All right, I would like to call the meeting to order and would ask those in attendance to join your council in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. All right, thank you for coming. First item on the agenda would be to approve the agenda. We have, I guess I would note that we have all council members and mayors present. Can I get a motion to approve the agenda for the evening of this? So moved. Is there a second? Second. Any discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Same sign. All right, next we'll move on to the consent agenda. We have ten items on tonight's consent agenda and these are items that are considered routine, will be enacted by one motion with no discussion unless a council member or staff requests the item to be removed from the consent agenda for separate discussion and action. Tonight's consent agenda items are as follows. City council minutes from our last meeting, claims and bills, our work session schedule, the hiring of a police officer, three different donations, a gift card to the police, that's Resolution 7709, a gift card to the parks, that's Resolution 7710, and the third donated item is election volunteer time, that's Resolution 7708. Item number eight is a recap of the election. Number nine is a time extension for a solicitor. And number ten is a contract for construction services for Bolton and Mink to work on the Lyft Station 18 force mail replacement. Any comments or questions or any items that people would like to move off of the consent agenda? Mr. Mayor, I'm going to pull number eight off the agenda, please. Okay. Anybody else? Otherwise, I would entertain a motion to approve the consent agenda minus item number eight. So moved. Is there a second? Second. Any further discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Same sign. All right. We have several presentations, but I think we will move, we will hear item number eight first before our presentations. I think it will be relatively quick. Thank you, Mayor. I'm pulling this off. I know we were just talking about the election results, but I really wanted to thank all of the people who worked and volunteered at the election. I really appreciate these people coming out and helping us with our civic duties. And it means a lot. And I think they did an incredible job. So thank you to them. Yes. You're here. Any other further discussion on that item? I would entertain a motion to approve item number eight. So moved. Is there a second? Second. Further discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Same sign. Motion carries. Now we'll move on to two different presentations. This will occur before we take public comments. Item number 11 is our 2026 community survey. I believe we have somebody here from our survey company that we hired to walk us through the results of that survey. Please. Stand back here. You must have had someone taller than me last time. It always droops. Sorry about that. No problem. Well, thank you so much for the opportunity to be here tonight to present these results for the 2026 national community survey. Before I begin, on behalf of myself and my POCO co-workers, I would like to extend a thank you to Rachel, who was here earlier, back here. Laura was a point of contact for us as well. They provided thoughtful and detailed feedback not only on the presentation we'll go through here tonight, but the survey instrument itself, the report of results that's been shared now with you every step of the way. I would also like to acknowledge my colleague, Lily Vasquez, who was the project manager for this year's survey and did a bulk of the work here for this important effort. So before we dive into the results, I'd like to share a little bit about who we are. So POCO's mission is to unite people, data, and government leaders to help communities thrive through more informed decision-making that helps to improve residents' overall quality of life. You may know us best for the national benchmarking surveys that you see on the slide here, like the National Community Survey, the National Employee Survey, the Community Assessment Survey for Older Adults, among a few others. In 2022, POCO actually combined forces with Balancing Act, and we now offer interactive budget simulation tools that help to bring residents' voices to the budgeting process. Taken together, ultimately, the National Research Center, Balancing Act, and POCO help to elevate residents' voices in the decision-making processes. So one of the major advantages to working with POCO is the opportunity to compare your residents' ratings to ratings from other communities around the United States. The National Research Center in POCO was the first organization to conceive of this idea to create national benchmarks for local public opinion. And as you can see on the slide here, our national database currently includes over 400 communities in total. And you'll be seeing those national benchmark comparisons as we work through the slide here and throughout the entirety of the report. Now, in addition to being compared to all of these communities around the U.S., the city also elected to receive custom benchmark comparisons to a smaller group. As you can see on our slide here, we have a number of communities around the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. We've actually worked with over 40 communities, over 25 within the last three years alone in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro. So you'll also see comparisons in the report and on the presentation today comparing yourself to those communities as well. So the NCS is really just step one in what POCO likes to describe as the priority-based budgeting or, excuse me, governing cycle. Everything ultimately is downstream from the NCS, things like strategic planning or budgeting. The results here from this statistically valid scientific survey can help every step of the way and can help to build on what your residents told you here in this effort. So with that in mind, let's take a closer look here at what the National Community Survey is before we turn to some high-level results. So the National Community Survey focuses on these ten facets of community livability that you see on the slide here. These facets were identified through extensive survey research as those that are most impactful to residents' overall quality of life. Each facet includes multiple items within each of these facets, providing a well-rounded picture of how residents feel about your community. And I think most importantly, these ten facets also tend to align with municipal departments, making it really easy for city staff to find the information that's most important to them in their day-to-day work. So this was the first effort that we conducted with you all, the first National Community Survey conducted in Orono. To select survey recipients, a list of addresses was purchased from the United States Postal Service and cleaned using city boundary files to remove addresses that were outside of your most recent boundary. From that list, 3,000 addresses were randomly selected to receive the invitation. Those households, as you can see here, started to receive those mailings on May 20th, and the survey remained open for eight weeks. The first mailing was a postcard invitation, followed by a paper survey packet with a postage-paid return envelope. Both of those mailings included a link and a QR code to complete the survey online. The survey was also available in both English and Spanish and included instructions in both languages. A total of 433 completed surveys were received from that effort, resulting in a 17% response rate and a margin of error of plus or minus 5%. We then weighted that sample against the population here in the city using the most recent Census and American Community Survey data to ensure that these results better reflected the overall adult population. Now, in addition to that randomly selected mail-based sample, we also opened up the survey to all residents outside of those 3,000 households. That open participation survey was open for two weeks in June, and we received just about 15 responses outside of our mail-based effort. The presentation today and the report that's been shared with you are based on the 483 randomly selected results, but you can see the responses from those 15 individuals who took the open participation survey separately in the full report too. So with that, we'll dive into a couple high-level results here, an overview of the survey results before we turn to some key findings. So on the NCS, we have two questions that ask directly about those 10 facets of community livability we saw earlier. The first question you can see here asks residents to rate the current quality of these 10 key areas, and you can see here the national benchmark comparison via the shading on the chart. So looking at these results, we can see that the highest rated areas were safety, natural environment, parks and recreation, and the economy. The overall quality rating for safety, natural environment, the local economy, and a little bit further down, education, arts, and culture, all scored higher than our rolling national average. The second question then that focuses on these 10 facets of community livability focuses on future importance. So this is asking residents which of these areas should be an essential or very important area of focus for the city in the coming two years. Here you can see utilities, the local economy, and safety emerged as top priorities. That's very common in communities around the U.S., while education, arts, and culture, mobility, and health and wellness were less prioritized by residents. Those final three facets there on the bottom, as you can see, actually scored lower than our national average in terms of future prioritization, indicating that residents are likely satisfied with the current quality of those three items. So we ask here both about the current quality and the future importance, and we actually put together this gap analysis or this gap chart that you can see here on the slide. It's also available in the report of