City Council - workshop

the bms and the little bike jump show on her was fantastic it's so we did not make it down there for that but we saw them when they were in cologne so my kids having

All right. It is 530 on this 21st night of September. I've been wanting to use that all day. All right. Good evening. We're here to call the work session to order. First is we are going to talk about the emergency operations plan discussion with a whole bunch of people, including Chief Walsh, Mr. Simmons, Mr. Merrick, and... You serve I'm sorry I haven't met and your name isn't on the agenda. So I'm not good at guessing.

I'll introduce and counsel. So, part of our strategic plan, or the console strategic plan was to look at your emergency operations planning. As, you know, we have 2 large kind of binders that we work in collaboration with Carver county emergency management and have adopted their plan. And we have. All the plans kind of in place, so to speak, but working to develop more of a cliff notes version, if you will, of the city's emergency operation kind of action plan. And so kind of heading that work on our staff side is chief Walsh and Andrew Simmons ahead of public services related to utilities infrastructure. et cetera. We did then contract with Rick Larkin with Beacon Safety Services to help us lead that work. I'll let Rick go over his background, but has a wealth of knowledge and experience related to emergency management. So tonight, what we're here to do is provide you a little bit of a summary of the work that we've been working on for the last year or so, but then also to perform a little bit of an exercise and to be able to ask questions Rick questions related to city councils or elected officials roles in emergency management or just really any questions that you have about kind of the city's response in general. The hope is really to if Andrew Tim and I were no longer here. Uh, or available someone could look at a, you know, instead of a huge binder, look at a list, you know, maybe 5 to 10 pages and say, okay, this is what I need to do and hear other people and hear what their roles are and to put essentially put us all on the same page. So, with that, Rick, take it over.

