost that you mayor, members of council. That's that'll be added cost on top of that. It gets into our agreement with our Internet service provider and then getting the door system set up so they're I don't wanna speculate, but just just adding, like, the the Internet connection to the building and then having the the monthly fee to have the building. So we're negotiating that,
but it it was pretty spendy with the provider, in the neighborhood of, like, $500 a month just to have Internet at a bathroom building. So, like, I think we're negotiating that with our service provider where it didn't seem to make sense. But, ultimately, that would be the goal would be that they're all on a schedule, electronic door locks controlled, modern, but we're not there yet on our bathrooms at our parks. One additional point is that from the vendor's point of view, it's just a recipe item. So just checking the box, they provide it all the time. So the logistics of how the city connects to it is an issue.
But to actually have it integrated into what's delivered to your site is just it's pretty standard these days. Thank you. Councilor Beamer. Mister Bennett, have you guys considered looking into, like, Verizon hotspot for those locations? Something a little bit more wireless, probably much more affordable. Something we started doing at work with our models versus, running an actual Internet into it, seems to have actually saved us a pretty fair chunk of money. Yeah. Mayor, members, council. So that
that is something that, we will explore. I don't know. I know we do have some of those, but certainly an option for us to to consider. We do have some already free Wi Fi in our city parks. I think it just have to be the giving it on door system the reliability, but we could certainly work with our IT department on that. I don't think it's that we didn't explore it. I just don't know the exact, door controls in that, but it's something we can look into. Alright. Thank you. Are there any other questions? Alright. Thank you, mister Jacobson. Is there anyone from the public who'd like to comment?
Alright. Just a stupid thing I was wondering. Do they really not make time locks that don't require an Internet connection anymore? Thank you, mister Graves. I'm gonna add, that item to your previous comment card that you commented on. Here we go. Just keep it running. I've just got your tab open here. Alright. So thank you. Yeah. Good question. I I don't know the answer to that, but we'll if it if it would work for us, we'll look into it. Mister Bennett. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Mister Martick. I know I know who you're talking about. Yeah. There it is. I always do I always make a mistake every night, and there it is.
Mister Martick. I was just gonna prompt you, mayor, that when it goes back to council discussion, there could be potentially the opportunity to pose that question back to staff. I was actually gonna make a couple of minor comments related to the related conversation too. So if you wanna keep that in mind, I'd welcome the opportunity. Great. Okay. So let should we get a motion on the councilor Peterson White? I will move approval of the Riverside Park Playground Improvement Plan. Thank you. Councilor Holmes. Second. Alright. Councilor Peterson White, would you like to kick us off?
Sure. Well, I'm thrilled to see this plan before us and to hear Bruce's lovely presentation. I vividly remember the work session at which we hatched this idea that instead of a traditional playground in this park, we could have a natural play area that would, could become a lovely gem along the riverfront, and an alternative kind of environment for kids in our community and, their grown ups. And this is what's what's been worked through here and brought before us is just beautiful. I think it's extremely I my children are 15,
nine, and five. I spend a lot of time in parks and have done for fifteen years. And, I have a lot of opinions about what's, like, playable, what's pleasant for parents, what's interesting for kids, what kind of parks they wanna go back to over and over again. And this design has so much going for it that I think will be really lovely and really multi generational, which this neighborhood in particular I think really, will benefit from having an extremely multi generational space with lots of shade, with lots of seating, lots of visibility, but also a feeling of kind of enclosure and a defined space that just looks
lovely. So, and I'm very excited about I think our community will respond really well to the concept of a nature play area, which, we don't really have yet in town. So many, many thanks to everybody who brought it this far. Staff, Bruce, the parks board. Really fantastic work, everyone. I look forward to hearing more about the bathroom options. I appreciate the thought that's being put into that, and I really like the idea that whatever we figure out could be a model for other locations, especially given that this is kind of it's kind of on the edge of downtown, but the downtown is kinda pushing in this direction right now too.
So, I think that, this is a great, place to focus to figure out the best and most cost effective way to do this and provide that resource. So thank you. I'm excited to, see this happen in 2026. Counselor Holmes. Thank you. I think staff, current, past, who have helped push this and and move this forward, and the members of the parks board, we've had a lot of discussion about it. So I'm glad to hear, fellow counselor who can appreciate the direction getting to this point because it was a little bit of a challenge to break out of the mindset of the playgrounds that
we have. I won't go on and on here, but what I will say is that I think I'm the only person on this council who moved to Northfield without having a job or having any affiliation of going to any of the colleges. We moved here, but we could have moved anywhere. And we moved here with a five month old with the anticipation of adding of growing our family, which we have. And one of the big things that we looked at was parks and places that we could see spending time with our children. And since we moved here ten years ago, the parks haven't really changed.
So I am very excited to see us add something new and, and and to diversify, if you will, our park, and our recreational space, play space for young, young kids and adults. For all who play. Right, Mr. Jacobson? Because I think that it's all connected and as we think about wanting to expand our tax base, wanting to have families here, want all of these things, we can't neglect our parks. And so I think it's very important. I'm glad to see us,
looking at using the the fund that we have started to put in place to be able to to upgrade and manage new, exciting, and innovative spaces. Thank you. Administrator Martig, would you like to jump in here? Thanks, mayor. Mister Jacobson convinced mister Bennett to give a deeper dive on bathroom discussions to bring you along even though the master planning was probably real in the weeds there. But I think it's helpful just because the numbers are hard to get your head around, and I would say too is that if somebody thinks they can find a more
cost effective way to do a public bathroom, as you can see, Bruce is trying to find as many options out there that people are looking at with quite a range. I just wanted to add, Mr. Bennett commented on a couple of things I was going to related to the bathroom locking. I think like the project sequence chart now is a good time even though it's early probably on that, but I think if we don't think about it, it's better to get it addressed now. So I appreciate bringing that out there. I think the answer is yes. There are electrical systems that don't have to be integrated with our Internet and into our overall door control systems. Photo, like, voltaic or timer options could be looked at.
But, also on the project that mister Bennett's referring to since I heard an audible gasp on a council person next to me on that cost, I do wanna remind the councilors that dollar amount that was quoted by mister Bennett is dramatically less than was on your consent agenda tonight related to our negotiation that we did with MetroNet. So dramatically lower. So if the public is thinking we're paying that number on that monthly fee, we brought that down in a lot of our locations. The transit hub is the most recent one. I believe that one also required an Internet connection related to our compliance with our
elevator system too. So that particular location was a number of reasons why we wanted to have some more automated door controls there. So I just wanted to add a little bit to that, but I think good discussion on that. Thank you. Other comments? Councilor Sohka. Thanks. Yeah. I'm it's really great to see this plan move along. I think the only thing I have to add to the bathroom discussion is, I don't think that $100,000 option is ugly. And and and, you know, to each their own,
but I'm just thinking about the, opportunities that we have in this town for public art and getting a blank building that could be covered in a mural is maybe a great opportunity to use some of those dollars that we set aside for that purpose. So, a, you know, a bathroom can just be a box if it then creates bathroom in a park that we don't have. Yeah. I think I'm trying to think because there's a porta potty there now. Correct? Yeah. And when I was a kid, that was my neighborhood park,
and we would just all the kids would go to the grocery store and use the bathroom, which is probably not cool with the grocery store. But there wasn't a bathroom there then either, so that would be a great location to eventually figure something out. Thanks. Alright. Councilor Beamer. I'd like to just sec second Councilor's soak up's thought process there. And I guess it's a question that popped into my head at that same point in time too. The $100,000, does that include the utility hookups,
the water the water and the sewer and the sewer hookup? Just for a single bathroom, though. For a single bathroom. But yeah. All in, it came with a con concrete splat, pad already. All they did was put a gravel. You know, it's a three season thing, so it's not heated and cooled or anything like that. But that was everything total, 100,000 for what you saw on the screen. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Well, I will I will add, a third voice to that. If a 100,000 can get us a bathroom in that park, I'm not opposed to that, moving forward in that direction.
