um all right at 6 30 we'll call the monday november 22nd city council meeting to order if we could start with the pledge of allegiance please i pledge allegiance all right with that we have any additions to the agenda tonight hearing none i'll look for a motion to approve the agenda as presented i'll make that motion i have a motion to have a second oh second motion a second all in favor say aye aye aye aye same sign motion carries 5-0 that will take us to public comments if there's anyone who would like to discuss anything that is not on the agenda please come forward seeing none we will close public comments move to consent is it a consent agenda that needs to be pulled for further discussion hearing none i'll a promotion to approve the consent agenda as presented i'll make that motion we have a motion to have a second second thank you we have a motion and a second from help motion carries 5-0 that will take us to 781 2022 sheriff's department contract and hours update members of the council i want to thank you for giving me a few minutes of your time tonight and uh i just want to touch base on a couple of things that are going on uh within the office and within the contract policing system um we can click to the next slide here we'll jason just for the uh record and for anyone who may be watching could you just introduce yourself sure i i'm sheriff jason camerood thank you just we have made some changes to uh staffing to distribute the workload of contracts amongst a larger pool of employees historically we would keep our contract deputies that are funded through municipal contracts and our county deputies that are funded through county lever levy we keep those separate and we would put the municipal workload on the contract deputies and all of the support and the county workload on on the levy county levy funded employees well we've had a little bit of uh turnover in uh personnel and this is a national thing right now and we'll we'll get to some data here momentarily but that with that turnover and those vacancies in the position in the positions that we have we had to find a different way to do that and so what we've done is temporarily put our contract workload and our general patrol workload kinda in the same pot and distributed it amongst the entire pool of deputies instead of just off the two the alternative would be we would have to leave some contracts unfilled and then that would result in a lower level of service for those cities who who chose to go that route we started this on october 11th and we had floated this idea with city managers and didn't get a tremendous amount of of pushback and and i think that's because most of the city managers realize that that we're better as a team and when we all work together and we say hey here's the facts that were that we have right now we can't continue operations like we have been doing it this way will work temporarily let's go ahead and do it um it about in no decrease in the service level which was really important to us uh because you know the the citizenry is expecting a certain level of service and and we're going to try to deliver that uh to the extent that we can and it's just bridging a temporary staffing shortage we have employees who are in training who once they are successfully complete their training they'll fill vacancies on the schedule and we ought to be able to go back to the the standard practices they say well what brought us here well you know this has been an ongoing trend in law enforcement for quite some time with a decreasing number of people entering the the field and an increasing number in retirements uh retirements are up about 40 to 45 percent nationally and and that's significant but it's not surprising to most of us who have been in the business because if you recall back in the mid 1990s the federal government packed a bunch of money into what was then called clinton cops right it was bill clinton the president clinton's administration provided grant funding for municipalities and sheriff's offices to add personnel through these grants well mid-1990s when that happens 25 years ago those folks are all in their 50s mid 50s and are retirement eligible and and what we're seeing today is everybody who's eligible to retire is leaving they're doing it uh what we hadn't seen a lot of and that we didn't predict is this next one the number of people who went to school for law enforcement got into law enforcement worked it for a couple of years and decided i'm going back to the job i had before um i personally would attribute some of that to uh going back to memorial day you know a year and a half ago and this whole defund police and the criticism of police people are just looking at it and saying it's just not worth it there's it's not worth sticking around so we've lost nine to that now fortunately for us because we're a medium-sized agency we have a lot of non-law enforcement positions we were able to retain three of those in some civilian positions and some of our civilian positions would be in the jail in dispatch center records you know some of these other supporting positions and mission-critical sorts of things and so we we kept three i think they all landed in the in the jail uh municipal agencies uh we lost 11 to municipal agencies and and when i say this is going on nationally but it's also happening right here in minnesota this attrition rate is not unique to carver county and we know that because these metro agencies are having vacancies that they haven't had they're not adding cops they're they're clinton cops are running out they're retiring they're leaving they're having people leave the business and just be done uh you know the city of chaska is a perfect example of an agency they've historically had very low attrition rates uh very well-run agency well-funded uh and they're losing people just like we are right and they've actually hired this next one that they hire will be our fourth employee in the last two years that left the sheriff's office to go to chaska pd um we do exit interviews with with all of these folks and and every one of them has been really candid uh and and i i believe they're totally sincere um they're telling us that it's the money they're not leaving you know i didn't really like my supervisor but i wasn't going to quit my job over it and i didn't like the policy i didn't like we can't grow beards but i wasn't going to quit over it money money prompted them to to leave and and we're not talking about nominal amounts of money here there the hiring practices with these municipal agencies is they're all on a step system and so you start at step one and every year of service until you get to the top of the pay scale i wouldn't be surprised if if the city does a similar sort of thing with it with its employees well the old days of lateral movement was if you had five years of experience at carver county we the municipality would hire you and bring you in at step two or three right and you know higher than the first day rookie but not at the top of the scale what some agencies are doing now at least what they're offering in their ads is if you have five years of experience at carver county they will hire you where you would have been had you had five years with them so it for some cities they're bringing them right in at the top of the pay scale and the top of their pay scale is three dollars an hour more than our highest paid deputy is making so when you are looking at a deputy our average deputy makes 35.58 an hour and they can make a seven dollar an hour increase to go work at uh you know pick your municipal agency uh that's a pretty tough thing uh