everybody uh thank you for joining us for this open house to provide you information about the planned upcoming projects in shorewood oaks and the smithtown stormwater pond my name is greg larue i'm a shorewood city administrator and the purpose of this meeting is to share information with you about the projects and also to hear questions that you have this meeting will begin with a video presentation from the city engineer andrew buddy following the presentation mr buddy and city staff will respond to questions you have uh additional city staff at this meet include director of public works larry brown this meeting is being recorded and a link to this meeting will be added to the project page at the city's website so with that i will turn the meeting over to andrew buddy thank you greg uh i am just going to share my screen and play the video and then afterwards we'll we'll stand for questions all right you should see the first page of the slide and here we go welcome to the open house for the city of shorewood smithtown pond and shorewood oaks drainage improvements projects the goal of this meeting is to provide an overview of the drainage issues in the area discuss some of the recommended solutions and provide an opportunity for residents to give their feedback there will be an opportunity for residents to ask questions at the end of this presentation in 2020 the city of shorewood completed the western shorewood drainage study which identified and evaluated various drainage issues within this area the study took a closer look into sub-watersheds to identify drainage issues including significant erosion in channels and creeks standing water in residential yards high flooding risks to homes and buildings and the need for future improvement projects the study evaluated a variety of options to resolve the issues and provided recommendations that took many things into consideration these included hydraulics water quality protected structures phasing costs flexibility and other items today's presentation and discussion is specific to two projects smithtown pond and sherwood oaks drainage improvements the smithtown pond project is a major component of the western shorewood drainage solutions as it allows for significant improvements to upstream drainage issues while also providing reductions to the flows and downstream channels the shorewood oaks drainage improvements portion of the project can best be resolved by taking advantage of the planned improvements at smithtown pond three different configurations for smithtown pond were evaluated as part of the study option a and option b were single cell pond configurations and provided a range of different pros and cons that varied in cost hydraulics water quality improvements and a variety of other criteria ultimately option c a two cell pond was recommended and approved by city council to proceed with final design this option provides a reduction in downstream flows in grant lorenz channel by 23 reduces sediment loading by 45 reduces phosphorus by 25 maintains larger vegetative buffers around the perimeter of the property and gives the most visually appealing and natural layouts for both residents and the habitat the project will also include the replacement of the culvert under the lake minnetonka regional trail improvements to the outlet controls on the freeman park side and the installation of a new trail through the property from smithtown road to the lake minnetonka regional trail the hydraulics and water quality of the overall watershed will be greatly improved by allowing upstream water to drain quicker be stored in the smithtown ponds and then released at a slower rate than existing conditions the right-hand side of the profile is freeman park or the south side of the lake minnetonka regional trail and the left-hand side is near smithtown road where water will leave the site the normal water levels of the basins are within a couple feet of perched ground water encountered during soil borings therefore no significant impacts are anticipated to groundwater elevations and existing wells the solution for shorewood oaks relies on separating the footing during tile from the storm sewer at shorewood oaks drive and the freeman park basin a new eight inch pipe will be routed to the north side of the lake minnetonka regional trail to discharge this ensures that the footing drains are not influenced by the high water levels on the south side of the lake minnetonka regional trail in freeman park to facilitate construction and provide the improvements to drainage smithtown pond will require the removal of many trees to help reduce impacts to trees staff have surveyed all on-site trees and walked the area with the city's arborist to identify the species and the conditions of all trees the pond grating and trail alignments were then adjusted to preserve healthy significant trees of a variety of species the trees highlighted in orange are trees programmed to be saved based on design changes the city can save mature maple walnut hackberry kentucky coffee cedar scotch pine white pine poplar and cottonwood trees the city is taking the opportunity to remove ash trees near the construction and is considering a plan for buckthorn management on this site as part of construction the city will be planting over 60 new trees on the site that currently include maple river birch hackberry white oak and elm trees the pondsides and open areas will be planted with native grasses that will encourage habitat for wildlife and pollinators to complete the proposed improvements this project will require the lake minnetonka regional trail to be detoured it is our goal to minimize the inconvenience of the users by routing them through freeman park and taking advantage of some of the existing trails which helps minimize tree removal coordination is ongoing with the hennepin county regional rail authority and the three rivers park district the city is currently in the final design phase of the project and is planning to award the projects in may construction could start as early as may of 2021 and extend through may