I also like, that you brought us many options and that you brought us the option of having it without a roof. There are numerous, organizations I can imagine that might wanna help us, put a roof, if it means we can get, two stalls instead of one or, something that looks a little nicer perhaps. But, I think a bathroom at that location is pivotal for downtown for pickleball players for the other uses in the park. I really like that location, for a bathroom. And then going to the park design itself, I especially appreciate the stormwater design and the thought that was put into that.
It looks exceptional. And, also, in many European parks, the parks, they work the natural systems into the park. Whether you're on a mountainside or you're near water, that is part of the park. And so I really appreciate, that piece of it. So thank you very much. K. I think we're ready to vote. Alright. All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Those opposed? Motion carries. Thank you very much. Thanks very much. Okay. We're at seven twenty one. Would we like to take a break before we discuss? Can I just add one thing? Oh, yes, Councillor Nuss. Mr.
Bennett missed one important introduction when he was introducing mister Tussing. He's also been a member firefighter for Naffers for seventeen years. Mhmm. Yes. Yes. Right? I well, let let's take a break now because this next one has a little bit of length to it. Okay? We'll be back in Okay. We're going to reconvene and move on to our next item, which is to discuss services related to expiring residential waste hauling contract with DSI and upcoming proposal request.
And this is indeed Mr. Bennett. Yes. Mayor, members, council, like the mayor said, we are we've, our contract with DSI has been in place since 2012. So, it's been renewed and extended through amendments a couple times. So the contract, runs through the end of the year. So we're really we're ramping up the process to, go out for proposals for services, for our residents. So just a little bit on the timeline. We are at the Environmental Quality Commission in July. I'll share a little of their input, later in the meeting.
We're here tonight really just to kinda run through the service offerings and get any input as we prepare the the proposal request to go out and get hear from counsel. We have a hearing on the the proposal on September 9, and then we'd issue the RFP, in September. Really, the goal is to be back, later in November with a with a new contract in place. So just, we'll run through a little bit of the service offerings. So, weekly garbage service, we currently have biweekly recycling services. Within our current contract with DSI,
we do have an organics clause. It has not been activated where we could roll out citywide organics pickup. Currently, Northfield Curbside Compost has been a grassroots initiative that's operating in the city, and they've been, going out, getting not only residents, but they've been working with, some of the the businesses in town, working out at the the NCRC, with CAC. So really, helping not only on our residential side in our community too for organics diversion from the from the landfill.
Just a reminder. So when we did the last iteration of the amendment, we added the 20 gallon, container, option that wasn't available before to look at, opportunity to continue to try to look at diversion from the landfill. I'll have I add some numbers later that can, that came out in the supplemental memo. You can see how many customers have the different size carts. So we've got the 20 gallon tank, cart, the 35, the 64 gallon, and then the 96. And currently, with the biweekly recycling, we have had, we do offer the larger cart.
So if somebody's 64 gallon cart is full, the carts do they are supposed to be from Rice County. We do have some that DSI has helped provide through the community, on the Dakota County side, but then fill in too on some of the the cart availability. Had some availability issues with carts from Rice County. Other items in the we have the Christmas tree pickups. First two Mondays in January, we did add, and the last amendment to add the yard waste service. So it's it's on Monday's pickup.
We did not have that before, so that's been going very well. I I don't have that number in front of me, but I'm thinking we're six or 700 yard waste might be more customers that are have signed up for that program that runs mid April through November. We still have probably not utilized as much where they could, call if they bundle their brush. DSI would still come and pick that up. It's more of an on demand service. And same with the the yard waste bag tags. White goods. So your appliances and those sort of things are they follow the it's same as
the spring cleanup days, so the prices are laid out in the contract. And residents can call and they can pick them up, and those those amounts are fixed in the contract. Other items that kinda were add on services that DSI does provide. So, donating donation of trees for every ton 70 tons of recycling. They've added a scholarship for my environmental. So they give out a $500 scholarship either to a business or an individual. They share on some of the recycling reimbursements and then the the youth activities where
the proceeds go to local youth organizations, the the roll offs that are at family fair and come foods. This slide is out of our 2045 comprehensive plan. And I think when I when I get to the next slides, I think when we think about our contract, I think, this is obviously the hauling portion of it, a portion of it, but we can think about how we would wanna roll out our services to try to so, like, actually decrease total per capita municipal solid waste by 30% by 2030.
So we I can I'll show where we're at. It it seems like we've been pretty stagnant. I think I'd like to go back to when we have back data back to 2020. It'd be nice to go back when Northfield Curbside Compost initially started to kinda see some of that diversion of the organics to see if we can see that, amount of volume being reduced. 70% organics diversion from the landfill by 2030. I'm not gonna read all of them. I've just some increased recycling. So so some of the things like and I have questions later.
Should we should we go to weekly recycling? Should we initiate the organics program? So those are some of the poly policy type questions that we'll be that we'd like to hear from counsel on. So on this slide, I think I'll I'm gonna start at the bottom one. So in 2020, the per capita pounds was about £479 per capita. Now we have about roughly 5,000 garbage accounts. We have more utility accounts that, so just thinking about the ones now we're not doing apartments, the larger buildings, so we just had a high level.
We had to try to factor the per per capita. We jumped up in '21. We went down slightly in 2324, and then we kinda are back up to 509 pounds. So, all the all the loads get weighed when they go to the landfill, so we kinda know where we're at. We know how many customers we have, so we've been pretty stable, I would say. We're not really I think this would be something that'd be nice if we could see more of a continued decline in our per capita solid waste numbers. And then the upper the upper chart is so these are the 20 gallon containers.
So we have 286 customers with the 20 gallon, roughly 1,900 with the 35. A large majority, almost similar, I guess, to the 35 of the 64 gallon and then the 96 gallon of about 600. So I think, also, we can think about it in terms of when we think about establishing our rates and we think about our tiers and we think about the size of the structures. It's not just the the hauling service, but how we set the rates based on the container size and could maybe also play in terms of the diversion and trying to achieve the goals and the comprehensive
plan. When we went to the Environmental Quality Commission, they're they're generally supportive of the service offering. I think I think the they certainly would like to to see us continue to move towards our goals and our comprehensive plan. They did not they did not seem strong or have strong opinions about, the, like, mandatory in rolling out the compost citywide. I think with Northfield Curbside composting, they did not bring up any changes to that.
Some other things that we heard is, like, on our clean so so on our cleanup days, is there a way, like, some reuse or something could be added from other vendors also attending these events to try to some stuff can be recycled, maybe some stuff could be reused and try to repurpose and gather some get some of that stuff at some of the cleanup days to be reused so it's not going to the landfill. So that that was one thing that we we heard. I think that's something that we could easily work to try to have different vendors
potentially there with our whoever is with our hauler or our hauler try to coordinate having other vendors there to try to do some of that reuse type stuff with some of the items that potentially could be brought. The other item, from the the HRA or the staff from the HRA, I just wanted to to share about, do we think it would be possible to have one of the cleanup days be on the North Side of town? So we typically do two Saturdays. It's at our street maintenance facility. On the South, could we if we could partner and collaborate maybe with, like, the school because you're gonna need a a larger parking lot.
