a march 29th to order we're gonna have quite a few presentations tonight um so the first one's gonna be the allen s king plan advisory plan panel and the next steps um from the study that you're working on who's gonna go first john okay mayor council members thank you for the opportunity to present to you tonight i thought we might start by just having the members of the advisory panel raise their hands you can see who are here to volunteer their time for that process and i want to thank all of you i'm sure we all do want to thank all of you for putting that time in it it's very very helpful so what what i'd like to do is just give you a quick overview of the information we're going to be presenting tonight i'm going to start by giving you an introduction of where this idea came from and some of the basic ideas that shaped it one of the first programs we had was a presentation from nick martin from excel who talked to us about the integrated resource plan and explained how the closure of this plant and other coal plants fits into the broader integrated regional resource plan and so as you may know colette juric who was a part of this process retired during the course of this process and so trisha duncan will be providing an update about that information uh brian bem will then uh give us an overview of the property one of the the next things we did was just get a a deep dive on the property itself how big is the site how much shoreline what's the topography what are all the issues ryan's not going to go into that level of detail but he'll kind of give you a sense of of that and also talk a little bit about what the decommissioning process uh will entail uh john regal will then give a summary of the economic impact and i would note that later on in your workshop today you'll have a deeper dive from a couple of my other colleagues who will talk about the tool that's been created as from the grand proceeds that the city got on fiscal and economic impact lisa yeager is here and she will talk about the environmental issues from a variety of different perspectives my colleague lauren wahlberg will then kind of share what happened when we shifted from purely educational workshops to actually asking opinions and getting some viewpoints in a strengths weaknesses and opportunities threats exercise tim freeman and john rigo uh tim as one of the co-chairs uh we'll kind of share the a summary of the the comments that came from the members when we looked at a couple of different big picture development scenarios and i'll wrap it up by talking about a couple of basic concepts and talk about what the next steps are so believe it or not it was july or august of 2020 when we were in the conference room over here and had this first conversation and my suggestion to the council was you know rather than reacting to what happens in this process it might be a good idea for the city to be proactive as the land use authority for this land and convene a group of people that would be a cross-section of boards and commissions in the community as well as citizens at large invite neighboring communities some of the major regulators some of the other stakeholders the business community and so forth to be part of a process that was focused originally on education so that you would have a core group of people in your community that would have a common understanding of the complexity of these issues and also the opportunity to kind of build some resources with in relationships with some of the other stakeholders so this is a the timeline that we worked through and you can see that orange line in the middle was when uh covet 19 shut us down for eight months with the first meetings that we had were virtual and we were trying to come back and very interested in meeting in person especially when we were going to do the interactive workshop pieces so we originally thought we could restart the process in june ended up being august so when we had our first conversation about this uh the idea of the advisory panel is again just a group uh to appointed by the city to advise you as you contemplate the decisions you need to make down the road about this important topic we had a discussion about some strategic discussion about who the representatives on that panel should be again some of that was kind of easy kind of all the boards and commissions in your community but also and what are some of the key environmental interests what are some of the key business interests and so forth um and so i would just compliment you on the group that you put together i i've been doing this for a long long time and it was a very civil mutually respectful group and really thankful for them for hanging in there the the emphasis on the beginning was educational this is a complicated issue anybody who says why don't you just do blank hasn't thought about uh enough of the issues because there's nothing simple about it and so we we really emphasized to the group when they got together that the city what the city council was not delegating the responsibility for making this decision to them or basically recording their opinions and their ideas and their responses to the information that they hear through the process all of that information has been documented and all of it will be presented to you so that you have it when this process is done so i want to turn it over to trisha to talk a little bit about the integrated resource plan thank you john members of the council uh mayor um i would be remiss if i didn't introduce mike wilhelmy he has replaced uh colette eric who raid retired so i think some of you may know him as well so he will be work with you going forward so just a very brief overview of the integrated resource plan and as john mentioned nick martin who is a manager seems like i'm cutting in and out but nick martin is a manager of energy environmental policy did come to the did come to the group and did an overview on our integrated resource plan since that time the puc has made a verbal decision on the plan which occurred in june of 2021 so we are still awaiting a final written decision on that but we did get a verbal decision on a few things okay i'll just keep talking and give me a signal if i cut out too much um so a few things i just wanted to highlight that did impact that does impact the king plant here in oak park heights as many of you all know the retirement of the king plant will occur in 2028. we will reutilize the interconnection rights at the king plant and place nearby renewable energy generation nearby this will save our customers hundreds of millions of dollars by utilizing the interconnection rights and then we will be doing stakeholder work around the king plant site so there will be a lot of that work that will occur between now and that time i'm still on the other side john then we'll be decommissioning the plan the decommissioning plan will occur for the king plant as well as a plan for transitioning the workers uh the workforce from the plant so all of that will be done through the public utility commission and filings next slide please so just an overview this is kind of an overview of our integrated resource plan otherwise known as the irp closing coal plants so we will be closing retiring the last of our coal plants in the upper midwest so this does include the king plant in 28 and our circo 3 unit in 2030. we'll be adding renewable energy resources which consists of 2500 megawatts of solar and solar energy in 2100 roughly 2100 megawatts of wind and energy by 2032. we'll continue our carbon-free nuclear our monticello nuclear plant license was extended we'll continue the process to gain approval to run that monticello plant through 2040. we'll address our prairie island nuke plant in our next resource plan that will be filed in february of 24 and then we'll enable a carbon-free future continuing to use the natural gas facilities to ensure that the electric system while exploring new uh not yet available technologies in renewable energy and will build for carbon-free future so with that that's all i have is an overview of the integrated resource plan i'm going to turn it over to brian bem here who is our plant director out at the the king plant right hello council members and mayor i'm brian damon the plant director of the king plant and i'm going to go over a plant overview just kind of in general what the property look like what it consists of we went over a pretty in-depth uh presentation on the characteristics of the facility as as it is right now largely the properties you can see sits along the saint croix river consists of approximately 150 acres of property um with the majority of that being largely in a flood plain so there is some considerations to take into account for redevelopment as well as for remediation as we move forward john can you move to the next one okay so here's more of a detailed look at the plant from looking basically from the new bridge from the north to the south you can see we have a coal yard where we can hold up to close to 1 million tons of coal we have the coal conveying system immediately to the east or to the left of the coal yard then the beautiful saint croix river and then further to the south is the main powerhouse and air quality control systems i'll answer the question that everybody asked the stack is 785 feet tall and we will be taking it down when we go into demolition and we're not going to implode it we're going to take it down piece by piece so that that's what we're looking at from there where are the falcons going uh we'll really relocate them like we did at our hybrid at our high bridge riverside and uh black dog power plants so some area that's tall maybe maybe the new saint croix river bridge or saint croix river bridge potentially that's to be decided but we will relocate that box and then here's a video that we utilize some of our xl drones to get an understanding of the property so just kind of more or less get an idea of the scale of the property so for redevelopment the property is attractive to a number of industries primarily because where we're coming into right now we utilize the river for cooling through that cooling tower that's non-contact water it doesn't touch any chemicals or anything like that it's a once once through system uh where we're flying over right now is the discharge so in the winter you'll see that that's open and a lot of fishermen use that area because of the heat from the plant opens that area there's the cooling tower and then right where we're coming over right now is the inlet from the river that we use for cooling and we're proceeding along to the left you'll see a tall coal conveying belt that we utilize to bring coal in we have approximately one mile of coal conveying belt in our cold system a lot of it's buried underground so you can't see it in tunnels thank you for stopping that john uh so the first building right in front of you that's that's what we call our crusher building we use that to crush the coal and then the larger building with uh all the garage doors that's our coal yard shop where we maintain and store our coal yard equipment the big yellow equipment and then also you can see there's some storm water runoff ponds in that area that's uh what i have for the highlights on that as far as the property itself decommissioning process that's a multi multi-approach the process so we've done this a number of times with xl in the minnesota in our minnesota footprint starting with our highbridge plant then moving on to riverside then blackduck so we do have experience at this so the first step is the retirement of the plant that's in 2028 and then you start remediation but even prior to retirement we will start doing the characteristics understand the characteristics of the property as far as any managed wastes or materials that we need to look at uh start doing an assessment of any uh chemicals or asbestos on the property so we'll start to lay that out on the timeline