results. This is used ultimately to help determine which areas are of relatively higher importance and lower quality to residents. So those with the largest gap where importance exceeds current quality. As you can see here on the slide, utilities have the largest gap with the local economy, community design, and community connection being right at that tipping point between positive and negative, from negative two to positive two. So we like to use this chart. It's just one of the many visualizations in the report that can help you to interpret your data. And really what we think it's most useful for is helping to determine which broad areas may need some additional focus or some additional resource allocation in the coming years, and which others are doing well by comparison. So of the 127 survey items for which residents provided evaluative ratings, 54 of those items rated higher than our national benchmarks, 70 received similar ratings, and three were lower than the national benchmark. Ratings are considered similar to the benchmark if they're within 10 points of the rolling national average of those 400 communities we saw on the map earlier, and they're higher or lower if they're more than 10 points different from the rolling national average. As I discussed earlier as well, the city also elected to compare their results to a custom subset of communities from within our national database. That's communities within the Minneapolis-St. Paul Metro. We had 126 items there for which regional comparisons were available, 31 were higher, 101 were similar, and 13 received lower ratings. And we'll take a look at those here in just a second. So next I wanted to move into some highlights of our findings. I want to point out a few items that stood out to our survey research and data science teams when they spun up this report for you all. Now, there is a lot of additional data in the full report, including demographic and geographic comparisons. We won't go into that much detail here tonight, but the rest of the presentation today is really going to focus on a few key areas that we found to be most noteworthy within your results. So first and foremost, residents view the city as a great place to live, and they are committed to the community. So around 9 in 10 respondents provided positive evaluations to Orno as a place to live, the overall quality of life in the city, their neighborhood as a place to live, and your overall image or reputation. Residents also displayed a broad commitment to the community with 9 in 10 indicating that they plan to remain in the city for the next five years and would recommend living here to someone who asked. As you can see here on the slide, when compared to the benchmarks, each of these items scored higher than our national averages, but came in line or were similar to the Minneapolis Metro comparison group. Second key takeaway here, safety is a clear strength with crime-related measures rating above the national benchmark. So nearly all residents reported feeling very or somewhat safe in their own neighborhood during the day or in any downtown or commercial area throughout the city. More than 9 in 10 residents also stated that they felt safe from violent crime and from property crime, results that scored at least 10 points above our rolling national and metro community averages, as you can see on the shading on the chart as well as the column on the right. And then finally, at the bottom of our slide here, 87% reported feeling very or somewhat safe from fire, flood, or other natural disasters. The NCS also includes a battery of questions that asked residents to rate safety services in the city. Here, over 9 in 10 residents gave excellent or good marks to fire services, police or sheriff services, crime prevention efforts, and ambulance or emergency medical services. Once again, as you can see here, police and sheriff services and crime prevention scored higher than the national averages, with the latter also exceeding the Minneapolis metro communities. Fire prevention and education and emergency preparedness were also given positive reviews by just around 8 in 10 respondents. Our third key takeaway, the natural environment here is a strength with cleanliness, air quality, and water resources rating especially high. This is quite a slide here. As you can see, every item on the screen is scoring higher than our national averages, with water resources like beaches, lakes, ponds, and riverways scoring much higher, meaning 20 points or more above our rolling national averages. The open space and efforts to preserve natural areas were also rated higher. As you can see on the bottom here, around three quarters provided excellent or good marks to those items. Our fourth key takeaway focuses on education, arts, and culture. K-12 education is a community strength. Opportunities to participate in arts, culture, or community events did lag behind some national benchmarks. So questions related directly to the quality of educational opportunities in the city scored higher than our national averages, including the availability of affordable quality childcare or preschool, adult educational opportunities, and K-12 education. I mean, as you can see here on this slide, K-12 education is the highlight of this slide and maybe the highlight of the entire report, scoring more than 20 points above our rolling national average and ranking in the 98th percentile of over 375 communities that are part of our national benchmark. Opportunities to participate in special events, community support for the arts, and opportunities to attend activities did rank lower, but were mostly similar to comparison communities with only the opportunities to attend cultural arts or music activities scoring lower than our custom Minneapolis metro communities. Fifth key takeaway, confidence in the local economy remained strong. A few items did fall below the benchmarks. So residents rated the overall economic health of the city higher than other communities around the U.S. Over 8 and 10 provided excellent or good marks to that item. You can also see here over two-thirds positively evaluated the city as a place to visit and work, overall economic development efforts, and the overall quality of business and service establishments in the city. Items toward the bottom of the slide here did receive excellent or good marks from between 1 and 3 and 1 and 4 residents. Employment opportunities, vibrancy of downtown commercial areas, cost of living, and shopping opportunities. Each of those items did score lower than our custom benchmark comparison, and the vibrancy of downtown or commercial areas and shopping opportunities also fell below national averages. Then our final facet that we'll look at here is mobility. Those ratings were mixed. Drivers fared very well. Public transportation items did trail national benchmarks. More than 8 and 10 respondents provided positive evaluations to the ease of travel by car, the ease of public parking, and traffic flow on major streets. As you can see here, traffic flow on major streets is a much higher comparison to our national averages and scored higher than our Minneapolis-Saint Paul metro community comparison. Other mobility items were also positively reviewed with around two-thirds giving the ease of walking, the ease of travel by bicycle, excellent or good marks. The lone item here scoring toward the bottom, ease of travel by public transportation, was given excellent or good scores by about 1 and 4 and did score lower than our custom comparison group. Now, similar to what we have on the safety facet, we also have a battery of questions on the NCS that focuses on mobility services. Once again, here we're doing very well, more than two-thirds, positively rated snow removal, traffic signal timing, traffic enforcement, street cleaning, street maintenance, street lighting, street repair, as excellent or good. And you can see the dark green there is higher than our national averages and traffic signal timing scored above the metro comparison as well. Bus or transit services here once again toward the bottom of the list and again scoring lower than our custom comparison group. And then finally we'll wrap up here with just a couple of additional special topics. So the NCS is standardized, but the city included a few extra custom questions to focus on some topics that were of special interest to you all. The first one here asks residents about their preferred method of contact with the city. So select just one of these items. Emails, newsletters, direct mail were far and away the most commonly selected items. Text alerts were also selected by about one in ten respondents with utility inserts and social media being less preferred alternatives. Now when asked about specific types of new housing development, residents clearly prioritize the single-family residential housing and senior living with over three-quarters saying that they strongly or somewhat agreed that this type of new development in the city should be pursued. Affordable low-income housing, multi-family housing, additional parking options were supported by about four in ten respondents. However, as you can see here on the slide, there's quite a, it's a pretty level scale for affordable low-income housing and multi-family housing with just about as many residents saying they strongly disagreed with those two pursuits as strongly or somewhat agreed as you can see on the left-hand side. And then finally, we had one last question here which asked residents to rate how important, if at all, they thought it was for the city to focus on some specific areas over the coming two years. Here you can see that access to public waterfronts and trails received the highest levels of support with over 60%, stating that that should be an essential or very important area of focus for the city. Enhancing services for seniors or people with disabilities and developing workforce housing also received essential or very important ratings from around half of respondents. Oh, one last one, sorry, I forgot this one. One more. There was one final question here which also asked