I continue to believe that this project is not what the vast majority of our community wants and or needs and I'm nervous about taking this on financially based on the proforma provided by our outside uh operator. I'm still not convinced of the economic viability of the regional sports complex.

UMR has been one of the bright success stories over in Rochester over the last two decades and the way it's kind of grown up and seeing this on here really does show that it's become an important part of our both downtown but our our overall community and our overall economy and I just wanted to call it out above and beyond the normal consent agenda.

The 12.6 acre site is located south of 18th Street north of 20th Street and east of 37th Avenue Southeast uh in an R1 zoning district. The general development plan was approved by city council in June of 2020 and consists of uh 185 units having 139 single family lots and 46 attached single family lots. Uh phase 4 of this development proposes 15 single family lots that are uh detached of various widths and depth.

No, happy to see it in the ward. Uh there's been a lot of nice work done in that subdivision already. I see the families out outside using the heck out of the area. It's really nice to see how active they are. It's like those kids don't have iPads or something. They're actually outside playing. So, it's just nice to see and I'm happy to see more coming to the area and then living it up out there. Hopefully, we can get them a a path to uh get to the main part of town easilier.

Our policy is that new development pays its own way and therefore we have to keep these fees up to date to cover our costs. At the same time, these rising fees are a detriment to trying to get housing built. Is there any sort of wrestling going on to say how can we stem this or what type of cost controls can we put in place so that we're not moving in lock step as all these construction costs go up and basically hindering one of our main policy objectives uh over the this year and in the coming years?

I guess building on that, would our June 22nd study session when we talk about the urban 3 analysis and our tiff policy be a good time to talk about what incentives and where we have adequate infrastructure and where we have new infrastructure costs because there does seem to be a differential and um we we talked about this with the the stormwater credit fee as how we incentivize and help infill development where we have adequate infrastructure often built. So I'm just curious if if there is a future place from a policy perspective where we have differentiated fees whether they're in target opportunity zones or outside.

I'm still concerned about the troubling location far outs southeast. While I do agree that indoor space is needed and I recall in the back of my mind when I said I didn't think we should choose Southeast that if we did there should be an indoor location. Um and and that's what you're bringing forward here. Um, I'm still not convinced that what the community is asking for is in there because I don't think I I haven't heard enough discussion about what will be there.

We certainly can work that into the design phase and have, you know, public engagement around uh the financing options that we likely would present um in September. Happy to do that if that's what you'd like to do. And it it's just going to have this big qualifier like on the bottom like images are concepts and will be refined as the design and budget evolve. like, you know, we just are trying to manage expectations.

I look at our civic center and it has performing arts space, it has an art center, it has flexible event space. And I also think of other community efforts and I I hear from constituents often that we don't invest that much in arts and cultural spaces for people. And so I am uncomfortable moving forward with further investment in sports tonight without a deeper dive into potential uses be they limited with some restrictions by the authorization of how could a scale of funding like this potentially be used and add an asset to our community.

I'm not in favor of this only because a lot of reasons, but the biggest reason is that I think that we have staff and we have male clinic people working. I don't think we need to add more people to this. And I'll give you kind of an example that we've had two recently that having more than a lot of people involved and nobody really wants to take responsibility. And one of them would be for the St. Mary's Electrical that cost us $900,000 in the Peace Plaza. And everybody's playing to everybody else on these issues that these this is what went wrong. So I think adding one more group to this doesn't make any sense.

So there was an RFQ process or request for qualifications. We made it pretty widely open. We received 10 proposals. Um there was an an initial review and scoring with a number of items. I think there were about six different items that we were asked folks to score included representatives across city departments including parks, public works, community development along with DMC um folks and Mayo looking at them.