We make sure we can queue vehicles to maybe do one on the North Side of town. Even though most people that are going to the van are driving a vehicle, so it's not that much further to drive down there, but certainly something that we could explore. I think they wanted to illustrate and highlight just some of the the the pilot program that they did at Viking Terrace And Floralas where they they they cover the cost, but they had those cleanup days there. They worked with DSI, to have dumpsters there to coordinate that cleanup with volunteers, and those were some of the the costs of the of the event related to
the disposal of the items. I'll just maybe run through high level policy feedback or any general feedback from counsel. But, biweekly recycling, I think what we've heard from, DSI and, Jeff Wiese. He's the director of sales. He's here too, so we can have it. So, like, we have very few that we think that their recycle bin is overburdened weekly where they need to do it. And some of those cases, we've offered the 96 gallon as the as an option. So, the spring cleanup, should we look at a north site if we can work out a location? Maybe it's at a church or at the school,
something to figure out. I think it it doesn't have to be in the contract, but we could work with the vendor, or with our hauler related to seeing if we can get other reuse type vendors or people that do pick up, like, the junk and try to not just take it to landfill, but maybe try to repurpose it and reuse it. And then continue the the voluntary yard waste program, not make that mandatory or just continue as a voluntary sign up. And then citywide co organic, so we can continue to have that clause,
or it could be, council could initiate it and have it be rolled out citywide, within our our hauler contract. So that would be an item that staff would would like to hear from the council on and any other items. So that's that's really all I have tonight. I let's see. I do have a comment and a clarification on one of the slides, but, well, I guess it would be starting the council questions then. So I would like to clarify, if you'd go back to the EQC slide, that I was at the EQC meeting. Also, Matt Roan was at the EQC meeting,
and he sent us all an email. This slide does not accurate accurately express what either Matt or I experienced at the EQC meeting. And we also have a, handout from Curbside Compost, who was also at the EQC meeting. And I think one of the reasons they shared this, update with us was because they they didn't get to finish their public comment and because one EQC counselor made some incorrect statements, old statements about curbside compass that are no longer relevant. So I had asked to have this pulled,
from the agenda. So, I don't know. It's here now. It's in the record. But I my, take, having been present at the meeting, they they were not asked any of the policy questions the way we were being asked tonight. There was a presentation, and then there were a few, comments. So, I just wanted to share my, experience at the EQC meeting. Mister Martig, did you were? No. I think that's helpful, Mayor. I was gonna make one comment too, and I know I had a little pre meeting preparation that the mayor might be ready to facilitate, this maybe after the question period. But one other item that was discussed,
I think, related to the alternate site on the North side of town was even if you go to the NCEC, I think based on the, some of the mobile home park work, even if it's at that location, I think some people in the area might still struggle with being able to get things there because they might need trailer help and some of that kind of a thing. So I think there might be an opportunity to try and look at other ways to help people in need related to the transportation to the site, maybe as an outside option, maybe from the contract that there might not need to be a separate location based
on the public worksite. If we can find a way to maybe help people who don't have maybe the equipment to get it down, there might be a better solution because they might still have equal challenges getting it to the NCEC site even if you had it in that location. But, that was one other potential discussion item, I think, related to the policy. Right. So we'll continue yes. And so I'm thinking when we get to the policy questions, we'll do it more work session style. And if we don't have an obvious consensus, if it looks like we're split on something, then we can, take a motion on that item.
So we'll do the questions, take public comment, and then we'll then we'll go through the policy questions. How does that sound? And if we need a motion as we're going through the policy questions, we'll take one at that point. So other questions on, the report from staff? Counselor Holmes. Yeah. Mister Bennett, I think you gave these numbers, but I just wanna be clear. Did do we have a number of people who participate with the yard waste? Let me see if I can find it. Okay. I think I think it's it's less than a thousand. I think we're in the 700 Okay.
Number, but I can look to see if I can I don't need, I mean, just estimate is fine too? And, while you're hope this doesn't distract too much, when we look at the strategic plan and the decrease in waste and the diversion of organics, are those based on 2024 numbers? Are they, like, 3070% of twenty twenty four numbers or are low? Because especially as we look at the how the waste has maybe even increased over the past four years. Is it trying to get to lower than where our lowest has been?
Or Mayor Smith, that's a good question. I have to go back to the the comp plan. It might have came out of the the climate action plan under the waste section Okay. That got kinda rolled into the into the comprehensive plan. So that was a core area is was the waste, but certainly something we could look into. I think it'd be be nice to have, like, Minnesota averages, national averages per pound capita to do also see that comparison too, but don't have that information. Thank you. Councilor Peterson White.
Could you flip back to the chart that shows that one? Thank you. I was trying to do some math on this bottom bar chart when we flipped slides, and then I couldn't find it. So when I when I first looked at this bar chart, I thought, wow. That's a huge amount of variation. But then I realized that, the chart itself is pretty misleading in the way that it's laid out. I know it's not intentionally misleading, but, can you just confirm for me that I'm thinking about this right? That the the bottom 400 pounds are missing from this chart.
Right? Yeah. So 400 that yeah. The 400 is missing. So this is just yeah. So that it's kind of a condensed or it's kinda yeah. Really I mean, you're really looking at 30 pounds. Like, 30%. 30 pounds. Yeah. Not a very big variation in years from a percentage perspective. Right. My, like, back of the envelope math is that this shows maybe, like, a 3% deviation from the mean over this five year period. So I'm I guess my question is, first of all, next time, can we have a bar chart that's easier to read and make meaning out of?
Second of all, my question is, is are there sort of I mean, I don't I don't really have any sense of, I mean, obviously, if our if our goal is to reduce our solid waste to zero, then a three percent variation is way too small. But also that bump from 2023 to 2024 is not as concerning as it looks on this chart. Is there among other municipalities that have similar goals, are there is that a big variation or a small variation, that 3%? Is it should we be trying to make some meaning out of that? Or, if we looked back farther,
would it would there be more change? I'm trying to figure out, like, how to kind of why this chart is here and what I am to how I should apply this information to the decision making. There was it was one item that came up at the Environmental Quality Commission to, like, how are we doing? Where are we at? So we we went back five years, with some of the we had some intern staff here helping out to go pull the data and look back at the landfill weights and try to see where we're at. I think a high at a high level, I think what it what it the trend is not down.
You know, it's pretty you know, the 3% variance. But if you wanna get to, like, the 70%, I think what it's just illustrating is, like, we're not seeing over the last five years, like, we're not stepping down. So, like, if you if you wanna have a goal of of in five years to be at 70% reduction, then we're probably gonna need to think about how we make a different change in our program and offering to really drive a change in habits of people. And Yes. So the solid waste,
this includes just garbage, not recycling. Correct? Correct. So I think I would like to know how the recycling has effectively shifted. And, I mean, this isn't necessarily relevant to our decision making today. But if our larger goal is to reduce the community solid waste generation by 70%, then, clearly, we do need to be thinking about some strategies because it's we're not moving the needle much here, at least over five years. But I would like to know what the reality looks like with recycling. What I recall from the last time we negotiated this contract also is that some
of the feedback we got from the hauler from DSI was that Northfield has the highest rate of wish cycling of any community they serve. Wish cycling, for those of you who weren't there for that meeting, is when people put things in their recycling that they wish were recyclable but which are not. And so I I, you know, I think that, if we're trying to get people to change their behavior, then I wanna know that we have the right tools in place. And that if people are being more realistic about their recycling, and therefore, our solid waste is going up a couple percentage points because people are wish cycling less because they're more educated about what they can recycle.
Maybe that's a dynamic here. I'm again, maybe this isn't a place to talk about this, but, I just wanna make sure if we're if we're talking about data that we're drawing the meaning from it that we that we can and should to inform our decision making. Thank you. Thank you. Councilor Ness. Thank you. Is it possible to get the number of garbage accounts from 2020? Because if it went up by even 30, that's one pound per person, and there's your 30 points. Yeah. And, Mary, we'd have to dig into the data more and really look at the utility accounts.