of 2022. the city plans on requiring the contractor to construct enough of the pond system this summer so that the new shorewood oaks piping can be functional by september of 2021 therefore a portion of the pond excavation may occur over the winter of 2021 or winter of 2022 the longer duration of construction allows flexibility to contractors and lowers pricing for the city as approximately 2500 dump truck loads need to leave the site also the pond does not need to be completed until the strawberry lane and trail project starts which is anticipated to be may of 2022 to stay informed on project progress sign up for email updates on the city's website at ci dot shorewood dot mn.us slash e-news you can also contact the city engineer with any additional questions or comments all right thank you for watching that presentation uh now i will open it up to any questions that residents would have uh and i'll try and answer them to the best of my ability or uh follow up with you if need be so if you do have a question you'll have to use the raise your hand feature uh which you can get access to through on the bottom of the screen there's a reactions button and in there is a symbol that looks like a hand if you click that we'll know that you have a question or if you're sharing video you can oftentimes just wave your hands too yeah i saw amy's hand go up first so i will recognize her here we go hi uh thanks for the presentation i just had a couple of questions um what do you anticipate the average water level to be it looked like the high water level was that was it 9 57 or 9 yeah so it's going to depend on which pond you're actually referring to i'll kind of walk down the chain in freeman park which is on the south side of the trail the normal water level is around a 960 elevation uh the high level there ends up being a 969 which is pretty similar to what the existing condition is it's just a little bit lower than that um tell you what let me if you don't mind i'm going to share my screen because i do have the powerpoint presentation i guess my um the reason why i'm asking that is do you anticipate them to always be full or um kind of really fluctuate and will there be any of those i've heard about the other problems of like them not being maintained and smells and things just from welcome to the open house for the city of shorewood smithtown pond and darwin oaks drainage okay that starts to play once i go to it sorry um we anticipate them to generally stay pretty close to the normal water level that we have there and um obviously then when you get a rain event that's when they fluctuate up and down in those areas and will that affect those neighboring creeks um will there be more or less water or the same water and creeks that kind of flow right around it yep good question so there is this creek on the east side of the parcel that water is mostly going to be routed through the pond basins and kind of controlled that way so very little flow will come down this side channel except for what naturally makes it over land in that direction the other channel is pebble creek which is off to the west a little bit and we are anticipating that the construction of this project isn't going to change the flows of pebble creek very much but with the future strawberry lane project we will be reducing the flows in pebble creek to help control erosion that's happening on those channels that storm water will ultimately be routed through and discharge into this upper pond here this is the pipe that would ultimately go to strawberry lane and cross under pebble creek thank you uh mr elsie and i would add too that the um the razer hand feature is found under the participants tab at the bottom mr elsie first thank you very much for having this forum that's great you know i appreciate that at the top of my questions you've got the final design and plan coming up and once you have that what you plan on doing to make that available to us because for me many of my concerns will be incorporated or not incorporated in that plan and that's where i would look for more details about a variety of items that you and i have spoken about before so where what is the next step in the process for us to be able to see the details of the plan um we so we're we're close to being near the end of final design once we kind of have that to the point we would make that available typically in a city council packet and that would be available like the wednesday before a council meeting we can if you'd like make it available to you earlier if you have questions that you really want to get into the details of we can provide that to you a little bit ahead of time as well too or earlier than that all right but you expect the next couple weeks to have that document available to us yes all right and um i've listed about 12 variables that i wanted to make sure were incorporated in that plan uh ones i won't go through all of them at this moment but i'll be looking for them the ones that i've mentioned a few of them are your maintenance plan risk of flooding risk of pollution of wells the effect on ground water levels etc so mosquitoes another so you plan on trying to go through kind of a uh tick list of concerns that citizens may have um and engineering and design concerns so that the questions we might have would be answered already in the plan uh generally yes um that is kind of the whole intent of this meeting and and mr yells yet we do have your letter that you submitted and and we try to incorporate as many as we can into a presentation like this but i know some of your questions are pretty detailed we are planning to prepare a frequently asked questions that we will post on the city's website as well and i i feel like that's probably the best venue to answer some of your questions um and we hope to have that up here sometime next week trying to take questions that residents would have from this meeting and and uh hopefully that will help address most your questions otherwise we can meet uh in person or do a zoom call to help answer any other additional questions you would have all right