as far as what we need to do to remediate the facility and then we'll understand demolition so that'll take a couple of years to do demolition so we'll probably start with the coal yard areas fortunately we do not store ash on the property at king plant that is shipped out on a daily basis so there should be minimal impact and minimal remediation or decommissioning of ash ponds or any of those facilities so that that's very helpful and then once we'll move into um doing the demo of the main power block and what's the next one yeah then restoration so restoration will largely be dependent on what what level of um uh repowering or reuse redevelopment of the property that that'll help drive how much we're going to clean up the property so if we if it's determined it'll be industrial used for industrial we'll clean it to us that standard if it's going to be a park we'll clean it to a different standard that's the approach that we've taken on all our other facilities and currently we don't have any plans right now to reuse the facility we will be reusing the substation area that's we're for sure we'll stay we need to have that it'll be very cost prohibitive to relocate those main transmission lines and the substation facilities brian who makes the final determination of what the reuse of the property is going to be can you clarify that yeah i think that that's largely going to be a collaborative effort between you know the company the puc will definitely be involved because there will be a lot of costs involved in that um so it's going to be a collaborative effort between the community the commission and xl i know that question when i testify at the house and senate that question comes up often yep john unless anybody else has any other questions on the property itself thank you nothing eric okay john turn it over to you how long is it going to take to take down the stack just just there's a lot of variables in that and i understand the question but it largely is dependent on largely dependent on the level of remediation or decommissioning that we have to do and then it's just typically it's taken anywhere between three and five years to to do a decommissioning of a plant so it's not an overnight process it's i just i remember watching it go up yeah but for me yeah i understand yeah when you say 2028 i mean is it the beginning of the year middle of the year end of the year i mean when does that that kind of that's a very good question i'd like to have answered myself yeah you know largely you know a lot of our employees want to understand yeah okay is am i going to be dispositioned or relocated to another facility at the beginning here at the end of the year and also for budgets planning our budgets and then other additional power resources that we may have to bring online to replace the king plant capacity so that has not been determined at this time but it will happen in 2028 if i had to say you know it would probably be closer to the beginning of 2028 but that is to be determined another question other people have is what are we going to do with the employees we will uh we've done this a number of times before we've never had to lay off any employees and that will be the plan for king as well uh within 50 mile radius of king plant in 2028 we'll have over 650 opportunities within excel for our employees and we have roughly 80 employees at the proper on the facility right now so there shouldn't be any issue we'll retrain them and transition them into a new opportunity with excel these are great questions but if we could share movement sure mayor city council members and staff my name is john riegel i'm a relatively new resident of oak park heights kidnapped for love nine years ago i've been a long time st paul guy and i have to share this story with you i love i'm sold on this community what you're what you've done in fact i love when in saint paul after four to eight hours after a measurable snowfall i'll call friends and co-workers and say you haven't no one's declared a snow emergency but my street was plowed 44 hours ago what's the matter in your city so it gets under their skin every time and you have to use this as a as a marking or a calling card for going forward so thank you john mentioned on august 18th we convened and we had a great meeting that night it was i'm a past public finance nerd and we had a guy come in by the name of bob streeter and give a fantastic presentation on the economic impact we talked about what would happen to the city tax base property taxes and the local economy and it was really good when we started talking about fiscal disparities and tax increment financing and local government aid and all the tools that you're going to have and what happens and in a nutshell and you're going to talk about this later but i just want to give you the summary the economic impact the taxable value is going to go down about the property about 2.1 million dollars to 9 million the fiscal disparities levy is going to go up about 122 000 local government age shouldn't change the property tax um impact on a single family home with a market value of 271 thousand dollars would go up about 351 dollars or almost 27 percent you know this already oak park heights is the fifth highest taxed uh town in in washington county with after the decommissioning it would become the second highest and that starts with property taxes beginning paying in 2030. and and this was great with uh members b the diversity of the advisory panel was great and and some people feel very strongly about this some people feel strongly about some other things but this was very well presented by mr street art we also talked about some tools that could be used that you're going to get into more detail about about stabilizing the impact to that that the stantec folks will share with you later and maybe some further use of homestead credit refund program or things like that and finally bob talked about the impact with losing potentially up to 70 jobs at the plant that the direct indirect and induced basis impact to the economy which was very interesting and i encourage you to take a look at those stats and then we had excel and dan come in and speak and he too was fantastic talking about the program that excel has with their economic development programs that help repurpose properties and get them marketed either in certified site ready site or ready building opportunities we spoke in depth about a good conversation about the example of the ewmore park in in rosemont and that was a great example of how excel is working with the landowner and getting that ready for on public use again there we go thank you good evening everyone thank you so much for your time and attention my name is lisa yeager i work for the national park service with the saint croix national scenic river way tonight i'm here to provide just a brief overview of the topics we covered on september 15th which was the environmental context section section of the advisory panel this night brought presentations by the minnesota department of natural resources by the national park service by excel and washington county on all the different environmental contexts and regulations that would be at play for potential redevelopment of the site and we've heard a few things tonight already about the location immediately adjacent to the saint croix river as well as sorry if you can't hear me um as well as the fact that the location is within the flood plain as well we discussed the wild and scenic river which i'll touch on a little bit tonight if you go back one slide thank you we discussed the wild and scenic rivers act as well as other environmental factors such as location in the floodplain and other factors that should be considered within site development next slide please thank you the saint croix river in its entire length from gordon wisconsin all the way down to the confluence is preserved and protected by the wild and scenic rivers act of 1968. this is a federal legislation that has a goal of preserving and protecting rivers throughout the united states and including our very own saint croix river the act created the wild and scenic river system and also the some language from the act is on the screen which is very difficult to read so excuse me certain selected rivers of the nation which in their immediate environments possess outstandingly remarkable scenic recreational geologic fish and wildlife historic cultural or other similar values shall be preserved in free-flowing condition and they in their immediate environment shall be protected for the benefit and enjoyment of present and future generations as i mentioned this act also created the wild and scenic river system which is the tool or the method that the national park service and other agencies use to preserve and protect these rivers so that they remain as they are for enjoyment next slide please as we are all very well aware the king plant site is within and adjacent to the saint croix river this section of the river way is within what we call as state administered zone of the lower saint croix national scenic river way which is really just a way to say that day-to-day management of the river is managed by the states and not the national park service or not the federal government however the national park service does retain some regulatory authority within the section of the river all this really means is that for federally assisted water resources projects for example a boat dock bank stabilization or other similar features would require permitting from the national park service to make sure that those outstandingly remarkable values of the river are preserved and protected into the future now there's much more to say on this than two slides and of course the national park service would be happy to answer questions and to be a partner along the way to make sure that the river is protected and whatever the future of the site becomes next slide please this september 15 meeting also had presentations from others including the minnesota dnr you can see a slide that a dnr representative provided i'm talking about the dnr's involvement with the location and some specific things to keep in mind moving forward perhaps one of the most notable takeaways is that the dnr nor the national park service are not the only individuals involved in permitting whether that be regulations or zoning there are many factors involved whether it be local government county governments federal governments um we're all well aware that many of these decisions moving into the future will have many layers of zoning and permitting the take-home message from the evening was that early coordination is key and that at the end of the day we all want the same thing for preservation and protection of the river and of the site as well good evening mayor and members of the council i'm lauren wahlberg um and along with john helped to coordinate the advisory panel process with stantec as john mentioned in his introduction we went through a series of um educational sessions uh to you know kind of start out this advisory panel process um our october 20th meeting then was a shift to more discussion-based um conversational sessions where we got together with the advisory panel and you know ask them what they their opinions of the site um given the information that they had taken in over the first six sessions the exercise that we did on october 20th was a strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats analysis where we asked the members of the panel to respond to a series of questions um and did an exercise with them to kind of let them see where um where they fell on each of those the strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats um of the site um so as you can see we put together a word cloud and so the big words obviously are the ones that came up several times during the discussion we've also got on the left hand side um our exercise that we actually