Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to our April 28, study session of the Rochester City Council. And I hope everybody I hope we will be able to get out of here before we have to go to the government center basement. But, we have, three items on our agenda today. First, factors influencing the budget. And then we'll, discuss our city council rules of procedure. And, and then, the council will go into an executive session. So with that, I am going to turn it over to administrator Allison Zelms,
who will, walk us through the factors influencing the budget. Thank you, council president, council members, mayor Norton, members of the public, most of whom are staff members here today. Really excited, as you all know, to be here for the first presentation talking about the two year budget. It's like Christmas for me. So I will try to make this, as expedient as possible, but also an opportunity for feedback, which is what it's intended, the very first kind of look at, long range, what we have in front of us, and not a lot of detail, yet in the budget. So between myself and,
city or deputy administrator Aaron Parrish, who will lighten this up a little bit towards the middle. We will be presenting. So, you are entering the phase of a two year budget. So it's really a forecast over those two years. It's always a continuation of, a number of different policy items that have been set forward. It is a little bit difficult to get things done in a very short period of time in government, if you haven't noticed that yet in, your time together. But that's because we are generally influencing and transforming the entire community. And so it is important that we be thoughtful about,
how that happens. So with that, we typically have set a set of strategic priorities. And so a little departure from what you would normally have during factors influencing the budget. We had started some strategic plan updates with the council. So what you see before you right now is old strategic priorities. And, we thought we would kick this off with a little bit of an update from what we heard from the council. During your, first two, study sessions focusing on updating the strategic plan and get some of your reactions. So what we heard and what's next,
is that we wanted to update a bit the foundational principles and strategic priorities, so a little bit of, play within those two topics. We're looking to understand if we're on the right track or if there's any major departure from what you had experienced in those meetings. And depending on what we talk about and if we're headed generally in the right direction, would you like us to schedule a follow-up? Unlikely to be on a strategic, or strategic priorities, unlikely to be on a study session based on your study session calendar, but depending on your feedback, we could put something we could find find another date, to be able to get together and really,
hash out anything where there's not agreement. So the first one is fairly simple. I've mentioned more than one time that this has always been the community vision. From the community plan, it was fitting a graphic, and we will let graphic fit community vision now. So if there's general consensus on the community vision and that, which is from your community plan that was created with a lot of public input, we would recommend changing that to be the actual words community vision instead of city vision. It is a lot more inclusive of the broader community to say it that way. Also, we do have an organizational vision,
which is internally and also when we're hiring talent, what we are looking for and how we're providing, day to day services to deliver on the community vision. So vibrant, compassionate, innovative team. And then we start seeing changes from what the discussion was. So on foundational principles, what we heard was to move quality services from a strategic priority to a foundational principle. And the other thing that was discussed was, community connections. And so when we had been talking about that at the last study session, one of the things that had been on the graphic,
but not within the colored portions, was inclusive decision making. So I don't know if there's any major concerns, with making these the new foundational principles. Obviously, one of the things we'd wanna talk through in the future, if we're on the right track, is what those mean to you. Do you wanna pause and kinda get feedback at this point? I think that would be wonderful. Okay. Any any feedback? I really appreciate, inclusive, decision making up there and, quality services. I think that's a, a appropriate place to put it from my perspective.
Others' thoughts? Mayor Norton? Did Patrick, did you put your hand up? Mayor? Oh. No comment about that. Oh, go ahead, Pat. Yeah. I mean, I I Council member Keane, I'm being very informal. Yeah. I'm sorry. I I, again, I I didn't wasn't ready to kinda go through these now. But I I too can reflect back on our meeting and think these reflect, what what happened, especially the inclusive decision making. Was just good discussion, quality services? The ones that, again, I'm just trying to get, to that idea of, like, the the foundation principles versus the, strategic priorities and making sure they're specific enough to help in decision making.
So let's I'll just leave it at that. Okay. Let's continue. I do have a question. Go ahead. Sorry. Just a quick question about, fiscal responsibility and sustainability. Is sustainability in that context purely fiscal? Because I I know we'll talk about sustainability in the next. So just clarifying how that is interpreted. Council member Miller, council president, I would say it depends on the project. So when I think when I think about fiscal responsibility, depending on what we're trying to do, it might really be important to think about not just the sustainability of it fiscally,
but the sustainability of it being how much does it cost to operate something. And so make depending, like, if we're building a project, for example, the heating and cooling of our buildings, it made sense to pay a little bit well, some people would say a lot more upfront because the payback for that in your ongoing operating costs were significantly different. So I guess I see them as not interchangeable, but in today's day and age, it's hard to think about fiscal responsibility and sustainability of fiscal without also thinking about some components of sustainability could be longer term fiscally sustainable.
Okay. So I think But, again, this framing, fiscal is the operative word, and there might be some environmental sustainability impacts, but fiscal is the guiding principle here. I believe that is the guiding principle, but that will depend on what the city council discusses as what you believe it is. Any other comments at this point? Let's continue. Thank you. So then the strategic priorities, and maybe we can move the, captions a little bit. But we had looked at these major areas and, ironically, if you we I thought it was equal,
but now I'm looking at the slide again, and it was six foundational principles and five strategic priorities. So what we looked at here was adjusting to inclusive growth management. And you can read for yourselves what the sort of qualifier for that was, based on discussion. And that separated this out from what used to be economic vibrancy and growth management, as well as, some sub bullets of affordable living. Living. And so that was that discussion. Housing access, was a new conversation separated out from affordable living. So you can start to see that,
I guess, to, council member Keene's point, I would say these strategic priorities start to get more focused than the prior strategic priorities, in what they actually mean and tell us. Economic resilience, came separated out from economic vibrancy and growth management and some discussion there. Transformational capital projects and that we would deliver on those investments, you know, that we will get them done and done well, was part of the discussion. And so if added, that would be, I would say, entirely new, but kind of came from a discussion of foundational principles. And then responsible environmental stewardship would,
come forward as a strategic priority. So that would be new but also refocused from the foundational principles in that discussion. Thoughts? Mayor? The only thought that I had, I think I mean, this is interesting, and they're they're you kind of have to get your head around the new way of thinking about it. But, the responsible environmental stewardship, I've wanted to have that there for a long time. The only thing that I find restrictive is that it's in city operations as opposed to just a period after responsibility. Because I think, while from your perspective as administrator,
I understand that you're focused on city functions because that's what you manage, as a member of this board, I want that responsibility and stewardship to be beyond just what we do, but how we, set the community up for success outside of maybe just our operations. And one of the things I think about is development, for instance, and housing and infrastructure, which is not all city done, but we have a role, when we approve projects at the table about asking things of people who might be coming here. So I I just that was just one I thought was a little maybe a
little tiny bit too narrow by just focusing it on city operations. So that would be my my comment. Council member Miller. I guess, just to build on that, one of the things I I was just looking at since language is important here focusing on environmental sustainability, I wondered if instead of encourage, we might, use a word like integrate, talking about the integration of environmental sustainability as a strategic priority across city operations and planning. And I I even wonder then thinking about action steps if that leads into considerations in the RCAs of sustainability, defining how this integrates as a principal and strategic priority into the operations and planning.
But I I'm glad to see it here. I know we've heard a lot about it, this priority from the community. I heard about it all last fall. It's I think it's it's a a unnecessary step. And I also wonder if we might define a couple of areas of a prioritization. I mean, greenhouse gas emissions are one, but, building energy, some of these other big projects and, because I think natural resources are an important one. I think city operations and planning are important one. I just worry about, greenhouse gas emissions perhaps as a the core area of where that priority become comes
into play. Council member Miller, did you say integrate as opposed to, encourage? Is that the term you use? That would be my suggestion. I I do like that. And getting back to the mayor's point about, city operations, I kinda go back and forth on whether we should really just focus on our own house or include the, the wider community. I think that's important that we be, be champions for the wider community. But part of me says, if we are I do like integrate,
more than encourage if we're going to keep it, focused on city operations. I think there is something to be said for really working on, like I said, our own house first and integrating those, those, procedures that we need to be a model for the community. And I think then broadening it a little further, in, a future strategic priority may be where I'm leaning on it. Council member Keane. Yeah. My comments against I I don't wanna build off that stuff.
Again, when I look at us going from the three we have right now to these five and I think of the discussions we had, I do see the new, you know, there has there was more of that talk about, environmental stewardship. I personally like it to be focused on what we do as a city and not imply a mission beyond our beyond our operations. But again, that's just me looking at what I how I use these. The other comment I have on I spent a lot of time talking about those transformational cap capital projects. But part of the way I wanna use these is to not overload ourselves with
other things that distract us from those things. And, I guess I when I think of this as a list of five and this is number four, I I just wanna make sure I don't we don't lose that. But that's my comment, and I'm I'm good with going from the three to five. I will make the comment that you mentioned there's five foundational principles because one of them we're taking out of there. Right. So Yeah. Other thoughts? Council member Dorian. Yeah. I was, on the environmental stewardship, strategic priority, I'm going to suggest that we cast that broader vision, that we just don't limit it to,
our city operations, that we really serve as a model and serve as a benchmark, integrate environmental our natural resources and integrate environmental responsibility with just the period there. So I'd like to cast that broader vision for the community. Could I offer a reflection on that just Yep. From Go ahead. At the risk of sounding bureaucratic. When I think of what you're saying, I don't necessarily view it differently. But if we were to cast that vision for others in order to do that legally, I think that you would need to do that in some sort of city operation, whether that's changing your policies,
changing which, again, is maybe not encouraging or inter like, there would be a lot of city operational things that would still be guiding all of that. So, for example, if Republic Utilities, which they are, is going to invest in advanced metering, which provides individuals the opportunities to make decisions, part of the city operation is to communicate that that how it could be used. If we're talking about requiring businesses to, rather than encouraging, then I I'm not sure well, I would wanna talk to legal about that,
depending on what we were trying to accomplish. So, I mean, there would be a lot of different policies that you would need to adjust, put in place, and also make sure we're complying with state law in order to depending on what the idea was for, how to move something forward. So I'm not saying it couldn't be that. I'm just offering a little bit of guardrail that depending on what the intent is, you would have a lot of city operation that would be necessary in order to do that. Council member Miller. Just a follow-up question on that. Is there an opportunity would you feel comfortable adding a third
piece of this that's promoting in the broader community? Is that some sort of promotion incentivization, a better way that we can focus in the operations, integration of environmental responsibility, and then leading a promotion of I feel like we should have a secondary discussion of this and talk about how are we moving from lengthening a strategic priority and creating action plans within them, or are we right. Because I I feel like some of these, for example, greenhouse gases and greenhouse gas emission is part of the action plan.
So the more detail oriented of the existing, strategic priorities, which don't call out environmental stewardship in a strategic priority, but talks about affordable living and quality services. So, I I guess my thought would be depending on the outcome, and I think it would probably lend itself to more discussion and facilitation from the group about, you know, making sure that whatever these words are, that the majority of the city council agrees with what they mean. Or you may find yourselves you might find yourselves in a pickle anyway, depending on the topic. But it may mean something different to each of you and then be less valuable
of a strategic priority. So that would just be my concern, if we were but I think the conversation is helpful, A, as we develop a budget while not quite complete with strategic priorities. And also, I just think if I was a city council member, I would appreciate a broader discussion of that to understand what the implications might be or what the perceived implications might be for any of these strategic priorities. Thank you for that. I just wanted to point out also I really do like the inclusive growth management,
housing access, and economic resilience pulled out into their separate bullets. I think I think we get closer to what council member Keane has discussed, which is having a little bit more meat to the strategic priorities. So, I'm very comfortable with those. And on the transform transformational capital projects, I wonder, council member Keane, if you could maybe flesh that out a little bit more as to your thoughts on that since you were the main champion of that.