residents to rate parks and recreation and natural environment developments. Here you can see providing children with places to play, Providing natural open lands and wildlife habitat, providing places to walk or jog, and providing visual green spaces within the city were supported, received the largest levels of support. Over six in ten residents said that those should be essential or very important areas of development when thinking about the natural environment or the parks and recreation programming. So to recap, the city received strong ratings for living in, recommending and staying here locally. Daytime safety is strong with crime-related measures rating above the national benchmark. In terms of natural environment, cleanliness and air quality led the way with water resources rating above national comparisons. K-12 education excels, but some cultural and arts opportunities lagged the national benchmark. The overall economic health of the city is solid, though shopping, employment, and a few cost of living items did trail national averages. And then finally, six drivers did farewell, a few items related to public transportation trailed national totals. So as we introduced at the beginning, the NCS, as you can see here, is just step one, and the loop kind of continues. Priorities, budgets, performance, outcomes all can build on what your residents told you here, and they can even help to shape the next survey. And as part of your work with us, you actually have access to so many additional tools to keep that cycle going, including the ability to engage with almost 300 residents who actually said, sign me up. If you send out another Pulse survey or an event or a follow-up questionnaire, I would love to get that right in my inbox. So you have about 300 people who said that. In addition, your Polco track dashboards on the right-hand side, you can see here, can help to add some additional context to your NCS results. They actually place publicly available data right next to these resident sentiment items, helping to draw out some more conclusions from your report. And we'd be happy, obviously, to walk along with you as you continue that cycle and use Polco in the future. So with that, I'm going to catch my breath, and I'd be happy to answer any questions that you might have about the survey effort, about the report that's been shared with you, or about this deck that we just went through. Thanks so much for your time. Questions from counsel? Is the response rate a 17% average, good, below average? It is above our national average. Typically, we see between 12% and 13% response rate. I would say it's pretty typical for the Minneapolis area. We have very engaged residents in this part of the country. So I could get you the actual average of the Minneapolis metro, but certainly above national averages, yes. And it got us to our 5% response, or margin of error, which is the goal. Could we get the names of the other cities that you polled in the Twin Cities area? I think that would be instructive. I certainly can. I have it here in my notes, but instead of listing 30 of them, I'll have it sent over to you. I looked for them in the survey, and I didn't see it, so that would be instructive. I'll make sure it's added to the report, too, so it's there publicly as well. Other questions? I have one question. How often do you ask about this question or other communities about accessing public access to waterfront and trails? Is that something that comes up often? Yeah, so that is a custom question, obviously, that we added here. We do have, I think that's actually pulled directly from one of our pre-curated Polco library surveys, so I'm sure other communities have asked it. Not enough to build a benchmark, I'm sure. You know, we want 100 plus to build a really solid benchmark. But certainly something, should we continue to pursue this or want to create some trend lines, if we ask that again, we could see change over time compared to yourself as opposed to others, but not something we have a benchmark for. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I'm struck by this gap between the importance of utilities and the actual delivery. What is that telling us, that we need to develop our utilities more completely? I mean, we have some unique things here where water service is available only to about a third of the city. Are they telling us they want more access to city water? Are they telling us they're not happy with the provision of our city water or pricing that we assign to it? What are the specifics that we could be aware of there? Yeah, that's a great question. Actually, I printed out the entirety of I thought maybe a question on utilities might come out. So if you take a look at this is on the PDF report, but it's on page 17. Ultimately, that gap analysis is based on the question that asks about the overall quality of utility infrastructure in the city, including water, sewer, stormwater, electric gas and broadband. But we also ask about seven, seven specific utility items listed below. And it's very clear we have a couple that were rated lower than the others. The affordable high speed internet access was about one in two. Again, it's similar to the benchmark, but certainly the lowest item here. Utility billing was about three quarters. Drinking water was about three quarters, which is, I'm surprised, not higher than the custom benchmark. And so you could dig in deeper there. I also would say that this is one of the commonly, one of the common facets that we do follow up surveys on. We get kind of this broad idea that there's a gap. And then we really ask more detailed questions on utility, both in current service or future planning that you might have. But that would be my suggestion. You could also take a look at demographic comparisons and see, do renters and owners differ? Do younger and older residents differ? All of that is also available to you. You could probably find some unique differences there, I would think. I'm sorry. But I think, didn't you say our rentals like three percent of the survey? So your renters, let's take a look. I have that here as well. Your renters were three percent of the survey. However, as you can see on the weighting table, the target was ten percent. So they were weighted up a little bit. So ten percent of your weighted sample included renters. I would think you'd have enough in certain questions to be able to see reasonable differences there. You also could interpret age or housing type if you really wanted to get at the renter. Attached versus detached is a pretty good proxy for rent versus own. That's also in there too. Some own attached housing, but not too often. Anything else? Great initial data. We look forward to doing a deeper dive on a few of these areas. And thank you again for coming tonight. Of course. And we're always here to help if more questions come up. Thanks very much. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Our next presentation is we have Lake Minnetonka Conservation District representatives here. Please come on up and address the council. Good evening, mayor and council. My name is David Krueger. I'm the executive director of the LMCD. In addition, with me tonight is our board chair, Anne Holzer, as well as our board treasurer, Nicole Stone. So I will cover these general four topics on the next slide. Which is why I had him do the slide. All right. So our agenda here, we'll look at budget context and history, municipal dues and reserves for 2027 expense and revenue highlights and initiatives to plan and discussions. Move it to the next slide. Okay. To our next slide. Thank you. So a little bit of a budget history here. And these, you know, were taken from an administrative point of view by minutes, financial actuals and talking with staff. So just to context, I've been here a year ago this month. So I've been here a long time, right? So anyway, I'm learning along with everyone. So essentially in how the history goes in the last seven years or so, in 2020, AIS harvest program was disbanded. The equipment sold. The AIS portion of those dues to cities ended in 2001. In 2002, our board talked to auditors. The auditors said basically that our reserves were too high and we should bring those down. So in between 30 and 50 percent. And dues were reduced to 300,000 to draw down the excess return of balance to that range of 35 percent goal. So even though it's 30 to 50, the goal is ultimately 35 percent. So in 2023, dues held at 255 to keep the reserves near the 35 percent target while salary and cost of living adjustments were phased in to meet the pay equity standards and market comparisons. So during the 2023-2025, essentially we went from an hourly situation with our employees to a salary situation. And we also upped their salaries and COLAs to meet the guidelines of the state and our salary survey. In 2025, our reserves were brought down at the end of the year to 130,000 roughly to try to meet that 35 percent reserve. You know, it further was drawn down in 26 to try to reach that target. And quite frankly, it's a little bit below that, obviously, because things happened that weren't really accounted for necessarily. And some of that was water patrol and some other larger expenses that did happen. If you'd move the slide. So municipal dues in 2023 to 2025, excuse me, 23 to 25, went interim director. This reduced the overall salary cost to MCD restructured operations during that period. In 2026, dues returned to 375 to fund operating expenses of real estate and full time director. So in 2021, they were 375 and coming back to 375 in 2026. So this was again established in 2021 when they asked program related dues ended. The board's view is this is returned to the back to the same level in 21. So reserves outlook dues were reduced in 25. Excuse me. Dues were reduced through 25 while reserves were drawn down. Reserves were projected now to be at one hundred and fourteen thousand by our year end now. So in 2027, the request is 18 percent or 440 due structure that is of one point one million. So 440 of the total that could be one point one million maximum. So why additional revenue? This covers ongoing operation, builds reserves. And after the 2026 expenses pushed the target below the 35 percent. So we want to restore the 35 percent over the next two to three years. You could bring it to the next slide. So this shows an example of the reserves in 2022 at 649. 