did with the advisory panel on the october 20th session so they were able to you know kind of write down their thoughts on sticky notes and put them up on the board and then um take a look at them and see you know kind of the differences in opinions um the big themes that came out of the strengths were of course the location on the wild and scenic saint croix river access to the river transportation network utility infrastructure trails surrounding communities and the twin cities metropolitan area the size and the and the usable area of the property and the scale of possible development for taxplace base replacement the weaknesses and challenges you can see the big words on there um the major takeaways from this uh question were that you know significant weakness or liabilities could be the cleanup of the site and contamination and the challenges that could pose for future development the infrastructure that will remain on site federal state and local restrictions for development on the sites the location in the flood plain and the divergent land uses surrounding the site opportunities the panel felt that some of the opportunities included public park land or open space development as well as shoreline restoration the opportunity to recapture lost tax revenue to create a destination within oak park heights such as a hotel marina recreational development etc and also the potential for housing commercial or industrial development um the threats that the panel um mentioned included tax increases and the loss of jobs conflicting goals and lack of reuse planned consensus the nature and amount of land that excel will retain post-closure and the cost of remediation of the land um in our next session the november 17th session we focused on the vision for the future of the king plant site and we asked the panel members to respond to their ideas for the vision of the future of this site should you know the site be reclaimed should everything go according to plan what they would like to see for this site um you can see on the slide obviously you know there are some main takeaways um on the right hand side um there was a several different opinions about you know the vision for the future of this site as to be expected um some of the responses included mixed use including commercial light industrial residential office hospitality park recreation shoreline restoration marina green energy trails so just a whole host of different different opinions as to what the future of the site could be it was important to the advisory panel members that the site is adequately reclaimed which restored shoreline and elements that highlight the wild and scenic river and a mix of public use public access green spaces and more active uses um must replace some and also replacement of some of the lost tax base and i will hand it over to john and tim to go over our next session okay so the next session we had was talking about some of the takeaways that we had we convened into small groups again and the thing that i hold out of this is that really none of these are mutually exclusive you can do some of these things together and they peacefully co-exist so when we throw these concepts at you it's not either or it can be can be others the first one is really it's a big emphasis on on light industrial and again not your grandpa's industrial like we've been like this building is or structures down there i've had some work with st paul port authority and excel's previous decommissioning of the hybridge plant in st paul and they shrunk their footprint and and put in some really impressive tenants their light industrial high-tech companies that pay their employees very well matsura comes to mind on that but the conversations that that came out of that when we were talking about this there's still some space you'll see where there's a there's a public access there in the green to the parking for uh for boating but then heavy um light industrial work there was some possible multi-family activities um there's a recognition that the site's probably not appealing for residential there's some land usage rules with dnr and regulatory aspects could take a portion of this and dedicate it to green green space and walking trails there's an influence of neighboring properties and other noise levels that could impact this maybe possible boat manufacturing or something going online of a cruise line port dry stacks and then this site possibly being eligible for tiff and other abatement funds from the feds of the state and maybe possible use for anderson expansion if they had ideas going north and something that would fit in possibly with the trail system so that was that was one of the options that came in with option one i'll let tim explain option two thank you excuse me so the second option and these were kind of plans that stantec put together both of these and and then let let us you know kind of bounce some ideas off so it wasn't um this wasn't a result of what so much happened the evening that we did this but more the comments and and the types of uses and how they might fit and how they might not fit um so this this particular option too was um more of a higher development as far as the things we normally think about commercial residential those sorts of things whereas the last one with the industrial i think that the idea with that is to try and capture more tax base because they're you used more intensively but anyways um i'm just gonna go through a few of the items trail connections um commercial restaurants um not in the floodplains but adjacent to it trying to capture some of the the beauty of the site or the beauty of the river um possible parks or museums uh hotels with restaurant on the first floor and and uh you know trying to maximize the the river you know the view of the river um some of the mixed use places could have uh retail on the on the bottom floor and maybe some upper levels of uh residential there was another thought hotels perhaps um and then the center kind of driveway area that goes through the site is would be you know could be something where they could do a little main street kind of a thing with little littler shops or something like that um but i want to talk about some of the comments that all the comments are listed on the side kind of the bottom half of it and push as much development out of the floodplain which which makes sense i mean there's there's a pretty big issue there and i think there's a there's a whole bunch of talking that can be done about the regulatory process and how cumbersome that's going to be but um trying to push the development away from that so that but but a good portion of that property is in the plain i mean even where the plant and whatnot are so um then we had a comment someone wanted to save the stack and o'brien said the stack's going down but they had ideas about a climbing feature and maybe a restaurant rotating restaurant at the top and a carnival ride and you know amusement attractions so um there was some it was pretty creative talk about things comments um but anyways i you know i think that uh you know trying to utilize some of the floodplain areas for like a marina as he also talked about but then shoreline restoration is another big issue and that i think that's going to have to happen no matter what you know that that shoreline is not really it's not a defined shoreline as easily so restoring that shoreline is probably something that needs to be looked at and then one of the other comments was this is probably not a very good place to have single family homes and you know that's that's obvious just because um it's not a very intensive use and if you're trying to maximize the amount of tax base you get back then you need to try and use it as intently as you can intensively as you can so that you can leave more of it open if that's if that's what you're choosing to do so that's what i had on that um just as we're segueing here what the guys just talked about was the reaction of the panel to those graphic images of two scenarios we also gave them verbal written descriptions of scenarios and then asked them to respond to that so the first one is the maximum industrial scenario this is where we're trying to recapture as much of the lost tax base as possible and replace jobs some of the comments were just it's a great from the perspective of lost tax base but might not be best for the community goals including harnessing the beauty and recreational opportunity in scenic riverway um it's it's it's certainly industrial but maybe not a move forward with riverway values it's the most realistic and desirable scenario however parking and green space uses are inevitable and should be included in realistic uh some person said one person said that this believes that this is the most important scenario the loss of tax base is huge and then someone on the other side said no way not on the first national scenic river way ever designated we had really good perspectives on that the next one is is really about natural resource restoration in a riverfront park scenario um and and it adds to the great trail system that we already have established in this community uh and and continuing that and someone has said you know recreation should be a component but given the relative relatively scarce available land available elsewhere in the city for development tax base does need to be considered here seems like this would be most likely from a regulatory standpoint given what will probably be really difficult constructing or doing anything there but some tag space offset is needed and that marina concept came up here someone thinks that the portions of the scenario could and should be included in any redevelopment however if it is the only focus it will cost citizens here without generating any tax revenue in return and someone just recognizes also that it should be part of this but not the most important so again a very diverse response the next slide the residential mixed use development neighborhood commercial kind of thing you know there the comments i don't think the site's good for houses and commercial floodplains not a good attribute for new housing well and that's true but i mean um we have a site that we have i mean you can't pick something different besides what it is um so another comment was looking to neighboring properties for potential housing instead of looking at this property which again is i mean that that works good but um this is the property that we have to work with so um uh it says there is enough land for a multitude of mixed use opportunities including high-end residential condos it's still i think i think it's still difficult to try and recapture the tax base with residential and that's why the industrial thing was on the table as well you know that that type of thing but um you know i don't know that uh anybody was in favor of all residential because it it it would utilize the whole site but it also doesn't fix either of the two issues you know so um some people thought this was the best of all worlds but um might also be able to include some sort of light industrial and business uses professional office space so um yeah i mean i i don't have a comment about that the next the next slide is was about destination hospitality mixed use uh with residential and park and trail features which is kind of a little bit of all of that some some housing and whatnot and then parked which seems to make a little more sense um the marina excursion boats uh private slips those kinds of things i know that that would just create um competition with the with the one right next door but um again this is the property that you get to work with so some of the comments were a hotel retreat center major events center it's inconsistent with the riverway um development focused on a relatively small footprint with most of the floodplain restored is more compatible with the riverway another another comment was about to be a great option