Thank you. Yeah. What what I'm talking about here is when if you go back to, the start of, like, bold forward, but also things like our bus rapid transit, Sixth Street Bridge, there's a lot of things that we've done, spent a lot of work getting. And I I, for lack of a better word, teed up for the next two or three years. And to me, if I wanna make sure our strategic priorities include execution and doing those well and not being, distracted by this idea of, like, what what's another new thing we need to be worried about? Which I think will come up. I think it will. But I think from a strategic priorities,
I wanted to make sure that we're stating both within our own conversation, with our conversation with the staff, and conversation with the community that we are focused on completing what we set out to do versus someone else will do that. We're off to the next thing. And and I wanna that's that that was my thoughts going into that. Thank you for that. Other thoughts? I hear that as deliver on the dream. Let's call it that. Don't dream and then go, oh, that's not what we thought it was going to be. So, I guess if my other question would be if there's any, like, major heartburn with how these are ringing true or not with you and if there
isn't a desire to have a follow-up discussion that's just focused on, I think, focusing on, you know, we have the short version and and after the colon. Like, what does after the colon mean to you? And if there's general agreement, if we can do that in another meeting, I think that would strengthen, your ability to approve these, talk about them publicly, and and collectively share what they mean. Granted, there's always going to be individual nuances of projects that you really care about or policies that you really relate to one or or all of these, but, just having a collective understanding of of what the intent is in a separate mean,
I think would be valuable to staff as well. And maybe we could bring back some a few examples of, action plan items that we think would fit in certain places that might help flush out how staff would use it as well. Council member Miller. Just a final comment. One of the things that I think is was part of affordable living was housing and transportation together. And maybe transportation is an inclusive growth management with infrastructure planning. But I would look hopefully for some definition of an action plan, which priorities those transportation, access and quality falls within,
and it's partly under transformation capital projects with BRT. But just in the planning, our our comp plan so closely aligns land use and transportation planning, and I would love to see that flow down to our strategic priorities and action plans. And I I think it's there. I think it might be in multiple places as I'm just looking at the strategic priorities and then thinking how will we matrix that. But, Okay. It sounds like we've got a few areas to focus on in in a I'm hearing we're going in the right direction. Yes. And I think, I think,
I'm hearing, a little bit more, fleshing out of what we may agree on on responsible environmental stewardship and then how how the transportation fits into inclusive growth management. Is that fair? Sounds good. Let's And someone was taking notes. Well as well as the clerk. So I we'll come up with something. Really appreciate it. This is helpful. We are at the beginning of the budget process, but we are in the budget process. So, that's just maybe a good example of,
how, to look at some of what is a more tactical, look at finances and and and what we're sort of up against and opportunities, that we have moving forward. So as you're thinking about, the the budget and the two year budget cycle, things to think about not just today, but are there any areas of feedback you have where if you're you've heard something out in the community, you've learned something on with colleagues that you've talked to, are you interested in things like service levels? Like, are are we okay changing service levels? Typically, adjusting upward, a service level has a cost to it,
and adjusting downward, a service level has a cost savings, but a sometimes political cost to it. Are there areas of priority where you really think we should invest? Some of that was our strategic, priorities conversation. Are there areas that you think we should really look closely at because you doesn't you don't feel confident that it's either as important to the community or being provided in a way, that makes the most sense? Interested in shared services in any areas? Centralize it. We've done some of this over time. Centralizing like services. What are the challenges you're hearing about and seeing? What opportunities do you think exist,
where we should be really focusing on investment? So just ways to think about the budget as a policy tool versus dollars and cents. It's all about the money, but it's not all about the money. The goal should be for us to be influencing, the results for the community, much in alignment with what was discussed for, the strategic priorities. And now, I can't click. I think maybe because we were there we go. So, again, there's a timeline to the budget. The budget never ends. This is the beauty of the budget. Even after you approve the budget, we're managing it throughout the year. So, it's one of the reasons why I love the budget is because it is our
ongoing policy document that says what are our constraints, what are our opportunities, and how do we keep moving forward in delivering on, recommended capital improvement plan, which is a significant part of the budget, but a little bit easier to get your arms around because there is a finite project in there, and so the rest of the budget is a little more amorphous. We'll also have the results of the 2024 audit. So, you know, we budget, what's the plan, and then the audit is what happened. Hopefully, they're close to each other, but sometimes things happen. Then, the recommended total budget book,
will come to you for, some study sessions in August and September. Your meeting in September is where you set the preliminary levy. So that is the levy amount where you can't go up. You can only go, the same or down from the levy, that is established in September. And then, hopefully, we've gotten a lot of feedback between August and September, and sometimes there's still minor changes that need to happen, for the budget before the budget hearing and final budget adoption in December. But again, we're looking at baseline. What does it take to be the city? And I will go to the mayor if allowed.
Any service modifications to the baseline and, of course, the capital improvement program, which can vacillate year to year. We may have we have a $100,000,000 project. Your budget changes a lot in that year. So. Mayor Norton? Yeah, I'm sorry. You don't have to move the slides. But two slides back, you had the two questions for us. When do you want the feedback on those two questions? I would say it would be helpful to have it probably before the May, if you have the sooner the better. Okay. If you're thinking about those things,
today would be great, but sometimes you don't think of those things until you have the details of the budget either. But if it's high level, something that you've been thinking about that we think the city should be investing in or you've had questions about, it's just helpful to hear those things to understand how they may or may not actually show up in the budget. Sometimes there's not a budget implication to a question or a concern. Just a couple of items feedback wise. And this goes back to our our comp plan update. But as we talk about the cost of providing services and what the appropriate service levels are, I would love to see an update.
The DMC, engaged beyond that is to look at the cost of services over that same area and, beyond that is to look at the cost of services over that same area and understand the real cost of some of these where our comp plan integrates transportation planning, see the the financial impact of that. And then another area I would love to see a little bit more fleshed out from a policy perspective is the travel demand management programming,
transportation planning that integrates our land use and comp plan goals, because I don't I think with our active transportation position now opening up, that would be the last transportation planner, on staff at the City of Rochester. And, obviously, that's a coordination with Rocog. But I think with those being so tightly key to our comp plan, we'd love to see how we're we're integrating those goals and end staff time. I'll just offer this the first part of that, maybe a little bit of the second part too, might be something that we need to do over the two years in order to
structurally adjusting our budget and and showing, the relationships of capital investment that are necessary for private growth to happen, and whether that private growth is, I guess, paying for itself or not. Right? And some of the type of economics you use. It just might take a little bit longer than developing this, but it's something that we can consider in the process and how we could look at it. Sorry. So much excitement about the budget, I thought maybe there was a question. So this is really just to ground you in the budget that we're in.
So we are in 2025, currently inclusive of Rochester Public Utilities. The total budget is just shy of $720,000,000 Again, we're buying power, with that. We're delivering a lot of different services over almost 57 square miles. So it may seem really large, but the vast majority of that, you can see, about half of it is operations. So the day to day, getting the work work done. And then a lot of it is the capital improvement program. So if you think about the project at the wastewater reclamation plant, that's almost a hundred million dollar project.
So very quickly, those things add up when we're talking about the capital improvement program. And then, actually, a very small amount of the budget is debt service, so less than $33,000,000. If you look at the operating revenue, we like to focus a lot on the ad valorem taxes, which is your property tax levy, but it is less than 16% of that total budget. So, the lion's share of the budget is actually charges for service. So when you think about utilities and rates, it's fairly significant amount of charge per service, in parks and recreation as well, you're getting a large amount of that total budget paid for through rates and other
charges that are not the tax levy. If you look at the chart and go to intergovernmental revenue, we get a lot of intergovernmental revenue. So if you think about the transit system, federal and state aid, there's no tax levy going to that. There was a very short period of time where we put a little bit of tax levy, for, the structures, that were updated, for, accessible pads and, bus shelters, very small amount. But we do not have tax levy going there. If you think about the airport and the revenue that's coming from the airport, if you think about we do still get local government aid, aid. Things of that nature,
we do rely pretty significantly on revenue from other governmental sources. Even the conversation that we've been having about, the fire, service area and the township revenue, that's intergovernmental revenue. So when you look to other taxes, you're at about 1%. Other taxes is actually primarily your lodging tax. So that's been pretty much committed to the Civic Center and its future capital, its operation and future capital investment as well as you have debt service that's being paid for from lodging tax. And then licenses and permits, even though we talk about bold forward and bound a lot,
it's not a huge, part of, the the permit fees. Obviously, there's also, some of that, in the charges for service. But, again, we talk a lot about the levy, but when we really think about that $720,000,000 it's not a huge part of what's, making all of these services work. It's important, of course, but, you do have a lot of other revenues that are coming in. So just another way of looking at it, the general fund, we talk about a lot. The general fund includes public works, fire, police, significant personnel driven, parts of the organization. So when the general fund when you look at that,
we are more reliant on the tax levy in the general fund because we don't charge to send a police officer to your house. It's just an expectation sort of like having insurance. If you look at the property tax of 111 a little over about $111,000,000 for 2025, you can see how it breaks out. Very much the general fund is reliant on the property tax. Again, that's where police, fire, public works are. Parks and recreation, fairly reliant on the tax levy as well as the library. The capital improvement projects, about $9,000,000
a year, and then some debt service and, a little bit goes to the airport for, for its operation. The if you think about a median value home, $288,000 has probably increased a little bit, in the last year, about $1,325 a year in city property taxes. You can see how that breaks out in your tax bill. So a large amount of that is going towards public safety, but it's a large part of our budget. So not surprising that if you were to break it out this way, the way that your tax bill is getting used is public safety,
general government, public works, municipal recreation, and then it goes down the line. So another way of looking at that, because why have a pie chart without a bar chart, is to think about the total budget for police. There is other revenue that's coming in, but a significant amount of that really is relying on the tax levy, as well as fire, public works, again, the municipal recreation system, and the library. So we like to show this slide. It does not mean that we are 200%, under on our FTE count. Obviously, a lot has changed, since 1980.
I wouldn't have this clicker in 1980. I probably wouldn't have a PowerPoint in 1980. I might someone from IBM might have helped me with a PowerPoint in 1980. But, I mean, a lot has changed. Right? We have different ways of providing service. If you look at the far right bar chart, that's actually the number of hydrants and the percent increase we've had in fire hydrants. But we also have things like geographic information systems now. So we don't have to have a set of paper plans to know where fire hydrants are. We can take something out and plot it quickly and access that data.
But we haven't grown our staff. We try always and have been for many, many years, to understand that we can't just increase increase increase our costs. We have to think about how we're providing service, which could be a contract, could be staff, or it could be, new technology investing in that. So with that, I will turn it over to Aaron Parrish, and he will talk a little bit about some of the major economic indicators that we have coming up. Before you leave, could I ask one quick question? Go ahead. Go ahead, mayor. Thank you. Usually, when we see those pie charts, we have one just for the full general budget that says how much is public
safety. This time, we only are seeing the tax levy. Is it I was we always talk about the percent of the full budget being I don't know if it was 62% or 57%. Yeah. I don't know if we typically put it as a percentage of the total budget, but I want to say Yeah, we used to. Okay. Police is about $30,000,000 So $30,000,000 of $720,000,000 of the total budget. We typically show it Just of the, yeah, general fund budget. We have it in, like, as a dollar bill. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we just didn't have it after this particular presentation.
Okay. And if, if we could follow-up with that at some point just because it's easier it's easy to talk about property taxes, but it's also good to talk about taxes as a whole. Oh, my lord. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. Absolutely. And we'll update it, in August when you receive the recommended budget. So I I get to bring you some good news and bad news, this afternoon. So from an economic perspective, there's a lot of great indicators out there. And when we try to ground you in the budget, we want you to do it, you know, within the context of what's happening out, you know, in in the community and in the country. Overall, as you all know, Rochester has very low,
and virtually, you know, almost no unemployment at 2%. Now that doesn't mean there's not people not actively in the workforce, not, you know, getting picked up in that. But by state, standards and national standards, you know, we're hovering just over 2% unemployment. It's very low. You know, some economists would say that's full employment. So that's very good, for us, although it means, you know, some of our employers can have challenges, recruiting or retaining folks. On behalf of the community development team, they very much were glad to deliver you the highest valuation of building permits,
that they've ever recorded, last year. And so, just under 700,000,000 in 2024. It's a record year. That's the good news. The bad news is is part of that is based on the building permit. It's based on how much it costs you to build things, and it's getting more expensive to build things. So a little bit of that inflation is built in here, but, nonetheless, a very significant, valuation, for last year. So, overall, that's good. Can I ask for it? Yes, sir. Before you go to the next slide, administrator Zelms mentioned, the Bolt Forward program in relation to licenses and permits.
Are we expected to see that in 2025 go up both from a percentage standpoint and the number of permits? We are projecting. So I would say the vast majority of this 700,000 did not relate to Bull Forward on bond. Most of those permits have yet to come through. We are segregating both regular conventional traditional billing permits and then those that are associated with bolt forward onbound because we have some staffing. But we'll get you the breakout of those as we move forward. Got it. But this is strictly just generally stuff that hit the general fund in a positive
way, last year for the most part. So Thank you. You'll see that positive outcome, when you see your audit in June as well. Again, lodging tax is a great story. Lodging tax, of pandemic, very pandemic impacted. We are just down in that era, at about $6,000,000. We're coming up now just under $11,000,000 in that very short period of time. So we did crash a little bit around the pandemic, but lodging tax has been, going up. Room occupancy is, holding and growing, as well as your daily rate for your rooms is also getting Can you hold for a minute,
council member of Can can you remind us what, the, 02/2019, tax might have been and how we compare? It's a little bit higher. Yeah. Off the top of my head, I don't know the exact number. Certainly happy to grab that and, and show you just to give you a sense of what the dip, might have been there. But, yeah, off top of my head, I do have it. Believe it was closer to the 2022 number. Okay. Closer to '22, it sounds like. So we'll definitely, get that. And we do have five year forecast for lodging tax, also looking promising in the five year forecast. Again, lots can happen in that space,
but we do do that. Lodging tax covers a couple things for us. One is our civic center operations, just under just around $4,000,000 of lodging taxes allocated to civic center operations. And then we also, have debt on the civic center facility, which you're seeing a refunding of that come through because we are ahead in collections on that. So that's positive as well. Council member Miller. Just to pull it up, I I pulled up the past meeting from 2023. In 2018, it was 10 and a half million. 20 19, it was 10.4. Okay. Thank you. Alright. Sales tax. Another,
you know, good good, indicator here. Also did not have the 2019 information if that question does come up. So if someone wants to grab that, that'd be great. But, I will say it's if I recall, it's closer to the 2020 data or maybe just a little bit closer to the '21 data. When we went in to do the, we started in 2020 working on the renewal for the sales tax that, obviously, the four projects are now being funded out of. When we went to the legislature with that, we projected those numbers off of, $13,000,000 as our projected collections. Going into next year,
or this year rather in '24, we are just under 16,000,000. So we've seen good growth in collections. Again, things are costing people more. That means they're paying more tax on it. But at the same time, we're also seeing good economic activity in the community as well. Council member Wall. With inflation being as it, has been, why would '24 be a little less than '23? Do you have any, ideas? Yeah. I mean, in the scheme of the the revenue source, it's relatively consistent. It's just a couple hundred thousand dollars different. So I don't know if there's one variable in there that would have attributed that.
Inflation, you know, really, really did sort of hit in that 2324 time frame. So, yeah, I can't put put a pin on that. It might be people just spending a little bit less, you know, just thinking about what's going on in the economy and maybe just pulling back a little bit. But a couple hundred thousand dollars variation, it's really hard to pin that down. It's not so much the, almost stable, but, the other years showed significant growth, 800,000, more than a million, another more than a million. Yeah. And we had a little bit of retrenchment.
Yeah. Or or maybe hitting equilibrium. You know? I think you had a a point you know, you also are coming out of a pandemic here. You know, again, the economy was doing quite well those couple of years prior where you saw that growth, and there's more apprehension out out there at this point in time. So I think that if I had a prognosticate, I'd probably put it in that space. But, overall, we're in we're in pretty good shape here. We were projecting 13,000,000 for collections. Mhmm. And we're, you know, getting up to 16,000,000 here. So, moving on. More good news.