and that tick list and my questions are typically ones all of our residents would be interested in i believe and very few are specific to to my property so we appreciate you taking the time to build this that drawing is very good it does not give us enough detail to know just what sort of buffers will exist and remain a height of the land after excavation all sorts of questions what are you using for a wrapper within the ponds to prevent leaching etc etc so those would be things i would expect to be incorporated in your engineering document and i hope to see them there and if i don't see them there i will feel as though additional review is going to be required okay thank you thank you uh chris hello uh let's see here sorry hi i'm chris mccumberman uh pete circle um i just had a couple quick questions um i was just curious the strawberry lane pipe i know um i believe i had maybe it was andrew or somebody had come out to walk the properties with us last spring beginning of summer um and i know it was kind of still a little bit up in the air where that drainage pipe was going to run and obviously one of the proposed sites was my backyard so and my neighbors i was just curious has that been finalized where that pipe is going to go is that a dig up project or a boar i know there's the boring option was the other one um that isn't 100 figured out yet uh that that pipe segment is more tied to the design of the strawberry lane street project and so we're in the feasibility stages of that and hope to have that locked down here sometime this summer and we'll know a lot better what that is and two i don't know at this point whether it's open cut or directionally drill um either we ideally like to minimize uh disturbance to the residents but uh there's some factors yet that i gotta figure out okay um the second question i had was you mentioned all the dump trucks that would be uh moving through is that all out through smithtown or was there i just i wasn't clear i may have missed it cause they joined a little late where those entry action points were going to be running yes we are trying to set it up so that everything will go out in and out on smithtown road okay got it okay um and then i think it probably was addressed i mean the gentleman just before me and some of his questions but i the well water impact it sounds like fairly fairly confident that there won't be any impacts to that i know we're still discussing city water versus not um is it kind of a fairly confident 100 confident the wells won't be impacted or is it still a little bit unknown well no i'm fairly confident um the work that we're doing on this site is kind of surface grading when we did soil borings we they encountered water i don't know 10 15 feet deep in there but that's perched groundwater that's showing up there i looked at all the well records in the surrounding area and almost all the neighboring wells go 100 feet deep and that's where the static water is sitting is around 90 to 100 feet deep so we have from from my perspective we have very little influence on the actual ground water where residents are are drawing from it for well production because between that we have 80 70 80 90 feet of pretty tight soils that that really is not conducive to infiltration and that is actually one of the challenges in shorewood is it's really hard to infiltrate storm water into the ground because of those soils so for those reasons i'm pretty confident that there's really no impact to existing wells okay thank you uh elder hi can you hear me now yes yes okay sorry um yeah this is jim elder i'm i'm in the the property um in that triangular lot that is in in your current view right right in the kind of the upper yeah that area right there that's that's my property i i did have a question about the wells uh was a concern and there's been a lot of discussion about that so i guess we probably don't need to talk about that too much more um you know i understandably have a concern about that um the uh so i just had two other questions one one question was there was mention of closure of the regional trail is that going to be a permanent reroute or just a temporary reroute during the construction that is intended just to be a temporary reroute generally shown here in this yellow kind of highlighter we we have had some initial conversations with the uh hennepin county regional rail authority and we know we're going to replacing the existing culvert that goes underneath it we're actually adding another line for the short wood oaks drainage improvements and so what we're doing is we're trying to temporary route people kind of on the south side of where all the work is going to happen and then we're going to have a big cut through the existing trail to put in the pipes and anticipate doing all of the hauling and excavation from the south side of the trail out through this and back up to smithtown for that so we're anticipating about a two month detour give or take um probably during uh late summer to fall is is what we're hoping for okay i i did have want to thank you very much i did have one other question um you you mentioned that the little creek that runs into that upper pond that one right there yeah um when a few of you were out at my property some some week or months ago um i mentioned that that creek gets really really close right now and maybe even encroaches uh onto you know over the property line you know um you know right right about you know right where you can see right just right before yeah right in there and my garage my garage sits right there at the bottom of that triangle and and i have i have had concerns over the years about the the the gradual um you know the crate the creek that is is naturally uh moving in you know it and because the because of the curve right there it's it's it's it's gradually been eating into and encroaching on the property line um is there's is there something in the plans that you that would either slightly reroute that or or make some sort of uh uh you know prevent it take some sort of a preventive measure to to stop that erosion yes