to balance because this this particular option had park and trail issues and some mixed use residential and whatnot so some people thought that that was a good idea for the opportunities of tax-based replacement um people thought that a combination of this with the last option uh is the way to go and um the last scenario the one the one above it and easily blended it has a seaside resort feel and i don't um yeah i'm going to stop so again all of that information will be summarized and made available to you at the end of this process so after we had this input from the members of the panel um and the recommendations were all compiled and we distilled them into what we call two high-level development concepts kind of either or the brackets if you will of the different approaches you could take to the development of the site and those were reviewed by the panel and their comments were provided the first of those was really the idea of reusing this site for an industrial use the footprint essentially where the where the plant is right now this concept shows the retention of the of the of the cooling facility and the water intake uh it also shows the substation remaining and the and the transmission lines being retained we didn't try to choose what kind of industrial building we didn't show any particular kind of industrial buildings we simply showed a footprint of some large industrial buildings as you'll see on both of these concepts it anticipates a significant shoreline protection and anticipates in this case a very significant natural resource restoration and trails um it didn't anticipate any uh filling in the floodplain or any reclamation of any land in the floodplain that obviously is a possibility in the future but we didn't want to presuppose it with this concept certainly you could you could have accessory uses to industrial uses in that area that might be subject to periodic flooding it could be parking or loading or storage that you could that you could periodically allow flooding and the next concept is basically what would it look like if we tried to accommodate all of the creative ideas that everybody had for this site and what happened if we would in fact fill in the flood plain and go through all of the all of the contamination cleanup and all of the indemnification and all of the other issues that would need to take place and clear a lot of different regulations again this shows significant shoreline stabilization and significant natural resource restoration along portal it also shows significant trails as well and a number of the creative ideas that have been thrown out as a gentleman summarized so mayor and council we are here on march 29th it's been a long journey and again i want to just acknowledge the fact that this group really hung in there through this process it's hard that it's hard enough to do these meetings virtually but to do them virtually and then have an eight-month gap and come back and try and pick up where you are where you left off is a difficult thing to do but without exception every one of these meetings was done respectfully uh even though we had people sitting at the table who had very different views about what should happen on these properties but i think that's a good thing and it's actually the intention when this idea was suggested was that you would end up with a core group of community leaders community stakeholders that had a common understanding about the issues that are facing the future of this property and so we're happy to answer any questions that you have there's also a presentation on deep dive on the economic issues that's coming happy to answer any questions i'm not trying to be funny about it but it's a question i get answered asked quite often is if the tower comes down can people buy bricks for historic purposes like they did when the i think it was with the wardens or not the warden's house but the prison when it caught fire many years ago the old prison i don't think that's beyond the realm of possibilities or could we use them as pavers for one of the roads in one of the parks yeah i i don't think that's beyond the realm of possibility we should be able to accommodate a request like that actually we've done similar uh things with some of our other plants when they were retired if there's equipment or other areas that were memorable to the community we've donated equipment to schools to the community actually chunks of stacks from high bridge and and black dog to the community so that i believe that'd be a possibility and then when you after the decommissioning um when you start taking things out i think it was at becker or have even been fergus falls started taking some of the equipment out ahead of the retirement and moving it around to different plants yeah yeah that'll be part of the you know decommissioning of that maybe not the operating equipment but it will be a lot of our inventory so if we've got spare equipment that is compatible with another plant we will most likely ship it to those facilities uh for re resource recovery um and then and parallel uh we can also do some of the demolition and decommissioning another question i had when i was going through the i was on the irp panel um was the upgrade of the transmission lines once this is retired will it be going to unipolar will you still be using the same lines same towers i hate to speak for the transmission area but the plan currently what we'd like to do is if we put in some solar renewables in the wisconsin side of the saint croix county we would you call it double circuit the existing lines now i'm not a structural engineer on the transmission side so i don't can't tell you if we would have to put in larger towers or how that would work but our goal would be able to use that existing transmission corridor so you wouldn't have to expand expand beyond what's already existing okay i got one question on uh the first option the cooling towers are to remain is there a purpose for that or is it just it was just the idea that potentially the cooling towers could be reused okay also at the irp was the question with um i just lost it oh one of the comments our last comments that we put in from the city was a um and commissioner sieben put that in for to keep the uh communication going between xl and the city and timelines you know 2023 that you do your presentation and keep it going so everyone's okay with that okay i just had a question on the floodplain and maybe um how i mean where where is the property at compared to being above the floodplain is there i would say there's a certain area of our um coal yard that's at least four feet below the flood plain uh in the spring time historically what we've had to do is build a berm we'd come to the city we put up a temporary berm approximately four feet tall that has been you know success successful and holding back most of the flood waters but the power block itself or the power plant the main power plant is that does have a berm around it already so that is pretty much fortified against flooding it's technically in the flood plain but it is fortified i can tell you that nationally across the country areas subject to flooding are growing and they expect it to continue to grow over the next 30 years so if it were to be filled to take it out of the floodplain probably would be a safety factor built into that was there questions questions come up about the rail line you know abandoning the rail line or or did you get that far in that any discussion well we know that anderson windows continues to use that red line that doesn't come that far north uh is it there ever been a discussion about the spur line yeah they're um so from xl's perspective due to the that we have we're going to maintain the substation it's much easier to transport a heavy uh transformer by rail so that's advantageous to us but there's also the plastics facility just north of even anderson windows and basically north of the entrance where you come into the plant and they would desire imagining they would desire to maintain that for them to ship their product in and out so that will have some bearing on the access for whatever goes in down there then okay any more questions for everybody i really appreciate all the work you did been on these panels before and i know they can be contentious sometimes but really i find them great learning experiences so thank you so much to everybody for all your participation thank you lawyers are going to make a little money off of this are we i said the lawyers are going to make a little money off of this hopefully not so so lee are we doing we're doing the economic study piece which is all related folks so right stick around so who's going to lead that off is that lee you can come on forward for the presentation on the economic and fiscal impacts give tom the bad [Laughter] the microphone important for recording reading or [Music] he says reluctantly well jordan was you know way yeah shaking his head yes sitting here thinking i should have gotten amazing well i wanna i wanna uh say at the outset that one of the things that strikes me about the past convert the previous conversation is how comprehensive the thinking needs to be and was about to say so many different considerations are involved in thinking holistically about what the right future is of the site and what sales process is and so on and so forth so um that's that's interesting to me and i also appreciated uh mayor and council members your good questions about it and and your involvement with this process all the way along the way i say that partly because we're leaving the world of comprehensive thinking and we're going into the world of a deeper analysis on some of the questions that are that are really important to get a a better handle on so we supported you in applying for grants to explore some specific questions in a little bit more depth and those included understanding the economic impact of the excel plant closure and how to what degree that is replaced by new economic activity on the site what the fiscal impact or budgetary impact is of the excel plant closure and how that is addressed by new development of the site and some of the infrastructure elements on the side and learning more about that and lee mann will be discussing that piece and uh andy and i will be talking about the economic and fiscal analyses so that's where we are in the in the conversation i'm going to begin my focus was on the economic impact uh and analysis uh so um well these are some overview questions we looked at that relate to both the fiscal impact and the economic impact so so we looked at and essentially this is how we structured the study and we're two-thirds the way through the study we wanted to understand what the impact is of the closure how redevelopment with different development types um remediates that impact and thirdly uh what some strategic recommendations are to you in this regard how you might improve the fiscal impact or improve the economic impact of the site so this was essentially our work plan and we have worked through understanding the existing uh conditions from an economic and a fiscal perspective understanding the impacts of the accel plant closure from an economic and fiscal perspective and understanding the redevelopment impacts so we have not yet uh done our work related to proposing to you for discussion some strategies for addressing that we have some in mind you'll see some bullet points on the slide but that's the area that we're going to be working on next so in terms of the economic analysis i appreciate that you were already exposed or reminded of this analysis by bob street or our colleague where he estimated uh the economic impact of the assault the excel plant closure and and he talked through that economic impact is at three levels the direct impact is the loss of jobs at the plant the loss of the the payroll at the plant the indirect impact is the loss of jobs and payroll