We did see growth in our property tax valuation, 1.77. So you'll see when we come back in June, you know, you'll be requested to increase your levy by some amount. However, it won't if it's just say this for a number. If it's a 5% increase, it might not feel like a 5% increase to the taxpayer because we had new growth and new construction to spread that, property tax over to a larger body of folks. So, just realize, new construction's a good thing. It helps buffer and mitigate the property tax increase. The other thing, the valuation adjustment of 4.81%.
That means the existing property properties in Rochester grew in value. So we you saw that, at 4.81. People take that a little bit differently. A lot of times, your property taxpayer will say, well, my dollar amount changed and with their valuation went up, that's doesn't resonate as much with them. They just wanna understand what their total dollar investment is for property taxes. I will say one thing to note, that property tax is a complicated system. We have seen the last couple of years, the last couple of cycles, a shift from the commercial base to the residential base.
So commercial, you know, evaluations either staying the same or going down, and then the residential evaluations going up quite a bit more. And, as you saw may have saw recently, the county is, seeing some higher commercial valuations. We don't have that data yet, but we will look for that and we may see a bit of a shift back to commercial. So that's one thing we'll also bring you in August is a better understanding of what kind of shifting is happening between commercial, residential, and multifamily housing. Our good friend, Jim Miner, on behalf of the Southeast Minnesota Realtors, gives us great data,
on housing. And so you can just see your average sold price, relatively flat in '23 and '24. I wouldn't put too much stock into '25. That's really one month's worth of data, and that can change, over the cycle of a year. But you are seeing a little bit of, a little bit of stabilization of those property tax or of those, housing sales. Same kind of space in the median. So we have average and median in last couple of years. Although you can see over the last ten years, a fairly steep curve of appreciation in a, you know,
average single family home, in Rochester. This is one. If you have not received a lot of feedback on it yet, you will at some point. This is our general property tax levy increase. We try to bring you a forecast for that. So our finance team does a five year forecast that'll be updated as part of the August presentation to you all. It tries to give you a sense of the decisions you're making budget wise, what they forecast out to be in the outer years. I'll just say, like, you can see we go back to 2014 here. We have a couple of 0% levy increase years that are followed by very significant
spikes up. So those 0% years, it does take us time to recover from those. And, you know, then eventually we sorta, you know, get back to to equilibrium. So we had a 0% year in '14. We, in essence, had a 0% year in 2021. That 2.51%, that area is, related to the park levy that was approved. So we had a 0% operating increase that year. That 2.5 is parks. Now you're probably gravitating right to that 2026 number. Council member Wahl. Well, he's getting to it. Oh, okay. I'll make a comment after this.
Okay. That that 2026 number, that council member Ball has been looking at since we started talking here, is 10, 68%. So, again, based on our our labor contracts, based on known increases and cost escalations, based on our revenue mixes. And we're gonna talk more about our revenues in a moment. That's that. Now I will say I know the team has been working very hard, and Allison's gonna cover this, about what are some strategies we can implement to get less than 10.68%. So I know that's definitely you know, we've heard that conversation with the council.
We understand that has an impact. We understand the local ecosystem there, and so we'll be, even later in this presentation, discussing some things, but even more so as we get into August, bringing you some ideas about how we can do something different than 10, six eight. And that's what we're here to receive feedback on tonight as well. You can see after ten point six eight, it does start to go down a little bit. I will, in the next slide, show you how we have been relying on some onetime federal money to, buy down our property tax levies over this period of time to recover from that
0% levy. We're weaning off of that, but I'm very anxious to hear council member. Yeah. I was gonna say, did he correctly anticipate your question? Yeah. Yes. And, I guess, my question has turned into more commendation. The 9.44%, when we first saw this a year ago was over 10%. The next year at 9.96% was well over 11%, getting close to 12%. So somehow staff, has worked to bring that forecast down over 2% or about 2%. So my hope would be that,
we can work on that other peak and and, somehow, make this even more palatable, to the council and the community. So thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Mayor Norton? And just we do this all the time, and I point it out all the time, and I think we need to continue to point it out all the time, that it's not a 10% property tax increase. It's just an increase in the whole levy amount that gets apportioned out, and it affects all of our taxes differently. We just need to keep saying that because it gets misunderstood. Council member Doreen. Just out of curiosity,
when when, projections happen for that five year span, what are you talking about in terms of levy increase for additional services? Or is it just making the assumption that the level of service that the city is providing is static? That's a great question. I would say, we generally are projecting out what the current level of services are and what it would take to sustain and maintain those. However, there is some buffering put into the forecast to account for things you don't know or some some moderate level of new investment that you might wanna consider. Okay. Council member Miller. Just a quick question.
Many of us are new to the Council this year and the curiosity about prior year numbers pre-twenty twenty had me open this slideshow from 2023. And could you talk about the primary factors between what was projected in 2023 for the 2024 budget increase of 5.9% versus the actual of 9.44%? I'm trying to understand your question. So go Councilmember Miller, council president, I would say the largest was the, settling of the labor contract for,
the law enforcement labor services and a market adjustment that a five dollar an hour market adjustment. That was a significant increase that we hadn't anticipated, going into that. But on the flip side of that, you saw that we were somewhat muted coming out of of COVID and during, and we actually had very during a time where we were at, like, a 2% year over year adjustment for all of our contracts, there were cities giving people canoes, $10 an hour market adjustments for police, things like that. So, I mean, we were muted during a time where there was a lot of investment going towards
that. So that's one example of something pretty significant that changed. Okay. Thank you. Because, yeah, looking at the the 2023 presentation, the levy projected increase is fairly flat, around 6%, and this projection a couple years later is just different. So I I appreciate the context. The other piece of context that works into those, we'll call it the 2020 to 2020, even now, '26 time frame, is we we received onetime federal funding that we, in essence, have been programming to buy down the levy. We started off in '23 using 2.3
purse 2,300,000.0 of that funding. In that year, if you would have taken in '23, you know, that particular at 06/1985, had we not had that funding, that would have been about an 8.85. So just think about that as we kinda march through, and then we're we're been kind of stepping our way down out of it. But it's not insignificant. There's a fair amount of, you know, buffering that we did with that one time federal funding. K. Council member Keke. Yeah. I guess I will ask you just because of the timing of it. I I wanna make sure I understand it because I know about the that idea of you you that the buying down.
But I thought we specifically targeted that at places that were mostly hit by COVID, like parking, like things that were gonna come back. So that we wouldn't create this sort of, vacuum where now we had to come up with bigger levy increases to to make up for the the, holistic budget stability funds. So council member Keane, these are the amounts that we've appropriated every year for a holistic budget stability amount. We did receive a significantly higher oh, excuse me. A significantly higher amount of, CARES and ARPA funding that we eventually,
you know, put into parking programs and other economic incentives for local businesses. But this approximately $7,000,000, was specifically appropriated to buy down the levy. And and let let's make sure we know when you say buy down the levy, that's, that's that's funding that was going into the general fund that it had to be made up in the out years through levy spending. That's correct. So as we stepped down in '23 from 2.3 to 1.4, you know, you had to come up with a one point well, 1% increase in the levy Mhmm. Approximately.
So you can think about it that way too. Council member Fredericks. Thank you. Mayor Norton's correct. The public perception of of the tax levy is that it translates right to their property taxes. So I'm glad she clarified that. But for clarification, what is what equates from, let's say, our proposed this year is 9.96%. What is the percentage that drops down to the residential household owners and the business owners?
What is the percentage that the drop down is? So it really can vary from neighborhood to neighborhood. And so I'll give you last year as an example. And what we'll do for you in August is we'll give you the projected tax impact on an average value home. So we'll say this is the impact of the average value home in '25. This is what it's projected to be in '26. So you can understand whatever levy increase you ultimately land on, you know, that's gonna be the impact of the average value taxpayer. Now you have to kinda keep it up there because last year, we also saw, you know, in the the neighborhoods with houses from,
you know, we'll say, 200 to 400, you know, they had significantly higher valuation increases and appreciation than neighborhoods from 400 to 700. So, you know, that though I'm just gonna make this up. But, like, in the higher end, you know, home might have seen 5% and, you know, the the 200, you know, that mid price home from two to 400 might have seen, you know, something like, you know, 10%. So the valuation adjustments within the community are not always consistent. So we always just try to put it in the context of that average value home.
That would coincide then, though. If you're saying 10% for an average value home, we had a leverage increase of 9.44. Yeah. I was using that for as an example. I'll I'll give and give a couple examples from last year. So last year or this year rather, last year's budget, the one we're living in now, 9.96. You know, in that case, we saw a lot of people come out of that much less than 9.96. So we saw quite a few folks in that 4% range. That's that's what I'm trying to get to is, you know, what is the real number? You know? Okay. So your taxes were $33,500
this year. It went up, you know, is it one percent? Is it is it is it five? What is the number? You know? That question does get asked a lot. So, council member, council president, I think the challenge is there's no 1%. So what happens is if you have all of the property within the city, the valuation is the big pie. Right? Yep. You have a slice of pie that's commercial. And what was alluded to earlier is if the commercial slice of the pie is growing because their valuation is getting bigger, it's automatically going to absorb more of any increase to the levy. Very familiar. Even a flat levy, it would absorb more of the existing amount.
Right? So let's say the during that 0% levy year, there were properties whose property taxes went up. I understand the valuation. I'm just asking what the city budget adds to it. I understand all that stuff, and I think most people do. Problem is is it's very different on every single tax bill. We can't say it's 10% because it depends on your valuation of your property and the valuation. There are years where people's tech Goes down when we do an increase to the levy because their valuation doesn't adjust and their neighbors adjust, so they will automatically be absorbing less of the total levy.
So it could be negative 5% to plus 15 or 20% depending on the category of tax that you're in, how that category changed, how much that category absorb was absorbing of the total tax, and how the multiple categories of taxation shifted, like, from each other. So it's a complex map problem. I'm gonna go to mayor Norton because I believe that she has spoken to a lot of constituents and tried to explain this. So go ahead. I'll just say this is one of the most difficult things we do, and we pressure the staff every year to give us the number.
And the truth of the matter is the county does their assessments, and we don't get those until November. And so we have to make our decisions and then wait till the assessments are done and released to find out how it's gonna we don't even know really we have to it's guesswork at this point, based on last year's numbers. And it is different for every single house, and to the point there are years where people come in and say, I had a 45% increase. And on occasion, and I fear a little bit that's what's going to happen with commercial property this
year because there were multiple years where they did not assess the the commercial properties, that they're gonna feel it more this year than they have for the past several years because the county does assessments. They do, I think, it's ag, commercial, and, residential, thank you. And they do it on a cycle. And so they missed a cycle, and I don't remember the rationale. There was a reason they couldn't do commercial, and it's a year late. So I think commercial is going to feel the brunt of it this year, which is a little a little scary. But just know, council member, we every year from now until November,
you will hear us pushing because we we want to know what how it's going to impact our constituents, and they can't tell us anything until after that the evaluations come out or the whatever in November. So and I also wanna just say one other thing, just for perspective, historic perspective, regarding the ARPA funding. We were thrilled to have gotten some money from the federal government directly to the City of Rochester. The county got a lot more than we did. We got some, but I just want to put this in perspective for you. The City of Rochester got $18,000,000
The City of Duluth got $65,000,000 with less population. The formula was not just population based. It's a very squirrely formula. But Minneapolis and St. Paul got, I don't know, dollars 100,000,000. We got only $18,000,000 and yet and we worked hard to keep some of it available to to try to help modify this tax increase, but it was nothing compared to what other communities had. And I just want you to know that the staff worked really hard with that $18,000,000 to make it go as far as they could. And I guess we're I I wanna be clear. We're grateful for that 18,000,000,
but it was nothing compared to Duluth, Minneapolis, and Saint Paul. Thank you, mayor. Mister Parrish, go continue. Yeah. So we'll do our best to give you some great examples, in August and give you the average value tax increases, let you under understand what's going on with the base and understand that. You'll also be the you'll have the opportunity to have your property tax statements shared with the community. So that's another way people look at the percent increases. So that's, something to be prepared for. And then, additional impacts, other things that are kind of rolling around with the budget, both for an unbounded other infrastructure costs.
I mean, clearly, you know, there's an active conversation, with that, you know, particularly in the DMC space and a number of things happening there. So I know the team's got a lot happening in that space. State funding. I mean, we, as the mayor pointed out, we are not favorably treated, by many of the formulas despite, I think, what we have is a good story and good need. So we're not maybe as susceptible to some of these challenges, but there is real impact coming, from some of the state policy issues that are out there. State's budget isn't doing great. As you all know, there's a lot of robust conversation happening out there.
The governor's budget currently includes reductions in Greater Minnesota transit funding. We don't know that that will necessarily impact us year one, but it may impact us in the future. So we have to be aware of that. There's kind of a summer sleeper item here that we receive reimbursement, for duty related disability health insurance for our public safety employees that, retire, due to a duty related disability. We are currently getting a % reimbursement based on some onetime funding that the legislature appropriated a few years ago. That's projected to run out in '27.
So what we are getting for reimbursement at 05:30 will probably go down to, like, '45, which is our historical level at about eight and a half percent funding there. So just realize that one time funding at the state is going away, so our obligation will resume in that space. Oops. There we go. Local government aid, a lot of conversation that happens there. Just to say our numbers have been going down over the years, so we, you know, probably could expect that. It went slightly up in '23, from '23 to '24 and '25. Depending on how the state budget reconciles this year,
we could hold or we could go down. So we're we haven't seen any projections based on the house or senate budgets yet. The tax bills have not been released, but, we're kind of anxiously awaiting that to understand what our local government aid situation might be. But $5,000,000, that's not insignificant for us as a revenue source, and there is a potential that that could, go down. I'll just continue the mayor's, thoughts on unfairness to Rochester. When it comes to local government aid, not only Duluth, but Mankato, Austin, and we can name as many cities that get a lot more than we do.
