I'm up here. Council. And the diversity council spent many years, working to support community organizations, community members, particularly with the efforts of improving social equity across the community. And when we had this opportunity, the idea came forward to say, how could we have community members who have great ideas, who are innovative, who better understand the barriers that they might be facing to come up with ideas that they would want to utilize across the city and different organizations to better serve the community, maybe build the community that they live in. What I found interesting at the very beginning when we're doing the the research on
this was we had lots of individuals, grassroots organizations, community members, members who did a lot of this work on their own and looked for funding in various ways, whether it was mini grants. But a big barrier for a lot of them was if they were not registered as a five zero one c three or a nonprofit organization, they were not able to access a lot of funding. So this provided an opportunity for individuals, grassroots organizations, to be able to access that kind of funding. The goal for the fund itself was to bring these ideas to life or at least to support them maybe to grow or to try something out for the first
time. But it also placed us in a really unique position to understand and hear from community members, whether that was dreams, aspirations, barriers that they were facing, and provide an opportunity for ongoing engagement in a way that we hadn't had before. So as we think about the 2025 structure, we started out 2024 with $50,000 that were allocated for the use in this fund. In 2025, we still had that $50,000 as a base allocation, but through a CIA on August 19, got an additional $50,000
to support a large grant. And we'll describe a little bit of both of those and how they work. So the total allotment allotment for 2025 was a $100,000. Seems like a lot of funding, but went by fairly quickly. In thinking a little bit about the fund structure I'm a little baseline structure for the grant, which is structure and ecosystem, coming up with rubrics, implementing the website, coming up with application questions, frequently asked questions so that we would have a baseline that people could look at when they wanted to apply. Recording in progress. And then in 2025,
we increased that to seven teammates from across the organization that then had access to being able to evaluate this. It was open to all teammates that were interested in participating in this, and they just filled out a simple application indicating why they were interested in being part of this grant and then were able to be part of this review team. Now that particular application process, we try to make it as low barrier as possible. So for the small grant application process, it's simply one page asking what is your idea, how do you plan to implement it,
when will it be implemented? What communities will it serve? When will this be completed? And would you be willing to provide us a report at the end of it to show how successful or maybe how not successful it was? And what did you learn from it? For the large grant, that was a little more extensive when that was introduced. We had to do some additional paperwork and forms. It included way more. They had to submit a project scope, timeline, detailed budget, success metrics, etcetera. And they also had to meet with the city team for some additional questions before their grant would be approved.
If you looked at the website, there was a link to it on the community building fund page. We made sure that the application process was detailed, including the rubric that we were using to evaluate it. So as people applied, they're able to reflect on that and know how that is going to be evaluated. We also included frequently asked questions so people could see. It's notable for many people who mentioned, I mean, I'm 15 years old and I can apply. Absolutely. So anyone 15 years old and above could apply for a grant as long as they had, a mentor or sponsor along with them who was over the age of 18. If they needed assistance with the application process that was offered, so whether it was a language barrier, technology barrier,
etcetera, one of the, people within the team was able to assist people with that application process. So the goal being anyone that wanted to apply or needed to apply would be able to do so. So going forward to see how many of those were approved. So in 2025, we had a total of 18 grants that were approved. Of the land grants, which means those that were $5,000 or above, we had four of those that are detailed up there. Amount. So I would note, as is detailed in the report, that people were not always awarded the total amount that they applied for. So sometimes, somebody might have applied for $5,000
and as the team reviewed it and looking at other sponsorships or scholarships they may have, received, we might give them a reduced amount. We were thinking about the budget that we have, how far we wanted it to be able to go, whether or not this is an idea that was supported by other organizations to ensure that our funding could stretch as far as possible when it came to, awarding these grants. You'll also notice that they vary in structure. Some of them are for events. Some of them are for ongoing work. Some of them were for murals.
For example, the John Marshall mural that was put up. And some of them were to support, like, a global farmer's market, which I'll talk about in a little bit. Some of the highest reflections and learnings from having the community building fund include that we have a really engaged and socially conscious community. People are interested in building the type of community they want to live in. They're innovative. They're creative. And sometimes, they just need a little bit of support. We've received applications that were asking for $600. Right? We received applications that were asking for 5,000 or $20,000. So the amounts vary greatly,
but a little bit of funding can go a long way in supporting something that is a great idea. And one of the things that I think we learned from, from, and I I don't know if you felt the same way as you read through these reports, is just the varied ways that people define barriers and problems within our community, but also the innovations that they've come up with to solve those on their own, which is what we would hope for. We want community members to feel civically engaged, but for them to have ideas that they bring forth themselves. We use a rubric to ensure that we are as consistent and equitable as possible. Each person on the review team scores the application separately on their own.
And then we get together every Tuesday morning and have a conversation and look at the scoring guide and say, why did you score this at a 10? Why somebody else scored it at a 15? And where can we meet? Should we approve this application? Yes or no? And if so, for what amount? If we're not agreeing on approving it, what is the reason that we would provide? There were some questions about, you know, what are some grant applications that were not, approved? We can't, give the specific names, but what I will say is we always provide a response. And sometimes we'll even give them links to other resources, give them links to other resources that are more applicable to them. So for example, if they wanted the grant for business capital or equipment,
that's not something that the city can fund. But we can certainly share with them a resource or link of another organization within the city that can support that. So ensuring that people don't feel discouraged if they get a no and that they're able to proceed with that application a different way. The other thing that we will say in reflection is the the large grants. They were impactful and had broad impact, but they did take a significant amount impactful and had broad impact, but they did take a significant amount of staff time. They took much longer to review. The process was a lot longer. And it was difficult to get information back because we're ask asking them for a lot of metrics and KPIs at the completion of the large grant.
So just some notables there. One thing I will share about, this grant in general, I provide the example of the village global farmers market. I didn't know that there was land that was leased way Northeast by a bunch of global farmers who wanted to grow crops that were to grow crops that were reminiscent of the cultures that they came from. Right? And it started out with them growing these crops about couple of years ago and trading them amongst themselves to ensure that they had enough produce. And this year, for the first time, they invited me over to their farm, took a look around, and said, we have so much produce.
We're not sure what to do with it, and we would like to kind of figure out how to sell some of the both that produce. And so we looked at our, community where we had maybe a shortage of of fresh food where people didn't have very much access. And we'll be prototyping a village farmer's market over at MLK Park beginning this month. So a way to connect what is happening within the community is something that we have funded and supported with communities that might not have access to fresh food in a way that is meaningful, areas that are very diverse.
So connections beyond what we intended. They're working closely with the Parks and Recreation to make that happen. So, unexpected reflections and learnings. Now looking ahead to 2026 and 2027, as you think about, the budget ahead is, you know, is the $50,000 disbursement later in the year because we were building the system, ensuring that it works, we dispersed all the funds within five months. And that was with careful consideration and being thoughtful and not awarding every application that came our way. In 2025, we began that process in January.
And within six months, we had dispersed all of the funding, again, with careful consideration and being thoughtful about what was being awarded. For your thought and consideration on the large grant, we had that pilot. It was fairly successful. We had those four that were awarded. Is this something that we would like to continue, or would you consider having some of that funding, rolled into the small grant and have additional funding that goes a longer way. So those are just some preliminary thoughts for your for your consideration. And I will say, really grateful. A lot of times, the recipients of the grants will send the team emails or letters or cards indicating
what they enjoyed most. The picture there is of a young woman looking through the Black History traveling exhibit. And some of the schools sent back little notes written by the students saying how wonderful it was to have that brought over to their school, but maybe for the first time seeing themselves reflected in a way that they have never within their education. So very cup filling, I will say, to get some of those notes, but also wonderful to see how communities that typically are civically disengaged are getting connected to city government and are doing stuff within their own communities,
kind of build the community that they want to live in. And with that, I am grateful and open to any questions that you might have. Great. Thank you very much. I I've got a couple questions to start us off. First, can you talk a little bit about how wide the pool of applicants are in both the large grants and the small grants? I kinda wanna get a sense of, you know, how many of, them we are actually funding and how you know, if you reduce the the applicant grant
award to bring in additional, applicants. So, council president, to ensure I understand you, you're saying how many applications in total did we receive? Yep. K. I would say let me do the quick math in my head. Six applications were not approved, and we had 18 total that were approved. And this is for the large and the small grants or So I'm trying to be thoughtful about the large grant and not indicating how many because then it'll be really obvious Okay. For the people that were not approved. Okay. Got it. Yes. But in aggregate,
we had six total, of both small and large that were not approved. Okay. Then my next question has to do with, is there an expectation that, I'm looking at the list of, small grant applicants or awardees, and some of them are continuing programs like Latino Fest, Rochester Pride, soccer league, and then some seem to be kind of one a new event. Is there expectations that this funding will continue for them, or is it an objective of the program to give startup funds and then they
kind of take off on their own? Council president, I appreciate that question. And the answer is there is no expectation. The grant is not designed to sustain a specific event or program. It is either to support if it's an existing program so that it can continue. Right? Or, for example, you mentioned Latino Fest so that they can proceed that that particular year or for a brand new one to have the funding that is needed to start up. We try to be thoughtful about, applications coming in fast come faster. Right? So we encourage people to apply as early as possible. But at the same time,
as we're reviewing them, we want to prioritize applicants that are new and have innovative ideas. So we do have a couple here that are repeat of getting the grant for the second time, but it's not an expectation that the grant is supposed to sustain that. And we always make sure or ensure that they have additional funding from other sources. That's one of the questions that we ask, is how are you going to sustain this going forward? Or who else is going to be supporting this particular initiative? Great. Thank you. Councilmember, Keane. Yeah. Thanks. I appreciate hearing this. I did have some questions just going through the,
packet when we talk about our rubric of questions. But I think you sort of, explained it as sort of like the who, what, where, why, and and and and then who are you supporting. And that's really the idea. Those are the set of questions. Right? Those are the set of questions with a couple of additional. So, we do have the rubric that's shared on the website and then we've changed that not changed that, but we created that into a form so that each person that is scoring has a scoring sheet. Essentially, the questions are the same with a couple of additional questions. Good. I'm glad to see some sort of like, and it's hard to do it early on,
but some sort of standards that are used across. But I also got the impression, and I just want to get input on this, is it's a revolving thing. Someone can apply January 7, someone else a month later. There isn't a cycle that you do two two cycles a year or anything like that? We tried that the first year, to try and break it up that way, but it was difficult because some people are planning their events or programs for November. Right? And we want to encourage them to apply as early as possible because if we withhold funding, then that kind of creates a barrier for them,
and they're not sure if they can proceed Right. With their planning or not. And so this year, we sent out notifications letting people know, if you're thinking about planning something, please apply as early as possible. That way you can proceed with your event or your idea. In 2024, I think we had one or two applicants that didn't proceed with the idea because we were waiting. And so they needed certainty to be able to, whether it's reserved locations, for few items, that type of thing. Again, I understand the I like the benefits of having a cycle, but at the same time, I understand that the the hardship that can create.
But I guess my take with this, and I wanna see if I'm reading it right, is we're trying to keep it very, like, simplified. We're not trying to standardize it and have it go like that it would be a reoccurring thing. This is something that, if if I remember how it came apart during ours was this idea of, like, these individual things that come up that we wanted a better way to have a process in place for doing these. And so that's sort of the idea that we keep it simple and allow it to be, you know, flexible with that idea of a group of people assessing whether it's whether it makes sense or not. Yes.
And I think the added benefit to that is teammates who typically wouldn't be in this space or having connections with communities in this way, being the ones reviewing that, I think having a huge impact even on how they make their own decisions within the departments because they're getting first hand experience with community members in a very different way. Do you it sounds like we have a way of communicating to the likely group of people submitting this. Is that a distribution list you're maintaining or how does it grow or how do people get on it or do people get off of it or how does that work? For year one,
we reached out to grassroots organizations that we knew existed and sent them the messaging and said, You know, we encourage you to apply. What has happened in 2025 is word-of-mouth, right? So there is the distribution list and then who they've shared that with. And then we've shared that information with teammates as well to say, you know, if somebody reaches out to you with an idea or seeking support in some way, please direct them to the Community Building Fund page and let us know if they need any assistance with that application process. I I'm I'm asking mainly because I wanna make sure that that we don't you don't have those situations where someone says,
I didn't know this existed. And so as best we can, I there's no way to communicate everything to everybody? But, if you build that list and then when you're communicating, that that'd be helpful. Yeah. I noticed in the some of the applications, there's times that the applicant is an organization versus an individual. Do we tie this down to an individual or is it okay for something, like you say, the farmer's market to apply? Or does it have to be a person that's responsible? Either is fine. So it can be an individual that is planning an idea or it could be an organization. So either one is fine as long as,
the individual has a w nine that they're able to share with us as well as some of the other criteria that we've set forth and that they're able to provide us with metrics and rubrics and kind of a summary of the implementation afterwards. Okay. And, the last thing just in terms of is there like a test that this is the City of Rochester or that it's the benefit is to the City of Rochester or the people involved in it are the City of Rochester? What is the connection that it happens in the City of Rochester? How does that, come into play? Well, yeah, when yeah, if somebody again,
I'm trying to make sure that since this is City of Rochester funded, that there is some sort of test that it's connected to the City of Rochester. That could be that the residents benefit, as an example, when you talk about if the land is outside the city on the farmers market, or is it that the resident who is the person applying has to be from the city and can't be from another community because I'm just testing the city funding? Oh, thank you for that clarification. Yes. One of the criteria that is set forth is the idea has to be implemented within city limits and benefits the community within the city Of Rochester.
