Council Meeting 5-28-15

One for the ages, we had a pretty concise and relatively short (1 hour) meeting last night that covered some very important ground for the City.

First of all, I would like to give a shout out to Tim Kennedy, who was absent from the meeting tonight recovering from an emergency medical procedure that he recently had.  Get better soon Tim!

Following the approval of the consent agenda with the addition of a few items, the Council considered an application from the American Legion Post #413 for a temporary liquor license for a beer tent in the parking lot adjacent to the Legion Hall for the weekend of Fisherman's Picnic.  Terry Breithaupt, the manager of the Legion, was present to give the Council a brief run-down of the safeguards the Legion puts in place to prevent beer from getting into the hands of minors, which sounded sufficient and appropriate.  The Council voted unanimously to approve the temporary  license for the beer tent.

Next was a pretty important item on the agenda.  The Council considered a new contract for a bonding arrangement with the County to take care of the EDA Business Park with the City limits.  The history on this goes back to 2007 when the original bonds were issued.  The expense of developing the Business Park was leveraged against special assessments on each of the lots in the amount of $60,000/lot.  This amount was to be paid concurrently with the purchase of a lot.  Since not all of the lots have been sold and because the EDA believes that the special assessments are hindering their sale, they have asked for the lots to be re-assessed in order to lower that assessment. (Still following?).  Basically, the County and the City are going to share the cost of the bonds for the business park so that the amount of assessment on each lot can be lowered so they can sell and so the City/County can start collecting tax on those lots and so that the Business Park can be used for what it was developed for.  After some input from our legal counsel, the Council voted and approved the contract for bond financing.

In another exciting piece of action, the Council had the second reading of Ordinance 2015-01, which dictates growler sales in the City.  We had the first reading at the last meeting where we had a few questions concerning language and structure of the ordinance, but at this meeting we were advised that the ordinance was in good form and thus we voted to approve the revised Ordinance 2015-01, which allows for Sunday sales of growlers.  In looking around, it seems that Grand Marais got on this pretty quickly as there are only a handful of other cities in the state that are currently selling growlers on Sundays, so go and get it!

The Council added a few additional conversations to the agenda, one being a conversation about topics for the next joint powers meeting and the next being a conversation about creating a plan for the public bathrooms in Grand Marais.

For the joint meeting conversation points, the Council brought up garages again, to see if there would be any interest in partnerships in building or handling that topic, the Council brought up recreation spending and wanted to have a conversation on where each entity stands on that, the Council was also very interested in seeing the work that the County has done on making an objective application for entities seeking discretionary funds, and there was interest in hearing from Grand Portage on its agricultural/compost projects, which sound incredible!

As for the public bathrooms, Councilor Benson suggested creating an action plan for the project so that we don't find ourselves sitting in the same place 12 months from now.  This was agreed on and added to by Councilor Mills pointing out that we are going to be getting back the building assessment for City Hall soon and that can inform any changes/construction we do.  The conversation will continue in the future.  Stay tuned for an action plan of some sort.

Then it was time for Councilor/Staff reports.  It was a pretty quiet few weeks with Councilors Moody and Benson not having any reports and Councilor Mills reporting briefly on his meetings with the broadband committee (to brainstorm what is next), the YMCA (discussing finances and budget), and the Northwoods Food Project (discussing their area food survey and compost project).  You can get the survey results from Diane Booth at the Extension Office located at the Community Center.

My report took a little time because there were several things that happened in my weeks since the last meeting.

1. The City won another GreenSteps City award for the work that has been done in creating more energy efficient/waste efficient practices in the City. I will be going down to the League of MN Cities Annual Conference in June in Duluth to accept it.  I also invited the rest of the Councilors to attend the conference because it usually isn't so close to home and the trainings have proven to be very, very valuable in application to our work here in Grand Marais.

2. I brought up some conversations that I have had with residents asking questions about vacation rentals by owner in Grand Marais and seeking some clarification in how and where these are allowed.  The Planning and Zoning Commission will bring a summary to the Council in the near future.

3. There will be an unveiling of the public art sculpture on the library lawn this coming Friday June 5th at 4:30pm.  Everyone is invited!

4. We had the first meeting of the stakeholders in the senior services conversation.  There were many very knowledgeable people in attendance and we spent quite a lot of time talking about the situation and then decided to set some dates to meet with the companies that returned the City's RFP for doing the market study on what services we have and what we will need as a community. These meetings will be happening in the coming weeks and then I will make sure to update you of progress.

5. Finally the last update I brought forward had to do with the District Heating Biomass project.  Last week myself and many representatives of the project met with potential customers to present the contracts and service agreements to each.  We received a good level of support and some more questions, which we sought to answer.  In the end, we were faced with the fact that local area businesses/agencies are getting propane for extremely cheap right now and thus the finances of the project simply are not viable for most.  Facing this reality, the City took advantage of one of the contingencies built into the process to stop moving forward on the biomass project at this time.  The economics of the project are not viable to finance and be competitive with current fuel prices, so we are going to wrap up all of the information that we have gathered to this point and "moth-ball" the project until the economic models make it more attractive and feasible.  Although this is disappointing, I believe that the City performed honorably in pursuing this project.  We protected the City with the contingencies built in, we gave this a heck of a run, and we ended up with a project that is still about 80% complete.  In the instance that fuel prices spike again, we will be ready to take this off of the shelf, update the numbers, and get the project going again if it is deemed worthwhile.

That was it.  As always, if you have any questions, please let me know and I would love to chat with you about it.