Um, basically just looking for your approval to send the delinquent bills to Hennepin County for certification on the property taxes.

So everybody has until the end of October to make payment before it gets certified to property taxes.

This is a non-exclusive franchise agreement between us and CenterPoint. It allows them the use of the public right of way in public grounds, and establishes the terms for the construction, maintenance and operations and the responsibilities as such. Uh, this is a 20 year franchise term. We do these every 20 years.

We don’t have any cost in this. So if something happens and something gets damaged, they have to take care. They’re fully responsible for fixing it. Clean it up and making it whole. Nothing. We don’t have any costs.

Anything I brought to him was taken care of. Within weeks. Um, JT, with the park system, when I lived here as a child, we didn’t have no parks. Parkers Lake Park was a farm run by the workhouse. We still had cows there.

What we did is we went back and we really sharpened our pencils this year to try to get that 4.8% down, and we brought it down to 3.9%, which is the levy in front of you tonight.

So, Councilmember Peterson, what I hear you saying is like, we operate our budget with integrity in terms of we don’t kick a can down the road. We don’t, um, we pay for our operating costs on ongoing operating costs with our operating funds. We get from levy increases.

I also, though, you know, as I think about the budget, I think it’s important to think about why we’re able to do this and we’re able to do this in part because of a decision made in around 1965, when leaders in the city at that point decided to zone a lot of land industrial.

We’re doing this in the context where the wife’s at a school district bond referendum went out in that payment’s going to start next year. So that’s a 5 million, $500 million bond payment. So our residents, a lot of our residents, about 60% of the school district comes from Plymouth. Um, are going to have a big tax bill next year.

We heard from the community that they wanted this plan to focus on realistic and achievable goals. Because of that, the overarching goals chosen for this plan are to reduce community wide greenhouse gas emissions by 40% below 2016 levels by 2035, and longer term, to reduce community wide greenhouse gas emissions by 80% below 2016 levels by 2050.

And what is the strategy to get people to ride public transit? You know, and what is the cost? Um, and to do that, how are we going to create enough increased community and walkability? Because the only thing we really can do, you know, is like the Boulevard, it’s a new development. Um, we have, um, the city center area here is something that we can try and work on, but City Wide is a sprawling suburban city. So I’m not quite sure how we achieve that.

And one of the things that we have in the summary at the front is that this plan does not commit the city or anybody involved to actually any of these actions. Um, it’s not prescriptive. So there’s none of the, like, code language, like, we shall do this. Um, there’s there’s language. Not like that. It is entirely voluntary.

You just need to look a couple, I don’t know, 100 miles south of here to see what happened this weekend. With nine inches and a couple hours. If we don’t have plans like this and we don’t guide our wonderful public works team to say, you know what? We know we need to spend more money with a bigger stormwater system. The cost to the taxpayers of a blown out stormwater system because of a storm that we chose not to plan for is astronomical.

And as we get into it and we start to understand whatever the economic impacts are, either positive or negative, that we’re just very transparent about that, because I think the broader state of Minnesota is realizing right now that when we signed legislation to go to 100% carbon free energy, um, by 2040, that has an economic impact and energy costs are going up because of that legislation, because we refuse to acknowledge that we need a healthy balance of energy from multiple sources, not just non carbon producing energy sources.