2027 projected is one hundred and eight thousand. You can see the spend down each year in column four. Our percentage of operating expenses and then municipal dues. They went from 300, 255, 375, 440. The change in dues during the first two years was a negative 20, negative 15, zero, zero. Last year it was 47. This year it's projected at 18. If you move to the next slide, this is just a bar graph showing that how it went down and back up essentially. If you go to the next slide. So our expense highlight this year in 2027. Total expenses are six hundred and three thousand down from recent years. So a six hundred and ten last year, six hundred and three coming up this year. And that's with additional cost and expenses. We cut some to get below what we were last year, essentially. So efficiencies and process, operational improvements, reduce these costs. Staffing. This is back to the full time director, as we always occurred up till 2021. Reinstated in twenty, end of twenty five and now went to twenty six, twenty seven. Our technology. We're now looking at cloud storage. We unfortunately had our server went down. We had a catastrophic situation happen there. Our technology is really at its end of life. So we're reinvesting in our technology to be up to speed using A.I. tools and administrative efficiencies, not only in the office, but in the field with new inspections as well. So investments support the reestablished dock inspection program and streamline operations. So essentially in 2014, we ended inspecting on an annual basis and having sort of a self-regulation situation with our multi-doc license. We're now moving back to yearly inspections. If you go to the next slide, please. So this is a graph or a bar basically showing what those expenses were during the years of personnel costs. So this is insurance and other costs and everything in. So you can see in 2022, personnel cost was 57 percent again in 2023, 58, 55 and 24. In 25, we began moving up. This was partially the full-time director and 24 to 25, we changed our insurance coverage as well. And so you can see that now we're at 73 percent. You know, so it kind of moved from that to this. But it reflects, you know, full-time salary staff or an hourly new paid leave costs that we didn't know essentially in 24 for 25 budget moving forward. And then, you know, looking at just like all local governments, when you look at coal adjustments, salary or excuse me, insurance increases, Family Medical Leave Act and looking at pay equity standards, we need to meet those as well. So this is how the history kind of got there from where we were. So I believe looking forward, right, at least in the salary and benefits area, we believe the compensation market is now aligned. So in other words, people are being paid what they probably should be and what they are in salary based on the surveys. We believe our insurance, even though we predicted 10 percent, we believe it will be in that range. So looking forward beyond the reserve, we believe we'll be in that 78 percent again each year. That's the goal. That's what we want to do. If you can move to the next slide. So when we begin talking about revenue highlights here, the license and permit fees this year. So we in 2026 through the old permits fees moving into 27 will reinstate our inspections annually. So the renewal fees for multi-doc, permanent doc and de-icing licenses increase to recover the full cost of administrative service. So the statute says we can't charge more than that. So we created a formula based on the cost that those permits would essentially be. And that's what we the board adopted. So the cost recovery gap, this is essentially where in the past we've had situations where we've enforced our ordinances, but folks really didn't take it very serious on the violators end. And some of these things took years to accomplish. In some cases, we're still working on those. What we did was the council adopted an ordinance that allows us to recover for expenses that are incurred above and beyond the normal. So if we've inspected them, they violated it, we got a plan with them, they said they're going to fix something, they don't. Then it starts to accumulate a cost center for them that we can be reimbursed for. So that doesn't fall upon the members like your member city to pay those expenses, but rather the person who violated those. So a clear structure, the multi-doc license fees combine a former base fee with the adjusted BSU and actually WSU calculation. We tried to model this essentially after the Shorewood model. It's not exact, but again, it's in the philosophy that they use, which is averaging. So before it was a base fee plus how many BSUs and WSUs you had at $750. Now we average them 1 through 10, 10 through 25, things like that. So they're gauged on an average now. And we again looked at that model at Shorewood. The inspection program, the budget reestablishes the doc inspection program like I talked about. This is really supporting the safety, consistency, and best practices. So since we began already inspecting, we've seen multiple safety issues. And some of those are electric, electric shock issues, trips and falls, and some other types of situations that are public safety issues, ultimately. If you can move to the next slide. So our initiatives and strategic plan. And so these are kind of the big rocks moving forward is we're going to be looking at and moving back to our inspection program yearly residential violation fees. Again, this is to make sure that we're enforcing those at the residential level. They're not being left behind. Increase what we've been talking about here. Rental watercraft, illegal charters, working with cities, working with water patrol to make sure that we are tightening up that as best we can. Increased enforcement and pursue future collaborations. Again, encouraging cities to have their own ordinances on top of ours. We have a protocol so we can enforce stronger there. And then modernize updated code. Basically, we want municipalities to work together more often in exchange, look at ways in which we can enhance things. But this is also really about how we can update our special density license with cities as well, moving forward. Whether we keep that, we bring it into a qualified marina situation. So our board will be taking that up rather than it's a little confusing right now. So we want to make that a little easier for people to read and understand. So there's really our strategic plan here. So docs and licenses. We're sort of advancing the surface water and safety. Again, public safety. Clarify our purpose. Balance lake uses fairly and equitably amongst everyone, not just picking and choosing. Lake use and safety. So consolidate our code. That's what I was talking about a little bit earlier. Fully support water patrol and public safety moving forward. Promote practical guidance for lake users. This is where we attempted and looked at best practices for lake use. And we'll continue to look at those using social media and other educational situations. Lake protection. Develop annual strategies for our Save the Lake funding committee. Support AIS. So even though we got out of the harvesting AIS treatment prevention, we're simply looking at how we can enhance education, more or less, or things that don't cost money. This summer we had just some interns that went out and did some rake tests at different landings, just making sure to see if we get early detection or not. Really doesn't cost anything, really just kind of out there making sure and reporting what we find if we do. Pursuit joint grant opportunities. So the county still hasn't their year of grants. We're looking at the University of Minnesota right now with a program there. So we're just looking at avenues that we can enhance without expending more dollars, really. Operational effectiveness. Strengthen our board workshops and training and evaluation. Review our fees and maintain that 35% fund balance moving forward. And implementing a financial dashboard communications plan amongst our board members and to the public so they can understand where we're at and how we got there each quarter. You can move to the next slide. So our overall message is we're trying to get cost recovery and really make sure that our recovery license for administration costs are through fees and not to the member cities, that they're being calculated properly. Our financial stability moving forward, keeping that 35%, improve our technology to become more efficient, do more with what we have or less. Statutory compliance, we want to make sure we're following and that we're compliant with our statute and doing that way, try below our legal maximum. So you saw that 440 versus 1.1 maximum. And then making sure we stay at our levels of staffing that we currently have. Any questions? I've got a few, but I'll open it up to council members first if you've got questions for Mr. Krueger. Anybody? I guess my first question is, what are you planning to do or how are you planning to do an AIS treatment? Are you working with LIDS? Are you working with residents? What exactly are you doing to...? So what our board has said is that they want to take a look at AIS. They have not identified the actions that they want to take yet. So staff has just simply looked at... Well, our board has given us permission to look at education, social media, things of that nature. And we did, like I said, do some landing, kind of checking on some AIS material if it was in there. But our board still needs to define what their strategic plan is to move forward with AIS. It would appear that I would guess that they're going to do a crawl-walk-run situation. We're really on the very crawl area right now. Okay. How about, how are you going to fully support the Water Patrol and