The new Wood Lake Nature Center building will have a 3,000-square-foot room with a catering kitchen, one of the largest event spaces in the City. During the building design process, the community expressed a desire to host events such as weddings, anniversaries, and fundraisers in the space. The community also shared a desire to have alcohol at events in the new space.

Staff has drafted an ordinance that would give the City the flexibility to manage alcohol use in the parks without having to revise it every few years.

Defines low alcoholic beverages as anything with less than 17% alcohol by volume, providing flexibility in what can be consumed as drinking trends change, while preventing hard liquors, which can be more prone to overconsumption.

It is important to note that with these changes, there will not be a significant immediate change to how or when alcohol is consumed in park spaces. The draft ordinance only provides the latitude to allow consumption in park spaces.

Alcohol can be an important cultural aspect to celebrations and events. The current prohibition of alcohol in the parks impacts who chooses to use City spaces for special events. The ability to consume alcohol at City facilities impacts the potential revenue generated by these facilities and their eventual cost recovery.

The conservation/tiered rate structure is designed to encourage water users to reduce consumption by charging higher rates for increased water usage.

To keep things simple for this exercise, staff assumed that 1 residential unit in a multifamily building would be allotted the same water consumption volumes as a single-family property. For instance, a 14-unit apartment building would have a conservation/tiered rate structure that was 14 times that of a single-family home.

The financial impact or difference in revenue from not capturing these higher consumption volumes via a multifamily conservation/tiered rate structure is $5,044.58.

Put another way, moving commercial accounts onto a structure that is modeled after the residential conservation/tiered rate structure would amount to a 44.4% increase in annual water expenses for all businesses that use water at tier 3 volumes. An estimated 115 commercial accounts would be affected by this change.

Staff believes the question of whether or not commercial accounts should be moved onto some sort of conservation/tiered rate structure is ultimately a policy decision that must be made by City Council.

Purpose is to adequately fund the maintenance and replacement of existing infrastructure through user rates on an on-going basis.