you know for them to say well it's seven bucks an hour it wasn't 40 cents an hour they just stuck around but so that's pretty significant uh so what are we doing to mitigate that well i'll get to that sir i'll get to that you've been working with the county commissioners on this banging on their door and their absolutely and we'll talk about that but i it's important to understand what's going on uh in this and and we had three that went home uh we they just i hired a nice young man was a deputy out of blue earth county grew up in blue earth county was living in his granddad's farm driving to chaska to work for us he wanted to go home we we weren't going to keep him he took a cut in pay to go home but that's where he wanted to be so i've had a couple of those and then we've had five resign and those are usually people who were in the uh this isn't working out you might think about resigning mode right that's the fte vacancy issue it gets compounded for us on the schedule when we have soldiers who are currently deployed when we have injury on duty taking them out of the mix and then family medical leave act uh the the deployed soldiers i i'm i'm grateful to have soldiers in that work for us um the deployment is a little inconvenient i gotta be honest but i'm i'm grateful that there are men and women who are willing to do that family medical leave deck we've been hiring young people people in their 20s and 30s start families and so as soon as the the child shows up they they're gone for 90 days which is what the the act allows and and i think it's great i when my daughter was born i took time off and was at home it's it's an important thing uh here again though it's compounding our our scheduling uh glitch so what we have done to make this work is we we calculated on patrol time and and that is the amount of time that a deputy spends working in a patrol capacity you know you don't when you hire an employee will use your city administrator for an example you probably hire them for eight hours a day monday through friday 52 weeks a year that's 2080 hours well in your pack compensation package there's probably at least 10 or 12 holidays in the mix right so you're planning on her being off on fourth of july memorial day labor day all of those so that's 80 hours so you are even if she showed up every day it's 2 000 hours planned well she's going to go on vacation and take sick leave and get some continuing education credits and all of those sorts of things deputies are the exact same way and so what we did was we calculated the time that they're actually in a squad car taking calls and doing work and took that workload and divided that amongst a larger pool of employees so we have that accounting mechanism they report their time on contract policing to account for that temporary scheduling adjustment and the one part i want to be clear two points that have to be actually clear on this is temporary and the change is for accountability we are not switching to an hourly model we're going to continue with our fte model but because we're mixing and matching right now i need to be able to report back to the city that your scheduled deputy had sixteen hundred forty hours of on patrol time here is how we made sure you were getting that uh let's see uh it's uh the on patrol time is the guaranteed minimum if we come up a little short of that through the accounting piece then we refund the difference and if we end up with a little bit of an overage uh there's no added fee for that it's just uh how that's gonna shake out for us the they put account for their time in five minute increments um and we have uh the staff that does the time they recorded on a time sheet timesheets already structured for this and we have a team watching it to make sure that if they owe four hours in mayor it just doesn't say four four four four four on their timesheet because they would either be really ridiculously good at time management or they're just filling in the slot because i would expect it to be three hours 35 minutes one day and four hours 10 minutes another and you know it should happen flow but we're shooting for the average uh retention strategy some of the things that we've done and i've talked with your city manager about this we went to the county board of commissioners and explained the situation to them in the springtime and they negotiated a collective bargaining agreement to pack some additional money into that to be more competitive with municipalities to the east and this is a long standing negotiation issue with the deputy's bargaining unit who did not have an appetite to accept the proposals presented by the county and that involved pay for performance and so they haven't had a mechanism to move through the pay scale and the board of commissioners in this last round allowed the hr director to get pretty creative and she now there's a mechanism to move through the pay scale and there is a pay for performance component to it what we're finding out now is because when you go back to how agencies are doing the lateral movement you find that the deputies are not inclined to wait for that mechanism to kick in when they can take one step and go to one agency and hit those higher numbers right from the get-go so we're a little light on the base wage still some of the other things we're doing is we're trying to use the resources that the board of commissioners allocates to us to be effective even though we might have a few less deputies working patrol than we would like so we've civilianized some positions i've talked to you before about the mental health core responder that's one example that's a force multiplier uh you know the data we don't have enough data points to really know but anecdotally i know we're getting less repeat calls on mental health calls we are have a crime analyst that we have funded through the our salary and benefits money that crime analyst other cities who run this see that person solving about 30 to 40 percent of the cases for the detectives the detectives still have police work to do on the back end but the analyst links all of these crimes together and and can narrow the focus and they're linking crimes committed in other counties that have a tie into carver county so trying to create some additional professional development opportunities within the office we've always kind of had that but it's been more long-term so like we might assign a deputy to be a detective for three years well what we're learning or at least what i'm reading about we haven't done we'll try it uh is if you can just give them an 80 hour so a two week or a four week stint in investigations to dabble in it and scratch that itch if you can do that periodically that's just as effective for the professional development piece flexible scheduling is another one this workforce more than previous generations has said that work-life balance is important to them they have made that abundantly clear and it's not in my opinion a uh an unwillingness to work it's a values-based prioritization they are saying being home with my family teaching my kids little league you know whatever it is that they happen to do is more important to me than working and that's an okay thing we then as an organization have to be adaptable to meet that and one of the things we can do because we can control the schedule is we can be flexible in in how we do that it's a little harder in a 24 7 patrol post but it it's a co it can be done in a contract like in in town here where we can allow the employee to go home early or come in late to meet some personal needs while also recognizing we might want them to come in early