Thank you, Brent, uh, mayor, council members, um, as Brent said, my name is Rick Larkin and I, uh. Work primarily as a consultant in emergency management in the twin cities area. Although I do have relationships nationwide and internationally actually, but. Primarily, I work in the area of advising local governments in emergency management. I've got about 40 years in emergency services, starting out as a paramedic back in the 1980s, or as my kids like to remind me, the before times. So I've been in this area quite a long time. That career evolved to emergency management, which is really a discipline in itself. by bringing together all of the elements of public safety into that one planning and coordination umbrella, if you will. So I was the Emergency Management Director for the City of St. Paul during 2008 to 2018. Worked with Mayor Chris Coleman over there and three deputy mayors. That was a quite an experience really grateful for having had that experience, but had a chance to work quite closely with state local regional governments, the federal government as well on all kinds of different things. Um. My career, though, in emergency management started in the city of Burnsville, in the Burnsville Fire Department. So I was a paramedic firefighter for the city of Burnsville and enjoyed some really great opportunities for training there and was able to pursue the emergency management So my experience spans all the way from the small suburb to the big city here in the state of Minnesota. I learn something every day by working with different levels of government. Work with colleges and universities as well as private sector entities as well. So appreciate the opportunity to work with your city folks. You have some tremendous, tremendous resources here in your own city. I'll point out my friend. Tim has been in the business quite a long time. unfortunately not longer than me so i can't really tease him about being old he teases me but you you in all seriousness have some great some great uh resources my role as i see this was to be kind of the the planning um The planning instrument, if you will, to help discover in the city, how your city staff and community would respond to a major emergency or a disruptive event. And when we talk about. disasters you know those are few and far between thankfully but it seems as though disruptive events like water issues not in this city water main issues cyber security issues civil disorder, protests, those kinds of things are actually happening on a weekly basis. So one of the encouragements is to look at your emergency plan not as something that's kind of kept under wraps and set off to the side in case of the big one. We seem to have a lot of small ones every week. And I would really encourage the city to start incorporating those emergency management principles into how you're doing your work now. Again, you have some great staff that are very willing to adopt those principles. And I think you're at a point where this infrastructure that you're building meaning the resources and capability of staff to respond to these events in a coordinated fashion i think you're you're right at the cusp and i think the plan is the first step in doing that so um we'll talk in a second about the plan um but i would also say that Unlike my Vikings that I was yelling at the other day, it seems as though practicing of the plan is kind of the key, right? We have to have what I call that muscle memory, because as soon as that emergency or disruptive event occurs, Um, it seems that we kind of lose some of that memory and what was that training about that we went to 3 years ago. So, by incorporating that into your more day to day practices, it becomes more of a 2nd nature. So, in addition to planning, I would say practicing the plan and training on the plan as well. So, training staff, training folks with specific roles on staff in some of these principles. The state of Minnesota offers wonderful training opportunities for emergency management training and things like disaster finance, which is Not necessarily something that, you know, is kind of covered in in the standard financial operating classes, treasurer's classes, those kind of things. But there are some programs that are going to make a big difference down the line to the financial health of the city. Um, so that's that's another encouragement, I guess, is starting with the plan, but don't let that be the ending. Um, go ahead and continue on with the training for staff as well as, um, practicing opportunities. So, um, my understanding is that you all have the slides that that were provided to the city manager. So, um. The general approach here would be to just talk about the overview of emergency management. Not real exciting stuff. So I won't spend a lot of time there, but then talk specifically about about the plan that we've been working on since was about January or so. I think is when we finally came together on the. On the project, and that's been a lot of great back and forth with staff looking at. Really understanding how they see themselves doing their. Particular role in an emergency or a major disruption where we're not asking staff to be something that they're not. We're asking them to do the jobs that you have them in, you know, finance people being finance people, building inspections, doing building inspections, but within the context of the emergency that's happening. So, again, thankfully, they're not happening all the time. So, uh, we don't have a lot of chance to experience that. But really exploring with staff, you know, what their priorities would be in order to fulfill that function in a disaster emergency. And then, as the city manager mentioned, really focusing on the checklist version. I've never been a big plan or excuse me a big fan of what I call planning by the pound. And that's how you get that good 5 inch binder and in the counties and the city's defense. The reason those things turn into 5 inch binders is because somebody somewhere decides there's a good idea of something that must be included in the plan. So there is a federal law, for instance, that requires companion animal sheltering. So, local emergency managers have to have a plan for companion animal shelter. And that's a federal law proposed by representative Jim overstar from our great state. So there's all these requirements that are put on the county's plate that must be addressed. And unfortunately. Sometimes we lose the main focus, which is assembling county and city forces and the community to respond to this bad day. And I end up being mostly this collection of requirements that folks end up making sure that they don't miss something and they put it in the plan. It becomes a 5 inch binder. Which, when you have a city manager who wants to know what they're supposed to do. Doesn't really find a lot of guidance in there a lot of program language, a lot of requirements, which is good, right? Because we all want to make sure we're following the rules and. Meeting the requirements, so we get that reimbursement, but it doesn't provide a lot of practical guidance. So that was very loud and clear from from your staff that we really wanted a practical approach to this. I can give you the references for all the programs, all the law numbers, all of that stuff. We can find that. For you, but really what to do in those initial stabilizing hours, 2 days of a major emergency that impacts the community. That's what we're we were focused on. Um, and then, lastly, as the city manager mentioned, we'll talk a little bit about the, about the, uh, council's role, uh, important role, frankly, critical role, uh, both in getting things started as well as, um, moving moving forward. So can I have the next slide please? Thank you. So, by definition again, what would emergency management be without a FEMA definition, but FEMA looks at a structured organizational framework and system of plans to protect communities. So that's from. Both natural disasters and human caused disasters, and those can include things like intentional disasters that are forced upon communities, attacks, sabotage, those type of things, or human caused accidents. When I was in the fire service, we would say that the three top causes of fires were men, women, and children, and usually in that order. We look at things that occur naturally, the tornadoes, the floods, and those kind of things, but also these human-caused events that are both accidental and intentional. You're reading in the news lately about artificial intelligence potentially becoming a horizon issue. It's interesting to note that while FEMA talks about a framework and a system that the state of Minnesota looks at emergency management quite differently. Emergency management considered in the state of Minnesota means the preparation for and carrying out of emergency functions. And then things that are not primarily the military forces. So that goes back to our civil defense days and back in the nuclear war threat. When I was growing up as a kid, we talked about duck and cover drills in schools and we had fallout shelters. And when I was the director in St. Paul, one of the things that was interesting is we went out to those fallout shelters to see if we could discover any of those kits that were placed in the fallout shelters. There were actual kits of supplies, food and water and medicine, believe it or not, real medicine. So we tried to go to those churches and things to see if we could locate some. We actually did locate a couple at the colleges and universities, and they displayed them as historical events. So quite an interesting event. difference between FEMA looks at a system across the country, and then the state of Minnesota looks at a functional set of activities, really. Sheltering, evacuation, notification and warning, mass care and human services. So about 15 different functional areas that the state of Minnesota looks at for us. Interestingly enough, they don't provide us a lot of guidance in terms of how we have to plan. There are some requirements, which thankfully you don't have to live under because emergency management in the state of Minnesota is functionally stops at the counties and the large cities of the first class. So, as many programs that you deal with deal with the county level, not necessarily the local level where things actually happen is that these functional areas and these requirements are administered by the state to the county level again. That's why you have the 5 inch binder, but it doesn't provide you a lot of local. Um, guidance, the good news is in that is that gives you a lot of freedom and it's been very. Very good for us to sit down and go through with the staff. Let's just talk about a bad day. Um, and say, you know, we have a tornado that comes through impacting X number of homes and X amount of infrastructure. What are your priorities? What are your concerns? What are your top tasks that you're going to look at carrying out? And then the plan is becoming that sort of I don't want to say cheat sheet because this is right at. Uh, the top of mind for folks, but it's, it's more of a of a memory jogger for them. It's written going to be written in a checklist format. So, um, and when I say going to be written, it's. 99% done this week, we're actually going to be working with staff on a, uh, tabletop exercise and going through. kind of the draft of the plan to make sure we have it exactly right before it comes back to you all for your consideration and adoption so it's written in a