So, and I know that this may not be the year to, see any change from the legislature, but I know our team is continuing to tell the Rochester story that a city of a 25,000 people, we do have needs here. So Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Of course, federal, issues. Right? So there's a couple of things happening at the federal level that are impactful to us. I would say, you know, we categorize all of our city grants, and we have at least 55 federal grants that are federally focused. So, there's a range of impacts.
Some of the grants are operational. So you think about community development block grants, something we historically get also in the category of things we get a lot less of than most. Various law enforcement funding. You know, those things are things we sort of get year to year. They'd support operations to a certain extent. We'll monitor those and determine, you know, if those are continue. We have a number of projects that are awarded in drawing funds. So you think about, like, the airport runway project at over $90,000,000. You think about BRT at $85,000,000 of federal funding. Like, those are significant projects that are in flight.
We're monitoring to make sure that, you know, the we continue to be able to receive funding and reimbursement in those categories. And then we have a number of projects where, you know, there's a lot of, public attention paid to them and they're awarded, but we might not have a grant agreement on that. So, like, Sixth Street Bridge is a great example of that. You're not allowed or able to get a grant agreement until you're within six months of construction, and we're not quite to that point yet or the Fourth Street roundabout, which was a congressionally directed spun spending allocation for us. We are,
you know, not able to, you know, draw down funds in in that space yet. So we're trying to determine, you know, are we gonna be able to move forward with these projects? In some cases, you know, we've got significant design costs, in those areas. They're a little easier to manage because they're, like, project specific capital money. But at the same time, you know, you look at, like, the North Broadway Park And Ride is kind of a favorite project of mine. A lot of people don't think about it, but, like, it's $12,000,000. It's out of the rec center. You might have got a call at one point or another about parking issues out at the rec center, and it's gonna be great for transit and great for that particular site.
And, you know, we don't have a grant agreement yet. So we're just trying to make sure that we can move forward on these projects. I'll say our local representative has been really great, for us when we reach out with questions or if we're experiencing a difficulty, which we've had on a few things. They've done an amazing job of being responsive, to, you know, help us troubleshoot, issues that that we might have. So a handful of these projects are are there, and just you wanna be aware of. And this is just a more visual version of the previous slide just highlighting some of those, significant federal projects and collaborations that we have ongoing.
Somehow, I got to be the person to deliver you to the news that, your wage increase is not budgeted for. That is something that you have to tell us to do, by motion. So that's the the guidance that we have in this space, as well as just letting you know your travel, budget. You know, previous year was set at 15,000 and, you know, it's proportionally allocated, and so just letting you know that landscape. But I think council member Doring Council member Doring. Yeah. I not to interrupt or go back to a previous question. So with federal funding dollars,
are are we paying attention to the whether those dollars come to us with now restrictions on them or or conditions on them, you know, like removal of DIA programming or anything like that that we we hear in the media? And if so, will those come to us before a as a a council decision before we accept those funding funds? Yes. Thank you for bringing that up. I meant to address that, and I did not. I was excited to get to your salary news there. But, yeah. I mean, it's a fair a fair question. We're in a situation where, you know, we want to get the federal funding,
and we have to want to get it with the requirements that come along with it. You know, we've been given some indications. And when these things come through with grant agreements, you'll often approve those. You'll understand what the terms are. But there's some broader guidance that's happening out there. I don't know that, there's been anything specifically that we'd have not been able to meet at this point in time, but I think as the issues come up, we would engage. Right? So if it is something related to immigration enforcement or if it's something related to, you know, the way we,
ultimately, you know, do our hiring practices, which I believe we're consistent and compliant in that space. But these are all things that, you know, might be asked of us, and we either have to be prepared to answer, and then you have to be ultimately comfortable with the policy direction. So, Michael or did I hit that correctly? You did. Nailed it. Alright. So You can go back to talking about our wages if you want to. I think sorry about that. So I think I said enough on the wages. Just if you wanted to adjust or talk about that, that just takes a motion of the council, and, you know, then we would reflect that in the budget,
but we just don't autopilot that. That's a council decision that you all make, there. And then, of course, you know, not with the you know, not to be outdone on any of these other things. There's just a handful of broader economic issues, tariffs. Kind of a quiet sleeper issue is the elimination of the tax exemption on municipal bonds. So if you think about a few of the bond issuances we brought forward to you, and we're actually working on the, regional sports and rec complex issuance now just be to get ahead of the potential challenge if the, you know, the bond exemption were to go away.
So just know that we try to monitor those things, but it can impact construction. It can impact any number of different things. I'm gonna, I'm not gonna go back to the wage part, but in the in the first paragraph, I did wanna ask a question on the travel and training funds. So they're currently budgeted, for 2025 at 15 k. Were they initially budgeted at around 30 k, and then that was one of the kind of pieces that the, the council last year Yeah. Your '24 budget was about 30,
and then your '25 budget through your action was changed to 15. Okay. From my per my perspective would be I would like to see that go back to its initial fund. And like I said, I'm not going anywhere near the, the salary issue. But I think the public has to understand that as council members, we do not have a lot of, if any, dedicated funds to us. And so the ability to, to do learnings and trainings,
and also represent our city at at, whether it's League of Minnesota Cities or other, national events, I think is a valuable place for us to learn to do our job jobs as best we can and to, represent our city. Mayor Norton? Well, I have three thoughts, three things. One, I agree that we need to have enough of a travel budget so that folks can be represented at League of Minnesota Cities and the National League of Cities. They're beneficial. We have four new members who can learn a lot at these conferences on particular
issues, whether it be transportation or housing or what have you, right? Public safety, there's a lot of information to be gained. So I would love to see that addressed. And I'll just say, you know, you may not want to talk about your own salaries, but I do want to talk about your salaries. What happened before happened because people got afraid to put a cost of living increase in the annual increase. And when you don't do that, and then ten years rolls around, suddenly, you are completely out of whack with what other cities of your size are doing or what's reasonable for someone to think they could do to do the job.
So I guess I would I'm not going to put an amount out there, but I do think putting in at least a cost of living increase is reasonable or if you've done bargaining and there's a particular percent that you've done for your bargaining and average or something among other city employees, I mean, we are not city employees, but that's a number to look at as well. But I think at least a couple percent increase based on cost of living is reasonable. And the third point I want to make has to do with, what you just heard about the tax exempt municipal bonds.
That is an issue that when we were in Washington, D. C. With National League of Cities, we did talk to our state or our congressional representatives that represent the state of Minnesota and others, and this is a huge issue nationwide. So every city is concerned, probably counties as well, are very concerned about that particular issue, and it is my hope, that wiser heads will prevail and they won't touch those. But just know it is an issue that we've been involved in and we should continue to be involved in. And just maybe extending the the mayor's comments,
I would note the county, this budget year, did move toward indexing their, their salaries as well. So just that's certainly another, you know, benchmark out out in the world for that. Council member Miller. Is that perhaps a topic that would be worthwhile for a future study session to look at how other cities are looking at their long term protections for best practices in that space? Yeah. We could roll it into the August budget presentation, just to give you some context. And If there's council concurrence, we can do that. But that's a Yeah.
And I'm looking at my colleagues. City. It's all over the place how they do that. Okay. But I'll just say this city council has a much larger stipend than most city councils. So I don't know that that would be incredibly helpful depending on what you're looking at. Okay. Well, I mean, to mister Parrish's point, I was thinking about the county as well in this past year indexing or doing a study at least of peer counties. Or just options for indexing. Like, I think that's the the more normal, you know, thing is to I would agree with, council member Miller. I mean, I'm not afraid of my my salary.
I think, and I think everybody here works very hard for what we make. And as anybody, you know, you're doing a job, and, you should be proud of what you do, and you should get increases. So, I don't have a problem with discussing it and and being transparent about how our how the council member salaries have been frozen at, what is it, twenty twenty numbers and, that, we can look at it, compare it,
and and then make our decisions. Council member Keane. And just a clarification, you can use indexing and have that as your model, but the the council or the charter says you must vote each year if the salary's changed. So you can't just put it on automatic and get increases. That's just so we're we understand what we mean by indexing. You can have that, but you still have to have that individual discussion each year. Thank you. No problem. So we did talk about it. Thank you. Moving on to credit card fees. Did we cover that? Credit card fees, and we pay about $500,000 a year of those.
And so I think just something at the staff level we're evaluating. Obviously, people expect to be able to pay that way. We don't currently charge for that particular service. If you go to, you know, certain governmental entities, you often pay a charge for the use of your card. So it's a bit of a policy question, whether you wanna build the convenience into your fee structures or whether you want to, you know, charge for that particular service. I would say this is also a fairly significant issue for RPU, and so there'd be there it's kind of a concurrent evaluation that we'll try to do in this space. Other funds,
equipment revolving. So you don't normally see, like, hey. We're buying a new, you know, plow truck or police car or fire truck. We have a a depreciation or a sinking kind of fund, that's set up for equipment revolving. Departments are charged depreciation after the purchase price within the operating budgets. I would just say, the the fund is challenged. We're seeing at times if you have a vehicle that was supposed to depreciate over seven years that it could be twice as expensive to replace it than what we might have depreciated it at. So we're looking at options for that fund help,
but just know if there's pressure in that space. Similarly, we've seen some trends in the work comp space. We're self insured for work comp, so we monitor what we're paying out, what we're taking in, and how we're allocating that to departments. Likewise, with property insurance, we just, for the first time in the last seven years, had all of our buildings actually evaluated for replacement cost. And so this year, there'll be a fairly substantial increase in property tax property insurance premiums rather. Good news is in the night of a tornado watch that we have better coverage.
But and the bad news is it's gonna cost us a little bit more. So it was good to go through that reconciliation, but we, you know, obviously have to pay for that. Airport fund, as you know, the general fund, we contribute about $500,000 to the airport. In the past, you know, this is we'll call it the pre pandemic, point of time. Our, you know, revenues over expenditures in the airport would have been, like, $1,100,000. You might have seen, like, some pictures with checks to the city for $1,100,000 for the airport. Big deal was made out of that. They have been, significantly, funding operations or they've been receiving significant support for operations through a federal program designed
to help airports coming out of the pandemic. Those dollars are going away. We're now expecting that revenue over expenditures to be more in the 300,000 range. So if you think about, you know, less margin in the airport unless we get new service, so I think it's again, as you think about how to be innovative at the airport, how to encourage service, how to encourage utilization, how to travel through RST, these are all important things as we get the airport, recalibrated. Any questions there before I move on to facilities? K. So facilities. You're gonna see a much more significant presentation on this in June,
so I will not go through this, you know, chapter and verse by any means. But, you know, like like our road systems, and I think council member Miller was sort of talking about, like, you know, what does it really cost to maintain what you have, and how do you, you know, maintain that, and what does your growth pattern do to that? For us, I mean, we have a fairly significant, facility footprint. We have over 1,600,000 just kind of in this little bucket. Now this doesn't include everything either. This doesn't have, like, Soldier's Field, Clubhouse, or the park shelter, or any number of different things there. But our core city facilities,
you know, it's a significant asset. We had a facility condition assessment done. Up until a few years ago, we had no dedicated funding for facilities. It was really done on an emergent basis, one time programming. We didn't really even have a facilities function to speak of. It was sort of decentralized, to departments. That facility condition index is identifying about a hundred and $20,000,000 of deferred maintenance within our buildings. And as you can see, you know, there's a number of of things highlighted here. The Civic Center being our largest, you know, facility at 600,000 square feet and just under $40,000,000
of deferred maintenance within that building. Each one of these has a different story about how it was funded and how you would fund replacement in the future. This doesn't really include our enterprise facilities either. So just kind of as note, most of these are impacting the tax levy or some other kind of general revenue, to speak of. So this just really highlights the significant need where some of the hot spots are. I actually think is and this might be a little more complicated, but this slide, I think, does a good job of just showing you, you know, if I had to replace or we have $20,000,000 of roofs coming due in the next ten year ten years.
So we have a little bit of a roof challenge at the rec center recently, a roof challenge at the Civic Theater. These are, like, coming up as they leak. Like, we wanna kinda get ahead of that. And so, you know, $20,000,000, you know, is what we project our roof need to be. If you look at the HVAC line item, you start to look at, like, $26,000,000 of HVAC. Stuff that isn't meant to last thirty, forty years. It's really ten, fifteen year kinds of life cycles, twenty year life cycles on those items. So you just think about that those needs in the context of right now,
we, budget about, a million dollars a year for facility renewal. This obligation here over ten years is a 10, so think of, you know, $10.11, $12,000,000 a year of need there. We clearly aren't gonna be able to close that gap in this ten year period of time, but we also want you to know, you know, you have a bit of a fiscal cliff you're looking at here and just trying to kind of, you know, get you onboarded into the idea that we need to be thinking about our city buildings. And then we'll be talking more about that in June. So with that, I will flip it back to Allison to,
talk to you about the budget. I have a quick question I was trying to get, council president Schubert. In that in that facility numbers, where are parking lots located? Not like not like parking structure, but building parking lots. Is that, earthwork and site Sitework and earthwork at that first line. Yeah. Yeah. We were planning on gravel. No? No. So, just to take this home, so the baseline budget, we talked about a little bit. We have some notable items that that come forward. You'll talk, a little bit more about that as we we move. It the cost of labor is barely ever flat,
and so we are a labor focused organization. We're a service organization, requires employees in order to do that, And we work in a labor environment where the, Minnesota rules regarding bargaining affects almost every employee in the city, with 20 bargaining units. So, looking at sort of where things have been, the baseline carries a 4% adjustment, for 2026 and three percent for 2027. That's the cost of living adjustment. There's there's other things associated with the labor contracts, like the market adjustment that was mentioned. There's not always a market adjustment,
but sometimes, there might be. So if you also look at this, we are starting to see some costs coming to us with the paid family medical leave program that was put in place, with the state of Minnesota. So there are some longer term implications to this, but essentially, the employer puts in point 44% as does the employee. The bigger unknowns and challenges are how often this will get used. It reloads every single year. And so depending on if we have to backfill someone who's out, with paid family medical leave, there's the other cost of overtime or something of that nature, that we will need to address over,
I shouldn't say overtime overtime, but I'm going to. The health insurance costs that are referenced there, eight percent and one and a half percent for dental, actually fairly muted compared to some markets. And then one thing that we are building into the budget this year is labor allocation. So if you think of, an entity like I'll just use Rochester Public Utilities because it's the largest one. They don't have their own HR department. So if you think of overhead, we've never charged for that. We do have the payment in lieu of tax for our major enterprise funds, but we're looking at a reasonable cost allocation so that the rates,
pay for some of the overhead that's necessary in order to have, have, a wastewater operation, Rochester public utilities, etcetera. So it kind of gets into a little bit of that shared services because otherwise, you're duplicating, the cost within a fund if they are are doing that directly for themselves. So it's a minor adjustment, but it's structural. Can you talk a little bit more about the economies of of shared services and what you've been doing with the city and some of this, especially the, the charter commissions like RPU and parks and libraries.
