If we wanted to do development at Blakeley today because our plan is considered an acquisition master plan, we would not be eligible for regional funding. So converting this and updating it to a development plan opens up that eligibility.

I know especially in the beginning there was a lot of interest for people to attend those meetings but had signed up to be on the citizens design team and so we had to kind of remind people that this isn't open for the big public discussion yet that will come and so I think in the beginning there might have been a little angst about not anybody could come right away you had to sign up you had to regularly really attend.

I would say the needle is moved because of household income. I mean, that's I mean, demographically true. I I would just say to this because it's from a couple years ago with Met Council that bothered me. When we see things like this, we shouldn't just knee-jerk react and say we have to try and get more people who make under 50,000 in the park because you know what? Everybody I know has a household income under 50,000, they have other issues of why they're not getting to the park and like that's not going to be their top priority.

One thing I want to mention about the the ravine, especially the one um well the one in the blue circle is that that is a more shallow ravine compared to others in the park and there is in about the middle of that ravine there is a field road that cuts through it. So, this represents an opportunity for using existing corridors um for trails.

I think one of the suggestions at the parks community meeting last night or the other night was um provide the trails and then have a horse private horse organization or or business outside of the outside of the boundaries of the park that they can start up and and then rent and then people can bring in the horse to go around the trails inside the park.

I think there there's concern too about the who are the bison in the SMSC, you know, they're part of the family, the the whole cultural um significance of it and are we overstepping what they feel is right.

FHWA noted or hope change on regarding considerations. Uh, one to eliminate racebased prioritization to be in compliance with that those federal law changes from December of 2025. Uh, remove references to the environmental justice framework. That's kind of talking about uh highway harms. Um, removing language around that. And then they called for them to broaden the definition of community.

The second piece was removing references to the highway harms. I do think that they did a pretty good job on that. They they most remove or entirely removed those references from the scoring criteria. And then again the third bullet point from FHWA was brought in the definition from community and they just deleted their they had a definition from community in the previous criteria they just deleted it. So you know not exactly what was was uh asked.

As the as the applicant, it's your job in the application to define what community is for your project. And uh you need to make that case and that could be miles away like you said they said that it could be downtown, you know, Scott County to downtown. That could be your community is the people that that large. you have to make that case in the application and I ask are the scorers going to be trained you know that same way that this is flexible this can be we can look at communities for the way because if I'm just a lay person looking at and I see nearby communities I'm not thinking miles so they said yes that's going to be part of the retraining that they do with scorers and again just they really said it's up to you as the applicant to define.

The things that we're concerned about um should we be sending a letter to the tab. This can be talked about next week obviously that sending a letter with our concerns and then maybe reading it into the record of the tab meeting or whatever you know the idea of nearby or deleting the definition of community considerations that is inadequate. You know that should I guess I'm suggesting we probably should have some formal response.

We probably maybe just based on what I'm hearing from HHS um really trying to work on the prevention and that dollar and where it's going, we think it has brought value. Um I'm a little worried that maybe we went a little low on this preliminary levy based on what we're hearing back from DHS and some potential issues uh that make me a little bit nervous.

We are a subcontractor without a contract on a lot of these. And so we took a look as we've been looking at these budget book pages and looking at the projections when the state does not increase we are down to what is it 1% revenue Danny or something a little over 1%. Um when they are not increasing and we have staffing contracts and increased costs it is not keeping up. So you can say it's staffing that's driving it, but it is the lack of the support from those supporting agencies um in keeping up with the true cost of doing business.

From their February forecast from 2025, it's projected to increase by $3 billion. Uh, which is a 40% jump from 2025 to 2029. Um during this time, state revenues are projected to increase just by 10%. So Medicaid would make up over a third of Minnesota spending.

So we've asked uh managers, supervisors to dig more into their budgets than they ever have to try and learn it. It's still a learning process. I know Jen Schwarz and Barb and Suzanne have been working with their departments, but they're starting to see use of fund balance lines within their cost centers. And we'll go a little bit more into that, but that's not the only reason for doing this, but also an important component because you will see these in the budget book and say, 'What is that fund balance?'