checklist format we don't prescribe every single event that they have to consider what we're describing is every major function As I had mentioned, the state of Minnesota looks at functions, but also we look at the system of your city government and what are you going to have to, uh, maybe work with the county on law enforcement. It's a perfect example. Um, we rely on the sheriff's office for the law enforcement for the community. So, that's a mutual aid type situation, whereas the fire service, you have the fire department right here in the city. So that's something that you own and operate as a city, looking at all of these different functional areas and how will we organize. Um, according to, uh, department, according to functional area, such as a human services area versus infrastructure and, um, public works that kind of thing. So, um, I want to point out another definition here and I think. I'm a little bit biased because I was involved in this program for about 14 years as a volunteer. There is an accreditation program out there for emergency management in the public sector, much like there is for parks and public works and public health, different accreditation. And it's interesting to me that the accreditation program for emergency management views the emergency management program for a jurisdiction as a system. That provides for management and coordination of prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. So that full cycle of emergency management is viewed as a system. And the way that applies to you all here is that the emergency management program for the city of Carver is much more than just the department or departments that are tasked with carrying it out. Really the emergency management program, if you can kind of view it as a jurisdiction wide or an enterprise wide program. Um, that is that is directly responsible. It's a key element of the public safety. is how you organize and react to disaster events. It's not just the fire department's capability. It's not just public services capability. It's really the whole enterprise of the city government, including the finance section. So that's a challenge I might lay down is as you think about the emergency plan and it's very kind of tactical, but I challenge you to think about that from a system point of view and how that this system of preparedness response and recovery really applies to the entire city organization and the emergency management program. Even though the fire chief is designated as the emergency management director. It's really a management program for the entire jurisdiction, not just fire department. Emergency management in Minnesota, as I mentioned, is recognized and carried out at the county level. So 87 counties, 11 tribal nations, four cities of the first class, and then some what they consider special jurisdiction, excuse me, special jurisdictions, such as the University of Minnesota system, such as the Metropolitan Airports Commission, they have an emergency management program. But essentially there's 87 counties Counties that they are concerned about, so their programs are directed to the county levels. Their role is to support the counties in emergency management. There are 6 regions throughout the state, or the largest in the metro region, uh, region 6, and, uh, all of the, um. Interesting, you'll not be surprised by this. I'm sure but. the regions for the Minnesota Department of Public Safety do not copy the same regions as the Minnesota Department of Health. So Minnesota Department of Health has a metro region. Minnesota Department of Public Safety has a metro region. Those two are not the same region. So when we talk about the 10-county metro area, that's basically what the Department of Public Safety region metro region is. So they deliver programs at the metro region as well. The state of Minnesota has a disaster assistance program For after the fact, um, so how the, how the federal public assistance works is that there is a. Damage threshold, and it's about 2 dollars per capita statewide. That is uninsured. Non reimbursed property damage so. Roads and bridges. Any kind of public infrastructure to the community center, the recreation center, those kind of things, um, because they're self insured. Um, those would be counted against that per capita disaster. So you have to have about, uh, 11Million statewide. And then there is also in the federal law per county indicator, which is just under 5 dollars. So, uh, for Carver, that would be about 500,000. Or so, um, so. We're talking about not a lot that gets us to that threshold, but you have to meet both thresholds quite often. An isolated disaster will reach the county threshold, but it's not going to reach the 11Million at the state. So therefore the governor doesn't apply to the president. I will say that there has been lots of news recently, and I say recently, I mean about the last two years or so, that the current federal administration is not following a strict eligibility threshold, that there are multiple other unknown criteria that are being applied. Um, and there that, I mean, that is just a reality, uh, in, in the current state. So states that have definitely met the threshold exceeded it both county wide as well as statewide. Um, you know, Congress wanted to make it easy for. federal assistance to come to the states. That was kind of one thing that just about every senator is going to agree on, that when it's their turn, they sure would like it to be easy for their state to receive assistance. So basically, they put those thresholds in there. They gave FEMA a lot of guidance about types of disasters. But when you meet the threshold, you should be eligible for disaster assistance. Unfortunately, that's not happening right now. We'll see how this next round goes. Usually in the fall, we see a couple of hurricanes make landfall and that'll be an interesting telling point. The state of Minnesota has put forward a disaster assistance program that meets 50% of the FEMA eligibility. So there was a lot of disasters in the early 2000s that were sub-threshold disasters from a financial point of view. Counties and local jurisdictions were really impacted in a big way, but. They didn't meet the thresholds and so there wasn't a lot of assistance going to be coming their way. And so, uh, the. Different associations of Minnesota counties, League of Minnesota cities, um, the. Association of Minnesota emergency managers, uh, worked on that legislation and they passed a state law to create a disaster fund. Basically, it's. The same criteria as the federal government, and it's 50% of the thresholds. So, um. For a countywide indicator, we're at about $270,000 countywide to be eligible for the State of Minnesota Disaster Assistance Program. As a local jurisdiction, Carver is a eligible applicant, but as I mentioned, all of the state recognition stops at the county level, so it would have to be that amount of damage in Carver County for Carver County to be eligible and then all jurisdictions and nonprofit entities within Carver County would be eligible for that state assistance program. Relative to the plan itself and the project itself, we're kind of coming in towards the tail end here. On the left hand side, you'll see the deliverables that were part of the project plan. Again, we met quite a bit with staff, went over any current plans that they had, previous plans that we could locate, kind of reviewed those, make sure there was elements in there that they liked and wanted to keep in the current plan. We captured all of that. The city manager provided a list of the stakeholders and the different folks responsible for functions throughout the city government. We met with the county, we met with the sheriff's office, we met with the dispatch center, because they provide your warning and notification for the community. They provide the reverse 911 type things. They provide the law enforcement. So those kinds of things we want to make sure that even though that's not being provided directly by the city, we're talking to the folks that are. And then back and forth with drafts and those kind of things that I mentioned, we're finalizing that where Thursday of this week, we'll have our exercise and we'll go through and we'll actually walk through several different scenarios with with folks and making sure that we've captured in the plan. what we want to have happen. I always say, you know, plan for two things. One, people that wrote the plan are not going to be available when the disaster happens. So the person that knows all that, oh, Tim knows all that stuff. Well, Tim's at the Fire Chiefs Conference, so Tim's not here. Second thing is make sure that you're ready at, you know, 8 o'clock on a Sunday evening, right? That seems to be when those kind of things start to happen. So it's not when everybody's in the office necessarily, or everybody can quickly assemble and address the problem. Usually it's at the worst time and folks are unavailable. So again, we're not planning every single thing and every single step. We're planning for those broad strokes to allow flexibility of staff to meet the actual conditions. And then so the final steps for adoption and of course this this would be subject to your adoption process So from a general point of view is to have us conduct that final review with the staff Validating those plans using different scenarios and talking our way through that making sure we've got this and And I'll say it's not an adoption and then done. It's really a very big project that you've undertaken. But the idea is to continuously. Revise this document and revise these plans and not just set them on the shelf and. And wait until the big 1 occurs, but actually use them for planned events, for instance, and then through the city manager and city attorney, just making sure that we do all the steps necessary to adopt it as an official document of the city. So, when you declare an emergency locally, you're taking an official act. So, when the mayor is able to declare an emergency, and then when the governing body either extends that emergency, or perhaps the timing is where. The governing body just adopts a declaration of local emergency. You do that under the Minnesota statutes that apply. So we just want to make sure that what we've written into the emergency plan reflects what the proper authorities and responsibilities are under state law. And then, however, you're going to present that, you know, it could be a consent agenda item. It could be another discussion, whatever your process for adopting those. The last thing I have is a brief discussion about the city council role in emergencies, which is sort of a I think a little bit laughable because you're pretty much involved. It's not a special role. You're there the whole time. So it's not something that you just come in and out of. You kind of own it from start to finish. But specifically, we're talking about the declaration of local emergency. And then during a disaster or emergency, what kinds of things typically do we see with local governing bodies? The first thing is in Minnesota state law, the declaration of a local emergency. That responsibility belongs solely to the mayor of a jurisdiction or in the mayor's absence, the legal successor to the mayor's office. So I don't know if you have acting mayors or temporary mayors or things like that. So the legal successor to the mayor's office. The U.S. Conference of Mayors or something like that. I'm just sending people all over the country here.