for suppliers to that plan parts and equipment and the induced effect is the economic impact of the employees of that plant when they take their wages and spend those wages the part of their wages that they spend in washington county the geography of analysis is washington county so a portion of their wages they also expend in washington county and support jobs and payrolls in washington county and that's the induced effect so you know it totaled roughly 179 jobs is the impact of the plant closure with all three effects 18 million dollars in labor income loss put it he put it in perspective that that's depending on which measure you're using that's a fraction of one percent of the economic activity in washington county i'm going to sidebar a little bit here now now the analysis is about to what extent is that economic activity replaced by different development types we were not involved with proposing a development scenario or proposing that the site is all one thing or another but we did want to understand with with industrial development how does that replace the economic impact the economic loss how does that replace the budgetary loss with a residential redevelopment how much does that replace those losses with a retail perspective so we developed um four development types that we analyzed in this sense i did from an economic replacement standpoint and to use those for the fiscal impact analysis what amount of your property tax budget does that replace so those four types were an industrial scenario and in each case we had to look at um on a per acre basis how much of the site would be public right away how much would be uh developable land of that land what the square footage would be what percentage of that land would be developed as that development how many employees would that employ and these are important factors for us to plug into the economic impact model so i'm gonna in this scenario i won't go through all four but just as an example in the industrial scenario that math worked out to on an acre of industrial land about 15 000 square feet is likely of industrial floor area that could be redeveloped on on that acre of land would employ about eight full-time equivalent workers so that's a that's a metric then on a per acre basis that could be plugged into our economic impact model we did the same for a single-family housing scenario in that case we estimated about three homes per gross acre could be developed an aggregate household income on our single family estimate was about four hundred thirty thousand dollars in those three households a multi-family scenario and in each of these cases we took a comparable development as some guidance in a multi-family scenario we estimated around 19 apartment units per gross acre an aggregate household income of about 1.3 million less per household but more households and in a retail restaurant scenario about 5500 square feet of rest retail restaurant floor area around 10 full-time equivalent workers would be employed on a given acre and in this example the capital we used was your commercial development alongside highway 36 so back to the analysis this was the the loss that bob streeter estimated through the excel plant closure which we confirmed in our analysis i'm going to just jump straight to what we learned in plugging in each of the redevelopment scenarios in this case we we um in order to compare apples to apples we scaled up that per acre income to say if it were all developed industrial or if it were all developed single-family homes or all developed multi-family homes how does that compare to the loss of employment how does it compare to the loss of labor income so you can see looking at the first column employment for example that you replace most of the the highest level of employment in fact most of the scenarios replace more jobs than are lost in the excel plan closure the only one that replaces less jobs is the single family housing scenario even in a housing scenario those households go and support jobs in your community but most of them support more jobs uh than are lost in the excel plant closure the the ones that replace the most jobs are the commercial scenarios the industrial scenario and the retail restaurant scenario and the same is true of the labor income that's that's paid um in those redevelopment scenarios now i added a column that looks just at the induced economic impact because if the if the price or if a concern is is not just how many people are working in oak park height but our concern is what existing businesses you know what support is recovered to existing businesses in oak park heights that's more closely approximated by the induced impact because those are what people who are or incomes are spending in oak pockets so if you look just at the induced slice of that for that slice of the income the residential scenarios um have the biggest impact in supporting your local your local businesses probably your retail and your services businesses even greater than the commercial businesses although they all um more than make up the loss to you know to the spending at your local businesses than is lost by spending that the excel plan employees do locally i'm gonna i i think that's oh i i have a couple of summary points here i'll just walk through these some of this will be restating what what i've already said but to reiterate the employment lost with the excel plan closure is a small proportion of washington county employment altogether in most street development scenarios more economic activity would be generated than was lost in the excel plant closure industrial and retail development produced the highest economic impact in terms of total jobs produced the residential redevelopment scenarios produce a greater impact in terms of supporting local retail and services businesses in oak park heights i guess the last thing i want to say is that the loss of economic activity here because it's a small share of the economic impact activity in washington county and even in oak park heights we recognize that that's less of a pressing issue than the loss of property tax base so this is an important element to pay attention to i think this is important context for you to understand but it's it's probably not the problem that is at your top of your priority list to solve but i can pause there and and um take any questions about this piece of the presentation are all of these slides in this presentation and one previous are they going to be available for the council or will they be in the final report okay rather than trying to write down all that information be keep it questions anyone all right well thank you you got it very good technology worked as it should the microphone i don't know if that's going to work or not so hopefully i can talk about it for everybody to hear so my name is andy burnham with stantec i lead our management and consulting group here and our focus is really on the the part where tom was leaving off looking at financial forecasting for communities for their existing revenue streams to make sure that they're sustainable that they can cover their operating costs capital expenses for the quality of life and level of services that they want to provide and so we routinely are able to answer complex questions like this in ways that really translate to where the rubber meets the road what are those financial and fiscal impacts to a community of some of these major potential development decisions or impacts of things going on around you and so that's where we come into this process and so we really had really four components that we did to try to add some context and some understanding to those fiscal and financial impacts of the kingpin closure first is working with your staff eric and team and betty was instrumental in this process giving us information about your financial status as you sit today for your communities general fund so that we could have a baseline forecast of what do things look like today even before the king plant closes what does our future look like and then as we go through options of what happens when the plant closes and we look at different types of redevelopment we would have a baseline to compare against so we first said let's develop that forecast understand what our future looks like see what happens when the plant closes and then understand what are our options to try to mitigate those financial impacts once we've understood them and so that's really the part that i want to go through today and so i just have a few slides to kind of tee up some of the baseline data and assumptions in some of those diagnostic observations that we have then actually want to go to the financial tool that we use to do this and show you how we've started to evaluate some of these impacts and how we plan to continue to use this tool to integrate some of those strategy recommendations that tom was mentioning so our financial analysis and management system as i mentioned is what we've been using to work with hundreds of communities across the country to simulate future cash flow forecasts for their communities under a variety of assumptions and scenarios so that we can compare those results in side-by-side fashion and make sure that we understand those consequences of near-term and long-term decisions and those alternatives and the whole idea is to make this process as efficient as possible so that we can do this interactively in meetings and conversations to really understand the impacts of potential decisions you know as clearly and as quickly as possible so our baseline forecast we worked extensively i mentioned with with eric and staff to make sure we had the right data we started with your 21 ending fund balances we brought in your current operating budget and capital improvement programs for the next few years for the general fund we looked at your current baseline trends and taxable value increases and assumed that those historical trends would continue into the future for a baseline taxable value increase and we also recognize certain conditions that would change in the future such as your debt levy that would drop off after fiscal year 28 so starting in 29 and really wanting to make sure that in this modeling process we had a sustainable cash flow where our tax levy really had to generate enough revenue to cover our anticipated operating and capital expenses and so that's what that chart at the bottom depicts is what your current tax levy is as a percentage of that total tax capacity 50.8 percent and how that changes over time as you get to fiscal year 2029 you can see that's where that debt levy drops off and so it actually comes down a little bit from the 50 range down to about 47 and holds at that level for the next couple of years and so once we baseline the financial forecast so we actually took the model out 20 years there's another 10 years that i just couldn't fit on the slide but you'll see it in the model because we really wanted to make sure we took this projection period out far enough to really understand the long-term impacts we then started to bring in the plant closure impacts and those were well documented they were presented to the planning uh advisory panel the planet advisory panel by bob streeter we you know confirmed the numbers make sense to us that we're talking about when the plant closes and uh impact your total tax capacity of about a five million dollar reduction there's offsets to that because of the fiscal disparities contributions as well as what you would receive back from that that net off to make it a little bit smaller number but at the total line basis it's about five million dollars your total tax capacity that would be going away and we've anticipated that with the decommissioning starting at 28 would get into the tax base in 29 so that would start happening in pay 2030. and so that's what we've modeled as part of our analysis we've similarly modeled the impacts as i mentioned to some of