or stay late to cover some municipal need right you have the car show whatever you might want to flex that and so we can have that balance with them uh we've worked with human resources i'm trying to pursue some non-traditional candidates uh this has always been uh on the the uh forefront you know we've hired cadets which are people who are perhaps second career folks we are continuing down that path we have asked the board of commissioners and they have agreed to make the licensing process a legislative priority and what what we're asking the post board to do is to create alternate pathways to peace officer licensure i'm not talking about lowering standards or changing into that it's let's change the pathway the current pathway is the person enrolls in school gets the academic piece goes to skills which would be kind of like a police academy kind of thing then they come out eligible and ready to be licensed then they get hired and then they come and they train with us for 16 weeks well some of that training is really redundant and so i believe we can do some of that i could train them internally on a lot of the stuff that they get in skills meet the same standards because post tells you here are the things they have to know when they're done and then we so we can buy ourselves some time that way um also trying to get after uh more females in in in the workforce in our workforce right now nationally women make up between 11 and 14 of all of law enforcement ridiculous is the most underrepresented group of people the the bypoc group has a better representation proportionally than than women and now if you uh believe this the article in the star tribune and i do two weeks ago uh many women who took off work to stay home with their families during covid have decided i'm not going back to work so now i expect to see that pool getting smaller so my goal is to find out what are some of the barriers and what can we do to draw from that pool and and maybe that involves getting out of some of the traditional stuff that we've always done you know we've always said oh if you want to come be a deputy sheriff at carver county you got to go through this process you have to work patrol and work nights and weekends and do all these other things well does it have to look that way there's it might but i'm not sure that it absolutely has to so maybe we can change up some of those processes and look at some different assignments that are more conducive to people whose values put them at home and also accomplish our need i have jobs that are monday through friday that irregular day hours that could be worked right uh trying to create a promotional job class in addition to uh work-life balance the the workforce today wants to know what steps to take to progress through an organization and you know um so we're talking about they do this is common in the south where they'll have like a master deputy and that's probably a deputy who has a certain amount of time in grade but has also uh maybe been a field training officer maybe been a firearms instructor perhaps worked as a bailiff or in investigations or some other assignment that gives them a broader knowledge base to draw on and we're working with hr to try to do that what what i would like to see from our contract partners is the continued flexibility in the liaison in in the deputy assignments uh the the ability to mix and match these people uh our employee the contract and the levy funded group has really been critical uh for us to bridge this this temporary gap and then i would also ask the city to be open to scheduling flexibility uh when when the time uh comes it'll be managed by the sergeants so that the city is in fact getting it what it had what it's contracting for and and these are things you would be doing if you had your own police department right you'd flex and try to get the employee to be available when you need them but let them go home and coach little league and and whatnot and i'm just looking for some flexibility to do that and so far we've had that and so i'm grateful and and i would just ask that uh if it's continue if it works for you guys and it's working for us i think we keep doing it with that i would entertain any questions that that you might have any questions for the sheriff so you say temporary we think maybe going into q1 of 2022. uh correct i have i have five in training right now uh who are slated to be done you know they don't all finish at the same time but a couple are in the end of december and a couple are in the first part of january and you know if we don't have too many more go out on on fmla or on an iod then i think that's pretty realistic to uh in q1 i don't plan to run longer than that unless i absolutely had to but i would be in communication with the city administrator if that was the route we had to go but it's not i have no desire to go beyond q1 and i can tell you and i think i speak for everyone we say we certainly want to be flexible and help where we can and thank you we understand the situation and you know the pains of it all um are most or maybe all uh police departments or sheriffs are they all unionized or is it individual they don't all have to be do they no they don't have to but i would say that's the norm yeah there are some agencies that are that are non-union shops but they're pretty few and far between uh at least what i know anecdotally so i can i can tell you a few of my concerns maybe on it and i know i've talked to maggie a little bit about it just because of the shift and and the days that they work so it almost appears we have four different deputies really covering the city now um so i've asked maggie to maybe reach out to the the six six pm deputies and maybe have them come in and just meet with her on like council nights or other nights we have meetings at 6 30 when she's here i think it makes sense for them to come in and so she's going to work with them on that but for sure i can tell you my other concern and and i i don't want this to be taken the wrong way by any means um i can tell you since october for the last month for sure i've never once seen a deputy in town it's a little concerning i used to see brad all the time wherever it may be sitting somewhere or even at the fire station talking with another deputy or some he was around there was a presence and i can tell you i haven't seen it it's a little i know they're out there and i'm gonna start tracking some of these numbers on you know the stops and stuff i it looks like they've gone down some which tells us they're not you know i'm just concerned a little bit with that to make sure we're getting i'm not saying anyone's lying or they're not here by any means but it's more of a maybe just a note for you for you but i've noticed it yeah i appreciate that and uh you know what happens on on that scenario is you're spreading it out uh amongst multiple deputies and also seven days a week so you're adding coverage to the city on days that you wouldn't have normally have had an officer at all and you know mathematically because people have asked about what's it done to uh response times and you know we'll take a look at it when we're done to see how feasible this model is going forward um but you know just the math behind it says that you're getting the same number of on patrol hours in the city so you should end up with roughly the same uh response time averages right and but but the visibility uh you know i have heard that and uh you're gonna see it in smaller blocks uh another thing that i in you know we we cannot overlook is your number of daylight hours is significantly different today than it was in