Call the meeting to order at 7:02 p.m. Please stand for the pledge of allegiance. liberty and justice for all. All right. Are there any changes to the agenda? Um I do have one change to the agenda to delete um item number 9. I was hoping to have that completed present. Okay. Okay. All right. Anyone want to make a motion to approve the agenda with the removal of 9C? So moved. All right. I'll second. All in favor? I I. All right. Public comment. I don't see anyone on line. Right. Okay. Um announcements. Okay. Um and then approval of the minutes. Consider approval of the December 17th, 2024 meeting minutes. I'll make a motion to approve. I didn't see anything that needed to be changed. I didn't see anything when I read it either. Okay, I'll second. All in favor? I I All right. Public hearing. Consider draft ordinance 321 amending title 11 chapter 5 H of city code concerning fences. Yes. Okay. Uh so this all started back in October at the parks commission meeting. Staff introduced a request to incorporate these enclosures pictured here um around all the portable toilets located in city parks. While determining possible locations for these new enclosures, staff did further research and these enclosures would be considered a fence under our city zoning ordinance. Although ex exempt from requiring a permit, it they still need to meet requirements listed in city code. Um such as it shall not exceed 8 ft in height. Um and fences for special purposes, which this would be considered, may be permitted in any district only by issuance of conditional use permit. So, if we wanted to do these, it would require conditional use permit each and every time we uh wanted to build one. The parks commission meeting, uh staff recommended that a zoning ordinance amendment would be a a better approach to deal with the issue as opposed to dealing conditional use permits. Uh, at the November planning commission meeting, it was introduced and the planning commission was also in favor of an ordinance amendment allowing an exception for these portable restroom enclosures to be built on city-owned property for the purposes of screening portable toilets or restrooms. The planning commission uh directed staff to go back and draft an ordinance amendment. So, that's what we're doing here tonight with a public hearing. Since it is a part of the zoning ordinance, it does require a public hearing um as part of the Minnesota state law. If the planning commission recommends adoption of the draft ordinance, staff will prepare the item for final consideration by the city council. Here's that draft ordinance amendment in its entirety. Basically just creating that exception listed under there uh for a All right. Thank you. Yep. I will open the public hearing at 7:06 p.m. Anyone have comments related to this? I don't think so. Do I have to ask three times? Okay. As no one is in attendance from the city, I will close the public hearing at 7:06 p.m. Right. our thoughts, questions. Are we okay with making this recommendation? I'm okay with making a recommendation to council. Me as well. All in favor? I I Thank you. All right. Miscellaneous. Um, a 2024 planning commission report and accomplishments. Sorry. Sorry. General business. There's one item. Sorry. General business. My bad. Uh general business, discuss and adopt planning commission goals and priorities for 2025 as well. Just the goals that you formally adopted in continued review of the comprehensive plan and the presented over chapters as allowed. Um just continue to resize it which was a high priority and did implement some changes for the new cannabis law. requirement already shipping containers and detached accessory structures tools that housing affordability do anything specific along that lines last year provide internal education. We have some of those prepared reviewing variances like that. have some of that prepared but haven't yet providing identifying community for 2025 we really should adapt some goals and present those to the city council I have a couple things here. Just continued review of comprehensive plan, continued review of zoning and subdivision ordinances. Again, adding that minimum lot, researching our minimum lot size requirements based on industry standards and council requirements. I strongly believe that our minimum lot size requirements are too large. um review of our tower and antenna ordinance. Um we have the city attorney currently looking at our ordinance to see if any changes need to be made. We're currently looking at our sexually oriented use ordinance. Want to make sure we're in compiance with state law as itends to sexually oriented uses. The last time we did review that was in 2019. Um and just as we continue to annex property into the city, we want to make sure that um continuing to meet state law and continue. And if you guys have anything regarding affordable housing or specifically things that you would like us to research, please bring them up and then just continue education research both internally and externally. One thing that I thought after this was released is um shortterm researching short-term rental ordinance for Airbnbs and a lot of communities have those in place and we haven't we don't have any lot of draw. Do you guys have anything else that you would like to add? Um, in regards to like the affordable housing and I don't know if this is actually a thing or not. Um, like can we look at like I know we want to talk about the lot sizes, but can we look at like the ratio of like the size of the house to the lot size? Yeah, a lot of communities have Well, a lot of communities have an impervious surface require maximum impervious surface requirement that we don't have currently. So, right now you can make your house as big as you can as long as it meets setbacks. So, are you saying you want it smaller or bigger? Well, I think of affordable housing. I don't think of like three or four story houses and if we're trying to focus on affordable housing, you know, and we're helping create developments and things like and the builder wants to build these large homes on these small lots, get it. But if we want to draw more people that can actually afford the homes, sure. How do how does that is that a thing? Is that a possibility? I don't know. I haven't seen that. I don't know if that is legal. have to review city attorney. I think you