Part of that parks master plan, one of the first items on the agenda there was to um seek and add a parks director position to uh staffing. That was part of the 2025 work plan which was also um reviewed with parks commission as well as city council in January 2025.

We simply can't do u a good portion of them. And this has been told to us by city staff with the current structure we have. So we are as our chair said um kind of stuck in going forward in any meaningful way.

I support a position that is leaning towards that. Maybe it grows into a parks director and I'm just thinking operationally how we are with our public works department and how we have with our communications. Maybe it's nobody don't shoot the messenger here, but maybe it's like parks coordinator or something like that to start off with and then you when you grow the program and you get something and the city grows and you have more resources to put towards that then it maybe becomes a director position and you you know you're doing more with that.

The two big factors is Uh, one, the financial side of it, right? I mean, if we're replacing playgrounds every 20 25 years with with 14 playgrounds soon to be 15, I mean, we're looking at every year and a half replacing a playground at that rate, right? And that's 200 to $300,000 every year and a half to two years where um, if that's the need, then you know, great. Like that that it's a it's a good investment. But the second piece of it is is is it the best use of of all the parks that we have, right?

Part of the hard part with this was the council has had a yearslong discussion and and you you're well aware about do we start to shift towards larger more centralized less number of playgrounds. Then in the long term you get more bang for the buck. You have one or two really large ones and less of your$15000 to $200,000 ones. or do we continue to do your your 130 your 150 200 everywhere and it just happened that this was the time when Lions is up.

What we really are looking at are starting the community engagement planning um financial analysis for the implementation and long-term maintenance. That's one of the things that we think is crucial is understanding what this is going to cost the city and then understanding what options you have that may bring in more revenue, some options that could lower expenses and then what does this look like long term um to the city.

What do people want in this park? What are they willing to pay for? And we come up then, okay, here's the cost of them and then a Morris Leman survey that says, you know, the cost is $20 million. Would you support a referendum for $20 million to include all these items? If some says no, would you support a referendum for 15 million that would exclude these items? Go by order of preference.

You know, early on in this discussion, um, we're looking at the land that we had. We discussed how this is an investment for the a long-term future. 50 years from now, people look back at this park and say that was really a smart decision. We have this beautiful park you in the middle of our community that we can use.

Looking at Lake Elmo, you've got a number of different types of residential lots around the city. Uh you have a neighborhood like Union Park, you know, with higher density uh smaller lots. Uh the old village with um relatively small lots. And then you've got Tory Pines, for instance, um larger lots with larger homes... I guess what I want to hear from council is your thoughts on equitability. Um, do we look into expanding the category the categories associated with calculating storm water utility fees in particular for residential lots?

I think that as I look at our system, I think it's not particularly fair and equitable by a long stretch of the imagination. I'll go back to what you taught, mayor, you have development where they have storm water ponds and infiltration. And so they basically pay the cost of treating the storm water within their development and they pay the cost of storm water throughout the entire city. That's not in any stretch of measure fair and equitable.

back when this was developed, there wasn't a lot of storm water infrastructure anywhere in the city. Even other even in your downtown, there wasn't much. Um, if you look at traditionally what this fee has been used for, it's being you there should be a base fee on all properties regardless of whether they have their systems because we haven't been using the fees for storm water infrastructure. We've been using it for studies. We've been using it for your surface water management plans that are required.

So we are just trying to narrow down and finalize the number that we need for um our preliminary levy at next week's meeting. Um and also just taking any additional input on the budget um from from here on out.

So we decreased the general fund levy by $400,000. Um, and this does assume uh using fund balance of around $270,000 at this time.