Long term value to our communities. The project is designed to enhance quality of life, expand access to recreation, and strengthen Rochester's position as a regional destination for sports and events, which we all know a lot of those more travel events happen on the weekend when we have more capacity within our existing 6,000 hotel rooms. By attracting tournaments, training programs, and other events, the complex will bring new visitors to the city, support local business, and create a positive ripple effect across the local economy. This is the economic development aspect that delivers both community and financial returns.
Importantly, it also does not rely on property tax funding. That was something that we talked about throughout development. Instead, what we are proposing here and what we'll get into is leveraging, designated resources and strategic partnerships to build and operate a facility that operates, in a manner that doesn't rely on significant public subsidy. In fact, what you'll see is, as we've been talking about over the last year, what we've looked at is a pro form a for the outdoor that actually does not rely on property tax in order to operate. The council, is being asked to consider a path forward that reflects the most favorable financial outcome
for the city, ongoing operationally and recognizing that, the desires that came forward, were about double what we had predicted when we were going through the sales tax project. The project also emphasizes accessibility and affordability, and you think you'll hear that from, our operating partners, Chad and and John with Sports Academy, who will be able to share with you the details of how they've built this out. The current operating model is structured to allow significant community use, especially during the weekday when you're talking about the diamond fields. There's more flexibility on the square fields, and there are a number of amenities that are not sports focused,
but, service supportive amenities that will be available, maybe not twenty four hours a day. We try not to have people in parks after dark. And then, having fees that remain moderate and striking the balance between affordability and operational viability. So, our goal is to, provide a little bit more, detail for you that was requested at your last council meeting focusing on that. So Ben Bolt will be, focusing on how we've operated many of our facilities over time to get some, clarity on how those operating partnerships work and how this, recommended partnership would be different. I did just wanna acknowledge that the original concept that was developed through community engagement
envisioned a balance of and mix of outdoor and a significant a significant amount of outdoor, and indoor, but always talked about the need to phase. We had estimates at that time that were at 5% estimates. I will say that they were underpriced for what we're seeing today. And, what came forward early this year would have cost at least double what we're talking about for just the outdoor concept, And the available sales tax is $65,000,000 so just wanted to acknowledge that and then point out the other, thing that came up earlier in the year is the operating pro form a for
indoor tournament level facility would have still required about 500,000 to a million dollars a year of operating subsidy. Not but that would likely have come from a property tax levy, which does not mean that's off the table for the future. We are continuing to move forward, assuming that there would be a phase two and that is, how the, design is is created is to be able to be supportive of a phase two that would benefit from the site development of phase one. So with that, I would turn it over to Ben Bolt, and he is is gonna kick this off by talking about how this park system has operated with many partners,
for the different sports facilities we have today. Great. Thank you, Administrator Zellms, council president, council members, mayor. Thanks for having me today. I thought I would start with a little background on how the existing parks and rec facilities, work and how the programming is offered, in a a wide variety of, ways. Maybe I don't have turned on. There we go. Alright. So, yeah, a few bullets here just to highlight. So a lot of the programming, especially across the park system is provided through partnerships. And these are all public programs whether it be T ball,
youth soccer, participating in active sports, swimming, all of those types of things. The vast majority are offered through partnerships. Oftentimes, the partners will bring in financial investment to help with the facility, and I'll share a couple of examples of that. There's pictures of those on the screen right now, whether it be the baseball fields that Rochester Youth Baseball, helped to fundraise for the lights and infrastructure that's out there. And again, those programs run from as early as just getting into the sport with T ball
all the way up through your 13, 14 year old travel baseball is all offered by Rochester Youth Baseball, and that's just one sport. Example, in with that financial infrastructure, that they're able to kind of upgrade the facilities that we have within our system. That often comes with, them having primary time usage at those facilities. Again, these are all public programs so that anybody in the community can, participate, sign up for or try out for a team, there. And then we,
as Parks and Rec, also coordinate the schedules there. So that partner will get us their schedules. We'll get that all filled in. And then as other requests come in, we'll do our best to accommodate those. I will say oftentimes that, that partner that we're working with, again, I'll use the example of baseball. If we have an opportunity to run a tournament or run a different type of event at that facility, with the relationships that we've built from our department to these partners, we are able to reach out to them and see if they can alter their schedule for a given period of time in order to accommodate other requests that come
in. And they do have some flexibility to do that but also needing to of keep on track for their participants in their events or their games and practices and things. So again, it really comes down to the relationship of being able to develop that and have that be part of how we put all that schedule together. And yes, so another example there on the screen would be Rochester Youth Football. They, participated at Fields Out There and did fundraising for the scoreboards and, other amenities at the football fields. We have so and then there's a third component at those two complexes,
for example, is that they're part of the state property that is where RCTC is also located. So we have an agreement in place at that facility where RCTC has provided the land. The city has enhanced the infrastructure there for the sports facilities and then that local sports group has come alongside to help add additional amenities there And working kind of as a partnership with three entities in each sport area, we're able to provide that programming to our community.
A couple other examples here, and, the first two would be on a couple of our indoor facilities, one being the National Volleyball Center. So there's some key partners there with it being, built on school grounds up at Century High School. So the school has access to that facility during the course of the school day when they're in session. And then it's utilized for, Rochester Youth Volleyball Association, again, offering things from their Tots volleyball program, just those getting into the sport as well as those who would play at a
local level or be on a travel team. Both boys and girls play for Rochester Youth Volleyball. And then we as Parks and Rec also run the adult, volleyball leagues during the week, and then we have open volleyball times and some tournaments on the weekend, being a facility that's, very busy with a wide variety of volleyball and a little bit of basketball on the side even though our facility manager isn't quite as well about the basketball. She's certainly a volleyball person. But, and then this time of year during the summers, we're hosting things like FCA camp happens there for a week,
Mega Kids Sports Camp happens there for a week. So other ways that we can utilize that facility and create more opportunities for the community to come in and use the great facility that we have up there. The center picture there is of the pool at the recreation center. So several partners have all come together at the recreation center. From a operator programmer perspective, one twenty five Live offers a wide variety of adult and senior programming. There's some shared time that's all, kind of set up by the agreement there for,
their membership to be able to utilize the pool. And then in addition to that, we have, the Rochester Swim Club that utilizes a pool. They have a swim team. They swim lessons, the biggest provider of swim lessons in Rochester. And then they also help us host meets where we can have some regional impact by bringing swimmers to Rochester to participate in swim meets. So that's on the kind of the wet water side of that facility. On the other part of the facility is, ice rinks and we have some great partnerships there as well.
Rochester Figure Skating Club, Rochester Youth Hockey, the Grizzlies junior hockey team have all been part of updates we've been able to do to that side of the facility. We're just on the finishing phases right now of redoing the North Rink, which will be great for these organizations like figure skating and youth hockey, but it's also the rink that we utilize for all of our open skate that happens throughout the year where community members can come in and open skate, for a small fee to be able to come in and utilize that.
And that's a very popular activity that happens especially through the winter months. And being able to put the packaging together to finance that project was really made possible by all the partners that we had and that we still have and are able to couple other things I would highlight, Rochester Youth Hockey also hosts free learn to skate and learn hockey, days that they have. So again, a lot of these partners that we have are finding ways, trying to create opportunities for community members to come in and learn a new sport, try a new sport.
And then if it's something that individual really enjoys, can progress through the phases there. But, really trying to offer that programming from the kind of very beginning, getting into it all the way through more advanced levels. The third example on the screen there is the Outdoor Tennis Center at Kutzke Park and, that we were able to just renovate many of the courts there in the last, five to six years and that was done in great part to, Tim Buterak and the others from the tennis community who helped to do that fundraising.
The tennis center being one where, we have opportunity for there's youth lessons that happen all through the day or all through the the daytime, especially during the summers. There's a lot of young people out there participating in that. The reason I put this example up here was similar to, I think, what we're considering for the pickleball courts at the new, sports complex. This one would be, community members have the ability to have a seasonal membership. They can come and utilize the courts. They can also there's a day pass available there.
So anybody could come in and play, for a day and participate in tennis as well as sign up for the more structured programming and lessons and other things that we're able to offer at the Outdoor Tennis Center. So, maybe I'll just pause there just kinda with the existing, facilities and partnerships that we have right now and see if there's any questions on that topic. Thank you, mister Bolt. I'll start. I have some questions, and it's based on, one, I I have a lot of respect for the nonprofit associations, clubs, and groups that are really encouraging youth,
activity in sports. And so I and that benefits our community here in Rochester. But I wanna get a better handle on kind of the range of these agreements. Now it sounds like you're talking about a lot of support in the facilities at on the front end of, building the facilities. Can you talk a little bit more about, like, how many of these are informal agreements? How many of them are contracts? What are some of the terms of these contracts? Are there length of time of the contracts or are they revisited?
What aspects of the contracts as far as terms are there, maintenance agreements, agreements when it comes to recruitment and marketing. And what I'm getting at is one of the, one of the issues that I hear a lot about in our community is there's a great benefit to this model to the city, but one of the downsides is that it doesn't create access to everybody. So what I'm wondering about is do we have any provisions that,
encourage recruitment of of people in underserved communities, programs that have sliding fee schedules. Do we, as a city, encourage those and free service? A lot of questions there, but try to tackle them. I'm channeling council member Palmer this more this afternoon. So Alright. Thank you, council president. So I'll try to to hit most of those. If I miss something, please just feel free to ask again. But, so as far as the structure of the arrangements or the agreements with the partners,
it's a mixture. Some are formalized. Some are more informal. I would say on the formal written agreements, those would be, the majority of our indoor facility partners. There is a formal agreement there. It just kind of helps to make that structure work a little better. And being in a finite single location makes that a little easier by comparison. Like with youth baseball, they're using baseball fields in our small neighborhood parks and kind of all across the system. So that would be an example of an informal agreement we have would be with
Rochester Youth Baseball. As far as the term goes, many of our indoor facilities, those are annual agreements that we put together. So the Grizzlies, the swim club, the 125 Live agreement would is a longer term agreement. That one's not an annual one, but the ones on the kind of more rec center side of that facility are annual agreements. Another indoor facility example would be at Grand Marina with Rochester Youth Hockey making major financial contribution there. They have a long agreement. And perhaps that's a time for me to highlight that
when an organization makes a major financial investment that usually is a time that we formalize an agreement and set it at a term based on what that contribution was, if that makes sense. So we're contemplating an agreement right now to redo the pickleball courts at Cook Park, for example, and that would be an agreement priority time with Rochester Area Pickleball Association. So based on I have so with these agreements, is ongoing maintenance a consideration in those agreements?
It is. Okay. Yes. So when when a sports association is making an upgrade to a facility, that upgrade is the responsibility of that association. So I'll give an example. At the recreation center, Rochester Swimming Incorporated provided the capital for the big screen scoreboard that helps them run their meets and those types of things. That amenity is something that RSI is responsible to maintain over time. So when it needs repair or replacement of parts,
those types of things, they've committed to making that change. Same would be for the timing pads they use in the pool and other things like that. So that upgrade would be that responsibility. Smaller scale version of that would be, with baseball, they prefer clay mounds versus egg line mounds. Clay is a little bit different to maintain, so they help offset the cost of what that clay maintenance on the mound is. That's a kind of niche example, but hopefully, that's helpful, that those upgrades, we do ask the partner to be part of that ongoing maintenance over time,
and and they're willing to do that. When you get to a few other questions about how those partnerships work, I would say they work best in working relationships. I I've I and others in our department have been able to develop good relationships with many of these partner organizations. So, we know and we encourage them to try to make their programming as available as possible. I know several of the youth sports associations. They have scholarships available and ways that they can make it more affordable for those in need to be able to come and participate.
And again, they offer that kind of range of options. So your T ball or House League, baseball or basketball, those types of things are much lower registration fee compared to the child who plays on a travel basketball team and has more expenses there to travel to tournaments and those types of things. But even that, at the travel level, they still offer some scholarship, opportunities, for kids who would be who would try out and make a team like that. They can, help them if they need to. And just with that over the,
you know, that relationship with them and knowing how they operate, you know, kind of operating in in lieu of Parks and Rec offering some of these programs internally, they they do try to make it as available as possible to community members. Council members. Mayor? Yeah. To the point, I think that you've been hearing, Council President Schubert talk about, we do have a lot of contracts with different groups and we have wonderful organizations, and you know, I've been to many of their tournaments, and they do a great job. But as far as having public amenities that are available for non competitive
public use, that's the part that's been frustrating me for the last seven years, is trying to find more time for the community to be able to come in and have open swimming, open gym, open whatever, and that's so narrow and not and at least as far as my experience over the last seven years and then prior to that as a parent is it's not necessarily a set time, it's not regular, it's not something people can count on, it's not very well publicized. And so as we move ahead and talk about these, you know, amenities, how are we making them available to the community who just wants to use them for pleasure and not for competition,
who isn't interested in being on a baseball league or doesn't have the skill set to be, you know, highly competitive. They just wanna have fun, and they wanna use the city owned facilities to do so. So, I guess, I would just say moving ahead, the more thinking you can put into that and and highlighting options that aren't competitive, that are just for public use, that are reliable, you know, uniform weekly, and do some more publicity so folks know they're open because a lot of folks don't realize these are actually city owned facilities that are actually open to their use because we don't market ourselves very well.
Council member Keane. Yeah. Just as far as setting this up for going into the next section of this, you gave a lot of examples of these partnerships, and I I think they are good ways for us to think of this. But, a lot of them are local. A lot of them are, like, embedded in the community. Yeah. And I'm looking at this one differently, and that's one of my my concerns. But I I the analogy I'm coming with is how we manage the Mayo Civic Center and hire another company to do that. And if it's possible, that's how as we go forward, I'm trying to look at it that way as opposed to the way, the swim club would manage or help us manage that asset or the way the
tennis local tennis club. Because I think that's something we really have to struggle with here is how, you know, when you bring in public assets and merging them with private companies, how the public is protected. Yes. And that I think if there aren't other questions, you can maybe lead me right into the next slide here. If you have other questions, I can wait. We have Council Member Palmer. One quick statement is one that you always miss is the, Rochester's Running Club with the track, and they rebuilt the track and they do a yearly maintenance on it. For over fifty years, they've done the all comers track meet.
It's something that that everybody enjoys a lot. And so that's one of those examples that that, people don't realize. But that track was completely rebuilt and and almost paid for by the the track team. Yes. Great example. And I'll just I'll just close off with, the how I directed my, questions is to what the mayor was talking about is, if overall there is a sentiment in a part of our community that that there are parks and recs facilities that aren't as accessible to them and whether it's for
informal activities or formal activities that that, when we go to a proposed sports complex regional sports complex and it doesn't have that community aspect in it in the first phase that that just makes that point even, more difficult from a community standpoint. So I'm looking overall at parks and rec. And is there a way that we can more formalize the activities of the clubs and and,
associations to encourage recruitment marketing and sliding fee schedules and free, service schedules, when when they, work on their, their schedules and their, their recruitment. So with that, you can Thank you. Yeah. And I'll just maybe just a quick response. I'd I would say, you know, as a department, we're always open to figuring out how how to do things better. There's always room for improvement, right? I think we have made some effort on that front. I think in general, our open skate times, one example being,
open volleyball, it's nearly every Friday and Sunday evenings. It's always at the same time so that, you know, hopefully, that can be more of a, known thing and available time that folks can come in. Perhaps the communication hasn't been what it ought to be. So again, ring for improvement. I would say we are attempting at least to make some effort there to make it available. And I would just also to highlight, the partners that we have. Again, if there is a special event or event or something that they come to us and say, can we work this out? What's going on at this neighborhood ball field or something like that?
I'll give you a quick example. So two weeks ago, I had a, a neighborhood group who wanted to get together and play kickball with their neighborhood at one of the, small neighborhood ball fields. On Wednesday nights, it's usually used by Baseball, but we were able to make it work so that that particular team that would have been there Wednesday night excuse me, would have moved and they went and played on a different field that night so that neighborhood could could utilize that field for a kickball game. So, I mean, I think there are some and that's just one small anecdotal, you know,
example, right? But I think there is, an openness for us to try to be as accommodating as we can be while at the same time still trying to honor those great partnerships that we have. And I'll pick up my remote. So moving on to the kind of to the main topic here today. With that background in mind of how the existing facilities run, I think one of the ways that we're imagining this facility to be different is that we won't have as much of that committed priority time to one group or
a small number of groups, but to have this be more operated where it's just more of a level playing field that those weeknight practice times or whatnot can be requested by any community group to come in and participate in that facility, have kind of a baseline of what the fees would be and that would be available for anybody. Again, being on the weekends primarily for that sports tourism, bringing visitors to Rochester, you'll see in a couple of slides here about how that queues up the pro
form a to make it more affordable on those weeknights for the community activity. Many of those tournaments would be run with kind of by in house staff, which helps us again work out the pro form a to have some additional revenue opportunities there within those tournaments, again, in an effort to lower the cost of what it would take on the weeknights for rentals. We'd have other tournaments that we'd be hosting there, which would be rentals or local or state tournaments, perhaps Rochester Youth Baseball or Rochester Youth Softball,
rents the fields for a weekend to run one of their tournaments at the facility. So it'd be a mixture of that for the tournament side. Again, the community groups would have opportunity to rent the facility without a primary, partner that would use up the fields. We'd be able to try to have variety of renters in there. There would be other space around the facility where you could have more unprogrammed or drop in type events happening on. There's green space, the trail access that we've highlighted before in the design as well as playground,
plaza space, thinking of, items like perhaps a neighborhood concert, things like that. I think there'll be spaces where that can happen that's, either perhaps on one of the fields or in one of the other common green spaces around the site. And just a little more background. So this is a slide you've seen before. We've had this in several other presentations about the the sports complex, about where we're at right now and where we have been with how we're envisioning the operations of the facility. So we'd be looking for a private partner to come in and handle the operations
and management and sales of the facility. We've had a planning partner with us through since the middle of last year, helping us as we have worked through the design and plans and developing the pro form a, making sure that the budget can work with what the amenities would be. But at the same time, we would certainly still have the public collaboration there. The city would be very engaged on the capital investment over time, would be overseeing the agreements,
making sure we were hitting indicators, having the open lines of communication and transparency when it came to reporting. And a little more, I guess, just kind of continuing to set the stage here of where we're at now and what the near future would be for our milestones on the schedule. So we are continuing to refine through the design process, checking that against the cost estimates, making sure we're staying on track there. We would like to come back, assuming we're still continuing on the kind of trajectory we've been on for the last
several months, with operating agreement and the final design, asking for bid authorization coming up here in likely October and then having the public bid time frame and then come back for bid approvals in November. So that would be a few things, on our milestone list here for the next couple of months. And with that, perhaps I'll turn it over to Chad and John to introduce themselves. Everyone. Council president, mayor, council members, esteemed public here. So my name is Chad Faulkner.
I'm the founder and CEO of Sports Academy. This is John Spatz, president, also Bennett at day one, founder of Sports Academy as well. It's a it's a real pleasure and an honor to be here today. It's been a real pleasure to work with the talented people within your city and the folks that they've employed to bring this project to life. Just quickly on Sports Academy, I heard a couple of great things this morning that are near and dear to my heart of why we even started Sports Academy about ten years ago in the community where my wife and I raised our children. And it was really I had the fortunate experience of playing Division I football.
So and a really terrible team, by the way. But that's a whole other point. But the point being is that I experienced a lot of interesting coaches in a in a in a spectacular environment to grow as a young person. What I found in that environment, though, when I got back to my community is that I was kind of the kid that was always kind of looking up at some of the other kids getting some of the opportunities. And so as we talk about access and community access and access to to certain folks, it's near and dear to my heart. My mother my mother was, our family was divorced. Mom mom was raising my sister and I.
And if it wasn't for some coaches and some other people looking out for me in the community, I'm not sure where I would end up, and I'd like we wouldn't be here today in front of you. So with that being said, as we started Sports Academy in, about ten years ago, we started with the as a private company, but also with the five zero one c three. Because in sports, as I learned in locker rooms, there's all of life that sits in a locker room full of a 100 young people. And so if you can find your way to navigate through those environments, it's really a rich environment to grow. So as we brought that into a community, which on the outside would maybe look like it's a very prosperous community,
not so different from this community here, we also found our community that we had 19 of the schools attending public environments. So, we had that we had that conflict within our own environment as well. So so, with all that, we'll fast forward through the rest of the Sports Academy story here. But I would say that we're operating in several facilities around the country. We've got this bootstrapped ourselves at times as we've grown our company over the last ten years. We came up with a very high quality product with the mission to democratize the access to development through sports. And in doing so, we attracted some interesting people around our journey where we journeyed through a couple of
years ourselves alone. And then we met an interesting guy named Kobe Bryant, as some people may have heard of, changed our name, lost him in a terrible accident, went back to Sports Academy like everybody did during COVID, found a way to survive and to grow our business from there. And the way that we did it is really based on how we started the business from day one. It's the values that I talked about, the values that were instilled in me, and the values that we had demonstrated within our community of being successful and being a good member and a solid member of our community that could not only provide a team for everybody for the entry points, but also could provide in our community for those outstanding athletes and the families
sporting community in the areas that we operate by operating and providing programming on sliding scales. Subsidized programming. Some programming is not subsidized. Some experiences are not subsidized. Some experiences are not subsidized. Some of these big tournaments when Adidas is in taking over our environment last week is not a subsidized event. But guess what? It helps subsidize the other events that we had and the other programming that we had. So it's a very dynamic community. Sports is very dynamic with what we're gonna work with. It's gonna be very dynamic in your community. Some people are gonna get frustrated. A lot of people are gonna be really happy when they look back and understand
that the values, what you guys have created within your community, as we've been directed to manage and come up with solutions that can work for a broad range of constituents here, that's the mission that we're on. That's the mission we're working with every day. We're really proud to work with your leadership in doing so. Now, my good partner here, John Spots, is going to take us through some numbers and a few other things coming through the budget. He's going to employ his CPA background and experience here for all of us. So, I think between both of us, we're happy to answer any questions you may have. Thank you. Mr. Spots? Okay. Thank you,
Chad and council president, council mayor, council members, honored to be here. Just talking through how we developed the pro form a. Typically, in the early stages of the pro form a, it's built on general industry norms of how things would operate. We've gone a step further on this and there's a facility over in Franklin, Wisconsin who would do who does many of the same things that we would see this facility doing, operating sports or baseball and softball tournaments with a sanctioned partner and then using that
income and revenue off of those big tournaments to subsidize the rest of their operations. And the great thing about a place like Franklin, it's a little ways outside of Milwaukee, very similar climate to here, so similar seasons of when it would stop and end, very similar demographics. If you look at the census numbers, Minnesota and even the Rochester area, the demographics in terms of income and so forth are about 10% higher, but very similar. So you can have some confidence that the same type of programming that could work
in those environments would also work here. So the tournaments that we would hold on weekends would be, like I said, sanctioned tournaments. There are a few of these big operators in the country. We operate we own and operate our own baseball facility right outside Memphis, Tennessee. So we're responsible for top to bottom line of that. We also have an indoor facility in Thousand Oaks. These are our two biggest flagship facilities, an indoor facility that's primarily basketball and volleyball.