september right and and uh um you know is that a contributing factor i i don't know but um but what i what i will say is the the record keeping on the on the log sheets is pretty consistent with what we've asked for so maybe i'm just missing them but i i mean it's just an observation the other thing i wanted to ask and again it's i mean council hasn't talked about this by any means but i know for us in our community for as long as i can remember back to oh 607 when we started this we weren't real concerned with early in the sundays mondays maybe even tuesday just because not a lot's going on you know we wanted more the end of the week was you know seemed to be more more of that do we need to do seven days a week five you know if we said to you hey you know for q1 we don't need sunday monday tuesday let's take 15 hours off you can have that back for 15 put them other places needed instead of here and then i just feel the money we spend and the time we're covering i just don't know how much value it is to the community and to our residents and our taxpayers it just i struggle with that and i don't know if that's something we can work with or if it's no we're in contract for 88.88 it's just getting spread over seven days is there and again that's just my opinion council might not agree with that we haven't discussed it i think we will that you know if your openness i don't know where it stands well i think that uh you know we have to remember that the .88 is driven by the actual workload in the city and so the city certainly could say we we want to get out of all of it and i'm not recommending that to be very clear but but what would happen is you would see a substantial decrease in service because i cannot because of the agreement and the litigation in chaska we absolutely cannot provide police services that you municipal police services that you did not pay for and and so if if you don't buy at least the workload the work has to go somewhere and it'll go undone if it's not funded by the city some of that my thoughts on it were again trying to be flexible and really helping helping your department to here here's some deputies back for you or we just heard they're needed you know so why i hate to have one sitting here for five hours not sitting here i understand the lack of a better term but being here on a sunday night when it's not really necessary they could really be used somewhere that you could really use them but i get what you're saying on the 0.88 and how does that then somewhere the rest of his salary has to then fall back into the county i suppose if the city's not paying for it well yeah the salary is not the issue in this one though it is the workload okay because if you if let's say you dropped it to .5 just to keep things nice and simple picking up the balance of the fte uh with vacancies is not an issue the problem would be you would still have .33 amount of work that has to be done and and we can't do that if you're not funding it that the city won't get that 0.33 yeah because your citizens are still going to call and say there's a dog barking uh then the cars are blocking the the the snow plow street all of that we're not going to come so even at 0.5 you want to do that because you have 0.88 amount of work it takes .88 to do it and the reason we cover it 24 7 365 when you buy point you buy your full workload is because if you could run this if you could magically anticipate when all these calls would come that's how you would schedule right well we can't do that so you buy the workload and then we use the resources to cover that now you would still get emergencies keeping the peace and apprehension of felons because we're statute the sheriff's office is statutorily obligated to do that you would not get misdemeanors nuisance complaints uh you know code enforcement uh you know those sorts of things so um you know those are things the city would want to weigh uh in that uh scenario yeah and i have no interest in reducing that at all i mean i don't have an interest out i like said i just i would just try to work something for me like this is a very sh from what you're saying is a short-term issue i don't necessarily think it needs well pressing your finger like if this starts stretching into like after q1 from what you were saying and now this is the new model then i definitely think that i'd be interested in having those conversations that mike was talking about but for right now i mean we just have to be flexible but i agree like we really like the hours we finally came to that we had set for the summer where we were kind of doing that four to ten or what was it four ten hours four ten hour days like that seemed to really work we finally i felt got the days and the coverage that was really beneficial i think and it worked for the deputies so i i hope that we can get back to that for warmer months that is the intention is to is to get there and and i'm hopeful that um you know we're able to uh make some uh some changes that affect our retention a little bit you know i'm hopeful that the the contract that was signed in summer of 2021 impacts 2021 and 2022 and i've shared with uh um the county administrator that because of that there will be a a change in in pricing on on the fte and and that'll impact your 20 20 30 budget which you'll be planning starting next summer summer of 2022 so you'll see those numbers then i guess for me my concern is just if the staffing level continues to decrease what does that look like well you know these are all decisions that we would have to make uh if and when that were to happen but if we were to play this out to worst case scenario if would do the same thing you would have if you had your own police department what would you do you know and you would i don't have uh enough cops to do the full amount of work so what would you do you'd prioritize the work you would decide which is critical and to remember there's there's a certain volume of work and a certain number of employees to do it and if this number gets smaller we can shrink the volume of work by by changing the work that we're going to do we might say for example uh and this has not been the type of call we get here but we have seen it in other cities where we're responding to a grass clipping complaint where the neighbor blew their grass clippings on one person's side of the property line maybe we look at that and say we're not going to go to those kinds of calls it adds to the workload and it's not legitimate enforceable law enforcement sort of thing you know we would probably so we would look at some of those sorts of things i can tell you that we will have enough resources to manage person crimes and and and felonies right and emergencies that's really where by priority will be and we'll have to look at some of those other lower tier calls for service and maybe make some different decisions but we're a long ways away from having to fret about that good how close are how close is carver county and pay to other counties for deputies you know scott company or mcleod or well you know i think we're i think we're competitive with uh the other counties but for hennepin and ramsey and that would uh be compelling if we were losing deputies to other counties we're losing them to municipal agencies in hennepin and ramsey county and that's who we're really competing with so yeah we we pay a lot more than mcleod county and we have brought over exactly zero deputies from mcleod county despite the fact that we pay quite a bit more and and i think the issue is where carver county is relative to hennepin and ramsey is that's where our workforce is coming from we're not