Council Meeting 4/29 and other stuff!

It has been a while and a lot has happened!

I attended the MN Mayor's Association Conference in White Bear Lake and met many of our area mayors including Two Harbors, Ely, Hibbing, Nashwauk, etc.  It was great to get to have some of the conversations about our city with these other cities that have similar, yet very different, environments!

The sessions offered had to do with groundwater and surface water management, which was very enlightening and informed me of some state and federal programs that exist that could help Grand Marais afford to re-do some of it's aging water and wastewater infrastructure.  They also spoke about how reclaiming graywater is starting to build up some steam at the state level, so stay tuned to that one!  I had an opportunity to ask the DNR's director of water resources about the regulations that are applied to surface water taken and put back into Lake Superior and was relieved to hear that the state is using the new regulations to "test the waters" both figuratively and literally because the regulations are where they want to be, but it could ignite a storm of protest because compliance could be very expensive for many small towns...

The other session had to do with how cities can work with state agencies better.  I met and chatted with the Commissioners for the DNR, the DOT (about Hwy 61), and the Pollution Control Agency (about regulations and about the potential of a GreenCorps intern in Grand Marais).  They spoke for several hours basically saying that they want cities to do their homework and come to the state agencies with some background, a solid plan, and workable numbers.  The state agencies don't work on ideas, they work on proposals.  I think that this is valuable information and hope that we can use it to connect with the state better on our future initiatives.

I was also on MPR for a conversation with a few of the younger mayors in the state.  It was fun for me to be a part of it and I tried to reflect Grand Marais in a coherent and honest way.  If you want to listen, here is the link:
http://www.mprnews.org/sto…/2015/…/24/bcst-millennial-mayors

There was a lot of other stuff going on, but I will try to mention that in the summary of the meeting!

Ok, here goes:

First of all, we did pretty well and got a great deal of the business taken care of right away, which felt good and put us a little ahead of our time expectation, but we had some complicated conversations to have and the only place we can have those conversations is in that meeting, so we are ok with it taking some time.

Since no one spoke up for the public comment period despite having some people in attendance, we moved right into the Consent Agenda.  There were a few minor semantical changes to the minutes of the previous meeting and a few additions to the current agenda, but the consent agenda passed unanimously.  On the consent agenda this meeting was the MN Deer Hunter's Association Raffle request to raise some money for their group, so keep your eyes open for those tickets.  They will be available at the Legion I believe and from members of the association.  If I remember correctly, their prizes are pretty amazing.

We moved on to the approval of the fireworks plan for the 4th of July show.  Just like in past years, Bob Spry has offered to put together the performance with the Lion's Club defraying the cost of the fireworks to the city.  This passed unanimously.  *We are very lucky to have Bob to help us with this!  Thank you Bob for your work to make our fireworks display great!  And a thank you to the Lions for their support!

Next, a letter from Jim Wiinanen asking for support of the Cook County Emergency Management Conference, which occurred last weekend here in town, was considered.  The letter had a description of the conference and an explanation of what the training means to local emergency workers.  Seeing the value of the conference for our local emergency workers, the Council voted to support the conference at the same level as last year, $200.  A thank you to Jim W. as well for putting together an incredible conference.  I heard something about a bus being tipped over or hitting a semi... Pretty amazing training scenarios any way you look at it!

The Street's Department brought a request to the Council to send out for bids to crack and chip seal a considerable amount of the City's streets.  The request was to seek bids for $75,000-$100,000 worth of maintenance, which is estimated to cover about 25% of the City's streets.  This technique, where cracks are filled with tar (or something flexible like that) and the road surface is sprayed and coated with some bituminous material, is the best way to preserve our road surfaces.  It can be applied to roads that are in moderate to good condition to extend their life about 10-15 years.  The Council asked why we waited so long to do it and the answer was reasonable: Economies of scale ($100,000 gets you a LOT more than $15,000), and the fact that Lenny is a relatively recent hire as the director of the streets department.  There is an annual budget of $15,000 to go toward this, so we can expect to have this request come up every 4-5 years, which will put us in a good place concerning road maintenance...
*Re-building roads in bad condition are another conversation.  When I was at the Mayor's Conference I spoke with several other mayors who are petitioning the Dept. of Transportation to include funding in their next transportation bill for city street maintenance, especially smaller and rural cities.  Currently the MN House has a bill on the table for $7 billion with little to no city street funding and the MN Senate has a bill on the table for $11 billion with roughly $57 million in city street funding.  It isn't much, but it would sure help us get some more of our streets (and the infrastructure underneath) back into good condition...

At this point we were cruising through the agenda, so we decided to skip the Tennis association request because their representative hadn't arrived yet!

We moved on to the Assisted Living Request for Proposals.  The City received 4 proposals from organizations that the City knows and trusts, but each of the proposals was vastly different from the others.  We purposely cast the net wide for this RFP and we got it!  Now we will move forward by inviting community members who have knowledge of assisted living to take a look through the proposals so we can distill down which organization has the skills and can capture the full scope of the market study we would like to do.  There will be representatives from the hospital/care center, the North Shore Health Care Foundation, as well as other organizations with insights into this topic.  Councilor Benson suggested that we consider putting someone on the committee who has construction experience, which certainly isn't a bad idea.  The rest of the Council agreed with her and is trying to think of people who have both construction and assisted living experience.  If you have any suggestions of who should be on this committee, please let me or one of the Councilors know and we will consider that.  We would like to get this going pretty soon though, so please act quickly if you feel strongly.

Then it was time for Resolution 2015-07.  That means nothing to you right now, but I will explain:
Our Council meetings will now be held at 6:30PM, NOT 4:30PM.  The Council thought that it would be more appropriate and accessible for the meetings to happen at 6:30 so more residents who work would be able to attend if they want to.  We will be advertising this around town, but make sure to pass this information on to others who would be interested!