So that's another reason when we were brought in to look at outdoor versus indoor, all the sports that we were talking about, we personally operated those sports and understand the mechanisms to players in the game and so forth to know how to gauge these pro formas and look at the general market and what could work in those markets. So in addition to those sanctioned tournaments, we've also allocated space on weekends for some of the big existing tournaments that are
in town. And these are like the Minnesota Youth, the MYAS tournaments and so forth. So in June, we have an weekend with a sanctioned tournament operated by one of the big sanctioning bodies through us, through the city and Sports Academy managing the staff here. So same thing in July, there are three weekends where in Rochester that there are big regional tournaments that are
at the community level. And we've allocated space in the field for those tournaments on those weekends too. It wouldn't be totally here and wouldn't be totally in the RSRC, but that there would be exposure there. And in some cases, the sanctioned tournaments would go out and rent high school fields and save that space for some of those community and youth tournaments that have always been in the community here at least the last several years that I can see evidence of.
So as you look through the pro form a that I had sent, that was provided in the packets, in there, there were on the baseball page, there were rental tournaments included in there. Those rental tournaments, there were four of them, those are actually the tournaments I just described. So we're just renting to the local community, not to some outside group that's there. Most of these tournaments are three day tournaments. Some are four day tournaments, so Friday, Saturday, Sunday, sometimes also including a Thursday.
Some are called five day tournaments. They do that, and then they just have the semifinals and the finals on a Monday during the day. A few more notes on the pro formas. The weekday programming is entirely or yeah. On weeknights, that programming is entirely community programming, renting the fields at in the pro form a, we have $20 per hour, which is similar to the same as what existing fields are renting rented for, which might not be lighted,
might not be artificial surface. Artificial service basically gives you dependability of the service to be available to play more frequently, right, sooner in the season. And also recovering from rain or rainstorm in the morning, you can still go out and play during the day. So those are all, that's community, and we'll work with the city on coming up with city management on the best way to allocate that field time, how that's all gonna go into work. So, that's the weekday use.
And even on weekends, our projection on how much of this would be people coming in and traveling here from greater than 30 miles and how much would be local, we have that as about 35% would be locally local teams that would be within 30 miles and especially hopefully a lot here from the Rochester area and then the other 65% coming and traveling in for the tournaments. And it's really important in this to have a really good local base of teams
because what do you want when you go and play in a tournament? You want to play other competitive teams, maybe some teams you haven't seen before. You want to have like a good mix of teams in there. So when the local community has a good set of teams, then that helps to draw other teams. It just spreads out layer by layer out from there. So any facility, even when it's our own private facilities, it's all community based. It's your business is going to come almost all of it from the people that
are there. You know, it's on weeknights, it's people that can get to the facility in ten to twenty, twenty five minutes. Right? If you're going to have to travel much further than that on a school night, not going to usually do it. So, we talked about affordable rates for weekday use. And then in the pro form a, we haven't included anything yet because it's it takes more development, but we haven't put in any revenue for weekday summer use. So the only weekday usage we've put into the pro form a are four rental
hours per night, Monday through Thursday. So even, let's say, that's five to 9PM, there's a little bit of time before that when maybe you could charge and rent it out or provide free programming. Time after, say, 9PM, adult leagues and so forth, it could be playing here. And none of that's in the pro form a. That's potential upside during the summer when the kids are out of school. Again, we don't have anything in the pro form a there from a revenue standpoint on
bringing in camps or any other activities that would be there. So again, that's upside. The other thing that's not in the pro form a because it's more difficult to to gauge without further discussions between an operator, which could potentially be us, and the local softball and fast pitch softball communities. There's nothing in here currently. We do anticipate those parties using the facility. It's just it would take time to figure out with them,
to talk with them and figure out, okay, you have the softball facilities already there, how much bigger could the want to be having those and so forth. And also the month of August, there's nothing in there at all in the pro form a for the month of August. So again, we are planning on having programming there. We don't know what it is yet. We don't want to claim it, but we don't want to programming there. We don't know what it is yet. We don't want to claim it on a pro form a. So again, potential upside to that pro form a without the it would only be programming expense like when you run something, you have to have a person there that's the coach or so forth,
not any additional administrative burden in order to run those extra activities that we're talking about that could contribute revenue or contribute to community usage. So very important on that. Okay. The pickleball courts, we've I think we've put in some fairly conservative numbers, some very conservative numbers. We see this is $5 a player per person and nowhere close to capacity of what those courts can produce.
So that's in the numbers and that's how we see that. So you consider it a daily fee. Especially in the beginning, we'll have blocks that you would reserve the courts and we would do that with local community groups. And then on weekends or on weekdays, there would be opportunity for leagues and tournaments and events. So, that's again working with the local pickleball community on how that would work. On the rectangular fields, we have we haven't put in any programming that the operator
would produce. That would be rental on practices, leagues, and tournaments depending on weekday or weekend at rates that are the same as other city facility rates. So that's what's in the performer for those. And our concessions, again, for we've only based that on the tournament business and for that $10 to $10 per visitor for tournaments, we find that to be a pretty reliable number for what a tournament facility can produce on concessions for revenue.
And, so that's there. Going to the the five year projections, you'll notice up in the top row that we have the years listed across there, and under year three, we put down stabilized. So that's kind of the big base year where we look at a facility like Franklin that has now been operated for three years by a sanctioning partner. And it was below even the level of detail that was included in your packets, there's a level of detail below that where I went
through in each weekend of the year, I've programmed it out, put in the exact entrance rate, how many visitors, how many coaches, how many players and extremely granular level of detail to get to these numbers. One important thing to think about here is that the tournament business, the weekend tournament business produces 75% to 85% of the income,
the net profit for the facility. So it's very important in terms of the operations of the facility that limited amount of usage can then pay for and subsidize the rest of the programming that's going to happen here. And then that doesn't even deal with the other benefits to the city in terms of employment and hotel usage and so forth that's that's involved here. So that that's the benefit of bringing in those extra teams from outside the community.
So, year three stabilized, like I said, is really based on kind of where the comparison facility is operating right now, the number of teams they're getting and the type of fees they're charging the teams and at the gate. And then year two and year one, we're back down looking at some trended numbers from other facilities as well as theirs as to how facilities will trend over from when they start up until when they get there. We call year three stabilized because then after that, you get into more of normal 10% growth year on year after that for the
core businesses. So in this case, on this pro form a, and I'm just going to go to the next slide here. Year one on the slide that is our base case slide, year one, that was 67% of facility or stability is what year one was to build into that. I wanted to get some sensitivity to say what if the facility starts out a little bit slower than what we've seen in other facilities. It could be any variety of factors,
right, that could cause that to happen. So I trended it two different ways. One, if we were to achieve 50% of that number in year one and then again at 25%. And you can see that on year one of the facility and the pro form a, the operating surplus, EBITDA, earnings basically before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization, some of my CPA talk. So EBITDA, dollars 628,000, dollars 50% stability. We're still making money at
$206,000 And then if we go all the way down to 25%, you can see there's $330,000 that would need to be helped out with there. And so you can probably guess based on that trending that it's right around between 3540% where it would be breakeven of that stability number. Can I ask you a question about the Franklin, Wisconsin site? You said, are they at year three now?
Is Yeah. Did you say so what, what was their, year one stability and year two stability? Similar to that '67, like, that build up of '67. They were '67? Yeah. Okay. Like, right around there. And, yeah. So Okay. Right in that range. So council member Doering. And Franklin is the most comparable to Rochester being a quarter of the size of our community? So the population of Franklin is 36,000 residents and Rochester is a 120,000 residents? Yeah. Well,
the the, there are several there are differences between the two situations. Like, for example, we're going to have eight full size baseball fields. They have, four full size baseball fields, two youth fields. So that's their they really only six fields of which two are youth, and youth, you could charge less on these tournament weekends. And full size fields. And then they also have a minor league baseball stadium on premises there. And that minor league baseball stadium, sometimes that's available. They'll be able to use that for a few tournament games here and there.
There. So we're not looking directly at an apples to apples comparison. We're looking at a similar comparison, but not a direct comparison. Yeah. And, I mean, even Milwaukee is a million and three people. Sure. We're pretty close to Twin Cities where Metro population is 3,100,000. So, you know, there are definitely some differences in both of those. Sure. And can I ask an operator question for Franklin? So, say, year three in Franklin, as an operator agreement,
if you hadn't reached where you had said we were going to reach this level of occupancy and reach this level of revenue, is there anything in the contract that you have with the community of Franklin as the outside operator saying we are going to operate this as the, you know, as the the organization bringing these sanctioned tournaments and we have fallen short of our projections, and we have promised your community that they is going to generate this much revenue, and we've messed this up.
We are now on the hook now to then provide this revenue back to your community in a way? Do you is there any sort of guarantee? So, number one, we don't operate the Franklin facility. Okay. So just to make that clear, that's I just use that as because I can go online, I can see how many teams register, I can see all the different factors that go into calculating the pro form a. So we don't operate that facility. It's privately owned. So, but to answer the question more broadly,
this is a city owned facility. And so, the way that the management fees have been calculated in here are not based on taking a high level of risk on the operator part and, you know, high risk, high reward, then there would be a much greater maybe remittance back to an operator if they were taking the risk on the other end too. So, you know, those are some of the trade offs that would occur in in those instances.
This is a management are gonna be worked on. It's a collaborative process with city management by which this will be done. As providing our expertise, we'll develop those budgets. We'll work with the city to get them approved. We will not spend above those budgets, unless the city grants us an exception, to those budgets. So those safeguards are built in to make sure that an operator isn't us or whoever operator, what's built into this kind of fee is that there's not that type of where
they can just go and spend whatever they want on this. And the key staff will be chosen in conjunction with city management. They'll have whatever level of say they want over that, and then we'll work with the management on the ground management to to just be working with them on their relationships, on coaching them through the P and Ls and comparing them to what we have in other facilities and so forth to come up with, the best answer for the city. Mayor Norton.
Two two things, I think. The first is you talked about in your pro form a, pro form a, looking at bringing in rentals weekdays, and some other times from, I guess, folks that are already using our current facilities. So I'm wondering, if you worked with either the parks department or RCTC or other people who actually now currently benefit from those rentals on their own property. I think RCTC has seven core seven, ball diamonds and Watson has some, to to make sure we're not going to be building something,
and then setting our expectations by hurting other entities in town. So I wonder if you've had those discussions. And the other group, I wondered if you'd had discussions with the Honkers, and how that may or may not have anything to do with with what we're doing here, but we do have a, you know, the Northwoods League folks. And then my other question, just I'll throw it out here, is the the picture on page nine that you had up here, it has a large stadium looking seating. And when I asked this question just two weeks ago or a week ago, I don't know when it was, when we talked about this,
there was only like three levels of silver little seating in the pictures. And so I'm a little concerned that we're about what we're talking about here. Are we talking about a large drawing a large group of people in here having seating for them, having them there to use the vending machines? Or are we talking about a few rows for a couple dozen people and we need to be careful about the pictures that we're showing. So just was asking just those two issues. Yes. This facility here is our Tennessee facility that we operate. We bought it a year and a half ago and it was a USA baseball
facility. This was the main USA the big USA baseball governing body. Facility that we operate and have operated. So it's not representative of the seating that we would have here. This is seating kind of between the dugouts around home plate, you know, going around where you really want to be in the action there. That's the the key seating and some, space for lawn chairs and so forth to go in because a lot of people like bringing their own chairs.
They have a nicer back to them and like to sit up higher like me with my long legs and, you know, get my hip mobility in. But, so, it would be more, like that. Good question. And then could you address the other Watson field, RCTC, all of our other fields in town and how they're gonna be impacted by this? Yeah. So we spoke to on for both the indoor side and the outdoor side, every sports body that, Rochester Sports Federated, Ed and his team,
Ed Ed Ruska and his team, as well as Rochester Sports, experienced Rochester, everybody that somebody could think of and determine demand. And what we found is that on the baseball side, especially at Rochester Youth Baseball Association, they're often sharing fields between multiple teams because there aren't enough facilities to accommodate everyone in those spaces. So, there is a need for extra practice field space within the community and that combined
with, what I believe the effect will be for teams like the Yard Dogs as they get going, and now the families can stay closer to home. It's not such an in you always have that. I have two daughters that are now in college who's playing college sports, and I've lived through the whole cycle. And I know, from working within communities that it's the big choice. Like, oh, do I have the time to go and try well, when you can do more of your tournaments at home, it's a lot easier to manage, you know, divide and conquer, all that those type of situations that happen.
So we, we definitely think that will help these other groups to grow that would be tournament users within here with that exposure. So, we're pretty confident that it won't have material impact on those other facilities. Member Miller. It's me. Since you mentioned the the Wisconsin, Milwaukee area facility being privately owned and privately operated, not by your company, are there other peers that you found in our region for public facilities that are run this way? I mean, how should we be thinking about that? Because it doesn't quite feel like a comparison,
for for this model. Most other community facilities are very similar to very similar to our facility. When I was looking at the number they just opened in July, when I was looking at their tournament numbers for the first couple of, first few weeks of operation, I was like, okay. They drew that's how much they drew. That looks good for us. You know? So that again kind of reinforced some of my comfort there. Outside of Champaign, Illinois, the community built a big facility and not doing as well.
They do have a sanctioning body in there doing that. It is, run by a private operator, but, they're they're pretty far out of town. There's no hotels around. And it's in Chamblee, you know, far away from the major airports and so forth much further than we are here. So, you know, there are some structural advantages that Rochester has that for a sports tourism like a a tournament facility like this that bode really well. The hotels in town being this close to the facility and generally because of the nature of
weekday business for Mayo health care system, it's an excellent, you know, off every week. The weekends bring in baseball tournaments in season and weekdays, hotels doing well on with with health care. Great. And so for the the facilities in our region that are currently drawing tournaments, or, I guess, feel free to correct me. Are are we imagining generating new tournaments? Attracting tournaments that already exist? We will no. We will be operating new tournaments that we're growing that will,
right now, like, a a month ago, talked to, Beau from the Yard Dogs. That morning, on a Wednesday morning, he was driving down to Kansas City with, his other coach and a bunch of kids in the back seat, you know, going to Kansas City. He's like, oh, I can't wait till I don't have to do this drive and I can have this in my backyard. So, it's other regional tournaments is we will attract teams from there to these tournaments, and then it it'll grow that base from there as well as from you know,
teams like to travel out of their area during the summer in order like, I'm sure Beau will still wanna get out of one or two times a year out of, with some of his teams, out of Rochester and go and hit some different competition somewhere else. But I guess that's my question then. How durable are these tournaments anchored to Kansas City or other like, why would they come here and why wouldn't the teams that are finding competitive advantage to play in these other markets continue to go, like, I guess, I'm I'm not totally understanding how we generate this whole model and and don't have
to compete, right, or, like, convince somebody that our facility is is different, better, you shouldn't travel to Kansas City this weekend. You should do yours here. I I think, in the Twin Cities, there aren't a lot of big tournaments with the scouting services that we'll have at this facility. These travel teams, they want to play in front of college coaches, in front of pro scouts. Part of the staffing that we'll have here is a scout that will be on staff that's riding that up,
attracting those coaches, advocating for the players that are there. So it's it's providing coaches and teams that want to get exposure to different sets of coaches. Maybe you're in a tournament over in Indiana, and that's drawn a lot of coaches from that region. And then you're coming up to this region to get in front of a lot of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa coaches that will get attracted to this tournament. Okay. I guess different set of questions.
What can you tell us about the trends in the youth baseball industry broadly? Where have they been? Where are they going? It's and certainly, baseball itself has been growing in the past. It was pretty patchy like about fifteen years ago on the pro baseball level, but baseball, again, is has been growing pretty nicely. And, the coverage of college baseball and college softball on TV has grown exponentially and become a real spectator sport on ESPN and those type of platforms, the networks. The it's considered one of the revenue sports in college because it has that network
coverage, and they get network fees in there. So it's football, basketball, men's basketball, women's basketball, baseball, and and women's softball, which are the five big considered the five big revenue sports and and college sports now. So that helps to attract more and more kids that want to get a piece of that action. And, it's both for, kids that want to go to pro level or go and make NIL money in college, but also just to get
given colleges. Okay. I got and so this is the this would be the first facility that you would be operating anywhere in the Midwest then? Yes. But what could you tell us about the unique risks of, like, how should we be thinking about those? And I would I'll name some. Climate. There's severe storms in the forecast for today, you know, frequent air quality, alerts, reasons that people can't play outside. That'll be a future study session topic today, how we're monitoring that heat. You know, it's been really hot this weekend. I I can't imagine you know, I I I grew up in Louisiana, and I I remember frequent stories of severe health issues of youth practicing outside when
it's too hot. I know you operate facilities in in Texas, and it looks like both your facilities are indoor facilities. I'm just curious about the unique risks of moving forward in the operating model that's focused on outdoor recreation as we look at other trends. And then I'll ask too about the economy and risk is how resilient is youth travel baseball to economic variations? Okay. So I'll address some of the climate issues first. As hot as it is here, our Memphis facility, I was down there
a week ago, I guess it was now. And there was a team from Canada down, a couple of teams from Canada that were down there, and I don't think they'll be going back down there. They felt like they were melting. And so this would be like an attractive alternative. So I think that the, the center for baseball kinda wasn't in that southern region and the climate will, I believe, will hurt those regions where then it's like unbearably hot.
And it's also been very rainy down there this season. We've had numerous rainouts of of our facility, whereas, up here, you know, it's by comparison, it's looking better. So guarantees, there, you know, that that's all I can say is that there are places, like, that are going to continue. If it's everybody, it's getting hot. There's places where maybe people are traveling before that they'll travel less there before and that could actually benefit us more than it's hurting us.
And then the, city Air quality. Pardon? Air quality. Wildfire smoke that makes it go down. There is, you know, just natural, climatic situations happening, you know. Sure. So the budget's not Can you can you come to the microphone, please? Yes. I'm sorry. Thanks. I was just gonna help, John, just a little bit here. So, yeah, I I would say in those situations, there's gonna be air quality, there's gonna be heat issues, there's gonna be all these different issues. That's why you never maximize in a pro form a or financial forecast that you've got this thing filled up 20 fourseven. You just never show it full.
So, it's gonna have a natural capacity, which really is a capacity because we have these issues in life that we all deal with. So, I think the weather those issues are there. You know, one of the other important questions that you're asking, again, around the financial viability and what's the long term perspective here, you know, within our bio here, which you guys have within the packet here, it references our partner with our partnership with Major League Baseball Players Association with the union. That's itself to better their game of baseball, youth baseball, and within that is also fast pitch,
so grow the girls' game as well. So there is, along with the trends, and the macro trends that John, had mentioned, we're also very familiar and very intimate with the plans of the union and where they're taking and where they wanna take their sport and their considerable resources that they're putting behind that and with the the commitment that they have there through their leadership. And so, that's something that when you think about this model of high school sports and the financial capabilities there and a lot of companies that are out there swimming around in that, that means there's big business in there,
and there is. There's also coming in players like the union that doesn't like that. And they want to see a more fair playing ground. They want to see their sport taken care of in a little bit different way. They wanna see more developmental opportunities within their sport. So when you start having that kind of input coming in versus the virtuous cycle, let's take another dollar for a family, now you're starting to start moving the game a little differently. And so that's bringing another stabilizing factor for the long term perspective of the game, which you can play that all the way through to creating fans from the early
experiences and kind of that cycle as it grows through. That's what those folks that's the initiatives that they're running there as well. That kind of bolster to some of the questions you're asking. Okay. And so I I guess, you know, coming into this, I'd understood this to be more of a regional youth traveling baseball, but I hear you talking about teams from Canada, the Major League Baseball. I mean, what are we talking about here? Are we attracting national, international tournaments? Or what is the even like It's gonna be regional, but, again, it's it's we live in a big country, and it's a big industry. Okay. So having leverage within the industry because these larger travel sanctioning organizations Remember,
all of them have a national championship. Okay. All of them have a regional championship. All of them have a weekend whatever the day of the weekend's championship or whatever it is. And then, there's qualifying events that you don't play on this one, you can't get to that one. Hey. You gotta come play over here or you're never gonna make it to that one. So there's a lot of that stuff. So it's a much larger catchment area then? Absolutely. And so Okay. Calling it a regional tournament where we're gonna fill up eight fields capacity in the community with some high quality playing. These kids may not all be D1. Nobody ever is on the baseball team. I guess, go down to Florida a little bit maybe,
a little bit of California, but that's not even really true. So, you're going to have a lot of kids that are going to have opportunities to find the team that's right for them. And that's really what will happen in the regional tournament environment when you're bringing in sanctioning bodies. But just because you have a sanctioning group coming in to help, doesn't mean it's the same. Because they might not give you that best tournament, they may put that one over there. So, there's still a negotiation and leverage that has to be brought to the table here that's beyond your community and that's where we can be helpful and that's what we're bringing to the table. Okay. And last question,
I'm sorry for taking so many. There was a question about shared risk, and in one of the building stability, sensitivity analyses, there's a shown loss, and that would be absorbed by the city tax levy. And I see you talking about potential upsides. Right? Like, what what risk are are you sharing in in this pro form a as designed today? Yeah. I I I think the the first one is that we actually really love Can you step just a little closer? I'd say I'd say yes. I'd say the it's my quiet voice. Yeah. I'd say the the first thing is is that we really love what we do.
If we do a bad job, we don't get to do it anymore. A bad day in my family. So that'd be first. So we have there's reputational risk for our organization and the and the great people that work within our company. So that's the that's first and foremost. As a leader in the industry, we don't plan to lose. We don't plan to lose with you guys, and we haven't been losing for ten years. So we're gonna keep up our good streak of doing things the right way with the values and delivering, as we say. So as the rest of the, you know, the structure of the operating agreement comes together, then I think all these things are gonna be discussed and to understand the right
balance of performance. Right? Because we're talking about performance and delivering here. Right? Sure. And so we we understand that. Okay. And so and and we're looking forward to getting into those conversations and and further working through that. And I appreciate you coming here today. Honestly, you know, to date, we've been mostly looking at schematics, designs, and I don't know anything about your company until pre predating really this packet. I just know that what we're proposing here is a $65,000,000 publicly owned amenity that, you know, your reputational risk, right, is your own.
But at the end of the day, if this doesn't work out, you've got some reputational harm, we've got a $65,000,000 facility. Yes, sir. Okay. Council member Wall. Thank you. I think most of mister Spot's comments dealt with youth baseball and how it is ascending. Girls' youth softball is just exploding. We attend many of those tournaments, and it's not infrequent that, we see tournament, players from Illinois and Nebraska and Colorado. Even though they're regional tournaments, they're coming from a great distance to play. This past, Thursday, my wife and I were in the Twin Cities for an arts event as opposed
to a baseball game, and we decided that we would stay overnight, at a hotel in Bloomington. And, the place was full of girls' softball teams that were there for the monster tournament. And, I don't know how many teams Highland, Illinois brought, but I'm sure I saw a 100 girls, with that same uniform on. One time we got in an elevator, and I saw a a familiar uniform. And, I asked, who she was, and she gave me her name. Turns out she's played hockey with my, granddaughter who also plays,
youth softball. I mean, so I the the place was just full and vibrant, with these softball teams, this very big hotel, in Bloomington. My question is and I don't think that, either of you dealt with that particular line in the presentation, that an approved operator, should it be this fall, would likely be working already on tournaments for 2027 to ensure that the first, year is a good year, that you're not gonna wait until December '26 and say, well,
golly. We we should do something. Yes? Yes. So, in talking with city management, our goal is to get an operating agreement in place by October, and that will give us then ample time, like, enough time to, begin working with sanctioning bodies and so forth to put together the plans for April 2027, so we open, hit the ground running. So yes, it's definitely time to get moving on that.
