Dayton City Council — Transcript
Thursday, October 29, 2026
Budget and Preliminary Levy Reduction
Organics Recycling Mandate and Implementation
City Planning Department Staffing
Building Permit Fee Structure and Unfinished Projects
Police Department Overtime and Event Cost Recovery
Fire Department Duty Crew Staffing
Miscellaneous Revenue and Expense Adjustments
Water and Sewer Long-Term Plan
Votes (8)
Budget Work Session: Overall Levy Reduction
The work session began with a review of the budget, focusing on a successful effort by city staff to reduce the preliminary levy. This reduction was a direct response to council feedback during an early September session. Details on the specific percentage decrease and its impact on average home values were provided.
Organics Recycling Program Implementation
The city is now mandated to offer organics recycling due to its population exceeding 10,000. The discussion centered on how to implement this, contrasting a free-market approach where haulers offer the service (adding cost to resident bills) with a city-contracted model (potentially cheaper but with less choice). There was confusion and debate over state statute interpretation regarding uniform pricing for haulers and concerns about residents being charged for services they might not use or be aware of.
City Planning Department Expansion and Professional Services
The city plans to add a new City Planner position with advanced experience in 2027, transitioning away from reliance on Landform contractor services. This aims to bolster the department's capacity for plats and complex development projects. Separately, adjustments to professional services contracts for inspection (Metro West, Stantec) reflect increased building permit activity. The budget also allocates funds for a comprehensive plan update in 2027, largely grant-funded, with the expectation of extensive council input.
Building Permit Process and Upfront Fees
Concerns were raised about the city incurring plan review costs for building permits that are later put on hold or pulled by developers without payment. While a recent instance was resolved through invoicing, staff proposed that the council discuss implementing upfront fees or an escrow system. The challenge lies in the current fee structure, which is based on a building's valuation, making it difficult to determine an exact upfront cost.
Police Department Budget Adjustments
The police department's budget reflects changes in salaries, benefits, and an increase in overtime expenses, primarily driven by staffing for various community events. The city clarifies that while some event costs for non-profits are offset by a dedicated line item ($22,000 annually), overtime costs are separate and are being tracked, with an understanding that revenues often offset these expenses.
Fire Department Duty Crew Staffing Enhancements
The Fire Department budget includes a $25,000 reduction from initial duty crew projections while still increasing hours. Proposed enhancements include expanded Sunday (10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.) and Friday (6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.) coverage, plus an additional person for weekday 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. shifts. The duty crew model is favored for its reliability and consistency compared to the paid-on-call system, providing predictable two-person responses during peak call times, with good staff availability to fill shifts.
Review of Miscellaneous Revenues and Expenses
The council reviewed a broad range of budget adjustments. This included increased state aid for police and fire, Safe and Sober grants, and building permit revenues offsetting costs. Expense changes covered decreased election costs, administrative increases due to HR, significant legal increases from data requests (prompting discussion of HR's role in review), finance department changes with new Planet budgeting software, and an IT upgrade to cloud-based BS&A software for efficiency. A new $50,000 contingency fund for council-directed spending was introduced, designed to roll over and grow. Parks and Public Works saw a budget decrease due to staff time reallocation.
Water and Sewer Long-Term Plan Update
The council received an update on the long-term plan for water and sewer services, particularly concerning the city's relationship with Maple Grove for water supply. A stalemate exists, with Dayton waiting for Maple Grove's decision on a major treatment plant expansion (to 40 million gallons per day), while Maple Grove is reportedly awaiting Dayton's decision on its water source. This situation creates uncertainty for the city's future water strategy, with further information expected in November.
Notable Quotes (23)
city staff worked really diligently together and and through many processes to figure out how we could um voluntarily decrease the levy based on comments made by council members during the preliminary levy set in early September. We did reduce it by the uh number escapes me now, but I believe it was about 60 to 70,000 dollars somewhere in there based on changes in revenues, expenses, reviewing overall line items. They brought it down from 9.71% to 9.17% for the levy.
next year's tax impact for a house of 549,000 dollars, which is the average tax for or average home value, it would bring it down 11 dollars.
state statute and MPCA are very explicit that all haulers have to charge the same amount of money for every resident that has trash, whether you you use all three services or just the one service. This is only coming into fruition now for us as the city of Dayton because our requirement is 10,000 people, which we have hit. And Hennepin County is now pushing on their ordinance 13, which comes down from the state statute, which comes down from MPCA.
Your easy button push for the city council and city staff on terms of workload for city staff and for residents is that we would update an ordinance that would require licensing in the city of Dayton overall for all haulers and then would require haulers to offer organics collection service in the city. What that will do is will trigger the and comply us with state law related to organics and the MPCA, but it what will do is it will add that cost to the residents. This will take us out of the situation and put it on the haulers.