know maybe with the setbacks maybe that's all we can do. I definitely would have to review that. I'm just curious because I think you know I you know I people think of affording housing as like maybe I don't know apartments or town houses or things like that small. Yeah. And I'm that's what I'm kind of thinking but I don't I don't like a tiny house and we not like a tiny house but average like do we have anything in our ordinance now that allows by right like two or three units on a a lot or does it truly have to be a single family home then on one lot. So one unit per lot. Yes. In our single family residential zones we don't allow duplexes. Okay. Some communities do have seen and in the state legisle last year for that mandated, right? But do you think there's enough appetite um from constituents and from developers to maybe look at that or do you think maybe we should just let the state take the lead on something like that? I I don't know where staff's time would be best utilized in something like this, especially with the next few years looming in front of us. I don't know. Yeah. So many of the things that were starting getting introduced last year was just kind of throwing a lot of what we've done. Right. Right. because I don't want to waste staff's time. I mean right if that's something that you're interested you know one of the affordable housing things I've always had in the back of my mind on it is we require garage And even if they don't build they have to build the two car immediately they have to leave space on the lot for three car. So is that in our townhouse developments? We saw a concept plan for single stall garages. Our code doesn't allow that. The only way they can do that is so is that something I would be supportive of something like that. Yeah. So, don't we have affordable housing in Christmas? That was done through special. Yeah. I guess what's wrong with the house size of those? I already think they're pretty small. Pretty compact. kind of big. Actually, the lots are really tiny. They're 40t wide. That was really extreme. Um, as far as sizes, are they selling? There's like three permits last year. Are they full? I know they've had a hard time selling the model home. circumstances. Yeah, I don't know. I think it's a 40 foot lot, but they're building. Well, I'm just Yeah, they're not selling. I just We want to push the limits with our setbacks. I mean, Elco New Market is not a town for small homes. people come out here to get away from congested areas in the metro. I guess what I'm saying is like there's no space. That's up to the builders. I guess they're on top of one another. So to me that would be excuse me congested and not like I Yeah, I get what you're saying, but I think the biggest thing is that the builders are coming in and they want to get the most bang for their buck and the best way they're going to do that is build up. Well, I understand that. And that's why I'm asked if this is even a thing. Yeah. Trying to figure out like maybe what you're trying to do, right? Think of like my age, but like starter homes like smaller houses. Right. I was going to say because of the way things are. So, how do we get people how do we attract more people to come here to be able to afford those? I think we're going to see that happen is that the older I'm not going to call let's call them older, let's say anything built in the last 25 years, those are going to end up becoming the starter homes because people are going to start moving to the Boulder Heights, any of the other these new additions that want to stay in this town if they can afford it. Well, that's when they're selling their houses and they can afford it. Yeah. But what about those that are mortgage locked though, which is a real thing cuz, you know, as we are looking to our next stage of life, right? We've been in our home now for a little over 20 years, you know, and our oldest set of children have moved out and so we have the one at home. It is it's getting harder to justify staying here with the one child, but we're literally stuck in our mortgage. There's no way we could afford what I want in this phase of life, you know. Um, and I guess that's where I'm coming from. I'm mortgage as well. Um, and so I I see there's a there's a concern. It's not just me. It's not just you other people as well. So, how do So, I haven't been in my house for years. And I can't afford one of those houses. I don't know how people do it. You know, I look at our income and I'm like, how the heck are people doing this? This is not even feasible. So, that's where my brain like how do we is there a way possibility to do that. Not that I want to live or present who can move in, right? And not just Yeah. any perceived entry level housing we have and when we have a few small homes in the old market they rarely turn over and then your entry level housing is a townhouse in our in our town and those aren't there's cheap either no so how do we get builders to build homes like our old Elco new market It's not going to happen. Never will happen. I mean, you you what you could do is you could have a development that, you know, people like you guys could buy your lot and contract or build your own house. That's going to, you know, that's probably the best way you're going to do it. But if you're going to have LAR come here, good luck trying them to have them build you a three-bedroom house. Well, I think the market We only have so much control here. I think the market will dictate we were at a conference last weekend. So there are ways we can be creative, but as someone in the market at my age looking for like an affordable home or a starter home, like not to speak for my whole generation, but kind of just overall. So like maybe I'm just being a little bit pessimistic about it, but I don't know if it's so easy as how do we get those homes to be built again because I don't know that it's going to be more expensive. I guess that's what I'm thinking. You're never going to get affordable new construction. So you gota incentivize people like us to move out move out because that will be the new start right at least for me it is what it is we're not going to get the rates you guys are so you'll get them you'll get the rates just let it will come down you'll get the rates price real estate Sometimes you just got to gamble. Go with the flow with