Sure. And, of course, each of those entities has very specific services that they're experts in, like trees and parks and electricity and water. But there are other things like HR services where HR would be sort of the expert in that. And so I mean, it's probably the easiest example. So we've always provided HR services across the entire organization, but we've also been looking at that for things like facilities, that was mentioned by Aaron Parrish. Excuse me. Deputy administrator of Parrish. And then, different things like communications. Having separate communications people embedded within each department because they need to have specific,
you know, knowledge of that. We have service experts that can inform communications so that our story citywide is clear. We are city of Rochester. We have specific services that we provide rather than replicating those things within each department. So if a department if each department doesn't have, for example, a communications person, is it reasonable to think that, you know, we'll have 14 communications people because we want one for each department, or can we provide that service in such a way where they're distributed, across the organization of their expertise,
which is communications and engagement, and have enough partnership within each specialized service area to be able to support their work. So multiple schools have thought for that, but I would say organizations generally, both private sector and public sector, are moving more towards that shared services model. I could give more examples. IT would be an example. Geographic information systems might be an example. All of those different types of services that are you know, you have an expert in that field that can deploy their expertise across multiple other fields of work. So so a follow-up.
So do you feel like you you're seeing progress in, in, the last four years as far as bringing together those shared services and seeing those economies of scale? Council president, I I think we've made progress. It is progress against forty years of history, and so there are some financial implications to that. Right? There's maybe a group who's used to having direct service, and they go to their teammate that works in the building that they work in. And so it's a little bit of growing pains, from a like,
how does that impact the culture of the organization? They both have to move simultaneously, whether that's, you know, a financial impact. One example might be there maybe somebody already embedded in a department that isn't a centralized service. There's a way to think about that differently. It doesn't necessarily have to mean everything goes into the same department if our mindset is that we all work together to get the work done. So there could be a a allocation, a cost, and they were allocation coming the other direction from an entity if we're thinking like that. But it really needs to be about what is the result we're looking for versus,
I guess, in my mind, versus, oh, I don't have that. This other department does. I don't think that's how people think about it, but we're human beings. Right? So folks would like to have the the closest point be right where they're working, but I think we have to think about our work differently in order to make sure that we aren't the most expensive government. Because just adding something so every single service area has the same thing is a great way for it to cost a lot of money. Thank you. Which is not our goal, in case someone was listening just just then. So budget optimization is also something we're looking at.
So this is what deputy administrator Parish was discussing. Every year, we're looking at all of these types of things across the budget before we ever bring a recommendation to you. It is not ever my goal to stand here and think, I didn't really need to ask for that from the city council. My goal is to say we've looked through the budget to try to optimize it. And so based on conversations that started with the team back in October, the initial review of recommendations, we have we're tightening up the budget. So I would qualify this by saying, you can't tighten up the budget every year without major political conversations.
So about $1,700,000 of revenue adjustments to the positive, which help absorb some costs. Some of those are building permit fee revenue. Some of those are in the public safety space based on what we've been seeing. Can you pause? I mean, council member Miller I have a question after you finish Okay. With this. And then about $1,300,000 in expenditure adjustment. Some of those are structural things where when we really come through, there was an example where something was moved to an equipment revolving fund. So we're annually reserving in order to replace something, and the annual operating never got removed.
So that's an easier one to make, but if that department was relying on that total in order to feel like they're getting to the end of the year, it's gonna feel tighter to them. So this is across, primarily tax levy related costs. So you can see when you're looking at your peak in your chart, our goal is to not have the same percentage peak. But, again, you don't get to do these adjustments every year without actual changes to your services. So I just want to qualify it with that. So my question is related to revenue but on a different item.
We recently approved a new structure for a gas utility franchise fee. We have not historically charged a gas utility franchise fee. Might we expect, a consideration of that revenue source potentially in this budget cycle? Council president, council member, I don't know that it would be within this budget cycle. The actual hearing process that's necessary by statute to do that maybe would push it out towards the second year if that's something the council wanted to consider. But if the council wants us to look at that, the reason we had stopped looking at it, it had been as something a point of conversation two, three years ago before the sales tax,
became the focus. But during that time, there was a major rate increase in the natural gas space, so people were seeing their $200 a month bills go to, like, 4 and $500 a month. And so the political will for that shifted a little bit shifted a little bit during that time frame. So if it's something the council would want us to look at, it's something that we could, but I wouldn't wanna mislead you to thinking that it would be ready for, like, adoption in December. It might be, but, again, it wouldn't probably be better to understand that in context with what you would want to focus those if you would wanna focus those dollars towards something specific,
you collectively or, have it just be adjustments to the tax levy. And the reason I ask is because we've just talked about sustainability as a strategic priority, and many cities are using gas utility franchise fees to pay for additional rollout of those kind of programs that ultimately save people money on those, services by improved insulation and other programs that improve the, energy efficiency of their homes. So I just wonder how we think about, again, long term sustainability and how we're passing on those benefits to our community beyond city operations, and and that's an area I think of in that conversation of how we're promoting
this in the community that go beyond city operations. Thank you. Continue. So this is an example of those very specific things. I just would say these are currently contemplated as being baseline adjustments, so these would not be cuts in in what I'm recommending to you. But I wanted to bring you some things that I would consider as having more direct service level impacts to the community, because I don't want to make that decision for you. I think that's a policy level decision that the council should have. And, of course, all of these don't add up to a huge amount of money, but it's approximately what was reduced from the budget in December of last year.
So looking at potentially doing services differently. So if there's anything on this page that jumps out at you either today or in the future that you never want to see again, before you on this dais, let me know. If there for example, I've already heard about the fireworks. This would not be ending fireworks. This would be not having the day long event leading up to the fireworks, but still having the fireworks. There's a cost to providing the music, the vendors, setting up the Soldier's Field location or any location, for the day of festivities. And there's a separate cost in the budget that's just the fireworks.
So that would be an example if, I think, actually, Parks and Rec is sort of recommending the $7,000 adjustment based on, experiences that they have seen and value they think they could have for adaptive rec of using specific facilities and not leasing certain spaces. Tall grass and weeds gets a lot of love and hate every year, depending on which side of the tall grass you're on. And, the disease tree complaint process is talking about disease trees on private property that only threaten public property. So those are what currently, parks looks at is not this wouldn't be boulevard trees and this wouldn't be a
diseased tree on your neighbor's property threatening your property. That is a private civil dispute. And so then, I'll just go back to the one that's probably, I skipped over, which is the, hours at the library and, some of the other specific services that that they provide. That would be a significant, cost reduction, but also would be something that potentially would be able to, reduce the budget. So there are things we could talk about more. There are things that we could share more details and specifics about and will during the budget process, whether that's in but, again, these are currently included in the budget.
The question is whether or not you'd like to talk about them more and whether you'd like to talk about removing them. Thoughts? Yeah. Go ahead. Council member Fredericks. One thing, if we're gonna close the library for four hours on a Sunday or something like this, would there be anything wrong with closing the the library for the day? The public fireworks thing, obviously, you know, it's part of our country. It's part of our heritage here. You know, wanna wanna keep that. Obviously, what I'm gathering from what you said reading between the lines, maybe the festivities aren't well attended and stuff like that.
It's maybe not great use of our funding. So if it don't make sense, obviously, I trust the parks and rec to, make those recommendations to us. But fireworks in the fourth of July in a community like this, I think it's a wonderful thing. And, yeah, I think that's about all I have to say. Can you clarify with the fireworks, is it the music that would be so what your The event's like the all day event, the fourth fest event that has the vendors and the music would change. You could probably still have music with fireworks.
The fireworks line item is, like, another 30 or $35,000 So that's not on the menu. From this. So the question would be, do we have a day long event, which sometimes gets rained out, and then we only move the fireworks because our contracts for the day long event are for that day only, or you'd be paying a fair amount of insurance for them to remobilize. And it's usually if it's bad enough weather, you still can't put people back out on the park because you'll destroy it. So, can I not answer the question about the library? So not an answer. You want. I I think that's the is it,
you know, would there be a problem with closing the library for a day? I think that's the trouble with anything on this list, and it's in the eye of the beholder. If someone's main day that they're able to utilize the library is on a Sunday based on their work schedule, it's probably a problem for that person and that segment of the population. So this list of things brings with with it some of the reality of if we're really talking about cutting a budget, we would be talking about service levels and changing people's experience of government. And I'm not suggesting that we should, but these are the kind of hard these it's not balancing a budget.
It's trade offs within a budget when we're talking about significant reductions that start to impact what people's expectations are of the community. I mean Yeah. I appreciate I I this list and, I'm we have three now in a row, so I'm gonna go to to Keane, the mayor, and Yep. Just, my my comment was just that I looked at this as previewing recommendations. Yep. I didn't think we were going through these today, so I I'm not prepared, and and nor do I think we should try to make decisions on this right now. So Mayor? I had a question about, reducing the the Sunday hours.
And it looks like there's a lot of different things that are kinda being picked out with the library. And so what what would reducing four hours what would those four hours be? Would they be in the morning when people are at church and not available, or would they be in the afternoon, evening when people utilize it? And then, if if that is how much of the amount that you've listed, I guess, would that reduction be? I think I guess before you answer, administrative zones, I I I tend to agree with council member Keane. I think your intention was to put these in front of us and not to
discuss them now, but to know that when we get to that that crunch point in August and September that these are areas that we may or may not want to delve into. So I guess the the what what we're being asked to do now is say, is there something here that that a majority of us say, we don't want to you to even keep this on the list? Is that a good way to Yes. That I was looking for visceral reactions,
and we will come way more prepared to have deeper discussion if there's items that if I hear no visceral reaction to any of the line items, I heard one visceral reaction. Could I please follow-up? I I asked for that information in order to help determine Absolutely. How I might feel about this. And so that's why I'm asking now. Yep. I don't have that answer right now. Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I so I will just say I would like that information. Give me just a second. For the next phase of the discussion. And also just I don't know where it falls in here,
but some of these are issues that for the newer ones like Tallgrass that are quite you hear from the community about and I hear from the community about. So we can have those discussions as we move forward and we hear more. But that information would be really helpful for me than I asked. Very helpful. Council Member Miller, then Council Member Fredericks. So my question, and perhaps I missed this, is this a representative list of sample, or is there a broader set of the The broader list adds up to 1,300,000, and those don't have the same types of implications as what was shown here.
Because thinking back to our foundational principles, adding inclusive decision making and thinking about the timing of the budget of getting something in August, right, I wonder how we as council members might have a more robust conversation with our constituents about those feelings? I mean, initially You would have them about this list. The other list of things are structural things within the budget or they were recommended by the department and we discussed that it wouldn't have significant impact to their ability to do that. So we could take this as a a representative full list for consideration of those
modifables for the August Just this amount. There's Yep. Another 1,300,000.0 that already we're looking at not bringing in the recommended budget. And just just to clarify, we will see that I will give you a representative list, but, I mean, some of them are $500. So listing the all of that adding up to $1,300,000, you will never get the budget done. It'll be a little bit more expanded. We bring a recommendation at a pretty high level. Yep. Okay. Because I I think of the the process, the feedback that we hear, obviously,
is there should be more cuts. There's something should be done differently. And I would love a time horizon to have robust conversations within Ward 2, and I'm sure some of my colleagues would agree to bring back real nuanced conversation about these these areas. Because I'm not planning to bring you a detailed list and have a detailed study session about the $1,300,000 that won't ever show up in the recommended budget. That's fine. And I'll take these as a list that I will work going forward to August. Or other things that people might bring up to you that they have concerns about.
And and I guess that's my question of are there areas that might be at risk that people would likely have concerns about but might not find out about until August when we find out about a a recommended budget? I don't think anything from this list puts anyone at risk other than they have to be thoughtful about their budget throughout the year. I wouldn't have recommended it. It would have ended up on a longer list of this. I would say the bigger things out there are the $4,000,000 worth of decision packages that were requested, which is almost equal to what we were hoping to reduce from the budget, which would be additional capacity within the budget.
And in any given year, I have about a million or a million to have to work with if we're not trying to cut the budget and be at zero. I think the biggest thing is people perceive that we are cutting the budget. It is almost never going to be possible for you to reduce the amount of money that you're putting towards the budget unless you literally are jettisoning the departments because that 6% total personnel cost increase per year is always unless you're reducing personnel, which means you're reducing services, which means you're not providing something,
it's that's what cutting the budget means. You would have to literally be getting rid of things. And does any summary of this, this 4,200,000.0 in decision package requests That will all come with the recommended those that are approved and not. So if you go and look at the prior budgets, you see recommended, not recommended for both '26 and '27. And, fasteningly enough, sometimes you don't see the same request year after year. So that is usually a signal to me that it was an idea that maybe
wasn't a plan. Council member Fredericks. Time's up. Yep. Okay. This one always gets a lot of attention. The outside agencies, I'm just forecasting that I got a very significant number of requests. Typically, this is intended to be support for these organizations and not just constantly increasing. So we did go through and move this up within the process and not with each of the teams that was looking for an adjustment. This is where I'm thinking of my recommended budget being. You can see that the funding for 2025 for these was 838,000.