the offsets we would lose some tif capacity that goes to zero for that particular property but we would then see changes as bob streeter modeled to our fiscal disparities contribution we would be contributing less but then we'd be receiving more from the fiscal disparities pool so we've factored that in and we've also brought in and i'll show you the impact of a potential of a million dollars of you know state authorized local government aid that would start in fiscal year 2029 and we can have a conversation about that assumption and the probability of that but we wanted to model that to show that as part of a state coming to the solution as part of evaluating these closure impacts and so you can see in the bottom here two side-by-side results now the baseline scenario which we'd save to these green bars and values and you'll see this in the model when i go live with it and now we've updated the model to reflect all these assumptions that you see on the screen now so you can see what happens to your tax levy in this scenario in 29 it actually goes down because we brought in that local government aid that million dollars a year early so you could see what that impact would have and that reduces that um tax levy by about seven percent from 47 percent down to 40 percent but then when we have the full impact of that loss of tax capacity in 2030 you can see now that tax levy goes up to about 52 which was above our baseline assumption of 47 but i'll even show you a scenario you're really not going to want to see but i need to show it to you if we don't get that million dollars of local government aid what happens to that tax levy at that point so as we've modeled the impacts of the plant closure we then also worked with tom and team to incorporate those future redevelopment options so not just bringing in the revenue based upon the anticipated values from those reference property examples that tom mentioned but also taking your current operating and capital expenses and understanding okay we're going to have some incremental cost of service for serving these different types of redevelopment that we need to bring into the forecast as well it's not just new revenue there's likely going to be incremental expenses to provide service to the redeveloped area above what's being provided today and so we brought that into the model and set up the analysis that we can be flexible just as the discussions have been about looking at different combinations of redevelopment types it could be all industrial could be all retail could be all single family all multi-family a combination so we have the model set up to be able to look at those different types of redevelopment options as part of the um process as just kind of a bit of an overview when we did that net analysis not just the revenues but the anticipated incremental operating expenses and just for r r components not new capital we kind of wanted to show what the net revenue impact was so gross revenues less the incremental operating expenses for the different development types that we were calculating and you could see that single family is basically a break-even proposition but apartments would be a net positive obviously retail restaurant and industrial would have you know higher net revenue per um per acre based upon our analysis but the important part here is in this analysis that we've done for fiscal modeling we haven't brought in any new infrastructure costs to provide additional city infrastructure in this area so that may have to be done by the developer or whoever redevelops the site maybe it's a special levy but any incremental infrastructure costs are not captured in this analysis and that's something to keep in mind as you evaluate the redevelopment options are what are those infrastructure costs going to be and how are we going to pay for them because that's not included in this analysis and the last thing that i mentioned that's in progress um are just you know the model set up to look at a variety of what-ifs and i'll just you know use a couple real high-level examples but as tom mentioned the team is looking at identifying different strategies in addition to tax levy options that could be used as potential ways to diversify revenue streams and to address the financial impacts that the city will observe from that loss of the tax base in the area net of whatever the redevelopment assumptions are so what i was wanting to do is just take a break and get us out of powerpoint world for just a moment and maybe go over to the financial model itself and we could all stare at some numbers and i'm going to zoom in for just a minute you know this is the best part of my day what we've done and i'll be able to zoom out and i'll scroll around here for us just keep zooming in a little bit more so folks can can see this better this is basically the source of a lot of the data that i put in the powerpoint and what i have now is taken the current status quo scenario that i showed in the powerpoint where you don't have the decommissioning of the plant i'm just showing what the property tax levy needs to be each year and as i scroll over to the right you'll see how that changes over time and correspondingly what the assumptions are of the total tax capacity for the the subject property for excel energy and the total tax capacity of the city and i've identified here in some of these other rows what happens to our tif tax capacity when we change the decommissioning what happens to our fiscal disparities contributions as well as distributions that we receive and then what happens to our debt levy and as i mentioned you can see this drops off in 2029 and there are some graphs and charts that are built into this tool as well that will show us changes as we make changes to the assumptions to our annual total tax capacity in million dollars that we can also take a look at but as i mentioned we've set this model up to be dynamic so that we can compare scenarios and unfortunately i'm going to start with the worst news for you first to show you how we build this up so if we wanted to just say what are the impacts of just the excel decommissioning to your financial forecast without any additional contributions from the state for local government aid and i recalculate the model now you're going to see what happens to our total tax capacity and you can see that that goes down pretty substantially because we've lost all that excel tax capacity so you can see that here on this chart and i'm going to keep calibrating the screen here so it's viewable so we went from what was about 14.8 million dollars to now it's about 11.4 million dollars in 2030. and with that we correspondingly now have a dramatic change in our property tax levy it would have to go from 47 to 61 so again this is very consistent with what bob streeter was presenting to the advisory panel in terms of the magnitude of impact that the plant closure would happen by itself without redevelopment without any changes to any other revenue streams or revenue sources outside of what's there today um have happy residents no we will not have happy residents so but you can see how this compares to our baseline forecast and so we've set up the tool that we can look at what happens with additional uh funding sources such as local government assistance that as i mentioned if that starts in fiscal 29 i'm going to scroll over here so you can see now if you look at this 2030 number of 60.9 percent now that changes to 52 so that million dollars a year of local government assistance is worth about eight to nine percent on that tax levy um if we're able to successfully receive that type of of local government aid or assistance and you can see that keeps our tax levy more comparable to what we had to start with in our baseline but it's still a bit higher and so this is where we can look at additional options in terms of the redevelopment and so we've set this up where we can put in the different acreage assumptions and i'm just going to put in a combination of acreage assumptions we can adjust the acreage amount but it then applies those net fiscal impacts and so now i'm going to scroll over here and remember this 52 in 2030 and this forecast of about 54 or 55 percent i scroll down here and when i recalculate the model you're now going to see when i bring in that type of redevelopment we're going to see an increase back in some of that tax capacity it's not back to where we were before but we were able to recapture some of it we're now at 15.8 million versus the 17-6 so we're closer to it and so now if we look at that same time period of our outlook instead of a 54-55 tax levy we're looking at about a 52 tax levy so we're able to see from that redevelopment combination i just did 50 50 industrial and commercial that would you know have about a two percent impact to your tax levy just in this hypothetical example and this again can be run for various combinations of different development types so you can understand those impacts to the levy and then the last part to come to the conversation will be looking at some alternative strategies whether it's revenue diversification uh temporary levees there's a number of options that we want to look at but if we were to have a different type of revenue strategy come in that provided an additional half a million dollars per year and i were to recalculate the model in this scenario and again i'm going to zoom in so we can see the numbers you can see now that extra half a million dollars per year we're back to a pretty comparable tax levy as to where we were before we started down this journey so the whole point is that we've set up this platform to be able to synthesize this analysis to help you understand where you start this conversation and what are your different options in terms of the impacts of the closure additional impacts of local government aid different types of redevelopment and other strategies that you can use so that you can have a future that looks very similar to what it does today before the plant closed to really help inform the process did you take into consideration any calculations with the energy transition grants you know the economic uh renewables through the state we didn't factor that in directly unless that was implicit in the million dollar local government aid assumption eric shaking his head so no we didn't specifically calculate that in but again that's the point with this tool is you know we could put another core source of revenue exactly and so maybe that half a million of what if revenue it could be that particular program includes a level that's correct when you go back down to uh the later years you're not including any capacity for debt that's correct so if we would add debt for any infrastructure or anything that the city might look for in the future we don't have that capacity we really wanted to establish a baseline status quo for kind of existing depreciation renewal and replacement activities and then any major infrastructure obviously that's got to be a specific conversation that would happen but we would want to model that in both scenarios if you were to do it so we decided to leave that infrastructure out for this purpose did you have more i don't unless you want to keep uh playing with scenarios and numbers which i'd be happy to do all night i suspect yeah make them really big and really big exactly no just so we can see them we just don't want to see them go up i know we want to see them go down right absolutely so hopefully we can find some solutions to help make that happen any questions no thank you thanks very much all right i think it's uh perhaps lee's turn i think so i think that's the utility feasibility study yes mayor and members of the council we did submit this uh back in december um and we're certainly glad that we get the chance to talk about this information tonight in the context of the overall look at the king plant situation so i have a relatively brief presentation