I'd like to have your budget.

It's easy when you're a consultant. You don't have to pay for it.

We'll charge it back.

Let's say, oh, I didn't want to have the mayor get injured by the event. So the mayor's out of town. Um, unavailable, uh, so then the, the person that fulfills that legal obligation that that duty falls to that person. Under state law, that's, um, that can only be for, uh, 3 days. Um. Days versus hours, the law says 3 days. So, um, I think, you know, if you declare it on at noon, I don't know if that buys you an extra half a day or on the 3rd day, you know, you lost 12 hours. I don't know, but it's 3 days. Um, then it has to be acted upon by the governing body and that's either. Um, to. Extend it typically for 30 days at a time, or to rescind it. You can rescind it by non action. So, in other words, maybe it's a smaller type event. The mayor declares an emergency, and that allows city forces to take emergency actions and. It gets resolved within that 3 day period. No need to extend it. Um, you've incurred all the expenses under the 3 day period. You're not going to incur other expenses that can't be acted upon in a regular fashion. So you don't need the extra. 30 days, let's just expires on and it just expires at the end of that 3 day period. Um, or the other would be to, uh, ratify it and extend it. A lot of that depends on the politics and the, um, relationship of the city council with the mayor. Again, I deal with folks from all over the place and I wrote an emergency declaration for a major major event that you would be very familiar with where the city council did not want to allow the mayor to have that authority. For 30 days. And it was based upon a misunderstanding of the state statute. And I said, well, number 1, you're not giving that mayor carte blanche to do anything. Any special regulations, any emergency regulations. Are going to be adopted by the governing body. But in an emergency fashion, so. They can put forward an emergency regulation. Parking restrictions, let's say. Uh, snow emergency is actually a perfect example of the authorities here. So they say no parking on 1 side of the street. Okay. The city council doesn't agree with that. So they come in and they say, no, we're not going to allow that to continue. Okay. So they either create an ordinance that goes against that, or they just allow it to expire. So they thought they were somehow handing the keys over to the mayor to run carte blanche and do whatever they wanted during that 30 day period. That is not the case. Governance still applies. There are still breaks on the system. It's just that everything is done on an emergency basis, such as contracting. That's the biggest 1. if Andrew needs to hire a number of contractors to make emergency repairs. He can do that based upon the emergency declaration. You don't have to wait 30 days or six weeks to get a contract and an RFP back.

For that, can the mayor then just say, go ahead, Andrew, or does that have to come through the governing body? That's what the declaration means. That still doesn't... So that means that then for three days, Courtney can authorize anything on her own without the governing body? I'm just going to throw this out. He... The river happened, we need a new front end loader right now because our other one fell in it, right? So we need to buy something right now. And not that they make them that fast, but we're going out to the lot, we're going to buy it. So Courtney can say, Andrew, go spend $500,000, whatever it costs. And that's fine without the governing body saying... I can answer that.

I think the city that Rick is referencing has a different form of government than we do. So... In our instance, all America, not all American, but they're limited in declaring the emergency and in our purchasing policy, the city manager can authorize a purchase that exceeds a certain level and then brings a report back to the console at the next meeting date for ratification. But there's. There's no, uh, authority for the mayor or any council member to ever make any purchases for the city or on behalf of the city or say, Andrew go go buy it.

Okay.

The way the way I would describe it is that there are no inherent authorities that are granted. From the declaration of an emergency that is not already there. In your governing body, in other words, sorry for the confusion that I introduced this was a week mayor. City administrator, so the city administrator runs the city. On a daily basis, the mayor was declaring the emergency to allow the city administrator and the departments to do what they needed to do in response to the, to the event. The concern came from as the person thought that that was giving the mayor. Inherent authorities that they didn't have. No, there's no authority there once you declare an emergency that you didn't have before. So the purchasing policy and the restrictions, according to how you do your governing is still in place. They can do some things. Um, that frankly wouldn't wouldn't stand the mustard. You know, we've been trying to get this fire truck for a long time. And now we're going to declare an emergency tool. Somehow get this firetruck because the council is against me. So now all of a sudden you introduce something that you know it would never stand up. It has to be related to the disaster and it has to be consistent with the governing bodies.

It just shortens the red tape time.