And so whether it's an individual or an organization, they could not apply for the funding and then go and implement the idea outside of the City Of Rochester. All of it has to be within city limits. Okay. And that is part of the process, the application? That is part of the application process. Yes. Very good. Thank you. Councilmember Doring. I just have a question about, the funding gap. Right? So, I I very much appreciate the presentation and understanding that, some of the projects weren't funded at the level that for in which they asked for funding. And I'm wondering, if we were able to fund everything at the requested amount,
what that total would have been? I actually have that here. Yeah. I don't know if I missed that in the packet. And if I did, I'm sorry. Thank you, council member Doran. The in total, a 147,250 was requested by approved applicants and a 100,000 was awarded. Okay. Thank you so much. I apologize. Thank you. Can I clarify some of those you wouldn't have approved because they didn't meet the rubric, right? So this the amount I quoted is only for those that were approved. So there were six additional that were not approved that would have added to that total amount. Council member Miller.
Yeah. Thanks for the presentation. Just a few more questions. Do you have a, like, a sense of categories across the two program years? I mean, events, art. How might we understand some of the themes of programs that are emerging? And, I guess, thinking about maybe a comprehensive resource library, you know, you you don't fund business applications or business related things, but are there people that are looking for sort of business startups? Or how do you differentiate between an event that raises has maybe ticketed revenue
versus a trial business? I guess, I'm just trying to think about other categories that might be emerging from community needs, that would the spirit that maybe is not a business is accepted as, a category. Council member Miller, I would say broad categories would include events. That would be one of them. There is a pretty broad category on food food insecurity, disability awareness and justice, and then business support. So, when I said business capital and equipment, that's something that we can't fund. But if it's programming around business that supports entrepreneurs to be successful,
we can. So that could be training sessions, that type of thing. The only caveat we have is that it has to be free. It's no cost to the end consumer. So that's one of the questions that we ask is how will this allow access to anyone that would be wanting to participate? There can be no fee charged for that. So for the Sound of Gospel experience, that was a ticketed. Is that correct? Yes. So how Yes. So that would be different for large grants. Sorry. I should have provided that clarification. And in that particular case, they did note that there would be a fee charged, but they would hold x number of tickets for anybody that was not able to
afford the fee to be able to participate. Okay. And my other question is about other funding, for community resources or community applications across the city organization. I know that the Park Board has a community engaged resource program. Are there others and how is there a is there a consolidated resource library of types of city programmings? You were saying that if you were not able to fund, you were directing, information back to the applicant about other resources, perhaps, other city or otherwise. Is there a comprehensive view of,
these types of programs available in the community as far as thinking about lowering barriers to access, making some of that information more available proactively rather than, you know, waiting for somebody to apply and then getting that feedback, is there Customer Mamelah, you're speaking my language. I mean, well, that's one of the things that we're talking about is how do we create almost like an ecosystem or directory of whether it's resources, whether it's economic support, whether it's housing support, all of those things. Some already exist within other entities, like a housing directory. But I think in terms of economic mobility,
that's something that we've been talking about and working on. But in terms of a resource library like this, it doesn't exist. We do a lot of the homework on our own or research and then share that and kind of grow our own library. A lot of the references that we've sent to people or resources are outside of the city organization. So whether that is to, you know, a small business development center or Collider, that that type of thing, we share those. Were there teammates from parks on the review process? I can think again about that program. Yes. We do have a teammate, who is on the review team for the from the parks and Recreation Department.
Thank you. Council Member Palmer. Thank you. The feedback that I've gotten from the program is that it's an excellent program and that it's easy to apply and it worked out well. And so I would be in favor of increasing funding for next year because I think that's an important grant, that we have. So thank you for all you've done on this. Thank you. Councilman Palmer. Can you talk a little bit more about, the large grant and the large grants? I I see on your agenda that you would like us to discuss the large grants and large grant pilot projects.
So can you repeat that? Or Yes. Thank you, council president. One, it was a one time allocation. Yep. So as we roll into 2026, what we have is just the base $50,000 to utilize. So whether or not there would be another large grant or not would be up to the policymakers to make that decision. And then the second one thing I mentioned was the process itself for application. You know, as we're envisioning the community building fund, it was supposed to be as low barrier as possible for application due to the
amount of funding that we would we offer in that large grant. That application process is quite long it's a bit longer. I would say a little more prohibitive. We can support applicants through that process. But it does take, quite a bit of time on the staff end to evaluate those, follow-up with any of the metrics that are required by it, all of the reporting to finance, etcetera. So, it's not that it we it can't be done. It's just a little bit more complicated than just a be more specific as far as how many hours does it with the large grants and that intense process,
how many staff hours does that take? Good question. Approximately. Approximately. I would guess maybe I don't want you to guess out loud and be wrong, but I can get back to you on that. You can get back to us on that. So question for council member Palmer. So were you specifically talking about the large grants? Is that what you're advocating for? Okay. Other thoughts on that, council members? Council member Wahl. Is the, application pool so sophisticated already in the first two years that, you're not getting any more applications in the next five months,
or are people still applying and getting disappointing news? Council member, we are disappointing them a little bit because we're still getting applications. We've done well about making sure we're communicating that effectively. So if you go to the website now, you will see a notification that says we're out of funding for, large and small grants. Please return in October Mhmm. And start applying for 2026. And given that the, large grant program was a first year pilot and we spent all those funds, how did I know how I know the inception of it,
but how did all of the rest of the applicants, find out about the large grant program since it was new? Same the same exact messaging that we sent out to the small applicants said, you know, there is a large grant available, for applications 5,000 and above. Mhmm. Please share with your networks if you know of anybody that is interested or has a great idea that would require a significant amount of support. So and I'm sure some people also share it with friends' networks in order to get those applications in. And what is the city source for the grants?
So this came from outside agencies funding. It's a tax levy. Thank you. You mentioned outside agencies. Is there can the outside agencies that we fund through our other process, can they apply for these grants as well? Can I punt that over to city administrator zones? Can they double dip, I guess, is my question. I don't believe so. But there could be someone who's, for example, utilizing a facility and for their programming that they're requesting funding for.
So if someone was putting on some I don't know. Farmers market was happening inside the art center or something like that, they would be able to still utilize those facilities. But it is not intended to be for more traditional organized groups that are receiving funding in other ways. Council member Keane. Yeah. To try to address this question about, like, where the what we should do going forward, like, it's my understanding that we have the 50,000 small program approved in 2024 and going forward. I would suggest that we look at the large grant ones as a decision packet
when we're doing the other stuff in the in this year's budget as opposed to trying to just do a consensus discussion today. Yes. You will if you have that discussion, you'll be talking about either cutting something else or increasing your levy during the budget conversation. Thank you for that suggestion, council member. Any other thoughts? Seeing none. Mayor. Just quickly. I had the this a similar question regarding, city when I saw an outside city's name listed. It did occur in the city of Rochester, but it was outside of our county, I believe, and which was surprised me a little bit,
but it did take place in Rochester, so that was kind of a that was a question. And then the other one had to do with, not everything boils down to numbers. On a few of these, you say x amount of people benefited particular event, in order to see if we're spending a large amount of money on a small group of people or a small amount of money and it's affecting a large group of people, to help us better understand small grant versus large grant. So just a thought moving ahead. Thank you, mayor. And I will note for this 2025 report, a lot of the, ideas are still ongoing.
And so we don't have the final reporting from a lot of those organizations, so we will have more information. Alright. Thank you, miss Marcella. And next up, we have equity in built environment update with, miss Julie Brock. Welcome. Thank you so much, council members, mayor, and city administrator. It is my privilege to be able to, talk to you today about the equity and built environment grants, where it came from, and what now is happening at the end of this granting cycle. So we'll just go ahead and get started here.
So this started three years ago, actually four, if we're real honest. And Global Mayors Challenge, came up and we applied and we were invited then to continue the application process. With that, we had a city coach. They helped us through, to really refine our idea and our process, and then we were granted one of 15 global cities that then received a million dollars. We were then able to take that million dollars and leverage some conversations at the federal level,
and we were then, given an appropriation, I'm saying that correctly, that, our senators Smith and senator Klobuchar worked really hard for us to be able to do that. So we have 1.7, five. Like, how do I say that? $1,750,000, total to spend over the course of three years. That actually ended up being two years because of some funding, delays, but, we were able then to, lay the groundwork for a big, program that is called Bridges to Built Environment. So this is our timeline. So I just walked through that a little bit.
We were awarded the Global Mayors Challenge, then in January 2022, we won. And now if we fast forward, in spring, we've had full training cohorts with waiting lists for, CAD classes as well as construction one zero one classes. So we're really excited because we're starting to see the growth, and we're starting to see that spread of, enthusiasm, from women who are participating in our programming. This was a co designed, So, essentially, what that meant is that along the whole way, we were actually, rubbing up against,
the Global Mayor's Challenge system a little bit because they wanted us to come with the idea that we wanted to implement and we said, no, no, we need to create the idea with community and then we can test it, because if we're building something without community, then we're building in the wrong direction. So these were the people that were involved in our co design process. We had industry professionals as well as women, who had lived experience within built environment industries and also women who were outside of
built environment industries. And so this was a a good two to three month process of just doing co design work here, and then it it rolled into our application that we then were awarded. So collaborative approach is, definitely one thing that I will say was a big deliverable back to Global Mayor's Challenge Mhmm. Is that, doing a co design process made sure that any idea that we were taking forward was one that was, essentially, validated and, through lived experience of women of color.
So, the goal really was to create practical and impactful strategies for fostering a more inclusive and equitable workforce. And when we went through this process, it distilled down to four core components. One was k 12. Our women said you gotta get early and often. Right? Get upstream. Our second was training and mentorship. Absolutely, we would we can go through training, but it's we want to learn with somebody who looks like us, and we want to be mentored by somebody who looks like us. Industry training. Industry actually was fantastic.
They came forward and said, so we've been talking a lot and we finally get it. Wages and benefits aren't enough. We also need to be in an inclusive environment, that can respond to the needs of all of our workforce, whispered, we're not quite sure how to do that. And so we were able then to support trainings, mentorship trainings, and also, the work of the IUI designation for our our industry partners who worked with us. And then the fourth work stream was entrepreneurship. It's not enough to train me to to go and work for somebody else. What if I wanna work for myself? And so those were the four work streams that we had.
Here they are in a different format. And when we think about these, four work streams, we really had a great codesigned approach for that training and mentorship one. K-twelve, we went and we actually took some of that funding and did a codesign process with young women of color. And so we codesigned with educators as well as women of color to figure out what that K-twelve, system should look like. And then we also, the training for the industry partners, we worked with industry as well as all our different, diversity, equity,
inclusion, and belonging trainers to figure out a customized approach for each of those organizations who decided that they wanted to get IWE designated. And then entrepreneurship, we didn't want to repeat anything, so we partnered with, entrepreneur one or e one, which is a regional group of entrepreneurs working on an ecosystem as well as the collider for training. So the qualitative outcomes, are here. We had 68 women enrolled in WDI services. And so what this meant is that through our marketing efforts, women said,
hey. Heard about this built environment thing. Tell me more. And as we would talk through it, they were like, oh, I'm not sure that that is for me. But we have them in the door, and so we were able then to get them enrolled in workforce development programming and get them training, that they may not otherwise have gotten because they were exposed to WDI through this program. We had 35 men who enrolled in, equity and built environment programming, and 18 women completed that training. Many times, people ask, like, what why is that gap? Right?
Well, we had 3,500 women who we marketed through that we could get the demographics through our marketing, analytics, and from that 35, then the number we had, like, maybe 162 who reached out and wanted to learn more, and that number would decrease as we go because at each level there's another level of commitment. And the gap between that thirty five and eighteen a lot of times was life. We had women who said, this is really interesting. The training time doesn't work out for me. This is really interesting for me, but your I have three jobs that I'm working right now,
and asking me to drop one is a lot. Right? So there was all sorts of different, very unique circumstances to each woman who came through the doors. And we were able to, mitigate some of that for many of them because we were able to, offer wraparound services. We were, able to offer, transportation, childcare, training stipends. So when we could customize the right and everything fell into place, then that's when we were able to move women forward. And then we have 12 women who are employed across built environment careers. This is everything Miss Brock,
can I ask you a question? How long was the training? So it would depend on which trainings that they took. So we have an annual, calendar of trainings. We have, ones that are actually simulated training that they they are self paced, and we ask that they try to get those done in about three months. We also have trainings that are six weeks, three weeks, two weeks. Just wanted to contact you. Yeah. So the context of that. And then we also have women who entered in a training, and then they decided they wanted to continue to pursue perhaps something like project management
or something within design that will require a degree, and then they actually get enrolled in tuition supports through other programming at WDI. At WDI. And then we had four companies pursuing or earning the IWEE designation, which stands for Inclusive Workplace Employer. And then we had, we established a preventative maintenance internship pilot here at the city of Rochester in the public works. So over on the side, you'll see that digital campaign number and then also for the pitch, which was a, eleventh grade activity that we provided every semester for, economics co design for,
young women of color, they said, do not make it optional. Do don't don't let me opt out. It has to be part of a curriculum in which, I'm required to be there and my friends are required to be there. And so because of that, we were able actually, we've reached a 100 over a 140 young women of color, but then also we, actually exposed quite a few kids through the economics, to built environment industries. So some demographics outside of that, were also breached. Our sustainability plan. So people often will look at this and go,
man, that's a that was a lot. Well, we didn't have something like this built at all. So, we had to build some infrastructure to really start to think about what does this look like long term, what does this look like, when we think about getting upstream and entrepreneurship and how do we really build a system and and have strong infrastructure that we can build upon. So our sustainability partner is Workforce Development Incorporated. They, they have Bridges to Built Environment Now, which is their bigger umbrella program that did not exist prior to this.