Public Safety? What are your measures there? So, again, I think that, you know, some of the things we've done in the past to save the lake has given money to make sure that we have dedicated officers, extra officers, overtime officers. I don't know if we will continue to do that, depending on, you know, we have worked to look at ways we can educate the public about... They're having staffing issues, so they have like an explorers program almost. There's an explorers program for high school kids or some for college, specific to water patrol kind of activities. So we've looked at enhancing that as well. We're currently looking at data to try to support Commissioner Edelson in her goal to see and make sure that the Sheriff's Department is adequately knowledgeable with the commissioners about the data on the lake, how many, you know, how many users at each launch and boat counts, that kind of thing. So we're trying to support your information at this time, but those are kind of what we've done so far. Can I ask a question back? Were you meaning specifically how to support them in their role or how to support them financially? I was just questioning what you wrote in your statements, so that's why I was asking the question. I mean, if you have something specific that you're going to do, I'd like to hear it. Well, I guess speaking from a financial perspective, we met with the mayor of Minnetonka today and their city manager, and we had questions, they had questions about the last time that I met with them. We had been supporting the water patrol to have specific dedicated water patrol. And then Heather Edelson came to the LNCD, and since we really do pay for that through Hennepin County anyway, we had asked about that, and they came back and decided that Hennepin County was going to support that. One of the things that the city of Minnetonka asked us today was that they wanted to keep a pulse on that because they feel like it would be double paying if we were paying for that specifically through the LNCD and through the Hennepin County, through Hennepin County. So I just wanted to address that part if you were asking about it financially. Go ahead. I just want to add one of the things that we try to do is have open conversations with water patrol, and we're always revising our ordinances so they're enforceable. So we write the ordinances, but water patrol is out there every day seeing what's happening. So they'll come back and say, you know, there's a problem with this, and we try to fix it and make things easier for them to do their jobs. I've got one. Go ahead. No, you go, Jackie. I just had one more question. I just want to know how did the efficiency of the LNCD change from having an interim executive director to having a full-time director just because you seem to be, you carried on quite nicely, I thought, without it, and it is an additional expense. No offense to you. Maybe I can answer that. I've been, I was here, we had an interim twice during my time on this board, and we were very lucky to have Jim Bermeyer who is amazing. I don't know if you guys know him, but he's a very experienced city administrator sort of a person. So he was able to jump in. This was the second time he'd been with us, so he already sort of knew what we were. He did a great job. He helped us with some efficiencies in the office and helped us streamline a little bit. He really helped the staff that we are there grow in their roles, but we weren't able to really think about the future. I think one of the mandates that we have is to provide sustainability for the LNCD. I do think we provide value. I know there's some disagreement about whether we do that or not. We do take our jobs seriously. Having a full-time staff helps us do that. It helps us maintain consistency over the years so we don't have these ups and downs that now you're questioning. It helps us think ahead and make good decisions. It helps us work and develop relationships. We didn't have that with an interim, so we have a great staff. David's a really great addition to that staff. I think they work really well together. I really think that this is the best the organization has been in my 12 years since we've been here. Thank you. On that point, I know other council members have other questions, but on that point, how many are on your staff and what are their respective roles? Is that clear? We have four staff members, myself, and then we have essentially a zoning administrator. We have a finance director, and she also has HR and all the other kinds of duties there. And then we have a person that assists with code enforcement as well, but she's also kind of our office manager person that assists at the window, answers, does all the meeting kind of information, and is a backup. So even on inspections, I'm learning inspections, she's learning inspections, so that we have multiple people that know how to do roles there so people can be gone, people can take vacations, somebody leaves that we can all step in and so forth. So those four roles is really what's there. And so my understanding is that's been for people essentially for a long time. It's just we had an interim person for a while. And I want to add something else. Yeah, please. Before we made the decision, and Jim was supposed to be interim, I mean six months, and then he agreed to be nine, and really Jim loves working. So Jim didn't really want to stop working. Jim also had two major medical issues during that time that we had to work through, and it was uncomfortable figuring out what the next steps were going to be, and we ultimately had to make that decision. But we asked the staff how they felt about, you know, do we need a fourth person? After David started, he just had to review. We asked the staff again, what do you feel like the workload is like? And their response just recently in the last few weeks was, could we make it? You know, part-time, yes. We would probably quit in a couple years, you know, or we would be overwhelmed. So it's hard. I'm a small business owner myself, and it's always a balance of what's enough and what's not enough. So we hear you there. But it was something that was unanimous. I mean, the board voted to bring back an executive director. We knew that the levels of the interim were lower. And I'd like to add a couple things, too. Rich and I, your director, the director from Orono, we were on the finance committee together. He and I and two other people are the ones that took a deep dive into this. Rich cares deeply about, like, LMCD. He cares deeply about being fiscally responsible. So do I. That's one of the reasons that we took a deep dive into the reserves, and we took this major cut. He and I have worked on the budgets together for the past five years. And when we say that I'm the treasurer, he's my left leg. So he knows it like the back of his hand, and I'm not going to say that he doesn't. But all of the decisions that were made were made as a group and were voted on as a group. So just a follow-on on the staff issue. So it sounds like you're going to be inspecting docs more now, which is great. Is that going to add to staff? Is that going to add to personnel costs? We're going to do it with the staff we have. And so during this time period of interim director, members that were in the office were doing additional duties, essentially. In some cases, working 60, 70 hours a week, my understanding is I wasn't there, but that's what they've told me. And so they are going back to doing what they're supposed to be doing. In addition, like I said, I'm learning some of that, and we also have another backup. So we know that people may be out for medical or other reasons. People on vacation, we want to make sure that we're able to conduct business, which is one of the reasons why we want to go to like iPad situations with intelligence and whatnot. Right now, in the past, it's sort of been on a paper basis that then we go back and put into computer. It's not consistent. We want a program that gives us all consistency. Anyone can pick that up in the office. We can do each other's job, mark it all. It goes directly into the file, digital file system, and we can find it and understand it. So that enhancement will help us quite a bit. It's been more difficult in the past when one person has this file and that person has this file, and it's not consistent. So that's our feeling in the office, and we can do it. In fact, previous years, we actually had a consultant that went out in the field and did some inspections. And so we got rid of that, and now we're doing that. So even though our budget is $603,000, we actually had another $30,000 in expenses. So we took those other ones out to facilitate having the four people do more with less dollars. Great. That's my question. Okay. Okay. Other questions? Yes, I have a few questions. Can you just explain to me in simple terms what spend down means? What spend down means? You must have a reserve, and you tap into this reserve amount of money. Is that right? Is that a simple way of saying it? Yeah. So in 2020-21, there was a large amount, like 800,000 in the reserve. So my understanding is Director Anderson and other board members asked our auditor, what should we be at? Should we really have this much reserve? The auditor basically said be between 30% and 50%. Our board decided to be 35% would be a good operating area. So that's what was spent down, was 800,000 down to where we're at today, a little further than we should have. And so the spend down was included in the annual municipal dues? During those years, we were balancing our budget with reserves. Okay. So one of the comments you made was in just a second here. You made a comment about some unexpected expenses in 25-26. And it looks like in that year, you spent down twice as much as you'd spent down in the prior couple years. I'm just curious what those were. One was a big miss that Rich and I had in the budget as far as what we were going to collect in fines. So when voting was really popular and that's all you could do during COVID, there was a lot more tickets that were written. When we were doing