It really does. In the state law, it starts the process of authorizing city officials to provide emergency assistance. That's your litmus test and that's what the test is going to be coming back is. You know, no, we didn't need that fire truck. You just use that as a circumvention to get what you want. But we did need that front end loader because we had 1 get destroyed by a falling tree or something like that. And we couldn't provide emergency assistance without taking that step. But there still is the accountability down the line as well as. When you're going to apply for federal or state assistance, there needs to be justifications for them. Why did you make a decision to go with ABC contracting to do debris removal versus XYZ contracting? well because we had a pre-existing contract with them and their rates were certified previous year you know all of those things are still going to apply to the purchasing it's just that you can eliminate most of the things that are time consuming in that process so To me, the next level is probably the more important aspect of a local governing body, is the strategic oversight and policy level guidance. What do I mean by that? I'll give a great example. I lived this as well. Had a very severe back to back set of windstorms straight line winds and took took about every other roof off of every neighborhood in the city. The city council said we will go ahead and enter private property for debris and we will take storm related debris. Now, the definition of storm-related debris got a little bit looser with time, but, you know, if your roof section is laying there, your deck is laying there, you got tree branches, just pile it up. We will enter one time, and then we're going to take it away. Well, they weren't very clear about the 1 time, so people that waited and waited to see what the city was going to do didn't have their debris piled up. They were going to try and figure out insurance all of these different aspects. Went through once cleaned it up. Um, good to go. Then there was kind of an uprising that, hey, we were waiting for our insurance company. You told us to wait to the city council made a decision. You didn't publicize it very well. So they decided the city council decided those are legitimate concerns and they would then go neighborhood by neighborhood on different days. You know, similar to how most of us are doing trash pickup now. So, you know, we'll be in this area of the city during this time period, have your debris piled up and sorted. So they made those policy decisions kind of on the fly based upon good intentions. But maybe not well executed on the staff part. So they went back and needed to make the right decision based upon community conditions. And that's always, I think. The purview of the City Council, of course, is to be in touch with the community and find out what those needs are and directing the city resources for that public emergency assistance as a result of this event. So that's one example. Another example would be from a financial point of view. Same set of storms and the city Council felt as though that folks had been through a lot. It was a little bumpy at the beginning. So they wanted to ease the burden on homeowners. And what they did is they passed a minimum permit fee. So any building permit got a storm damage category. Storm damage. Pay your $25 minimum and you got a storm damage permit for your home. Well, I mentioned that about every other house lost a roof. Every other house needed to be inspected. Only had two inspectors. So it tripled, quadrupled their workload. Now, 1 of the ways that we use those permits is to pay for the labor, obviously, to run the inspections program by charging a minimum. It was a kind thing to do, but it didn't take into account the amount of workload the current staffing had to deal with. So they tripled quadrupled their workload and took away the revenue source to increase their capacity to inspect those homes. It turns out that your homeowner's insurance is going to cover the permit fees anyway. So, we could have kind of made an adjustment to lighten the burden in other areas that we didn't think that way all the way through. We thought it was the right thing to do. But a little short sighted 4 months later, when people finally got a roofing contractor, and we're able to finally get their roof replaced. we had to hire temporary employees for inspectors without that revenue source. So that was, thankfully, through some good work by their emergency manager, they were able to get those expenses reimbursed another way, but it would have been a much cleaner way, and the records would have been clearer rather than storm damage being, could have been a deck, could have been a tree through the house, it could have been just a new roof, could have been new siding, We don't know what the storm damage was from that storm and what happened in the history of that property. So, kind of some lessons learned there. And then, of course, the potential relief mechanisms and recovery strategies. These events, the response is very short. Um, but the recovery is. Sometimes years long, so the decisions that you all make as a governing body in that moment have those lasting impacts for the recovery of the community. And there might be opportunities. In the recovery piece, there may be a strategy involved about, you know. What percentage of damage do you have to have before you're going to require folks to build up to current code? There are provisions in the code already for that, but maybe there are wind resistant items, or maybe there's some flood areas that now you're going to have to take action because this particular event occurred those policy decisions. End up taking up a big portion of, uh, governing bodies time and. Really, I think that's the unique role that this council plays obviously is to provide the strategic and policy guidance. Direction for for the community, um. We've got great staff that can carry it out, but really that policy guidance following a disaster. People want to donate money. Well, there's not a lot of mechanisms typically for donating money to the governing body. So. What about a foundation? What about the chamber of commerce? What about all these great community groups? But then does the city have a voice on that in terms of those funds being designated for recovery? How are those operating principles of those programs? Those are always very, very complex issues that that really, uh, council, uh. Need to be need to be engaged with, I think, at least. Based on what I've seen over the last 27 years, those are the more, um. Time consuming discussions, I think that that happened is what happens to those funds?

How are we distributing them? Is it equitable?

With that, Mr manager, I would. Stand for any further questions any questions we gave you the whole version. Sorry.

I have one question. So what is the mechanism? I mean, it's not noted here, obviously. This is the Cliff Notes version. For council notification of the declaration. So once Courtney does it, when does council come into play that we find out?

Probably send you an email or text even before it's declared. We've done this for flood events and stuff like that. Yeah. We'll send a note out and say the mayor is coming in to sign a declaration. We have an emergency meeting scheduled for Friday at 3.

So you do that because you're Brett Merrick, right? What if it's not Brett Merrick sitting there? Is it written in Somewhere in here that that, you know, the council is notified.

Either before immediately upon that it'll be in the checklist that Rick's preparing. Okay.

The, uh, the state law says filed in a timely fashion. I DON'T KNOW THAT ANYBODY HAS EVER REALLY DEFINED WHAT THAT MEANS.

SO LESS THAN THREE DAYS?

YEAH. WHEN I WAS IN THE CITY OF ST. PAUL, I'M AN IRISH LAD, SO MARCH 17TH, CITY OF ST. PAUL, PRETTY BIG DAY FOR ME AND MAYOR COLEMAN. Every year seemed like for a five-year stretch is when we got it spring floods and it was March 17 so I would tell him a week in advance that based upon the the predictions that Wednesday was gonna be the day because He could just sign it in the morning and the City Council had a regular meeting in the afternoon on Wednesdays and so they would just come in i mean it was something we've done for a hundred and some years the river flooding in st paul it wouldn't screw up our parade that way it wouldn't mess up so on the no notice events it's really just a matter of as quickly as you can because you want the council to be taking action as well on other events that would come up so the mayor does get that three days but most mayors that i've worked with even even the one that they didn't particularly care for, they don't really even want those three days. They want their counsel to be involved in these decisions because, frankly, that helps them own those decisions. You made that decision on your own. It's a lonely place to be after a disaster.

And you guys know how savvy Brent is. When we've had those conversations of like, okay, now's the time to sign the declaration, the conversation generally is you sign it today, We'll have the meeting on Thursday, the next day, or, you know, whatever, and I've let council know, or we can't have it until Friday because Christie's got a conflict tomorrow morning or, you know, whatever. And, like, I think Brent does a really good job of keeping us on the road.

It is in the city manager's checklist is notified.