the market. I do I do agree with you or um question for you too. when you went to that. Um, so Brennan and Jake and Tom went to a workshop on housing and did you remember the number of units that were short in the Twin Cities um, housing units? It didn't change much from last year, but it got worse. It got a little worse. Do you remember was it like 100,000 or I I can't say without I think it was more than that. It was for sure. Yeah. If I had to guess, I'd say 12,000, but that's just a total guess. I don't know if that's right or not. I feel like it's Yeah, I think I for some reason think it was over 100,000. Yeah. very short very short. We would love to have um we would love Elco to be really creative with this and our zoning and stuff and we want to support our city staff in doing this and we don't want people to come here and angry mobs either. You know, I would be 106,000 in 2024. So I'm guessing ants 112,000 now probably. Okay. And that's just in the Twin Cities. That's not even Twin Cities, right? And we're in that weird rural space too, which we can't ignore either. So I think that weird rural space makes us more attractive to some people and less attractive to others. more expensive. It does. Yeah. Right. Right. Okay. So, I love the discussion and, you know, talking about housing and um and then we'll add um short-term rentals to the list. I think that's a great idea. So, the short-term rentals would be like the Airbnbs. Yeah. Yeah. Do we have like we don't we are not allowing any Airbnb. We don't regulate them. So, somebody could move in next door to you and put the house on your Airbnb. Oh, or you could put your house at that point. Well, another reason to do that too would be also to get the um taxes generated from that as well because we'd also have to create an ordinance and then instead of that tax revenue going to the state, we would get it that is part of our chamber stuff, right? That was one of the biggest pushes down in Northfield for doing it was that rather than having that taxes go to the state then we would capture that too. And I would use that as an argument for Elco because we are so spa you know um our city attorney's office I'm sure has dealt with implementing these ordinances all over and um you know they're Lakeville's attorney I'm sure they have ordinance in place they represent many cities in the metro. So, okay. Anything else on that? If anybody want to make a motion to adopt the goals and priorities for 2025. I'll second. I I Okay. All right. Um, on to miscellaneous, a 2024 planning commission report and accomplishments. just included a memo in your packet that um outlined all of the ordinance amendments that you considered in 2024 um and land use applications. So, good work, a lot of work. Just for clarification, what are the hours of operation for construction? It was related to um well contractors are only allowed to work during certain hours. What are those hours? I don't remember. It's 7 to 7. Monday through Friday and then weekends it's 9 to 7 and holidays. That's what I had to find. I'm going to speak for somebody that I know. Yeah. They're very annoyed that they're starting at like 650 backing up vehicles with beepers and loud construction at like you know 6:45 on the weekends and during the day but the actual vehicle may be exempted like it's the power equipment I think that kind of drills on but if they are definely If it was on a weekend. Yeah, for sure. Probably working late hours, too. Yes, they are. Yeah. It's the only way to do it. So, people call us on Monday morning and say, "Oh, somebody was working over." And you have to call the It's the only way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you just call and say, you know, this is a non-emergency. I need they will they have a priority. They'll go to the other one first, obviously. But, um, yeah, if you want us to email you those hours of operation, um, we can certainly do that. Sure. will forward them on to the other person. [Laughter] Okay. Um they were restricted during this year and it was really initiated by construction at the Niagara site. The uh what that is something there was some it was and it was also contained in two separate sections of the code and there was a little bit of a conflict. So we simp simplified it in one section. Um, okay. And then there was just kind of a building permit review. There's been a standard template for several years. And I just kind of plugged the new numbers in. Overall, our num our permit numbers um from 2024 were very similar to 2023. We're up a bit on single family detached units. Last year we had 23 and this year we had in 20 we had 39 in 2024. um permits overall. You can see this building permits total. Um this 2019 we had a big hail storm go through so most of those were re- roof and resides. So that's why there's a spike there. Um 2021 was just kind of one of our bigger years in recent history. We had more um detached single family in that year as well, but last two years pretty similar. our single family homes. Um again, you can see that spike in 2021. And then by development, um we just mapped them by development. Most of them were down in Boulder Heights, um Pet Hill, and Ridge View. I guess we've issued a fair number in Ridge View now. Seven. Uh these are the different builders that were in town um last year. Lar who started uh pulling permits I think in late September uh has pulled 18 housing units. So they just build overall housing starts and then we do this exercise where we call around to all the area cities and see how many housing units that they pulled. So the these are just single family attached and detached does not include any apartment units but it's kind of starting at Lakeville and uh Lakeville was number one I think shock be number two I think Farmington was number three yeah they just are kind of built out Yeah. Yeah. That's what we got from the cities. So, of increase in activity in single family home permits, uh with the city seeing effects of national home builder entering the community, um we had 18 housing units within a three-month period of time. City expects an increase in permanent activity for 2025 given the level of interest from multiple national builders. Um, permit was issued for Niagara. Construction value is 40 million on that building. And that's all I have on that. If you have any