What we did for this is high level. We we we use really, demographic information to do an estimate on how the growth has changed from a population based over the last five years, and then it was back calculated to figure it out. So, certainly, if we could get into the data on how the account number of accounts change per year, something we could look into. Other questions? Okay. Public comment. We do have mister Wiest here from DSI. Oh, it's on now. Oh, now you should've asked. They turned it on. Good?
Yep. Good. Good afternoon. Jeff Wiese, director of sales with Dick's Sanitation. Couple of things I just wanted to touch base on the RFP is that the one thing is I think that for a long time, Dick's Sanitation has been a good partner with the city in Northfield. I think we've shared responsibilities in a lot of areas, and we look to continue to share those, partnerships with the city. The one thing I'm a little leery of is when you do go out for an RFP, there can always be somebody cheaper. Doesn't mean it's apples to apples and doesn't mean that the values are there. Right?
So a couple of things I wanted to touch base on after hearing the conversation is weights. I can tell you we've been struggling for probably the last six months with understanding other areas because, a route maybe doesn't change. The same volume is there and our weights are up. And we've been scratching our own head for six months going, why is our disposal so high? What's going on? And the only thing right now that we can think of is with all the rain. We don't know, but we're scratching our own heads in some other areas, not just Northfield. Another thing I wanted to touch base on is recycling.
We have cities that have mandated weekly recycling, and we had those same cities prior to weekly recycling. Their volumes have not changed. It's negligible. One thing Dick sent, we've provided, I think, 750 or 800, Dave, 95 gallon carts for residents of Northfield. That Rice County doesn't have 95 gallon carts. They only go up to 60 fives. Actually, they've been pretty shy on having carts, period. So we've provided those for residents, which, I think is a big big item because that resident who maybe had a 60
now has a 90, so they can put more of the recycling into that container, and it's not going in the garbage. You know, I I think that's a big piece of where we're going. So You if you have another comment, you can Yeah. Go ahead. As far as the HRA and the cleanups, so Dick's in the past worked with the city staff. City staff actually came up with some great ideas. We did cleanups at the Florillas And Viking Terrace. It worked out great to help people that couldn't get they actually had volunteers with pickups and took stuff out of people's homes,
and, we actually ended up working later just because of the volume. The first year we did it, it was crazy. Every year it got better since then. So I would encourage something like that again highly. And I guess I just wanna make sure that when you're looking at this that you value the partnerships that we've had for a long term. Thank you. Councilor Peterson White. Can I just ask a question? Yes. Mister Weiss, could you stand for a question, please? Not so fast. Yes. I just wanna clarify. So you're saying that communities that you serve that have mandatory weekly recycling. So everybody I mean,
when you say it's mandatory, that means people have to have the bin. But it's we're not talking about, like, in California where you get a fine if you put your recycling in the trash. Correct. So, we have to drive by their house weekly. Mhmm. It doesn't mean the container's out. Right. And even if it is, doesn't mean that there's more material in there. Okay. But those community am I right that what I heard you say is that those communities that have mandatory weekly recycling, meaning people have to have a bin, have not seen the same increases? We have seen negligible change. In those communities? In those communities.
Very small. So what's your interpretation of that fact? I think a lot of it too is also having to do with volume of materials. If you look at any water bottle today versus, excuse me, over years ago, it's lighter. A lot of the things that you are recycling are also different. I I think there's a lot of changes. The economy, certainly, people are getting less packages to their house at this time. You in the past, you had a lot of cardboard boxes. Now a lot of that stuff's coming in a plastic bag. So there's a lot of little things that are affecting the bigger picture.
And I will tell you, I would I would encourage anybody on staff to go by, Bridge Square and look at the recycling bin, and then we'll talk about Wish cycling. Seriously. Oh, I have one of those bins in front of my business. I'm well aware. Yeah. Would you comment? Would anybody else like to ask mister Weiss a question? Mister Ness. Yes. I know several years ago when you were here, you said that if you offered the organics pickup, it would need to be in one of the large Parts. Cards. Yes. K. And that's still true? That'd be our preferred safety is a core value with us.
And, you know, getting out of the truck Pickup. To pick up, we can go by with an arm. And that person that's driving that truck is not getting out. We have cameras in every one of our trucks. That person's not getting out of the, truck with a potential for safety or other issues. So yes. But we would love to be able to provide that. We've worked with David in the past to make sure that, you know, this was part of the contract, and we talked about it and said, hey. I we highly encourage it. Let's get the ball rolling. If it gets to a number, then then we could take it over or or at least review it.
Right? Yeah. Do you do you have any, estimations on cities that you do this service? Does their waste how how much does their waste reduction drop? So that's such a, hard one to answer just for the fact that, you know, like Hennepin County and some of these areas that just rolled out carbon, organics. We haven't seen a lot of change. The people that want organics are are doing the right thing already. So to force organics on some other people that maybe don't want it, it it hasn't been a good solution so far from what I've seen.
Councilor Holmes. Just a question on organics and yard waste. If you were to do organics, would it be a fourth bin, or would it be organics in with yard waste? Great question. I guess member of Holmes. So in the past, I actually we were we were able to be fortunate enough in another city to do a commingled with yard waste and organics. However, the processing facilities, today will not do it that way. And I think you're gonna see more change with organics in the way things are done in the future. Not saying it couldn't happen, but at this time, I have not been able or Dick's sanitation,
we have not been able to get that approved. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Counselor Peterson White. Oh, same question. Okay. And I'd say, you know, adding the yard waste that was carded, David, we pretty much took a guess of a 100 people when we started, and I think we're at about seven eighty, right now. And that's been a big benefit. Right? And and, you still have an awful lot of people that bring it to their own compost site or backyard composting, but it's been a big benefit for a lot of residents. Thank you. Oh, councilor Nez. Does our yard waste currently go to our
yard waste site, or does it go somewhere else? I I believe it does go to your yard waste site. Goes to our compost site? Yeah. Yeah. Thank you very much. Okay. Anything additional from staff hearing upon hearing that? I see six fifty yard waste containers on our numbers. Okay. That's fantastic. It's one of my favorite things. Fill it up every week. So okay. So we've finished with, council questions, public comment, more questions. I'm not going to request a motion. I'm going to move through these policy questions. And if we need a motion, we will make one.
So let's start off with the biweekly recycling. I think we'll have to take these one at a time. If you are if you do you want to would you be in favor of continuing what we currently have? Yes or no. If not, what would you prefer? Councillor Ness? What we currently have, and Mr. Reese said that it doesn't affect amount of stuff recycled. Thank you. Councillor Peterson White? I think on this first question, I I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other.
I think if I it it still seems unclear to me whether mandatory weekly recycling would increase people's recycling or just increase wish cycling. My household generates a lot of recycling, and we rarely run out of space every other week. I have a family of five. I'm sure there are larger households with more boxes than we have. But, I'm I'm still open on this question. I'm eager to hear what my colleagues have to say. Thank you. Councilor Soukup. I'm I'm curious kind of what weekly recycling would do to rates. If it didn't affect rates a lot,
I'd be more curious about it. But, I've there's four adults in my household, and we've generated a lot of recycling, But we've also just come up with creative solutions to get everything to fit. So I think I'm in favor, but that's a really, you know, small sample set. So I'm I'm also curious what others think. Alright. Thank you. Counselor Holmes. Yeah. I think what I'm struck with with, I think, all of these questions, it's not unlike some of the other issues we've had lately, is what problem are you trying to solve for? And, like, we're just looking at solutions.
Right? I I mean, I feel like what we're hearing is this might not, you know, doing weekly hasn't had the impact on in other communities. So so I guess I just kinda go back to, okay. Well, what are we gonna solve for? And what and what is the solution that will actually that will actually drive these things that we want in the comp plan? Because I'm feeling like it's not coming from this to, like, this contract tonight. I mean, I I just feel like that's not gonna be what's gonna move things. So I think that I I just wanna, like, put that out there in with this.