The cheapest answer, which he told me, was we haul for everybody and do one contract like we do currently for um recycling. That's going to be the cheapest for residents cuz it's power in numbers. If I have more people that I know they know or they're going to haul for, it's going to be cheaper for every resident to then haul for.
My one of my issues with it is again, we're hiding costs to government. So I will guarantee you that almost everybody I shouldn't say almost everybody a lot of people use recycling because [snorts] it cuts their garbage amount in half, right? I easily fill up my recycling and my garbage every week. This almost nobody's going to use. We know that. And so now we're going to have this this this amount chunk of money that people are spending in their taxes that they know nothing about and they don't even know, you know, like So I asked my brother who was in Rogers. He didn't even know he had this. But there's a bill in his uh line item for organics.
We're looking at getting a new city planner associate planner. Make sure that's an added position for that department... Landform is going away. We're slowly moving them off. We did get Cole, yep. So, Cole has stepped in, did a great job, but obviously as new you you just have to there's a learning curve when you start.
this this position is a higher level of experience that we're looking for, yes... We need to have somebody with more experience who has done plats, who's done those kind of development projects um in town. I'm looking at other communities too when I look at this and I look at Rogers and I try not to compare us typically to Rogers, but at the same aspect they're going like us and how many people do they have in their department and it's three.
changes in professional services 125,000, but again offsetting about $100,000 worth of grants. Um so, a total of 25 grand for that comp plan service that we're looking at doing in 2027.
We have had recently um we had a number of uh a one builder reach out and say, I have five permits, please put them on hold. Um they caught three of them in time, but two of them have already gone through review.
one operational type item that the council might want to look at and discuss and I'm not looking for a direction today, but just things to chew on is how we pay or how we have developers pay for those permits or builders pay for those permits. Do they pay up front for the building plan review? Do they pay up front for some sort of cost?
What's the minimum that we've ever charged anyway? I'm just thinking and throwing things out there of a thousand dollars. You have an escrow type thing.
current changes in salaries and benefits and then a number of line item changes related to overtime and such and that's as we're seeing more and more um overtime needs requested by the police department and for um various events around town.
Are we tracking that to see cuz I know we've um a lot of these events are for non-profits. So are we making sure that they are actually like
the chief and I did work together to reduce that $25,000 based on current trends that we're seeing dollar amounts for next year and duty crew staffing. This is looking at again an increase in duty crew hours related to Sundays from 10:00 to 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Fridays from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. and then one additional person from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.
I don't think it's more cheaper, but I think it's more reliable. It doesn't spend the more more aspect and it's dollar for dollar I bet you if we had to go okay, I know I'm going to serve the community with two people. I'm going to get somebody with two people there versus I could have six, I could have 12 or I could have one. Uh it's that unpredictability of like you know we had calls where we have it was and the chief and I call them um a stopped toe call of something very simple and we have 14 people show up. Or we have a really you know serious call of a heart attack or something and we have one person show up.
I think the other thing is that the investment um into the duty crew program will continue to be flat or static if you will, you know, based on the dollars and the the call increases there's no more cost for those additional calls. So as the calls continue to go up we have already in theory paid for that service already.
Legal we're seeing a lot of increase in legal. This is something that I want to discuss and talk about with the council overall as related to data requests. Data requests have been significantly higher than we've ever seen historically.
if the data requests continue as they have and maybe they won't. As Scott said, maybe a week from now they'll all disappear. But if they don't all disappear, um it might be worth if we can pull that out to see if adding more hours onto our HR person is actually more cost-effective than paying the lawyer a $199
BS&A software that the council approved at the August meeting. Um and that's moving it from our current legacy program, which is on our server, to a cloud-based program, um which will take away updates and uh um make things a little more efficient. It'll also be a much more efficient for uh field inspections. So, currently Metro West goes out and does inspections in the field related to building permits. We don't get those updates for 15 days.
This will be the first year we've ever had a contingency. That's correct. It's 50,000 bucks. Again, starting off something cuz at least it's got some seed money there.
We will have another conversation about long-term plan, water sewer long-term plan. We plan that with the other water stuff that's going on that we're trying to finalize um, with Ellers working on our rates and what that looks like for um, moving from Sultan and water with Maple Grove or our own system.
They are holding until we make a decision. Oh, great. And we're waiting on them to make our decision. Oh, great. So, we're in a fun little situation.
Ordinances & Resolutions (10)
Hennepin County ordinance pushing for organics collection, based on state statute and MPCA.
Referenced repeatedly in the organics recycling discussion regarding hauler charging requirements.
Code utilized for setting building permit fees based on valuation.
Comprehensive Plan, slated for an update in 2027 with significant council involvement.
Request for Proposals for organics haulers, or other city services.
Permits for construction, whose processing costs and fee structure were discussed.
Specific type of permit seeing increased revenues.
Specific type of permit seeing increased revenues.
New budgeting and CIP (Capital Improvement Plan) software being implemented by the city.
Legacy software being upgraded to a cloud-based version for improved efficiency, especially for field inspections.