Last Council Meeting of the Year... Happy New Year!

Today in another special meeting the City Council met to finish up some year end business. We decided to make this meeting a special meeting because there was no business on the agenda that required significant discussion and because it was far more convenient for Councilors and staff.

Because this was a special meeting, the agenda was advertised before the meeting and couldn't be changed once advertised.  There were only a few things on the agenda, so without further ado:


The meeting was called to order at 12:00pm with myself, Councilor Moody, and Councilor Kennedy in attendance.

We moved on to the public forum, where no one spoke, so we moved on to the consent agenda. The consent agenda was the usual three items: Approving the agenda (which was kind of a non-issue because the agenda was set), approval of the previous meeting's minutes, and the payment of bills (which was the main reason for calling this meeting! We like to get our bills paid on time!).
The Consent Agenda passed unanimously.

We then moved on to the approval of Tobacco Licenses for the City. Did you know that we only have 5 locations in the City where you can buy tobacco products? For some reason I thought it would be greater, but there you have it. The State requires that we license our tobacco sellers, so the motion was made to approve these licenses and it passed unanimously.

After that we had to accept (or set) our 2016 mileage reimbursement. The IRS lowered the reimbursement for mileage for 2016 from 57.5 cents/mile to 54 cents/mile and we had the opportunity to accept this change or set a different amount for mileage reimbursement. Considering that if we set our rate any different than the IRS it would result in additional accounting work for our administration and it would result in additional income that would need to be accounted for for our employees, we accepted the IRS's suggestion, thus making reimbursement 54 cents/mile.

The final item on the agenda was the adjustments to the ending balances of our capital accounts for the City.  These are accounts where we budget money each year so we can save up money for large expenditures such as equipment or facilities improvements. Examples of these are street improvements, City Hall maintenance, fire protection, and insurance. This was no problem for us to approve because the adjustments that were being suggested were all positive adjustments.

There was one more adjustment that needed to be done though, that one was for the Gunflint Hills Golf Course.  The Golf Course is owned and operated by the City of Grand Marais and is a useful amenity for those who live in our area. It is an attraction for the Rec. Park and is used by leagues, the Cross Country team, and several visitors. It is a City enterprise and thus is an opportunity for the City to make money. However, due to weather and conditions, the Golf Course did not make any money this year. Thus we needed to transfer $8,000 to the Golf Course account to make sure that it has a positive balance for the year end. This is one thing that we would like to take a look at and see if there is anyway that we can make the course more profitable for the City. More to come on that!

Well, that sums it up!  We will be kicking off 2016 on January 13th at 6:30pm and will begin talking about what we want to accomplish in the year and how we are going to do that. If any of you have suggestions for what we should be considering as a 2016 project, please let me know and I will take note of it for our discussion!

As always if you have any questions, please let me know!

Happy New Year!