City Council Meeting 1-27-2016

The City Council has been very busy this week with a few of our Councilors going to a League of MN Cities training in the Cities and with us having a worksession regarding the Public Utilities Facility project plans. I will be writing up a synopsis of each of those events for you shortly, but thought that I would get through the regular City Council meeting first!

The Council had already been in our worksession on the Public Utilities Facility before the regular meeting, but we wrapped that up, took a few minutes to gather ourselves, and then jumped into our regular meeting.

After calling the meeting to order, I opened up the public forum and no one spoke, so the public forum was closed and we moved on to the Consent Agenda.

The Consent Agenda had the usual three things on it (Approval of Agenda, Approval of Meeting Minutes of previous meeting, and Payment of Bills). We added to the Consent Agenda the American Legion's Bingo permit for offering Bingo on the 27th of February, the 19th of March, the 16th of April, and the 7th of May. We had received that application that day and thought that we could squeeze it in (so we did!). We also added an item to the agenda, which was the consideration of a class action lawsuit that the City is eligible for.  With those changes, the Consent Agenda was unanimously passed.

That means we can all go down to the Legion for Bingo once a month starting in February!

The next thing on the agenda was to have a conversation about the Arrowhead Animal Rescue Service Contract that the City has with the animal rescue group. It was brought up to the Council at the last meeting that the contract was expired and that the group has been offering its services without a contract with the City. We looked a little closer and found that the contract has an auto-renewal clause in it, so the City and Arrowhead Animal Rescue have had a contract in place all along, which is good. We still took a look at the contract though and decided that there was no reason for us to change anything with it, so we acknowledged the service that they provide for the City and took no specific action on the contract. Councilor Moody will continue to represent the Council to the animal rescue group and will keep us informed of any developments with the group.

After that conversation we had a thorough and kind of round-about conversation regarding the Coalition of Greater Minnesota Cities' request to all member Cities to pass a resolution in favor of supporting Local Government Aid payments to Cities in Greater Minnesota.

*A little explanation of all of this:

1. CGMC (Coalition of Greater Minnesota Cities)--This is an advocacy coalition of a number of cities outside of the Metro Area that focuses on and promotes issues that affect typically smaller communities that have challenges not faced by larger cities or cities in the Metro Area. Grand Marais is a member of this organization and has found it useful in representing us in areas such as housing and economic development.

2. LGA (Local Government Aid)-- This is a pool of money determined by the State Legislature to be divvied up to the Cities of MN based on a very complicated formula that includes population, population growth, unemployment rate, median income, square mileage, jobs per capita, housing inventory, housing value, property tax rate, etc, etc... I don't ever pretend to understand the formula, but you can download the spreadsheet of all of the determining information HERE. LGA can be used by the receiving City as property tax relief or any lawful expenditures (operations, special projects, etc).

The CGMC was very concerned about a spending bill that the MN House of Reps put forward that would have cut ALL LGA payments to cities, thus creating some big holes in these cities' budgets. In reaction, CGMC has created a resolution that encourages legislators to reconsider by showing that LGA is very important and needs to be maintained.  They want all member cities to sign it to show how big of a deal this is...

Our conversation started very favorable to the resolution, because it would be good for us to support other cities who would be dramatically affected by the cutting of LGA, but Grand Marais only receives about $55,000 of LGA and that is only because there is a special piece of legislation in place that grants us some LGA because we are the only municipality in our county (among a few other factors). So, LGA isn't really a critical part of our budget and under the current calculations we shouldn't get any anyway. This thinking started switching the attitude in the room. After that we started talking about precedent. If we signed on to this resolution saying that LGA was a big deal to us and that it is essential to our operation, but we don't fit into the formula, that could create a problem for us in the future if LGA were to be cut, or increased for that matter... The last piece of the conversation was that our situation just didn't match the language of the resolution and the Council felt that if we wanted to make a statement on LGA we should research the City's situation (like why our LGA has gone down from $300,000+ to the current $55,000) and create a statement that truly reflects that. There was a motion made to support the resolution, but it failed in the vote unanimously. You don't see that happen very often, but it was a great conversation none-the-less!

The next item was a very interesting one as well! The City of Grand Marais has been offered a piece of art by an artist with close personal ties to the area, and the City doesn't really know how to handle that! When former Councilor Sivertson was serving she was working on creating a "Public Art Policy" or an "Arts Commission" for the City so that we can better handle these generous offers of art. How do we quality control the art? What is the right character of the art? Where can it go and not go? These are all things that came up. It was suggested that this be a topic for Comprehensive Planning this year, but the Council was not wanting to re-create the wheel in these conversations so I agreed to speak with former Councilor Sivertson and other art leaders in our community to get a pulse on where those conversations were left so that we can continue them. I have made contact with these people and will be reporting back to the Council at the next meeting. It is an exciting concept to add to the City though!

