COVID impacted the city of shorewood was it caused us to have to upgrade our technology we um we were basically forced to implement different methods to allow our staff to work from home effectively to be able to do zoom meetings just like the rest of you and moving forward um we're going to be doing what mayor screedy said a blended zoom in person um none of that would have ever improved or been carried out at the rate that it was had it not been for covid um and one result of this has been our regular council meetings have about double the amount of residents if not triple then it then we used to have pre-pandemic pre-zoom meetings

I think it speeded up change for our city and on a couple of fronts one is the technology piece we're also going to try to incorporate some type of hybrid um you know service for the community going forward uh two i think it got us closer quite honestly to our businesses and certainly closer to the chamber of commerce i think coming out of it we've got a stronger relationship certainly with the chamber of commerce think than we've we've ever had

The trump administration passed a a robust federal package and i think that made its way down to the cities and a lot of that money was able to we were able to pass that on to uh our first responders and um and that really helped kind of stabilize things for us because because it does make such a large percentage of our overall budget

The pavilion broad project we broke ground on it actually back a few weeks ago it just happened to be that week when it was i think 20 below zero or 10 below zero we're all out there but uh we're excited for that project uh we're hoping to have that project completed in time for the fourth of july and you know if we're able to get past the restrictions and the emergency declarations we're hoping to be able to have some type of community event again certainly for the entire south lake uh minnetonka area uh for the fourth of july

We had a significant influx of breaks that started to occur just in these last couple of years we'd have 23 since february of 2019 and when that happens uh we have residents that lose all of their water we've heard stories you know of individuals that um you know they're trying to get ready for work in the morning and suddenly they're just completely without in some cases i think the worst case scenario we had was someone who had actually was in mid-shower with shampoo in their hair no water so we have got to do something about this

We've done over three million dollars worth of road repair and uh storm water projects in the last two years we're hoping that uh that'll continue we've already got good bids for this year

I actually was uh pursuing my post certification with the thought of possibly becoming a sheriff's deputy so just this past fall i was going through the training and i was extremely impressed with the candid and open conversations that we were having about everything that had happened in minneapolis and the use of force and the proper way to apply it and when to apply it um and i i not only uh found it refreshing that uh you know the instruction is heading that direction um but honestly all of the young men and women that are out there that are are stepping forward to to to to serve the community um i'm extremely confident that they're all doing it for the right reasons

I have the honor of chairing the south lake minnetonka police department coordinating committee this year and on our agenda will be a discussion about uh sharing an embedded social worker for mental health uh calls and uh i i'm very really excited about that i think it's really really important uh aspect of of uh law enforcement to deal with mental health crises i don't know the exact statistics but it's it's at least half of the calls that our officers respond to are related to someone who's in has a mental health issue

We have in our budget um over fourteen thousand dollars for training and it includes um and we have for many years our officers train for use of force implementing and how it should be done properly but we also have a lot of other training however the state of minnesota also requires officers and every police department to conduct and have certain training and we use the league of minnesota cities as one of our venues for training they have a fabulous online and also interactive training um sessions we do training for um exclusive implicit bias we do training for also mental health which is also a very important training aspect and as well as use of force

I would love i know there was a there was a time uh even before me that uh about putting in a bridge over county road 19. um and that's that's kind of a concerted effort i think probably between shorewood and tonka bay and three rivers and the county you know because it's a county road uh i think we got really close last time and i would love to rekindle that conversation now granted i think it's going to take some time to maybe get something like that that that put through but from my standpoint i think that's something that that we can get done

I also think as as a region we really should try and figure out a way to make county road 19 more pedestrian friendly just with the amount of traffic that's coming through the fact that it's getting busier we have a lot of cyclists and certainly i know as my children grow older i want them to be able to easily access downtown excelsior and uh in order to do that i want them to be able to get to the trails as as safely as possible and the only way to do that is to to create a safe pathway between here and you know the trail system that links into

Recently like mayor jennings i also testified in front of the capital improvement committee um kelly representative kelly morrison sponsored a bill on behalf of the city of shorewood for funding for a galpin lake trail that's kind of more over um on closer to like where minnesota inboard is on highway seven um the reason we approach the state with that is because that strip of land has a trail on the sh on the chain has an end that ends exactly where the shorewood line starts and for shorewood to connect into their trail then we're taking it up to the state highway 7 and hopefully we can get people into excelsior um to school to the excelsior businesses

I think as a nation it's something that we're we're really focusing on more closely than we have in a long time and we need to uh quite frankly uh i'll i'll also i think i'll come out and and i'll say um i've actually said this a number of times living in tonka bay is is very much like living in mayberry um it's there's not a lot that happens here um and i think to some degree uh we actually sort of embody what white privilege is uh i mean we're we're fairly homogenous um we're fairly sheltered um we don't have a whole lot that's going on and so it's very easy for us you know out of sight out of mind um so as a community certainly me personally i think it's just incumbent upon us to uh to to to to focus on these things and and and think about them just try and think outside our bounds

I think diversity and and it starts kind of with our own personal philosophies and i think as leaders we need to have the right philosophy and that is inclusion and how we get there how we demonstrate that can be in many different ways but i think we need to educate ourselves about the issues and then we also need to immerse ourselves outside of our bubble and i think that's a key because we do live in a bubble out here but when i was growing up in some of my for some of my formative years i lived in a community that was a multi-racial and i think it really impacts your vision on things future in life