And when we talk about, will there be a dearth of teams, how many traveling teams does Rochester have, different levels of 10, all those I mean, even if we held a fourteen u tournament, that only takes one small subset of teams out of the region where all the other teams are going someplace else. Do you find that? Yes. We're leveraging our base to attract teams from the Twin Cities,
from Western Wisconsin, from Northern Part Of Iowa, the whole region here is that's the first order of business is to work through those networks. The staffing that will be hired here is, for the most part, going to be local staffing with local connection, local networks. That would be the first call of order is to, have that type of staffing involved here. This is a community project, and that that's, you know, the people will be living in this community. Thank you.
Council Member Keane? Yeah. Thanks. When when I come to this again and we come with the idea we have been seeing the schematics, we've been trying to see this, and then this question is, is this realistic or not? But before I start getting into that, I try to think of what does the city really want to get out of this? And then what does sports academy want to get out of it? And how do you do that sort of contracting? And from my perspective, the city comes to you with this asset. And what we want out of it is we want it to contribute to our local economy. We wanted to open up additional fields and opportunities for our residents, and we wanted to stay off our tax rolls.
Okay? So that's kind of what we want coming here. From my perspective, you guys come here with this industry expertise, with this reputation for trying to being good asset managers. But, you also come here with the idea that you you wanna make money at this. And so that's my basis of how we came together. What am I missing, or do you think I have the right perspective on what's happening here? I think you have the right perspective for sure. And, you know, the proposal is to have a base fee,
which, you know, at at that base fee, we're basically, like, you know, maybe not even covering cost, but it's sustainable and we're we're here. We wanna do it. And then a percent of revenue once that base fee gets above that So that's that aligns our incentives. And And this is what I wanted to get into. So just so I understand, we're we're reviewing your pro form a. This is numbers you're bringing to us. In my view, you're trying to give us a sense of we understand what's happening here, and and that should be helpful for us. But at the end of the day,
who is taking the profit and loss risk on that operational model? It's a city owned facility, and, almost and if there is a loss, then all the loss is being taken by the city because it's a city asset, city owned property. Then then I need to understand where how you make money. If the if the losses come to us, why wouldn't the profits come to us? They do. Like, the last four years taking a management fee, not you're not you're you're you're managing an asset for us as opposed to taking
the risk. Yeah. So on on the pro form a management fee and incentives, that's what's in on that line of it. You can see oops. You can see that when it if it gets down to 25% of facility, that management fee dramatically drops. Yep. You know? And then it gets down to a base fee for us in terms of, like, we're we're gonna have to have several areas of our staff helping out here,
HR side, financial side, ourselves, and me is especially spending a lot of time on on the project, and love doing it. So, yeah, I've loved my time here in the city and love the people Administrator Zones, did you wanna weigh in on this? Yeah. I think you've touched on something that's important, and we did skip a slide because it was a little bit of an an odd space within the presentation. But part of what we the challenge that we face is that we've continued to move forward with this, and we have operators at risk here who have helped us to design a facility
that can be competitive in the way it there is competition in this field. You can't just say, come here and have your tournament. There's a lot of work that will have to go into making sure that this pro form a works. And I think what's critical here is if we continue to move forward, which is what we have continued to to march down in this direction, that we would finalize the negotiations and be able to talk through. Are there unique things that the city would like to see within that, in that operating contract? And I'll tell you that that's a very low fee compared to what you raised
as a comparison, across the street, at the Civic Center. And so it's a little bit of a reverse model where we're getting all of instead of, like, the Civic Center, we get 5% of gross sales over a certain amount. In this scenario, the basic concept, which has not been negotiated, is that all of the revenue over expense is staying with this facility for reinvestment in the facility. So if they make only 50% of what they projected, which I don't know why someone would project that and enter into an agreement where they only receive 200 and something thousand dollars a year and fail when they have
other facilities that they own and operate. So their reputation of the facility they own and operate would also be significantly at risk, which is millions of dollars, I would imagine. And so all of those things come together, and we say, are there unique things in here that we would like to see happen? So I think it was a pretty high revenue, one that doesn't even show up in the five year pro form a before they start getting the incentive, like, any significant amount of incentive that changes your bottom line as a as a nonprofit company. And and as they've pointed out, they wanna have conversations.
This is the chicken and the egg. In order to fully build this out and understand all of the other uses that come because you're able to bring the tournament revenue, they need some agency here to be able to continue to talk to the community. They haven't rushed out and tried to, like, sell the community on something because they don't wanna do that ahead of the city council saying, yes. We think this could be a good partnership. Let's move forward and talk to all of the different potential users, softball, as was mentioned here today, the rectangular fields, other potential programming that could happen at the facility that isn't has never been brought
up to date because we've been talking about how could we make something work that is going to be built to a standard where you can be competitive to bring that in, bring the 75 to 85% of revenue so you can build out all of the community programming. That's what we've been talking about, and so I'm grateful that we've been able to get to this point to have the conversation. But part of why they can't answer all of the questions is because they have respectfully not gone to the community and had that secondary conversation beyond some of the first one because, yes, we have an exclusive negotiating right with them, but we haven't gotten,
like, the general nod to keep moving forward so we can bring you a final document. Well, thank you for that. It's good good clarification. One thing that I can get concerned with is this too with this idea of an operator and then, like, an ownership somewhere else, and the city has many examples of that, is how do we maintain how do we ensure that the asset is maintained to keep its value? Is that is there incentives for that? Or is it just if we're making enough, we have assets, we have reinvestment, but if we're not, it starts degrading? I don't know, Ben, if that's a better question for you. Yes. Thank you for that question.
So that's part of kind of that continuum of private, public and where we're going to land with operations is that the city would be actively involved with that capital improvement and management of the asset over time. So, you know, we wouldn't just be asking to have an agreement, approved and then, you know, we just kinda walk away from it. We would still be engaged with our, facility team and parks team to make sure we're keeping track of, the facility and that things are operating well, both from the capital and and infrastructure side,
but as well as the programming and access side and all those other things that we would be, that we'd be wanna be very engaged in. Thank you. I I have two other fairly technical little small questions. But I saw something in the pro form a talking about housing income and $5 per room. Is that something that you're that is generally done? There's a or is there, like, logistics and mechanics in place for tournament, hotel rooms would provide this $5 per room back to and it would end up
with Sports Academy. How how does that work? Sure. I can answer that one too just from my twelve years of working with Rochester Sports. So that is a typical, arrangement that's made for kind of that Lots. Lots. Whole environment as you, you know, go and get some preferred hotels. And as part of that, they're they're willing to give you a little bit of rebate to help with the tournament budget Okay. Overall. So that's all to be negotiated, but that's a pretty standard And and it leads to the other question that'd be more for the city. Yep. What role does the,
does the hospitality tax play in this? Or is it a possible source of, payments for this? Or is it, totally separate from what we're talking about today? I would maybe defer to someone else on that one. I mean, I can take a stab at it. Mister Parrish, are you gonna tackle it? If if it's not understood yet, that's okay. But I I just wanna understand it. Yeah. Your honor, I I think you have the opportunity here to evaluate your current relationship with Rochester Sports. I know we are in that conversation now in terms of the renewal agreement there.
I mean, I think that's part of the ecosystem, and I think it's part of this assessment and the negotiation of the agreement. We wanna understand roles and responsibilities, for who's doing what to bring tournaments to the community. And obviously, Rochester Sports covers a wide range of tournaments and, you know, part of that ecosystem. But I think, you know, certainly, we could consider, our allocation there and how it works into this agreement facility as well too. Yeah. I'm just thinking of it as a funding source for these sort of agreements. So I'll I'll just float that. I I think we're way too early to be talking about that level of detail.
But, no. I appreciate you guys being here today trying to add some light to this. We have our own debates within our city about are we building the right asset and that. But that's a different debate that we need to have. It's when it comes down to the if we build this, how are we gonna manage it? It's an important thing to get straightened out. Thank you. Council member Doreen. Yeah. I I as one of the, council members who really requested financial information as we decide if we're going forward with this project or not, I really thank you for your hard work to produce this information in a couple
weeks to get into our hands. So thank you for being here. I do have some questions, and I think they're city questions more than questions for you. So what happens if we just say we're pausing on this and we're not ready to what are the ramifications of just saying we just need to take a break? You've spent about $6,200,000 moving in this direction, and you've purchased land. And if you take a break, you probably you lose one year of construction, and you increase at least three you lose at least $3,000,000
of value. So the, facility, schematic for outdoor facility that you looked at is prob it's I will just say, I would almost guarantee you that you don't get to build that. You get to build some different version of that, which is less. Some different version of an outdoor facility if we decide to build an outdoor facility at all? And what we looked at for an indoor facility is Yep. More than what you're looking at for an outdoor facility because you have to build all of the in ground infrastructure no matter where that is, utilities, site work, etcetera. So you don't you need to figure out how you're gonna fund probably
20 to $30,000,000 beyond 65,000,000. I understand that argument. I really do. I just I wanna I don't want people to think that Yeah. No. No. No. No. Redesign something. I Yep. Like, what we have shown and what we have designed already based on what came forward in the community engagement that said we would like to have something really spectacular for every single sport, which was what we always showed was a sports program focused indoor and outdoor facility. If if you want and and based on the premise that it was going to operate in a way where it wouldn't have significant subsidy from the property tax levy,
that's a very different project than what I was talking about during sales tax, which is fine. I just don't want people to go into that thinking that you immediately get a community center. We haven't designed it. We have no design for a community center. Yep. Yep. Never designed a community center. Yep. And I I appreciate that clarification. I think I think that the the issue I'm having and and the space I find myself, the position I find myself in this evening is hearing an overwhelming amount of communication from members of the community saying
understood that, they were voting for an indoor facility, not an outdoor facility, not a facility that was meeting the needs of everything. So I heard you, just say, Administrator Zones, that that, that it was a facility to meet both indoor and outdoor needs. I hear, that now that we're pivoting towards outdoor needs, and I hear from community members that they had an understanding for indoor needs. So there's a mix up of information somewhere, and I'm I'm I'm I'm trying to balance that clarification in my own mind and
and trying to understand where that disconnect is. Right? So So that's where it's confusing to me and I'm just trying to to do the best job I can to serve the community and and and provide the best community asset possible. So I want to ask you a question. Earlier in your presentation you had said that no particular entity was going to be given priority as we were moving forward in this process, but we've spent now an hour and fifteen minutes talking about baseball tournaments or ball
tournaments, and we haven't talked about anything else other than tournaments. So I have a hard time understanding how we're not giving tournaments priority. I understand that tournaments are going to fund the facility, but because tournaments are going to fund the facility, don't we have to give them priority, which then means that we have to give them priority to make this work? Sure. I may not have been clear earlier. I guess I was comparing it to what our existing facilities are where we have a specific group that has a priority usage time frame.
Where in this, it would be our kind of in house staff that would be scheduling and it yes. The the the whole pro form a as you as you just mentioned for the last hour plus has been on, you know, how would we, set up the pro form a to to help it maintain affordable rates during the week would be that tournament usage on the weekends. So it would be on the weeknight practices or daytime practices or other things that are going on. And I thank you for for that clarification. I think we also need to be clear that,
we have also mentioned in the presentation and the discussion that it wouldn't just be weekend tournaments because we've also mentioned three day tournaments and four day tournaments and in this discussion five day tournaments, which is beyond weekend dates. Right? So that would be Thursday evenings, sometimes Wednesday evenings, and I also heard Mondays, which would then necessitate community not having access to those ball fields. Correct? Yeah. The the majority of them would be in that three day
community programs are out there running Monday through Thursdays. I I believe the information on a Monday game would be a Monday daytime game, kinda your championship game during the day that day, and then teams are leaving, so Monday evenings would still be an opportunity for for the local use. And then have we talked with the hospitality industry about the fact that we were programming tournaments when our number one industry in this community had reduced usage rate of hotel rooms and the fact that if we expand those
tournament dates out then we're going to rub into having more usage in those hotel spaces and where are people going to stay? Sure. So the majority of the teams would be here on those nights that are lower occupancy, Friday nights, Saturday nights. If you had championship games on Monday, there's gonna be a a few teams left for that, but it's not gonna be the bulk of teams who have left. In in my experience of the tournaments, there's certainly events that have been run-in the community that are longer. We we've done AAU girls basketball nationals that are here for seven days long,
and we're able, you know, to make it fit. It just raises occupancy, you know, fairly high during that week of time. But the bulk of the tournament attendees and hotel users I'm just trying to look at things from all angles. Right? So I also see in the, pro form a, pickleball usage rate. I'll I'm just gonna go there too. Why would someone pay $5 a day to play pickleball when you can play pickleball for free at other places in the community? So I have questions about that rate. We have you have scheduled rectangular field tournament income in the pro form a.
Can you really run a tournament on on two rectangular fields? How does that generate tournament income? So I just have lots of of more minute questions, and I I appreciate that we haven't reached out to those communities to to to really navigate that. But that's all information that I feel like I need to say, hey. Are we moving forward in the right direction? Right? So I I I don't I don't know if I feel equipped to make those decisions. It's not gonna stop saying,
hey, let's continue to move forward, but I still have big questions, I guess. That's where I'm at this evening. So I wanna I wanna answer that question, are we moving in the right I don't know. That's how I'm gonna answer that this evening. First of all, I I see that, council member Doering has got kinda gone to our conclusion. I wanna be respectful of, mister Bolton and our visitors. Are there quest additional questions for, mister Bolton? Council member Fredericks? Yes. I do. How are you doing, mister Bolton?
Good. Good. Yes, sir. Alright. Great. You're in the hot seat here for a while. Just a quick question. We went to this type of arrangement for the first phase of this because it has the highest likelihood of being sustainable, meaning profitable to actually pay for this facility and get on its feet the quickest. Is that correct? That's correct. Right. And that's the way I've understood it since the beginning. There hasn't been a lot of confusion on that. I do like the idea of offering programming, but I do know this taxpayers don't want things coming back in their lap in
lieu of tax levy. So to have something that can sustain itself and then subsidize other things in the future, it does make sense to me. So I do get what you're doing here. And I have other questions, when you're done, when he's done. Could could you expand on the $5 pickleball and Yes. The community? Yep. So, our thought process has been that with the higher caliber courts also being lighted courts, we we don't have lighted courts, other places for pickleball, in Rochester now that there would be enough interest there.
I think as we talked earlier about existing facilities, we have the Cook Park Courts, where there's priority time for RAPA. So a community member who wants to play during those times can struggle to get onto a cord and play there. So, again, this is an opportunity where a friend group could get together and reserve a cord at a certain time. That's their preferred time. There would be a a little bit of a fee for that, but it would give them the time they wanted and the reliability of being able to go get on that court when they want to. So I I think that is the the rationale behind that.
Getting to the rectangles, as the Sports Academy team shared that rectangle field revenue, it was just based on an hourly rental rate. So whether that was a tournament or a series of games that happened at that time, perhaps two teams coming that meet here in Rochester because they it'll be a more reliable surface with the artificial turf and the lights and those types of things. We didn't build or they didn't build the revenue, and we've been working on this together to be a larger revenue margin like we would have when we're running an in house tournament.
It's more just based on that hourly rental. So I guess, yes, just trying to get back to a couple of those specific questions. Councilmember Fredericks, more questions for I'll have some for the salms after Yep. When he's done. Okay. Questions for mister Boldt. Council member Wahl. Yes. My understanding of, the sales tax is that it is, of necessity, a regional, asset. That's true. That, you know, community members have contacted all of us. Sounds like a lot of them would like a replacement for the YMCA. Sales tax money cannot go to replace a community center.
Correct? That is that is the way I understand the legislation. Correct? So as as that will impact. As I would understand it then that this, economic driver for the community is an asset, of necessity, a regional asset that for many days a week, will benefit the community. Would that be fair? I would say that is fair, yes. As I mentioned, we're looking at those tournament dates on the Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and that will help to subsidize lower, fees during the week when community members and community teams can be utilizing the assets
out at the facility. Thank you. Yep. I've do you have questions? I'll go next. So I wanna get back to you. And I, one, thank you very much for, for all the information on the, regional sports complex. And I real that really is even though it has community aspects aspects to it, it really is a sports tourism model. So I wanna kinda get back to my original questions, which were the partnerships that we have for community space,
parks, and rec across Rochester. And the mayor mentioned RCTC. Can you talk a a little bit more about the partnerships that we have with RCTC, both with the fields, the rectangular fields, the ball fields, and then there we do have something of a unique relationship with them, on the field house, which has, I believe, eight, basketball courts. Yep. So sir certainly happy to share more information there. They're each a little bit different. So the field house and performance courts,
so there's six basketball courts in that facility. And then the stadium, the the regional sports stadium there, those are both managed by RCTC. So their staff schedules it and, manages and does the the the maintenance on those facilities. That's part of that agreement. Also, part of that agreement is, allocated time that RCTC has access to the facilities and then time that's dedicated for community time. So for example, in the field house, on the evenings and weekends, that is when the community can be in there. Like parks and rec,
we run our adult basketball, programs out of there. Other community groups rent court space, in the in the field house for evening activities or weekend activities or weekend tournaments. On the outdoor, fields, so those are still on state property, so they're still part of that agreement. But, the city parks and rec, manages the schedules there, and there is a little bit of time allocated to RCTC. So they have teams that participate in those sports being, soccer and baseball and softball. So during when they're in season,
they have a field that's dedicated to their use so they can have their practices and games for that. But the other fields that are there are available for parks and rec to schedule, community use. And, many of those are, again, in that partnership realm, like the, example before about Rochester Youth Baseball, that's on state property. And one of the fields is used by RCTC during the spring season, but the other five fields of baseball fields there are utilized by Rochester Youth Baseball.
In the spring, I also schedule, high school games to happen there or other games. So a variety of uses are there, but, Rochester Youth Baseball being the primary community group. That uses those fields. And it'd be similar on the soccer, the football, or the softball fields out at that facility. So with the field house, which RCTC manages and we get we as a city have used for our residents after hours. Do you do you think there is opportunity there for greater partnership,
greater community use if that facility were went through some kind of a, a, re read, recap? Sure. Thank you. I think that's a I think that's a good question. I'm a little hesitant to answer just because our CTC staff isn't here to provide their feedback on it as well. You know, I think, I think there's there is potential there. You know, I think they've gone through a few different, facility managers out there over the last few years. So I think they're looking for ways to continue to reengage with the community.
I think there is opportunity for some additional utilization there. But that being said, it has been a good community asset over the several years that it's existed, and there's been a lot of good activities and programs happening there. Thank you. Councilmember Miller? So I just wanted to acknowledge, I know there are a lot of community requests that no facility, no matter the type, nor location within Rochester is going to meet the needs and expectations of everybody. And yet, we have a parks and recreation system with indoor amenities, outdoor amenities, trails connecting them,
roadway infrastructure. So I would ultimately like to hear a better case for how some of those needs that we're hearing maybe aren't met exclusively at this facility, but, like, broadly are meeting improved access to recreation. And so with that said, I wanna ask about some of these specific economic factors of this. And looking at the staff expense analysis, there are nine full time jobs listed. So it's creating nine jobs. It's creating lodging tax revenues. And so my question is how how can those be used? Perhaps administered out. Make sure you weren't gonna have a Palmer length list of issues.
I'll go one by one. Just the flexibility of the whole Palmer has been awfully quiet so far. It's so So let's not pick on him anymore. I know. So there when you're talking about economic generation, there's any any economic generation profile I put out there, someone will put holes in as well. But you can generally consider that as you're going across the community, when you have people coming in, even local people that are playing in a regional tournament locally, they stay within that complex during the day, and they're with their friends, and they're part of those dollars that,
aren't just at concessions but also are nearby. And so sometimes they're hosting their friends if they don't wanna stay in the hotel. And so I would just say that depending on how, successful it is, although, again, in a very conservative pro form a, it's anticipated to have revenue over expenses in the first year, you would be able to consider you could have either some models say one and a half, sometimes say up to three times as much of the spending that's happening within the facility as indirect and direct economic generation within a community because you have additional you
do have additional retail. You have additional, like, service provider of course, the lodging tax, which you pointed out. The lodging tax in Rochester is a little bit flexible. We've dedicated a portion the 3% is funding the sports, I always get the name wrong, Rochester Sports, there and how they're part of operating existing tournaments, the operation of the, Civic Center facility and that operating model that, council member Keane mentioned earlier. And then anything above and beyond that goes back to the facility in order to
operate it. There's also a 4%, lodging tax that's dedicated to continue to pay off the investment in the civic center. And as recently as a couple of months ago, we understand that we can continue that to reinvest in the Civic Center. So it provides some opportunities, in the future. Also, that current lodging tax is really being driven by in the week during the week, a Mayo visitor. So how much you're receiving per room night, how busy you need to be to operate a hotel in the black is really dependent on a weeknight here in Rochester,
which is very unique to most communities. We most communities would never have 6,000 hotel rooms of a community of our size, and most communities are building those for the weekend. So we also have a lower average daily rate for hotel rooms on the weekend, which is advantageous to traveling sports. So if you're able to fill up further on the weekend, you should see an uptick in your lodging tax, which is just under the existing lodging tax revenue going to continue to increase your revenue, and that you should be focusing on reinvesting in generating economic activity that's related to visitation,
tourism, and things of that sort. So reinvesting in facilities, investing in facilities, those types of things. So the way that we have it set up in the budget is if you get additional lodging tax, it's committed to, right now, the Civic Center because that's the main driver of non mail revenue. And then in the future, I think that you have options to be looking at when is that revenue coming in, and we have Smith Travel Research reports that will tell us what our occupancy is on the weekend, what the average daily rates are, and how that's moving the needle. Okay. It will also generate sales tax, which is committed to these projects.
Correct. And, it will generate some hospitality jobs as well, part time most likely. But I I guess what I'm I'm curious about is then to those, recreational needs that have been identified in the community engagement work, is there any economic generation from this project that gives us some ability to meet some of those? I would argue that the lodging tax provides you some flexibility depending on how you're looking at the long term and when the debt is resolved at the, Civic Center, which we have been collecting more than what we had anticipated in the financials for,
repayment of that. It's not, like, in a year. But there is some potential there to have a conversation about that. And, I mean, if we do see an uptick in lodging tax, then there is the potential to look at that, but you also wanna make sure that the sensitivity that you've talked about today that we're not, hedging on something that has a future downturn because of whatever happens. Yeah. That's helpful. And I just want us to be clear to the community what success of this model then gives us flexibility to do. And at best, maybe we can invest in some of those other areas,
but we can't guarantee it. Correct. And I can't guarantee that it but four or eight years from now that there won't be completely different ideas. I wish I could, but I I don't have the crystal ball of how the community is going to continue to adjust and change. We didn't have the crystal ball when we were talking about square fields that people would tell us that actually they weren't gonna be able to utilize all of the hours for that and that Blaine would build 10 artificial turf courts in the midst of our talking about a sales tax. Courts. Excuse me. That was a very improper sport word. Fields for soccer.
So that can continue to change, and the desires of the community and the council can continue to change. And we can continue as was directed in February to look at what our opportunities are for phase two. There might be a world where if there's better communication about indoor opportunities that already exist and there's reengagement, although we're trying to hit a opening date that doesn't end up costing you more to build, whatever you build, that that we could be looking at something different than what was designed as, like and there will be people who,
as you aptly pointed out, don't like that. But indoor tournament level sport facility is what we had designed. And so if there's something different and the council desires to go in a different direction with that and we reengage and there's something different and you still have to figure out how to fund that, that I'm open to that. I just Yeah. Don't want there to be I don't want people to think the trade offs are are within our current financial dollars viable for Indore. Indore just keeps going up. What and I just wanna make totally clear what the potential community benefits are to
folks who have reached out and and said, I don't see this as the project I'd envisioned. And no matter what project, we're gonna get some comments. But I do think it's striking how universal those comments seem, and so I'm just trying to get down to the an understanding of what potential community benefits there are. And are there those that aren't well documented here? Right? It's but it it really does sound like this is to create a sustainable baseball complex that is successful in a tournament model that is at least regional, perhaps national.
