City Council - Regular Meeting

all right good evening we'll call this meeting to order for the for the what day is it the August 27th 2026 Apple Valley City Council meeting For any members of the audience who have signed up to speak, as your name is called, please come to the podium to address the council. With that, the first item on our agenda is the Pledge of Allegiance. And for all who are able, please stand and join us in the pledge.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God,

All right, thank you. The next item on our agenda is to approve the agenda. And Tom, were there any changes this evening?

Mr. Mayor, members of the council, good evening. No changes to tonight's agenda.

We have no changes. Do I have a motion to approve the agenda?

So moved. Second.

motion from council member grendel a second from council member bergman all those in favor indicate by saying aye aye opposed uh that takes care of our agenda approval the next item on our agenda is the audience participation portion of the meeting we've got a total time limit of 10 minutes for this item and this is for items that are not on the agenda anyone who would like to speak to this item we have one person who has signed up to speak I did not give a name, which you mind coming forward.

Good evening. I'm here before you today. On behalf of American citizens that value the Constitution and the God given freedoms it defends. I'm here in complete opposition of any and all things under the name flock safety, axon, or any system that utilizes mass surveillance. Before I continue, I want all of you to realize that these cameras and recording devices are photographing and recording not only license plates, they also utilize AI recognition software and are in works of using Bluetooth signal tracking, which means they are not only tracking vehicles, They are tracking everyone, no matter if you are in a car, on a bike, or on foot. These devices do so 24-7 with no oversight, no constitutional restrictions, and are completely unregulated. These systems blatantly violate the First and Fourth Amendments of our Constitution. Flock and anything of that nature, including Axon, are enemies of every American citizen and must be abolished. As point individuals, owes you have taken to represent and defend the Constitution of the United States. against enemies both foreign and domestic. FLOC's vehicle fingerprinting technology violates core constitutional protections, particularly the Fourth Amendment, which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures. The Fourth Amendment requires a warrant based on probable cause to track an individual's movements. FLOC and Axon cameras continuously track drivers and pedestrians without any individual suspicion of a crime. These systems and how police are potentially using them are flipping the script to you are guilty until you prove yourself innocent. Legal experts cite the mosaic theory established in Supreme Court cases like United States v. Jones 2012 and Carpenter v. United States 2018. While a single snapshot of a car on a public road is legal, aggregating thousands of snapshots into permanent searchable databases reveal a complete mosaic of a person's life. The knowledge that one's location is constantly logged creates a chilling effect on free speech and assembly. This is a steep and slippery slope. People attending protests, union meetings, or sensitive political gatherings, all of these things have potentials to be used against them unconstitutionally. The US Constitution protects the fundamental rights of interstate travel. A nationwide dragnet of cameras that logs, excuse me, that logs every crossing of a city or state border acts as a defacto checkpoint system. Because technology evolves faster than legislation, flock networks often operate in a regulatory vacuum. There are no federal laws regulating how automatic license plate recognition and any other data FLOC or Axon collects can be kept, who can access it, or what security protocols must be followed. In states like Minnesota, general statutes govern automated license plate readers, but they often fail to address advanced features like FLOC machine learning talent network, which links data across state lines. Flock Safety is a private, venture-backed corporation. Private entities are not bound by the same transparency, public record laws, or constitutional restrictions as government agencies. Because Flock's software algorithms are proprietary, independent auditors, defense attorneys, and the public cannot inspect the code to verify how data is collected, sorted, matched, or protected. As appointed individuals, owes you have taken to represent and defend the Constitution against enemies, both foreign and domestic. Thank you all for your time.

Thanks for sharing the comments. I will just say, for the record, Apple Valley does not own flock cameras. So just so that we're clear on that. Yeah, Apple Valley does not own flock cameras. Private businesses may choose to install them. Apple Valley does not own them. Anyone else? That's the only person who has signed up to speak. Anyone else from the audience who would like to speak this evening? All right, seeing none, we'll move on to our consent agenda. These items are considered routine and will be enacted with a single motion unless a council member or a citizen requests to pull an item. Council members, any items from consent you would like to pull to discuss separately? All right, seeing none, citizens, any items to pull to discuss separately? all right with we have a motion for approval from council member melander do we have a second from council member grendel all those in favor indicate by saying aye aye opposed all right consent items all pass unanimously we're going to move on to our regular agenda and start with 5a and that is a certificate of recognition for citizen stephanie ransdall and artem drakov chief francis would you mind uh doing these for us yes