They only structured they only focus on construction and trades, and now we have a whole bunch like, now we're really addressing the entire build cycle from design all the way through to maintenance. Maintenance. They also offer the inclusive workplace, the designation. And so they also host that and those trainings for industry partners. And then they also have the career planning and also wraparound services available to, folks who come through their programming. This is something that is offered to every universal, person, but that's why we wanted to partner with them.
They are the experts in our region. The second partner there I mentioned is our, entrepreneur ecosystem. And so we are referral partners to them. If we have somebody who comes through the program and they say I'm really interested in starting my business, then we refer them over to Collider, and we're able then to support that training costs for them. Rochester Public Schools is a sustainability partner. In in in the co design, we didn't, only co design for built environment. We really thought about, well, okay, so this is one of many industries that are underrepresented or underexposed within the education
system. And so we built out a full career exploration program for them that they are starting to implement. One of the pieces for that is, having an embedded career navigator, youth career navigator from Workforce Development Incorporated at each of the comprehensive high schools. So we started pilot with, a full time, counselor at at the ALC, alternative learning center, last year. We also had a career counselor who visited every other week on Mondays at John Marshall, and we're adding, to that model to Mayo High School this year as well.
So they'll actually have, in tandem with another system that they have, which is actually correct collecting all of our, high schoolers' post secondary plans. Now we're able to pull that data, and anyone who's interested in built environment industry, we can actually get them connected to mentors, to, trainings, to the ability to be exposed to that before they graduate from high school. And then Cradle to Career is a big partner as well. They're providing parent education. One of the things that young women of color said is that we might know all of this,
but if our parents don't and they still think that this is a a not a safe job or a job that that isn't for me, then I'm not gonna go. Right? So bring my parents along. And so we were able to, do some learning sessions with them and they partnered with the FAFSA so that when parents showed up, not only did they get information about built environment, but they were also able then to fill out those, FAFSA forms, which are not easy, in order, to help their their children progress in what they wanted to do post secondary.
This is us winning. This is a there's a lot I don't like, this is a big deal. So this is all of the people that were involved in this process, and, each person just gave so much of their industry expertise, their lived ex expertise. And I'm really proud of the infrastructure that we've been able to lay down, for the Bridges to Builds Environment program going forward. So we do thank we thank city council for saying yes, yes, you can take this grant money, yes, build those, programs,
we thank the city staff for saying yes. We'll try this pilot of the in of this, internship. Really, I I just can't thank WordPress Development Incorporated enough for saying yes and saying Yeah, we'll figure it out. Yeah, let's get to yes. And we ran into quite a few pieces that were like, Wow, we didn't anticipate that. Oh, we don't have a policy for that. Oh, what's our process for this going forward? So there was a lot of learning in this, and so I really want to thank the industry partners who stayed with us, as well as the women who took a chance on us.
Every woman who took okay. Every woman who took a chance on us, something life changing happened for them. We had a woman who was able to buy her first house and provide for her family. We have a woman who got to have buy her first car that was, like, within two years. Like, it's brand new and she's used to driving something that is 16 or 17 or 18 years old, and it breaks down all the time. I had a woman who said, because of the efforts that you you invested in me and my family,
our generational wealth gap is shifting. So I know that the numbers look small, but we're gaining momentum. We have a full CAD course that's not in our, numbers right now because it's still going. That's 11 women who are in that course. There's another eight women who, completed the construction 101 in Winona, and they all got on a bus and went over to Winona together because we were able to do that for them. They have created friendships. They've created their own bonds. We have one woman who came and is partnering with another woman in her construction
company. Is it fledgling? Is it starting? Yeah. But she's gonna lift. And she's gonna lift because she had the ability to get the resources that she needed when she needed them, and they were trusted, and they were validated through our program. So I just thank you. And I will entertain questions. Thank you, miss Brock. And thank you, and congratulations to you and the hard work that you did to, put the infrastructure in for this program. Questions, council members? I have one. So you talked about,
WDI and that they look like they're going to be the the main partner sustainability. And I think you just at the end maybe talked about what is happening now. I'm looking at the 18 and looking at what do we what do we think the we'll see on a yearly basis going forward, and and is there a sense that that trend will go up upward? That is that is the hope. We the trend that we saw even within the first three years,
went from four women to, I think, nine women to now the, completing training, the 68 plus. So we're seeing that trend starting to to rise right now. The sustainability model that WDI has is that we're actually partnering with Rochester Area Builders as well, and really starting to think about what does a built environment council look like? What does it look like to have the community come around and start to really think about what is it that we need,
how do we need that, and how can we work together as an industry to make sure that, yes, we're good competitors. We're not saying that, but within the industry itself, we're also thinking about the needs of our entire workforce and going forward together. The Bridges to Built Environment program does live at WDI. They have other very successful Bridges programs. They have Bridges to Health Care, if you haven't heard of that. And and Ginny Rittman, who is the executive director, said, really, the establishment of a new program like that that is multifaceted and community kinda all
community bound together, it takes about seven years to start to see real, trends that truly pick up. The other, piece that I will say is that the program used to it used to be responsive, and now we're getting proactive. So as of July 1, we have our full training, calendar set so we can market those on time early and often, and we have trainings that are for anyone. So we have online trainings that are simile assimilation based. We have, we partner with When you say we are primarily talking WTI WTI. Sorry. I I'm No.
That's I get really excited. Yes. WTI's program, Bridges to Built Environment, has this set, and we partner with real building strong communities, which is a union based program, out of the cities that offers a training down here in February. So we are also partnering, with other training facilities that were not redundant, and we're actually utilizing industry expertise to make sure that that this can continue on. Right. Council member Wall. So has the grant money now been spent and, our involvement has come to an end? Correct.
Okay. Our the city participation is over. So city participation, we still have the, the internship doesn't end until December. K. So within that, there's still participation there, but the the money that we have has been secured for that Mhmm. And that will that it has been extended extended to be spent through till the end of this year. And so what is happening to the employees that were hired through the grant money? So, they know that it is a year long program. And then at the end of that year, the intern that we have,
we will network and help help them find other places where they could take their skills. We hope that there would be a position within the city. Right? That's the hope is that this internship would then fill city needs first. Mhmm. And then the mentor trainer has already, we've already thought about how to reimagine that role so it could be part of a position versus its own position itself. And so this is a case where the city was able to, invent a a program that then has been adopted by private industry?
Yes. Okay. Thank you. Mhmm. Council member Keane. Yeah. I've watched this a little bit and summed it through some of our other programs like, some of our contracts to what is the diversity per targets and the women in construction. But I've also heard that there is, that like you said, the numbers aren't great at this point, but there is this idea of, like, does this the you know, is there I I don't wanna call it industry cause you've got some great partners we're working with, and I know there's some successes at Benecke. But is there are we breaking down is there barriers to be broken down here
to get these new skills into these environments? The short answer is yes. Yep. The quantitative numbers, are just part of the story. The qualitative learnings that we have are very large and very wide and very, nuanced. So do we still have barriers to break down? Absolutely, we do. We're looking at an industry that has been primarily white male for hundreds of years, and also, a sense of generational, right? So, Oh, yeah,
I oh, you know, when we got in there we started asking questions like, Oh, yeah, my uncle's been in construction forever, or, my, yeah, my best friend's dad got me in. So there's still a lot of that, this is for a particular group Mhmm. Versus, and and that is a perception, right? That's a perception, but as we started to dig in there, there's some real reality to that. Yeah. And to one of the biggest learning that we had too is when we're thinking about workforce development and when we're thinking about inclusive environments,
that is a continuous improvement, procedure, and we're coming into a very highly compliance Industry. And if you don't meet compliance, people die. Right? So there's this there's this, like, tension, I think, about this idea of investing in this workforce work that is messy and continuous and infinite refinement, and and trying to figure out how that plugs into a very highly compliance based industry. So, I'm gonna leave it there. No. That's good. And and and I I did wanna as part of this discussion,
there are there's barriers. But, I mean, I saw a a really good example at Behnecke where they've got new employees on there, you know, working for them now that it's working. So those things happen. When we went to the, plumbers union when they do the waters on thing, they have examples there too. So there are small wins, but it is it is a long, arduous thing. And it's really good to see the sustainability members, the workforce development and things like that, and Cradle to Career and the schools. You know, those are the those are the things that go forward. Absolutely. Yes. Thank you. Councilmember Miller. Yeah.
Thanks so much for the presentation and the work. I'm actually thinking about a question between the two presentations of the Community Building Fund and your work. You talked about entrepreneurship, and I know I was able to and a few colleagues were able to join the JM pitch competition and interact with some of the students and their ideas. I'm curious in this gap between what other barriers might exist to other careers, other entrepreneurial activity, and maybe if there are lessons learned from this program and some of those experiences that might inform even how the city thinks about, you know, we've adopted a new strategic priority of economic resilience.
Yeah. I wonder where, some entrepreneurial support might be informed by some of these these two programs. Absolutely. There's a whole dissertation here, actually. But to keep it succinct, one of the the biggest barriers that we found, for entering built environment, industries specifically is that there's a lot of, rules and regulation and policy and procedure that a new entrepreneur needs to learn. And so we actually partnered with both Knutson and Amcrest Anderson as bigger organizations. They have mentorship Mhmm.
Programs in which they bring in people that they would identify as somebody who wants to be a subcontractor and eventually work to be a general. And they take them through and they teach them the industry. They teach them how to bid. They teach them, all of the different aspects of that are very niche to built environment industry. So I think number one, yes, a big learning here is mentorship and cohort learning is huge. And the more that we can do that, I think, is really beneficial, especially in that early start. The other, piece is access to
string free funding. There was a there was a couple partners that that we got to a place, and we were able to then hand them off to a different agency that was better for funding. And it went from we streamlined it. We made it pretty simple to, nope. You need to come back with this piece of paper. You need to come back with this piece of paper. And so the experience itself to become an entrepreneur and to get access to, stable funding and stable mentorship, I think those are areas that we can really think about locally how we could
do that a little bit differently better. And the pitch competition portion of it was imagining, activating a downtown storefront. Correct? Yes. And I I wonder if you might talk about some of the other perceived barriers even beyond the the equity and built environment program that we might just talk about in the discussion of barriers to entry for entrepreneurs in other areas. And I'm curious, maybe miss Motel as well might have some thoughts on how this program informs, other learnings. And I I wonder if other cities are engaging in even just rent support,
start up funding that's somewhat string free, that helps entrepreneurs? Customer Manula, I would say I think miss Brock covered a lot of it, but I the learning curve is the biggest portion. And I think the other side of it is as organizations that are really accustomed to being in the spaces and understand the complexity of it, it seems simple to us. So how do we, one, reevaluate processes and procedures that we've had for a long time, and figure out how to streamline it and make it clear to individuals that might never have access to spaces before? Before.
But the second component that, miss Brock also mentioned was the idea of mentorship and partnership. I attend some of those alliance programs that they have where they pair new entrepreneurs with folks who have been in the space forever. So however we can support some of those partnerships, I think, however we can support some of those partnerships, I think, is very valuable. Some of the work that we're doing, in our own space as we're thinking about targeted business goals, etcetera, I think Casimir Keane alluded to that a little bit earlier, is supportive of that work. Because how do we ensure that even for our projects that are much lower, below a $100,000,
if we have some of those goals, it allows opportunities for budding entrepreneurs to be able to bid on projects in a way that they wouldn't be able to have access if we had goals only at projects over $5,000,000. So I think it's an end, end, end process. So we're thinking about educational and learning, streamlining processes, partnering in pairs and mentorship, and all of those things. Okay. And I appreciate those answers. I I guess I I'm also thinking, you know, of those things. Okay. And I appreciate those answers. I guess I'm also thinking about some of all of these projects were basically at least within the high school population of the pitch retail storefronts. And I wonder, beyond the equity in the built environment program,
how we might think about some of the bridging the two presentations today, thinking about that entrepreneurial startup retail storefront activation and wonder because I I thought they were all great ideas and I thought there were many ideas that Downtown Rochester could benefit from. And I'm not aware of any funding that would allow that level of start up to try business, because the space that they were designing is is very high cost per square foot. Right. So which is just to acknowledge a major barrier for a different set of entrepreneurs. Other questions?