The requests for funding were a hundred and $80,000 more than that, which is not in alignment with what we were talking about with the rest of the budget. If If these were the adjustments that were made and I'll just point out the 01/2025 live adjustment is contractual, but we're showing it here for reference that would be about a 5% increase in the total amount provided, not equal across the different organizations, but trying to apply, some of the context. If I still wouldn't recommend if you went all the way to a higher number in 2026 that it be near that $1,100,000
So, I did provide another thought process in, the far right column of if you are really wanting to provide additional funding, for different organizations to them, you know, what I would suggest is a reasonable max based on the detailed information provided. You could do that, but, again, that's coming from your tax levy. So looking at transitioning some of these in, but also recognizing that, for example, doubling the RDA, maybe there's a way to provide one time funding, but that's significant increase when it used to be a hundred thousand dollars of support as recently as 2020.
Council member Doring. I'm gonna hate to do this, but I'm gonna ask you to go back to the previous slide. I'm kinda like in no man's land down here, so it's it's okay. One more. I'm having a visceral reaction to any cut in library services. So you asked for that reaction. That's my reaction. I'm looking forward to going back to Ward 6 and talking with constituents there about how they would feel with any reduction about of of any of the library services. I hear a lot from them that they want more robust library services. So, any reduction in those services, I think, would be problematic for, the constituency that I represent.
My other question is in these budget optimization discussions, if a constituent or if we have a suggestion for an optimization, what is the process to bring that forward? I think you should send it to me, and we can talk about it. And k. I will share either information about it, or we could get more information from another individual depending on how detailed it is. That's great. I just my other nonprofit board experiences, they all have different budget budgeting rules, budgeting procedures. So I just I wanted to be clear about the procedures here.
And then you also have a series of public meetings where you could also bring it forward if it's not recommended. Sweet. Yep. Great question. Thought. Yeah? I won't forget about you over there. I'll try not to. But magically, we have arrived at the policy considerations again. I won't reiterate them because I think you provided great feedback. And we are also going to turn back one more time, except I can't because we moved the chat, to the CIP, which maybe I'll just run through. This is currently what we have projected in the capital improvement plan. We will bring in detail, the,
capital improvement plan, not including RPU. We are still working hard to align the Rochester Public Utilities budget process with the rest of the process, but we aren't quite there yet. So a lot of, projects represented here. Many different funding sources for these projects. I think we mentioned $9,000,000 a year of tax levy goes to the capital improvement project. So, if you look at the twenty twenty six year, significant, amount of that is coming from funds that are not the tax levy. I can't click again. Thanks. One more. And then also attached was the master fee schedule. Typically, we had been adopting this in December,
where we were hoping, I guess, that you were going to agree to the fee schedule because it's kind of important for the budget to work out. But, again, when we look at those, you may recall a wonderful, conversations that we had about golf in '20, '22. And, what is included in the budget for the master fee schedule is the continued adjustment of the golf fees, which are intended to go back to ongoing maintenance, as well as moving it off the levy. The sewer charges are based on the five year rate study, and growth management plan, as well as the cost index, or public works fees. So there's an explanation next to each of those.
So we're hoping to get that adopted earlier in the process. Also, the capital improvement, projects list so that we can then be focusing on some of the operations later in your in your process. We made it to discussion, but we had great discussion during the presentation. So appreciate that. I don't know if there's anything else. Other thoughts? Council member Keane? Yeah. Again, I'll just make some kind of summary things here. Just one thing I kind of approached with with what what the economic factors are around us as we approach here. We've gone through these labor things, which was a huge thing.
We went through the inflation stuff, and I think you've seen that reflected in this. We're probably not there as much as we were before, but we have this sort of thing where we negotiated 4%. And I think that's sort of like baseline. That's where we're at. Some other things though that, like, we are in still experiencing, like, a 5% growth in property residential property values. And when we you've got it you've got it in the thing that's, you know, 6% growth of value. But I do get concerned with that. That that means that the same people living in the same house, they're not dealing with that 10% increases.
They're seeing much higher than that. So those are concerns that I think we need to keep for in forefront. I don't wanna get into that whole how the process works. But when property values are going up and we're just concerned about saying, like, how much we're getting, it individual homeowners are paying more. And that, you know, that goes back and forth when the resident when the in COVID, when a lot of the commercial property values went down, we saw a lot a lot of problems with that. So those are the things in the background. The other big community thing that's happened here is we've just got done passing a big school referendum, which most people don't differentiate their tax bill from city,
county, school. Everyone's tax bills are going up. And I what I've been hearing is, you know, in some especially at the on some of the commercial, it's it's big. So that's the environment we're going into as we're doing this work in 2025. You know, budgets are still we have got to have the financial discipline, and I really do appreciate how we approach this. But at the end of the day, they really are what are your values and what are your priorities. And that's where you should be spending your money, and we should protect that we're not spending on things we're not calling our priorities. But the main metric that that what I've watched is the story will be a
9% or 9.96% increase. The the metric that I'm more concerned with is the tax capacity and how much the percent we're hitting on the tax capacity. I think we're right now at a 49 or so. We don't have that in the numbers today. But I'm really saying this more for my peers that when you're watching where how efficient we are using this, it's a little misleading because as the property values go up, it gives us some relief. But it is something that I watch as that are I can compare community across community and say, are we out of control?
And I would just say, you're referencing a slide that you'll see in, June and August, is that the net tax capacity for the current year 2025, despite the changes you've seen in the, overall tax collected, is still the second lowest it's been in the last twelve years. And is is it, like, 49% now? I believe it's 49 and change. Okay. But it's never it's been over 50 before, and we've been under 49 to 48, percent tax capacity for, like, the last twelve years. So we needed that. Just for here, like, you could you can sort of take that and say,
are we really out of control or compare it to Des Moines or you go out of state, well, bring it in state. But you can sort of get a feel for it. Everybody does different amounts of services. But the question is, is, like, are taxes just, you know, you'll hear just too damn high? Or is there do we need a reference to know what that means? And I want to make sure we stay with some sort of reference that we're not just, you know, because we really have been adding to our expenses. We've made decisions to improve salaries to maintain people. We've made decisions to staff traffic engineers.
We've done those things, and they cost money, and those are reflecting our values. But we have to make sure we don't get to the point of we're, like, ratcheting up the cost of government past the point that that most people would consider to be reasonable. Council member Miller, did you oh. I had one thing, that I that I, Wanted to, reference. And you you talked about, how we have stayed pretty lean with our FTE count. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about kind of the role of professional,
consulting in, in particularly, public works, community development, other places. Because I think there's also a perception out there that, that by not increasing FTEs, we're moving that to, to consulting services. And so can you talk about kind of the philosophy of of how you how we use, professional services? Thank you, council president. Council members, I would say it's part of the constant optimization of how we're doing service. You had a discussion at your last council meeting about, for example,
contracting out the pavement index, and so and not utilizing interns who we haven't been able to hire. So making it's really a question of what do we think will bring the best result for the most value to the community. We also for example, when we do the Mill and Overlay project, that's a combination of city employees and contractors. So if you think about, the the way that so we don't do the concrete insets for the inlets that are on the edge of the pavement. Right? So the concrete work is contracted out. That's partially because it's not just people. We would have to hire people,
like, have something for them to do in the winter months. Also, make sure that do we really also wanna buy all of the equipment that's necessary in order to do the work that's happening, like, five months out of the year? Or is it more optimal to consider that we are going to have a combination of employees and contractors or employees in some very specialized work that we do. We have engineers, but we also still, hire engineering services for some specialized work, where it makes a lot more sense to have specialized work go to an engineering service and not hire a full time person that maybe utilized very occasionally on that
type of work. So we're always trying to have that optimization mindset of what is the best way to accomplish the work, recognizing that, you know, having positions of one is probably a thing of the past. And if you're gonna have one project of that nature in the year, it makes more sense to utilize a firm that's doing that across the country or at least across, you know, the state than to hire a person who you're only gonna use occasionally. Occasionally. Thank you. Council member Miller. Just two final comments from the whole presentation. One, mister Parrish mentioned that the valuation increase of lower cost,
more affordable housing has been outpacing the cost or the valuation increases of higher, cost housing or higher valuation housing. Is that a hypothetical, or is that a real thing we're seeing? That was in that reassessment cycle. Okay. So a lot of different things influence the assessed value. But during the reference cycle of last the 2025 tax levy, for example, my home is in the over $400,000, and I had a very I think I was at, like, a 2% increase now. Two years before that, I was, like, 11,
and we were at six at the city of Rochester. So, it's it was during it was a period of time where I don't know if the the neighborhoods that had that value of housing were in a reassessment year or if that's some of that's per you know, the purchase price just went up more within that, period of time, which influenced the assessed valuation in those areas. Is the supply and demand pressure on affordable housing. I mean, I know it's something that we're tracking, and it comes up in the community. And I I would just love to know more exploring what that pressure is that's driving the valuation increase of the more affordable housing units.
And And that was a one one one time that we saw that in the last set of notices evaluation. So I don't know that there's a trend. Okay. My my second just comment is that I I noticed on the we've mentioned the growth over the nineteen eighty to twenty twenty period. I I think it's important in the staff and the question of how we're doing that. I also just noticed that we're growing our infrastructure, our roads, our fire hydrants, everything. It's outpacing our population growth, and it's just a concern, especially as how we develop and how much, additional
future maintenance cost, that will have levy impacts. So just a comment. Mayor Norton. This kind of follows council president, Schubert's comment. We talk about the 14% increase in staff or whatever the FTE is. FTE 17. Yeah. And someone asked me about this the other day and I didn't have the answer, but it has to do with with Boldford Unbound, with all the growth that they're doing, we know we have hired, people for that. Do they count in our staffing or not because they're supposedly, like, temporary or DMC related? Council President,
Mayor Norton, they count in our staffing, but I think that number was a prior year. So, like, I it's prob I don't know how much that would influence the percent from 1980 to, the year that was referenced, but Mhmm. Those were just authorized within a recent budget, and that graphic is from two years ago. Okay. They do count. However, the thought process was that we would also look at succession planning and that this was, like, building up during a period of time where we have specific work. And so the intent and I'll just repeat this for my friends that are, wanting to request budget in the future is not for those positions to get repurposed
into something else unless unless there is a discussion of needing that. That would still be like a decision package and a request. It is to look at succession planning, things that change, and you would potentially not fill another position or not fill that position, as turnover would happen in the future. And I appreciate that clarification. And then also DMC staff, are those counted in our staffing? Those are counted in our staffing. And so when that went from contractual to staffing, they count in our FTE count. But again, the funding is coming regardless of funding source. Another example would be we used to staff the Civic Center with FTEs.
We don't anymore, but we still have a cost in our budget for the operating contract. But those are FTEs that have fluctuated, not that the service necessarily went away, but we're doing the service differently. Thank you for clarifying. Any final comments? Well, great discussion did you get? I got so much. Thank you. Yeah. Good. Good. It was good budget discussion. I'm fulfilled until the next spreadsheet. Thank you. We're gonna take a five minute break and come back and talk about rules and procedure. Okay. We are our second item for,
this afternoon is city council rules and laws of procedure and code of contact conduct review. And administrator zones, take it away. Travel and training policies. Oh, they just hadn't turned me on yet. Yeah. You are on now. Primarily, just gonna go through this quickly as a high level overview of the purpose of the council rules of procedure and code of conduct, a little bit of touch point about other parts of the charter, and then a slide about what change the more significant changes were that were made, over the last two years.
So in general, you've got this in your packet, but realistically be thinking about, how does this help your legislative process? How does it how help you act as a body? This is an odd job, to make decisions together and, work together when maybe you weren't in the four that agreed to the decision. So just be thinking about it like that, how it helps you, stay in your role, as elected leadership and policymakers, and it helps, city staff members stay in our role of the implementers of the policy in the day to day operations. It really is intended to help you, to be respectful of each other even when you disagree,
thinking about time and resources and how we spend those effectively. And then really, honestly, having robust discussion on this, I like to call it the television show, is important to the community. The things that they hear you talking about and saying your constituents are how they understand whether they're represented, on the on the council through, who they've elected. So just a couple key provisions. These are clickable. Obviously, legislative authority vested in the common council. You have to have a regular meeting every month according to your charter. You have the authority to make these rules and change the rules, but you need five sevenths of yourself to do that,
per the charter. And then, we talked about this a little bit earlier. You can't work for the city and be a city council member, and you also have to, approve something by ordinance if you're going to adjust your salary, for a future year. Apologies. I'm clicking again. So when you think about this, also, in the ordinance, although it's listed on a a slide called charter, you have the ordinance about, conflicts of interest within the ethics, portion of the code. And then just because I like to talk about myself, we do have the administrator, which is outlined within the city charter. So, really,
this talks about the day to day operations of the city, bringing you an annual budget, etcetera, and all of the things, that we try to do to make sure that what's on your agenda is necessary to be there. That is a component of it, but also making sure that if there are, changes that you wanna make, to the priorities of the city, that we do that as a body. I try not to serve one of you more than the others, and, that is both the blessing and the curse of the city administrator role. So, again, the policy level is really that 50,000 foot view, and down to maybe about the 20,000
foot view. You start getting into a lot more staff time when we're talking about delivering projects, details, the task work, the day to day of getting the work done. And so this just is a good reflection of, how those, duties and responsibilities sometimes cross over a little bit, where there's more of the council role in establishing the vision and more of the staff role in carrying out the day to day operations to achieve that vision. So again, the main thing that are in your rules of procedure, I think of the rules of procedure about your meeting. How is your meeting going to go? That's really the rules of procedure section.