Good evening, Mr. Mayor, members of the council. We have two citizens awards. I know one of them is here. I'm not sure about the second one, but two citizens award that we'd like to present publicly to some folks that did some amazing work to support our police department. Perfect, I'll call you up in a second. So we'll start with Stephanie Rensdell. I'll have her come up and I'm just going to read the award. So these are awards that are put in similar to our staff awards for our police departments, whether it's Officer of the Year, Life Saving Award, Medal of Valor, Medal of Honor. Our police officers who are out there at these scenes submit applications to our awards committee. And we have several times each year recognize residents for what they have done. And so I'm going to read this first award on April 15th, 2026. Officers are dispatched to Goodwill on the report of a customer that was not conscious and not breathing. Upon arrival, officers located Stephanie Ransdell performing CPR on the patient. Responders took over patient care and he was eventually transported to the hospital. The next day, the patient's son sent a follow-up email letting officers know the patient was alive and doing well. He said the patient had a 100% blockage in one of his arteries that required surgery. The patient's son let officers know that because of this quick action taken by Stephanie, there was no oxygen loss to his brain. Stephanie saved his life by being brave enough to start CPR on a stranger at the store. Unfortunately, the individual is 80 years old. He passed away about six weeks later at home peacefully from something unrelated, but the family expressed just great gratitude for the opportunity to spend additional time and have that additional time with their loved ones. So on behalf of the Apple Valley Police Department, I want to present Stephanie this certificate of recognition. Um, next training for CPR.

No, no.

Um, I would like to get, uh, some official training for it. Nice. Thank you.

Yeah.

Oh, um, next we have our town Dracheff. Come on up. Stand right over here. On May 22nd, 2025, officers responded to a 15-year-old male that was in crisis and mentioned to his mother that he felt like jumping off a bridge before he left his residence. The juvenile was seen on a traffic camera straddling the pedestrian wall for the Palomino overpass over Cedar Avenue. Prior to officer's arrival, a motorist, Artem Drachev, stopped and was able to get the juvenile to come off the edge of the bridge. When officers arrived, Drachev had his arm around the juvenile and was talking to him, expressing words of hope and encouragement. He relayed his own personal struggles with mental health and prayed with the juvenile. The juvenile became emotional over this compassion and embraced him. Drachev's quick intervention with the juvenile no doubt prevented a tragedy. Thank you very much. Yeah, these are just a couple examples of folks that, you know, we've got dedicated staff, but every day we have folks in the community calling us, alerting us, stepping up to help and getting involved in the important work of keeping our community safe. So appreciate them for taking the time to come out and be recognized publicly.

I just say thank you to both of them for taking the minute to step in, right? That's a split-second decision many times, and you just have to follow your heart and go do it, and both of them did that. In one case, the family got six extra weeks with a loved one, which is huge at that age. In another one, we've got a young man who is still with us today. So thank you both for just being good people. I don't know if I have better words for it. Thank you. All right, let's move on to 5B, which is our oath of office for Officer Ella Campos.

Yes, me again. It's police department showcase night tonight. So I'll ask Officer Ella Campos up here with us. Introduce her to the council and we'll do the swearing in. So, Officer Ella Kamphouse, she grew up in Princeton, Minnesota and attended Princeton High School. She attended the University of North Dakota and received a bachelor's degree in forensic science. After that, she worked in the evidence room for Grand Forks Police Department and later for the Cottage Grove Police Department doing evidence work, crime scene processing, and so on. She later returned back to school to Rasmussen College to get her law enforcement licensure. get through the skills program and then in December of 2025 she joined us as a police officer with the Apple Valley Police Department has been out completed all the training and field training and is out on solo patrol outside of work she enjoys reading books spending time with family at the lake golfing and walking her dog Tika and I'll let you say anybody else that's with you if you want to introduce anybody

Yes, welcome to all of them.

Thanks for coming. And I'll have you step over to get your, or I guess we're probably going to do it right up here, your Oath of Office. Sounds like her husband and nephew are gonna come up to pin the badge on. Good luck with that, with the little one.

Let them get done, yeah.

That's cool.

See? officer what what is your nephew's name um aiden aiden councilmember bergman aiden you were so kind to help pin the badge councilmember bergman has something for you uh here this evening for your help over here

All right.

Well, yeah, we're happy to have Officer Campos here with us. As you know about our police department, it's always a family affair. And when we have people come in and get sworn in, it's a great family affair, too. So we'll continue to bring them in and welcome their families as we're doing our soaring in.

Officer, you've joined a great department. And I say this every time. So those who are repeat, who made this appearance before, have heard me say this before. But this department makes us all proud every day. We're happy to have you on the team. And please stay safe.

Thank you comes from a grand old cops on the court last night and all of us there. So we heard about 8 and being so proud of his own.