Then we started talking about Public Restrooms.  This conversation seems to go on every week, but there is a reason for that.  We need to figure out what to do!  The background is that during the summer our visitors can't find enough places to use the restrooms and thus burden our local businesses with their bathroom needs.  The City provides port-a-potties around town at several different locations, but that isn't seen as a permanent or sound solution.  A set of plans was developed for the city showing what the old visitor's center (attached to City Hall) would look like if it was reconfigured into bathrooms.  It is an impressive plan, but the questions brought were:
1. Is this where we need bathrooms?  You have to put bathrooms where the people are.
2. Is this overkill?  What are the usage numbers of our current bathrooms (and the downtown)?
3. How are we going to pay for this?  We spend about $9,000/year for port-a-potties and building bathrooms will be more expensive, likely even in the long-run.
*Potential solutions/ideas were:
--putting smaller bathroom facilities in at Boulder Park and maybe at Coast Guard Point (if we even can!  Boulder Park is in the conversation easement, which has limitations on what can be done there)
--Renovating the existing bathrooms in City Hall so they work better and putting a few extra port-a-potties in strategic places around downtown (out of the way so they aren't an eyesore).
--A new thought was to use funds from the storefront loan program to help downtown businesses renovate bathrooms and/or install low-flow fixtures to encourage them to allow visitors to use their bathrooms.  The sticky thing about this is that many of these downtown businesses don't have bathrooms that are even accessible to the public... It's a thought...
--All of the ideas that were brought up, which included these in many different iterations, were just ideas... It was agreed that we couldn't move forward until we got the cost estimate on the designs we already have so we can know roughly what we are talking about.
One of the things that we DID agree on was that we should authorize some money to get the current public bathrooms up to snuff for this summer.  We voted to authorize up to $5,000 to install ventilation, improve the stalls, fixtures, etc so that we can get through the summer better.  During that time we are going to be gathering usage information from City Hall and hopefully from some downtown businesses so that we can have more information about what is appropriate!

After that conversation we were back on schedule and ready for the Tennis Association.  In the same proposal as last meeting, the Lee Bergstrom asked the City to consider assisting in funding the renovation of 2 of the tennis courts up near the YMCA and Community Center.  The Council showed great support of the Tennis Association and for the project, but had some questions.  First of all, $60,000 of the money they need (roughly $150,000) will come from 1% funds, but all of the project was originally slated to be paid for with 1% funds.  The City has some funds that could be used for the $20,000 request, but that money would have to come out of the "Council Priorities" fund, which has historically been used as a stop-gap account or to fund the different projects identified by the Council as important.  This fund would be decimated by this request and thus would limit the other projects or expenses that could be taken on.  This was not seen as being a good idea by the Council.  Lee said that they would be changing their plan to perform the renovation next spring instead of this fall because the funding has proven difficult to obtain.  This would allow the City to budget for this expense and share our part of the burden.  The real question was what is our burden?  The last time they renovated 3 courts at the expense of $240,000, the City only put in $10-15,000 (the exact number was unknown at the time).  The Council decided that we need to get these numbers and also take a closer look at the Council Priorities fund to see how it has been used and if such a donation is a good idea.  Lee said that she would be glad to keep coming back for this and we hoped, for her sake, that we could get it taken care of so she didn't have to!

Following that conversation we moved on to the seasonal staffing for the Park's Department.  Dave Tersteeg brought three names before the Council for consideration and they were unanimously approved.  Here's to another great season in the parks!

In "Other items" there were two:
1. Resolution 2015-6 or the letter in support of constitutional protections for peddlers of farm/garden goods.
2. Purchase of a new phone system for the City Hall.

Starting with #1.  It came to the Council's attention shortly after the previous meeting that when we passed the resolution of support mentioned above, some of the language didn't reflect the message that some of the Council members meant to send.  Because of this, the resolution was brought back before the Council for further discussion.  Basically, the changes that were proposed were specific and concerning inspection as well as safety measures used in processing farm goods.  We spoke about it to gather a better understanding of the impacts of the language and then voted to replace the existing resolution with a new resolution with the mentioned changes.  It failed 2-2 in vote, so the previous resolution still stands.

#2.  Finance Director Kim Dunsmoor brought a bid to the Council for a complete renovation of the City Hall phone system.  This was spurred by the installation of broadband at City Hall and the possibility of getting a more useful system that could use the broadband connection for the phone as well.  It was determined that the needs of City Hall does not warrant that technology right now (I pushed them on this... does it really make sense to wait?), and thus is would be much cheaper to go with a digital system that would provide City Hall with the flexibility to grow and to access the services that we need, like voicemail...  The Council voted unanimously to accept the bid for telephone replacement, so soon you will be able to call and leave a message at City Hall!

In staff reports Councilor Moody attended an EDA meeting where they made a request to the Planning Commission to consider rezoning part of the Cedar Grove Business Park to be commercial/residential.  There will also be a meeting on May 15th where they will dive into the housing study again to start looking at possible actions.
Councilor Benson said that there was a North Shore Management meeting while she was out of town on vacation and that she is getting the meeting notes so she can report back about it.
Councilor Mills said that the last YMCA meeting was focused on team building and getting to know one another better so they can move through the challenging items facing them.
I reported on the Mayor's Conference, an update on the District Heating Project (look for information at many local businesses!), and the Moving Matters Blue Cross Blue Shield educational meeting that was hosted by Grand Marais on Monday and Tuesday.  I met many of the BCBS leadership and was very glad that I was able to!  There was a slough of other meetings, but I can't remember a lot of them off the top of my head!
Councilor Kennedy was out of town.

That's it!
Whew!  We look forward to seeing you at a meeting in the future!  At 6:30!