And I don't I don't know if I feel I have two recycling bins. Because I moved into a house that was a duplex when I moved in, and we still have two. We fill them up. Even sometimes it's like two weeks is not enough. And we need we need to empty more. But so and we're we're not wish cyclers. We're actually, but I know. Right? But I also came from Seattle where you would get a fine if you had, you know, we had to be very, intentional about what we put where. So I don't know. I think I'm probably okay with bi I don't know.
I've I'm not one way or the other on this one. Say, I think it's more about education, maybe for all of these. Thank you. Yeah. So I mean, one reason to go through these is to help, frame the RFP. So, councilor Dolan. I echo councilor Holmes on everything except the two bin problem, and, I just would go with the status quo. Councilor Beamer. I would love to see it picked up weekly. I have a 96 gallon, and I'm often finding myself smashing that thing like crazy. Maybe even chance to witness me jumping inside of it to get it to jump down.
Do you sell tickets for that event? For you. Sure. But I mean, one of the things that I I I mean, if people are running out of room even with a 96 gallon, they're not likely to take it to a different location to get rid of it, you know, like the cardboard drop offs and stuff like that. So I would venture to say it ends up in the trash can if there's a room in the trash can. So, you know, going to a weekly pickup would hopefully help prevent that, especially if we're, you know, looking at trying to reduce our waste.
Question on that number one. Sure. Councilor Ness. Is it possible for somebody to request a second bin that's staying at biweekly, but they have two bins. Do we know if that's an option, mister Bennett? We'd have to explore that to see if that's a possibility. So currently, Rice County provide Rice County actually pays the recycling fee directly to our hauler. Now if we went to weekly, I don't think Rice County is not gonna change their fees. So I I would just see, like, we'd have an added hauling fee that would be part of our contract.
Mhmm. I just don't see the county picking up that that fee. Thank you. Okay. Administrator Marting, I will hold my comment. Are you sure? Yeah. I can wait. No. I'm Just a minor thing and maybe that was covered too, but another thing I think related to, like, our climate goals is having the vehicles less on the streets and the I don't know if there's really much additional wear and tear, but factoring some of those things in might be part of the consideration. That was my comment. So it's fine. So I am strongly in favor of only what we currently have because of the
vehicle miles traveled. These are even though I know some of them are gas. I don't think all of the ones we are all of them natural gas? Many of them? Okay. But it's wear and tear on the roads. So I'm strongly in favor of current status. So I need to know from staff since we have, like, three in favor of twice a month, couple people who are open, and one strong every week. Do you need a motion for what you should put in the RFP? No. I think I got general direction.
Okay. Okay. Thank you. Alright. Number two is spring cleanup. So should should we try to locate an a north drop off-site for the Saturdays in May? I'm curious about this as a policy question because in the past, it was hired by our or handled by the HRA. So, when I was on the HRA, we paid for this and, managed it as, something for, to support folks in those, lower power housing options? So, Mayor, I think this would be our spring so,
like, the HRA ran those separate programs with volunteers that did the the Viking Terrace and Florellas. But if we wanted to take one of those Saturdays that we have at our street maintenance facility and move it to a northern site, so we do it two Saturdays. So that would be separate really from that Viking Terrace item. So this would be just our general spring cleanup days. I think we probably would still wanna work with the HRA or even think about a strategy to assist with Mhmm. Some of that cleanup still. Certainly, there's definitely a need there. Okay.
Wow. Councilor Peterson White, and then we'll go to councilor Nuss. Do we I again, I come back to councilor Holmes' question. What problem are we trying to solve here? Have we heard feedback from people that they find it difficult to get to the street maintenance shop, or is there is there public opinion or feedback of some kind driving this? I I understand the concept, but it's also not that big a town. And I also wonder, I'm interested in knowing if it would require additional staff time and other additional costs to create two different
sites or to do it really anywhere other than the maintenance facility? If are we saving money by doing it at our own property and staff time as well or not necessarily? Mayor must there there'll be some I I don't think there's gonna be a drastic cost increase because we still staff it. On the events on Saturday, we do have staff there. We have in our contract with DSI, they have to have staff there. They have to be there to help with that too. So I think it'd probably be very similar. I think we just have to you know,
when the bins get empty, they just have to be there'd probably be a cost to relocate them to to the North site if we did it the next Saturday, like, on the North Side of in terms of the problem we're trying to solve, I still you know, it came from, the staff related to with the HRA. And I think I don't have a good understanding if it's still trying to solve the Viking Terrace and Floralas, and I don't know. I think that's still, I don't think that's really gonna solve the north drop off-site issue. But other than just providing a north drop off I think that's like a separate issue,
a separate item that we have to work on with the HRA. So I don't know if it's gonna solve the issue. No. Most people are in their vehicles anyway. They just have to just drive a little bit further. So Question from councilor Ness. In that, in his answer was the answer to my question. Okay. Great. So Thank you. Do we need, to move one of the spring drop off sites? We'll start councilor Ness. I would say no. Counselor Peterson White. I agree. I don't think that it's worth the extra complexity work and possibly money to do
two separate locations. However, if if there is a separate problem we're trying to solve here related to, and I you know, as a former community organizer in rural communities around poverty issues, the question of how to dispose of things like mattresses is huge in, for people who are struggling to make ends meet in our community. And, we absolutely should do more to make that easier for people. And there would be many community benefits to doing that as anyone who cruises Facebook to see the pictures of things that get dumped in various places because people can't
afford to dispose of them otherwise would know. But I don't think this is the solution to that problem. So I don't think we need to do it. Thank you. Councilor Soukup. Yeah. I would agree with with that. If the North drop off-site, I guess I'll just say I I really wanna make sure we're we're as a city still working with either at this level or the HRA level of still organizing that yearly pickup that happens specifically at Viking Terrace And Floralas. It doesn't seem like beyond that,
a North drop off-site makes a whole lot of sense. Thank you. Councilor Holmes. I would agree with those things in terms of not needing the North drop off-site, but emphasis on helping, Fluellas and, Viking Terrace. Councilor Dolan? I'll take I'll take the same position. Thank you. Councilor Beamer? I don't think we need to move it, but I'm gonna just toss an idea out there. Maybe we those HRA coordinated ones, maybe the city would help pitch in on that and
open those dates to anybody else that is in the area since both of those areas are on the North Side of town and might help solve some everybody wins. Yeah. Thank you for that additional feedback. That's appreciated. Same I also don't feel that it's necessary the way it's outlined here in terms of leaving one in the southern end and making one in the North. Leave them both in the southern end, but we definitely need to address, and pick up, pick back up those, events that we were doing in Viking's Viking and florillas.
So that brings us to item number three. Also at the EQC meeting, there were some reuse vendors present who were interested in, having an option to work with the city on those spring cleanup days. So that's our third policy question is, is there interest in working with reuse vendors at spring cleanup days? That only makes sense. The more you have of those, the less goes in the landfill. Thank you. Councilor Peterson White. I agree wholeheartedly. And if you'll indulge me,
I have one other idea about spring cleanup while we're still talking about spring cleanup, which is that one thing that might, facilitate the use of that the resource of those two days for people, who might not have the resources to get things there would be to see if maybe Northfield chairs or some other community group would be interested in, organizing some volunteers with big trucks who could just help people get things, just make a few extra trips, since that is a huge barrier for people. If you I mean, I wouldn't have a big enough vehicle to haul a mattress. And if I needed to do that and,
probably a lot of people don't either. But we certainly have a lot of people driving around town in really big trucks who could maybe use them to help their neighbors. Yes. Thank you. Counselor Soka. Yeah. I just second everything that's been said so far. Okay. Thank you. Counselor Holmes? Great. Counselor Dolan? Okay. And councilor Riemer? Yep. Great. I I think yes. I also agree, that we should work with reuse vendors. I think, Bloomington does this really well, and I think this is the wave of the future. I have heard that from DSI at,
the Ramswana meetings that, they will be hauling less waste in the future and dealing more with reuse. So, awesome. Alright. Yard waste, continue with our current voluntary sign up for yard waste. We yeah. Concert us. Seems to me like it's working. Just as an example, our townhome association has been signed up for that for quite some time. We have one bin and 10 individual property owners who share the bin. So You need another bin. Oh, okay. Councilor Peterson White.