We'll get him some cake to calm him down. And start recruiting early, right? It's never too early. Thank you. Welcome. Welcome to the team. Thank you, Chief. Absolutely. We'll give you guys a few minutes to kind of reconvene out in the hall before we start.

Yep, I was repressed.

You could hop like, yeah, it's maybe all I have left in me tonight. That's a, that's a 16 year. 1st. I don't think I popped at a council meeting before. all right we'll move on to 5c and that is to proclaim september 26 2026 this kelly park grand opening festival and authorize some temporary signage and a few other things and you are our parking rec director uh eric carlson not nate rosa as it may say in the agenda so mr mayor members of the council just going to go through a quick presentation on kelly park and talk a little bit about the opening festival uh plans that we have

All right, so Kelly Park. So Kelly Park was part of the 2023 parks referendum. At Kelly Park, we have a new stage, a new playground. We have a community splash pad that's being sponsored by George Fisher Industries. We've got three new restrooms, a shelter, and we're investing $10.9 million on the park. And you see a picture of the new stage here on the side of the slide. So just here's some slides. These pictures are taken from earlier today, so it's just a lot of progress that's been made in the last couple weeks when you last saw a slide update. And I'll just go through them kind of quick. So there's the playground. That's the actual playground, not a rendering of the playground. You can see it kind of in relation to where the stage is. Kind of a shot looking north and east. A shot looking north and west. See new parking. See the splash pad there between the restroom building and the shelter. And as mentioned when we were at the informal meeting, we also purchased a 17 by 10 LED screen that's mobile. So not only can we use it at Kelly Park for the concerts and for movies in the park, we can use it all over our city for different events. And so that just leads us to Saturday, September 26th, when we plan to do the grand opening of Kelly Park and have our food truck festival and a ribbon-cutting event. And we're doing that with the help of the Apple Valley Arts Foundation. And yes, the purple bear does appear on the slide.

By the way, it's coming to the 26th.

So we've got the schedule of the events for the day as the food trucks will open at noon, run throughout the day. We've got live music for kids and families starting between noon and 1.30, which is Kids Dance DJ. Then we have the Continuing Education Band, which is made up of District 196 students, former students and current students. They call themselves Continuing Education. They'll be playing between 1.30 and 3.00. then starting at three o'clock the main act will be setting up the stage and so we're going to turn our attention to the large screen and have some type of a sporting event on whether it's the twins or the gopher football game or something like that then at 5 30 the city council and the parks committee will be taking the stage for the ribbon cutting event itself and then at six o'clock The live music urban classic presents the music of earth, wind, and fire will be on stage for about an hour and a half, and that is being brought to you by the Apple Valley Arts Foundation. So again, we'll have food trucks there, and this is the list of food trucks that we plan to have. Again, we've already mentioned the band. They're there from 6 to 7.30, and it's because of the generous contributions of the Apple Valley Arts Foundation that they can be there. we have parking so we're expecting a crowd of in the neighborhood of 4 000 people the site can fit it the parking cannot so we've got parking options for people there will be obviously parking on site in the parking lot there'll be ada spots available for people that would require that there's on street parking in and around kelly park and in the immediate neighborhood there's a city owned lot west of culver's that people can park at and then walk to the site And then MVTA will be providing two buses that will do a circular route from the parking lots at the Western Service Center and at the Municipal Center so people can park there, take a free shuttle bus over to the site, and then take a free shuttle bus back to get to their car when the day is over. Please don't park in apartment parking lots. Those are for those residents. Please don't park in business parking lots because businesses are trying to operate and there's no parking on the grass. This information will be on our website and as we get closer we'll put more details on there. These are some of the sponsors that are making that event and that day possible. And then there's a proclamation that I can read if you'd like me to. Please go ahead. All right. So whereas the city of Apple Valley is proud to provide cultural experiences for its residents, and whereas the Parks and Recreation Department has arranged to combine the third annual fall food truck event in various family activities with a ribbon cutting event to celebrate the completed reconstruction of Kelly Park. And whereas the Apple Valley Arts Foundation has generously arranged and sponsored the musical performance by Urban Classic Presents, the music of earth, wind, and fire on Saturday, September 26, 2026 at Kelly Park. And whereas the Apple Valley Arts Foundation residents, civic organizations, business community, and the Parks and Recreation Department have joined together to develop this free community celebration. Now, therefore, be it resolved by the City Council of Apple Valley, Dakota County, Minnesota, that Saturday, September 26, 2026 is hereby proclaimed to be Kelly Park Grand Opening Festival. The Council further declares this event a community festival, encourages the citizens of Apple Valley to support and attend, proclaimed this 27th day of August 2026.