Yeah, Eric.

Yeah, I do have a couple of questions, Rick. So I know you said you didn't want to create a five-pound book of responses, but I am curious, what kind of exigent events did you cover? Did you set up or are you setting up a plan for the things we think about, like the river flooding or a tornado taking out water towers and we lose water pressure? Or things that we just aren't prepared to ever think about, like a mass casualty event and what descends on the city when something like that happens? What kind of situations have you discussed with city staff? What did you cover?

Uh, great question. Mayor counsel, um, sort of tell the joke, you know, that I'm in the bad day business, right? So, um, everybody thinks all the good things about the city of Carver and you hired me to think about all the bad things that could happen to the city of Carver. Uh, we really have covered that gamut. So there is in your county emergency plan, a section called the hazard identification or risk analysis. As well, as in the county required mitigation plan, there's a number of hazards listed there. So, by percentage, by likelihood of occurrence by historical, we know we're going to have flooding in the city. We know we're going to have spring and summer storms. So. The others that we go to are those human caused events, mass casualty events, the. Transportation accidents, whether it's a tanker truck. Or it's a busload of folks taking a detour to 1 of the local casinos or something like that, where you have a special population that is in a bus accident. And now they have a mass casualty incident. So we've addressed mass casualty incidents. You have a chemical and hazardous materials issue within the county. And and your surrounding environment, and we don't just look, you know, stop at the city borders. We really look at the transportation system and what's involved. In your neighborhood, so to speak, uh, that can impact you. Um, all of those elements are are in that, uh, section.

Okay. And that's at the county level though, not the city level.

Sorry, that's where we started is at the county level to get those, um, identified hazards. But then we look at, um. At the city level infrastructure failures. You mentioned a water tower, uh, you know, large scale power outage from an ice storm, for instance, um, those kinds of things you mentioned mass casualty that's in there as well.

Uh, Christie mentioned, you know, what happens if Brent isn't there? And I worry about that too, because, you know, we, we rely a lot on, uh, the guy sitting to the right of you. Uh, But how about a communications plan? Do we have, you know, the time to do it's now, right? Have some kind of pre-assigned contact list. You do that in public safety, you have operational groups. Do we have any kind of pre-assigned communication groups, you know, that we're going to push out to city staff so people know who to get a hold of, right? And how we don't want to rely on Facebook Messenger. We want to rely on something that everyone has access to. That's one question. And then in communication strategy, and I know this is, I'm thinking a little more serious type of events, but does anybody, do we think about priority preemption? Because if it's a big deal event, do we give anybody at the city those kind of tools so they can talk to each other? So that's the communication question. And then kind of attached to that is how do you deal with the media? So something big and bad happens. Yeah. You know, we've got some people that have a little experience with that, but the rest of us might not. And, you know, we don't want to make a situation worse by saying something we shouldn't.

I'll I'll go ahead and talk about some of these. I don't know if the city manager would have, um, others. Other answers, but 1 of the things that we encourage all staff, um, to have in place is what we call a 3 deep. So, who's up 1st, you know, the fire chief is is the head of the department, but if the fire chief gets hit by the meteor. Now, who steps into that role in their absence? Um, and then we try and encourage that to go 3 deep. Um. The other reason for that is. Folks are not able to continue to operate for 24 hours at a time. So, who is going to take the reins? After the 1st, 24 hour period, when the city manager has been in attendance and engaged and involved for the full 24 hours, we need to get. From a health and safety standpoint, as well as a good decision making standpoint to be off and get some rest to come back and tackle the next operational period. So that's. That's 1 aspect that we encourage the departments to do at the department level of 3 deep planning. Um, we do have the capability, uh, and we would have to do this probably through the chief, uh, to go to the county and obtain, uh, those wireless priority. Um, cards, they're called the, uh, gets cards, uh, government emergency telecommunications services, which does allow you to call into a special number and actually, but in line of. Everybody else on on wireless communication. Honestly, the, the, the difficulty in that is there are so many folks that have wireless priority. Um, is that you've. You've bought into a very long line already, so you might be. Better off than budding in line with the rest of the community. But now you've butted into a line that's extremely long of people who have wireless priority service. So definitely is a possibility and you can do that. It's a very easy thing to do. They give you a card. It's like a credit card with a special phone number on the back. That number is assigned to you When you make a call you just call that number and it prompts you for your special number and then it Buds you into the telecommunication system Another aspect would be the first net program First net is a federal program for responders and certain government officials that in an emergency you're on a network that's a different network than everybody else is so i do not have first net because i'm no longer affiliated with a government entity so everybody that i work with at the minnesota state fair is on the first first net network i'm not So, we sit next to each other and a text will come to them and 30 minutes later, it'll come to me. So it definitely works. Um, it's a different. Kind of bandwidth for the 1st net, um, and government officials are eligible for that. Not just limited to strictly the. The standard public safety folks that, um, we think of. So, if you have a city issued phone, that might be worth checking with your provider on the 1st net. Um, and then you mentioned the media council member, um. The media. Uh, is our friend and sometimes also creates obstacles for us if they don't necessarily get our messaging correct or speculate. Um, when I teach about the media, I, uh. Like to say, if we don't feed them, they'll forage. And so it's our job, really, to feed the media the story that we want. And I try and keep things in groups of three. When it comes to crisis, I'm typically very, very clear. We don't put a lot of spin on things, or I recommend you don't put a lot of spin on marketing things. Uh, lens on it, it's really a very matter of fact and crisis communications and it's what has happened. So we've had a tornado strike the city of Carver what we're doing about it. Uh. Fire department has issued an all call. They're out in the neighborhoods assessing checking for down wires, checking for damages. Our public services people are assessing our infrastructure. And then the 3rd thing is what we want them to do about it. And that's the part of the message. A lot of times that gets lost. We talk about what happened and we talk about maybe what we're doing about it, but we always want to leave them with what we want you to do about it. We're asking the public not to come and look because it gets in the way of the firefighters doing damage assessment or there are wires down, so there are safety hazards. Or we ask people to check their gas meters or whatever the situation is that we're trying to get them to do something. And then we always end with, when is our next update? And we need to honor that. So when we talk about updating the public, it's really through the media. If we say we're going to update the public every 15 minutes, we better do that because confidence can start to erode and 15 minutes in a crisis goes by in a lightning-full manner. So the time period I don't think under 30 minutes is realistic, frankly, and 30 minutes seems like a long time in a crisis mode, but it goes very quickly and you're constantly having to have somebody paying attention to what those messages are going to be. In the crisis phase, I will really tell people to just continue to go back to that cycle. What we're doing about it, excuse me, what happened, what we're doing about it, and what we're asking you to do about it. 30 minutes later, what's happened? Hey, in the last 30 minutes, the fire department has completed their emergency damage assessment. Now they're going to be going back and looking for Gas leads, but we know we don't have people that need rescue or, you know, making something up that could happen in 30 minutes. Um, so you're giving that update of what happened. Here's what we're doing about it. So building confidence and. Community that we are acting on this information and then what we need you to do about it again, stay out of the area. Um, you know. Uh, report down wires, uh, use the city's website or utility outages, or, you know, those kinds of things I think are. In that crisis phase that rinse and repeat on a timely basis is the most important thing that you can do.