Mayor? Not a question. I just want to say, you know, this was a lot of work, to win this grant. It was a lot of learning for all of us that worked on this. A lot of staff members, and you saw the picture earlier, some people still in the jobs they are, and some people have switched to other jobs. In fact, one of our codesigners now works for DMC. Many of you know Watha. So it's been fun to watch the progress of the women, but really, it was so important to let the people that we were affecting drive the change
and make the suggestions and not design something and tell them what the solution was. And I think, you know, if I learned nothing else through this process, during the very beginnings of this when we interviewed young girls or we interviewed people in the community, they told us things that were that were their truth at the time that have ended up at the end of the three years still being the truth that was hard to deal with. It was it it seems so easy, and, you know, a pot of money is a great start to to be able to try some things, but that's that's not the whole story.
The whole story is it takes time. Changing systems is very hard. And, you know, we won this because we chose a wicked, you know, problem. Yeah. We didn't win it because we picked something easy that we could take care of in two seconds. We we chose something wicked, and they knew it was gonna take time and, I think, more than we thought it would. But, I wanna thank Julie and Chao and Ginny and all of our partners and all those faces that you saw at the beginning who really stuck with this through through the whole three years, because it it's going to take that.
And, you know, just for some of you that weren't here then, when we started this, Bold Forward Unbound wasn't a thing. Right? And so the work we just started this as a result of the work we have been doing and what could we do post pandemic to help people lead a better life. And then, Bold Forward and Beyond stepped forward. So the need for this is greater now than it was at the beginning, and hopefully, we've put the work in place. We've started those processes. We're changing the system.
And in the future, over the next six to eight years, as Bold Ford Unbound and the rest of our city continues to grow, we will reap the rewards then even more than we are right now. But I really just want to say thank you. It was a learning process. And there are other grants and other opportunities out there for us to look at to continue to build on this, particularly in the entrepreneurship, path because I believe and I think many of us believe that is really what a lot of people want. And, it's gonna take lots of support to get folks there. Thanks. Great.
Thank you. And, I not speaking for the mayor, but I I think you you're gonna have a champion here that will be watching as the program progresses at WDI. So congratulations. Thank you very much. Thank you, council. Next up, we have, disposition of Citi Real Estate and mister Brent, Svendby and team. Yep. Good afternoon, council president, mayor Norton, council members. Brent Slumby, community development here with Adam Frolke, also from community development. First of all, I just wanna thank Adam for his work that he did putting together the map
binder that's also included in your packet. And also, Adam did most of the work on the presentation that we will be presenting this afternoon to the council. So this afternoon, we are here to provide the council with an update on the disposition City Real Estate. So as we go through our presentation, just asking the council to, provide us with any feedback on the priority designations that we assign to the properties. And also, does the council support the recommended distribution strategy? Does it align with the economic resilience,
housing access, and inclusive growth management strategic priorities that the council recently adopted? So this afternoon, just, history of the council disposition of city owned real estate, what's been done to date, and then our update to the parcel list. And then finally, we'll talk about our work plan for the properties. So going back to 2021 is when the council discussed several properties that could be repurposed to in ways that could accomplish the council's strategic priorities at that time. So, actually,
in August sixteenth of twenty twenty one, they had adopted a a list, shown on the upper right hand corner of the slide of 20 properties. And that time, it ranked them as high, medium, or low priorities in regards to disposition. You will see that we've kinda changed some of the priorities on that list in our updated list that we are providing the council with this afternoon. So what's been done to date? So back in 2021, the city had a land sale of the parcel a that's shown on the map up there, which is up by Fire Station Number 2.
And, actually, that was a land sale for Caribou Coffee. Then in 2022, we had another land sale up there by Fire Station Station Number 2, and that was for a McDonald's. And then also in 2023 to 2024, we did the council did approve a real estate listing with Hamilton Real Estate for the listing of parcel C. That was listed for about a year, and, they did not get any any offers on that parcel. At the same time of, as that listing, we also engaged Hamilton Real Estate to list the,
area down on Fortieth Street and Commercial Drive Southwest. And we actually, closed on that in 2024 with Quick Chip Corporation. We also, in 2024, conveyed, some lots within the Homestead Trails subdivision. Had numerous conversations with a neighborhood group out in Homestead Trails because they were very passionate about their neighborhood. So we actually conveyed the parcels along 8 And A Half Street in 2024. And then beginning of this year in 2025, we conveyed the two parcels up on the corner of King Court and Sixteenth Avenue.
Currently, First Homes is in the process of construction constructing, two homes. You can see in the picture right there. That's nearly completion and, they do have plans this year to start construction on three of the other four lots, within that subdivision. And then that far lot, on the corner of 8 And A Half Street and Sixteenth Avenue is really not a buildable lot as it has a storm sewer that runs right through the center of that property. So, but we did receive some feedback on the first home construction.
When we met with the neighborhood last fall, they were really adamant about having the wider siding on the property. So we went first homes went with eight inch siding to kinda match the width of the siding on the existing homes out there. Come to find out during construction that eight inch siding only comes in color of white. So, that first home is white. And the hardy board up along the garage there will be painted a a greenish color that they work with the neighbors out there to pick out the color for
the hardy board siding. So, it's my understanding that first homes, has is will go to a four inch siding on the other three homes that will be constructed in the neighborhood because of there's a larger color palette of setting choices to pick from. So they will work with the neighbors on a color choice that satisfies them. Then lastly, as far as what's been done, so just last month, the council approved a, development assistance agreement with the, Sherman team to develop the Civic Center North parking lot.
Again, that will be constructed with a 76 unit affordable building and a 256 unit market rate building. So just this past Friday was a pretty big milestone for that project where we, they closed on some multifamily housing revenue bonds, that were awarded to the city for the project. So they they did a stop closing on those bonds. So that's, kind of first step, for this project. So now they're gonna go ahead and finish their architectural and building drawings and getting
ready to submit a building permit. They're thinking that may may take them six months to get through that process. Based on the language and the development agreements, they have they have to start construction at the latest of next year is May thirty first of next year. I mean, they don't anticipate starting that late. They wanna get going as soon as possible. But the city will maintain ownership of those lots until they are ready to build on them. So we will not transfer ownership on those properties until they have received their building permit and they are ready to start construction. So
now I'll turn it over to Adam. He can just give the council a overview of what we did for an update on the parcels. Thanks, Brent. So our updated list, we took the existing list that we had in 2021, reevaluated the parcels that were on there, some of the ones that were taken off because they were disposed of, and then took a a fresh look at other city owned parcels, and we came up with 22 total properties. And then we kinda revamped the priority designation that we gave for the parcels as well from a low, medium, high to a near term,
mid term, and long term, and then assign some some years to each of those categories. So in the near term, we thought, you know, zero to three years would be a proper time frame for disposing of those and subsequent development. Mid term is four to six years, and then long term is, exactly what it sounds like, which is seven plus years and ongoing. So also, included in our presentation is that map binder that Brent had previously mentioned. The first page shows, the first page shows, the that Brent had previously mentioned. The first page shows, a broad overview of the city where all those parcels are, and then all the subsequent pages goes into the detail on each of those,
individual parcels. And I should also add that while we were putting this list together, we did connect with the department heads, who maintained control of those parcels, and got their feedback on those. And then we also brought all the parcels, to the development review committee, which, is a collection of all the different departments and, how they discuss what development would look like on properties. And so moving on to near term properties, we have seven that we've identified it identified as near term, which you'll see on the screen here, as well as their their acreages.
A work plan for the near term properties, our recommendation is to bundle together, properties one and two. That's the Duran Subdivision excess and the Hilmers Highview Acres excess. Bundle those together, and put together an RFP, with a recommendation for single family development, to get some more, housing units in the city. We're re recommending relisting, Parcel 3, which is the Fire Station 2 excess, and issuing a new RFP for that one for sale. And I will note, anecdotally that we have heard from a few, affordable housing developers who are interested in that site,
for an affordable housing project. And then for Parcel 4, this is actually, a right of way that was never developed, in the subdivision. So our recommendation or our thought is that we would explore vacating that, and if possible, develop that as a single family home. Otherwise, if we're not able to make a taxable parcel out of that vacation, then the property would be split between two adjoining, the two adjoining neighbors. Near term work plan continued. We have the Rochester Sports and Recreation Centre South lots. So we're evaluating options of including an RFP or listening with a real real estate
agent for that one. Number six is the Foxcroft Access. Brent has been working with the surrounding property owners. This was one that the city got, when West Circle Drive was developed. It's not buildable. There's no access to West Circle there. So Brent has been working with the surrounding property owners, and they're, getting the land surveyed. And three of the four property owners have identified that they would be interested in in taking on some of that property. So they're working amongst themselves on getting the property surveyed, and then it'll be vacated and dispersed amongst those three property owners.
And lastly, under near term, we have the Badger Farms, and city teammates are are finalizing the location of the fire station that will be built out here on Badger Farms. And then once they have a better idea of how much space they need, we'll come back to council and provide a recommendation on what to do with the remaining, lots. And midterm properties, we have Brent coming back. I'll come back for that. Can I ask a question about kinda near term, mid term, long term? Zero to three, especially for those of us who are elected to office,
seems that can be a long period for three years. Is there, like, a immediate I mean, talk about, why the zero to three year? Well, I'm just saying some of these parcels here are probably pretty ripe to to dispose of quickly, especially, number six there, the Foxcroft one. I mean, a neighbor reached out to me a year ago, interested in the property. I said, well, we got slow slowed down here. And so I actually reached out to all four property owners that were adjacent to that parcel to see who was interested in that in that lot itself because I
just wanted to give it to one person and the other. So I wanted some interest in that lot. So I think just some of these are pretty should be fairly quickly to get rid of, but some you just know things takes a while to get through some time. Then you gotta draft an RFP, and then you go through that process. I mean, look at the Sherpa the Civic Center North Lot. It's it's been going on for three years off of that RFP. But, some of these will once you get the RFP written, we can put some deadlines in there as far as how quickly development needs to occur before maybe move on to a different developer.
Or maybe when you come to the council, you could you know, there could be a designation in market or something so that we know that it's active, that it's not waiting till the end of the three year period. Yeah. I think our our intention is to get on these seven parcels right away and Got it. Giving us a window to to complete that. Got it. Thank you. Mister Schruber? Council member Palmer and then council member Doran. Well, I agree with mister Schrubering. And and to me, you know, going three years out,
six years out, and seven years out, it doesn't mean that they're gonna be completed. All I like to see is the RFP go out for all these and then see where the the the demand is in the community and work our way backwards. Because, you know, I don't believe if I recall correctly that Badger Farms was a three year hold. I was understanding that we'd basically sell it the day that we bought it. And so I'm disappointed that we're still holding on to that property. And when we bought it, we had a plan for five acres for the fire station, and and maybe I'm missing something here.
But of all the properties, I mean, you're talking about five craft which is I mean, it's not a big deal. But we're talking about Silver Lake Power Plant. We're talking about almost every one of these properties are something that we can put out in the community. And even the park and rec facility, we don't have to wait to have them move out on listing. I mean, we can list it now and come back with, some RFPs for it. So I'm disappointed that you're thinking seven years out. I know Ms. Zelens is probably gonna have some good answer for it, but I don't particularly gonna buy it.
So, those are my 2¢. So I've got, administrator Zelens, deputy or assistant administrator, Yetzer, miss Zelms. Either way, I I'm glad that you're gonna listen to my my thoughts before I pass judgment. We're trying to be strategic about all of these. We're not just trying to put something out and sell it. Right? Like, these are investments the city has made, and we need to make sure that we are being strategic about the investments. And so I don't think the staff is suggesting that you don't put anything out, but we like, flooding the market with property is probably not going to be the best way for us to consider what the return on that investment might be.
But we're trying to show this as flexible, but within windows of time based on things that we know about these parcels. For example, Badger Farms, which I will then pass over to, assistant administrator Yetzer. We wanna make sure that the exact site and the amount of land that we need for a fire station is located correctly, not just because we think the corner would be good, but there's other topographical considerations for storm drainage and things of that nature, and we don't wanna arbitrarily constrain the potential for that if it needed to move
slightly south in order to get or slightly west in order to get the best location because how you get in and out of the site is important for a fire station differently than for for some other different, parcels. So we're not trying to hold off, but we aren't trying to go to market so quickly that we constrain future policy decisions of the city council. Yeah. I don't I don't think I have anything additional to add to that. I mean, the Badger Farms stuff, we're we're actively working on that to understand exactly which acreage we need. And I I do think that there's just a a difference in how we're looking
at three years to how you're talking about three years. When we say zero to three years, I do think we're meaning done with the process, parcel handed off, all those sorts of things. I don't think any of us are sitting here thinking we're not gonna put out an RFP for three years. That that wasn't our intent. It was more that first window is when we're done hopefully done dealing with these properties. Got it. Makes sense. So I have, council member Dohring and mayor Norton. Mister Dohring, go ahead. Yeah. I guess my my question is, the first thing you asked us to do is, ask if there are questions or feedback on the priority designation assigned to the properties. What what what,
criteria did you use to designate which were short term, midterm, and long term properties? Yeah. That because you didn't provide us with that. So that's my question. That came out from talking with the department heads and also going through that development review committee. We brought each parcel there, and based on their feedback that we gather from those discussions is how we kind of ranked our our priority for the each parcel. So market demand or, ease of sale or so I understand that you got that feedback,
but you're not sharing that feedback with us to say this is what that feedback was to designate that this is the short term. Does that make sense? I'm trying to understand that. Is probably where we if I may Go go ahead. Leave the midterm maybe where you would have the most feedback. I could just, since the slide is up, give you some perspective about, the, say, North Lots or South Lots Of Rochester sports facility. In order to show people what they might be buying, you probably want there to be a sports facility there or well underway in order to make sure that you don't receive the lowest price possible.
