City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening and welcome to the Chaska City Council's meeting for Monday, September 14, 2026. I call this meeting to order at 7 o'clock. Would everyone please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance.

to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Since they switched with Nate's chair. All right, Elise, will you please call roll?

Council Member Hatfield? Here. Council Member Benesch? Here. Council Member Shevlin? Here. Council Member McGraw? Here. Mayor Hubbard?

Here. All right, that moves us into adopting the agenda. Does anybody have any corrections or additions to the agenda? Otherwise, I'd entertain a motion for adoption.

All right.

Motion from Council Member Benesch. Second. Second from Council Member Hatfield. Any other discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? All right. Agenda is adopted. And then next that moves us to visitor presentations. And we do have one on our agenda tonight, Bountiful Basket. So we have the Executive Director, Patty Sinekin, right? Yep. Come on up.

Well thank you for the invitation and thank you for having me and thank you for all that you do for Bountiful Basket but not just for Bountiful Basket but for of course the families that we serve because that's the most important for those who I'm here really as a celebration we need to start off first of all because this was the second year that we did an um four city friendly food drive competition and i am very excited it was between chaska chanhas and carver and victoria very excited to say the reason why i'm bringing this heavy pineapple is that chaska won this year Chaska brought in, in one evening, 1,810 pounds of food and $3,932. Wow. That goes a very long way. The food that was brought in, of course, we love a good food drive because that's what really brings a lot of the dignity and the choice to our families as they're shopping, where they get those good items that are coming straight from grocery stores. make somebody feel good the dollars of course we can stretch anywhere from depending on the item six to ten times through our sourcing powers so we are so grateful for that just so you know is the greater um that evening alone between all four cities because we are thankful of course for all four cities um brought in six thousand i need my readers 6,685 pounds of food, $4,891. That is a huge accomplishment for one evening. So thank you very much and congratulations. And I do officially have Chaska engraved on the, you are engraved. So I don't know who gets to hold this for a year, but it's out of my office and it's now into somebody else's. I will leave that here. But just to give you just a little bit of information about Bountiful Basket Food Shelf, we've been in this community for 17 years now. Throughout the last four or five years, I mean, there's been exponential growth. We've gone from serving about 400 families every month to now serving about 16 well 400 services individuals are welcome to come two times a month we're now doing about 1600 services i'm sure you've seen in the news gas prices are up food is up expenses are up and the need not only here in our community but throughout the need is up so we only anticipate that the need will continue to grow we are doing everything that we can to make sure that we are fitting filling the need Anybody who walks through our door, we are a no-judgment facility. We figure if you're going to open up those doors, we know that those are some of the heaviest doors that somebody has to open. And asking for help is not easy. So you come in, we give some very basic information, and it is a... what we call a super shelf. It is a dignified, welcoming experience putting the focus on health and nutrition. So somebody shops and they leave and they can come back again for a second time. And just so you know, specifically to Chaska, there are some specific community outreach programs that we do. We do mobile deliveries twice a month, which goes to individuals who are homebound, maybe you're recovering from a surgery, you have transportation issues. Seniors are a big part of our community, and we also know living on a fixed income if you're a senior. We do deliveries, and part of this is in collaboration. Kevin Wright is there and his team to Zen, Landing, and Wayberry. Schools, kids are in need, and we have learned that kids in school sometimes just need a snack. So we provide snacks to every single school in the area. Eastern Carver County area, anywhere between 100 and 1,000 snacks every month to every school, depending on the population and the need. Our mobile programming, West Creek Apartments that was built here, what, has it been two years now already? We've got a, I think it's been two years in July. Yeah. But we put in, we were asked and we put in a pantry there. That way the individuals, homeless youth, previously homeless youth, have a place right on site where they're able to get their groceries. Because again, transportation's an issue. And I'm actually excited. I just left Beyond New Beginnings. We started a brand new relationship with them today with feminine hygiene products. Which, I mean, when I was passing them off, I'm like, you know what, this one box is could be literally somebody's hourly wage. So we are doing everything that we possibly can do to support our community. And truly, and I know it sounds cliche, but we could not do it without your support. So we are super excited that Chaska won the competition, and we are just super excited for your support and for all the support of all the communities. So thank you.