from my perspective we're doing two things um the biggest in change that's going to happen is the water is no longer the water from the freeman parks side is going to be routed through these pawns and so that's going to take away a lot of the flow that was otherwise coming through those channels and then when we're over there we do plan on um you know right next to your garage you know filling in some of those areas that have been kind of been cutting out and eroding and making it look a little bit more natural trying to reestablish vegetation on flatter slopes versus the nearly vertical slopes that you that are currently getting close to your garage okay so right and there's a big box elder tree down there that is in not the greatest health that if it looks like if it were to die would come come near your garage so we're also taking that out in this process as well okay thank you that was all i had for now thank you thanks mr elsie just a couple comments and i'm sure other people have a chance to to talk as well well again uh my concern all along has been on water table not necessarily uh drainage even though drainage is a part of that and i still would like to make sure that you do address water table i meant you mentioned it don't believe it will impact water table well we like to to one winters and springs when we have much more water and we have much more of a problem with sump pumps and flooding so you're going to be at a depth where a the pond itself could flood in the winter particularly with ice so again things like that i'd like to see mention just what could go wrong and how you're addressing them so how are you going to address ice blockage blockage of the pond itself so that it fills and floods um also just mention the wrapper and the way you're going to try and prevent pollution uh gaining some ground into the wa into the soil you mentioned buckthorn management without telling us what that meant again i'd like you to be explicit so if you're planning on using chemicals i would be opposed to that and if you're planning on using some pull methods i would be supportive of that so i prefer no chemicals particularly where we got all this water uh sitting around and moving around um i prefer that that be a mechanism so all of those variables mosquitoes water table the issue of potential flooding because you're now pulling water in a place that is potentially able to flood how are you going to maintain it those are all key questions that i'd like you to be sure to address and even whether you're going to move the soil and put up berms are you going to burn that property in any way to contain any possible flooding those will be things to be considered as well i'm done with my comments all right thank you we and we do i think the the best way to address those is probably unlike the frequently asked questions and post them online um so any other questions i don't see any other hands up there we go amy hi um do you a couple questions can you say anything to the maintenance plan right now in mosquitoes on mosquitoes mosquitoes maintenance anything yeah so mosquitoes are monitored by the metropolitan mosquito control commission district there we go um i actually was on their site uh their website here before the presentation because i was anticipating questions like this if if you go to their website they have they map everything they they map all these little basins actually i'm gonna i'm gonna pull it up here because i think it's it's interesting it is a good website it it's interesting to me and it's a very good website it provides tons of information that i didn't even know existed i just got a snapshot of this here so uh so maybe there should be able to see this so this is from their website and this is kind of the the general watershed for the smithtown pond area all of these little orange polygons is an entity that you can select on on their gis website and it'll bring up information as to kind of the level of uh say threat of mosquitoes breeding in it so they rate it on like a red orange or blue red being kind of the most prone to it blue being pretty low ranking they list off the dates of when these areas were treated last like i was amazed at how much data they have on it and so i was clicking around in this and seeing um kind of what happens and so clearly when a new stormwater pond is built on the on the parcel here the that district will will sample it and provide treatment in those areas as well as many as all of these other areas around and so we may be you know creating one surface area for these mosquitoes but our intent is that we're going to help dry up some of these other nuisance drainage areas in the watershed that that more habitually hold water as kind of a nuisance condition so so we might get a few extras well and it's yeah i it's that's i'm not i'm no expert on mosquitoes but that's just kind of where where some of that best information is at uh as far as maintenance goes we are uh planning to plant it with more of a native vegetation in there that's a little more conducive to wetland soils and pollinators in there and those soils are typically not mowed very frequently and sometimes they do require or sometimes it's preferred to do a burning on them i don't know that we're ever going to do a burning here in the city but that is one of those maintenance practices that that helps promote strong growth for it i think in the long term we'll i'll have to work with public works and see what is maybe more realistic in some of these areas that may require a deep mowing once or once or every three or four years uh the other outlet like the storm pond elements um the city will be required to inspect those uh really on an annual basis to make sure that they're functioning appropriately making sure that the outlet control structures are working and all that stuff so um i asked that too it's just i remember i wasn't on a city meeting for that topic it was for my neighbors back but if they were talking about some other neighbors were concerned about the smell in an existing storm pond in a different area like