Good evening everyone and welcome. I will call our Bloomington City Council listening session to order. Tonight is Monday, April 27th. Thanks everybody for being here. We had a few people who called ahead asking to speak. Tim Ekstrom and Robin Malik. Robin? Robin? No Robin. Uh so those were the only two who called ahead. Will you have to speak this evening as well? Others? I'm with Tim. You're with Tim. You have your two. All right. Well, what we'll do is uh we'll start with Tim. And if we have others show up, Robin shows up or others, we will talk to them. But if you could please come up and I think the microphone is on and speak into the mic, please, and identify yourself. And what we typically do is we usually parse out the time for everybody, but we'll uh if we usually do if there's not enough people to fill the time, we basically say we're not going to let you go longer than 10 minutes, but we'll allow you to go ahead and have a conversation. Yeah, but I appreciate that. I appreciate that. Uh I'm Tim Ekstrom. I'm the gambling manager for the American Legion. And we adjutant student being again. Um but the Legion W also said that I can speak for them as well. Um Uh I wanted to point out I'm also a I've been a journalist since I think I was eight. Graduated in 1997. I've covered a lot of cities and I was a city council member. Um He's not to my knowledge. Uh I wanted to point out that the community survey about the charitable fund, you know, asked the city whether they ought to set up a charitable fund and you know, require charitable gambling organizations to contribute. Why did they avoid the word tax? You know, there's the word tax is not anywhere to be found in there. A tax would be onerous. Um and take away from any of the programs we support. We just went uh through this three or four years ago and the city council declined at that time to take it up and it seems like pretty soon uh come back to the change that we just decided not to do. Um, you know, if we implement this tax you know, we already help the city celebrate in the city and we very speak at it. We have a Veteran's Day appreciation dinner that the Legion pays for. It's not the city budget but we basically fund it. Um, and we have helped the city with the Veteran's Memorial and we have helped to help the city with other projects. We helped on Summerfest. Uh a couple years ago we were kind of biased fans so we could take our own private places and veterans to events like uh Veteran's Day on the hill but we have um consistently funded fireworks and contributed to Summerfest and we were already in talks to do it again this year. Um, so you know, we have a strong uh municipal pride and we want to support programs. Um it is my belief that the city can donate to can request funds. They don't need to mandate it. If there's a basketball court or something that the city really has its heart set on batting cages for Red Hat Field you can ask uh charitable um licensed charitable organizations to donate to it within the city. In fact, the League of Minnesota Cities says so on its website. And I've asked for clarification from their research team because I have lived in other cities and they do it. Other cities just like Bloomington have participated. The school district does it. Other cities do it. I know a network of people who live across the state through the American Legion and [clears throat] they've never heard of a city not being able to request funds for programs that are uh as long as they are in the public interest like offsetting poverty, park equipment, um maybe it's a youth program, uh but you know, it's not going for you know, water bottles that say city of women. Um there are some exceptions uh like I know in gambling I cannot donate to law enforcement agencies. And law enforcement agencies might request charitable gambling. But parks [clears throat] department, you know, you know, so I think we need to revisit um talk to the League of Minnesota Cities and revisit this uh issue about how we can raise some funds for some projects in Bloomington if we want to help fix up the animal shelter and things like that. Um you know, I wouldn't want to have to be able to say that we can't give to any local uh governments anymore like the school district says, "Hey, we need some help with coaches' headsets or some other thing that they're like um high school uh senior class party. So, go talk to the city. They've got your money." That's what I'm going to have to say. They took it from us and we can't afford to give it to you. We give out lots and lots of scholarships. Go talk to the city. They've got your money. Um I want to remind you that Anoka this past month implemented this same 10% tax. And it had it had such a community outcry that last week the city council repealed it. So, you will see the same thing if we do this here. Um I think a lot of people aren't quite aware of it. That survey I understood what it said, but we already paid 33% to the state government. And the next highest state is New York with 5%. Uh the city taking 10% makes it 43%. Nearly half of our hard work would be taken by officials who did 0% of the work to earn it. I work hard for um raising this money. Many of our people are volunteers like with BCAF, the Bloomington Kennedy Activities Foundation, and Legion Baseball. You would be essentially taxing volunteer labor. So, I hope that makes you good. One option in the survey called for requiring organizations to have a certain number of members live in Bloomington, and I'm sure post 50 would pass this test, but I want to point out that this requirement would be unconstitutional. Uh the US Supreme Court has ruled consistently that government cannot compel organizations such as churches and civil groups to turn over their membership list or donor list to or their addresses. Most notable landmark case is NAACP versus Alabama. You can remember your civil rights movement. In 1958, the Bloomington City Clerk already has tried to compel me to turn over the individual addresses of our honor guard members, which is a violation of the Constitution and she should know better. I do support having the ordinance requiring the licensed nonprofit to be based in Bloomington or at least the trade area. We have far too many out of town gambling operations in our fair city. I'm glad that this is being addressed. So, you know, we have like the Minnesota Youth Athletic Services. They do Cowboy Jack's, and they do the new um place that used to be Crooked Mile Past. Um but I saw their annual report, and I could not make heads or tails of what is exactly going into Bloomington or not. So, I do commend the City Clerk for trying to do a deep dive on some of these video reports that get filed annually, and I told her that I'm really glad that she is looking into this because, you know, we have uh we do our best at the Legion to be among the