the budget, we looked at what the number was the year before that, and we budgeted a similar amount. That was an $80,000 swing. So in a $600 budget, that's pretty major. That's just one. Okay, yeah, I was just curious. It's outside of the pad for the few years around that, so I was just curious what that is. So one of the things that was mentioned was that there's going to be potentially another sizable increase to cities in 2028. Is that the case? We're budgeting now, passing our budget for 2027. We're not expected to have a large increase for 2028. There may be some. I said a large, yeah. It's three years. So if you're looking at the 18%, we're roughly looking at the same basically for three years, then it will go down. So they want to get the reserves back up to 35%. That's essentially what the thought process was. So I will just, from my point of view, and I voted for these budgets as well, so full transparency, but we drew down our reserves too quickly. We should have had the foresight to look ahead and be a little bit more responsible. I would expect that cities, I know my city, I'm from Victoria, would prefer to have a more level budget. We were drastic, and it was the opinion of some, let's give the cities a break. We've got the money. Let's just draw it down. We'll give them a break. They won't care then if three years it goes back up because they got this break. That's not how you budget. That's not how I budget in my home. So that was an error. I think part of that, having an executive director that's permanent, will help prevent us from making those kind of short-sighted judgments in the future. We also had some health insurance expenses. We switched out of our health insurance pool because we had young staff, and if we went somewhere else we could get cheaper rates for a year or two. Well, then when we hired different staff, those rates went way up, and we had to go out and find new insurance or eat those costs. So again, a little bit of short-sighted thinking. Again, I voted for those things. But looking back, we could have been more to the future. Okay. And then the other comment that I had was there seems to be a pretty sizable increase in licensing and permits revenue, like 55%. Do we anticipate that to be a risk or it's a pretty solid number that we think we're going to hit? So I missed the discussion that I think you had before this. So I don't know exactly what was said. I know there is some controversy and some threatened lawsuits. I can tell you we have vetted this with our own legal counsel. He has assured us that he believes what we're doing is fair and right. And staff has gone through their calculations to justify those fees. It is not a moneymaker. It is simply a way to cover our actual expenses. And they do have a formula that they've tried to prove what that is. Again, our legal counsel says that this is the way we should be proceeding and we're following that advice. I don't know what will happen. I was just curious. If you were asking if the revenue is stable in its current form, that's based on the amount of licenses we have. So the budget is based on the amount of multi-doc license, de-icing and whatnot that we have that they're probably not going to not get license. So it's based on that with the new fees. Okay. Yeah. I appreciate all the information and answer questions. You know, one of the things that was commented on was, you know, there might have been a little bit of a fumble to not pass along some maybe more appropriate amounts to the municipal dues in the past few years and kind of race to get to the reserve. I would ask that the LMCD consider not racing the other direction either. I hear that. Thank you. We've been talking about compliance and something that came up in the working session maybe before you arrived. Is a question I asked about, we've been talking a lot about as a city council about customer service. And I know that our residents expect certain things when they come to us about a water issue or whatever else. And it's no different with the doc licensing. And this is an issue that's come to me. And I know there's been some frustration with our representative to LMCD regarding compliance and how those docs that get flagged that may be an issue are followed up on. Because I know there was one early in the summer that I think is or a couple that are still outstanding. So in terms of that idea of our residents who write us, which we got some emails in support of these questions that were asked about the budget and the folks who are contacting me or representatives about docs that are likely out of compliance, two, three months ago, what is the right expectation for our city and our residents to have about the follow up on those compliance complaints with LMCD as an organization? Yeah, so I would say, you know, it depends on the type and the situation and a perceived situation doesn't mean it's a real situation. So it depends, right? Some homeowners might think that they that something's out of compliance or that, you know, the LMCD is in charge of something like an easement, which it's not. We're not. It's land. So it depends on the on the subject matter on our multi doc license and commercial license. We do take those extremely, you know, valuable and that we're looking at those. So, you know, since we really sort of looking after we passed our budget and our fees, I think we're more on top of things even now than we have been in the past. So in many of these cases, a violation happens, then we go out, we find out, we investigate, then we have to document that. Then we have to send our letter and that letter says you have 20 days to comply. Then they have a right through due process to say things like, I feel like you're wrong. And then they can challenge us. And in some cases, it's another 20 days and so forth. So some of these, even though it may be a perspective of a resident, we're not doing anything. There's things that are happening behind the scenes that are part of a process. So in recent weeks, you know, we've had some some violations. We've talked to our prosecutor. They're filing charges in the county court systems. We're meeting. We're asking them for additional information. This and so forth. So from someone's point of view, we may be doing nothing in the background. In the background, we're doing something. But we don't go on social media or something and say, well, with this particular one, we're in this process. But I assure you that we are taking them seriously. And that's good to know. We've struggled with the same issue and we've had discussions about a system whereby if somebody is making a complaint and they think it's being worked on, but months and months go by and there may be things behind the scenes, but the folks who are living near these docks that are maybe running some commercial rentals and are not seeing or hearing any updates, you don't have an ability to update the complaint in a system so that they can understand where in the continuum that complaint. I mean, we can email people or call them essentially. In some cases, you know, we do, but not everyone wants to accept what we're saying. So in Orono, there is an area where you have unregulated dock systems and one person owns the multi-dock, right? But many people use it. But they see it as an easement issue, which is a land issue within a county in the city, not us. So we finally, after four months of talking with their attorneys and people, got them to understand they need to go to the county about this easement, in which then they already had a dock at their property, unassociated with those docks, and now they can now move forward with their dock to Henman County, got through forfeiture property. But they kept thinking, we have the power to do that, we don't have the power to do it. And they thought that we could maneuver with the other property owner to force an issue, but really that's a separate issue. So it really depends on, so what I say is, you know, I say to your city administrator and whatnot, please give us a call, and we can try to explain to that person if it's through the city. We do try to explain it, and in some of these cases, I have met with those people two or three times, but they either don't want to accept what we're trying to say, or they simply don't want to go to the next government agency to change what needs to be changed. In this case, after four months of convincing, they finally did it, and they got the result they wanted. But it took a long time to get people to not understand, to get them to understand we're not the licensee on this particular situation. And I fully understand, appreciate the multi-agency conundrum, as it were. I guess, would our representative, did LMCD, be able to understand and update? Because I think just putting the onus on a homeowner who's living next to something that likely is out of compliance, based on my understanding, is that something our representative would be able to communicate back and forth with, with these homeowners? Because I know, I think in this one case, our representative's been asking for updates about where that process is. So I guess I'm just trying to help our council at least understand from our residents' perspective who support this budget, what they are getting out of this compliance. I think the answer is yes. Yeah, okay. I think we can, we can try to work and answer people's questions. So I guess I would just say, I haven't heard that there's been any issues, okay, as the chair. If you're not getting the answers that you think you need to be getting, let staff know. Call me. We're all here. Call anybody, and we'll help find the answers if you're not getting what you need. Please, it's a, you know, open conversation. Our information is all on our website. We're all happy to talk to anyone who's got questions. I'm just stepping away. I'm glad that we're meeting in our car for the whole time, everyone else is talking. I guess from an administrative point of view, I prefer staff to deal with, you know, clients and citizens. There's nothing wrong with the board representative doing that as