I love my yard waste bin. It's one of my favorite things about living in Northfields. I think it's such a great addition to our services, and, I don't think we should really change anything about it unless we find more opportunities to educate people about the availability of it because I think it's just so convenient and lovely and also reduces, vehicle trips to the compost site. Yeah. Councilor Soukup. Yeah. Same. I we, in my household, have a constant debate about adding a yard waste bin. I am the no, and then I am jealous
of my neighbor who has a yard waste bin. So, I'm I'm very happy to support other people's yard waste bin opportunities in town. Thank you. Counselor Holmes. I support it, and I just will call out, I think, on the education too because if my math is correct, if I went off of all the people who have solid waste bins, we only have about 14% of people who have a yard waste bin. So I feel like there's a there's a lot of people who can get on board and experience the amazingness of having a yard waste bin.
Counselor Dolan. As someone who used to go to the compost site, traversing the rail track is no small matter when it's a busy train season. So I really have appreciated the biweekly pickup of yard waste. Weekly. Sorry. I did say biweekly. Thank you. Weekly. And we'll all Thank you. Councilor Beamer? I would say we just kinda leave it as a voluntary sign up. I, unlike, councilor and me, I would like to have it, but my wife, on the other hand, is the one who says no.
I can drive to Heckler. So, I would say we keep it we keep it as as voluntary. So Yes. Thank you. Well yeah. I was gonna say that that, like, there's there's something here. I also love my yard waste bin. It allows me to chunk my yard work when I do enough yard work to fill the bin, and that's how much yard work I do every week. So, then I'm done. So That's great. Right? Gives me a starting and a stopping point. So, yes, love that. We have a number five question.
I'm gonna warn you, I have a number six question, which is about, the dollar amounts we we, charge per cart because that is one thing that came up at the EQC that is not on the list is should we incentivize people switching to a smaller cart? So that'll be my question number six. But question number five is about citywide organic. Should we mandate citywide organic collection? And so we'll start off with. Mandate, no. I like the system that is in place, and I would not want another cart in my garage that would hold organics.
I love the it's a five gallon pail. So I would leave that the same. Can I ask a follow-up question? Because I think what we have in the, I don't know if it's in the comp plan, is an opt out option where we would say we are engaging with someone for citywide pickup, and people would have the option to opt out is what we're thinking contract wise versus keeping up what we have and an opt out option. I like what we have.
Okay. Thank you. Counselor Peterson White. Sorry. I was taking notes. I I like my five gallon bucket, but I almost always run out of space in it, except in, like, January when there is nothing fresh to eat. But, we I but I I'm concerned about going from that to a huge bin and not being able to combine it with yard waste. It just seems like a lot of wasted space. That's a lot of bin sitting by my driveway. It's a lot of space taken up on the street with all those bins, which already are hard enough for me to find space for because there's a lot
of street parking in my neighborhood. I think there are some challenges there. I'm eager to see sort of the next phase of organics collection in which hopefully we could combine household organics with yard waste. I'm not opposed to including this if it is the opinion of my colleagues and the opinion of the EQC that we should do that. I certainly don't think it would be a negative, but I also I think we've heard from our provider that they're unsure that it's effective if mandated
and that uptake is not high, even if it's mandated, unless we go sort of the California direction and start finding people, which I think is pretty far from where we're at today. I am interested in proposals from the other provider who is currently Northfield Compost, which is currently doing curbside compost pickup because it does seem like they might be able to do it without a whole bunch of new giant plastic bins in town. I'm eager to hear what the rest of you think. Councilor Soukup. I like, the idea of staying with what we have for now with people using curbside compost.
However, I'm really interested in in eventually going into more of an opt out mode. I really like how to see how much how how many people in town are supporting, small local business and that they, you know, use bikes to collect the compost and, are trying to set up a composting site, locally, which will also reduce, the emissions it takes to bring all the compost to the composting site. So I'm I'm really curious to see how their model is changing,
in the immediate future and how, we might be able to continue to support that with the five gallon buckets. There was one other point I wanted to make, and I'm forgetting I'm forgetting it. I'm sorry. Well, we can come back to you if you Okay. Comes back to you. Thanks. Counselor Holmes. Yeah. I think I'm similar to counselor soak up more in terms of going with what we have. I wouldn't be opposed to something bigger. And I think to get to 70% diversion of organics, we're get that's gonna take a lot.
And I would given you know, we just got this information today from, curbside compost. So I'm interested in understanding what where they're heading and and what they're doing and especially thinking of supporting a local business who is already doing this. And I think that was I love the yard waste bin, but I think also curbside compost is probably one of my favorite things, because I think I I am not into mandating it so much in so much as I don't want people to resent it. I want them to see how easy it is and what an impact it can
have in removing this stuff from, from their solid waste. So incentivizing more if we can, maybe it is the opt out, but I just think that there's optics and things around that in terms of mandating it, that might run against us and what we were trying to achieve. So, so I think for now, I'm interested in just kind of maintaining what we have and helping support the growth that curbside compost is looking to build. Councilor Dolan. Maybe this is why I sit next to Councilor Holmes.
I agree with everything. And I would just add that we need to hear more from Northfield Curb Compost about their economics and look forward to hearing that information. Councilor Beamer? I'll keep it short and just leave it as is. Okay. So if we leave it as is, we won't hear from curbside compost. I will just write say that because it will remain part of the overall contract RFP. So if we wanna hear from curbside compost, we need to, I would just call it, modularize the organics portion so it's biddable on its own.
So if I and I think that's what I I favor. And so I'd also if you can correct me if I, misspeak. So I, favor the opt out for citywide and having that biddable separately from the rest of the RFP. That way, we're throwing the weight of the city education, the city branding, marketing behind whoever gets that opt out citywide, bid. If we leave it the same, the whoever does it wouldn't have that behind them.
Mister Martig, do you want to, you know, extrapolate? May I ask Yeah. So I would say the we the RFP would probably be structured where it is it is a nonactivated clause in the contract. And we'd make them aware that based on feedback, it it's a we're not rolling out the citywide, but we have the opportunity in the contract period to initiate it, and then things would probably continue to operate how they've been operating. Or that's that's probably one way.
The other way is to to consider, like, the separation and and moving to, you know, another you'd almost have two haulers. One that's I mean, it's not they're the one hauler is not doing everything then. Now you'd have another another contract that would go out just specifically for organics. And it wouldn't be I have to think about that because that wouldn't be a it wouldn't be a citywide service too. So you I might have to just check with legal on that if we're not rolling out a full citywide service as just an optional clause. If it would just be all I don't know how many haulers just wanna haul
organics, but certainly something that we'd have to probably explore and flush out a little bit more. We know of one. But, obviously, we know of one. Does and has been in contact with the city for a while. So, I'm a little I guess, yeah, I was under the impression that it was a possibility to mod you know, modularize this. Same thing with other reuse haulers at our spring cleanup days. How will we know which reuse haulers wanna work with us on spring cleanup days if that's not an option within the RFP?