The, Silver Lake power plant is actively providing, services to the community and so, you know, marketing it while there's no availability for somebody to actually close and know what their timeline is and those types of things is challenging. The Transit Traffic Operations Building has people operating out of it and is dependent on the public works transit operation and parks and maintenance facility being complete and moving people there as does the parks and forestry operations facility. So if you were gonna market that now and somebody was gonna have an option, if they wanted to proceed with it and you weren't just locking it down for
now versus understanding that you might be able to gain more in the future or have a different, you know, negotiated result, means that we either have to potentially temporarily house people, things of that nature. I mean, there are a lot of different stories to each one of these sites that we probably could go through, but those are just some off the top of my head. Yeah. I'm just trying to understand the strategy, not trying to question the strategy. You had intended to share more about that. Yeah. I would echo what administrator Zelm said. We consider, like, ease of development, if zoning and land use are conducive to development that we had in mind or
envisioned, if there's existing city staff in there, like administrator Zelm mentioned at the Silver Lake Power Plant and the TOB. And a few of the parks that we are including in, our list do have legislative, attachments to them, or we would be required to go through a legislative process at the state because of how those properties were, acquired by the city. Mayor Norton. Thank you. Two things real quick. One is, I mentioned this last time, and I'm still not seeing the property on the list. And so I'm a little surprised it's not on this time. But there's a property on in Northeast Rochester on Viola Road And Fourteenth
that was a flood a home. Little nice little white haired lady lived there, but, apparently, because of some construction, she had flooding. Her home was torn down. She was moved out and it was torn down. And I'm told the city owns that property. And as in talking with some other folks in town, who are looking at slab on grade, properties, that might be a good slab on grade, small home in a established neighborhood, and yet it never ends up on a list. So if someone would please go look at the corner of Fourteenth And Viola Road, it's a little tiny triangular shaped
property and and find out if that is we still own that, like, I think we do, why that couldn't be a slab on grade sale. So that was one thing because I mentioned it last time, and it's still not on here. So I'm just frustrated. Yeah, we can take a look at that. Okay. And then the other one is to thank you to make the statement that just because we own property doesn't mean we need to unload it all. One of the things that when a city owns property that can help them is they can put things they can sell things to get things that they want for
the community, not just sell it and let some developer have their way with what goes there, whether it be a home or a business or whatever. If there are things we want to think about that we may want in this community, then we can leverage that want with the sale of the property and bargain. So I just wanna say, it's not just unloading property. It's being strategic on what do we want in the city of Rochester and using the land that we own to get it. That's it. Okay. So, I I realize we are in mid presentation,
but I do have two more council members who wanna be recognized. So council member Keane and then council member Palmer again. Yeah. I just wanna understand in the work plan near term things, you have a couple of the properties talking about, RFP putting them together. One is a public works and the other is listed as parks. How does that work when we market them together? Is that causing us, like, grief that how how do we split that up? Because I would assume if it's a park land that's owned by the city, the the proceeds will go one way versus a different way. I'm not quite sure what property you're Okay.
The Durand Subdivision is listed as public works and Hemler then or one of them is public works and one is parks. It's it's not critical that that one, but I'm saying, like, where do the distributions go when these things happen? And I'm assuming it's back to the departments that own them. Well, typically, when a property is sold Yep. Like when we sold the Quick Trip property, that went into the future land acquisition account. Future land acquisition account. Yep. I talked with mister Nigber, and same thing happened with when we sold the land for Caribou and also McDonald's.
So those funds went into that. And that's because we had purchased that for the fire station, and it's all out of because I think that when you get into parks and you get into RPU, you're gonna have different distributions. Council member King, council president, if I may. It depends on how the land was acquired initially and how it's been funded. So when you're talking about, like, something that is an enterprise fund, we would be looking at if now if it was acquired for x and it's now appraising for y or someone's willing to buy it for y, I think that's where you would get into some of the potential accounting differences depending
on what you would be utilizing it for. So it depends on what it is. I mean, even whether even if it's parks or potentially RPU, if they acquired it from another city department to Yep. You know? So I think you have to go through the acquisition history to understand what it is, and so would each of those parcels might be slightly different, or they it might go back to the original source of funds. Okay. But, yes, if you're talking about something that was authorized out of, say, the utility fund, that's probably firmer answer than parks because any acquisition of parkland also has to be
approved by the city council based on the charter. Okay. So there's some different nuances, and and it may or may not have been property tax versus rates. I mean, parks acquisitions generally are happening with property tax, and enterprise fund is happening with rates, so that's probably the bigger differentiator. It is anything that was purchased for use by utility fund, like sewer, water, electric, or, stormwater. Hopefully, we aren't planning on providing someone stormwater land to build on. But Okay. No. Again, I I wasn't just looking at that specific thing,
but I get I guess I was going back to what the mayor said. When you talk about Duke going out for an RFP, it doesn't sound like we're just putting it up for sale. It sounds like we're trying to use it some way. And I think if you go back to 2020 and 2021, a lot of those properties, we were trying to market to add the affordable housing stock in the city as opposed to that's different than the property up by the McDonald's in Caribou, where we were just selling them at market rate or what we could get and use it and collecting the funds back into the city's future building. That's correct.
Building funds. I just noticed that one that there was we're grouping them together and they're different. And I I interpreted them as from being from different, like, financial packet places. So I I just wanted to wanted to mention that. Yeah. We found that out too on that list back in 2021. Some of the high priority parcels were parcels owned by RTU. And then looking into those parcels, some had really challenging development infrastructure to it, so we moved those to the long term list. And we also realized that they were an enterprise fund. So in order for us as the city to sell them,
we would have to compensate our queue for that cost of that that land. Yeah. So that kind of slowed things down in those parcels because okay. How are we gonna how are we gonna accommodate the enterprise fund to get those funds available to go out for an RFP or to sell them to the developer? But in addition, they also had some pretty challenging development infrastructure costs associated with the muscles. We push those from and this that way, they were listed high priority.
We push them back to a long term. This takes a part time to to look at it. Understandable. Thank you. So we have, council member Palmer and now council member, Miller, and then we'll let you get back to the presentation. Well, I guess the frustration about selling everything is that in 07/21, we we we went out for all these properties and and we, I think, have three of them that we've sold. And if my understanding correctly from the last email I received, the property up at the fire station, we lost money on the on all the developments. So we didn't make money on that development when we sold those properties,
after we developed them. So, you know, I would like to see us, you know, come up with with the funds and then have those funds either go to the building maintenance fund or or acquisition. I don't need to do other things with it right now. Council member Miller. Just hopefully a quick question. Could you clarify again, what you said type of development for the two parcels you're suggesting, one and two being combined in an RFP? Did you say single family home? That's right. And then my question is about the zoning on parcel one being MXT corridor. Why would we do that? Can you clarify which one is Parcel one?
Where are we? Fourteenth Street Southeast and, Third Fourth Street Southeast, Thirteenth Avenue Southeast, just east of here. We don't have a picture of it, but it's on oh, there it is right there. Yep. Number a. Okay. Actually, that that site has really challenging access to it. Mhmm. K. It's in right now, you have to access through a turn lane to get to it, So we'll have to, work with public works, in regards to access to that site. But, thinking that may not be single hand, but it may be multifamily in there. It depends on what, what interest we get in the RFP for that site,
if we get interest at all because, like I said, it's a pretty challenging site for access purposes. Sure. And I understand that. I I mean, I I guess I would be interested in the the result of the traffic study to see whether or not that lane is still beneficial to the system. I mean, it seems like a prime location otherwise being that it's light tech eligible, etcetera, and that their property is developing at higher intensity just west of there towards downtown. It seems like a a no brainer to keep it higher intensity than single family. Council member Fredericks.
Yes. My colleague, mister Palmer, referenced the site up by a fire station two not being in the black quite yet. Would that last sale of that fourth piece, I believe it was, would that put it in the black? I'm not sure what mister Palmer's referring to. I'm not I wasn't involved in those sales, and I don't involve in the development of those two parcels that were sold. So Gotcha. Let's, mister Yetser, go ahead. Mister Yetser, go ahead. That that doesn't match what my memory is, but, we can certainly look that up and follow back up with you of what the
city paid for those parcels and what they were each sold for to get the those numbers exact. Don't know them off the top of my head. For excitement, I just like to argue a little bit publicly with mister Palmer. I can tell you what we got for the sites. I don't know what we paid for the sites. I can I can tell you what we That first number would be really important, actually? What we paid for we got for them? What you paid for it? No. What we got for them. No. I'm sorry. Yeah. I'm sorry. Would be really important. I didn't hear that for you. Sorry. Alright. No worries. Alright. Continue with I think we're in mid I think we're in mid term properties and,
miss did an excellent job of categorizing our midterm properties. I'm not sure how much we wanna spend discussing our midterm properties, but I I think a key point here is, so this is looking all four to six years from now, because we still have some uses going on in the Silver Lake Powder plant. But, our thought would be to use a smaller area plan that kinda captures those five parcels to look at that whole area what is the best vision for the city along these corridors and what would we like to see developed along Broadway, along City Center Drive, along West Silver Parkway,
and over by Neil Field. So, our envision is doing a smaller year plan for that, which would be involve community engagement, speaking with business owners in that area, and coming up with a smaller year plan. And then that really gives us us a vision for that area, and we'll see where development takes us after creation of a smaller year plan. I I guess we could start working on a smaller smaller year plan in the next couple years with the thought of, yep, maybe we're out. Because with the the use of the power plant and stuff like that,
I think it goes to 2,030, I believe, if I'm not mistaken. Right? There's some obligations for, providing steam or mail at that site. And then we have a list of some properties that are are long term. Properties that have some, really challenging infrastructure Mhmm. Costs, development costs with it, and other issues that kind of push those properties out further. Just I don't know. Adam can jump in and finish it up. Yeah. So these are our long term properties. So we're looking at, development seven plus years out from now. There are and as we've mentioned previously and as Brent just hinted at, there are some definite development constraints here,
whether it be lack of access. One of the properties, Number 21, doesn't have have a, a developed road in front of it. So, an entire, right of way would need to be developed to even consider that property. So and then and three of these are also, parks properties, which we would need to work with, the parks department on, potentially doing a land swap or how they wanna, convey those properties and and eventually see those developed, if that's what we're envisioning. So I would say that these properties are all long term due to the the constraints that are currently there on them.
Council member Fredericks. At some point, does it make sense if there is a private property owner next to some of these properties? At some point, does it just make sense to offer them a real fair deal on these to unload them, attach them to an adjacent property just so we don't have to maintain them and mess with them anymore and do and spend the time and the efforts? That's something that we could explore. Like, for example, number 17 up there. Mhmm. If you look at it off of Twentieth because it's we're not talking a lot of land here. You're really limited to you get a a median,
and that roadway, I believe, and it's it's right in, right out access only. So that's really a challenging site to to get anything developed on that site. We were approached a couple years ago about a cell tower interested in, leasing this space, but then they moved on to a different location after realizing the the challenging access to the sites. That's right. I think that's that's really our presentation this afternoon of these 22 parcels and, are putting them in different categories as far as near term,
mid term, and long term. So we've got some council feedback already on our presentation, and we're open for some more. I have a question. If you could go back to the small area plan. And I guess my question is, so, when we do and maybe it's a question for, administer Zelms. When we do choose to do a small area plan, does that come back to the council for approval? I guess I have a question about, this plan, and it doesn't have to be answered today. But I'm not seeing the synergy in this site.
It's on both sides of the river. It's, the the plant site and the and others. And so it it seems to be kinda hobbled together to me. Well, I got I mean, one so we're trying to I think the smaller plans on coming to give us a vision for that area. I mean, we do know that there's a number of properties that have environmental issues, concerns on them. For instance, there's environmental concerns on Parcel Number 10, Number 9, potentially 15 based on past operations there. So that that plan really allows us to establish a clear and shared vision for
that area. So it means I'm gonna encompass more than just what's shown there. You're gonna probably capture that parking lot, to the east of Parcel Number 9 there across West Of Silver Lake Road, probably, capture the stuff between Parcels 10 And 14. I mean, what is the overall vision for this area? And that kinda gives the city and potential developers, yep. This is the city's vision for that. How can I meet that create that vision, make it come to light for the cities so we can meet our the council's priorities? Got it.