So, I think, um, what council member person might have been asking is, will that information. Be in the plan, the communications plan aspect of it, the, these are the 3 things we do so that if somebody picks it up, let's assume that we're all here. Nobody's on vacation that week that the, I always love you always use the example of the 2 headed billy goat. So, when the 2 headed billy goat escapes at Carver, because that's not as dark right of an example. Um. But we've got all kinds of local national and international media attention that's come down on Carver. Is that communications plan of this is who goes on record? You know, first choice, second choice, third choice. This is, you know, where we meet. This is who shares information with council. Is that in the plan?

Currently, I believe we have it as the city managers that designate spokesperson.

Yes, I understand that. My question is, this will be included in the plan. Okay, cool.

Thank you.

Okay, great. Eric, did that help? Do you have any additional questions? Oh, you're on mute. Eric, you're on mute.

Sorry. Thanks. I wanted to be sure that we had a pre-built communication plan and strategy for exactly dealing with the two-head ability goals. Thank you. Okay.

Got it. Any other follow-up questions? Nope. Okay. Thank you. That was a lot, but that was great. That was a lot.

Now that you've drunk from a fire hose, right? Exactly. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. I give you all a lot of credit, whoever decided that needs to be in the strategic plan. An old emergency manager like me, you know, just warms my heart to see the governing body recognize the importance of that. So I applaud you for that. Um, there's not a lot of jurisdictions that are intentional about it. It sort of just happens to them. And, uh, I give you a lot of credit for being proactive in that regard.

Thank you. That was something we decided we do our strategic plan every other year. That was close to 2 years ago and I'm glad that we're getting that wrapped up. So thank you. Okay, city managers report.

Thank you. Mayor and council. I'm working on sharing the screen here. So, if you just give me a 2nd. Thank you. All right, thank you. A couple of things to share with the council were notified last week, and they put out a Facebook post today. The city of Chaska and cooperation with Carver County will be doing some construction work on. County road 61, otherwise known as Chaska Boulevard. So that'll be closed. The closure is expected to last for 6 weeks. So that also corresponds to Spring Creek Drive being down, so Big Woods Boulevard or County Road 44 is the detour. We're expecting to be in a position where the council could award bids for the levy project at your meeting on the 5th. The Planning Commission also reviewed the site plan for the district's A school district transportation center at their last meeting and so that'll come to the council. Also on the 5th commissioner, he reached out and asked to provide a county update. So he'll also be here at that meeting. And then during the work session, we'll have the 1st draft of the 10 year financial plan and the 2027 enterprise budgets that Lynn and Andrew will be presenting. Related to budgets, one of the things that Lynn and I have been kind of tracking and have connected with Aaron Smith and Nick Jargensen on is building permit revenues. We've done some forecasting and... that can be hit or miss as far as how forecasted goes and what people's patterns or permit patterns might be. Uh, but we're projecting that we could be in the neighborhood of about 20% below revenue projections for the entire year. So, um, probably around $100,000. That's independent of other revenue budgets being higher than what was projected. Some expenditures not coming in as much as we anticipated. For example, we're probably in the neighborhood of about $25,000 in contract credit from the sheriff's office. But did want to give you a line of sight to that. And as we move forward, we'll certainly continue to update you. But didn't want to surprise you as we get into October, November, December, if we keep kind of talking about that and giving you updates on that. And then finally, I've been working with the team and our friends at Bolton and Mink on a special community newsletter on the public services facility building project. So a lot of this data or almost all of this data should be recognizable to you, but we are trying to put this in a kind of a clear and concise format. package to engage residents, property owners, community members to participate in our upcoming engagement opportunities. recognizing that there's probably not every question that we can have answered in advance, but sometimes teeing up those questions and getting them to participate is just as well. And so just wanted to, we're getting ready to finalize this, but before we do, I just wanted to give the council a look at it. And if there is any glaring pieces of information that you wanted to have put in there that we address that, now rather than getting that feedback after it's in the mail. So happy to answer questions on the guide or any other items or any items that I didn't cover that you're hoping to get updates on. Thank you.

Any questions? No questions.

Chrissy? I'm just looking at it. There's a lot of text in here. You know, I'm just wanting to just thinking about how the public, when they're looking at it, if they, if it's kind of academic looking text and we're just, if it. It gets lost, you know, pictures tell a 1000 words. So I was just, yeah, I mean, we.