We we would add that add context around having that as part of the RFP. I think it gets back to organized solid waste. So what like, back when the statutes change, we the statutes change in, like, 2013 or '14. So we had organized collection before that. So there's different provisions in the statutes related to the organized so the organization of the collection. And then if we're if it's if we split off part of the contract. So I think I would just wanna get a little bit further clarity from our
attorney on on that if we're splitting portions out and then gonna I mean, I think one thing that's happened is Northfield Curbside Compost compost, which has been great, they've been successful, and they've grown so much that there there could be appetite, when we put proposals out from other haulers for consideration just because of the volume that they're doing. Right. So will will it be clear that they can bid for just that? That's my big question. If we separate it, if we did a totally separate contract. I mean,
they could bid on the current contract too as a proposal to do all the services that are provided in the trash, the recycling, if they wanted to do that. But we'd have to probably module we'd have to do a separate contract just to pull out the organics if we wanted to have it separate. Were you raising your hand, administrator Marte? Yeah. I think there sounds like there's some interest there, so it might pose a question to mister Bennett. Do you think we have time that if we the staff research the organics question, which I I think it's likely that if we did that opt out option,
it would probably be a separate piece. Could we do a little research to come back? And then in the meantime, that might give curbside compost to have some more engagement related to that because I'm sensing tonight that there might be some interest, but we might not have enough information to keep this piece moving along. Hold on. Mister Bennett has Mayor, management council, I think we can certainly explore that if we were to pull that provision out, and what what that would look like in terms of a timeline and a process to issue a separate RFP for just
the organics. Counselor Dolan. I just have a question for I'm not sure who. It seems like if we extend the monopoly to organics collection, then does that remove Northfield Curb Compost from doing a private contract with me where I pay them? Yes. Because we would have the we would we would have one contract citywide, so there would not be another hauler. Yeah. We would yeah. Yeah. They would lose the the they would lose their ability, yes. Councillor Dolan? So that means that right now,
they're under contract with the city. They have some license from the city that does that expire, this curb compost Northfield curb compost license to do what it's doing now expire on a certain date? Mayor, members of council. So I would say they're they're probably in the gray as a grassroots initiative startup, and they they're just a licensed hauler providing the the organics. Because we haven't initiated the clause in the contract. If we were to initiate it, they would no longer be hauling, and we would have DSI haul. Counselor Ness.
Question. Given the current process of chipping and shredding the the yard waste branches right now, it just seems to me that commingling that with organics would not work given how those chips are currently being used. Yeah. Mayor Misko. I think operating the compost facility when you call like, start commingling, there's there's a lot of steps and process and regulations related to that. So I think we would have to do a lot more exploration.
I don't think our our site certainly isn't set up to take on, like, the those type of organics. Councilor Peterson might It seems clear from all the feedback that it's not in the near future gonna be practical to commingle household organics with yard waste. I just wanna chime in and say I think, the, Curbside Composting Cooperative has done so much to grow the culture of curbside composting in Northfield and probably get a lot of people in this town composting who might not have otherwise. And I it's a homegrown local business.
It's a cooperative business model, which I think is incredible and great for our community. And I think, I would like to see us put in an RFP that allows this organization to bid for curbside composting services for citywide organics collection if, as a council, we agree that we want a proposal for citywide organics collection, insofar as that is legal to do, to put an RFP out in that way. Obviously, if there are legal barriers to that, then we shouldn't do it. But, I, I think that, my biggest questions about moving forward at this time with citywide organics collection is
balancing the added cost for residents with the likely increased participation that we may or may not see, depending on how the model works. And, I have some reservations about the five gallon buckets at every household. I know I also just got done saying I don't want, like, a 60 gallon bin for my household organics. I don't. But, but I think for many, many households that are not currently composting their organics curbside, the five gallon bucket is gonna be a challenge. It's not so easy to use. It gets holes in it.
If you don't put the lid on tight enough, the raccoons come. There are many challenges with that for the community. And thinking about deploying that as the as the receptacle community wide, I think, is probably not, to be honest, gonna win a lot of new friends for curbside composting, if that's people's idea of what it has to be for people who have not done it yet. So just to whatever our bidding situation is, to those who might bid, I would say, I would like to see proposals that are provide some kind of intermediate container that
is extremely user friendly. And I know the five gallon buckets have many advantages as outlined in this white paper that we have. But they are not user friendly enough, in my opinion, for people who are not currently composting. Sometimes they're not user friendly enough for me even though I still use them. So, I, that's my very specific feedback about this. And, I but I think it would be a shame if we got hung up and ended up not offering this service because we, aren't sure what the container should be.
On the other hand, I think it would be equally a shame if we mandate curbside organics collection as part of everyone in the city's contract, but then do it in such a way that people really hate it. So, I hope we can we can really dig into the nuance of this and what and learn as much as we can about what has been effective in other communities so that we can make this, really feel like, some people's favorite thing about living in Northfield rather than something they don't like about living in Northfield. Thanks. Yeah. Where would you like us to go from here?
I think we can just come back with some more info related to the proposal on the organics, and how that clause would work or if we do it separately. It's kind of an inactive clause that we're not really activating. So, like, we haven't had another organics caller come to the door and knock and say, we wanna participate, and we wanna get our own bins out and compete against curbside compost because you have not initiated that service. Nobody's come to the to the door to ask to provide that service. So it may they just may be the company that provides that service because they've
started it up and have built a relationship. But so so I think that's something that we can bring back if we wanna have a bid citywide organics option. Even I I'm just struggling if we're not gonna initiate it, but we have the clause and how that what that really means if we pull that out and actually put it out of for a proposal to bid and it's and we're not gonna roll it out citywide. So I think I need to do a little bit more research on that. Alright. Does anyone want to, chime in on the amounts that we charge per the different cart sizes? K. Counselor Ness. Haven't thought enough about it.
Don't know. Thank you. Counselor Peterson White? I I can certainly, there are obvious reasons to differentiate prices. But I also think that to live in a small household is privileged. And, to live in a household that doesn't generate, say, a lot of disposable diapers is also privileged. And, so there might be some kind of incentives working at cross purposes with our desire to be inclusive. And, you know, if we're really if we're aggressively incentivizing people to have a much smaller trash bin, we are creating an advantage that only certain people in the community can access is
what I'm saying. So, unless we're providing a way to counterbalance that, then I have some reservations about it. I also wanna say that as a retailer who thinks a lot about pricing, I think the, where is it? Where is the price? $91.81 is the weirdest price I've ever heard for anything. That's the annual rate for a yard waste bin. As a retailer, I just wanna say if people are willing to pay $91.81, they're probably willing to pay maybe $94.99, $99.99. Maybe we could make it $89,
something just a little more. Like, I don't know why it's $91.81. If someone can give me a good reason, that's great. But in my world, that's not a price. Thanks. Councilor Soukup. Yeah. I just wanna to echo kind of what councilor Peterson Wyatt was getting at with the I I totally get the incentivizing less waste through getting a smaller bin that costs less. But I do you know, if you have a larger family, you can't necessarily go down in size. You can cut some of your waste practices, but you that might not allow you to go to a smaller bin.
So I would I would just hope that we're not increasing the costs of the larger bins to try to get people to go to a smaller bin. Because I I really believe that, for the most part, people are buying the smallest bin that they can, you know, realistically get emptied every week. So, you know, I get theoretically the idea of make if you make it more expensive, people will change their habits, but I just don't think at this point right now with the costs of,
just what it costs to be alive that we should be charging we should be penalizing larger families, for needing a larger bin. Thank you. Counselor Holmes. Yeah. I think those are good things to think about that I hadn't thought of before this, but I think for me, it's I go back to the question of what are we trying to solve for, and does this solution does pricing actually change the behavior that we're looking for? And I don't I don't I'm not sold on that. I think I need more information and to think about it and look at it more. Thank you. Counselor Dolan? Need more information.