Council member Keane? Yep. Thank you. So, again, my my feedback I'm, good on the the near term recommendations, and I think that is a zero two as opposed to waiting three years to start something. So I I interpreted that way to start. As far as the midterm, I guess I still, am not sold on the idea that in three years, we should be, doing that whole, Northeast downtown or that, this the, RPU site, the the other thing. There's some really good properties there. But we're still sitting on the South Side where we have the,
the Legends property, the other parking lot that we haven't developed that are city projects that are priorities now that aren't aren't going. We've got a small area plan that's mostly private property that I think those are more the priorities in the next ten years as opposed to starting on the RBU one. If there's some reason that that development should should happen before the other ones, then then I don't understand that. But that's something that I'm worried we're gonna get, you know, too many things up in the air. So that would be my input on the short term, midterms again.
Some of them are, you know, the, the operation traffic operations building. That might be uniquely interesting to someone because of location. But just that idea of starting to develop that whole thing as a as a community project, it's it's bothersome to me when we have that other thing going on right now with, the Legend site, the North Parking Lot, and the whole small area thing that's private property, I think those are more of the priorities for the city in the next ten years as near term downtown more so than the Northeast. But, you know, I can be swayed on that, but that's my input from what I understand right now.
Council member Palmer. Thank you. I I agree with mister Schubert again on Parcel 13 And 15, I think are separate parcels that are are unique in themselves. On Parcel 13, it'd be nice to know the history or or or if it sells or when it sells, where's that those funds go. I'm not particularly sure it does go to ARPU, but but I think we could do some research on that. On the number 15, I don't know, you know, where Mayo Field falls into this. Do we leave it? Do we not? I think somebody has to have some discussion with the park,
board on that. I think nine fourteen intent to me just seems to be ones that we should move ahead. I'm not particularly sure that those three parcels would have anything to do with what that whole neighborhood looks like. So, again, you know, I'll mention again I'd like to see us move our at least our fees up. And if there is some properties and like Mayor mentioned the one on Fourteenth, I don't know how we acquired that but that might be the area that we cannot build on that because of that. If those are the that's an example of some of those other parcels,
it'd be nice to say we can't do this because of this, instead of just throwing up, you know, some some properties and saying, oh, we own them but we don't know what we're doing with them. Am I making Yep. Okay. Yep. And I wasn't aware of that parcel that mayor Norton mentioned, so I don't but we we'll look into that, and Yeah. We'll get back to you on that. Council member Miller. I'll just add. I I agree with council member Palmer particularly about Site 10. I mean, I I'd love to know what minimum flexibility, particularly in the downtown, and this seems like a prime parcel that's, connected to our existing downtown proximity.
And, I it wouldn't need a small area plan. It's currently about 70 parking spaces and seems like it could be likely at least that many units of housing. Other feedback? Thank you, gentlemen. Appreciate it. Thank you. Moving on to our final topic, comprehensive service water management plan. And, I see mister Luxine coming forward. I'm sorry? Yeah. Customer? Oh, do we take breaks on I don't think we're at break level yet. I think we're gonna plow through here.
Is that oh, yeah. Go, Randy. Go ahead. Take a break. No. No. Go ahead. Mister Ed Luxein. Yep. Council president, mayor, council members, Aaron Luckstein. I'm deputy public works director, for environmental services. So again, that's water reclamation plant, collection system, and then our water resources, division, commonly known as the stormwater program, as well as the city's flood control network. With me today is Trey Erickson. He is the water resources manager. And, we'll be tag teaming this presentation, so you'll be hearing from both of us as we go through. So thank you, for the time today to talk about the comprehensive surface water management plan,
provide an update on that, several year long project that we've been going through. So the first, so the first, I'm just gonna kick it off. We're gonna talk about what is a comprehensive service water management plan and why do we need to update it. So here's just some of the basics. So that the plan itself describes our current surface water and groundwater resource. We'd say surface water that's our rivers, lakes, including our manmade lakes from some of the mining activities, groundwater, both shallow groundwater as well as, deep groundwater. And then things like our calcareous fence, Decora Edge, you know, some of our seeps, springs, like all of those. So that's when we're talking when we say service water,
as well as groundwater. And how stormwater can largely, that revolves around how our use of the land use, impacts those surface waters. Stormwater is a very integral part of how we're using our land. So that's really what it looks at. It also identifies the state, federal, and any local requirements, related to stormwater management and development. It establishes goals aligned with city's principles and priorities. And we'll talk a little about that. It also guides our capital improvement investments and can guide our development standards as well
as engineering standards. But it is a guide. And I'll talk a little bit more about that as well. The other is it does cover, again, a wide comprehensive number of items. So water quality, so how much pollutants are reaching some of our surface waters or groundwaters, flooding, wetland protection and mitigation, again, groundwater protection, construction site management. So we look at both, during construction as well as post construction management of storm waters. And then then public education. And there's a few other things as well. What it doesn't do, it doesn't automatically change any development standards.
It doesn't change our engineering standards. It doesn't change our permitting requirements. It automatically change those. It also doesn't set future stormwater utility rates. Again, that's a separate study, a separate process. And it doesn't mandate any projects. So, it might guide our capital improvement projects. It could guide how developments happen. But it doesn't mandate those. There we go. And so why is our comprehensive water management plan needed? One, we're approaching the current one is almost 30 years old. Originally drafted in 1997 and went through a small update in 1999 and has been
the same ever since. So it doesn't reflect the challenges. I shouldn't say it doesn't. Many of the components no longer reflect the challenges that we face today. As you know, we have Destination Medical Center, a lot of the supporting development. We're seeing a significant amount of growth and anticipated growth, and it doesn't, accurately reflect that. We've recently we received and updated our MS4 permits. This is the NPDS permit that the state issues to us that has all the state and federal requirements in it that we need to maintain. So our current permit had some new requirements added,
and we're going through another update in the next couple years that we're, working with the state on to make sure that this plan captures that. There's also been some total maximum daily load requirements. You're familiar with that. It basically means there are too many pollutants in some of our surrounding waters and we need to figure out ways to reduce those pollutants. So there are some of those new requirements that we need to comply with. Changing weather patterns and how we're managing some of the resiliency piece of that. And then the city, as you know, completed the 2040 comprehensive plan. And within that,
it said that we need an updated comprehensive resource water management plan. So this will fulfill that requirement. At this point, I'm going to turn it over to Troy, and he's gonna cover a few other topic areas. Alright. Thank you. Again, my name is Troy Erickson, Water Resources Manager with the city. So first, I wanna talk about just a few kind of fundamental components of the plan, the vision and plan drivers. So water being central to all our lives in one form or the other, the city of Rochester's comprehensive surface water plan has been developed to enhance the well-being and quality of life of its community,
and it supports a vibrant, sustainable, and resilient environment where all people enjoy health, safety, and reliable service. So, really, it's a it's a broad statement that that really it, you know, it spans from the the quality of the surface waters we see, which are central to the city, Zumbro, South Fork Of Zumbro flowing through it, all the way down to the services our group provides to the community and making sure storm water drains from streets and maintaining, you know, a level of service that's acceptable, you know, to the community. So along with that, now, Aaron talked about some,
I'd say, more technical detailed reasons why we updated why we're going through this process. The plan drivers reflect These outcomes and influencing factors that that ultimately shape the plan. So it's a it's another, you know, why? Why are we doing this? And, with that, the plan drivers we arrived at through, you know, an extensive process, I guess, through public engagement, internal discussions, things like that, include quality of life and social equity, resilience and environmental stewardship, public waters and recreation, public and private infrastructure investment, and fiscal responsibility and system sustainability.
So, again, a wide range of drivers are present there. You know, again, we're looking looking, you know, to fill a lot of of, you know, gaps that were present from the past plan. Again, that was developed thirty years ago and bring that forward. And along with that, we have, certainly, have a different view of of stormwater management and along with regulatory environment that dictates different, management requirements. So those drivers were really central to that. Alright. Now with any plan, public engagement is a big,
big component of it. Now much of this occurred, in the past several years, through a fairly lengthy process, but I just wanna provide a high level just to give you some indication of of what, who we who we spoke with and and how that was conducted. You know, people behind the scenes included several, team members that work closely with me. And, of course, it it worked all the way up within the department. So it starts with the core team, planning team that included, you know, a few more members standing across into the, I guess, it'd be with the maintenance teams and and parks department,
and and then all the way up to departmental level where we're working with with, you know, Wendy Wendy Turry at the time and Tyler Niemeyer, the parks department, and things like that. So and then, of course, we had many opportunities with the with the with the public interactions with them and then, you know, getting into, developers and engineers and then, of course, local agencies that, that drive a lot of what we ultimately do here. Some of the tools and and techniques that we use for stakeholder engagement,
of course, there were lots of surveys that extended the teammates, the public, also developers, getting feedback there in a variety of ways. A community advisory group, a co design effort where, again, diving deeper into some of the the the kind of the finer aspects of this, just trying to really get at an accurate cross section of the community in terms of understanding what the needs and wants of the community are. We used, some interactive ArcGIS online hubs to understand, you know, problem areas, threats, things things that people,
experience from a day to day basis that we're able to incorporate. And then, some unique workshops. One entitled the Community Resilience Building Workshop, which was, really, again, a broad, group of teammates, different agencies, all with certain ties to environment, surface water management, that kind of thing. Just understanding the threats, not only from a stormwater standpoint, but, just across the community. And, you know, really, the emphasis was on stormwater and surface water flooding, but it was a very,
a comprehensive review of that as we look forward for resilience and sustainability. And then, finally, stakeholder forums and public open house, we and individual stakeholder meetings. With that, I also just wanted to point out that an important part of our engagement was what we termed the integrative design approach. So internally, we would develop various concepts, some of which we'll talk, through here in the in the following, portions of this presentation, but we're very careful to bring forward those ideas to to stakeholder groups,
to the community, to whomever that may be, and always search for or or, attain input from from those groups and use that input to change it and or to to modify it in a way that, you you know, continues to to, continues to improve, you know, I guess, the the specific aspect we're looking at. So the the graphic you're looking at, illustrates that process where it's it's iterative. It circles back and back until the point where we actually implement that. And that with the, you know,
the ultimate, implementation as planned, the approval as planned will be its first, you know, first test, but having gone through many tests leading up to that point. And always looking at it with the, through the lens of being adaptive and and changing with with the needs of the community or, you know, weather, whatever it may be. So with that, I'm gonna move forward and we're gonna talk about some key plan components, things that, again, are are important but also unique to this plan. And those include an integrated stormwater management approach, the evaluation of entire drainage areas,
planning by drainage district, and then asset management and capital improvement planning. So, Aaron will, continue with the first, that being the integrated stormwater management approach. Alright. So, this is a fairly simple, concept. It really is looking at how do we mimic the natural environment as much as possible. So in a traditional natural environment, you have precipitation. It'll hold that water in the environment. You'll either lose some of it through evapotranspiration or it'll infiltrate the smallest amount of water, moving in the direction is going to be runoff. So that's the minimal amount,
as possible. Under conventional kind of built environment, it's a little bit of the exact opposite. So the rainfall hits, it hits the streets, put it in a pipe, and you're trying to move it away as fast as possible. We don't and so it's taking and yet, at the same time, we have to have a built environment. We're going to continue to grow. So we're looking at that third piece, which is the sustainable urban water cycle. So you're taking a built environment and you're trying to have it mimic a natural environment as much as possible. So promoting infiltration, reusing storm water as much as possible,
really emphasizing evapotranspiration, things like that, and ultimately minimizing the amount of runoff into our surface waters. And so that's really looking at blending those, together. And so thinking about that, there's kind of the full spectrum. So if you're looking at so my left on the screen, we're looking at the natural environment and those natural assets. So part of the process first is looking at what are the natural assets that we have on the site already that we're working with, whether that's the soils, existing forests, wetlands, meadows,
things like that. And what value do they provide? If you can preserve them, that that's the best. So instead of strip strip mining it and building over the top of it and trying to create a natural environment, you use and look at those built environ or the the natural environment as an asset. How can we use that in our development process? And then we'll move slowly to the right. You move into the more of the low impact development, which are a little more engineered solutions. So we're altering it, but it's kind of mimicking the natural environment. Things like rain gardens,
green roofs, bioswales, tree trenches, things of that nature. So those are good. You know, and they mimic a little bit more of the natural environment, but you still have a built environment, an engineered component to it. And then the engineered assets of permeable pavements, use of use of rain barrels, cisterns, temporary holding water so that you can reuse that stormwater, things of that nature. And then you have the gray infrastructure. We will always have gray infrastructure. We need bridges. We need roads. We need parking lots. We need pipes to convey water. You're going to have that.