And there is some general economic, activity that comes from that, but it's not easily quantified. I mean, we could pay to quantify it, but I Discussion or Just Okay. Yes. Okay. Mayor Norton. Yeah. I'm just going to add in, you're not surprised about my approach because it's been the same for the last three years. The community wants something that is focused on them as phase one. They're fine with a phase two, but they want something that puts them at the heart of this,
not just simply talking about economic development, because that's not what they thought they were voting for. So just I'm going to start with that. For me, phase one is a community centered something that can also be competitive if you can make that happen. The second point, this is Rochester, Minnesota, and I've just come back from South Korea where I watched them build something for economic development that was a summer sport. They have winter like we do most of the year and their economic development is two months out of the year.
Why not focus on something indoors so that we can see economic development all year long rather than just two or three months primarily in the summer. I get really frustrated when I hear about the regional piece of this too. And I'm just gonna stop and say, I really appreciate your presentation. This is not about you at all. Just please know that. So, you know, whether you're the right group, it sounds like you'd be perfect, and that's not my issue. My issue is with what we're building, who we're building it for and what's the right thing for Rochester,
not just the biggest moneymaker for Rochester, right? So I think we could have other types of indoor sports that maybe aren't going to make quite as much, but we could do it in the summer months, but we could do it all year long and stretch out that economic development through a full year. I think that would be smart and wise. But the regional component, the RCTC grounds, which has potential for a Phase one first approach, if we wanted to use it, has seven baseball diamonds, as I said, but it also has indoor facilities, basketball is something this community has been asking for, for some time.
And we look at that every day. That says regional, that is our that actually has the name, and I've talked to Allison about this from the beginning, a regional sports complex, we already have one, we need to find a different name for this dang thing. So we have a regional sports complex that we could enhance and fix up. And that was needing to be regional too, and it is perfectly acceptable to the legislature. So I think we can't just throw out regional as if that has some magic meaning, because as some of our legislators have told us, if that's a catch, we're happy to change that verbiage. That's not a big deal to us.
It is something that that the community is going to benefit from as well as be economically viable. So I just I wanna just say those things because we've all heard from this community. I've as mayor, it's my job to speak for my, all 127,000 of our residents. I have been trying to do that for three years, saying we keep forgetting them. We keep forgetting them. And that's who our focus should be. The rest of it's great, nothing wrong with it, but we we're putting them second.
They don't wanna be second. They wanna be our primary focus. And so, if we can't pause on this and do it right, they're gonna push back. And they're already pushing back, but they're gonna push back further. And I think it's incumbent upon us to do it. We shouldn't have to make them knock us on the head. Mister Boldt, you can sit down. Council member, Fredericks? Alright. That feel good to sit down? Yes, sir. Alright. Good. Alright. Administrator zones. I just have a few quick questions for you here. First of all, I think it's important to remember that when this was voted for,
48% did vote no. That is a lot of voices that didn't want it from the very beginning. So we're gonna hear those voices louder now than ever. It's important to remember that, I think, too. Only 52 I believe those numbers are right. Correct? Fifty two forty eight? Alright. So I think it's important to remember that. So now that a sales tax referendum passed, regardless of anyone's expectations or preferences, the city must build a sport complex with the $65,000,000 Is that correct? The language in the legislation says $65,000,000 for a sports and recreation complex.
Yep. Okay. This is an obvious question, but I'm just gonna say it. Do you understand why some of the voters may feel misled? Yes. And I think I tried to articulate that in the beginning. However, I I do just wanna point out based on some of the things that I'm hearing today, everything that was within the original conceptual plan that was a 5% conceptual plan was very clearly oriented towards sports and sports tourism, indoor and outdoor. It's unfortunate the way they priced that. Even when we were talking about this, it was always a phased approach because what the community discussed and designed if you
could let me answer the question with actual information, I would would really appreciate it because this is factual, accurate information based on I'm sorry. Miss Zelms has the floor. And, as council members and others on the dais, we should give her the respect of listening. Go ahead. I can appreciate why when we went and did the community outreach and there was people who wanted to have a walking you know, an elevated walking, people that wanted to have multiuse indoor. There were people that wanted to have it just be basketball. There were people that wanted to maximize and thought, okay. We could probably make this into multiuse.
There were people that wanted to have I don't even know how many courts indoor of pickleball. All of it was always shown as needing to be phased, and the outdoor was always shown as not phased. And so I'm not saying that people should have known all of those things, but in the presentations that we were doing, we were always talking about it from that perspective. And whenever we were asked if it was a replacement for the YMCA, we were very clear that that was never There was conversations at this dias at the time with different people here, and that is not what advanced. And that's not anything that we designed. I can appreciate the people's desire to do that and that some of that was
showing up in the comments and responses. However, that was not what we were tasked with doing. We were tasked with bringing something forward that was going to be able to operate. And what we did hear from people is they didn't want it to be on the tax levy. Now is that realistic completely? It depends on what you're trying to accomplish, and those are decisions that the city council makes all the time. However, what we designed and then what we actually got engineering costs on and what we came forward with in January and February was was double in order to actually be able to build it to the standards
at which people wanted to be able to use it both for recreational amenity and tourism. And the indoor tourism and recreational components did not pencil very well, which is not surprising considering there's about $750,000 a year of levy that goes to your recreation center right now, which is much smaller than what we're talking about. So those are conversations that can be had, but we were always moving forward with this under the assumptions that it was going to be a regional sports complex that was focused on outdoor with indoor amenities.
We moved through the community engagement process, and there was a significant number of people who wanted more indoor, which is reasonable to want. But I cannot build you something that's a 120 to a $130,000,000 for $65,000,000. I I would not be doing my job if I was telling you that that was realistic. And, council member Palmer brought up a good point several weeks ago. He said the YMCA closed. And it is unfortunate it did. My family went there, I went there, but it did close. It didn't sustain. It couldn't keep its head above water. So that that's a point that needs to be remembered as well.
The tax money, the the sales tax money is only for establishing the facility and can't be used for ongoing operations. Correct? Yes. The current legislation requires that it be for capital and not for operations. That changed in the 2016 time frame. If the facility has an operating deficit, we already went over this, it will be covered by property tax levy. That is a future decision for a council. What we would be doing is building an operating agreement where we would be checking in every single month to understand how is this operating. Are you able to bring it in? And if we said, no. You can't you know,
you need to lay people off. Off. This isn't gonna work. Really brought that question up because, council member Miller actually hit on that pretty good earlier. So but, if the sports complex is successful in hosting the many tournaments throughout the year and the many families coming from far enough away that they may stay in the Rochester hotels, that will likely result in the sports complex not needing an operation subsidy and will provide economic benefit to the, the Rochester area. We went over that already. So that's a yes. With further study, it's been determined that an outdoor facility with rectangular fields would not be successful in
driving tournaments. He addressed that, and that is correct. K? With further further study, it has been determined that our best chance at financial viability is the baseball and softball. We keep forgetting to bring that up, baseball and softball fields. We went over that. That is correct. Alright? When the when the community gives feedback on their desired use of the facility, it is fair to say that much of the feedback does not consider financial viability and the impact on our property taxes in the future. And that is one thing that I hear without give that people do not want their property taxes to go up.
And especially in the business community right now, it's getting whacked hard. So having something that's viable is extremely important. Putting a pause in the project would obviously make costs go up and we have an obligation to do a project. Were other no offense, gentlemen. You did a nice job tonight. Were other vendors considered to operate the facility besides Sports Academy? And why was Sports Academy chosen or in the let's call them in the bullpen? Sports reference. We did a competitive process, for the operator at risk, and we, I believe, had three proposals. It may have been four, but that has now been almost a year and a half.
And so, we went through the competitive process, reviewed what the costs were, the expertise of the different groups, and, we felt strongly that based on what we were trying to accomplish and what was had been discussed over a period of time, that this would be the best group to bring forward. They came forward in partnership with Oak View Group. And over time, as we've moved more to an outdoor focus for phase one, it's become clear that the main, focus would really would be best served by continuing to negotiate with Sports Academy. And so OVG has provided, I don't remember what it's called,
the letter of release. And so they any more acronyms tonight. They are going it's not an acronym. Letter of release of some sort. But it's completely fine with them that we continue the exclusive negotiating period, with Sports Academy. And I think you can see that they have a lot of experience operating sports focused facilities, and that's what this has has become, an outdoor sports focused facility. And OVG really operates more indoor facilities, concessions, and things of that nature. And that's based on direction we're moving. We don't think you need to add that cost to your project. Thank you.
I have one question for the president. Oh, may I use the bathroom? You you may use the bathroom. You have you have your own personal rights here. Thank you, sir. But I'm hoping you take a break after we're completed with this topic. Council member Miller. This just final point on the community benefit. It's in the news that, in North Minneapolis, there's a proposal that's moving forward for an 8,000 seat outdoor amphitheater concert venue. Striking that in that story and in that negotiation, there is a portion of every ticket sold that's being redeveloped reinvested into the surrounding
community via community partners that's built into their pro form a. So I think that we would do well to build out some case for the people who are reaching out, who are saying, where how is this helping me? How how is it helping meet my needs for recreational access for my kids? How is it benefiting the community? And that is part of where we are right now in developing an operating model. So that would be my strong preference that we find some way to meet some of these needs. And I agree with mayor Norton that we cannot leave the community behind. We 48% of people voted no,
but I'm hearing from a lot of people that say I voted yes. So I just want that to be really clear in the community and and this is, like, how do we move a project forward that's in conjunction with the community? And I know that this project continued before we had the discussion of foundational principles and strategic priorities, but we built in inclusive decision making into aspects of both of those. And this is, I think, a key project yet have an operating model that has to contemplate some of those foundational principles that we as a whole council have been very clear and that we want it to happen with the community.
So will be just my final point and question of the night. Is that a question or it's a point? It looks like the administrator Zelens might I don't know if it's a question or a point. I'm waiting to hear. It can be a question if you want. Otherwise, it can just be a comment. Well, I I'll I'll weigh in. And, to to the points that I think I heard from other council members, I have heard from over a 100 of our neighbors in the last week. And I will tell you that they run the gamut. They're across the spectrum.
Yes. A a, a lot of them voted for, this and are feeling like their expectations weren't met. Nothing against the, Sports Academy and the sports tourism model. And I think, what I heard tonight made me feel good about that model and the potential of that and the potential, as council member Miller said, of of having some additional, sources of revenue here in in,
in Rochester. But when when the numbers didn't work out and we got the phase one, and it didn't it it kept the sports tourism piece, and it really feels like the community piece has been, taken out of it. And so and this evening, that's why I really focused on those partnerships that we have across sports and rec because I do believe here in this community,
it's a model that is built in our into our culture of working with the clubs and associations. And there is a lot of benefit to that, but there is, some disadvantages which, makes members of the community feel like there are barriers to access for them. And so, I really want us to look at our model of partnerships and really incorporate, some, terms that speak to, that access and recruiting, marketing, and, sliding fee skit,
schedules and, and, scholarships, free free service, and actively promoting that, not just saying we have it, and working as a city to promote that with, with this the associations that, that we have partnerships and agreements with. The second point, and I think, mayor, Norton brought it up, is there is potential across the system and in those partnerships. And, in particular, there there's, potential with RCTC and, and that for the community for looking at those,
the the field house and whether those six basketball courts working with them to, to look at flexibility for that space or enhancing that space. I think fast tracking that in a way that we start discussions, so that we are really showing the community that we're we're looking for that community access as well. So that's that's where I stand on this now, and, I will go to council member Keane. Again,
I think this is a good discussion how we close this out. Some some of my peers have talked about that idea of, like, did we communicate it clearly? But, a couple points I wanna make. One is, we talked about the number that voted against the tax the sales tax in the first place. But I do think there's two distinct groups who are taking issue with it. One is the group that, you know, they wanted that indoor for that idea, the teaming and that other stuff. And I think that's a separate group from this ongoing discussion of a community center that would be much more urban, which would be,
it might have sports, but it could have other things too. And I think my my disconcerning thing here is, like, you try to do something like an economic development project like this. And there are many of the people I represent that don't think we should be in that business to start with. The fact is we are in that business. We've been doing it for forty and fifty years. And and many times it works, and there's been some examples where it's worked less well or it didn't work. But I think that idea of saying, like, we wanna do this and we wanna get a community benefit is where we probably
erred in communicating much more of this sort of a different asset than what we really were setting out and what we challenged the staff to come back with. If we do want to go back and say, you know, you talk about phase two or even I don't think it's a phase two of a sports complex if you wanna talk about a community center. I think it's a totally different mission that the city would take on. We might do it out of the, out of park and rec, but I wouldn't think that's a given. I know that, back about eight years ago before I was involved in council, the the the castle was up.
And there was talk about making that the community center. It wasn't sports oriented, but it was community rooms. It was, it was the it was the, industrial kitchen. Those are different discussions, and I think we munged them too much this time into one discussion of because we talked about community benefits, we ended up saying the sports complex should be the community center. And and I think that if if we really wanted to step back, and I think it's a hard decision, do we want the city of Rochester does not provide that sort of service. We have park and rec, and we have libraries.
But that idea of a community center is a different asset and a different cost structure. And I think that's something that we need to either step up to or continue on the fact that that's not something the city does for its residents right now. And I think it's a valid thing that this council could debate, but I don't think it's a given that we're gonna do it because we do other things. Anyone else wanna be heard on this topic? Well, great discussion, everyone. Thank you, everyone, for attending. Thank you to our Sports Academy, visitors,
and we will take a ten minute break. And we're gonna get started again. Yeah. Four hours later. Another two hours. Alright. We are on to, item number two, which is our Silver Lake Dam modification and sediment removal construction plan update. And, we have mister Aaron Luckstein to, start this one off. Yep. Button. Green button. Not that one. Yep. There we go. There we go. So we put that one back down. Can you hear me now? Yep. Better. Okay. Thank you, council president Schubert, mayor Norton,
members of the council. Yes. Aaron Luckstein with our public works department, and with me tonight is Matt Crawford, also in the public works department. And then Bill and Megan with WH Chaos Engineering. They're the ones that are assisting us on the Silver Lake Dam modification and sediment removal project. So just a reminder, as we go through it, there's four major components of the project. One is the the dam modification. The second one is the North Trail, portion of the project, and then sediment removal. We're also including, some modifications to the east shoreline as part of that. So Matt will cover that. And then also the footings for a future pedestrian,
bridge. So those are the the four major components. We'll also provide you some updated cost estimates. Keep in mind, those are preliminary. I'll emphasize that when we get get to that point, as well as next steps. And then as you know, there's a lot of exciting things happening in and around, Silver Lake. And if this project moves forward, we wanna talk through some potential construction impacts, what we're doing, to try and minimize those impacts as much as possible, but also call out the fact and start recognizing some of these these impacts. So, we have a lot of material to get through in the next forty five minutes.
So I'll defer to council president how you wanna handle questions. If you do take questions throughout and we think it'll be answered in a future slide, we'll just let you know that and try and keep rolling. So Sounds good. Okay. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Matt Crawford. Hello? Council president, council members, mayor. My name is Matt Crawford. I'm the project manager for this project. To give you a little background, because some of you are new and might not have seen me before, I am the engineer responsible for our sanitary sewer collection system, so the maintenance, the repairs, the sewer upgrades, expansions, but I'm also the engineer responsible for our flood control system.
So I'm responsible for all the inspections and maintenance on that, and I work with the parts department on a lot of those maintenance activities. So I've been doing the flood control part of this most of my career here, so I'm very familiar with these flood control items. So, I'll just jump right into it. We've been working on this project since 2019, and we've had a lot of concepts thrown out there, it's really still the same, but we've had some changes because of going through the permit process with the DNR and the Corps and other agencies. And so I kind of want to explain to you what's going on. So on what we call the upstream section is a black line, so that'll be to your right, that is where the new dam will start.
And the black line represents sheeting, we'll be using sheeting to create the core for the dam, and it'll be a rock structure around that. And really the sheeting is just to make sure it's waterproof to start out with, earthen materials will build up over time and also reinforce it to make it more waterproof. But that's the reason we're doing that, we've met with the DNR Dam Safety on this too and discussed this design, they're familiar with it, they've seen other places use it, there's no concern. But working also with the DNR, that was the big one that we had most of our conversations with, they're very concerned about the fish passage,
those are the rock rapids you see on there, the rock arch rapids. So they have a lot of design considerations. So when we're going through that, they were concerned that we make sure that the fish passage is the most primary thing we're designing us to do, move fish. And I understand recreational use too, but they didn't want the pools confusing the fish that would go the wrong way, that's kind of how we put it. So, you'll notice from some of the earlier, concepts where we're kind of fiftyfifty pools in the rapids, now it's primarily rapids with the smaller pools on the North Side.
That is to make sure that the fish have primary use, but we still have opportunities for use for kayakers in canoeists to use those pools. Also while we were doing this, the DNR had us looking at the downstream existing conditions, and they found like a scour down there, and that's more or less all the armoring from the existing dam. My hands move too much. So as the water moves through there, they kept armoring downstream of the dam, concrete and riprap, but the velocity just continued moving down and creating a scour hole. This scour hole will not allow fish to get into the fish passage where we
originally thought we were to design it, starting at the existing dam and going up from there. So we had to move it downstream, but that gave us an opportunity to move the start of the dam 200 feet closer to, the old dam, which makes more lake. One of the things people really wanted is to minimize the lake loss to do this. That increases more acreage of the lake that we're saving by doing this, this, but we did have to move the rock downstream further to cover that and create an impact basin at the bottom. So those are like some of the key things that have changed in the design
working with the DNR. I'll get some more details here. So here's an example of the cross sections going through the pools. As you can see, they're fairly deep, so there's opportunities for kayakers and stuff to play in it and to move the water down through this, through the system. I'm gonna kinda move through these, but they're kinda the same, this is to the end. But as you can see, it stops well before the rock rapids stop, so the fish will stay in in the rapids and not move into the pools, that was the concern. Now here's the Rock Rapids. As you can see there's a lot of rock,
and part of the DNR wanted to make sure that there was enough space for fish to hide behind the big blocks moving upstream, so they added a few more rolls they wanted. They wanted the slope reduced so the fish had opportunities to move. We don't have salmon and trout, we have all kinds of other fish, so they don't quite move upstream quite the same as some of those other species. So, because of that we have more of these rock rapids we had to install as part of this project. This is just an example of some water looking in there, but it's going downstream. Then at the bottom you can see at the bottom of the page is that
big rock kind of looking structure after the rapids. That's the impact base, and that's where the end of the scour is at. We have to make sure that doesn't scar out in the future so the fish can get into the passage and move upstream. So that's been something working a lot with the DNR. Megan's been doing a lot of modeling because they wanna know all the velocity vectors and all this or how the fish can get up there. So we have a lot of back and forth, and this is where we got to in the final design. It has been submitted to the, the DNR and the core, and they're working through their review right now. Just giving you a quick example, people ask if it's going to look natural. It will look natural over time,
there's some concrete that has to armor or fix in place the boulders and stuff that we're using, but it's minimal, and it wants to be made the stones and over time those change colors, they blend in, we get sediment down there, it'll look more natural. The first year it won't but as time goes on it'll look more natural than the existing conditions out there today. Now we'll get to the North Shore Trail. So we've had to look at trying to meet our normal standards, which is ten year protection for our trail system, so that means a ten year twenty four hour flood will not inundate the trail
so it's safe to use up to that event. After that event a lot of our trails start to get, especially underneath the bridges and stuff, start to get flooded, we have to close them. So we want this trail to be used as much as possible. So that was a consideration, plus we have to meet ADA. So at the bottom it shows some of the slopes, so it's showing the slope from where the trail has to come down to get underneath the bridge then transfer underneath the bridge. The blue on here shows concrete, that's gonna be concrete trail. The other color, the green one you'll see in the next pictures, starts up, that's the bituminous trail areas. So here again we're coming back out from underneath there, and now we also have,
underneath the bridge we'll have retaining walls in the front between the, bridge abutments and and the edge of the trail. And then here as you start going back up into the bituminous trail, we start having had to have, retaining walls with that bottom line kinda showing where the top retaining wall is above the trail against the properties we are tying into. A lot of those properties that we're tying into have really steep slopes and degraded to make it ADA compliant and make the trail as wide as we'd standard want them for trails. It's a 12 foot trail with recovery zones on both sides. We then start getting a lot of grading.
We've had to follow-up in people's properties, so we're using retaining walls, large block retaining walls, that will hold up to one hundred year events. So the idea is to have something we do not have to maintain on any regular basis and will function in different kind of uses and different kind of flood events. Here he ends showing the same thing, now this is all bituminous trail, we've gotten past where the new dam starts and we're getting back into the open water portions of it. More trails, same thing, retaining walls now are starting to get taller on the backside in some of these areas. That pink line you start seeing, that's a retaining wall,
it's gonna be on the water side because we're going back up to meet ADA and you get back into the park, so we're gonna need a tray, retaining walls on the backside and the front side to make that all work. Now here's just some cross sections showing those type of trails where you'll have walls in the front, walls in the back, etcetera, just some examples. And the green, I want to make sure you emphasize this, you are gonna have rip rap along the edge, but it's gonna be soil and paste riprap with native plantings in there. So short natives, you've heard the neighborhoods, they don't like the tall natives, so we're gonna go for short natives, but that's going to be an environmental improvement.
It'll help the shoreline out, opportunity to have other people even invest in it, put some flowering plants in it, that thing, type of thing, excuse me. But those will be a benefit to the project too. Now the pedestrian bridge, it's not being done with this project but we have to design for it so we don't have to go back in the lotterway and do it again. So I've circled where the trail's gonna go, that's the location that works for this, it works with all the other pedestrian trails we're doing, so that's the location. The big thing is the center pier, that's all we're building in this. The rest of it's gonna be a steel structure that in the future we can come up and more just put it on place with cranes,
and you just gotta work on the edges for the abutments and set it up in the middle. So we don't have to go back in the waterway to do any excavation or work. So it's really working for the future. And a lot of people at all those open houses and discussions we have, they can't wait till this section's done too so they can do loops around the lake. People have already compared it to Cascade Lake a few times, I know it's different, but when Cascade got their bridge built over 14, they created the trails around the lake, they were used a lot. People have talked about this in the same kind of aspect of once it's when
it's done, they have such opportunities to use this lake for activities and not have to be on Broadway and etcetera. So we've heard a lot of good feedback on that. Dredging now. One of the things that people have been really excited for us to get done because people that do try to use it, the rowing club, etcetera, and the people that rent out the row boats, there's a lot of sediment that has built up over there. So what we're showing here is different colors kind of representing how many, cubic yards are in those areas and come up with a cost. The light blue lines you see kind of running through the middle,
that's the flood control channel, that's what the core says you have to dredge out on a regular basis, that's the minimum. Now obviously if you just did that and didn't do something on the edges, more of it would just slough right back in and be back doing on a regular basis. So we don't wanna do this, we wanna go wider. And also it reduces when we have to do maintenance again, there are recreational benefits for everybody and the effort and the permitting to do this work. It makes sense to do as much as we possibly can. Now we showed the green going all the way up to almost the Pacific Center area.