hiring local kids i mean we have some but overall they're mostly coming from the hennepin ramsey county where they grew up and they they don't this isn't home for them and i think that's they're happy to go back to the hennepin ramsay side seems to be a big part of it then well according to the exit interviews saying and what what your your presentation money is a big piece of it yeah yeah and so that's the trying time i mean these are just times from what happened from a year ago and what's going on and funding and all that everything that everyone's heard about but the money isn't specific just to law enforcement i mean i have that in my you know i mean that's everything right now i mean right what you've gone through i think we can all you know relate to that um right my business is just different than your business everybody's having a labor issue yeah right now and uh you know and you know and it's really it's a very difficult time uh for difficult decisions for the board of commissioners because carver county is so unique in that we are the municipal police in all of carver county and so if the city of chanhassen had its own police department they would compare themselves to edina minnetonka eden prairie south lake minnetonka wyzetta deephaven all those municipalities around them that's who they would compare to if norwood young america had its own police department they would compare themselves probably glencoe silver lake arlington winthrop gaylord you know because that's who they're most similar to but if your workforce is all coming from hennepin and ramsey and you think you want to keep them you have to pay that wage otherwise you just have a turnover rate right and why do you think it is that you're not drawing anybody from mcleod if carver county is paying more than mcleod why why are we is carver county not stealing any of those deputies you know i don't know the answer to that i don't know if they have homegrown talent who like my deputy from blue earth county they just want to go home and live in silver lake and police mcleod county i i don't know the answer to that it's just you might come just so we can yeah this is this is chief chief deputy pat barry i actually know a few of the deputies that just left mcleod county and they actually went back home which is on the east end of the metro and so they're also hiring people from outside they're short staffed as well and they're also i just met with their chief the other day and so they're going through the same thing we are some of the people that they have they're long-term employees and so they're you know they're they're staying there they have no intentions of leaving we certainly have those staff as well but just to kind of give you a look at it yeah but when if you're saying that dollars is the main reason they're leaving why is mcleod county not leaving to come here if we're ultimately paying more because edinburgh grove heights is hiring too so they just skip right over is what you're saying and they're gonna drive from arlington all the way to inver grove heights to make and i get it i mean seven dollars an hour is fifteen thousand dollars a year that's a thousand dollars a month and that's straight salary yeah right you put overtime on that and night difference you know what an hour in a car isn't that bad or you can relocate and uh you know because we're not as the as the chief deputy pointed out we're not losing our senior employees we're losing those one to five-year employees who you know they haven't worked their way through the scale because we didn't have one until this summer right and that's where we're at but uh but we're not alone all agencies are going through this including some that are well-funded you know i used the city of chaska as an example very well well-paid officers and they're seeing turnover retirements people just left the work and i assume you're getting full cooperation from the board of commissioners as you work with them and they understand the issues and they're doing what can we do when they're at it hard well we're having some conversations with them and and mostly with county administration and finance and because if i go to the board of commissioners making an ask you know they need to realize have the finance and the county administrator saying here's how this might shape up but they have it has adverse impacts throughout the county they have this is one bargaining unit of 11. and um settling up with one group uh significantly differently than the other creates problems and and so i just don't know what kind of appetite they have to do that uh those are their decisions to make and and i don't profess to to know okay perfect any other questions oh maggie anything thank you wonderful thank you for coming in i appreciate thank you i appreciate your time tonight we look forward to partnering with you still thank you thank you one i do have one question i'm sorry have you made decisions for 2022 on i mean once we get back to normal in q2 for the mayor town deputy have we decided it was in a weekly update so it'll be brad hendricks again one of us knew thank you thanks for coming in i appreciate it all right with that we'll go to city council reports council member milan anything to report on yeah uh watertown community ed had a meeting last week i attended and um their construction is wrapping up in most of the areas they had some problems issues like we did with the fire station with material delays but that wasn't all bad with the project coming in lower than expected they were they are able to remodel some of their locker rooms that they hadn't planned on so that was a good thing their program brochures are coming out the winter brochure is coming out december around december 10th and then their spring summer brochure you'll see in the mail around mayish one thing that'll be a little bit different that you'll see is they're asking their program participants to fill out a survey to help them uh for evaluating the program and to help grow their programs but um they're uh they're doing well and make sure you read their brochure and sign up for an activity good perfect thank you councilmember wagner anything to report on i have nothing all right councilmember help um tree lighting december 4th december 4th mm-hmm wonderful all right is that everything i think so friday saturday saturday uh council member mcneely oh i don't have anything and i don't we uh had a quick personnel committee meeting uh prior to this meeting to interview for chief two uh so personnel committee has made a recommendation and that'll be coming to council at next meeting so with that i'll look for a motion to adjourn i'll make that motion a second a motion a second all in favor say aye aye same sign we are adjourned all right and with that then we'll jump right into the monday november 22nd city council workshop all right the first item is the proc a proclamation request so uh the mayor was sentenced a request to recognize uh in uh next year january 23rd to 20 the 29th uh to recognize that as national school choice week we have not received a request from this non-profit before and so um bringing it to the council for consideration what we want to do with it so as you know proclamations and ceremonial resolutions by the city council are requested from time to time by individuals or organizations to provide public awareness or recognition of events achievements and activities we did create a proclamation policy in 2020 to assist staff and counsel in determining if proclamation requests meet the standards so a little bit about national choice national school choice week they're an