Do we have a motion for that proclamation? So moved. motion from council member hebert second from council member grendall all those in favor indicate by saying aye aye and opposed that passes unanimously thank eric thank you for the presentation and all the work uh that went into putting this putting this all together and thanks to the sponsors as well and let's not forget the arts foundation for making sure we had some live music uh to kick us all off thank you thank you Tom, do we have any staff items this evening?

Mr. Mayor, yes indeed we do. We're going to call Eric back up again for one, and then I'll have one following his comments. Great.

Mr. Mayor, Mr. Council, in the spring of the year, I often stand up and encourage the public that might have young adults or people looking for a part-time job to apply and work for us on a seasonal basis. And this time of the year, we want to just say thank you to all those people that have helped us provide services and events and activities for people of Apple Valley. They may have worked at the golf course in food and beverage or on the maintenance team cutting grass at the golf course. They may have worked in our parks department cutting grass or dragging ball fields. They may have worked in our recreation department putting on programs, or maybe they were a part of the puppet wagon program. Or maybe they worked in the street department and they helped fill potholes. But as a city, we rely on part-time seasonal staff to get our jobs done in the summertime, and we couldn't do it without them. So we just wanted to say thank you to all of those people that choose us as their summer employment opportunity. And for those that haven't found full-time employment next year, we hope that they come back and work with us again next year. So just wanted to give that shout-out to them.

Thanks, Eric, for that recognition. You mentioned the puppet wagon, and I walked through my neighborhood park one day not all that long ago, and there had to be 25 kids and parents all huddled around the puppet wagon laughing and having a good time, and it was just kind of fun to see as you walked through. So, yeah, great. Thank you. Tom, you had one other item for us this evening.

One more item. We have talked about this as a city council in the past, and that is the update to the city's comprehensive plan. And this is a multi-year program that we are going through. And obviously, this only works well if we have good input from our citizens. So I just want to make everybody aware, we will be in many different ways trying to gather input, but we do have an opportunity right now on the city's website for a quick survey. So we would encourage our residents to go onto the city's website, complete the survey for our 2050 comprehensive plan. AppleValleyMN.gov is the address, AppleValleyMN.gov. This will be one of many opportunities. We had some of our staff members out at the farmer's market here last weekend gathering input as well. and there will be other opportunities. But this is an important process. This long-range planning is what kind of sets the framework for the work that we do as a city. And we want to make certain that we're gathering as much input as possible from our citizens as we prepare the next comprehensive plan. So thank you.

Thank you. And I've taken that survey and compliments the staff who put it together. It's probably five minutes of your life, and the questions are good. So it's not the only data point we'll get, but it's a good start. And the more people we can get to go click it and complete it, the better. Council Member Millander.

Yeah, Chief Francis and Eric, I've always been a big believer in saying thank you. It was so cool to have those ceremonies today and to thank the folks that come to Apple Valley to work. It seems to me that you folks are bashful about complaining, but getting a compliment, folks are pretty stingy with, so... Good for you guys for doing that good for the cops for recognizing such outstanding Behavior from from our citizens. It's a great testimony for the city.

Yeah, thanks for sharing that Thanks for that reminder councilman Grendel.

There's a question on the comp plan So if you fill out the survey, do we know if they're from Apple Valley? But anybody be telling us what they want to do in our city. I

The actual survey itself is available. Let me just look quickly at what do you like most about Apple Valley? What are your biggest concerns about Apple Valley? How easy is it to find housing that suits your needs? What matters most to you in the neighborhood? Then there's a section about transportation, business opportunity, economic opportunities. What amenities would you like to see? How do you define quality of life, community goals? Anything else you would like to share for Apple Valley in its future? So there is not specifically a question on where do you live.

CHRISTIE WOODARD- Anybody could be telling us what they want to do. So go ahead, Bo.

BOARD MEMBER BENNETT- Same goes for any of the public meetings we do. We don't ID at the door, those kind of things.

CHRISTIE WOODARD- Of course, I always put more weight on people who live here.

BOARD MEMBER BENNETT- Absolutely.

Any other staff items, Tom? Council members, any other items?

All right, with that, we'll move on to our calendar of events.

And just a reminder that city offices will be closed on Monday, September 7th in observance of the Labor Day holiday. Our next informal city council meeting is Thursday, September 10th at 5.30. And our next regular city council meeting is Thursday, September 10th at 7 p.m. And do we have a motion to approve the calendar? Motion from Council Member Grendel, second from Council Member Bergman. All those in favor indicate by saying aye.

Aye.

Opposed? Do we have a motion to adjourn?

So moved.

Council Member Hebert, do we have a second? From Council Member Millander, we are going home whether we get a second or not. All those in favor indicate by saying aye.

Aye.

And opposed? All right, we will stand adjourned, thank you.