Now from the railroad tracks back to the lake, that's where we see most of the settlement, so that's what we really wanna focus on. There's a lot of material, over 200,000 yards to be removed from here. You need to try to remove it from November to about March before potential flooding can start. That's a lot of trucking, that's a lot of vehicles. So we are concerned about how much can we get done and if we can do everything in this one shot or not in the wintertime. We also by the government center down with that dais, dais is down below, that's a normal sediment trap area.
We understand people aren't happy with the looks on that, we're trying to include that in this project too, but that's a little bit different area to dredge. So, but the bang for our buck is when the railroad tracks on down, we can probably get some good removals there and limit to how far they have to haul it in river. I just want to show another thing we're doing that we're gonna be using the old snow dump site as our sediment removal site for part of this project for dewatering and hauling it away, but also one of the things that people have expressed, they want more lake. We found historically there was a peninsula here, and so we built Seventh Street and you put in the pad ramp,
you kind of filled this in from the forties. So the DNR, while they don't want us to build new lake, they are supportive of going back to historic shorelines. And so by doing that we can create another acre of open water here, that would help I know if you met the rowing club, they're excited about it, it gives them a little more area to practice since they're losing a couple acres on the other end. So that's all we can do with the DNR to increase decrease water, size for this lake. So we're excited about that. That's So is that additional acre that the blue bubble?
Is that what you're talking about? Yep. Yep. That blue is really the water there. The the orange starts to be the shoreline going up and stuff. So alright. Now it's to Aaron to discuss the costs. The fun part. And we can stop right there too and just see if there's I know that crews through that being mindful of time. Was there a lot of information shared? Any questions at this time? No. Let's keep moving. Oh, council member Wahl. Is it hard to maintain those rock rapids with that teepee style of, I mean, that just looks looks hard to maintain to me.
Well, the old you gotta remember, the size of rocks are like two by three by four foot rocks embedded in rip rap that's bigger than my head. So conceptually, you're looking, I know, on a small plan sheet, but it's it's large rocks tying in together, let me get back to the sheet. They're mortared in too, Norm. Go. Mortared, okay. And so it does look a little bit steeped with the drops in between there, but I mean, that's yeah. There's the mortaring going on with with the rocks in place. So it's armored, it's large rocks, and velocity wise,
you gotta remember, when this hits a hundred year event, these are about five, six feet underwater. The velocity's all way above them. It's only when it's first coming up and then it gets above it. So it's not gonna be in major events, high velocity. That's all above it. K. Thank you. I do have a question on the, the the trail in, at the shoreline with the property owners. Yep. Can you talk about the, discussions with the property owners? Have you initiated those discussions? Where? Yep. We we had, mailings out there. We had numerous meetings with any of the property owners that wanted to meet with us.
We discussed what we could do with the project, where we thought we could do retaining walls. It's all on city property, but potential, like, safety fencing for them on their side. And then once we put all their information together, individual meeting with every property owner, we had a group meeting to let them come in and kinda show what we're proposing. So, like I said, some people don't want anybody walking anywhere near their backyard, so that was always a concern. But a lot of people were like, it it had some good benefits. They liked a lot of the walls that we're putting up because that is a separation because a lot of concerns were people coming onto their properties. So we worked a lot of their suggestions,
come up with a plan that works and I think makes it look nice, keeps their property separated from the trail users, and that's something we took a lot of their ideas in acceleration when we put that together. Thank you. Council member Fredericks. So with those walls, I'm envisioning it. Then is there one or two or three accesses along there where they can go down the street or up the street, whatever you wanna say, then just come down? They don't have access from their properties right to the trail then? No. We were planning we talked to them that we could put in steps into their properties so it'd be breaks in the walls.
They would have steps so they they wanted access to it. Did some of them buy for that option? Yes. A lot of them did. Nice. Idea. So we're gonna try to put that with the smallest because of rock is very high. We don't wanna deal with the rock where the wall is tallest, but we wanna try to make it work with So would you say it's fair to say you enhance their properties? My opinion would be yes, but they might not be great with me. So Any other question? Move on. Alright. And that was actually perfect transition into the cost, so we'll get there. So one of the things that I wanna emphasize, so you'll see right now we're seeing a preliminary,
preliminary estimates are showing a cost increase. So one of the things though, as projects move along, we do these periodic cost estimate checks just to make sure that it, to be able to evaluate how some of these changes are impacting the the cost of the project and with where if we're within range, and if not, where we need to start making cuts and do those kind of things. Recognizing that this would be an important component, we we obtained, updated cost estimates, specifically for today. The reason we included this in here is we will be talking and started those conversations with our project partners, RPU and the parks,
also to evaluate funding options. So we wanted to hear we wanted you to hear from us and not from others that there's been some discussions on perhaps finding some alternative, funding or increased funding to help cover those costs. So, I wanna really focus on the 2023 update and the and the 2025 because those are the most, you know, comparable in when we looked at the project scope. So, the North Trail, we saw some increases there. A lot of those are related to what Matt just talked about. So as we worked with property owners, initially, we looked at, can we grade back in to their yards,
get some construction easements to have more finish closer to the trail? What they largely wanted was the separation. And so putting in more retaining walls, that added cost to keep that nice privacy, boundary between the private properties and the city property and then largely keep all construction too within city property on that side of it. The other shift was with the the shift of, the the dam sliding 200 feet closer to the bridge. There's now more shoreline that is along the lake, and so there's some additional structure that needs to happen along that trail,
along the lake line versus, where the the wave pools and rock arch rapids are. So there was some added cost associated with with that. In regards to the dredging, actually, dredging came down a little bit because the majority of that, as Matt had had noted, is in trucking costs. So if diesel prices stay where they're at, we actually see some savings, and that's where we're really pushing. Let's remove as much sediment as we can in the short amount of time, especially where those price points are. We'll see where, diesel fuel prices are, come when it time to bid. So just be be mindful of that.
The dam modification was, where we saw the biggest increases. As Matt indicated, majority of that is we've had to extend that to beyond the other side of of the the Broadway Bridge to be able to address the the scour hole that was identified and install that impact zone. So what that does is as water flows down, that, removes a lot of the energy. So it dissipates that energy so that once, it gets to the end of it, you're not seeing scouring continue to happen down the river like as we see with
with other dams and like the the situation with the current one. So being able to fully address that. The other shift is as it shifted over, there are two other, scour holes, and one is up on the upper side of the existing dam. And so we need to fill that in. And also when you just think about it from that way, you shift everything down. We have more rock material that we're that we're using, in order to to fill in, you know, some of those holes. So, anyway, so those were some of the the cost increases that we saw. The other thing that I will note is we did include,
a a portion of the cost for the east shoreline modifications to open up a little bit more lake. So that expansion of that part of those costs were included in the dam modification to to create a little bit more lake. And then some of them are still part of the dredging because that was where we're gonna use as the dredging dewatering site. We'll have to refinish it. So some of those costs are are split, on that side of it. So but a couple things that I will note is we are looking for ways to reduce costs. So one of them is looking at materials, if, some of the rock can be sourced more locally and still achieve the structural integrity
requirements and long term maintenance that we need. So we're hoping, to find some savings there, as as we kinda work through this. So, so anyways, the other thing I guess I would note is we previously had included the bridge pier in with the dam modification portion of that. So we did carve that out. Some of that is with funding just just to be clear with you, but also so just to be able to capture the cost of what that pedestrian bridge is going to do. So you'll see that that new line there, and that was a shift from the dam modification down. So, preliminary funding. We are looking already looking at possible funding sources,
to to cover, the the increases as well as looking at at cost. And so I intentionally did not include hard numbers behind this because we're gonna continue to shift. And as you know, each of these funding sources have different criteria. It fits different components of the project. And so, until we have construction final construction costs, that's when we'll be able to tie numbers specifically to to some of these budgets. And as I indicated, we will be in conversations with the other project partners as we look at funding anyways but really quickly, just the North Trail, we did get, a quarter of a million dollars in the DNR grant, which is great, and and the parks has provided the matching, funds for that.
So there's half a million dollars there. And then his we've been looking at using the flood control reserves as the rest of that and still looking at at, that component. Dredging is still the nineteen eighty nine reserves. Initially, we were hoping to not have to use any of the 2023, but we may need to just based on what is left in those 1989 reserves. So, I just put that in there as that that's potential. The other one that we have been planning to use and would continue to use is some stormwater funding. There isn't ponds and other, stormwater catch basins around the downtown area,
and that it all reaches the river. So a lot of that stormwater sediment actually settles out there. So just like we would go dredge a stormwater pond to remove that, we would use some of the funding, to to remove the sediment, from Silver Lake and and the river section there. Dam modification still, our partners at at RPU, the Lessard Sam Outdoor Heritage Grant, and then the 1989 flood control reserves. And then the bridge pier, again, we're looking at that. We are already looking into we have some CIP funds allocated for trails, and this would be part of the trail system. So if there's any that we can shift in conversations with parks,
as well as that would meet the definition in and an acceptable use for the 1989 flood control funds as well. So, the other thing we will do is we will package the project components as we go out for the request for bids so that council can see if we need to make cuts. These are things that we would maybe cut out of the project or, you can see how those added components, impact costs. So Here we go. So, next steps in the process, so it's to obtain our our final permits from the Army Corps of Engineers. We already did receive preliminary.
We just got noticed on Friday that we received preliminary approval of our four zero four permit from the Army Corps of Engineers, but they can't complete that final one until the MPCA completes their permits. So those those work in in coordination with each other. So, but that's a nice, first step. The four zero eight permit is currently under review. The DNR is also reviewing things. And you're here with Matt. We've been working very, very closely with them. And so, based on that, we're waiting for the final approval from from the DNR. Once we have those, I know the historic preservation commission has come up as when is it gonna go
there. Much of this process, involves the state historical preservation, looking at those components. So we felt that that's a very important piece. So this to have that information from the state, so we can then take to HBC. So once we get that, that's then it would go to to HBC. Can you pause, mister Lexine? Oh, okay. When he's done. Okay. Go ahead. Keep going. Once we have those permits in place, we would, again, evaluate our preliminary funding, make sure we have the the funding resources to be able to to cover the project, put it out for bids, finalize those funding recommendations,
and bring it back to council. And so with that I don't know why it's not changing for me. Here we go. So the next, we're gonna talk about construction impacts, but again, I'll pause there. I think we had no? Okay. Any other questions before we move into construction impacts in the area? I just want to make it clear to everybody in the public and you'll confirm this. We are not going to screw around with the flood control. It will be the same, if not better, after this project is done. Is that correct? That is correct. Okay. And nobody in the city council wants to screw around the flood control.
We want it to be as or better. Is that not correct? That is correct. Okay. I just want the community to understand that because there's a lot of people who want to debate that. The only other question I have for you on this one is there's a trail under, Broadway on the North Side. Is there also a trail on the South Side? So not as part it's a great question. Not as part of this project. So that is part of the long term, plans for for the park area, but we are not installing a south trail as part of this project. Because that was not clear at your at your last meeting you had with the
public. People were, I believe, were told that the south was also being done. And so In our last meeting, we corrected that. We weren't saying it was done. People want to know when it's going to be done. I said we were looking at that as a future project. We have to get this first phase done. People want the bridge next. And then the third phase would be trying to get the the trail underneath. Perfect. I have other questions, but we'll move ahead. Yep. Yep. Keep going. Okay. So on to construction impacts, I'm gonna turn it back over to Matt right now. Okay. Alfred. Alright. Construction. So I just wanna make people aware, most of the work here for this project,
for the for the sediment removal and for building the dam, is hauling rocks in and hauling sediment by the Broadway Bridge where we're gonna be putting a concrete, you could say, roadway in over the trail, the trail will be open, but I can put like stop signs like you do to make people look for the trucks coming by to have flaggers available. But we have a lot of trucks hauling in and out from that location. The green line is the return line, the blue line is the going out line. This map shows where that's at. We have a facility out at KR3, the reservoir right across from the Kalmar Landfill.
That we built a facility to take all this material, ideally sandy material and stuff, if a contractor wanted to take it somewhere they can, like we have done other times, they'd use it for construction material, but we have a facility big enough to take all the material. I just want to make you aware of the route. There will be a lot of trucks driving eight, nine hours a day. You know, winter times it's not as much daylight but there will be a lot of trucks coming in and out along these routes. Again this is, and then on where the, I just mentioned the snow dump is, I have the loadout facility and we're looking at one on the South Side of
the road so that they can be working, in part of the river to move material out because we're going to have another project I'm gonna mention quickly, a siphon project going on in the wintertime to get across the river. So they'll have two different loadout facilities using for the sediment to remove it to keep up with the time frame, so that's what we're looking at here. We'll be shutting down a couple of lanes there on the north side so the trucks can get in and out safely. We'll be put in traffic both ways still but it will be just reducing it there by the, the bridge. Also during the wintertime because of these activities, there will be also closing down the trails.
I'll get to that in a second for the wintertime. Here's just that same route for when we're doing that load out. So here's for the sanitary site, we're putting a sanitary sewer across the lake when the lake's down, that's another project that's not tied to the Silver Lake project, it has to be done at the same time, and it has to go through some retaining walls and through the trail there right next to the bridge. So this paint shows the trails and the wintertime that will be shut down until we get that siphon across and can reestablish the trails especially on the West Side. And then we can get those paved so it's like,
you know, May, late May before we can usually get them paved. That's the first phase for the winter. At the same time, we want to continue that sewer project all the way down Seventh, so we're reducing Seventh to two lanes, one in each direction. This will all be on the North Side, and we'll be maintaining one access across right around the park for pedestrians like there is now, there is a stoplight there. We'll use that until they impact with the construction. They'll put temporary ones in so to make sure everybody in the park can get to the new facilities on the South. So it'll be open the entire time.
There's a few minor crossings, connecting services we'll have to do temporarily. But the main thing is Seventh Street is open. We'll be on the North Side getting the sewer project done. So we're prepared for future development to the South and keep this going because that's part of our sewer master plan to keep this. This was like our number one project on our sewer master plan list. So we'd like to get it done and get out of here so we're not bothering anybody after all this project is done. And I think yeah, this is Eleventh Avenue is the big one. We do have to cross Eleventh Avenue, so Eleventh Avenue and Seventh will be closed until that work's done,
which will still be at least come from, the West to get to everything you need to do at that time. The big one. Oops. Somebody else is next. So that was kinda quick. Yeah. Any questions? Yeah. I'm gonna so just one thing I do wanna emphasize because one one of the things that we had heard as part of the Council Member Palmer. Oh, sorry. Good. Finish your statement. One of the one of the things that we did here as part of the the open house, as well as we've had a few people reach out just with concerns, the timing of the new Silver Lake Aquatic Center with this construction,
we recognize, is not ideal. And so, that's very sensitive, and and we are doing everything we can to be able to, one, get this work done and be be out of there, recognizing that it will that the opening of that aquatic center most likely will hit, you know, when Seventh Street is is under construction with the sewer. And so, doing everything we can to keep those two lanes open, keep the trails on the north and south as well as providing that crossing, recognizing that, you know, the parking lot up on East Silver Lake Drive is used as overflow.
So making sure that we can get people to and from that as well as the skate park opening as well. So, we looked at several different options, either delaying this, working with parks on their timelines and what ultimately our recommendation is is to move through there as fast as we can and minimize the impact, to the parks and the users. Well, I mean, to that point and we just found that out last week that you were planning on screwing around in front of our new pool. And I cannot even believe that you're trying to do that. That, to me, is the most it's just unacceptable.
And so, you're going to have to, in my opinion, come up with a different way, of doing this when you're not there in June, July and August. And you can do that. It may not be what you want to do, but I think June, July and August, when that pool is open and if you look at this intersection of Eleventh Avenue and Seventh Street, you're gonna tell me that if I live on Fourteenth Avenue, NE, I'm gonna have to go all the way around and go to the pool. And in the most time that we use this this, park is in the summertime. So for me, it's a no go if you decide that you're going to do this,
the sewer project at this time. If you tell me we'll be done in May or we'll come back in October, I'm fine with that. But I can't believe the city council wants to spend money on a new pool and then have construction in front of it. People are just going to laugh at us. And that's not acceptable, so And I don't think I stand alone on that. Okay with me answering that question? Absolutely. Go ahead. So, Juan, thank you for those comments. So I will say from a And they're not new. Yep. And I will say from a staffing standpoint, this And I will take ownership of this.
It may not have been as clearly articulated as it should have been of the timing of these projects. But when we brought forward the request to do the engineering for the siphon project and the sewer extension, we've been very, very consistent in saying that we need to do this as part of the lake drawdown in order to get that siphon in. We've had clear direction from the state of Minnesota that they're not gonna give us another permit to draw down the lake to do that siphon. And the sewer extension is a big part of this. And we also put it in that request for council action of the timing to
be able to do this in 2026. So I I take ownership of not articulating and saying this is gonna has the potential of a direct impact with the aquatics. But, we had, tried to forecast the need to do this project. In regards to the timing and access, I'll defer to I guess, in regards so the other thing is from a construction standpoint, as you know, there's a lot of weather impacts. We will be doing everything we can during the the winter time frame and trying to get as much done as possible prior to, the opening of that pool and and the time.
But as you know, there's weather impacts and things like that that we just can't guarantee. But we'll do what we can, and then I'll defer to Matt in regards to the detour and access to the site. But to my point, you you at Soldier's Field, at the golf course, you put in the the temporary sewer in there and you're not using it because it was timely. You could be, right now, this year, have put that sewer in and up to the siphon and and and hold up to it. So I mean, this is a the pool's being built this year. No one's at the pool. You could have done it this year. You still can do it this year if you want to.
So the project has not been fully engineered, and we are not prepared to take that project out for bid right now, Matt. Anything else? So from that standpoint, I can't this next piece ready to go, with that and and do construction all at once. Anything else you would add, I guess, to that, Matt? Well, yeah. Part of it is also how we have to temporarily put sewer in for existing sewers out and tie it in. It really can't put a dummy sewer in there and not have it go live right away and wait for a period of time, that would be a challenge for constructability. So we're basing this on the best constructability that we need to get it done
the fastest. There's an opportunity that we could be well past the pool by July. But, like I said, weather, I can't guarantee it. And if you don't do it during our construction season and you say you can't build it during the normal construction season, that risks having roads that won't be paved and left gravel all winter which is not acceptable either. So it's one of those things of, do you want to have a road that never gets paved and is closed all winter, or do you want to try to work with it, you have full access to the pool, I know it's not a pretty sight looking out there, but you have access to the pool and then we get it done and we're
out of there, Don't have to come back a year later and do it again or something. That's how we looked at it. And then, Matt, can you answer it? I wanna get at your question and concern about access at Eleventh Avenue there. Can can you restate the question? Sorry, council member. I can't. Well, you're closing the whole intersection. And so you had almost all of Northeast Rochester, all the way from Century, you're gonna have to go all the way to Broadway to come to the to the new pool. And anybody on Center Street isn't gonna be able to come down there. They're gonna have to go over to Broadway or Third Avenue and and come back around. It it makes no sense to do that. And as far as Okay.
You, you you asked your question. If you can just give a brief answer, we do have three council members. I think, council member Palmer, you made your point. If, we do have three council members on the docket now. So any more to add on this? Oh, just one thing is that is a 66 inch sewer through the middle of the intersection, so there's no way to keep any part of it open and safely construct the pipe because of where it has to go. So it won't be a full closure, unfortunately. Council member Wahl. Thank you. Thank you. I, and I thank mister Crawford. I feel just a little bit validated because when he opened up,
he talked about a new dam instead of a modified dam. Yeah. Because I think that's what most people will see is a very new, structure that we have. I get the question often, would it be fair to say, although there are steps yet to happen, that there's almost certainly gonna be a drawdown, this winter and dredging this winter? That that is what we are shooting for, and our current schedule is to be able to get those permits coming in on council approval, but that's still the timeline that we're under. Okay. We've worked with the corps and and the DNR to know that we wanna start
November 1, so we get the drawdown done and get this all worked on, and they're working with us. So they're they're confident, but there are also other agencies. You never know what's gonna happen, but I we think we should be good by then. Okay. The only thing I would add to that is we have seen a pretty significant delay with the Army Corps of Engineers. We appreciate they're trying to move this along, but, with some of their funding cuts and staffing shortfalls, we haven't seen a delay from what we were initially planning. So I'm very appreciative of, the new dam and its placement. You heard me say that when I was a little bit surprised by that a few months ago on,
our tour. I assume that some of the new dam costs, I think you pretty much referred to that, is due to the fact that it's no longer at kind of a choke point, but it's moved to a a a place where we have to just wall off more water. Is that part of the cost, I guess? No. I mean, the cost really it's gotten longer to go underneath, so we've gotta extend it. So it's more rock cost. We gotta fill in that impact. So that's for a lot of the cost. The wall itself, it might be a little more steel in there for for extending where we put it in to get it more curved. You did you'll show it straight. So, I mean, yes, those are all impacts,
but I'm thinking the number one I'm seeing is the rock cost. K. Thank you. Council member Fredericks. Yeah. Council member Palmer is missing the silver lining and the good news. Short lines at the Silver Lake Pool next year. It's gonna be great. Is that what you've been waiting for? Okay. I'm gonna lighten it up a little bit. Council member Keane. Yeah. I just wanna make sure I understand you I I have not heard a sewer extension being called a siphon before. Is there something unique happening here that I need to understand? Do you wanna describe the siphon project? Well, the siphon is where we cross under rivers.
You usually have a grade issue, you have to go down. And a natural thing called a siphon uses velocity without any mechanical needs to move sewage down under the river and back up again. So that's what we need there and the old ones that have been there for quite a long time, so we're putting a new one in that will help that'll be there for the future development. Okay. And I don't wanna get too much into this, but you group up the project to be dredging and the dam and the shore and the pylon, but you don't include this in it. Is there is that a funding statement? Is that, like a simplification? I'm just trying to make sure I understand why things get grouped.
Well, some of it is it's a bidding contractor, so the ones that do siphon sewer work are significantly different than the one that do all the earthwork. So it's hard to combine them because then you sometimes don't see the savings you need. Yeah. Although from the public's perspective, you can see them all happening on the same road. Yes. Okay. I too have Councilmember Walls' concern here of saying we're just about in August. We had a schedule that said we want to start work in November. That means we've got to go out we, this group has to approve going out for bids. I mean, if we don't do it in August Well, we've already you've already approved going out for bids. So you just have to approve the bids when they come out.
Alright. So that's the key thing. That's one's one thing. That that helps cut down the timeline. Okay. So you and that I mean, I think that could come to us one of the meetings in September. Is that kind of the timeline that's I would say probably October is what we're gonna be shooting for for this. Wow. Early October is kinda we're thinking with the permitting. We wanna make sure all the issues with the permits are well resolved before we just go out for bids. Because otherwise if we get bids and we have to sit on them until permits that can make a delay issue. So we wanna be very confident that we're gonna get our permits.
Very good. Last thing, just a sort of a public vote of I know that these kind of projects are complex and we're going to run into things like these Swales Net and I appreciate they're being worked through. I think they are normal complex project kind of problems as opposed to, oh, nobody expected this. So I'm glad to see he's working through it and I have good confidence that we'll get there and be be able to start work in November. Thank you. Council member Palmer. Yeah. I have one simple question for, miss Elms. So how much money do we have in this $19.89 flood control dollars?