organization they're non-profit it's a national nonprofit that brings attention to equal choice or equal focus on education options so as you know there's many options for education from from k to high school which is traditional public charter magnet online private and home education in so every year participants of national choice week plan and participate thousands of events and activities fairs open houses student showcases to raise awareness of school choice across 50 states so the organization essentially seeks to educate families year-round about the resources that they provide and guide them in assisting in school decision-making they are non-political and non-partisan so with that i did include a link to their website um to provide you a little bit more information about them and then um the proclamation request that we had received and so at this time we're just i'm looking for a discussion on this request any additional questions you have that you want me to look into and thoughts on recognizing next january 23rd to 29th as national school choice week all right thank you any thoughts on this request do you know if other cities in the area also received it i am not aware of that i tried to look on their website to see if there's other communities that have recognized it in the past i didn't see i don't know if this if um i couldn't find a whole lot of other cities supporting it but i have seen other i think there were a few entities obviously school districts supporting it and then i think it it sounds like it's just a relatively new quest or something that they're reaching out to a lot more communities about to to get this recognition each year um i just found a couple articles from local newspapers that said that some communities had supported it in the past but nobody i couldn't find anybody in carver county um i've certainly done proclamations uh before i for me i like to keep them a little more local i think even even if it's a national thing but a local chapter you know that approaches us no i kind of prefer that would you be able to find out uh if one of the 27 governors was minnesota because to me it seems like that would be a minnesota and if our governor's gonna do it that to me would take care of things from a state standpoint also i don't know if we'd be just a thought if you could check that i'm certainly not opposed to it by any means i just yeah and i know i can confirm that in the past we've generally done local requests um this is more of a national one um so it is kind of outside what we've generally but it does fall within the policy right like that it does yeah it's it's something um like yeah any request that comes in we can consider if we feel that it fits um that's what we want to recognize so um some of the intent was to have some of these as he's come in to have a conversation through a work session prior it was uh the mayor could just do it and i just didn't feel that was right and i didn't want to get it to the point where i may say yep i'm going to proclaim this day for something bring it and counsel all disagrees with it and say no you know then it failed it just seemed awkward so we just thought it was better to talk about him instead of i just didn't feel i should be not that i couldn't make that decision but i i felt it's better to get some input so and this is just recognizing the weak right there's no financial commitment there's no financial commitment it's essentially they want us to recognize the week and through a proclamation and send them like a copy of it just saying that mayor support the city of mayor supports this um again it's just putting information out there that you know to our residents that there are a lot of education options out there that they can consider and just educating families on on these options yeah because they're out of california so like you know again is minnesota one of the governors is it right and i can look into that it's not uncommon um for to get these requests from from beyond i just think we do do like mike says do a little more digging yeah why don't you see if our governor did last year okay yep i can do that and i suppose it'd be interesting to see what watertown mayor school district if they yeah i can reach out i don't know where they would stand on that you know right if they want or homeschooling versus coming to public school you know but it'd be interesting to see yeah i can i can even send out some messages to i i looked on other city websites like previous years and i usually go through packets and see if they've recognized it and nobody in carver county did so i don't know if this is just a new request for 2022 but i can do a little bit more research with the cities if they received this request this year and then maybe some of the school districts i can also do the state as well because we got a little time i would say that this is probably like you said you thought it was newer i think i think just with the environment that we've been through the last year and a half i think this kind of organization is more prevalent now the choice the choice that that parents have on where to send their children i would agree yeah i'll do a little bit more research and then we can we can discuss it more perfect thank you all right 2022 general fund budget all right so as you know um we are getting close to the end of the year and with that we do need to have our final budget passed by december 30th and certified to carver county so um since the passing of the preliminary budget in september 2021 city staff and council have continued to review the budget for 2022 we do have our truth and taxation meeting on december 13th to accept comments from the public we do have the ability to pass the budget that evening if there's any comments from the public that we receive that we're questioning some of our budget at that time we can do a special meeting or do our meeting on december 27th so i am i did provide in your packet a bunch of my an updated budget statement city council goals our preliminary budget doc information budget information also my budget exp powerpoint that i will be presenting at the truth and taxation meeting any changes that were made to the general capital and debt fund budget i did include those in your packet and then the final recommended expenditure detail final revenue detail and then the resolution draft that i will be bringing so all these documents are documents that i will be bringing to the next meeting and explain how we went from the preliminary tax levy of 49.3 and my final recommendation at 48.3 um so again i know that's a lot of information but and so this meeting before our truth and taxation meeting when i present the final budget is to ask for any or answer any questions that you have before that meeting um so that i can make any adjustments uh or clarify anything so um with that um if you have any questions i'm available or if you want me to go into something a little bit in a little bit more detail i'm more than willing to do that as well any questions comments thoughts i i'm pleased with it i think it looks great uh meg i think you did a great job getting it down to that 48.3 so i don't have anything i don't need anything else for me personally anyone else nope okay are you planning the first meeting into summer correct yep december 13th is when our scheduled truth and taxation meeting is and so that's where a lot of this information will be presented um yep so if if there are any questions that come up before then get any clarification questions just let me know and i'd be happy to talk you through them and do we typically vote that night yes i