best in the state for following the rules, and ACM often asked me to testify at the legislature. You know, I mean have a reputation for doing things correctly and above board and transparent within the region here in town. But I do think we have some people whose reports aren't necessarily as above board as as ours. And in fact, ours is at 70%. I don't really support a measure to increase the 60% threshold when we as a city just increased it from 30% about three or four years ago. Why revisit this already? We give it 70% and ours is probably really 80% except our accountant sometimes classifies some of the scholarships as outside because the kid might live in Iowa City and the accountant doesn't know if this person is connected to someone in Bloomington. So, I really got on them I could get them to up it higher, but I let it go cuz we're already passing. So, we do help in some ways in the region like we fund the bingo at the Minneapolis Veterans Home. There is no Veterans Home closer than the Minneapolis Veterans Home. I'm sure there are some Bloomington veterans in that Veterans Home. And they have bingo they play like quarter bingo. We donate 2,000 and over the course of the year that quarter bingo gets spent and maybe even takes a year and a half to two years sometimes to get spent and then we reimburse the fund. And our volunteers go over there to help run the quarter game. You know, so this is outside of our trade area, but I think it's a viable thing the region. We donate to every third Saturday. How many people have heard of that? It's in South Minneapolis outside the trade area and I'm sure there are people from Bloomington and Richfield who use their services. And I think it would be a shame if we had a situation where we can no longer help. We also donate to a fund that is the Minnesota Veterans Assistance Fund where veterans are in places they don't have the means to get the help like they do in Bloomington. I have been asked by the city previously there was a veteran who was going to be homeless if they didn't catch up on the rent. They had a Bloomington social worker and we kept that person from going out on the streets. We've helped people who lost their apartment to a fire and it wasn't their own fault the apartment next door caught on fire to theirs and they had to have shelter some. We've helped veterans in town that have been talked to us by the Hennepin County Veteran Service Office. This is another example of here's the county asking for gambling dollars to help somebody. So and as you know it's easier to prevent homelessness than to fix it. There's oodles of other stories that I won't very I won't go into it but I do believe there is no need to change the 60% threshold even though I myself may not be able to be affected by it. I do think there is a place for helping things within the region and I hope that you trust our judgment to decide that overall that we're trying to do what's best for the Bloomington and the Bloomington area. That's it. Well thank you Tim. I appreciate that and a couple of things I fully acknowledge that the Legion VFW club you guys do great work in town. So thank you so very much for the outreach that you do and the work that you do and the services that you provide and just to be being a presence in this community like few other organizations really are. You're a great presence and I won't dispute that at all. I also want to clear up for some of the newer council members if you haven't heard it we did talk about this three or four years ago. You'll hear more later this evening. It's a study session item that we've got tonight where we're starting the the conversation about this about possible changes to our charitable gambling rules and regulations and distributions and so on. It's not a public hearing which is why Tim is here speaking tonight because he wanted an opportunity to give us a little bit of background. If it does advance and if we direct staff to move forward I mean ultimately yes it would go to a public hearing much like it did I don't even remember when that it was when we talked about this last. It was You're right, it was like three or four or five years ago as I recall. Uh so uh if it ultimately did get to that as a public hearing, we'd expect to hear from you again. And then, I'm sure a lot of other folks as well. So uh but I appreciate your appreciate your input. And I appreciate the the perspective that you bring. And as I said, I appreciate the great work that that you folks do. So, thank you very much. Uh Councilmember Della Santa, really quickly. While you're here, you can probably weigh in on something else. Another item on the study session tonight that you may have an opinion on that I'd love to hear a perspective on is um we don't have any mechanism to take away that right from somebody if they violate something or anything. There's nothing in the process that allows us to say you can no longer be that gambling designation. Um we're going to have to address something around that, too, because, you know, uh to your point, once you're in there, we it's impossible for you to get you out even if you do violate things. Not that you're guilty of that in any way, shape, or form. Open question to you about whether or not you support that. Uh I think that's an excellent point. You know, I used the the MIA's as an example. But, if they're turning in their thing at the end of the year as required to file and it's out of Oh, you know, they're only donating 20% of their winnings, even though the rule is 60% and used to be 30%. And you're helpless to really do anything about it. You know, I I support that. Um the other thing I wanted I forgot I should add Really quick, we got to wrap up. Yeah, one more very quickly. Very quickly. >> time the previous city clerk when she when this was under the stairs, they did get all the gambling managers together for a meeting at some point. And then, I hope that happens again. Yeah, if we if we move forward, I would expect that there's going to be a lot more outreach other than just the the survey that went out and the Let's Talk Bloomington page and that kind of thing. I'd expect there'd be a lot of that. So All right, thank you so very much. Thanks. Last once again, if anybody else in the room would like to speak on anything? All right. As I said, we had one other person sign up, but now we're 15 minutes in and I don't see that person. So, council, I would entertain a motion to adjourn our listening session and head downstairs for our council meeting. So moved. Second. Motion by council member Robertson, second by council member Carter to adjourn this evening. Yep. Further council discussion on this? All in favor? Aye. Motion carries 6-0. Thank you so very much. Thank you very much, Tim. Appreciate you being here tonight. >> Thank you, Mayor. It's funny, but the funniest thing I've ever heard in my life.