A lot of that is really grounded in the Robert's Rules, and that's the framework for how you, tend to discuss policy items at your voting meeting. Perhaps less so at study session, which is a little bit more informal. Talks about, the role of the president, make sure he does not veto anything when the mayor is gone. Most important part of the rules. And then also the order of business, so people expect, a certain order on the agenda. Also, remarks and debate. Talk you know, we talk about being respectful and courteous, and so, it is a little bit of an odd way of approaching a discussion that Robert's
Rules, but it really does help for especially contentious issues, to make sure that you're moving forward, you're making the motions, and that some of the emotion of the motions is taken out of it because we're staying focused on decisions, etcetera. And then the code of conduct, it really is getting more into the roles and responsibilities. How do we work together? How do we make sure, accidentally, most of the time, staff doesn't go marching in a direction because they had a conversation with a council member, but rather were acting, you know, in accordance with what the majority of the common council is looking to accomplish.
Importantly, it tells you where you sit on the dais, things of that nature. You could change that. There are cities that, do things differently. It also references your travel policy. And again, trying to get the roles and responsibilities right, have that clarity, and have it be established in a process and procedure to make sure people realize it's not personal. Business meeting agenda, how you get on the agenda, the questions and the process that we use to send out the information, and information symmetry was how this was described. So you get a really long email from me on Monday that's trying to give you perspective on questions that were asked that maybe weren't as clear in the RCA,
and so we provide a little bit more information for the city council to answer constituents or to determine whether you would want to pull an item from consent. And the reason that we try to get that by 01:00 is so you all can be prepared. If you aren't expecting someone to pull a consent item, you might not have read it as much in-depth or you might not have, considered some of the things that you would want to be, saying in order to sway someone to your opinion. It also lets us make sure the right staff are here to answer your questions and to make sure they don't have to be here if we don't think there's, a need for them to come and stick around with us.
Not that this isn't a wonderful meeting that everyone should want to come to, but not everyone wants to be here at 10:00 at at night. So, direction to staff for projects, those are some of the key provisions. We talked about that a little bit. Interactions with staff, and then requests for information on non agenda items. You've probably encountered some of this. Something that's not in your code of conduct, but was adopted by, a motion in December of twenty twenty three is how we've been navigating some of the legislative priorities and letters of support. We get asked by different organizations to support their initiatives.
We try really hard not to compete with initiatives that the city already has. It doesn't mean that we don't, you know sometimes staying silent is tacit support. It's kind of unique up at the legislature. And we have a process for when we are going to send a letter of support, a process for reviewing that, who signs it, and then, again, the submittal through the legislative director. So it's something that you could adopt, within your, rules of procedure, but I just want to make sure that you are aware it has been adopted. It's just not in your rules of procedure. It was approved, on 12/11/2023.
Something else that's referenced, in your code of conduct is about travel and training. We mentioned earlier that the amount for 2025 is 15,034. We just ask that you, you know, go through a process to request this training. I don't think I've ever had someone request training that didn't seem to align with the council, you know, council goals and city work, but I guess it could happen. And then making sure that, if you do want to do something that's beyond the apportionment, that is a possibility. It's just that we would need to put that on the council agenda to make sure that the, city council is authorizing something that's outside of the scope of the travel policy,
for out of state travel or, apportioning, the dollar amount to do that. I will turn this over to mister Spenler Craig. Thank you, city administrators, Elms, council president, Shoebring, council members, mayor Norton. I will be, fairly brief in these next three slides, not because the topics aren't important, but because you've spent a fair amount of time in this space already, either through prior council discussions or through your council onboarding. The materials that you're seeing are good reference materials to you going forward. You've seen iterations of these slides previously.
There's a mix of citations as well as links to substantive documents that you'll want to keep in mind going forward. Just a couple of things to say about this topic generally, though. This is there's layering of authority documents relevant to this discussion of ethics, ordinance, and gift law. Those layerings are state law that's specific to gifting. There's a charter provision, so your constitutional provision regarding gifting, as well as the actual ordinance that puts ethics review into practice through the ethical,
the ethics commission. All of those items, again, are are referenced through this slide. In summary, though, I think I just want to reference a few things and and and sum it up. No gifts of more than nominal value, if you remember nothing else, no gifts of more than nominal value from anyone who is interested in your council work, cannot be taken. There's some nuance, to that, of course. Yeah. And the reminder there for a minute? Council member Wahl. And the nominal value,
mister Spencer Craig, is, set by state statute at $5? It is. K. Yes. When I first came on the council, more than two years ago, I thought that was gonna be a real problem. It hasn't turned out to be a problem because it's easy to say no. But $5, how long has it been $5 that that is such a a nominal value? To your point, it has not been adjusted for inflation. It's been $5 for a long time. I'm not sure where really $5 originally came from, what was special about that threshold, but it's been $5 for a long time.
Yes. Because that's a Starbucks or a $5 or a $10 cup of coffee or whatever. Thank you. Absolutely. You're welcome. Mayor Norton? A question came to me recently that I hadn't had asked quite in this way before, but if you get a logoed, item, for instance, RCTC mug or we give out things as a city at events, kind of those kinds of things or a cap with a union logo on them, are those how do those, fall in this area? There's maybe a couple of different questions there. Mayor,
if if we are receiving, I would say pay attention to who it's coming from and whether that is an entity that is interested in the work that you are doing or a vote that is coming up or some sense of funding, for that particular organization. It may be a question of nominal value versus not. And then I think the second piece of that is us giving things away is less of a gifting question and more of a public purpose question and just assuring
that whatever it is that the city is doing, is in is in the interest of the city as a whole and is not, being given out, I guess I would say, frivolously. Yeah. I wanna clarify. I wasn't I wasn't asking about us giving. I was using that as an example, those cups that have the city logo, RCTC, for instance, when you attend an event or when they come to visit, you might bring an RCTC mug that is similar to something we might give as a city. If it is logoed,
is that considered a gift or is that marketing from because I had been told that there might be a little bit of a difference between a marketing item and a gift per se. And I'm I'm I was just I wasn't clear about that, but I was seeing if you had a way to help us. And for again, you're talking about for us receiving something from somebody else that may be may be logoed in some manner. Exactly. Like RCTC or like women in construction or like any number of things that we go to where they may be giving away or hand us,
thank you for coming and hand you might come to your office to visit, for instance, and hand you something that is a logoed item from that business or entity. I think I think I understand your question, and I would say that the the logoing or marketing piece of it is really irrelevant. I think it's, yet a question of nominal value or not. And, again, the question of interested person or or party as well. So both of those, not it's not one or the other, it's both of those that you would weigh? Correct. And then there are times when we get gifts as a city or as mayor
that are given to us, and it's not a yes or no kinds of things. The way we have taken it is it's a gift to the city, and it remains in city hall for perpetuity, like our sister cities, for instance. Correct. Correct. The city as a whole can receive gifts, and it's appropriate for the city to receive gifts, and we do. And we have a process, and we, we need to remind our teammates now and then to make sure that we follow that process so that the council is formally accepting the gift to the city.
Yes. No other questions for now? Do you have more on your list? Very briefly. Okay. The other two slides. What you'll see, here is just a little bit of the language from, the ordinance itself, which is reminding you of your high minded work. And then the third, slide that I'm presenting on is really just the the detailed version of the ethics ordinance, gets into the some of the nitty gritty and really some of the specific financial conflict of interest scenarios that are really the heart of the ethics ordinance.
In addition to just the general no gift takeaway for you, what I would just remind you of, and I think I've told you all before, these things will pop up here and there in a variety of iterations and oftentimes in a time sensitive way. Please reach out to city administrator Zelms or me, and we'll talk it through. Sometimes it's obvious and it's a question of just problem solving. How do you deal with that? Sometimes, it's gray areas and we'll just work that through with you. Of course, the important thing is to stay within the bounds of the law and ethics ordinance,
and none of us, of course, want to be, embarrassed either through the process. I'm gonna ask for you to advance the slides, but those are basically the when in doubt reach out slides. So the recent updates, we did adjust the regular meeting time to 6PM, and adjust the study sessions to 03:30PM on days when there's not a regular council meeting scheduled. Establish the two minute time limit for public speaking speakers during open comment, which doesn't change anything about the public hearing portion of the meeting. And then I believe this was actually in 2022,
but there was an adjustment to the selection of council boards and commission liaisons. If you'd ever seen the prior verbiage, it was very I didn't fully understand what it meant, but we had changed it. And so it did used to have some amount of prior years of service, and then reverse order is where I started losing me. Reverse order for the next rotation until all positions were filled, and I'm not sure what that is. Reverse order of what rotation of the same committees or commissions. And then priorities to lower number of awards if there, if there were equal years of service.
So that is not in your current rules of procedure, but I wanted to point it out because it has been pointed out to me before. And then, we had changed that to be recommended without the whatever reverse order till the next rotation and lowest number award means to any seated council president. And then we did clear That is not the method I used this year. We hadn't used it for some years. The, and then add added clarifying language to to appendix a. Really, that was because there was a change to, there was a change to, I'm on the last bullet,
and I'm reading the second to last bullet. Oh, right. We had tried to address the challenge of open comment being sort of literally the word open, by just suggesting that people stay focused on things that the city council could influence, locally at the local jurisdiction, and then updating the language because there was a change to, open meeting law regarding ability to join remotely, although it didn't change that much. But we did change that language. So, again, I don't know if there's any desire to make any vast changes to your council rules. It is something that really is a question for the council and only the council,
and it requires five sevenths of you if you wanna make any changes to your council rules. So that I would just stand for any questions or listen to discussion. Well, I'll I'll start off. And as you might imagine, I've read through the rules and guidelines many times. And what strikes me is that it is largely written as, as you said, to prevent certain types of behavior, which I agree are necessary guardrails. While it states in minute detail how we as elected, officials, what we must not do and how we should act interact with city staff,
I think it's lacking in best practices or, processes on how we should deliver public policy to meet the needs of our residents. In some ways, I I believe they constrain us from engaging in a free flow of ideas, options, and engagement with Rochester Stakeholders and with each other and our professional staff, which I believe are all necessary for building effective policy. I'd like to see us undertake a an examination of our framework of decision making
to ensure effective public engagement, transparency, and adequate time for deliberation. I don't have any specific proposals today, but I do believe we should explore potential options to refresh and open up our, procedures, including ways to lengthen the glide path to our decisions on high impact issues. Currently, the public and council members have five and a half days to absorb a proposal, gain public input, and in many cases, one opportunity to deliberate amongst ourselves and provide meaningful input to,
to impact a proposal. So what I would recommend is that we create a task force of two to three council members along with appropriate staff to explore options to make our decision making process more robust and transparent. Some of the areas that we should explore is clarifying the objectives of our study sessions, reexamining our in our agenda setting process, and consideration of council committees as a first stop for key proposals to provide the
council and public input prior to a final vote by the full council. So with that, I'll let my council colleagues share any questions or comments they have. Council member Wahl. That was a lot, president. That's why I suggested a task force, and I wasn't proposing anything specific. I I am, going to be very specific, and, that, has to do with selection of council boards and commission liaisons. I think that perhaps, our president was placed in an uncomfortable position, in January as,
past procedure and current procedure conflicted to a degree. And, the changes we made were on November in November of twenty twenty three. So we've, I think that maybe we're at a time, and there are only a couple of us seated here that can speak to November of twenty twenty three, but I think maybe we were so focused on some other issues that, we glossed over that. I don't remember any significant engagement about the change in how council members would be
appointed to committees. So, if there's a task force or whatever it is, and, mister Palmer I know has considerable interest in this, I would like him to be able to weigh in on this as well before we, as a council, would necessarily say what is currently in our rules and procedures is that process by which we would commit, for coming years. But maybe mister Keane, can can add. Mister Murphy Keane. Yeah. The only thing no. I would say in November of twenty twenty three, it was it was the part of the code of conduct that was more focused
on meetings and and, council interactions. It was not on the procedures for, appointments. That that is hard to, you know, set up in these rules because as you see, over time, things change. Like certain, certain committees have have gone away. Others have come about. So to try to, memorialize it in our procedures, I think, is a is a difficult thing. I think right now, the idea of having the the, council president do that drafting and then the council approve it, I I think is okay. I I'm not, I'm trying to come to appear open to, president Schubert's kind of different ideas of,
like, we need to do this. But I also worry that there's a certain amount of, like, lag installed that's gonna be put in here that that is, doesn't work well with the cadence of the way the council works right now. I think the problems of trying to solve that, like, that longer term, getting things into the public that they're interested in before we're voting on them within I I agree with that. But I also think we do a pretty good job of that through, through a combination of, existing study sessions, our NIMS, our our kind of public hearings. But, I'm open to looking at that kind of stuff.
I came here. The couple things that were on my mind are much smaller. It's like we did we did these changes to say six o'clock. I think that's working, but I wanna be open to say, you know, our meeting structure changed dramatically during COVID and afterwards. Do we have the right meeting structure right now with the every other week study session two a month? Or should that be, you know so I'm more interested in that side. But the other thing I I'm open to too is we did a thing of moving our our open comment meeting from four minutes down to two minutes.