We know 1 of the things that, and maybe Andrew can echo this if he has a different point of view, but in giving the presentations, so we've given it to the same 1, the council has gotten, we've given it to the HPC planning commission and business alliance. And I would say, for the most part. All of them are kind of getting the information for the 1st time. So, even though we've been talking about this for, it seems like years now, they haven't been. And so we feel like there's a certain I feel like there's a certain amount of baseline text that we have to provide to tell the story that the picture might show, like, the need, but it certainly doesn't describe the issue of what we're proposing to do, or the estimated impact. And so. I would acknowledge that there is a fair amount of text. I just don't know how else to tell that story in four pages without it. Andrew, any additional line of sight to that?

No, I think that covers it. I mean, I think it's a tough story to tell. It's a long story and it's an important story and I think Folks that are going to be concerned about the impact want the information and I think trying to provide it to them is going to be helpful. So they can have good conversations about it.

I get that. This is a little bit of a media document, but, like, for example, last Friday, the business alliance meeting, I think you took 45 minutes to go through the presentation and it was. conversation but not too much questions until we got to the end but I just think like this is your 45 minute presentation and we were praised highly by a number of folks from the business alliance who said this is great you guys are being really transparent so I think I'd rather have too much than not enough so that it's not like oh well we didn't know about the space study you know what I mean and I know you're not saying that but

Yeah, I don't want to take text out, obviously, that is needed. Maybe some of the print quality is a little bit poor on this page.

Let's just weigh it, print it out. It's going to be crisp and sharp.

Sure, and that will probably help. We're fading away here on the third page.

Because it's going to be like a fold-out. It's not double, two pieces of paper stapled together.

Eric, do you have any comments?

I don't.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

If I can have a chance, Mary Johnson, I do have a comment after he challenged me and gives me to look at it closer on the estimates for the Met Council provides us estimate for population. Could we put in their estimates or a range? Because we're building this, we don't know exactly how many employees, how much equipment and that's what makes our job hard, but we know there's going to be more. So. And rather than seeing a blank, what makes me think we don't know how many employees we're going to have. We don't even know a range. We're not planning anything. I'd rather see a number range than a blank.

What are estimated?

Yes. Yeah. Like, don't hold us to it.

But we know that. And I don't. And then maybe that's why there's a range. What if we black out those boxes?

Yeah, that might just be the visual. So the, you know, we're still editing my, my request was to just remove those two boxes and we'll do whatever the council requests that we had a conversation about estimating. And part of that is probably my, like, maybe some historical bias, like. when city hall was really a meaty discussion there was it felt like the estimates of uh staff um hiring became the main point of like so if we put in like 20 and that somehow like stole the show it's like you think you're gonna have 20 people and 20 like what's your basis for that so i'm we will It would be 100% pure speculation because we only have estimates for the first 10 years. And so my word of maybe a cautionary tale would be people, in my experience, don't have a lot of patience for pure speculation. But if you want us to put an estimate in there, we certainly can.

I think you just having I agree with you, or maybe for voice over 15 or something or. If you've got another idea, Lori, but yeah, it looks like.

Um, I do have 1 concern. Uh, the only tax impact estimation we have in here is monthly. Most people do not think about their property taxes on a monthly basis. So, if we could have an annual number in there as well, that would be helpful. Sure.

Is there a reason that you didn't do 2026 year to date? Is it just because it's not finalized? On the front one. On the front graph. We've got the end of 2025 here, but we're actually getting... What are you looking at? I'm looking at the first graph on the first page. So we're looking at 2024, 2025. Council population estimates, we only know 2025. So at one point, we had 2025, 2026 in there, but that looked a little...

We don't have, yeah, so we're using official numbers from the Met Council, and they only give us numbers from April of 25. So I won't have an official population until April of, for 26 until April of 27.

Would it make any sense to have an unofficial number of 2026 in there somewhere? Because we're higher than 73, 78. Right, so I don't know how much higher we are. Are we really what's our estimated population right now?

We'd have to, I'd have to ask Aaron to do some mapping. I mean, we could go back through permits.

Okay, go ahead.

Yeah, I'm not sure what you're looking at. That's what I'm struggling with. Sorry.

It's the first page, Eric. It says there's a graph on there. There's a grid on there. It says area of growth 2004-2025 across it.

Okay. The first page of what? Because I'm looking at the things that got sent out to me earlier today. So this is the handout.

It looks like this, Eric. Half blue on the bottom.

Yeah.

Like it says, planning for Carver's handout. Yep, that's it.

Yep. page one on the top it says planning for carver's future public service needs yeah okay there's a on the about a third of the way down on the right hand side there's a table that says area of growth in one column 2004 i'm sorry no you're fine you're fine i was going up and sorry i'll shut up no okay you're you're good i want to make sure you're good and that you're with us thumbs up if you're good

Oh, I've got to freeze frame that. Yeah, right. You're right. Freeze frame. 2025 is fine. It was just... I mean, this is the work session, right? We're just footballing stuff. Yeah. So if... I don't have a super strong feeling about it. I just thought if it... If we had something, because we're getting awfully, unfortunately, close to 2027 already. If we had numbers that might...

We could, I mean, what we used is if someone said, prove to me that you have it, I have a piece of paper that I can show them with a letter with our population on it. The other one would be, well, this is the work that Aaron Smith did to estimate it. So I just, it's a more conservative approach, but we can certainly go through that exercise if you think it would be beneficial.

I don't know. What does anybody else think about that? I think the official number is fine. I'm okay with the official number. Okay. Sounds good.

so i'm hearing remove the lower right two boxes and put a an annual tax impact on page three any additional comments i do not hear or see anybody with them thank you thank you right is that it that's all i have okay all right any city council request eric

Kayla? No. Christy? No. Lori? No. None from me. Okay. Can I get a motion to adjourn? Go ahead.

I'll make a motion to adjourn.

I'll second. We have a motion and a second. Can we get a roll call vote, please? I'm the one who forgets. Which is so un-Brenda good.

Council Member Pascoe.

Aye. Council Member Conrad. Aye.

Council Member Sayre. Aye. Council Member Furchman.

Aye. Mayor Johnson.

Aye. Motion carries. Thank you.