mean right because it's yes or no maybe yeah so if you hold the public hearing and you do get some comments so what we do is we'll present all the budget information how we got to it how we worked through it and then we'll invite the public to speak if there's anything um you know it's it's for us to answer any questions that they have if there's anything concerning that they bring up we can we do not have to pass it that night we can do it at a future meeting where we actually address some of the concerns if we don't feel comfortable passing it that night okay but typically historically historically okay historically we'll get maybe a couple people is all um with it reduced that helps okay and i think for me and nikki i don't know if you would agree i think most people when they come in once we kind of give some explanation and why they think it's going up somewhere and they understand now it's their house value went up and that's why tag so it seems once we kind of explain some of that most then then they're they understand it it's usually just a misunderstanding of how how your taxes are calculated and the percentage of it that's the increased value of your home compared to percentage okay yeah taxes went down about my we went down a percent but boy my taxes went up how is that doesn't make sense to me so right that seems that's was most of it i think by explaining the seven percent increase then from 2022 to from 2021 from where oh well that's that is the dollar increase so that's not the tax levy increase so hold on we are raising taxes right so the dollar amount yes is going up because our operations are going up but because we've had growth we've had new houses i mean if you want clarification on that larry if there's if that's concerning to you i think this is the time to bring it up but yes so when we get growth in the city when we're doing adding new houses and new services yes our taxes will go up but because of um growth and um other we do receive more local government aid and other grant sources and fiscal disparities that does help keep our tax rate lower and that's why one of the reasons that we were able to get it down lower and that's how we've been able to i think we've been able you know since 2007. we kept the tax rate down right the 48.30 yeah so since 2017 we've been able to reduce it a little a little bit each year or keep it pretty consistent and that's because we've been able to create and our long-term plans for all of our departments we've also been able to budget a little bit each year to save in each department as well and so if we do have anything you know those larger expenses that we plan for it doesn't hit we don't have to levy for it each year those larger expense items we we kind of save a little each year and so it's kind of we pay for those out of our reserves and again are not levying those large amounts and so that helps stabilize um things as well that makes sense we worked really hard the last five six years since i've been on earmarking money knowing that every ten years for like the fire department we have to buy new gear so we've been so instead of it all coming in that one year which happened to us then the next year we're like okay well we know that in 10 years this gear we just purchased needs to be replaced we said okay well it's about this much so now we levy 10 000 every year so that when that comes now it's and then i know we went up a little bit from 2019 to 2020 but that was because our our value that we received from the county was small like we only had two percent growth there was there was it was kind of a odd year there are yeah and that's the one thing we try and balance too is we know and again if you see in the 2011 that was higher ranges that's because we were coming out of a recession and i wasn't here at that time but i i can tell like a lot of cities went through that and so that hit cities really hard um you didn't see those those growth periods but you still had a lot of those cervix service expenses that you had to pay for and the debt and so um i think we're in a you know we're fortunate that we're in a time where things are we're growing again this year um has been um a little less because of some unforeseen circumstances but we're still a growing community um and i think we've been able to again um do a lot like we've been focusing on being more pro or being proactive and i think that that helps with our budget and planning and so i think this reflects you know a lot of a lot of things a lot of growth and positive things happening outside of our control but then we've also been really proactive about being like saving money and making smart financial decisions as well so it's all kind of come together in a in a positive way so is there any room in the capital to reduce that at all in the capital i did reduce it a little bit so historically we've always done 100 in the fire department streets we do i would say i did reduce it a little bit just because we are getting i'm expecting more to come in now that there's a transportation bill that was passed at the federal level um i think there will be some more funding coming possibly we are we are positively getting money next year through a previous program that was passed for small cities but i expect it to continue now that another transportation bill was passed so i did reduce it there um the park commit and rec levy and the public work works building i my suggestion is keeping it the same one because our public works department we've been trying to we started the program in 2000 or 2021 at 25 000. i did raise it to 100 because we are kind of in that stage where we're trying to figure out we're shuffling our buildings a little bit and trying to plan long term and with that long-term plan we're we're hoping if we can to get that building expanded in the next couple years um so that my suggestion is keeping it there we can reduce it but it would probably push that project out as we will likely be tearing that shed down in the next year or two that's the plan and then we also have to figure out what we're doing with the fire station the old fire station which could be we could that we don't know that could happen in the next year as well so um park levy um i think we're sitting pretty well with the park levee but i know there's a lot there's a large project that we might consider next year as well and that's going to come to a joint meeting soon and so is that the splash pad no that the first phase is it'll probably be a two-phase deal where the pavilion is built first the pavilion needs to be done first per state statute any way to put in a splash pad that we're that we're looking at so um i mean that's that's up for discussion though i wouldn't recommend reducing it anymore anymore just with kind of the future plans that we have based on our long-term capital levy that or long-term plan financial plan that we have in place and the stuff that we have um on that schedule already but it is possible that on those within that long-term plan we could move some of those projects out further um it was 135 000 right that seems like a big big jump i mean the others the other funds looked alright i mean i thought you did pretty well with those two but um yeah and i think there it it depends as well like how so not every year is going to be a great year so one year we had two percent growth this year i think it was higher like eight so what we there was a reason last year we our streets were down at 40 000. didn't we shuffle something to and that's why that came out that's because we were able to take some reserves out of our out of our um general fund and