I'd be comfortable at three minutes. I I think right now when I watch the flow of our meetings, I don't I think we're not, fighting a lot of issues with that. So those are the kind of things I came with. I tried back in 2023. We had the same meeting with the new council to talk about the seating arrangements because when I came in, it had just changed. But there was no appetite for it, and I'm okay with the way it is too. You can leave the seating the way you want it and change how the voting happens. But, again, I just don't see what big problem we're solving with those right now, so I I wasn't bringing them up. Council member Miller,
then council member Fredericks. Yeah. Just a couple of specific comments to build on council member Keane. I, agree that I I've been thinking about the study session supply of time. We've had some recent very full study sessions that have felt like we have not had as robust of a time for discussion as I would have liked. And I I wonder about the fifth Monday that occasionally appears in our calendar, which currently has no regular meeting and no, study session on as a potential place to add a little time. And in the glide path, I also wonder that I don't see here as the role of boards and commissions,
outside of planning and zoning, which has a an official role within the, the UDC, or perhaps other boards and commissions where we invite community members to take a more intensive role in a a topic, an area. I have not appreciated that there is a formal process that I hear from those discussions. Obviously, they're open to the public. I can attend. Sometimes, I do. But I would be interested in perhaps a task force type arrangement to look at that area of engagement too. And then I've also heard, that both council member Wall and the mayor had attended sessions at the National League
of Cities looking at public engagement best practices there. I would love to hear more about that, explore those topics, because I share council member Keane's comfort with three minutes. I've recently been at other public meetings where I've seen three minutes. Feels like it gives a little bit more time for people who are approaching us or approaching a body to be able to not be experts at a two minute argument. And I I would love to have a little more flexibility and, and it lower the barrier to people feeling comfortable approaching us in that space. I don't think it's a substitute for other robust engagement,
but I I do think it's a a point of something I would be comfortable exploring a a return to or a move up to three minutes. And those are my comments. I just wanted to like to off I know you didn't ask a question, but I just would offer that the idea of having council subcommittees, I guess, is what I would call them, and having items go to a subcommittee of council before they come to the whole council could be contrary to what we're talking about about good public engagement. Because if people think that based on the folks that are sitting in that meeting that it's possible that it will pass the entire council,
but then we go to the entire council and it's a very different sentiment, it could send some very mixed messages to the community. So I would just say, like, I think we would wanna have some time with this of understanding what the value and what some of the drawbacks might be. I share your concern about slowing things down, and I guess I would also say we wanna take that in context with the charter, which very clearly says that the council agenda is set by the city administrator. I'm not saying I have to set it, but it's not really a council rules of procedure change. That would be a substantive change to the,
like, the charter, depending on what, the desire was for that and depending on what the item is. If it's a subset of counsel, I think there are implications for the open meeting law, and I'll I what I would like to hear from the city attorney. And I also so I think we would wanna have a lot of discussion before coming back with and I realized it was pretty wide open, and you have to give some examples in order to make something wide open make sense. But I do think that depending on what the ideas are, there's could be some complications. And, for example, we have state law to comply with when we're talking about planning and zoning and
shot clocks for certain things, and expectations and entitlements. So I think, yes, and it sort of depends. And then, of course, we have only so many days of the week to have a committee meeting to have advanced notice to the when the next meeting is gonna happen, pull the packet together. There's a lot of things that happen behind the scenes in order to have any of those meetings, occur in a way that is meaningful for the community. Yes. I and I I I'd like to respond to that and, council member Keane's, initial piece on the study session. I want as I proposed it as a task force because I know there are
a lot of questions, and there's a a lot of ways that you can go when it comes to committees. I know that the county uses committees. My previous, public service role at the Metropolitan Airports Commission uses very, standard committees, and you can have committees where you may have four four council members that are committee members, but it still is an open meeting. Other council members can go to that. So there are a lot of iterations you can do.
But to, council member Keane's point, I do believe that the study sessions can perform the function that I'm looking at. And I I think we saw it a few weeks ago where we, when we were talking about the the pavers on the Peace Plaza. We had a study session discussion on those pavers, and then within a week, a week and a half, it was a decision to make. So that's what I'm looking for is I think study sessions, we will often get really large issues,
and then they may come back to us, two months, three months, four months later and in a more, detailed proposal. What I'm looking at is when we have very high impact decisions to make to really give us a couple bites at the apple so that we can assess public impact, that we can have greater deliberation between ourselves and, more informal deliberation with our professional staff as well.
So those are the kind of things I'm looking at, and, I think it's, as I said, worth a discussion among council members as to where the comfort is on that kind of change and whether it's, you know, we try try a few different things or we we, as I as I mentioned, clarify our study session, times to include framework like that. So I'll stop there. And it looked like, may mayor Norton. Thank you. I think it's interesting whether it be a task force or short term task force that would
look into this or committee task forces are more short term, or whether it be the use of a study session. I I think there are many issues here, and I'm gonna add a couple that I would like you to look at. A, we changed a couple years ago the process for, filling a vacancy when the president leaves, town, takes a vacation. And we did it in a way that just said if it's January, it's Ward 1. If it's February, it's Ward 2. I would argue that that has not always served us the best, and that while it's nice to let everyone have a chance at a discussion and
the chair has the prerogative to fill that, I think just setting a chair in a month is not the best way to handle that. And one of the rationales for that is, not everyone is comfortable running meaning for one, and it kind of puts you in the position where you have to, whether you like it or not, rather than the option of doing it. And number two, when I'm out of town and there were two instances I could think of in the last couple of years, where I had a vacation or was out of town and the chair was sick, or was out of town as well,
and then that means, you know, a person is not only the chair of the meeting, also becomes the mayor for a day. And I think I would I think it would be wiser to have a more thoughtful discussion and allow the chair and perhaps the chair and the mayor to make those decisions about who would fill in at certain times, rather than just having it be A, B, C, D, E. So I would just say that something that's concerned me a couple times over the last few years that I would like us to revisit. Also, we have this because of the way our strange charter is.
Yes, I believe this committee could even make recommendations for a charter change, but it's very difficult to do and very complicated and very it would be very time consuming. But even on some decisions we've made here, we get confused about the mayor's role, which at least our charter commission charter commission and sometimes the way the charter is written and viewed, the mayor's position is seen as executive, like a judicial, legislative and executive. When you go to their meetings and they've talked, they say, oh, well, the mayor is the executive branch.
That's how they view it. But it doesn't really have the same authority, except for veto authority, as an executive branch. And yet, there are other decisions that are made here where, and I give you the example of, RDA or other committees that we serve on, where the council made a decision that they shouldn't vote, but they also made that decision for me. Well, if I'm an executive branch and you're a legislative branch, we have different jobs, but we haven't always thought of it that way. We've treated the mayor and the council exactly the same.
And there are other examples we could go into. So I hope as we move forward and have some of these discussions, that really think about the division of labors that we have, what the charter says, and, you know, if you guys decide something for yourself, does it mean that the mayor has to live under that same rule? Or is the mayor's position somewhat different and should be treated differently, and in what instances? And we haven't always given that a lot of thought. So I just throw those out. Council member Keane. Yeah. Again, I I know there's a lot of topics on the table here now because the code has so many different things with different kinds of rules. But I'm gonna try to go back to council member, council president Schubert's thing with,
like the order and the basically the contemplative thing towards these big votes. Underneath that, the suggestion for the, task force. But in my view, the suggestion for the task force is the bigger change to our operation than the other one. And I I think we shouldn't do that willy nilly. I think we should I I mean, are we going to be a task task force sort of or a committee structure? I know that back in 2019, '1 of my first years here, we did an ad hoc one. And we ended up in trouble with it with the exact thing you talked about
that the committee ended up going in a certain direction that the council wouldn't accept. And then you end up causing this sort of thing. So I before we get into whether we do this, this idea of like breaking off task forces to me, we sort of assumed we can start doing that. But to me, that's the bigger policy question and the council or council right now than how we what we use it for. Can you clarify a little so when I when I think of council committees, it's member this body Right. It's just us in a different format.
It's not it's it's us. You know, if there if you have a council two council committees and you have four members of each, and the other three members can attend those meetings. It and you then but the council itself is the ultimate decide decision maker. So I guess I'm I'm kinda and these are discussions that I would see us working out in a So,
again, let let me see if I can just respond and see. I mean, we're we're in front of me right now is our rule, our, like, our rules of operation, and and they're they're suggested things that always we can always change within our our super majority ability to change. But I I still have this, like, higher standard thing that as a council member, I only have authority in the old world of committee as a whole when the seven of us are together making decisions. When the meeting adjourns, I don't have authority to make city decisions. And I I do know there's cases where I have been asked,
to be on a an RPU committee, and someone else has been asked to represent the city here and there. Those are legislative and things like that. But what we're what I think we're leaking into right now is, like, no. We can go off in groups of twos or threes or fours or fives and have authority as, like, making things for the city. And we could do that. There's other there's nothing in our charter that says we can't do that, but we don't right now. So I'm reacting to the idea like, oh, we're going to start operating that way. I'm gonna say that's a big deal. And so that that's what I'm trying to I see.
So you're you're responding to the task force itself. I'm responding to the idea of subcommittees or call it task force, but this idea that we're going to say, council member Wall and council member Miller are gonna go off and come back with a recommendation to this group. We don't do that right now. We could, and that's what I think you're suggesting, but that's up, in my view, a change. And whether that's them two or three and whether they whether they're more interested in it, I I'm gonna say it again. That's a big change to me because I have this view that I have city
authority as a member of seven, not as an individual leaving this room or not with meeting council member Wahl for coffee tomorrow morning. We're gonna make some things or I mean, in some ways, that starts sort of colliding with what the staff's responsibility starts colliding with open meeting. So that that's why I'm I'm not saying I couldn't support it. I'm saying let's be let's be clear what we're doing. Did, council member, Fredericks? I'll go for a short one at this. How's that sound? I think what you're trying to say is you just wanna have more input on
what our what our agendas are gonna be, whether it be for our study sessions or our council meetings. You wanna have more input before it just comes to us and is late in front us. Is that what I'm hearing you say? I think that may be part of it, but I think it's also, yes, more input, before things are Baked. Completed. And, we are, at our Monday meeting, and it may be after, you know, a very, agenda packed meeting, and we have to make a decision Right. That day. Yes. And that So it just It frees us frees us up on those high impact
issues. Right. And the next issue is is us seven, eight, don't get to sit down and just visit and talk about things and go through things. And I don't get to sit and hear what you guys are thinking and learn from you and all this stuff. We're always put on public display, enforce and not force, but, also, we're making these decisions where we haven't even none of us has even talked to each other about it. That it happens often. And and maybe I'm alone in that. But, you know, I'm I'm trying to abide by the rules. I'm trying to do things right, make every effort I can. It's like,
I've gotten to know you pretty well. I haven't gotten to know the rest of all these people really well because of the parameters we have to operate in. And and I would like to talk with you guys more openly and candidly and get to know you better and all those things because I stand to learn a lot from that. Mister Spindler, Craig, you had something to add. Yes. Thank you, mister president. That's maybe a good segue. And, council member Keene, opened that door as well. I don't wanna get ahead of the ideas or the conversation, but, yes, the open meeting law,
is is a significant dynamic here and a significant, guardrail to all of you. Not sure exactly what is being contemplated with the idea of a work group or a committee, but I would just tell you that that's a frequent point of conversation with other public bodies and the general rule is that subcommittees, committees, whatever you call them, are treated as sort of a separate public body that is obligated to a public conversation and posting of meetings and notice and recording and the data dynamics of us
managing those as well. So I just wanna put that out there that to the extent that that's where some of the idea or conversation goes, we would just need to problem solve through some of those limitations and obligations under the law. Council member Dohring. Yeah. Thank you, president Schoebring. I'm I'm grateful that you brought this idea forward. The part of, your idea that is most intriguing to me and most would be most beneficial to me in representing, the constituents that that put me in this chair would be, an extended length of time to gather public input from them on on,
especially high impact agenda items. I have found myself at at times wishing that I would have more time, to garner that feedback be before, being put in a position to make a decision, just because I want to represent them, well. It would also be beneficial for me to to have more of a heads up of things that are coming on an agenda, so I don't have a you know, for example, I had someone call me today saying, next week on your council agenda, you're going to be talking about this. And I was like, wow.
I had no idea that that was happening. So I don't you know, am I put in a position where I'm trusting that they know more information than I am, that I haven't seen the information they're gonna provide so I can actually engage in a dialogue with them. So I I I like the idea of a task force, being put into place to study, or to come up with some some ideas about how we can, as a governing body, be more engaged and get more time to have public input on on on our
decision making process. Thank you. So Much like the the strategic priorities, we will synthesize what we heard today and come back to you with what we think is viable and what the implications of a task force are because I think what maybe got missed is that your task force would be a public meeting. So you might just wanna have a study session. And thank thanks for clarifying that, administrator Zombe, because that's what I think the goals I think, council member, Doreen did a good job of crystallizing what I feel about it as well and
the process as to how we make decisions to get to a place like that is you know, I wanna make sure that we're we are following our our open meeting and, guidelines to get there. Thank you. I'm good if you're good. Alright. Any other, comments, suggestions? Thank you. Good discussion. Now, administrator zones, if you can, give us a preview of study session. Yep. Your next study session is in May, and I don't have the calendar in front of me, so I'm gonna guess a date.
Oh, there it is. Thank goodness. May 12. I was gonna guess right. I did just wanna point out that the annual bus tour is typically a little bit longer than 06:30, usually around 07:30 or so. So, it is a good opportunity to engage with each other, which was discussed earlier. So, we have that all scheduled out, hopefully, with enough time to, have, you know, good discussion, but also build some rapport, see see things on the ground throughout the city. And that's your, main meeting that you have for study sessions in May. And then you can see what's forthcoming on June 9. And that's all I have.
Alright. I'm gonna turn it over to, council member Miller. Go ahead. Sorry. Just a clarification about the schedule. I see that on June 9, we have UDC downtown parking. And then on July 28, we have DT parking to UDC update. Are those distinct topics? I believe that they are distinct. Maybe they aren't. That sounds like a duplicate. I'll double check that. They're a duplicate. Thank you. I think it, in part, was because it may be that you'd be coming back with actual language in the UDC, but that doesn't have to happen in that way. Sorry. Part of the reason they moved too was because we wanted those two discussions to
be on the same meeting. So downtown parking did change. I will turn it over to attorney, Michael Spindler Craig to, walk us through our next agenda item. Thank you, mister president. Consistent with the posted agenda, this is the point when we would move into closed session. This is the type of closed session that does require a formal motion and vote by the body. The language that I would suggest that you use is that you move into closed session pursuant to Minnesota statute 13 d. Three, subdivision 1b to discuss strategies for labor negotiations.
So moved. Moved by, Council Member Wall. Second. Seconded by Council Member Miller. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Any opposed, say nay. Motion passes. We are adjourned, and we will meet in nine minutes in, Room 104. Thank you.