please ask questions as needed but this this report identifies infrastructure that would be needed uh water system sanitary sewer and storm water management facilities that would be needed to serve a redevelopment of the king plant and as we've talked earlier this evening there are two development scenarios that we took a look at both a commercial industrial type development with a water demand similar to the anderson windows site and then scenario two assumes a multi-family mixed-use development uh with 25 of the land allocated to the roads parts etc and the remaining 75 percent would be an average of 25 units per acre now one of the things you'll you'll notice probably as i'm having my discussion as you recall john's discussion and lauren's discussion um you know we as we move forward in this process we'll be honing you know what all these assumptions are and they'll be coming together at some point when you know we get to the point of pulling the trigger and actually doing some of this work but at this point this these are the assumptions that we made the other assumption i think important to mention is is we did assume for this analysis a potential of 80 developable acres and certainly there's a very salient point to all that in regards to the floodplain but there are you know scenarios where a certain amount of the land that is currently in the flood plain can be brought out and you know that's a discussion for another day and and a whole analysis that would need to be done going forward as one of you know one of the next steps you know at some point in the future between now and the time the plant is decommissioned and you know the type of development is really kind of nailed down so in regards to the water main improvements maybe eric would be easiest just to go to the figure that we'll try to this map point at yes we'll try to point at that um can you make is it possible to make it just slightly bigger sure that's what'll make it a lot bigger there we go there we go so in scenario one um we are looking at you know an addition oh one other thing that i should mention is um currently the site is served by three wells and one small lift station um so in scenario one you know we will be looking at uh and i'm going to use the the actual numbers just so you get a sense of the difference between the two scenarios the maximum day demand for scenario one is about six hundred thousand gallons per day the max demand and for scenario two we'd be looking at approximately nine hundred thousand gallons per day um and for either option a fully looped 8 and 12 inch water main system will serve the site as shown on this particular map so if you look um from this point here we would be looking at bringing in a 12-inch water main down to this point and in this area an 8 inch water main and from this confluence point here bringing an 8 inch into the site and then within the site any development that occurs would need to be an 8 inch loop system and this these size mains with with the capacity that they would have would serve either of those developments with their maximum day demands as well as their fire flow needs which which are somewhat different between the two scenarios no question about 56th street because that was just reconstructed is that going to need to be torn up again to have a larger main in there we would need to make a connection there and there would need to be some construction there so the the addition of those water mains as shown on this figure at this point we've estimated to be approximately 1.1 million dollars 1 million 100 000 for that work in december of 2021 as everybody is aware you know prices on various items relating to construction and many other things in the world are in flux and so you know once we get closer obviously to the point of actually installing this you know we will need to refine our numbers and come back with with where we're at at that time the other two things to be aware of in regards to this redevelopment is that there would be the demand the increase in demand would require a new water tower a 250 000 gallon tank as well as a new well and pump house a new tower again in our estimates in december of 2021 is approximately two million three hundred thousand dollars and a new well and pump house would be approximately a million eight hundred thousand dollars so um you know this is a uh situation as far as you know has been on the city's radar as far as future development and at what point will the city need both that new tower and a well but certainly this development would would get us across that threshold question regarding the tower the water tower because of the location of the plume um in the aquifer where could it go and could you drill down to the mount hinckley um as far as drilling down you're speaking of the well there's a couple of sites i know that our water engineers have looked at as potential well sites i don't think that the plume is is a major concern in oak park heights at this point it was relatively close when looking at putting that tower down by the prison quite a few yeah i think we would be looking more to the north and to the west of that area okay so um and there's there's various sites that you know we've talked about over the years and various developments and developments that haven't occurred and city properties where some of those items could be located okay so that that kind of summarizes the the water system aspect the sanitary sewer that we'll be looking at is due to the topography on the site we would need to continue with a lift station and a force main and so for this analysis we would be looking at putting the lift station in this corner of the site it would be ultimately designed to be plenty deep in order to take whatever development could have could happen on the site so it would probably be a fairly deep list station 30 40 feet and then there would be a force main you know that would would follow up and connect into the mces system for the scenario one which is the industrial scenario we'd be looking at an eight inch force main and with the other scenario with the commercial mixed use we'd be looking at a 10-inch force main and between those two scenarios the cost range of the lift station in force main would be a million 750 000 to 2 million dollars again in december of 2021 costs so the stormwater management aspect of the project we would be looking at info infiltration basins with underdrains based on again the topography and the proximity of the groundwater to the surface of the land infiltration would not be probably feasible so filtration with underdrains would be what we would be looking at um and again with the you know where those would ultimately be located um would need to be uh resolved as we you know dig into the uh detailed design of the site and understand what the development actually is going to be on the site but the estimates for that improvement between again the two scenarios range from a million six hundred thousand to a million seven hundred thousand so fairly close um but in that range would that also need the ini permitting from that council as far as the sanitary sewer [Music] we would have obviously need to follow all the standards so that you know we minimize or you know completely preclude any ini with our force main as far as what's happening on the development site one of the things to mention is all of the with this proposal and scenario all of the sewer and water lines that are needed for the development would be installed by the development um so they would all have to meet all those standards of the city and mcs as well and then again just because it's related to stormwater of course is is the floodplain issue and you know the the way to remove the floodplain or land from the floodplain in this area typically would be what's called a letter of map revision um and you know generally speaking um in in floodplain analysis and removing from land from the floodplain you know there are certain amounts or depths of flood plain that are more conducive to removing because removing you know an area flood plain for example that has a relatively lesser depth of water in the flood um there's factors in the floodplain analysis that fema has done that you can remove some of those things from the floodplain and not actually impact um the the level of the flood or very minimally and so a letter of map revision is very common in fact up and down the the shore along here to the north and to the south of this site you know those have been done in the past um and so again that overall more detailed analysis of of the floodplain and the development you know going forward will be necessary to to really figure out what that's going to be and what the real developable acreage is going to entail will that involve the army corps of engineers again uh it involves fema and it could it could involve the army corps as well so that is pretty much the summary of the report how big is our small tank that we have out here so we need this tank the size of this one here questions for lee anybody well thank you thank you it's a lot of numbers well and just one other comment um this is in draft form so after this meeting we will i found a couple little minor edits that need to be uh taken care of and we'll get that to you as a final final report thank you thank you one thought though lee and just for john's sake and and everybody here um from my perspective whatever that's worth but we started this you know a couple years ago right in writing all these grants and and how we all come up with this everybody worked together really well at the council and staff and and we reached out to chris at the county and said hey what about is there funding and so he's been a great partner in doing the advisory panel and that work continues and then pivoting with some of these economic studies with tom and andy and lee and your things because we we don't exactly know what outcomes we want or when they'll occur so we kind of shipped them off to hinterland and and said hey come up with some best ideas and and here we are we're making it we're making estimates about and one of the most important estimates we're at now is is at the legislature as we know and asking them for five odd million dollars to basically build that which we're hoping gives us the most latitude um to to benefit any given scenario so uh all that thank you so you guys did a lot of work and a lot of thinking so yeah well there's the bill for the bonding trying to get that but there's also the other bill too well there's a couple other ones one is to make sure that the uh was in the p approved by the puc in the integrated resource plan shows the good plans with excel for working with them and then it's also um once a lot but i'm still testifying is the energy renewable grants you know for the city through the um energy transition so we're working on lots of stuff and lots of wheels turning well thanks lee but you're not done yet nope so i'll talk about the speed limits on the city streets yes mayor and council as requested we have done some research on the city's ability statutorily to modify speed limits and we do have a report on where we're at with that there's actually two ways that the city can look at city-wide street speed limit changes in the minnesota statute 169.14 it covers these items number one the road authority having jurisdiction over residential roadways can adopt 25 miles per hour in residential roadways the city can do that however in order to do that the road authority must erect signs designating the speed limit at the beginning and end of the residential roadway where the speed limit applies so that is the first way that it can be done so 25 miles per hour 25 miles per hour is relatively straightforward but again there's a cost involved with every street needing signs the second way is is the way that i think we've had some limited discussion uh about already is later in that paragraph