shuffle money around so that's why it was only at 40 where it what it usually is in 100 yeah it usually is higher but we were able to again it's a little misleading i mean we still used it that's true that's true so we do these i would say growth so that was where our struggle was last year to get to a levee amount that wasn't a super high increase was we did kind of take a break last year on some of these things that the council really has focused on you know that public works building knowing that that future need is going to be there to just do it in three years and then pay cash for it instead of doing a debt in three years for the full amount we have that in a document somewhere yeah we i believe well i can re i can send it there's a yeah so we have a long term capital plan that we just approved in early march or april so that's the one that we worked with work with abdo ike and myron every year um and that that reflects our long-term projects and our financial plan um so i think that was passed earlier this year um i tend to agree with maggie on red i like where they're sitting it for me personally if there was a reduction i would say park and rack personally just because we have a fund for park and rec if there was a need but i'm fine with the 50. um like i said you know we it took us a long time to dig out of a deep hole in the last three years where we've now been able to do this has been huge for the community i think to be able to plan ahead and get some money saved versus having to pay for it all right then and try to figure all we we worked so hard to get to this point um yeah we did lower a lot of stuff last year because we were running into and now we're even lower tax rate than we were last year yeah and it's the first year that we're getting more funds though from like the covered money that stan safety standards act whatever yeah the arpa money what was the last one you mentioned we well that usually is delayed so we did the federal government passed the transportation bill um yes so that's true but the one thing you want to consider as well is um [Music] in 260 what 260 000 for the covered money the standard we are yes over and we've already used we already earmarked some of that yeah yeah yeah and that can only be used for for certain things um which which does help i mean some of those things that we may have built into our long-term plan could be used for arpa money it's true i think you bring up a good point with that actually larry um you know a fire department you know that we did just buy radios and some some things that we're not going to need maybe that then should come off maybe some of that just to compensate for some of it this year if right you know if we spent 50 grand maybe we could drop it down 50 thousand and i yeah and to balance that that we got the one thing um and it's this is not a bad thing i know one thing we've been trying to do is keep the tax that'd be pretty steady that would dip it down yeah dip it down so i'm just saying like in the it sometimes it's better to take that money to reserve it then next year when they go up everyone's going to be like we have to bring it i never like to fluctuate no now that i feel like we're at a good levy that if we always are at like 46 and we're like crap now then people are going to get hit harder especially and market values always are behind so okay fair enough so it's it's what i've been trying to do is keep that in mind like i have been keeping in mind our long-term projects and needs and we're trying to reduce the tax levy as we go keeping in mind that we might have a bad year and so that is why these levees are kind of our buffer area um which so if next year we don't have as much growth this is where we would reduce it but then we have a year where we were able to at least grab some money to put in the reserves whereas next year we might not even have that ability we only had 11 homes this year so in 2024 or 25 whatever the three years we could have our value not be as high because we only had 11 homes added to our exactly uh taxable or you know does that make sense remember our values we're we're at 35 25 35 3 4 years ago so those homes are now just coming on our tax do most people look at the levy rate or do they look at the percent as a change in the increase from year to year on their most people will see the tax rate i found it used to be the opposite but that's all right well because they don't understand what the tax rate is but people usually come in for and then we just explain why but they see they see like oh well oh holy moly we you only raised our percent change at 2.3 percent it was only 28 000 and now it's percent it's eighty seven thousand dollars you you want more money but but if they look at the general level they say man you went down that's great debt service it went down that's great capital went up what what do we need that for i think most look at what they get from the county and if they see an increase they're like what the this increase and then sometimes it's as simple well look at the county portion of it or the school district portion not just the city and then once it gets into the house value and they've lost their chance to go to the county and challenge that when you do that in april i believe isn't it home values yeah there's a that's the time to go do that and talk to the county of hey i think my house is set wrong it's not worth this much that's where and they think coming here is and when they hear that then they realize well ours will be the highest of all the taxi districts whose will be the cities the city of mayor yeah ours will be higher than the school the county and yeah i know that right much higher than the school if you look at it though counties and school districts have more they spread it wider they do but our still will be the bigger slice of the pie but which that's pretty i thought the city and school board were fairly close on my last statement i don't remember now i'll have to look i haven't gotten my preliminary yet all right any other questions comments does does that get you what you need larry or no megan if you could get me a current copy of the capital the capital fund like it's the the new building when it's stated for and how much it's going to cost that's the capital plan right yeah well it's like yeah the estimated amount yeah yeah it's i think it's in the march or april packet but yeah i can resend it because we you think it is it should be but no i'll just resend it to you okay why don't you send it to me too because i wouldn't have a march or april packet i mean i could go out online but if you're gonna pull it and send it to larry yep yeah i just want to make sure you guys get what you need prior to the next council so we're comfortable with with well not that i agree with it but at least you're comfortable with what we're what we're looking at so maggie's certainly available uh workboard used to be higher oh yeah years before 35 to 175 to 100 several years prior and then we just started yeah we've completed one that was one department that we really yeah we did a lot of projects in the last four three or four years and we're kind of now anything more on the general fund any other questions comments all right let's move to the 2022 enterprise fund budget um similar to the general fund budget i just included what changes were made what information i'll be presenting for the final expenditure in revenues um and then this is all based on our decision that we were not going to raise rates for 2022 right all right i have nothing on that i'm i'm still comfortable with that any questions on the enterprise fund