questions. No, thank you. All right. Miscellaneous B 2024 building permit summary. Yeah, that was the summary. Okay. And then we skip the inventory. Then the community development updates. Jake has a included a little memo about the 2040 comprehensive plan. Yep. So we're going to be starting the process of updating our 2040 comp plan, turning it into our 2050 comp plan. Um, we're waiting for final guidance from the Met Council before we really start that process, but just wanted to give you guys a heads up that it's going to be a long uh process over the course of years and it's going to pretty much occupy most of our department's time. There's going to be some smaller projects and other stuff that we we're going to just have to put on the back burner while we work through this. Yeah. So, the Metropolitan Council the council will be scheduled to adopt their policy plan statements or their policy plans in the areas of parks, transportation, land use, sewer, and water. And they are scheduled to adopt those policies, I think, in February or March. And then their staff kind of drills it down and creates guidance documents for cities on what our plans need to contain at a minimum to comply with the Met Council policies. and they are hoping to release those to cities by October 2025. So, we'll be able to start working for that. We were thinking I mean, usually one of the first things you do is, you know, public engagement and surveys of the community and stuff like that. So, I think we had some good survey questions last time in our our comp plan. We might consider reusing those. um hoping to do a little more public engagement and just getting out to public events in the community. We didn't do a lot of that last time. Um city didn't have a staff planner for the majority of it. Um and then we're also hoping maybe to spread some of the financial impact because we'll have to hire consultants to help or Bolton and Mink in particular to help us through some parts of the process. If we can spread the costs over some multiple years that might as well. Yeah. I don't know if you any of you found uh or saw the city newsletter, but we I just pulled out these pages from the city newsletter that highlighted just overall growth in the city again in 2020 five developments that residential developments that had been approved um or even reviewed by the city. Highlands at Eagle View, Parkway Meadows, True North Development, that's Dakota Acres, Alliant Ventures, that was down on the southwest part of the city that kind of went away. Oldtown Apartments, the preserve. So anyway, when you look at it um in the list or on the map, see a lot going on. So we don't need to talk about every one of those. I'm sure you saw them in the city newsletter as well, but just a good over And then the Scott County CDA provided a year in review. And these are kind of wins for all of the cities in Scott County. Um, and I just in included that for your review. Um, again, I'm not going to go through them, but all the how many cities, eight cities, 10 townships are included there. All right. Thank you. And then planning commission questions and comments. I don't have anything additional. Okay. Sure. Niagara is probably close to starting up. They are. We were with them most of the afternoon today meeting. Um they will be starting to they've been given temporary certificate back on the entire building. Um they had a job fair over the last several days. I think they 17 positions which is all that they were trying to fill at this time. Um comments we received from um the leadership was that it was uh not as well as attended as some of their other job fairs but the quality of the people u were better than at other job fairs. So they were really happy with the results. They felt it was successful. Um they'll be starting to do testing and like back flushing of their lines and their filters and stuff in mid October, March. So they their goal is to have what they call the first shippable palette, which would be product ready to ship by March 28th. Not that they will necessarily be shipping them by that time, but they will be ready to ship by that time. What's that? their other testing um midFebruary. Um outside of Niagara, we have um this preliminary plat that you worked on north of City Hall at the east end of James Parkway. Um we expect to see a final plat application for that the first week in February. That doesn't come back to you. It just goes straight to city council. uh hoping they're hoping to have that uh to the city council in March sometime for so we might see that built out this summer. Um we expect that Highlands at Eagle View that you reviewed out by the elementary school expect that to be coming back with formal applications sometime maybe April Mayish. Okay. And then we are kicking off a little transportation study on the south of Boulder Heights. Um the developers of Boulder Heights have a contract to put the on the next 30 acres to the south that goes all the way up to the county line our counter counter 86 and we're have some larger just transportation issues about Beard Avenue and how the area in general should connect to Con. Okay. Pretty good movement up there right now, don't they? What's that? That's some pretty good movement up in that area right now. They got a lot of construction vehicles on that that 30 acres. Yeah. Okay. Well, it's not in the city limits yet. So, we'd have to go through an annexation process. Okay. And usually at that time during that annexation if u for instance if we want to have beard avenue paved by the developer through uh negotiations with the township we try to negotiate those big things before the annexation. Okay through street. Yeah. So I expressed we had a kickoff meeting today with and we invited partners from Rice County, Scott County, New Market Township, Webster Township, just get everybody in the same room and agree on our transportation plans like aligning and being on the same page. And I think I express have no uh support for that development without another connection into Boulder Heights. It's just Do you guys have anything to update on cannabis at all? required an issue where we have to respond to police still check. All right. Anyone want to make a motion to adjurnn? Moved. All right. We want a second. I'll second it. All right. All in favor? I. All right. Meeting turns 7:42 p.m.