Stay tuned for more about that!

Finally we got to the Class Action Lawsuit information. Again, a little background:

Grand Marais runs its own water treatment and wastewater treatment plants. These plants make sure that our drinking water is treated and safe as well as making sure that any water re-introduced to the lake meets State criteria for cleanliness. There are a number of natural processes that these plants take advantage of to treat our water, but there are also some chemicals that we need to buy/use to achieve the state standards. One of these chemicals is Aluminum Sulfate. Aluminum Sulfate is useful because it makes fine particles present in water stick together, thus making them bigger and easier to filter out of our water supply. Well, it turns out that the company the City has been buying this chemical from for several years has been price fixing and participating in non-competitive bidding so that they can keep the price of this chemical artificially high. That means that we have paid more money for the chemical than we should. Thus, the class-action lawsuit seeks reparations for this breach of federal law. Now, we don't use very much of this chemical at all, but we stand to get a little money back from it, so the Council voted to formally participate in the lawsuit. There will be no expenses for the City at all from this, all of the lawyer fees are built into the settlement, but we may not be seeing that for a while... Class-action lawsuits usually take a year or more to settle because there are SO many claimants. Anyway, the City is participating in that; I think that is the most important thing...

After all of that we moved on to the Council and Staff Reports:

Councilor Moody reported that he went to the League of MN Cities training in the Cities and the EDA is still working on housing in conjunction with OneRoof out of Duluth.

Councilor Benson reported that she also went to the League training in the Cities as well as listening in to the North Shore Management Board meeting. She phoned in to the meeting and struggled with technical difficulties during the call so was not able to bring up the City's request for resources having to do with the Municipal Parking Lot issue, but will bring that up at the next meeting, where she will be attending in person. The North Shore Management Board is also looking for a rep from the Grand Portage area, so if any of you can think of someone, have then contact Councilor Benson!

I also attended the League training in the Cities (don't worry, we didn't talk to each other there) and found it to be very useful. More on that in another post! I also attended a very productive Library Board meeting where the various Committees of the Library made some important reports:
-The Personnel Committee will be meeting this week to create a formal plan to deal with plans to increase staffing according to the 2016 budget requests and current staff needs/changes.
-The Financial Committee created some suggestions for the Board for ways to spend some of the Library's dedicated funds (gifts from over the years). One of those plans is to begin to replace the technology at the Library so that it is more up to date and compatible with new library services available through the Arrowhead Library System. This would mainly be new computers and servers. Another idea was to investigate options for lowering the Library's operational expenses by potentially installing solar heating units or solar electricity units on the library's south roof. This could lower the Library's operational expenses, thus freeing up budget space for more programs and outreach.
-The Art Committee reported that it is still planning on building a sidewalk from the Hwy 61 sidewalk to the entrance to the Library to compliment the Puzzle Tree sculpture. The Art Committee will host a call for poetry to select a few locally produced poems to stamp into the concrete of the sidewalk, thus making it more appealing and engaging.

Councilor Mills reported that he will be presenting the Northwoods Food Project's Green Dollars survey to the Council sometime soon. He said that the Food Project hopes that local food will be a consideration in the City's Comprehensive Planning this year. The Broadband Commission is still pursuing video conferencing and co-working space in the County and are working on a job description for a coordinator for those projects. They are also taking a closer look at the City's offer of the old Visitor's Center space as a potential pilot location for this program. His final update was that Executive Director Emily Marshall will present the "State of the Y" to the Council at the Feb. 24th meeting.

Councilor Kennedy reported that the EDA's housing projects are moving forward nicely. There will be 2 projects, one in the West End and the other in Grand Marais focusing on meeting the perceived housing deficits in those areas. The EDA will be bringing a more formal report to the Council in March.  He also reported that the PUC has been working on putting together some suggestions for a Community Solar project that City PUC residents could buy into. This means that PUC users could basically lease panels in this project for a set price and then would get the credit back on their bills of what the panels produce, thus creating a relatively short pay-back schedule. It sounded like our electricity provider SMMPA (Southern Minnesota Municipal Power Agency) was putting certain incentives in place for projects like this, so it may be less expensive to implement that the PUC originally thought.

Administrator Roth and Finance Director Dunsmoor are beginning the City's annual audit, which will keep them busy for a while...

There you have it! That was the meeting! If you have any questions about any of this, please let me know. If you are curious about our worksession or the League of MN Cities training I attended, stay tuned for other posts on those topics!