But the idea is that's one of the, you should minimize the amount of that once you've gone through this full process. You're not going to completely eliminate it but you will minimize it. Can you pause there? Let me Can you go back to last slide? Is this, requirements from the state and federal government or is this something that is beyond or are more than that? So it's not a requirement. So this is more of an approach that you would look at. Now, some of the requirements do get at this. So our standards, as well as like the state and federal standards,
look at, infiltrating as much stormwater as possible. So looking at making sure that your post construction environment meets pre construction, that's a push to say infiltrate and hold as much water on the land as possible. So some of these components are built into the regulatory requirements. But it's not as black and white as, like, what this approach sets up. Keep it in mind that, again, this plan doesn't mandate this. It doesn't say if you're gonna develop, you have to go through step by step. This is more of a recommendation and a concept that says when you're looking at
doing a development or when the city's looking at doing a capital improvement project, whether it's new construction for us, building a regional pond and I'll give you an example or we're, doing a retrofit, that it's better to look, take it through this approach, and I'll talk a little bit more about why as we evaluate that. I go back to minimum standard from like a building code perspective and to me, we should be enforcing at least those. Now this is a recommendation that's the like to sees. I'm not particularly sure I want to see that from the city.
I have one question for you on enhanced assets, rain gardens. Why do we want to do a rain garden? This is a loaded question. Me. Okay. So one, it's a way to capture some of that stormwater, be able to infiltrate it or use it through, you know, plants will uptake that water. One, it reduces the amount of storm water running off. You can also get, pollutant removal through that. There's also, you just get the natural benefits of plants and go out. So it looks like there's another Yesterday, Sunday, Minneapolis Tribune had an article about rain gardens and that they're trying to do uptake
of of phosphorus and that they found out that it really hurts the phosphorus. And so, I mean, so there's a theory out there and somebody throws that out there and now all of a sudden we got rain gardens and we're not really helping ourselves. And so that's the reason these kind of standards bother me is that it might be somebody's cool idea in a lab, but actually out in the field what is going to happen. So I'm gonna go all the way back. And I've said this the worst time. This does not set a new standard. We're not saying that thou shalt install a rain garden.
These, again, are, approaches that we recommend that you consider, that you would evaluate. We would also look at those. If the city wanted to mandate that, we would have to go through that process. So I don't know if you have something else to say on that. Okay. We do have, council member Keane. And just to the rain gardens, it also council member has to do with the infiltration of it and that how that rain garden is developed. I think in the Minneapolis example, it went too quickly into the stormwater.
Council member Keane. Yeah. Again, I I I wanna reiterate what staff's telling us here. These we're we're talking about this bigger plan here, and these are some examples of things. The standard is still, like, when you're when you're on a construction site, you the runoff should be no more than it was before you did your development. That's the the real standard and that's by that that's what we're into. As far as just showing these other examples, those aren't things we're doing. As far as the example with the the rain gardens in the cities, they clearly stated they they did them wrong. They put a bunch of compost into them and that ran then that was the
problem. It wasn't that the rain gardens were a problem. It's they did them wrong. Continue. So the other thing that, that comes out of this by doing if you do the approach correctly, there's several other benefits. You get the environmental benefits. There's social, benefits that come along with this. You have kind of enhanced, natural environment. There's some mental wellness components to that. You can also promote and educate people on these storm water, and water management approaches. There's also some economic, there's been a lot of studies that look at some economic incentives that come out
of this. Both it can result in increased property values, again, if done correctly. You can minimize the impacts of floods. These are much more susceptible to changing environments and the extreme precipitation events that we're seeing. So there can be some cost savings associated with that just from, from storm events, things of that nature. I won't go through all the details there. Here's just another example of co benefits that can also come out of this. So lot of times, we think of the primary benefits and why we're doing certain things. So if we just look at this example of street trees or tree trenches,
you know, utilizing those, the initial benefits are, reduced, you know, energy use. So, anyways, maybe I shouldn't have used that one as a great example. But you can sequester and store carbon. But there's also added co benefits that come out of that, again, with reduced flooding, heat stress, things like that that can come by by, adding these into the approach. So this is, I think, hopefully, where the rubber meets the road, and you can see the the real life example of it. So on my left, again, if we look at a a traditional regional pond approach so, if you've heard of the Section 7 Pond or TP40 Pond,
this is the one that we've been looking at, potentially building in Northwest Rochester to capture some of the flows coming into the King's Run area. Traditionally, what you would do is you'd build a pond that meets today's standards. Now if we looked at five years ago, versus today already with updated precipitation values, that pond would be undersized. So a historical pond we would have built, you would have only needed 22 acres. Now we're looking at a pond of 35 acres. In the future, if you have stretched that out based on future projections,
you might need a 52 acre pond. So you just keep getting bigger and bigger. That's and and by doing so, all you're really providing is flood control and prevention. That's it. You're not getting other benefits that go along with it. You might get a few wildlife or things like that benefits, but but not optimizing that. If you take the integrated stormwater management approach and all the co benefits that come with it, you can look more holistically at that watershed. That come with it, you can look more holistically at that watershed. We could look at preserving some of those natural assets and working with a developer, you know, on that, providing green corridors, providing access to,
you know, outdoor outdoor space. And and so if you look at the right, you can actually still preserve space for a future pond, but you can reduce the size of the pond you need and have set aside space to expand that pond if you need it. You can also build in outdoor recreational opportunities within that space so that if you needed to, you know, one, those can be temporary flooded, soccer fields, things like that. And but the majority of the time, you can still use them. Or if you had to, you could expand the pond and implement other things in there without having to tear
down existing infrastructure, buildings, things like that, where a lot of times we landlock ourselves. So that's really the basic, kinda concept that we would be looking at and promoting as part of the much more resilient as we're dealing with the changing climate. Alright, so the next aspect we're gonna look at is the evaluation of the entire drainage area. Now, typically, and as was done in the prior, Surface Water Management Plan, only the the area within the corporate limits of the city of Rasha were looked at. And,
you know, that that obviously is the meat of what we wanna get at, but there's a lot of area outside of the city that influences what happens in the city. So the this approach now, we've we've divided the city into what were termed, 10 drainage districts. So drainage districts are, in essence, the watershed that that encompasses each each one of the tributaries. So as you see there, we have Badger Run, Bear Creek, Cascade Creek, Game Haven, Hadley Valley, things are on, so on and so forth. So all 10 of those. There's one exception to that. That's the South Fork Of Zumba River,
and that's simply because of the the sheer size of it. So we didn't look at that, you know, to the west upstream, but there's hundreds of square miles up above that. But we are gonna look at that, through the the core of the city, you know, where it runs. Thus far, we've looked at Cascade Creek and a good portion of Kings Run, and we'll get into some details. So, what that means then, you know, Aaron touched on on, you know, some of the the rain events. So this really, by looking at that, this allows us, kind of better integration with some work that's been done, within I guess, as part of the one watershed,
one plan. So there's there's coordination there, and that's proof, fruitful already just with with some grant opportunities that are being done on on Cascade Creek. It also allows us to look at things from kind of a macro level. We're seeing the the flooding and and provides an opportunity to update some of that work. If you saw on the last graphic, the current hundred twenty four hour, hundred year rainfall event is is 7.8 inches. Now, there's work being done in terms of projecting what, what the, you know, what, the hundred year rainfall event will be and,
through another, publication through NOAA. For this, we've actually used, 10.85, which was, it's a a 90% confidence interval of of that that was used to predict the current rainfall standard. So it's increasing and that allows us just to project, you know, what flooding may be. Give us some idea how we need to plan for resilience and, really protecting our resource within the city. So with that being said, you know, looking at things from a watershed scale is important, but ultimately,
we need to drill down and, you know, what does this look like in terms of projects and, and, you know, that that can impact our city? So we looked at things, really from the perspective of risk. Risk is it's the product of of consequence. So what what it is, you know, I guess, it could be from a monetary standpoint, but some some evaluation of of consequence, but also the frequency with which this this, this consequent consequence happens. So and you see on the on the chart there,
on the graph, you know, likelihood the return period. So it starts off with a 100 on the y axis and goes to, you know, decreases. And you can see the the chart though, you can see risk actually increases. So really what that does, it really allows us to evaluate, you know, like, say, like, flood flood conditions that that maybe they turn out to be more more of a nuisance condition, but but things that that don't necessarily eclipse like a 100 event, like, you think of big flooding, but it's really the more, frequently occurring floods that that really,
you know, cause peep or problems to to residents and people that we maybe don't hear about so often, or maybe we do, but it shows within the modeling. So with this approach, from a risk standpoint, we've, evaluated in terms of of really three three elements, infrastructure, social, environmental. And we weighted those according to, the the chart up there. And you can see the the metrics within each of those, for infrastructure, looking at critical facilities such as hospitals, power stations, water wells, things like that, roadway flooding, road safety,
that actually has to do with with the velocity of floodwaters over over the road and emergency routes. The social elements including, like, building inundation, so homes that would be flooded, drinking water resources, and social vulnerability. So that includes a number of things from from elderly, environmental justice areas, things like that, and then environmental. So looking at wetland sensitivity, tree anaerobic tolerance, so the the period of time that they can be inundated before trees will actually die, and then stream bank stability. So, again, you know, understanding that floodwaters can can really,
impact, those stream corridors. So risk was evaluated as a, based on on those weights, and, as I mentioned, it's a product of of con consequence and, and likelihood. And within that, we calculated risk according to many, many sub watersheds within the overall drainage district. So this happens to be an illustration of Cascade Creek, and within and it shows how risk was calculated from a two year return frequency all the way up to a hundred year return frequency. And you can see now it's all relative.
Okay? We know a hundred year storm is much more, you know, magnitude and much more impactful, say, than a two year, but what this does is it gives you some indication of where things are occurring for all the all the storm events that happen in between. And with that, we've looked at, you know, cumulatively, and we ended up identifying, you know, identifying, you know, five priority areas within the Cascade Creek Watershed where we, identified the highest risk. Okay? And within there, this allowed us to look at areas where where projects could be implemented to achieve,
you know, was reduced flooding, but along with reduced flooding, also improve water quality. One I want you to look at is the Subcatchment 315. So that's a subcatchment that includes the area up around John Marshall, just for a familiar landmark, primarily why I picked that. You can see, you know, from our model results on the left, you can see, really what I want you to focus on is just the areas of blue, and that's indicative of largely consistent with what we've, witnessed over time and whatnot. There's one area just to the east of, of John Marshall. You kinda make that out with the track there,
the oval, sent kind of central to, to the figure there. Thirteenth Avenue, you know, has a long line of flooding down the street. If you go to the figure on the right, with with using an integrative, stormwater management approach, you can see how that's been greatly reduced. Okay? So that's been through a combination of green infrastructure, above and below ground storage, and and then also increased conveyance, gray infrastructure. Alright? So with that and within that figure, you can see, all those elements called out in terms of, you know, from the legend there,
if you look closely. So with that being said, said, looking at it from that standpoint, then we're able to identify, you know, various, volumes of green infrastructure. So in this instance, we opted or attempted to, retain approximately point eight inches over the entire attachment to store that. There's also more gray infrastructure implemented for storage as well, and then, increases to pipe sizes for increased conveyance. So all those basically allow us to kind of sharpen our focus onto where to look for, potential projects, both identifying those projects and then what it would ultimately take,
to to, implement those from a cost standpoint and and really, you know, location to be most effective with our with our dollars and also, develop a a a capital improvement plan that is prioritized according to that. And none of this neglects the, you know, the biggest flooding issues. I wanna keep that that very, you know, very clear. But, again, understanding that there's a range of projects that we need to address, this helps, prioritize those. Alright. Aaron, we'll we'll finish off here with the asset management and capital improvement planning. Yep. So,
Trey just walked through a scenario where we can evaluate risks and then identify possible project fixes and the costs associated with that. And so one of the other things that we're bringing forth as part of the plan is then evaluating these projects based on an Envision rating system. So this was developed by a third party that prioritizes the social well-being, protection of the environment, how to enhance, you know, human health, protection as well as economic prosperity. So where are we both investing and getting the greatest return on investment?
As well as there could be, again, things where it actually enhances the value of the property based on that. So we can run these projects through that scoring system, and it will help us rank them. And so this this slide tries to kind of pull everything together, a lot of what you had just heard in terms of how we would develop an asset management plan and our our capital improvement, plan going forward. So we would complete those drainage district assessments. We would evaluate where are the biggest risks. And as Troy just gave you the example of where are people being constantly flooded
out or we're constantly dealing with road flooding, that might rank as a priority. So we would then evaluate that. We then have some estimated costs associated with that. We would run it through the Envision rating system to see where it falls to help rank these projects. And then we would compare that against the level of service criteria. So what do the residents of expect? And so the plan does cover some of those criteria. And then that's what then will end up in a future capital improvement plan, which, as you know, then comes to council as part of the budget process, for reviewing. But that way, it's going through a system and not just left up to either a staff,
review of saying, well, this is where we're getting the most calls, so obviously, we need to do a project there. You know, there's some some justification and assistance behind that and, reliability on these projects. So the last thing well, so two more things that I wanted to cover. And this slide might seem a little bit out of place, but we really want to emphasize this as we've done public engagement. And then we recently went to the, Sustainability and Resiliency Commission. This was, again, one of their big concerns. So it keeps coming up as what are the potential impacts on development and ultimately the cost of that?