well. We wouldn't want to make it confusing or conflictual. But I can hear it, and I can then go to staff, I guess is what I'm saying. I can hear that there's an unresolved issue out there. Call you and Tom and say, what's happening? Get back to these people. Thank you. Anything else? I just wanted to ask one more thing. When you guys say clarify the OMCD's purpose rules and regulations, are you planning on doing some big changes or what do you mean by that clarification? I think, so we did go through a big recodification several years ago where we simply put our ordinances in a more modern format. We didn't change any of them, or at least the goal was to not change anything. A few things may have gotten lost in translation. We're trying to fix that. Mostly we're trying to make things clear. In our agency, a lot of our ordinances were created because of a problem. And so something happened. We needed an ordinance to fix it. We threw an ordinance in, you know, in 1970. It's still there. It doesn't make a lot of sense now. It's not very clear to read. It doesn't maybe work with some of our more recent ordinances. So we're now in that process of sort of code cleanup that as things come up, as the water patrol have issues, as we see new issues, for example, with the rental watercraft, we're trying to figure out how to write a new ordinance or revamp our code to address those. So I think that's what we mean. Okay. Thanks. What are some examples of the ordinances that you, apart from, you know, length of docks and stuff like that, what are some of the ordinances that you've passed applicable to a boater out in the middle of the lake? Well, we have lots of safety ordinances. Our ordinances about safety are different on Lake Minnetonka than they are on other lakes. Our water skiing rules are different. For example, you need a second person always to water ski. You can't have a mirror. Our times are different. Bow fishing we do special permitting for. That's different. Yeah, we have quiet waters. 300 foot from shore. That's a big one. 300 foot from shore rule. Rentals. The rentals are, you know, commercial marinas, qualified commercial marinas, are, you know, city dock situations. Those are all really unique, I think, to Lake Minnetonka. The water patrol is really, it's clear on what's coming from the LMCD versus what is the state law. And, I mean, how do they manage that when they're pulling somebody over that maybe is doing multiple things wrong in accordance with your ordinances and some other state laws? That is a great question. And that kind of has to do, I think you guys have an agreement with the water patrol. And I don't really know the specifics of that, but partly it's a relationship issue, I think. We do have some unique ordinances that they can only write under our ordinance because they're different than the state. Some of the ordinances would be the same as the state. They could then choose to write it under the state ordinance or the LMCD ordinance. Whoever they write it under, they get the fine revenue for that. It's prosecuted by, you know, either the county or our prosecutor who we contract with. So that's a water patrol question. We wish they would write under our, you know, ordinances. And we try to work with them and try to support them and help them to do that. But that's a water patrol question. Do you have any audit power over them or anything like that? We don't. It's the county, you know, they're a county-funded organization. It is the county's responsibility to provide safety on the lake. And that was the Commissioner's, Edelson's, she took that very seriously, that that is the county's responsibility. So that's where we have it. And I think one of the things that we've heard is that on that 300 feet from shoreline issue that they haven't issued any citations for that. Is that true information that we've heard? I think to clarify that last year, there were no 300 foot violations with wave boats. But other boats, they did write tickets. So, yeah, I mean, obviously we objected to the to the budget proposal. We can't do anything about our ability or our ability to withhold funds where it will pay for it. But, yeah, I think I'd like to echo what what Councilmember Persons said that, you know, on the way back up with the reserve, we'd appreciate a perhaps more measured approach to refilling the reserves and as well as a real close eye on the budget, because 18 percent a year is not something that we enjoy paying because we have a lot of other competition for our dollars here. And would would very much appreciate a close look at the at the budget and and perhaps a more measured increase to our our levies every year. I do appreciate that. And I hear that. I will tell you, we do take fiscal responsibility very seriously. Our budget, we spent months on this budget. We have committees, we bring it to the board. We go back. Staff worked on it. We do put a lot of time and energy. And our goal is to keep the levy as low as possible and still be able to fulfill our mission on the lake. So we will do our best. We take our roles very seriously. We're all volunteers, except staff. But it is an honor to serve. And we're happy to do so. Any other questions? I just, you know, making sure we're getting the bang for our buck, if you will. I mean, having paid these things and seeing these kind of increases and knowing what we're getting for it. I mean, we've had an experience experiment with AIS before. And now we're going to go back to that possibility. I mean, that's a big concern on that, because we've seen where that's gone. I've read that chapter. I can say no one on the LCD thinks we are the experts on AIS. So at this point, what we want to do is support other agencies, other sister partners and help with education, access, however we can be of service. It just seems like AIS is out there on Lake Minnetonka. We are the Lake Minnetonka Conservation District. It seems it just doesn't seem right to not at least be looking at a way we can help with that. But we are not planning to get out and try to create new treatments or methods or harvest or any of that at any time in my future. The reason I focus on compliance is because the lake is huge and these issues are huge. AIS is just one of them. And it occurred to me in our working session of how with your mission statement, it's broad. Do you determine in terms of strategic planning what you will take up and what you don't? So that's something that I think about because we have a lot of requests of the city to look into things or build this or that. And I think it sounds to me like anyway, one of the challenges with all this incredible effort is to try to carve out what you can bite off, what you can chew, in other words, because there's an enormous amount of work to be done. And I think it can get difficult with a mission. You're exactly right. And so we do strategic planning sessions just like you do. We have the big categories and then we try to divide up and the board will have a work session or talk about it at a meeting of what are the one or two things in this area that we want to pursue. As David said, at this point with AIS, it's education and support. Maybe try to partner with people to get grants, with the LMA to get grants or with other organizations to get grants. But at this point, we are not able to do anything on our own. Oh, and another thing too with the City of Orono, and again representing our constituents here and the people who live here, we have 40% of the lakeshore. And having that impact is a very important thing for what the LMCD is going to be doing and representing that percentage, large of a percentage, for the Lake Minnetonka, this great resource that we have, this natural resource that we need to preserve. We'd love to hear from you and either through each of you or through your representative, we're all in this together. We all live here. This is our resource for us to hopefully preserve and enhance over the next multitude of decades. So I see it as us all working together to try to make it a great place. Excellent. Yeah, we view it as our crown jewel, really, the lake, and it means preserving and enhancing lake experiences is very important to us. So thank you for your presence. All in it together. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the time. All right. Now we're finally at public comments. So it's an opportunity for members of the public to address the council. We won't get into a back and forth, but you certainly have the ability to let us know what's on your mind and hopefully something can be followed up after the meeting. But the public is welcome to come up to the podium, just state your name and address, and let us know what you're thinking about. Anybody? All right. We'll move on to item number 13, which is an award, add-on award, I guess, for the Hackberry Park revitalization project. Mr. Mayor, members of council, it's actually not an award. For some reason, the system would not let me change that title. Change order? It is change order number one is what we're looking to get approval on. So when the award for the Hackberry project was approved, council gave direction at that time to remove some of the footage of fencing along the sidelines. And so we asked the contractor for a cost variance for that. At the same time, the council decided not to select a couple of the alternates we had as options for the project. One of those was the pavilion with restrooms was not selected. So we went back to the designer and the contractor to look at getting some pricing on reestablishing a porta-potty pad and screening area so that in the interim between now and whenever in the future we might have a more established restroom facility, we would have at least the same level of service that we had for that before. So before you is a request to approve that change order, which would approve the elimination of 240 linear feet of three and a half foot high galvanized fence and to add the installation of a concrete pad and some privacy screens. I will say I just wanted to add, it's not part of the thing, but the other thing