I'll defer to Aaron Lochstein. Mister Lochstein? I don't have those numbers in front of me, and I don't have them memorized. But we are 14. So we are working through evaluating again the cost in comparison, you know, to that. What I can say is our preliminary assessment is, again, based on the outline initially that we're looking at that there will be sufficient funding. Plus, if you remember when we've talked about this previously, we we think it's important that we also maintain a reserve, should a major flooding event happen. So we would have enough to cover the project plus that that reserve. My recollection is that when we talked about this a year or two ago,
it was between 12 and 14,000,000. So if we have 12 or $14,000,000 that's from the 89 flood control dollars? Correct. I believe it's closer to about 10. Okay. Let's let's say it's $10,000,000. So I've got trails that are are in ill shape, and we t tell everybody we can't replace them because we don't have any money. So we've been hoarding this money and not fixing what we have for flood control. Being we get complaints all the time about our trail system that there's bumps and this doesn't work and that doesn't work. And and if we have $10,000,000 sitting there, why don't we spend some of it on on keeping what we have maintained?
So great question. And there always are. Come up. So one, we talked about this about a month ago as well. It is really, really important. A key component of those funds is that we have funds available to be able to do dredging or to be able to respond to a significant storm event that if we need to do armoring, structural support of the system. So a lot of those funds are set aside in reserves, to need to have access to it. In addition to that, there's been projects such as this one in which we've had funds that are in
the CIP and and set aside. So some of those there's other projects that have that have been in there. And then we have, just based on, our staff availability and time and things like that, looking at where are the greatest needs for the trails and continuing to do projects trail projects every single year, to try and stay ahead of it, recognizing it won't fully meet what everybody wants, but it allows us to utilize the funds that we have in a responsible way and still preserve the funds while the new, local sales tax pot is building back up to make sure we maintain those reserves
and be able to do additional projects in future. So out of the $10000000.5500000.0 dollars about is is for dredging. Correct? I don't have those numbers stopping that. I can get back to you about that. I think that's the problem of things. Okay. Yep. Thank you. Any further quest are you more presentation coming up? I have two more. Okay. Go ahead. This is yeah. For Silver Lake. Silver Lake. We're done. So oh, you you were talking about the next project. Oh, go ahead, Mayor. Thanks. I was just gonna say how much I appreciate, this presentation. We got a little bit of an idea as we did our tour earlier this
year, and I was so pleased, to find that you found something that's more acceptable to the neighbors. And I really want to just say thank you for the work you've done with the neighborhood because that was so important. There was so much misinformation, out there. And I think what we have is a better project, that the neighbors are going to be more supportive of. I certainly haven't had the outcry that I did years ago. So, I think, right is, is a good thing. And so I really appreciate all you do. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you, mayor. And thank you, mister Crawford. And, we'll start with Air Quality Alliance. Yep. Alright. We got a couple other project partners that'll come up here with me. So, yeah, you you know who I am, so I'm just gonna keep rolling with me,
with this. So with me tonight is Kayla Betzholt. She is our sustainability coordinator as well as Teresa with Olmsted County. And so, we had a couple other project partners that were here. Given that they were running long, they ended up having to leave. So I apologize for that. But So we have Lauren Jensen. We do have also Lauren Jensen from DMC here virtually. So if you have any questions for her, she is on speaker. Alright. Thank you. And then actually, Kayla, do you wanna introduce yourself just a little bit more and then get Teresa, and then we'll start the presentation? Good evening, council, council president, mayor. My name is Kayla Betzold, and I'm the city sustainability coordinator.
Been with the city for just a little bit over a year, and so there are some program partners here that have been a part of the alliance for for longer than I have, and they can kinda help fill in the blanks if you have any questions about the history of the group. Thank you. Good evening. I'm Teresa Blader. I work with Olmstead County within the Public Works Geographic Information Systems. So my primary role in the group is gonna be related to the mapping and the those kinds of things that you see with the data, but I've also been a part of the organization since 2019. So I'll also be able to answer some history questions if you have them.
Thank you. Great. Welcome. So with that, you'll note that much of the presentation is on the the city's role within this, but we also tried to provide a a high level overview of the entire Air Quality Alliance. One thing I should note, we are now referring to this as the Air Quality Alliance. We went through a recent rebranding of it. It used to be, called the Rochester Air Network. And I'll talk a little bit about why, why we did that. So, what we're gonna briefly cover here is I'm gonna provide an overview and background of, of what the Air Quality Alliance is. Kayla then is gonna talk about the partner roles,
responsibilities, again, largely focusing on the city's role in that, the types of air sensors, that that we have installed in the community. If we say monitors, keep in mind those are sensors. So I one and the same. The sensor data, how we store the data, what we're doing with the data, and then also the current project status and what we're looking at into the future, with the Air Quality Alliance. So, really quick, high level, it is a, collaborative effort between the Mayo Clinic, Olmsted County, City Of Rochester, and the destination of medical center. So that's we have the four project partners,
that are involved in this effort and have been largely from the start other than the very, very beginning. The key goals are enhancing air quality monitoring across Rochester and engaging the public about that air quality and actionable steps that residents can take as a result. The core activities and outcomes that we're involved with, one is the insulation and maintenance of those air quality sensors to ensure that we are providing trustworthy quality data. That's the key piece piece of this, and you'll hear that that's a large part of of especially the city's,
work here. Seamless public access to real time air quality monitoring, and, that's a large part of Olmsted County's role. And, again, Kayla's gonna get in detail, so I'll keep moving here. And then, some informational resources just on air quality impact. So what what does, air air impact mean to help? And so that comes in the form of the the meters, the website, the dashboards of the data, and then making sure that we're maintaining and storing that data effectively. So the quick background, the idea initially started in 2017 as the Rochester Air Network, and it was a research project. So set up by Matthew Spitten with,
Mayo Clinic. And it was the purpose and evaluation of what does a network air quality network look like. And his goal was to improve the health of individuals and communities through a deepened understanding of the link between air quality and human health and the impacts Yep, go ahead, Mayor Noren. Erin, I just want to add Go ahead, Mayor. Yeah. This is really fun to see for me because I was part of that original group in 2017 as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota. And so I was one of the ones running around the city with those air monitors, doing citizen science.
So it's really exciting. I appreciate you, mentioning how it started, and it's fun to see how far you've come. Sorry about that, Chris. Oh, no problem. You could do my job. Next time. So then in 2020, the first sensors were purchased and installed. And again, this was we had volunteers, Mayo Clinic, Olmsted County, City Of Rochester. Many of them were, actually, funded by DMC as well. And so those were installed primarily in the downtown area. And then, and then it expanded. So a couple things happened, though, along the way. And it really emphasized the need to have these sensors and the value that these
sensors provided to the community. And one of those was city council adopting the greenhouse gas goals. We recognized that, as part of that, we needed some of the data to help track some of that. And so it started to build on the value of this. Then in 2023, again, the set network, expanded to include additional sensors outside of just the downtown area to get a better, capture of of the citywide. Then in 2024, the sustainability resiliency community action plan was accepted by the city council. There are several things. If you remember,
if you were on the council at the time, there was a lot of discussion on the number of action items in there. And many of those are related to air quality. And so, again, it kinda tied into the value of this project. Then we started to see increased construction downtown in later 2024 and 2025. And we started to get a lot of questions about you know, we had some meters that had been pulled, and they said, why aren't these sensors out? Sorry, meters. Why aren't these sensors out? Where's the data? What does it mean? And so we started to get questions on it again, just emphasizing the importance of this work. And so then in 2025,
again, as we we kinda relooked at, as this thing has evolved over the years, and talked about, is it really the Rochester Air Network anymore, or is it more than that? And what we decided is that Air Quality Alliance is a better name, and we're looking for more project partners for people that wanna be involved and have more citizen science kind of components to it. And so, we did that rebranding and have been working through, what the next, vision looks like. And Kayla will talk about that. You know, I think the only other thing from a city standpoint that I want to emphasize is, we do annually, we've been fortunate to have a limited term intern work with a sustainability division to
help. And again, recognizing how this fit in with the SRC community work plan and interest, we were able to dedicate some of that entrance time to be able to do this work. Large part of getting the sensors out, making sure they were calibrated, developing standard operating procedures, things like that to help, make sure that this is maintained long term. So with the, the oh, sorry. One more before I turn it over to Kayla. The other thing is some people say, well, why is air quality important? Why would we why would we wanna, spend time doing this? The key feature, especially outdoor air quality, and there's a lot of tie with indoor air quality,
but it it affects everybody. And it is essential for a healthy community. But where we see some of the more vulnerable populations, especially in our children, older adults, as well as those that are already dealing with things like asthma and other air quality can have a significant impact on it. So being able to monitor those pollutants like particulate matter, especially at that 2.5, or lower And so anyway, sorry, 2.5 micrometers in diameter is the smaller. Those are inhalable. So that means you can breathe them in, they can impact you. So being able to monitor that,
Carbon monoxide, ozone, nitrogen dioxide, things like that are really important when we look at it from a health standpoint. And then some of the major sources of of air pollution, I won't go through all of them. But industrial activities, these are largely the ones that are permitted by the state. They do have to get air permits and have to monitor for it. But there's still emissions that come from that. Vehicle emissions is another large source. And then smoke from burning, not just burning woody debris in the backyard, but we've all been experiencing the impacts of smoke from fires, and things like that,
so Thank you. All right. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about the, the partner roles of the Air Quality Alliance. So we are kind of still evolving the roles of all the partners, but at a high level, each of our organizations kind of support the program in different ways. So the city of Rochester really leads on the installation and the maintenance of the sensor network itself. We help to coordinate communications between all of the partners, and we support the long term planning for the group. Olmsted County, and, Teresa is part of that team, provides the technical expertise, through multiple different departments, so through public health,
through environmental services, and through GIS. They lead on the development of the public facing map and website where all of our data is, publicly available, and then they support on the sensor upkeep, registration, and then group communications. DMC serves as the primary funder for sensor purchases and network growth, so they've been really great in helping us to expand our network over the years, and they contribute to the installation, again, registration and maintenance of the system. If you can't tell, there's a lot that goes into that, so all of the partners kind of help with that. And then Mayo Clinic brings kind of the scientific and medical expertise to the group.
So and then they also assist with, the colocation studies, the data validation that we do with, the data from those studies, and kind of help to strengthen this connection to public health, and science communication. So again, like Erin mentioned, in 2022, city council adopted science based greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, which highlight the link between permitted facilities and transportation are two large, sectors of air quality pollution as well. Our our sustainability and resiliency plan, as you can see here, include targeted air quality strategies under the topic area of environmental health,
and this kind of lists some of, the tactics. So sharing that data with the broader community, developing an air quality report, evaluating potential ordinances to address burning and emissions, and expanding the air quality program, which is what we're working on. When it comes to the city's responsibilities, the city's portion of the initiative is led by myself, the sustainability coordinator in the sustainability division, with support from our, part time term limited sustainability intern. He joined our team in June 2025, so it's been a really it's been really great to have someone that's kind of
really focused on this work and moving it forward, documenting processes, streamlining, things like that. So Nolan really helps, in several different areas. He helps with coordinating meetings and partner activities, kind of keeping things organized with the group, going out and maintaining, installing, and maintaining all of the sensors that we have around the community. He's been great with assisting with our data, calibration, colocation, and then data validation studies. We actually have one. He started one on Friday, so we have a colocation study happening at Franklin Elementary right now. And then also helping to support community outreach through enhancements to our website and our
dashboard. Sensors across the city, and the colors represent the real time air quality, levels that they're reporting. So the color coded, index is called the air quality index, and it's based on 24 of exposure. It ranges from green, which means good air quality, to maroon, which indicates hazardous conditions. So the yellow and the orange signal increasing concern for sensitive groups, and then the red and the purple indicate growing health risks for the broader population. So these, colors on our map do change based on the data that they're reading in real
time. This network and the geographic distribution of the sensors really help us to understand neighborhood level air quality within the community. And next, we'll take a look at the types of air quality sensors that we have in the Air Quality Alliance. So each sensor kind of collects different, components of data, and so we'll talk a little bit about that. We have four types of sensors. PurpleAir version one. These, measure the fine particulate matter, which is the PM 2.5, and they report the data to the public facing map. We have the Purple Air version two, and the only difference here is that,
they're a little bit newer, so they actually have a ring around the bottom that shows a visual representation of that color that we looked at on the slide before. So it shows the color coding of the actual data that it's, measuring. And then we have two types of Isola sensors. So these are more advanced sensors, and they, measure and provide additional data, including, various greenhouse gases and some environmental conditions. And so we'll get into isolus sensors in just a minute here. This kind of just shows the comparison different types. So the Alliance currently has 12 PurpleAir sensors installed across the community.
We have two additional that are in the process of being installed. There's a lot of coordination with partners and Wi Fi access and things like that. So we have two kind of in the queue and then, three additional and some other sensors that are, again, in a colocation study right now, before they will be redeployed. So again, these measure the fine particulate matter, PM 2.5, and the data is available on the public map. The first group of ISOLIS sensors, version one, were installed at prominent downtown locations. These sensors measure a broader range of pollutants,
like we said. So some greenhouse gases and then some environmental conditions like temperature and humidity. These do not have the capability, based on the technology and the sensors, to live report, project last week and integrated a new dashboard onto our website. So that when you go onto our website, you can click on that, and it does display the sensors and the pollutants that they measure over time. So essentially, we're pulling the data through on the back end and showing a graph on the website. We do have the data. It's been measuring since these were installed, and purchased and installed in 2020, and we have a solution now so that the data is available on the map.
And then Vaisala version two are the Olmsted County owned sensors. So these are installed at the OC Building and at RCTC. Again, they're measuring the same things as the other Vaisala sensors. However, because they're a newer version of Vaisala, these do have the technology to integrate onto the public map. So these are, there are with they do have live integration. So just a slide here about this, sensor data calibration and validation study that we do. So, really, the goal of this is to maintain the reliable air quality,
data. So we talked about it being publicly accessible. Our other main priority is that it's trustworthy and reliable. So what we do here is, we take the sensors down at least once a year, and we calibrate and validate those sensors to make sure that they're continuing to provide accurate and reach out to partners. We go out, physically take the sensors down, and then we bring them to Franklin Elementary, sort of primary calibration site. On top of Franklin Elementary, there's an MPC Minnesota Pollution Control Agency or MPCA sensor. This is a reference grade sensor, and so we're able to keep these sensors, on the roof of Franklin Elementary for three to six weeks.
They measure data in comparison to the MPCA sensor. We take them down. We pull both datasets, and then we graph those datasets to kind of compare the data to make sure that our sensors are still measuring, what the MPCA, similar to what the MPCA sensor is is measuring. Once the study is complete and the data validation has been graphed and analyzed, the sensors are reinstalled and then the monitoring continues. Mhmm. The reinstallation process is a question just and and and this is very technical. But so is MPCA,
date sensor, like, always accurate? I mean, how do you know that that one is accurate to compare ours to? That's a great question. I'm not sure the frequency. I don't know if you know how often the MPCA is doing the calibration on their own sensor. But they certainly have a process for that as well. Yep. So the MPCA meter. So they are the statewide experts in air quality monitoring across the state. And so they calibrate those meters. They are the ones that then are are set so that other communities that are using to validate against to provide that confidence that they're Yep.
Alright. Thank you. And there is a certain EPA process that they follow as well. So there is a lot, again, of manual kind of physical work with this coordination with site partners, and it can be a little bit clunky, but we're thankful to kind of have someone to focus his work and priority on this. So kind of looking at next steps of the network, we are going into strategic planning as an organization, so we're really excited about this. We're really looking to kind of ensure long term success of this network. We've, you know, kind of, I think, evolved over the years, and we're in this place where we really have an opportunity to get organized and
really think through what is the next, you know, three to five years of this group and what does it look like. So we're gonna talk about roles and responsibilities, ownership of sensors, replacement parts, things like that. More formal structure for these calibration studies, so what is the frequency, who conducts them? You know, we'll talk data, access and usage. So, you know, what is kind of the long term sustainability of all of this data that we're collecting? And then on the governance side, we're talking about kind of some bylaws or some decision making frameworks as a group just so that we can all be on the same page about what our roles
and responsibilities are and how we make decisions, as a collaborative. And then finally, we'll identify some future areas, so thinking about new sensor locations, some emerging technologies, and then just kind of, again, long term data sustainability. And that's all we have for you today. Thank you so much for your time, and, we would love to take any questions or thoughts or feedback that you have on on the program. Council member Miller. Thank you for the presentation. I I I think especially in light of earlier talk about outdoor recreation too, making sure that we're aware and keeping our our children, every community member safe and well informed to make their own health choices is critical
as we move forward. A couple of questions about one, there was a comment about encouraging citizen scientists. Obviously, with some of the monitors, PurpleAir, they automatically go to a a public map. Should should you opt in, there are more sensors in the community than just this Air Quality Alliance sensors. So how do you think about the integration of those different data points? And if you're encouraging people to be more active in this, is there a a pathway to either just using the purple air map rather than creating a new one or better integrating those
so that people don't see one set of sensors on one and a different subset of sensors on another? I can. You wanna take that? Yep. So all of it's pretty technology dependent, and so kind of my role in the group has been navigating that. And so, ideally, we have a singular map with sensors of all different brands in one location. So the PurpleAir, we basically are pulling that data from the the official PurpleAir map and bringing it into this geographic information systems map. And so we're also doing that with the base solid data. So Kayla mentioned that some of the older sensors don't have that real time.
And so, you know, our strategy moving forward as we're engaging with the community is to be open to different brands of sensors and then to also navigate what how is it possible to bring those into our map and things like that. So it's definitely a thing that we wanna keep in mind. And we're finding so far as we've talked with different agencies in the region who are doing, you know, data work like this, is that there's user friendly sensors and there's not user friendly sensors. And so at this point, we've experienced PurpleAir and Vaisala,
and we are sort of finding that as far as low cost sensors go, that PurpleAir is really user friendly. It's easy to plug in. It's easy to integrate into our our local map. And so at this point, that's the one we're kind of advertising for people if they would like to participate and they wanna engage. We have a survey on our website. If you just Google Air Quality Alliance, it'll bring you pretty much directly to our website. And we have a survey on there for people to fill out if they'd like to participate in any capacity and if they're interested in hosting a sensor or if they already have a sensor and what brand it is.
So we're definitely welcoming all sensors to the table. Great. I I actually have one at my house. Oh, really? Great. Well, you should fill out our survey. Join. My my second question is about then the public facing information beyond the website. Obviously, people are in the community. There are other pieces of information, you know, bank buildings that have the current temperature and time and those kind of things. Are there opportunities, and do you have, sort of plans to better integrate communication about current error levels, at least on the PM 2.5, around the color in different parts publicly in the communities, whether that's the TV at city hall or the government center,
somewhere in a public space, partners with Mayo Clinic, just so that people are regularly, seeing information about what the current air quality index is. Alright. Let me take that together. So, so and please chime in after afterwards. But so great questions. And I think so one of the things is we've been getting questions and comments like that. We've been getting questions about how does Rochester compare to other cities, questions on trends and things like that. And that it's all those questions and suggestions of things that we can do that really led to this strategic planning that Kayla talked about because we really wanna make
sure that any new things we add or we build excuse me, build off of, that it aligns with what the goals of this group are and that they can be sustained long term. Very, very minimal funding has been supported for this. It's 10% Achiela's time and we've had an intern. And like the other partners, they're fitting it in within their time. And we've been fortunate that the DMC and Olmsted County have been able to provide some funding support for those sensors. And so, again, trying to to do it with the resources that we have and really emphasizing whatever we do, we wanna make sure we're hitting on those right goals,
providing the information that's most beneficial for the community, and that it can be sustained, you know, long term. So anything else to add? Yeah. I'll say too that we're definitely open to sharing. We call it the dashboard. So that's our map with all the metrics in it and, like, temperature and humidity. And, you know, there's wind speed or wind direction in there as well and, like, environmental justice areas. So, like, we're the Air Quality Alliance is open to sharing that in whatever way is useful. And so, you know, there's been different conversations of what that could look like. I know for Olmsted County, we have little kiosk booths in different parts of the community for people to access
resources. And so we've discussed adding it there, and I know the the city of Rochester and DMC have had some different ideas as well. So definitely open to that and wanting to make it as as publicly available as it is helpful for people. Okay. I'll just put in a plug. It would be great to see as we build new buildings, particularly parks, things in public spaces, having at least the version that has a visible color ring built into it seems like a an interesting part of just incrementally adding on to public facilities. And just oh. Note on that.
We're in the process of installing one at, John Marshall High School. So one of our partners is RPS, and they're installing it at that greenhouse right outside of the front of the school. And so they're really excited to kind of integrate some environmental education, with the kids in the greenhouse and that air quality sensor with the ring on it. So thank you. Council member Wall. Thank you. Even with this Even with its older technology, I understand the VISALA, ones, the first four were were quite expensive. Okay. And and the I really appreciate the fact that the data is now, on the dashboard. Does it look different because it's a collection,
over time rather than it's not real time? What does it show, those four? Yeah. Great question. So the real time dashboard initially, will be above, and it just shows kind of the last readings within the last two to ten minutes depending on when that data came in. There's gonna be a dashboard below, and it's just gonna show, like, a a line graph over time as to I believe right now it's set up as we're sort of exploring how to make it look, you know, usable for the community. It's gonna show the the monthly average because it's a lot. If you think about minute data over two years,
it's a lot of data. So, anyway, right now it's summarized. So, like, the monthly average for that particular measure over the since 2023, I believe, is how far back, we have the data right now. So you'll just see a line graph for that particular chemical. Because they pull out more chemicals, the greenhouse gases. Yes. Correct. So that probably is going to be less effective for people who want to know, should I walk my dog? Yeah. Especially the historical data, you know, obviously, is gonna you can't do anything about it now. It's what's happened. But the the initial real time map is probably more along those lines of,
like, you can open it up and see, oh, everything's green today. I probably if I'm if I'm asthmatic, I maybe don't have to be as concerned as if I was about to go outside and it was all red. So I would say the real time map is one of those more, like, in the moment decision making tools. And then maybe for those of us who are interested in the the long term changes, we can flip down to the historical dashboard and see some of that. And it the dashboards may evolve over time as we get feedback of, like, what people wanna see. That's kind of my role is to sort of take feedback from people and to
make it into information that's the most useful. So definitely open for feedback. And the other thing I would plug is that the new Vaisala, though, do provide that real time. So that's there, and then you can still see it in comparison to the historical data for the older ones. Thank you. And, beyond the communication of current, air quality and, what has isn't in the recent past, does that data, suggest a course of action for us as a city? I will say that one weakness in our group right now is we do not
possess an air quality data scientist. So at this point, we are are people in our different departments and our avenues who appreciate good having good air quality. And so I think a key to answering those kinds of questions is gonna be, you know, our collaborations with MPCA. And so I just wanna be careful that we're scientists or graduate, you know, program people who are really studying air quality to then sort of make those analyses. Mhmm. And so at this point, we're just presenting the data. And people are welcome to try to wrap their head around it and make,
you know, any sort of conclusions that they want. But it is it is really just we're presenting the data and do what it what you will at this point. You know? I I I'm sure we'd all love our group to expand to fill more of that role to make suggestions, but I can see that being something that happens where we're saying, this is what we're seeing, and these are the suggestions that we have for the council or the county board or or whatever. So I think that's really important. I just don't think we're equipped right now to quite have play that role for the council.