I made it very known to numerous residents that i'm extremely lgbtq friendly to reach out to me if they had concerns or problems and numerous residents have reached out to me with various issues that i then assisted and pointed them in the right direction whether it was with someone with the school district or on the chief of police of the slmpd mike meehan who is extremely willing to hear people's issues to make sure that their voice is heard and to deal with um what what they may perceive as a problem um so i've i've gotten nothing but great response from our both our chief our fire and police chief as well as various individuals in the school district

The problem that we have out here is our land is very expensive and to build out here is also expensive and so it's um it's difficult without some type of subsidies from the county or the state or the city to build affordable housing we do have in our city in our woodland cove development we do have some more reasonably priced townhomes that are coming that are online and so but i don't know if they would really qualify as affordable housing but if people if developers come out here to build they would need some kind of subsidies and we're just not in a position to subsidize that with our tax dollars so it would have to come from the state the med council or the county to do that

I could see where um here if you have a median home value that's six hundred thousand dollars um but you want to provide an affordable purchase price and you subsidize that by 50 it's still a 300 000 home which i don't think really speaks to the spirit of what it is that we're trying to do because i think all that does is make it less expensive for a white collar you know middle management up and comer uh to live close to the lake and i don't think that's what we're going for

What they brought forward was a project that actually the city would design we would specify the spaces we need what we would like for town office city house city offices and then we would add on the back end of that the proposal that we saw was you could have 36 artist lofts and basically turn you know not only a city government office but have it run in conjunction with a kind of an art art studio artist loft type of location that would have very strict requirements in terms of people that would be able to rent those spaces uh they would need to be you know need to be artists uh they would need to have some type of of business

With affordable housing you also need good tran public transportation and we are sorely lacking public transportation especially out here in the very western side of hennepin county i i think it's very very difficult to have affordable housing when you don't have good public transportation that that's beside the dollar amount but that does play into the um issue as well

We are historically we're like an old cabin community and uh we have all of these non-conforming lots i mean they're they're either extremely small or they're weird shapes um you know it's it's it's tough to frankly to kind of build anything on them uh because ultimately what drives uh kind of the initial code anyway uh comes from the state so there are these conforming rules that we as a city have to follow and what we find is that when you apply those to virtually any one of the lots that we have in the city everybody's out of it no one's conforming like virtually it's it's everyone has to apply for a variance of some kind or another

We put in place a what we call residential review process with that we hired a city architect uh with that we established a set of good neighbor guidelines and we also established a process that any tear down or any new development that's being proposed needs to be reviewed by the city architect by the city planner and by our planning commission uh with that those those plans those proposed developments need to be held up against the good neighbor guidelines as it relates to do they provide enough green space blue space is the mass and scale right how does it fit in with the the neighborhood and the community where it's being proposed to be built

Greenwood recently revised our code so properties are regulated based on lot size as opposed to a one size fits all everybody has to have a 15 foot side yard setback which doesn't work at all on our teeny tiny lots and we've got like many of the other lake cities but got a big mishmash of a lot sizes and i would say it's working pretty well to have this this uh lot size ordinance so to speak uh in reducing the amount of variances that we see or at least the severity of the variance requests

Philosophically i i think it's a fantastic idea i think what it helps to do is address a lot of the polarization that we find in our politics today because rather than have candidates try to address and speak to the far end extremes of either one of their parties they have to think about the fact that it's there's an opportunity for them and if anything they're incumbent to try and address a wider audience i think which helps moderate some of those voices and there's good and there's bad in that so i i can see both sides of it but i think by and large uh especially with the tenor of things over the last several years anything that we can do to try and make the conversation um more more calm would be good

We don't have a need for that in the city of deephaven that was the people that asked you the question and uh it's actually more difficult to find candidates to run than it is to uh find uh how to rank them one through three if you're lucky enough to get them in so we have not looked at it whatsoever

The city of shorewood um the most interest we've had in local elections actually was when um i was elected mayor i still had two years left on my council term so my seat went vacant and we had nine applicants for that council seat but that wasn't um an election that was an application process the election for two vacant seats um which occurred the november right before this we had three applicants for the two seats um so as far as the rank choice voting we have had residents who are very involved in different organizations relating to ranked choice voting express an interest in this and what i have done is invited them to uh give a presentation to council and mayor at our council meeting on april 12th

We're having a hard enough time sharing two zip codes i don't know if we won an excel shirt 391 in wayzata i think if i had to draw another line through town i other than if i were going to name it 501 c 3 i have no idea how else we could split this town up seriously

Anytime you you do something there are consequences and sometimes unintended consequences and that is uh from my conversation with your barber as well as you know the owner of the coin store as well as an order from one of the restaurants um with some of the impacts that that we're hearing we're going to take that conversation back up at our special strategy session on march 27th which is a saturday from nine to noon and that's uh exactly some of the things we've talked about you know do we have the ability to provide free parking for the first 30 minutes or the first hour we have the ability to on that stretch uh where your barber shop is is declare that you know a free parking zone for 30 minutes so we're looking at a number of different things uh to try to minimize the impacts to our businesses there but it is it's a difficult balance and that's simply what we're trying to do is try to find some balance

I'd like to formally challenge all the mayors on the city of shorewood is it has entered a new contest it's called the wyland national mayor's challenge for water conservation and um the lmcc with the assistance of travis um and chris again we produced a commercial which will be posted on our city website soon it's it's a way that uh the mayors from all around the country challenge their residents to do a series of pledges to help conserve water bring awareness to water conservation and it's things as simple as like pledging to take shorter showers pledging to not water your lawn on days it's raining so it's a way that we're going to attempt to interact with our residents um and see where we stand the challenge actually occurs in the month of april