Recognizing there's a huge housing need, we want to make sure that we're not, working against ourselves on on that side of it. So keep it in mind again, the plan itself does not result in any direct cost, either savings or increases. This is a guide. Now it will be used as a guide we would build out the models that Troy just talked about. So we have Cascade Creek and Kings Run done. We have better planning tools. So when we build out those models, it increases our ability to evaluate those potential impacts. So we can run the models on different scenarios,
different storm events, and whether or not there's adequate downstream facilities. So a few council members, we know we've been working through some neighborhood issues where development happens, stormwater flows through the site, and they're like, woah, there's way more stormwater coming through here than there was predevelopment. Those are sometimes difficult. While we evaluate it, it looks like there was adequate downstream facilities. Now we're in this situation. We can model that and have a better idea of, can this amount of stormwater adequately flow through there? If not, they're gonna have to find ways to hold that stormwater on on-site,
whether that's reducing of impervious surface, increase in infiltration, things like that. So better planning tools could result in additional requirements, for development. The other thing is, again, the changes in precipitation values. As Troy said, as we get more data, we can add that in. We can model those different scenarios for those extreme events, which may require them to have to manage for more water. Now these aren't new. These are currently in the UDC. These are currently in our permit. They're requirements of development. But we have more information that can then be used to assist in evaluating those
proposed projects. So that is one way that it certainly could result in an impact, to that. Now keeping in mind that, again, if we go through this process, it should it could save money in the long term on maintenance costs, having to do projects, retrofits to fix some of these things to help address some of the concerns of of residents. Hopefully, there's less infrastructure to maintain in terms of, you know, hard infrastructure or maintaining things like that. So there could be some some cost savings, as well. So the final next steps.
So one, we are wrapping up, kinda doing the final review, making sure, you know, spelling errors, things like that, that the document is good to go. Plan to send that estimated to send that to council members in August of this year, so next month. It's a large document. I can't remember how many pages, but it's a couple 100. I'll just give you a heads up because we wanna get it to you and give you adequate time to read through that. And so then the plan is we would bring it back, you know, to council probably as reports and recommendations, on that final and get your feedback, seeking final approval. Most likely, again, reports and recommendations, get your feedback,
see what changes need to happen. And if if you're comfortable with that, maybe bring it back as a consent agenda approval or something like that. But we'll go through until we, we're working with you to to seek that final approval. The next then is to, build out the remaining, models for those, subcatchment basins. So that is in our our capital improvement plan right now. And so we'd be coming forward with a request to work with a consultant to build those models. We then, once we have those model results, update our asset management. And I I should have added the diamond shape. If you know that I identified which ones require council actions,
really emphasizing this is gonna keep coming back to you. So, but again and then the capital improvement plan does require, council action as we update those. Most likely, it would be '28 or beyond because we gotta build the models and all that. But, it'll be coming forward in the future. And then our recommendation too is once we have updated numbers on what is the cost to maintain existing infrastructure, potential capital projects, do move forward with the stormwater utility fee rate study, and complete that evaluation, which again, we'd have to seek approval for and and, hire a consultant for. So, any questions?
Council member, Keane? Yeah. Thanks. Just so I'm understanding and I and I've I've been involved in a little bit of this through my work with the joint powers and other things in over the past couple years, but can I or should I consider the comprehensive surface water management plan a sub plan under the comprehensive plan? Or is it a one off, something separate? So you said a sub plan. So I think of the comprehensive plan as sort of the, the, aspirational statements of where the policies for the city want to take us in the future. And then there's some things like the UDC is very specific,
how we do development, and then there's like the, active transportation plan. And I think of this as another plan underneath there that basically fleshes out that comprehensive plan. And I'm I'm I'm asking if it it doesn't sound like it's something you've developed it with, but that's how I'm thinking about it. Is that helpful? That's correct. Yep. So we have the planning to succeed 2040 comprehensive plan. It does take into consideration, you know, storm water management, surface water management, as well as, like, active transportation, things like this. This would be at that level Yep. Where it's a it works in conjunction with the the larger city comprehensive plan.
But that that's kind of specifically focused on, the comprehensive service water management components. Keeping in mind, again, we still have the UDC that has the the development and recovery component. Design. That this yeah. That's an important split too because I I'm not talking about specific rules for for somebody or even, our permitting type of changes. I'm talking about the the, again, the the the policy sort of direction and then from underneath there is how we develop our our our our, specific permits or our specific standards.
Correct. Good. Good. You mentioned the models and I'm trying to make sure I mean, I don't read too much into this. But if you have a model for King's Run or if you have a model for something, can you do a desk exercise where you'd say, if we got four inches of rain over a ten hour period that came from here, here's what would happen? Or is that that that's more that's that that level of detail just couldn't be Yeah. You you can do that. There are there are some limitations, but you can very much In fact, something, that we lean on as well is actually,
like, inputting, like, like for calibrations, actually, input, so calibration, trying to to make sure the the output from the model, matches reality. So with that, we've actually used radar based, rainfall information, so we know where rain fell and and at what rate and that kind of thing, input it to see the response from the model. So so absolutely, we can do that and and right. As as as a predictor of of, you know, what could happen or or just trying to understand what did happen. Good. I no. I'm glad to see that. I'm glad to see the starting with the Northwest because of all the construction that's
going on or all the all the development. And we really don't have when you look back at the 1980s doing the reservoirs, there there isn't a big one up that way. And there, I again, just for my peers here, this stuff's really important to me because Rochester is in a bowl. These the water comes in from all directions. My first year in the council in 2019 was the last time we had a really bad rain year in Rochester, and it you you don't wanna go through too many of those. It's a bad time. There was a there's a lot lot of the just the, the way that Rochester is on a lot of these hilly neighborhoods and that,
there can be a lot of damage. And, you know, you start out with all this what we're doing, what we're doing. I mean, we're protecting property and life with how we manage the stormwater. And, you know, you don't have to look far in our national news to see what can go wrong when when those things aren't watched out for very closely. So I'm very supportive of what you're doing here, and I I think we've really gone about it in a very professional way. I mean, you talk a lot about the idea, like, are we sustainable and doing this other stuff. But at the end of this, this is public safety, and protection of property, and and I think we're going about it the right way.
Council member Wall. Thank you. First, I would say that, my wife and I live on one of the city retention ponds, and, it is a great joy to watch the stories being told out there, especially through wildlife and the the influx and the outflow of, water. Sometimes we grieve when it gets too low, but then we know it's doing what it's supposed to do. Right? It's retaining our water. It's it just really is a joy. It's and last year, we got a lot of water. The first time I saw the overflow function of of that particular pond,
and I hadn't seen that in five years. But, boy, really exciting. That's it's great stuff. It works. Why why are we doing this now? Why didn't we do it ten years ago? Why did it take thirty years? What's the precipitator, for this? So if we go back to some of those first slides, we have some of those drivers that are doing it. So one, the new permit, so initially, when the permit came out is when we started this effort. It actually started in 2020. It's taking longer than it it should have, quite honestly. But, you know, we've continued to work on it over the last five years to to bring it forward. So it's changes in what we're seeing,
within development. Obviously, that board pulled forward on bound, come forward in the middle of that, large predictions for, increased, you know, housing in this area. There's been a few TMDLs that have been updated. So those are a lot of of the drivers. Plus the recognition that, as we've dealt with storms like 2019 and things like that and deal with, localized street flooding, we recognize, we need to take a bigger picture look at this and and put together the plan. The last one is the planning to succeed 02/1940. It it called for a new plan. That was one of the big drivers. Council directed it,
and so we brought it forward. So I consider, Rochester to be, well blessed with staff, including the two of you. I'm thankful for your work. Are other cities undertaking the same depth of of, study that you are doing? Or what does a place like Fountain do? You just get rain and just whatever happens, happens? Yep. So, great question. So, yes, other other cities are doing this. A lot of, you know, cities similar in size to Rochester, smaller, you know, twin city suburbs, things like that are going through, similar type efforts. Some of the concepts that we brought forward are are not new.
They're being implemented in in other cities. And so we've it's worked. So we're we're modeling some of those ideas. Smaller cities, it certainly is more of a challenge, but they also traditionally don't see the development pressures that Rochester is is seeing. So theirs is just more driven by what are the permit requirements that the state hands down, and that's what they implement. So Councilmember Palmer. Thank you. We have, sales tax extension money for the flood control. Are you planning on using some of that funds, to to help out with this? So great question.
So not in the development of the comprehensive plan and not in the development of the models or things like that. Now what could come out of those model scenarios? And as we look at, reconstruction projects, things like that or ideas, certainly, I suppose that could come up, and evaluate that as a potential potential funding source. So if we use the example of, the section seven, you know, pond, if that's gonna have significant protections from flood control, we would evaluate that as a a funding source. But most of what we're looking at would be stormwater,
you know, funding. That's things like localized street floodings. I know that came up, I think, two weeks ago in the study session. We have projects on there for seed flood control. Many of those are stormwater because they're either flooded intersect intersections or flooded properties, things like that, not your traditional when we say big flood control projects. So that answer your question? Look, it's, I guess, the dividing line between stormwater and flood control and and shoot. Where where exactly do we go? Or how do you decide, you know, if it's local street flooding that goes from your stormwater.
Is that what you're trying to say? Yeah. Most of so what we're gonna look at is gonna be stormwater funding. So I would say the differentiation between it as one is associated with the existing city's flood control network. So whether it's a reservoir, a conveyance, a levees, things like that. That then is flood control. And stormwater is things like streets, stormwater ponds, things like that. Now as we evaluate flood protection and, conveyance projects. We will evaluate what is the appropriate funds to complete a project.
Is it stormwater or does it meet the specific criteria of the sales tax, funding requirements? And so that would fully evaluate that. I don't have any great examples, you know, for you right now of where we would evaluate some of that other than maybe the Section 7 Pond. Again, looking at the flood protection that is provided by holding back some of that water up in the Kings Run area and providing better rate control there. Administrator zones. Actually, I think that Mr. Luke Stein got there. But basically, you'd be looking at what percentage of value is there to the flood control system
versus the stormwater system. Is are you getting something that otherwise you might have had to build separately with the flood control funding? And then, I see you have a fee increase looking at for your stormwater, evaluation. Don't we have a lot of money right now in our stormwater fund? So, Juan, I don't believe I said there would be a fee increase. We would evaluate those rates to the Evaluate and they don't go down. So Now it could be a rate increase, So we would evaluate that in looking at that. And yes, there is a surplus when you look at our capital improvement plan.
If we were to execute the projects on there, that balance significantly is reduced, but that will all be taken into consideration should council authorize us to pursue a stormwater rate study. And how many about ponds do we have in Rochester? Oh, I'm gonna look to dry for that. That. How many ponds? Public ponds would be about a 170. K. Plus or minus. And so today, I sent a note about one that wasn't mowed. I mean, don't we have them on a mowing schedule that you mowing every couple months? They are on a mowing schedule.
That's correct. So thistles this tall is is not on the schedule or It's on the schedule. They are we're seeing there's lots of lots of priorities this year in terms of, from from a vegetation management. So, they're typically mowed twice a year. So weather in in that particular instance, why it's taken to July. I don't know how it fell on that, but it it will be taken care of. We've been we've been jumping around based on complaints and and as well as sticking with just our routine. So Okay. I I just to me,
I would just thought you would be mowing every couple months and not have that problem and of course, I like spraying, but, some people don't. But also my Rain gardens don't need to be mowed nor do prairie gardens. Well, I I'm not disagreeing with you on that. But but I just found it interesting that that, you know, you're trying to do something here. But, I mean, the thistle's that tall. It's just not not a good thing. No. Not at all. And if it's in someone's neighbor my backyard, I'm sure somebody would be talking to me. So Right.
Yeah. And I will say I will say too, now, whether it had to do with the nature, how things grew this year, every year is a little different. I know a lot like, where I live, the thistles were externer and high. They just mowed them. The the it's a private property, but we're just mowed, but I know things did creep up a lot in the last. But, anyway and and I can get you more information in terms of this company. I I I trust you. You guys do a good job. I'm not Oh, thank you. Yeah. Criticizing you guys. I'm not But we we have gotten a load of complaints this year just because of the thistle's parsnip. It's it's extraordinarily bad for whatever reason.
So Mhmm. Thank you. Other questions? Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you. Moving on to our study session calendar. Administrators Elms. Excuse me. Thank you, council president, council members. I did just want to primarily focus on the study session for the July 28. You may note that we did add a study session, topic there based on your discussion from last Monday, recommended operating model for Rochester Sports and Recreation Complex and review of current parks facilities operating models. So I just ask that you give us a little bit of grace on the
end time of that meeting depending on if that takes a little bit longer. We also have, the UDC annual update, so just some information about that, in advance of future council meeting. The air quality quality alliance, you may know that as the Rochester Air Network. An update, you will be seeing some of mister Luckstein again. Silver Lake Dam modification and sediment removal project updates, and then electric vehicle charging rates. And that is, part one of a two part study session to get, some general information out to you, some feedback in order to bring that back to another study session a little bit later in the year.
And I will provide a break somewhere in there. So I don't know. It could go fast. Anything else for today? If not, we are adjourned.