there was some i don't i don't know much about it and i'm sure we're not trying to create a smell here or anything but is there is there gonna be enough water moving through or is there any proactive things being done here if there might be similar conditions do you know what i'm talking about there's a i'm not sure i'll i'll speak to that i'm larry brown director of public works i there's been um much discussion and and press and media coverage about the uh banner park pond yeah that is a pond that uh has a little qual little quantity of flow uh coming out of it and so you get stagnant water conditions that's another thing that you're gonna find on uh metropolitan minnesota minnesota i'm sorry minnesota mosquito control district is that um stagnant water are the waters that are breeding grounds for the mosquitoes the ponds as designed while they do have a a permanent wet pool they are still considered moving water because there's enough water moving through those on a regular basis that you're not creating the stagnant condition to uh build a home for the mosquitoes or the stagnant water conditions that have smells uh with regard to the maintenance of it we have done uh vegetation burns over on gideon glenn but those are typically where you have prairie grasses planted that's a common methodology for maintaining prairie grasses right now i'm not sure i haven't heard that we're planting prairie grasses in this but the final design has yet to be done so therefore it would be probably mowing around the edges we do prefer to keep some of the long grasses around the edge of it because that promotes a good habitat for you know life so is the intent of it to kind of just blend the woods right across the trail from it will it kind of have that same feel yes we're doing some we're doing both uh planting vegetative planting and doing tree replacements as andrew mentioned um last question do you anticipate any um changes to pebble creek or adjustments to pebble creek we anticipate less flow coming through pebble creek once strawberry lane is constructed how much yet we don't exactly know so just flow related not physically touching anything around it or correct yeah we don't plan on doing anything within pebble creek construction-wise restoration-wise planting-wise okay it looks like it's a a plan that people will want to walk through and go through are there will there be benches and things like that throughout is it going to be encouraged to walk through it or is it going to be closed off or don't it will be it will be encouraged to be waterproof it will be encouraged to be walked through okay i'll i'll add to that i uh andrew that previous slide you had had a a better shot of the trail um part of it there you go it put a city council suggestion there's a proposed trail uh that andrew's running his cursor down right now that's going to be our intent is to serve two purposes one to make it a a park feature a park type amenity to where we can partner with the watershed district and put in educational uh signage if you will as to the natural habitat and what's going on there explain some features of the of the project and then just have it as another park amenity that people can walk through and observe what's going on uh secondary is to ensure that public works has adequate access to get in and do the maintenance on these ponds great thank you and you'll have to unmute okay hi can you hear me okay yes yep yeah um you know to kind of piggyback on amy's question you know it really would be nice to have a bench on that trail you know there's not a lot of benches on the trails around here and i know that i walk them a lot and it would be nice to you know have that uh and that's all i had thank you for the feedback i'll i'll respond to that as well as that we have a number of uh folks that are number of residents and organizations that are um often looking for places to donate benches and we have eagle scouts who are are chomping at the bit to help put in concrete pads and install those benches so i see this as one of the prime areas when we get a a donor who's looking for a prime area i'm going to guess that this is going to be a very prime area for to for us to direct them to and put benches in here but that will that will typically happen after the project is constructed people start seeing the the greenery come to life and start using the trail and then they're going to say hey wow this is a this is a beautiful environment we want to add to that patrick did you have your hand up um i had it up then i lowered it i was going to ask about bow hunting deer back there but then i wasn't sure what my audience was going to be so i thought i'd keep my mouth shut patrick i would ask that you give me a call at city hall i'll give you my number and i'll be happy to go over that with you so you're saying there's a chance i'm kidding i don't know i'm not even saying that i'm just saying call me all righty thank you yep any other questions today and so we will as greg mentioned we will put the recording of this video up i do have uh some other figures that were used to prepare the presentation that we'll make available on the on the city's website as well so that you can get a a better picture of what that is other than just going back through the video so we should have those up here probably early next week uh yes i would also add that if you are going to if you are viewing this as a recording for the first time and you have questions about uh about what we've talked about today or really any questions about any part of the project you can always reach out to the city engineer his phone number is 952-960-7 uh you can reach out to director of public works larry brown 952-960-7913 or you can reach me at zero 952-960-7905 and if you have not signed up to receive uh email updates about this project or any city capital project you can call city hall at 952-960-7900 and we will get you signed up so you can receive email updates as information as posted to these various products projects so thank you all very much for attending today and have a good day you