uh regarding speed limits other than those set to be 25 and that for that for example if you wanted to set you know the speed limits on your streets at 20 would be an example like minneapolis and st paul has done and there's other communities that have looked into that as well in that case you need a speed a city-wide engineering analysis and study a couple of items to understand about that is from our look at it it looks like that would cost somewhere between twenty thousand fifty thousand dollars to do that study and i'll talk a little bit later about what will impact that cost that study would include you know research into the national standards research into the national guidance about speed limits it would involve performing crash analyses at major intersections performing speed studies on multiple streets obviously then the anal the data would be analyzed recommendations will be formulated and a report would be put together for the council to review the cost variable would really be based on how many meetings would be needed with the city council with city staff and in particular the statute talks about public outreach input and communication and what does that effort look like that can be you know a relatively straightforward effort it can be a more robust effort and you know how you put that together will impact the cost a fair amount other items like how many location speed studies are performed you know if you have them at 3 versus 10 it depends on the areas that you might look at and say you know these are the problem areas and we want to do speed studies here and there and then you know what do the final presentations of the report look like again to the city council to the public you know what does that community engagement piece look like for this study so that's that is basically uh the information that we have um and i would stand for questions the one question i have is i don't remember how many years ago we did this speed study around the city and it ended up going backwards instead of trying to drop the speed limit it ended up getting raised well the state correct and the other way for speed limits to be changed is for the city to ask the state uh to go ahead and do that and do an analysis and they they will do that um and like you say the rub with asking for the state to do a speed study is if the speed study suggests that the speed limit should be higher than what it is today you know that may end up being the state's recommendation and again just you know for a little bit more background the state bases their recommendations on what speed limits should be based on that 85th percentile speed you know when they when they do their study 85 percent of the cars are going at that speed or less and that's a national standard you know the studies have shown that when vehicles are traveling at the 85th percentile speed you know typically you have the least amount of issues it's when you have you know great variety in the traveling speeds is where things start to get you know more difficult and you have issues so you really want to set a speed limit where you know as many people as possible are ending up traveling that speed any questions for lee on that one i guess you're still not done no update on engineering findings for the south front row the slip lane uh west westbound turn lane at osgood yes marion council we did take a look at that and the request was made for us to understand why the state did not include an auxiliary uh auxiliary lane along highway 36 on the south side aft after the fact that somewhat prior to the final design that came out uh in the past they they had shown one or there was one shown and basically what it boils down to is that the level of service with or without the slip lane and with or without the south frontage road is is acceptable um in the studies and so because the level of service is acceptable in all scenarios you know our understanding or our conjecture as to why mndot would not include that is because um they wouldn't spend the money if the level of service is you know again acceptable so that's that is our what was there best to understand what was it c or d i think it was b it was b or c in that area in all scenarios in fact you know the county study showed that and our study confirmed that you recall we we did the study to you know understand some additional aspects to the situation and we we also confirmed that that level of service was in the acceptable range i mean it was actually the army that had proposed it it was part of their 2018 remaining 36 uh recommended plan was that they would end so it was the county that pulled it out and the part of the reason according to the email that i received was that they pulled it out because they figured they were building an ox they were building um new frontage roads they were going to take the traffic off that way but it made it worse on the northbound side of osgoode with no double turn lane when you're trying to turn westbound on 36. the traffic backs up really bad there right but that was on the slip lane right i mean so i think the next issue on the agenda was the as good issue right so i think the the asgood issue is very straightforward for the moment the county is is building that frontage road connection it's going to get worse then right in that area the one thing that they are going to do is close off that that access that closer area to osgood and so i think in order to justify or you know be able to take that to the county in the state for those left turn lanes we would want to be able to show you know what is actually happening there from a traffic standpoint and at this point you know that situation is about to change um at the end of this construction season we will have a different situation than we have today and so i think what we will need to do is wait until that construction is complete and then we can do some traffic analysis and say okay this is the justification or you know we'll see we'll see what happens um but we're making the improvements and morale to avoid that which happens now right with putting the roundabout in and then already at oak green there are double turn lanes you know northbound and southbound it just needs to move better at that intersection which probably should have been done from the get-go when they put the road in when the bridge was built well the city will have a much better leg to stand on after we present information once that change is made because they'll come back and just say well you're making a change you know they'll tell us we have to wait i would invite them to sit in the traffic and try and get out of that furniture right um any other questions for lee or one one thing to think about um we still have elements of the redevelopment king plant study to continue with as this goes on and i wasn't prepared to put these people on the spot tonight to to touch base on those things but tom alluded to a little bit that that those fam studies are not complete the final recommendations from the advisory panel will come in a formal study or formal document or formal report but ultimately another final piece that's still coming as an action plan and and what does that really mean well okay it's something we can all look to in a document that says okay this is our plan right and that can collect dust but at the end of the day we do want to have a list of strategies that make some sense and and that's the next phase that we'll come at you with here over the next six months or so so when i asked earlier about getting some of the information from tonight it wasn't to have it in a complete report but maybe just have the slides that you had that would be helpful anybody else want those too yeah yeah kind of hard to follow along does anybody want to see the irb and read that no that's good reading does anybody else have any questions or anything um i just was gonna ask eric if we can add a couple items for the goal setting tonight based on some of the things we had here well sure sure i mean do we can we add them tomorrow night i have uh so if they relate to excel next steps that's on the list so what if you tell me what they're they might be on i was thinking like the tower and the well yeah we can add those absolutely it's 41 things long so a few more can't hurt how big of a piece of paper it's going to be double-sided 11 by 17. is the color so we can read it this time i'll bring my magnifying glass but it'll be but yeah the anything is is fair game in that setting so we'll add those to the list if you got anything else i know carly sent me some stuff today or oh we'll keep hacking away at it it'll be a long meeting so we do have a work session again tomorrow night for our goal setting and a few other items on there so if there's nothing else we can adjourn oh go ahead yes hi sorry um thank you mayor and council i'm aj perron i'm a resident and have been on the advisory panel and i just want to recognize that everyone in the advisory panel understands we're at the very very very beginning of this project i have 30 plus years in architecture and design industry i've been on global projects like this this is very unique this project has never been done in the history of the world we have lots of mitigating factors and right now for us to come up with plans it's like telling us to build a castle and you don't tell us what kind of bricks or if we have windows or if you have doors or furniture nothing so there's going to be a lot more information that's going to come where i really feel the advisory panel can give some guidance some opinions especially around health safety and welfare there's a lot of issues with the contamination people that have small children are very concerned about that but it's also our community and so i would just ask and implore you to reconvene us whenever you feel like you're at a moment where we can add some opinion some advice and get community input thank you thank you i know for myself i would uh not let you off the hook quite that easily there's a lot of good um feedback from everybody and you've been there listening to all the information so that's very very valuable and we relied on that on some other big things like when this the saint story river crossing was built there was a very large group and that kept going on way after that group you know finished up their work so you're not off the hook you'll be back but thank you so much i can't tell you how much we appreciate all the work that you put in i know it was difficult with coven trying to do zoom meetings but thank you so much it was it was kind of unique because i said even when i would go to watershed people would ask me you know what's the committee doing and i'd say we're not i don't know entirely because they're keeping us out of the loop so we don't disrupt it because they figured that if we got involved we you know somebody would look and say well the council's saying this already so i mean it was unique to have the community doing it and to really in some ways be in the dark great guidance but i mean that way we actually get the information that you want rather than if you'd have been sitting there going well he's already seen this so why are we discussing it before the advisory panel started i would get feedback from different residents well it should be open space or it should be this or it should be that it's nice to have all of the information that stantec put together so that you can quantify as to why it should be this or why it should be that or it can't be built all the way to the river because of a flood pain or there has to be infrastructure so it's very valuable to have all that information and have all of your feedback as well you know and as a resident being on the committee if you want to be involved we can probably find you some other things here there's always park commission openings or planning commission openings anything else then we can adjourn until 4 30 tomorrow you