I suppose I'm I'm, directing, my attention perhaps to downtown construction. And, you know, if we consistently saw that there were some oranges or reds there and it was better on the outskirts, does that information lead us to some action over construction? Or I I I I I don't know exactly what I'm asking, but, I think you are right, though. I think that there is potential for that, you know, especially you know, we don't right now, it's not like you can go back historically and precisely say this month was really
high and and you'd have to dig up what activities were happening at that point. But I do think that's possible. And I think if you opened it up right now, you're gonna look and you're gonna be like, woah. What was going on? Like, those are great questions to come up, and I think that that is very natural. Because when you look at the historical data for the downtown Vaisala sensors, it is kind of interesting. So I highly recommend anybody who gets the chance to take a look at that data, and and I think it'll get your gears turning. Thanks. But just to council member Walls' point.
So the real time we can look at real time data on the particulate matter now. You can pull that out from the overall good day, bad day at this point. So Correct. Yep. That real time data is available at this very moment. Great. Thank you. Council member, Keane. Yeah. Just a couple points. One is I I, after going through or playing around a little bit with the charts I was given, I said, well, let me go out and look at some of that data. And I had difficulty finding it. I searched on the just normal search.
I didn't I just went to the county site and did AQA or a and the city's and I I had trouble getting access to it. So I'll pass it along to the team. I I have I claim no great expertise in doing this, but I couldn't lay my hands on it. And after a couple minutes, I think I got distracted and didn't didn't try anymore. I have heard that just, again, rule of thumb, this isn't like watching motions. But as you move these closer to our arterial our our main, you know, US Highway Fifty Two's and Highway Fourteens and even Broadways,
the air quality drops as you get closer to our thing. And, basically, our main air quality internally created issues are with transportation, and there's not a lot of Maine industry here doing it. Do you think that's a bad reading of or just a oversimplification? I'm not asking you to judge whether it's right or not, but is there places like, no. This construction thing is a huge thing. Or if if, if I think, you know, you look at the air quality right now, it's fire. That's nothing like that's just our our environment. That's not anything we have control over.
So very good question. And what I would say is we do not have the expertise amongst this group to be able to answer those level of questions. But again, we appreciate the feedback because those are the types of things that have been coming. And if that's important, you know, we do have communication with the MPCA and other experts in there. But also, as we evaluate, potential changes in building out this alliance and making requests to the community to be able to say, is someone an air quality expert, that can provide assistance and participate on this alliance beyond what like the Mayo Clinic
is being able to provide, that's an ask that we can make. And so I appreciate these types of questions. And you're not the first one that has asked that again, which has led to this. We need to have more discussions of what is of most importance. Because right now, our focus is on is making sure that we have the sensors out there, that the data is accurate, that that it can be trusted, that the data is available for those that wanna dig into, into it deeper, so that we can start going down some of those paths. And again, I appreciate those. All the the base requirements to have scientific data.
So I think we're going about that the right way. And I'll say too, when I look at our partner roles, I would think that kind of expertise hopefully could come from Mayo versus the city or the county and just looking at the different, groupings. Back on saying when you said it kind of stuck with me that since we made this commitment to reducing greenhouse gases, we needed these measurements. And I was kind of thrown off with that because I think that's more of our contribution to the, bigger community than it is what impacts we have on ourselves. Can you comment on that? Yeah, and I apologize if that's how I said it or that's how I came across.
My point was, is that once we had some of these centers out in the community, there was key decisions that the council made, like the greenhouse gas that the council made, like the greenhouse gas Yeah. Yeah. Specifically. And that having reliable data and access to it and starting to establish those trends long term to be able to see that is important and can be used, in decision making and things like that or to be able to evaluate the success of it. So it was some of those things that, again, it started more as research, and we started to see a lot of these connection points that said, oh We can use this data and it'll aid in this area.
And so those were just some of the key things that have have come along. Very good. I see. Validate, this I might overreact to how I heard it. So that's helpful. As far as, you know, the base science or what the city's role or the county's role, I do appreciate that idea of trying to have a data set that we're we create and we have going forward that can be used looking back and hopefully projecting forward. But I hopefully, those investments are balanced with other sustainability investments we could be making with buildings or with other short transportation. So, with that, I appreciate you guys coming and doing the update,
and, I support your work. Mayor Norton. Just a quick end. So I started by telling you I I did this as part of my graduate work, and it was a great project working with all the folks that are still involved, Mayo Clinic and Sierra Club, Matt, and others. And we had much less sophisticated monitors at that time. But we carried them and sat for hours in certain places in town and collected the data and took it back. And, I had the opportunity to sit over by Civic Center Drive, and it was the one time my monitor kind of started showing some concerns. And it was because while I was there,
first thing in the morning, it was, a, it was commuting time, but it was also the time all the semis were coming by, and they were coming by one after another. So that was one thing I thought, okay, well this is interesting, right? Some of these heavy traffic areas are are at least showing, even though, you know, we're not a big city in the way many other cities are. But the one time I did have it register, like, off the chart, was when I had gone in for lunch to a building, and they had had a fire in their kitchen, and the particulates inside that building registered in the dangerous point.
I won't mention the name of the place, it's not here anymore, but that was it, you know, that was like it can happen indoor air quality as well, and we forget that sometimes. You know, some fires, particularly particulates and plastics and wood and all that, affects our lungs there too. So, anyway, that's it. Great. Great great work. Great partnership. I would agree with, council member McKeen. I did try to navigate it. And so, you know, the more you can make it user friendly, I know it's you know, you're you're working on all ends, but I think I think it would be an extremely valuable as the public sees
it and and and is aware of it, of the concept of the city of health here. So thank you. Do you have a tip for how people can find it the easiest? Well, I will say you probably can't find it directly via, like, Olmsted County's website because we're just not oh, I what's that? It is on our, like, promotional sustainability website. It's available on the City of Rochester sustainability website. But we are sort of in this transition right now, like Kayla mentioned, like, sort of establishing a charter. And so we are starting to become public,
but we're not trying to get ahead of, like, our our, communications and things like that. And so right now, if you just Googled air quality alliance, one of the first websites that should show up is air quality alliance. And you might even see that AI chat mentioned Rochester as, like, an air quality so we tried to pick a name that was unique that other people weren't currently doing the work with. So if you Google Air Quality Alliance, you should get to that website. And there's a page on that website about air quality, which will share that data and also kind of give some general information about air
quality. Great. Thank you. Council member Miller? Just last point on that. I mean, even thinking about I I've looked at the map several times over the course of years, and it does seem like there's generally a consensus air quality number across the city. So I'm curious even if we could pick one sensor, perhaps one of the downtown ones or near city hall, and just publish it on a prominent place where people are already going, whether that's the rochestermn.gov website or something that people are prompted to discover it and not having to go to Google and search Air Quality Alliance and know that that's the name.
I think it's great that there are all these partners, but we each individually have, platforms, you know, and I I think we would do our community a good service to educate them practically about what is their quality and what is the current value and then link them perhaps to more information. So I think we can add that to the things that we can discuss as as a group and All right. Randy, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I did receive a note that, some there has been a hand up online to answer questions that hasn't been noted. So
maybe it's moot now. I'm not sure. But Maybe Lauren Jensen from DSO. Oh, Lauren, did you wanna add So Going once, going twice? Maybe after the fact. Yep. K. We are thank you. And, Kayla and Aaron, stay where you are, and we're going to move to electric vehicle charging. I really need the point. Battery time. Still on. Oh, there we go. Did you move it or did I? Okay. Alright. We will we'll see. We'll try and figure this out. So, you know Kayla and I, so we're just gonna keep rolling here. So, the big thing that we wanna talk about tonight is electric vehicle charging policy.
We did call it number one. When I talk about number steps, we'll we'll talk about what we're envisioning for next steps. But, really quickly, we're gonna walk through some background information. We'll talk about KWH, kilowatt, per hour versus hourly, rates. And again, some data that we've been able to to pull, potential next steps based on the feedback that we received tonight and, some discussion. So really quickly, why are we here today even talking about the potential for a policy? One, the city currently does not have a formal electric vehicle policy. And as a result of that, it's led to some inconsistencies in purchasing,
electric vehicle charges. And when I say city owned, let me emphasize everything we're gonna talk about here today is city owned. So there are publicly available chargers. We're talking about, when we say public, these are city owned chargers. So anyways, it's led to some inconsistencies just on the purchasing of the chargers, or many of those have come from grants. Pricing, so some of the meters, the chargers are priced different. Access, so just community access to those chargers. And just implementation of EV charging across, again, city owned sites. And so with the growing number of EV chargers as well as EV users within
the city, but especially those charged city owned chargers at public sites, where our fear is that it's going to lead to more inconsistencies. And so as we evaluated this, we felt the need to bring it forward. And one of the big things, that it could have is budget impacts on the future. The other thing I wanna emphasize is, so sustainability vision seems to be the place where if it isn't a true fit in a certain department or division, it comes to sustainability. So this one came up that we had a bunch of questions on EV chargers, and Kale and I are like, okay. We'll take it on. And, so we saw a need,
and we figured we would we would bring this forward. So I wanna note that that we we do work with facilities. We are working with our our parking and transit, partners as well as, as we go through this because that's where the the chargers are. So, key questions for the city council to think about as we go through the presentation. And I'm gonna ask these questions again. One, should we pursue an EV charging rate policy? What we found as we started to go through research and all that, we can go down a lot of different rabbit trails. And before we did that, we wanted to make sure,
are you even interested in a policy? Because if not, we're gonna stop our research, and we're gonna go work on other things. So one is, should we pursue this charging rate policy? Second, is there a preferred pricing structure, either per hour or per kilowatt per hour? And we have some research to be able to show you to assist in that. I'll also say we have a recommendation on which route we think we should go. The the third question is how important is is it to keep rates competitive with other chargers? And the reason that comes into play is both revenue generation,
for recouping the cost, as well as you'll see the fourth one, which is cost sharing. And I you could also say the word subsidy. So we had a couple questions over how much are we subsidizing? I use cost sharing. Right now, there's a cost sharing between the user and the city. And so the fourth question is, is there a cost sharing range that, we should be aware of when we're developing the rate options? And the reason that plays in with number three is we could say, we want the user to pay a 100% of this. And by doing so, we might price ourself out to the point where people aren't even using it,
and therefore, you're not gonna generate the income that you need to be able to sustain that. So we need to be, in our research, be able to assess how many people do we think. If we price it higher, we're gonna see user rate usually drop, And so we need to set that price point at the right spot. So those are the four things, to keep in mind as we go through that. Hint, our recommendation is develop a formal policy. We feel the need for that based on a per KWH pricing structure. So Hello again, council council president,
mayor. Kayla Betzold, sustainability coordinator. I'm here to provide some background information and a little bit about the research that we did. So this slide is just kind of, baseline setting, setting just to kind of explain the different levels of EV charging. So level one, two, and then the DC fast charging. So the level one is the kind that you would most likely see at home. Level two is more common in public settings like city facilities, parking lots, workplaces. And then the fast charging, provides rapid charging, so in under an hour. Typically, you see these near highways or freeways, and they're pretty expensive to install and operate.
The city of Rochester does have level two chargers installed throughout the community, and so the focus of the rest of this presentation is on level two chargers, and setting a rate structure specifically for level two chargers. Level three fast charging is currently cost prohibitive for the city to own and operate due to the large first cost with the charging stations themselves and the utility demand charges that we would incur with the level three charger. So it remains kind of a longer term option, an opportunity that we could explore with partners and and, you know, with, technology and funding options in the future. So the current network of city owned EV charging stations.
So in total, the city owns and operates 12 charging stations, including both single port and dual port level twos. We have these, kind of at key sites, so downtown parking ramps and city facilities, like the development services and infrastructure center. And the rates do vary by location. So some chargers are free to use, while other chargers, such as the one in First Street Ramp and Ramp 6, charge between 75¢ to $2 per hour depending on the time of day. So most of the infrastructure, so far has been funded through the parking enterprise fund with,
RPU and the general fund kind of supporting a little bit on some of those chargers. Again, as Erin noted, we do anticipate this network to be expanding in future years. So we feel that, like, right now, there's a valuable window of opportunity for us to, you know, really standardize our approach when it comes to the rates kind of while the system is still manageable. So kind of looking at the difference between a kilowatt hour versus a per hour or hourly rate structure. We started this project by researching what are other Minnesota cities doing. What are they charging for for,
you know, public publicly owned EV charging stations. And what we found was that there is a wide variety of of different approaches with no clear statewide standard. So this slide kind of summarizes what we found in our research. The most common is the KWH rate, so this is about 36% of the communities. This is where, you know, drivers pay for the electricity that they use, similar to what we see with other utilities. Hourly rates are the next, most common that we saw that in 30% of cities followed, by limited free charging and then unrestricted free charging.
Pricing also varies really really widely with the cities that we saw. So hourly rates range from 25¢ per hour to $2 per hour. Kilowatt hour rates are anywhere from 10¢ to 44¢, averaging around 26¢ per kWh. So kind of this mixed research that we found with other Minnesota cities led us, to really kind of reinforce the need for us to create our own criteria and really kind of do our own analysis of what makes sense for Rochester. This slide gives you, this graph kind of gives you a look at the other publicly accessible level two
chargers in town. So these are not City Of Rochester, chargers. These are level two. So these are other publicly available level two two charging stations. Out of the stations that we found, almost half of them are free to use. So that's a little bit of an interesting piece to it. You know, in comparison other municipalities have have more fees and things like that. 38% were the KWH rate, with rates then ranging from 16¢ to 30¢ per KWH KWH with an average of 18. So the 18¢ is lower than the statewide average for KWH that we saw on
the previous slide. Only 15% of the chargers here in Rochester are, are currently using an hourly rate, and that rate is set at $2 per hour, and that is on the high side of the statewide average. It's a little bit different here. So as we looked at how other communities are pricing EV charging, we found that, again, the research was all over the board, and so we developed our own criteria to kind of evaluate what would work best for us. So we're focusing on three main areas, equity, so ensuring fair and affordable access for everyone, charging patterns, so understanding how two different,
you know, rate structures impact driver behavior. And then rate complexity, so making sure pricing is clear, and easy to understand. So first, we looked at the hourly, rate analysis. And so, again, charging by the hour is it's a simple model. It's easy to understand. It's familiar, but it does kind of come with trade offs, and one of those is the is equity. It doesn't account for differences in charging speeds or battery sizes. We have lots of different electric vehicles. Older models will charge slower. Vehicles with smaller batteries will charge slower. So this does mean that, you know,
drivers of smaller or slower charging vehicles are oftentimes paying more, for the same, amount of energy. So everyone is billed for the time that they're at the charging station and not for the actual amount of electricity that they're using. Charging behavior is also impacted by this. So without idle fees in place, there's really little incentive for drivers to move their car once charging is complete. Also, we're seeing a lot of the free charging, free chargers at a lot of, the city owned sites, and so, again, not really an incentive to to move the vehicle. We are finding, pulling some data from our charge point,
we're finding that at city owned stations, vehicles are currently staying plugged in for an average of one hour after they finish charging. It's also interesting to note here that EVs do pull more electricity during the first hour that they're that they're plugged in, and so extended sessions can reduce that overall station efficiency. Looking at rate complexity, it is very easy to understand. So you just take the number of hours at the station times the hourly rate, and that kind of gives you a good idea of of what you'll pay at the end of the session. So it is a more user friendly model in that sense especially for someone who might not be as familiar with EV charging.
Looking at the k w a, k w h, rate analysis, we found that this offers a pricing model that more directly reflect reflects the actual electricity that's consumed at the site. So we do feel that this makes it more fair and transparent. It also mirrors how, like, how the utility is charging for electricity, so, you know, it's it's familiar and consistent in that sense as well. It's what you see on your electricity bill. Because, again, the user is billed for the electricity consumed, it eliminates that penalty that I talked about for, you know, users of or owners of older EVs or EVs with smaller batteries.
So all the users across the board pay for what they use, nothing more, nothing less. This pricing model can also lead to a more efficient charging, efficient station use. So typically, we see KWH rates paired with idle fees. So after a vehicle finishes charging, there would be, a a certain amount of time, and then after that, you would be notified. And if you still didn't move your vehicle after that, there would be an idle fee that would be incurred. So this does encourage drivers to unplug once charging is complete and reduces that congestion that we're seeing, at some of our charging stations where people are are kind of just staying there
all day. The main trade off here is that it can be less predictable for users, especially if you're a newer EV user, to estimate the amount of electricity that your vehicle will pull, over an hour or three hours or something like that. So it can kind of make cost planning a little bit more challenging. But when we do compare the two, we find that, the KWH rate really does align more with the criteria that we we outlined. So we see hourly rates easier to understand, but KWH pricing really supporting our long term our long term goals and criteria.
So again, as Erin stated, based on our research, our recommendation is to pursue a kilowatt hour rate for EV charging. This meets or somewhat somewhat or fully meets the criteria that we laid out when we kind of started the assessment here. And, again, if I didn't talk about this on the last few slides, it is, you know, directly charging for the electricity that's pulled from that station, so it makes it fair and equitable across all all different types of EVs. And we are seeing EV, vehicles, you know, that broaden to include a wider range of vehicles and user demographics.
Another interesting piece of a KWA rate structure is that it, offers regulatory alignment. So we're seeing state and federal programs require KWA some, potential alignment. And then it also does provide us with flexibility. So if we have electricity increases in the future or if we do want to consider level three charging, we can easily kind of, adjust the rates, and kind of make it pretty simple to add in level threes. I should note that those chargers along the freeways, those are all level three chargers that the state, the state and federal program. So if we go with KWH, we would kind of be aligning with that as well and set this up nicely
for for additional level threes in the future. Alright. And with that, I will turn it back over to Aaron to talk about kind of some next steps. Alright. Thanks, Kayla. Yep. So next steps and and, I alluded to this at the start. So initially, we were thinking we would come back for a second study session. Study session schedule is pretty full for the rest of the year. So if we can find a slot, slot on the study session, we'll bring it back for a round two. Again, assuming you tell us to move forward with developing a policy. If not, we'll bring it back as part of a reports and recommendations saying this is what we developed, here's our recommendation.
Get some of that final feedback. If there's significant changes, then we would make those changes, probably put it on the consent agenda for the next one. Or if everything looks good, approve it that night. Our goal, is to try and get this wrapped up by the end of this calendar year for implementation on January 1. A lot of that then is communicate we gotta communicate with the public so that we can give them notification, a January 1 start date. You know, it's an easier date at the start of the new year. We're gonna roll out these new a new rate structure and help with the communication. We also need some time to be able to communicate that.
So again, you know, our goal is to really, you know, probably come back to council again based on feedback, around that maybe September, October time frame. And then to be able to do communication at the end of the year to implement, at the early start of the year. Again, we have project partners we need to work with, to be able to get that that all set up and communicate out. So, with that, I'm gonna put these, discussion questions back up there. We can take any general questions. But also, again, our, our our key here, we really like to hear from you all of you is, do you see value in this policy?
Would you like us to develop a policy, hour per hour versus a KWH rate structure? How important is it to keep those rates, competitive? And, again, we intentionally didn't other than the averages and kind of the range Kayla showed you, depending on the research, you can get different numbers. So for us, it's important to say, do you want us to stay competitive with other publicly available chargers? Because that's gonna influence some of the decisions we make. And then also with that, recognizing there could be a cost share or most likely would be a cost share if you want to be competitive. Is there a cost share range or things that we should take into consideration,
as we do additional research? So, and again, our recommendation is to develop a formal policy, based on the KWH pricing structure. So So member Fredericks? Yes, thank you. Anything that has moving parts or anything period takes maintenance and upkeep and replacement costs, why would we ever give subsidized or free service for something? Because we're there's gonna be cost. Not not only that, staff to maintain, check them. There's always staff, cost as well.
Nothing's free. Right? So maybe help me get my mind wrapped around that. Was there, like, if we're gonna did somebody donate machines, we get a grant for them and all, and they have to be free then? Was it something like that? Or Correct. So the, so the the chargers that are in place were obtained through through grants. So and much of that covered the the charger itself as well as the infrastructure to install it. And so, with that, there wasn't a capital cost, you know, associated with with those projects. And so I don't know on every single charger why it was determined to not
charge, but there certainly is maintenance cost as well as the electricity Correct. Cost that is being pulled. And and we did collect some data as part of our research, and we're estimating that each charger again, there's a little bit difference whether it's a dual port, single port, and all that. But there's about a $1,900 cost per charger per year that is being, right now, either absorbed within our current budgets or, like, in the terms of the enterprise fund, you know, with they they are charging to help, recoup some of those costs.
So depending on Right on. The charger. So the other thing I will note that, you know, with some of the goals we've had, greenhouse gas emission reduction goals, things like that, there's been a little bit of a support for electric vehicles. You've seen it, you know, on on the larger scale as well. And so, again, they're, helping support that, within our community, I believe, led into some of those decisions to to set the price points where they were at to help get these vehicles in our community and help with the charging and build out that network.
Great. And as far as your questions go here, yes, kilowatt. I mean, do you want answers from us? Is that correct? Yes. Absolutely. So the I would say, yes, a rate. We'd have to have some kind of a plan, obviously. Preferred pricing structure, yes. Kilowatt hour would be, obviously the way to go. You laid that out. How important is to keep rates competitive? It's very important. I mean, we don't want to be way higher, but we definitely have no reason to be lower. They're going to need the power. I mean, we're not putting gas pumps in the parking ramps. So I mean, I don't know why we'd be doing that.
Anyway, and is there is there a cost share range that staff should stay within range of? Yeah. The consumer pays for it. K. So consumer pays a 100%? Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Council member Wall. I'm with, council member Fredericks. I, I've been amazed that the city provides any free, outlets. I looked up my own usage. I have a level two at home. On July 21, I got 224 miles for $5.14, and I'm not complaining. That's really a good deal.
You do the miles per gallon in gas, and that's that's really boy, it's really good. I went to Hy Vee. I was there for twenty one minutes, and I got seven miles, and that's free. I mean, you have to be at these places for quite a while to, make them work. I have a friend who, is both frugal and likes exercise. He will, walk he will, drive his car to, the DSIC, plug in overnight, walk home the three miles, and then the next morning, walk three miles to so if he got kind of a 60% full up,
fill up, which mine represents, it'd be about $5 maybe that he saved. And he's just very frugal and likes exercise. So it's a I don't know why we are covering that cost, both the electricity and the upkeep of, of the implement. So I think we should have a rate. I think it should be fair, kilowatt, competitive. I think that, we need to pay the cost of electricity, and whatever it takes to replace the implement. Council member Can I and and I just wanna thank you for the feedback, and this is really helpful? And I'll share a little bit of extra data,
and maybe we should have put it in the presentation. I don't know if it'll be helpful or not, but just to to let you know. So from a competitive standpoint, again, the average is gonna be around probably that 26¢ per kilowatt. It's gonna be around there in order to be, quote, unquote, competitive. That will be about a 75% consumer paid cost and about a 25 still city cover that. That would be in terms of, fully capturing the, meter and infrastructure cost as well.
So keep that in mind. Like, if we have to replace that meter or there's some infrastructure that needs to be added as part of it, that that would cover it. If we wanted to cover a 100% of of the cost of that, it would be between 20 well, so '26 and be on the low end, of course, with some of the estimates, but up to about 36¢, maybe even 40¢ on the higher side. So that gets to the point where then we have to look at, are we right now, there's about a 40% usage. So the meters are or the chargers sorry. I keep saying meters.
The chargers are used about 40 percent of the time that they're available. 60%, they're sitting there with no vehicles on there. What we need to start looking at is when you get those price points, how much will will someone still come and park at desicc and leave it overnight and walk home? And the answer is he won't because he's got a level two in his own garage. I know this. So so if that data is helpful in terms of just the the the estimates, at a 50%, if you wanna do a fifty fifty split, it's gonna be about 17¢. So that kinda gives you a a KWH.