we looked at but we didn't get good prices on is looking at the addition of putting in a drinking fountain at the end of the new water line that's being put in and run to that same area. We'll continue as a staff to pursue that outside of this construction contract as a potential possibility and bring something to the council if we get some decent pricing on something like that. Would we be able to incorporate that pad that you're talking about installing? And if we were to ever approve a pavilion, could that pad be used, can we build on top of it, I guess what I'm saying, and use it as part of the foundation for the pavilion or would that all have to be torn up? I don't know that it would necessarily be torn up. It might just be turned into a flat level spot that could be used for something else. Like picnic tables or something? I'm skeptical that it could be incorporated into the foundation of a different structure, possibly, but I don't think so. But there may be definitely future use for it. When you say looking at the cost of the water, what kind of cost are we looking at? Well, looking at the cost of doing a water fountain, we were estimating it would be somewhere around $5,000 to $7,000. We were getting quotes back between $14,000 and $18,000. Hold off and see if we can get some more competitive quotes on that to see where it really should be. A lot of people have water bottles these days or Gatorade tubs or whatever it is for the sporting games. I have a question about this pad. In this plan here, am I looking at two porta potties, one ADA and one not? Or is that a trash can and a porta potty inside that surround? Correct. Inside that surround are two. It's templated to be able to hold two different porta potties, one being a conventional porta potty and the other is one of the ADA compliant. Okay. I'm wondering, as you probably know, less infrastructure is more type of a person. There's expense and everything else involved. So I guess my question on this is, is that what is required for that space? Currently we're operating with one stall on site. It's not ADA compliant, but do we need one of each in order to fall under ADA guidelines? Because it's more expense, more infrastructure, more maintenance, and we're not increasing capacity at this park. I don't know that we have a code provision that's requiring us to have the ADA option. We have kind of as a norm for some of our parks that are of higher use, for example, the Navarre Playground, where we will include both a regular and an ADA to try to make sure that we're being as accommodating as we possibly can for the folks who might use our facilities. Right. So I don't have an answer. Is it required? No. I don't mean to say. It would be a good idea. The ADA option is obviously something I would support. I just wonder about the increase in infrastructure from what we have now, given that we're not increasing use of this park. And that's what it was. It's just an open question about maintenance and what we're biting off in terms of future maintenance costs. Also on the surround height, we have eight feet listed where I think six is more standard. So I'm just wondering about where the plan came about or those decisions. We just went and looked for standard surrounds for eight for toilets. Okay. Yes. And so the toilet, just based on how tall it sits, with a higher surround to block more of the plastic from the toilet, from view of people from around there using the park. And the surround is based, it's wooden? Yes. Yep. It's basically like sections of a type of privacy fence. I'm wondering on the drinking fountain, it can't possibly be that much more expensive to have a spigot coming out of the ground where the water is provided. Can it? I don't know how fancy the water fountains are that we were looking at. You'd be surprised how expensive municipal level water fountains are. We have a similar one down at the Navarra playground. Just looking to buy the actual water fountain itself. They're $3,000, $4,000. Yes, just to put in like a agricultural hydrant type spigot that you might have. No, that doesn't cost nearly that much. But getting a standard faucet. And we'll be looking at one that you can do a water bottle fill. You can have a convenience spigot for irrigation or hooking hosting. And then I believe we're also still required to have an old school push to drink type. What do we have at the dog park? At the dog park, we just have a hand pump. Which actually costs more than a... I remember that now. We paid a premium for a hand pump. Adam, where is this going on here? Just curious. Say again? Just the location. Where is the structure and the pad? Right there. Right here is where we're proposing to put the port-a-potty pad. Where was the... And then we templated where we put the water fountain right there. But the structure we had templated right in this same general area. Which is why we're proposing putting things like the water fountain there. We are running the water from the well down to this area anyway. And then there would be an opportunity to actually get it to the correct surface and have it be usable for folks. Will the field be irrigated then? The field is irrigated, yes. The new field will be irrigated. The old one was not. It's fun seeing the work being done there. Say again? It's fun seeing the work being done there. It is. It is well underway. It is so great. But I do say right now we're in the height of moving dirt around. It does not look pretty. But that's part of the process. It will get there. I think it will be a great park. If there are no further questions, does anybody want to make a motion as to the change order number one? I have one question. Go ahead. The surround. What is the orientation? It's three-sided. Right now we have it facing the road. The open? The open portion facing the road away from the play fields and the what have you. So it's screened. People are driving by seeing the porta potties as opposed to the screening and folks on the other side. Okay. Is that typically? It could be any particular direction. No matter what. Strangely, I have had a lot of complaints on porta potti door orientation. And it seems like no matter what we do, there's somebody who doesn't like it. I would have thought it would have faced the parking lot. I was thinking the same thing. We could certainly face it. That was a preference. There was no real strong feeling other than trying to screen it from the ball field where most people would be gathered. I'm just hearing your comment. Orientation then, the open part is currently facing Willow? Correct. But it could face the parking lot instead? I'd like that better. Because then either as you're driving by, it's transient in the parking lot, people coming and going, but driving by and or on the ball fields or on the park. Yeah. I like the parking lot facing the parking lot. We could make it smaller and just have one to save some money. No? I just wanted to break it up just because I don't know, not having kids who play sports there, how much of a need there is for two stalls at this site. I don't know the answer to that when games are going on. Is there a line out the door? Is it like state fair level of usage or is it one every so often? I'm just questioning it because it's cost of maintenance. Yeah, I'm not sure how much it's going to get used. I'm sure it's going to be used frequently when there's kids down in their ball fields. I personally think you need to have something for someone who needs an ADA compliant. Agreed. And that's the thing is I know there's some boat launches, they have one and it's ADA compliant. It's a large one as opposed to two. You just have a larger one that is compliant. I mean, I don't know. It's more expense than everything else in maintenance, so maybe it's not that much in the future. I guess I would say I can't give you an exact number, but we will not realize a great deal of savings shrinking that a little bit or removing one fence panel from the outside. And at the same token, if we build it so that we can fit two, that doesn't mean we have to order with our rental company too. If we only need one, we rent one and put it in there. Sure. But if we do need two, we can. And I would say that as one of our more used parks, I would err on the side of having that flexibility if we need it. I agree. I'll make a motion that we approve change order one. I would ask that you have it positioned where the opening is towards the parking lot and that it does accommodate up to two, including an ADA. I'll second it. Okay. Further discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Same sign. Motion carries. All right. Thank you. Any updates that Councilmembers want to provide? Other Councilmembers? We'll start with Steve. Yeah. I'll just give a quick update. Last week, the Shoreline Fire Department, there was a process to go through a couple weeks ago now to go through applicants. Those applicants were narrowed down, and this week we are going to be having another round of interviews with the remaining candidates and then moving along with the process of the permanent fire chief starting hopefully at the beginning of the year, of 2027. So I just wanted to give that update. Great. Thank you. I don't have anything. Anything? I just wanted to mention that we got to ride along with the veterans to Big Island. And it was quite a nice thing to talk to some of the veterans and to visit Big Island and just kind of honor their service. So I appreciate being invited on that. It was a very nice event. Great. Yeah, I don't have anything other than that. It's a great event. Good to see our park out there and grateful for Gabe and Gigi for sponsoring that. Agreed. And I don't have anything else to update anyone on. So with that... You know what? I do want to say one thing. I want to thank our LMCD director for ORNO here and all the great work he's been doing for us. Thank you, Richie. Thank you, Richie. All right. With that, I would entertain a motion to adjourn. So moved. Is there a second? Second. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Same sign. Motion carries. 735.