I also believe in the market forces that play. Councilor Beamer? I kind of echo what councilor Peterson White and councilor Nas and councilor Silke and councilor Hwang said. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. And I think, if we're not gonna do, some kind of opt out citywide composting, that's where this goes hand in hand, with giving if you do the citywide composting, then there's usually an opportunity to size down. So if we're not gonna do that, then there's no reason to do the, raise the prices of the carts as an incentive.
So unless there's something else that staff would like from us, I think we're done with that item. No. Thank you. Okay. The next item is, amendments to no. We we pull that one is do I have an updated agenda? Did we are we still doing 25? Oh, not the discussion. Okay. Got it. Thank you. Yep. Thank you. Okay. Administrator Martig on the discussion to boards and commission rules of business. Oh, oh, councilor Ness is trying to mute me here. The just just kidding. Just kidding.
Alright. I think I can be pretty quick on this one. The council the state law changes, you know, related to remote participation requirements that are under the law. The council amended your rules, prior meeting to allow for that remote participation. We have been prohibiting that based on just the lift of those pre prior requirements of having to have the location identified, number of other concerns too, just about the logistics of all the different boards and commissions we have and being able to know when they are and to get down the notice list seventy two hours in advance.
So council set their policy. Now we need to amend the board and commission, policy that mirrors the council. But the question would be on this one, because they could we could allow them to be remote, and not have to be at a location. There's still gonna be logistical concerns, and there's still, you know, being able to manage preparation, have making sure that if there's more than one gone now, can we make it work? So these are the three options that we have for staff to go make amendments. Ideally, maybe end up if we have agreement on how to approach it. Maybe it goes on a consent agenda item.
I'll maybe just kinda lean into the recommendation that staff has at this time. We the suggestion would be number two is what staff's thinking on it right now would be for the HRA EDA planning commission HPC. Because they have some independent powers, especially like planning commission, they get they respond to applications, and sometimes they have limited time. Maybe doing a run on it and see how it works. They've done some preliminary staff and IT work to see if they could accomplish it. Might not have super high production quality, but they feel pretty confident they can do it,
accomplish that. And they think it might be helpful related to some cases where, quorum might be a concern to make sure they can still act on issues. So I would say also we review the policies of our council and board and commissions every year. So if we were to implement something like this, it might be a test case for a few months to see how it goes, and we'll be checking back in January anyway to see how the how it is. You could look at it as kind of a test run. There might be some conversations under that number too to say, do we limit how many times people can do it remote or, related to why they might be maybe can't participate.
I might lean into if this is a test case to not create some artificial standards first, but to see how it goes and what works and what doesn't. That's kind of a nuance of number two, but, that's probably how I'd approach that one is not tie a whole lot of extra regulations on it to see how it works. Number three, I would say, is not recommended right now. I just think with the number of boards and commissions, I don't wanna really dive in with all of our boards being able to be remote. A lot of our advisory boards aren't, don't have independent powers, and, we have had some challenges with, participation. But I think we definitely heard some some caution,
especially looking at cutting back on some of our meeting associates on doing it for all boards at this time. Number one number one, I would say, is an option that could continue. We have had some feedback from boards and staff on the ones on number two, with an interest to be able to expand it. So I turn it back to you, mayor, to see if you guys have some feedback on that or extra questions. Great. Are there questions to start off with of staff? Alright. Then if folks wanna give their feedback, we'll just go councilor Ness. I get to be first all the time. You all all night. I like number two. Thank you.
Councilor Peterson White. As an EDA member, I am trying to think when the last time was that we didn't have a quorum, and I think it's been a while. But not never. It has happened that there wasn't a quorum at the EDA. But the EDA does a little bit less. You know, the planning commission seems the most important to me that they'd be able to act promptly, and probably the HPC. So, anyway, I think I think number two is a fine recommendation. I think if we are driving aggressively towards a lean organization where we are not doing anything extra because it costs money, then we should consider the staff time and resources that would be dedicated to this.
I have no idea how often it will be needed. But I think that and I don't it's I think it's really hard to know how often, board members will avail themselves of this resource. And it's, I can of course, worst case scenario it in my head where it becomes pretty burdensome and elaborate and requires a lot of time and energy on the part of staff to make sure that this is working correctly. And I don't think it's totally necessary. But I do think, especially in the case of the planning commission and the HPC, it will likely move business along a little faster on some occasions.
So I won't stand in the way of it. But I I do think that we should keep a close eye on the resources used. Counselor Soka. Yeah. I'll second all of that. It it was used in the HRA the last meeting, to meet quorum. So, and that was, I believe, needed because there was a closed meeting portion where there was a sale happening. So, if it's necessary, it some of these, special powers boards, that makes sense to me. But, yeah, if it's costing a lot of resources, then maybe we should rethink. I would I'm thinking, like, is it cost less to provide Zoom,
or does it or does it create more staff time and resources to reschedule a meeting where they can meet quorum? And maybe it's apples and oranges. But Thank you. Fair point. Counselor Holmes. I support number two and agree we should see as a trial and see what we learn. Councillor Dolan? More leaning towards number one, but I see the arguments for number two, and I would just like to know how many requests there might be, so hence the trial period. Counselor Beamer? I'm good with option two. Thank you. I'm also good with option two.
So I think is there anything else you need on this item? K. Then that moves us to administrator's update. Thank you, mayor, members of the city council. Just one second here. I'm basically gonna, read to you in the supplemental memo the one update on the bond sale, but I wanted to make sure I had it open, and I must have closed it here during the discussion. My apologies. Alright. So I just wanted to note that in the supplemental memo that's reposted in the admin report online, it's available. We did have the final final bond sale results
with the ICE arena. So summary of that one that the lowest indicated interest rates 4.3%, which is 0.71% lower than presale estimates. So that shows a $120,000 and 95 reduction to the average annual debt service cost from presale estimates, which accumulates over $2,400,000 less in principal and interest reduction combined between the City of Northfield and the City of Dundas related to those combined efforts. So Dundas will receive an annual reduction on their payment of a little over $14,700
and the city of Northfield have a reduction of a hun 108,000, $276 reduction on that. So the closing is scheduled into September, which is when we'll get the cash in the bank. There's really no other action related to this debt issuance. The EDA basically granted a parameter range of interest rates for a team to be able to meet and verify those and approve it, which happened, and was all completed last week. So very excited about that, tremendous rate and, positive work related to, getting that last piece.
We are still working on fine tuning the final lease arrangement with the school district. It wasn't really required as part of it, but we're working on it with with them on final agreements that will be completed related to their $250,000 commitment that they've made related to the, to the use of the facility and that will be allocated. Part of that to the debt service and then part will be going to the operations of that. So I did send that off to all of our partners, today as well. Thank you. And if the council would like a deeper dive on that, certainly could have mister Anhut come back in or Jenny Bolton if there's any questions
in the future or maybe try and package them to come, you know, give an update on that. We have another, any other related financing issues in the future. That could be another way that we approach it if there's an interest for a deeper discussion on it. Councilor Beamer. Thank you, administrator Marta. What you might not have the answer to this. What does that do, to that 8.4% levy impact? Does it I would assume that's gonna reduce that a little. Thank you. I should've had that ready to go, and I know I've given that maybe to a couple of inquiring minds around the table. So if any of you have that handy,
otherwise, I it goes down to seven point something. Seven. Yeah. 7.7. 7.7. Taken in my head. Right. So the debt related to our last budget discussion, it would go down to a 7.7 as kind of that baseline. So I'm having the finance director update that information. We're also working on a more detailed tax impact analysis across multiple valuations, residential, commercial that I had intended to have at the last budget meeting, but we're gonna send it out to you when we get that from Ehlers, also. So we'll send that as well. When we get it, we won't wait for the next budget meeting.
Thank you. Councilor Ness? Move to adjourn. Thank you, councilor Beamer. Second. Thank you. All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Those opposed, we are adjourned. Thank you, everybody.