So that gives you the range. So kind of $17.26, 34, 36, you know, cents, per KpWH, 40 on the really high side. Because infrastructure, again, is different. If it's right next to a, a building and you're extending that, the infrastructure cost is much smaller. If you're extending infrastructure a long ways, obviously, you have added added cost there. That's why there's that range. So, anyways, I don't know if that's helpful. Thank you. Let's go on to, council member Yeah. I I wanna ask, city, assistant administrator,
Yetzer, that if we really do not have a policy because I thought we have a UDC statement if someone's building a new parking lot that they must put in EVs. That is a requirement in the UDC. Yes. I I I'm trying to think how to say this. I'm I think that's a policy statement that we're trying to support EVs, and and and I'm not talking about with public money. I'm saying when someone puts up a new parking lot, just like we just did in the out in front here, we our our UDC requires so many I don't think it says level two, but level two charges per parking spot.
Can can I intervene? I think the key key is we are specifically talking about publicly owned EV charging rate policy. Okay. So we're saying, should we charge and how should we charge is Right. And what I'm hearing feedback about I mean, it it maybe it's very specific tied to that, but I'm trying to establish in my own head that we've already sort of committed to saying, and this is how I view it as a policy statement the city's interest is, taking down barriers for those who want to adopt EVs but cannot because of.
And maybe that because of is their apartment building doesn't have chargers or they can't, as, Councilmember Wal talks about, having a level two in their garage because they don't have a garage. And that's what I thought the city's interest is, was reducing those barriers. So I I I wanna give input on the, you know, the type of thing, but I wanna establish that I think we've already kind of said we want our city to be friendly towards this. But I think that that idea of, like, well, we need to ignore the private sector. My take is we have more responsibility to fill gaps that the private sector isn't
taking care of. And I I thought that was more of a policy statement from the city to say, I I don't wanna compete with, you know, c Circle cages put in two level threes up there. I I think it's great. I don't know what they're charging, but I'd love to see it up there. I don't want us to try to undercut them and find a way to lose money on it. So thank you for that clarification. And I guess whether or not Mr. Yatser has anything to add, I think that is policy that says the city's intention is to fill a gap to provide a community
need. And therefore Again, that would be that would probably need more work to see if that's a consensus. But going back on your questions, I totally agree with Kaye, of charging by that. But I I guess if I would model where the costs come from, I think there's a connect cost and then a cost per how many kilowatts you use. I'm I'm I'm modeling it. That's how RPU does it. I have a I have to have pay to have, RPU come to my house. That's a set fee whether I use any power or not, and then I have to pay for the power. So I think that more better that more clearly models how costs are incurred.
Well, can AWH, but it's also So I think they're so Can we get back to I I don't know that we got a clarification from mister Yetzer on what's in the UDC regarding private development. Go ahead, Kayla. So it's, surface parking lots 50 spaces or greater is when it's triggered, and then it's two, two stations per 50 spaces. So that would be so you'd have two automatically when because it you would hit, it would trigger it at 50 spaces. And and the only thing that I was gonna add is the UDC is silent on the the charging Exactly.
Yeah. Exactly. How much if if we may require an apartment building. Have, I have two conversations going on right next to me, and I think we have a discussion going. So We may require an apartment building to install, say, four chargers, but we don't say whether they're required to provide that charger to the residents for free or if they should be charged, like, paying a fee to use the charger. That on that portion of it, the city doesn't have a policy. And so we don't, therefore, have a policy for ourselves either, and that's, I think, what Kayla and Aaron are talking about.
Thank you for that clarification. Yep. So, again, let me as far as should we have our rate policy, I'm I'm good with the k w. I I'd like to consider that idea of, like, to connect to it cost $4 and then this many k y. Something like that. Yep. Thank you. And that could be a a structure that we set up. So, yes, you could have you connect. Now one of the things that that we looked at and the reason we didn't bring that forward as a very specific recommendation is if somebody connects, you go to you're only there for twenty minutes. Now you pay the connection fee and you receive very little back and benefit.
And And so it could influence charging behavior with that. And so what we what we're recommending in those numbers that I gave you, we included basically that connection fee in there so that you're capturing that. Capturing that. As soon as they plug in, it would include the cost. What we looked at, again, in those averages is it includes, the replacement of the charger, and we would amortize that over ten years based on the life expectancy of that. The infrastructure cost, again, over ten years. The maintenance cost, the, energy cost, off of that.
And I think is that it or is there one more? Installation. Yep. And then electricity. And then we also account for an administrative fee that works with Yeah. Company. And then So that would all be included just in that KWH cost so that to simplify Okay. The transaction as well as the process. I I I truly appreciate what you're trying to do, but that also causes you the complexity of that of saying, are you over or under charging depending on what you end up selling? And the fact is, it costs, I think you said, dollars 3,000 to 7,000 to put the level two in. So, now so so I think that's think that we're pretty consistent with this.
But I guess I that I wanna make sure that I I don't think we should have a policy of how we're gonna compete with Hy Vee and try to make sure people charge us. The fact that they're there, to me, gives us license that the city doesn't need to be in that area because there's already a solution. Yeah. And we wouldn't, so let me clarify. I guess from the competitive standpoint, again, what that comes down to is, as EV chargers become more and more available, people will have more options. So so if they're coming to a meeting here,
maybe they don't wanna charge here because there's one a block away. And as we look at pricing, pricing influences user behavior. Yes. Obviously. So do we want to be within a competitive price point when they look at that and say, I'm coming to a meeting here. It it's just as affordable for me to plug in and charge here versus park and walk, you know, two, three blocks because it's it's free at Hy Vee or what what have you based on the scenario. So we're not trying to out compete anybody else. We just wanna make sure that we don't set our prices well,
the feedback we're seeking from you is the risk of setting our prices so that it's so high that nobody uses them, and therefore, there's no revenue, coming in to then be able to maintain or replace the infrastructure in the future. So that when I say competitive Okay. Or we say competitive, that's what we're trying to get at is trying to find that price point, that optimizes the revenue coming in to be able to support, recognizing that there's some people who will just have to use it. And that's when we go through the data and we look at user behavior. Okay. We're gonna,
yep. That's appreciated. I have four more council members to go go through. However, Keane, do you have any I just wanna make the point here though that in giving policy input, I mean, that I I wanna state that idea, the policy stuff of I'm I'm not I I like what you're trying to say. Make sure we do we wanna fully recoup. We're we're not trying to make money, but we wanna price it so it's useful. But I still think the more policy important thing was what MnDOT did trying to say, you know, all our EVs are in metro areas, but they're they're saying they can't use them in the out outlying areas because there's
no chargers. So they spent their money putting them into on the interstates, so that someone could go to, you know, Sioux Falls and be able to charge on the way and not have to say, like, I can't do that because I don't know. I'm in a rural area where there's no charging. And the government policy was to fill those gaps. Thank you. Council member Palmer. Thank you. Do I understand? You said that your your, chargers are used 40% of the time? On average. Okay. And and they're parking in a ramp or a parking lot. Are they paying to park? Depending on the the charger.
So, like, the one at DSIC, there is no they're not paying to park there. But as opposed to the other one, they're paying for. Correct. Okay. Well, if it's, not after 05:00 or on the weekend. Okay. But if they're overnight, they're paying because we charge overnight for parking the ramps. Yes. I guess, to make it quick and simple, I don't know why we're charging and I think we spent more time talking about it than it's worth it. So I would charge nothing and hope that they use our parking ramps. I'll be brief. Is there just to start with the question, is there a a changing cost to us for the equipment whether it's used or
not? Like, does does the actual use of charging increase the cost of maintenance over that ten year period? Do it. Alright. Can you answer that? Yeah. It doesn't in the sense that we pay for a maintenance contract with the company when we procure the charger. So we're kind of taking that cost, and we're we're splitting it over. Cost in the infrastructure. It costs a certain amount to build it. It costs a certain amount to maintain it over that period. And then we pay an administrative fee and electricity use. Mhmm. So I would wanna make sure that we're at least recouping those variable costs,
and I would also wanna make sure that we're pricing in a way that encourages people after they're charged to move on and and perhaps recover cost that way. And again, it doesn't seem like any change in cost to us for the equipment maintenance, whether they're 40% utilized, 100% utilized. So I think simplifying it, I I appreciate council member Keane's, mention of a connection fee. I think that that just adds complexity. People go to a gas station, they they pay for whatever they get out of it, and there's some price in there for other maintenance. So I I think simplifying that rate and then encouraging people to disconnect and move
on would be my priorities. Council member Doreen. Yes. Pursue a charging rate policy, kilowatt per hour. Keep the rates competitive. Do not come back at another study session. Just create the policy, put it forward to us. We'll mess around with it if we need to. Thank you. I agree with the staff recommendation, and I look forward to seeing staff recommendation on, competitive rates and cost shares. And I'm ditto Mayor Norton. Go ahead. I'm ditto with, council member Derek and your during in yourself.
Great. Thank you very much. Very much. We really appreciate it. Last agenda item is our UDC update, and I do not see mister Caples here. So I think we have Taryn Edens to give us this update. Welcome. Good evening, council members, mayor, council president, Taryn Edens, one of the assistant directors, and I am standing in for Ed Capels this evening, representing the Planning and Zoning Team for Community Development. I'm here to provide you our annual Unified Development Code, cleanup update.
This is really just, our kind of practice of sharing what feedback we've gotten from the development community and others, recommended code changes, and it is an opportunity to get feedback for you. So you will, see it again, but this is the chance for the quick discussion on that. Other things to keep in mind with this, yeah, I mentioned that. I'll keep going. So, text amendment, I think you folks know what it is. The council has the authority to update the text amendment, which is the Unified Development Code or referred to as the UDC. This cadence happens annually. You'll see this in the next slide of why that was agreed upon,
but that's very intentional to provide an annual update. It gives us a chance to gather information for an entire year through many different respects. It keeps, this sort of streamlined to collect that information and make all the updates that occur thereafter once we make these updates. And then as you see, this will come to you more than once. It does take a lot of resources to do the updates, it's a good practice to do regular updates as previously we would do them sort of intermittently, but it's also intentional to do it only once a year. And that's mentioned as well. We update the UDC to advance the goals and policies of the city, and as you know, those can change as you're reviewing your strategic priorities as an example.
Essentially, what you're gonna see tonight is we're not recommending a lot of huge policy. What we'd like for tonight for the discussion is getting general feedback. This isn't the time to talk about huge policy discussions, but time to get feedback on future, asks related. I think you are all pretty well versed in Unified Development Code and the timeline, so I won't spend a lot of time on that. But just note that we did a very large amount of community engagement when we did the entire code rewrite. So when we're getting to just an annual update, we don't, see that amount of engagement to be needed, but instead collect it as we go.
So I just wanted to point that out, that a lot of that work was done when we did the overhaul for a quick clean up. We just get it as we go. But it's worth noting that since we implemented review of the and since we implemented UDC in 2023, we've reviewed more than 100 applications and held over 150 neighborhood information meetings. So in our opinion, it's working well at streamlining the process, which is exciting to share with you. The updates that we are, sharing with you or planning, generally are gonna be quick cleanup items. Right? We're updating references where it makes sense, we're updating language to be consistent.
For example, the UDC defines, at grade in a way that is contradictory to the building code. So let's update that to be consistent with the building code. We've got some, updates we need to do to reflect DMR DNR mapping, for their requirements. And then one that I'll cover next that should be expected for you is updating updating the downtown residential parking requirements. So, most notably, our UDC, as it relates to, updown updating downtown residential parking requirements, our UDC, requires a point five parking space per residential unit within the downtown. We're point five parking space per residential unit within the downtown. For our last presentation we provided to you, the direction we got is the council would like to remove that parking requirement within
the MXD zoning district specifically. So that will be our recommendation that we'll take forward to remove residential parking requirements within the MXD zoning district. So that is one that you will expect to see in our update. Things you haven't heard before that we would like to bring before you tonight, this is this is a summary and I'll go through them, but they include cannabis spacing requirements, cannabis permitted zoning districts, neighborhood information meetings middle deadline, introducing sandwich boards in the downtown, and increasing minimum height requirements in the MxS zoning district. Cannabis spacing requirements,
maybe even before I get to this, I'd like to share how we get some of this feedback. Sometimes we're making these recommendations, sometimes not. This is based on conversations we've had with potential operators of these retail spaces, and recognizing previous council feedback on this and align it with what state legislation is. So know that our recommendations aren't always recommending the feedback we got, but our best judgment in what looking for your feedback on it. So right now, as you're likely aware, these retail uses are under review, and they're and we have the ability to restrict them. So, right now, the UDC says cannabis retail uses,
have to be at least 1,000 feet from the nearest public school parcel, 500 feet from the nearest public park. That does include trails as a sort of interpretation. And 500 feet to a similar use regularly used by minors. Really, our recommendation, and we're looking for feedback on this, is to instead, adapt what the Minnesota State statute has, which allows us to prohibit it in spacing, that's just a bit more specific than our previous language. So it sort of get rid of that trail interpretation as an example. So, feedback we got was, that's sort of vague, can you give us more clear direction on where these can actually be established?
And we're looking for your feedback if that's favorable to the council or not. Just as well, cannabis and liquor, now let's put together, permitted zoning districts. Right now, these uses, as we call them, can exist in many different zoning districts, essentially. What we've heard from operators is that doesn't really reflect where we're successful in, establishing these. We're not successful in establishing these uses in a residential district, for example. So, our recommendation, based on the feedback and an effort to give more, clear feedback of where we think these uses best align, with our zoning districts is updating this to instead,
allow them within mixed use industrial zoning districts alone, so that effectively removes primarily those residential zoning districts. So, once again, seeking council's feedback, on that recommendation. Neighborhood information, meeting submittal, deadlines. So we got this feedback from, the development community, specifically or in addition, Rockstar area builders. Essentially, we require a neighborhood informational meeting for most types of developments within the community. Once you hold that meeting, you are to submit the application within thirty days and we got feedback that that was pretty quick turnaround, wanted more time to collect, apply that feedback,
and prepare items. So just asking to extend that to to sixty days. Sandwich Board requirements, this is based on feedback we got from internal city departments that we're hearing kind of needs from the business community downtown. Right now, we do have a portable sign provision of our code that regulates those signs. We don't have a specific provision for sandwich boards, and they've traditionally been not approved. So instead, we would like to recommend creating a code specific to sandwich boards. We've got some specifics in there as far as how many would be permitted, size, as well as the duration, how long can they be out. We'd like to start this with just the MXD Zoning District,
and we'd like to make this a simple process and not require a permit. So that's our recommendation as a way to test this, based on the feedback we've received. Maximum permitted height within the MxS Zoning District. This district is really intended to, support low to mid density commercial uses, and make access to lots of sorts of transportation. Right now, the maximum height is 36 feet. We found this to be sort of restrictive in a space where we're trying to support density. So, just as well, folks are aware that we're getting we're reviewing a lot of proposed legislation every year on how to support, density in our community,
and we thought this would be a good internal recommendation based on what we've seen in that proposed language. So, we're recommending to permitted height to 56 feet. I'll say this is still lower than what we would allow in the transit oriented development districts, and it supports development in a place where we, we plan for height and we're looking for questions, feedback. As I mentioned, this is also the time to provide any feedback for either this code update or future ones for us us to consider. We're asking for support, or direction around these recommendations. I'll come back to this slide, but just also to remember the next steps. It's coming to you tonight for feedback. It will also go to, required commissions, and it will come back to the city council as a public hearing and adoption
of those codes. With that, pause for comments, questions. So, can you give us more specific on which commissions it's going to? Is it planning and zoning, obviously, but are there other I believe it's also gotta go to the Heritage Preservation Commission. Okay. Okay. No. This one just would need to go to planning and zoning. Thank you for clarifying. Planning and zoning. Okay. I do have a question on the NIMS. So I'm assuming, and correct me if I'm wrong, the sixty days that the developers are asking for is because they want to incorporate
what the neighbors are asking for. Is that usually the case with why they wanna extend their application? Anecdotally, I I don't know if I could say that's usually the case, but that's partly what we've heard. Miss Woodward? Thank you. So part of the feedback we've heard is thirty days is a pretty quick turnaround for consultants to make any adjustments to those applications and want some flexibility, and, also, I think there's just a volume of projects going on. So, as part of our discussions, they were looking for some flexibility within that timeline. Okay. I had one comment on the neighborhood information meetings.
And so, I have some concern about the the geographic reach and whether or not we're extending that as far as we should. And, I do understand that neighborhood associations are now, included regardless of whether or not they're in the neighbor in the geographic reach, and, renters are as well included. But can you, clarify what the current geographic reach around the proposed property is?
I believe it's a half mile radius. So I would I would encourage us to consider expanding that. I wanna council president. Go ahead, mister Gegen. I wanna say it's between two hundred and three hundred feet. The only thing I will note is just keep in mind there's a cost to it, and so they're, like, I just it it's not zero. It's not a high cost, but as we've done a 100 Mailing of these. Mailing is what you're talking about. Okay. And so I just wanna keep it within reason of how far we're notifying. I wouldn't go to, like, a mile radius or something like that.
So this is something to think about. Okay. Council member Fredericks. Thank you. May seem trivial, but, the sandwich boards, fourteen days only. Is it can it is it possible that it could just be they can have it out daily, just have to bring it in at night? I mean, does why limit it to fourteen days? Because if you get no one for being a sandwich place and you have a different special each day, it's kinda fun to put it out on the sidewalk and catch people's eye, bring them in. Why limit to it to fourteen days, bring it in each night? And then the next thing is, it's kind of a two headed deal. Something about having them be tasteful,
you know, when they're sitting out on the sidewalk. It's just you want we want it tasteful. I don't know how much regulating a person wants to get into or not, but from what it says to what it looks like. Yeah. I think we're pretty limited on what we can regulate as far as, I don't know if you know that. So open to the council's feedback and duration out there, but it's intended so that it's not replacing what we'd consider a permanent sign. So it is intentional to limit the duration, and that would was what I would say is best practice be based on previous code provisions, but we're certainly open to the feedback if that's Yeah. I'm not I'm not feedback if that's Yeah. I'm not I'm not hard on that or anything.
I'm just saying, you know, daily, it's let's face it. There isn't like there's a ton of places at street level doing doing things right now. I mean, a lot of places are kinda hurting, and it's something to kinda them out. And, I I'm I'd like to help businesses any way we can, obviously. Mister Neumeier, did you Neumeier, did you have something to add? Yeah. Thank you, council president. I was just gonna add that, what we're trying to do with the fourteen day duration is trying to balance the right of way impacts that, you know, may exist in downtown streets if, sandwich boards are going out on a daily basis.
So we are trying to limit it to more temporary use, like Terence said. You know, we can talk about what that duration encourage use of sandwich boards more for special events or sales or things like that that they may wanna promote versus a daily menu or something that becomes a a daily potential tripping hazard right away, that kind of thing. Mhmm. Council member Keane. I had two con two things I wanted to comment on. Mixed use, streets, I I'm surprised going from 36 foot to 56. That's quite a jump. Is that was there, like, a a policy thing behind that or a certain situation?
56 feet is Miss Woodward, are you gonna take that one? I think we were looking at opportunities where there could be density and what's appropriate and still lower than what is transit oriented development kind of in that realm and realizing that this is an opportunity to kind of align those. And it felt like it was a little low, and so it was kind of reevaluating that height requirement. Does the mixed use have R two or r one connected to it? Because it's it's not a transitional neighborhood, is it? Mister Yetzer. A couple things with that. So 60 feet is kind of a sweet spot because it allows you to do
four over one, five over one style of construction, and so it maximizes the economics of a project from that standpoint. I would imagine we haven't done the analysis to see exactly where it abuts to single fam or single family r one, r two residential districts, though I would note your residential protection standards, neighborhood protection standards still apply. So if that did happen Alright. They would naturally have to step down the height to the r one, r two. That's why we've got those standards. You're good. Thank you, mister. Yeah. So that was my concern, the the residential protections. The other one is I did wanna comment too on the NIM sort of the
boundaries. I actually thought the limit was bigger than what we're talking about here. I thought we talked about a thousand feet from the development would be the notification zone. And then there are the unique things too where I heard, council president, Schoebring, say something about, neighborhood associations, but how formal those are and whether they, I don't I mean, there's a lot of the outlying areas have, you know, their own informal Facebook groups and things, but they're not formally aligned that way. So I don't want to have special treatment for certain groups.
But, the other one turns out to be, and this is one we I've worked with staff about when when, road alignments are changing. Is it really then only the people that close to it that should be, should be informed or should people further away that are on those same roads should be informed. So I'm not looking for a very specific change, but it's something that I'm just concerned with because of some scenarios we've worked through. Thank you. Council Member Wall. Thank you. While looking at cannabis, liquor permitted zoning district's map, and I realize it's following the zoning districts,
it looks like, most of the cannabis, is going to be in South Rochester or North West Rochester. Does that seem kind of odd? So this map is where those locations are permitted given the current district and spacing requirements. So this would, in all likelihood, probably, it would change. I wouldn't say it would completely tighten up where they could be because we would now no longer count a trail as that spacing requirement. So the way it stands today, right, this is what it would look like. It it would look different and in less residential areas with these proposed changes. Could we see, could you forward that kind of map to us?
Thank you. Council member Miller. I'll just say on the MXS and the height increase, I think it's great that we're leading by example and knowing where some of the legislative action has been. I think it gives us more leverage. Recently, I heard a state legislator from another state describe housing as the new weed as we're talking about cannabis and that it is coming through state legislator legislatures. There is building momentum, bipartisan support, especially among younger legislators. And so I think to the extent that we can show that we're engaged in this space,
build partnerships, I think it gives us a lot better position with our state legislature, and so I very much am supportive of that. And looking at the zoning map, MXS is not a broadly used zone. So I think that that's I I'm supportive of that. On the sandwich boards, I I think it's great to give some additional flexibility. I agree the right of way concerns. There's not a standard sidewalk or or public space, that's in front of different downtown businesses. So balancing that and also finding ways that even some of those businesses along Broadway that have very limited narrow sidewalks can still advertise maintaining that access.
I'm not sure that I have a recommendation there, but that's what I would want us to find a way to to do. Council member Dohring. I just wanna make sure I understand, the recommendation regarding, trails and cannabis. Removing the trail distance requirement. Correct? So that would not be a restriction? Correct. Okay. Thank you. Mayor Norton. The only concern I have with the sandwich boards is in an area we were talking about downtown and some of those narrows. It's really on Peace Plaza where we have we have to keep the space close
to the building and out to the lettering as free as we can for pedestrians and wheelchairs and what have you. So I would say that area, they may need to be a some sort of angle. I don't I don't know how you're gonna deal with that one, but that was the one area that I thought we might need to have some special a special designation in that area to keep it clear. Alright. Alright. You've got your feedback feedback. Thanks very much. Administrator Zelmes, take us home. Thank you, council president, council members, mayor Norton, members of the staff, and this media. I did just wanna point out that on this item, it should say that August 11 is your next council meeting.
So thank you for being with us all evening, today. And your next study session is before a council meeting on the eighteenth and is only planned for an hour and a half with one item. So thank you for your indulgence today. Good discussion. Thank you all, and thank you everyone for staying and adding an additional, very important agenda item to our meeting today. Is there a motion to adjourn? Oh, we don't need a motion. We are adjourned.