Thank you. Yeah. I know you guys partner with a lot of different organizations, and I know that Councilmember Hatfield and I had an opportunity to come do a video and really learn a lot about the services you offer and, like you said, how your setup is. But then even volunteering for Latino Voices and shopping, you know, once a week, I really got into a rhythm of how it works and it's such a great process to go in and you, you know, have the allotment depending on the number of people in your family, you know, how many you can pick out and you are, you get to select, you know, and I see that your volunteers help your customers or clients do that selection. I think some of that's also social. I saw people of various ages in there, and you guys make that process, like you said, so dignified, and it allows them that social ability, I think, too, to be able to shop and get what they need. So you are a real, true community asset, and thank you for being a part of our community.

Thank you. Well, we say we want to be relational, not transactional. So that is the part about with our volunteers, we do shop with our families, but we also do have a community resource navigator on site. So in order to build those relationships and the trust, they really, our shoppers get to know our volunteers, can either refer them to Janet, who's our community resource navigator, or Janet introduces themselves to connect them with other resources too. And then like you said, friendship.

Yeah.

There's a lot of friendships all the way around inside of our walls. So thank you.

Thanks. So we want to take a photo with Patty. Chris, I don't know, or Elise, if you want to take a picture. But should we all go down there and take a picture with the trophy?

Yes. Yep. Just right up there. Perfect.

If you guys want to squish together just a little bit.

Thank you so much.

All right. I'll take a couple. All right, thank you. Yeah, thank you. It was all yours. Thank you. Yeah, here. Oh, yeah. Maybe that's what we haven't got a lot of.

There you go. Yeah, that just means we have to do this competition for a really long time.

Yes. So 10 years? Yes, yes. I mean, well, the neighborhoods do a competition as well.

Yes, yes.

Not that we don't enjoy it.

We're glad to win, though, even though we like our friends in other cities.

I don't know where to put this. There you go. We can take it back.

Should I just put it here?

Just before you go, I want to tell you how excited neighborhoods get over this. We have come in second place every single year. This year we won a party because we were second place. But it brings out so much neighborhood friendliness and, you know, Renee Dawson from my neighborhood volunteers there. So she's always kind of the lead of it. But we get so excited to help you guys out and so excited. And so we're planning to do it again for our party night to do it again. But We love what you guys do.

So, thank you. Because I didn't mention individual neighborhoods. Yes. Because there has been a citywide competition for many years as well. And they did a first and a second place this year. So, Edelwood and it's East Canyon Creek, right? It is, right.

But technically, we wanted to bring this up. Technically, we donated more because there are only 35 houses on our street. We made sure there was a party involved for you. Thank you. Well, let's plug your website again, because you always have a list of current needs, and you have the ability to donate directly. You can also drop off, maybe give your hours, and then...

Okay. Website, Bountiful Basket, singular, bountifulbasketfoodshelf.org. Chaska hours, here we go. Monday, 9 to 3.30. Tuesday, 9 to 6.30. Wednesday, 9 to 3.30. Thursday, Friday, 9 to 12.30. And then the first and third Saturday is 9 until, I almost did perfect. 9 until 12. And during any of those operating hours, we've always got volunteers and staff who would be more than grateful to receive your donations. And then, of course, if you are in need of assistance as well, you can call 952-556-0244 to schedule an appointment.

Wonderful.

Thank you, Patty. Thank you very much. Thank you all very much.

Have a good evening. all right well that moves us along is anybody else here for a visitor presentation that's not a part of anything on the agenda okay i didn't think so but figured i'd ask all right so that moves us along to approval of the previous meeting minutes these meeting minutes were from um august 31st of 2026 does anybody have any addition or corrections to the minutes hearing none i would entertain a motion for approval

Motion to approve meeting minutes from 831.

All right, so a motion from Council Member Hatfield.

Second.

Second from Council Member Gra. All those, or any other discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? All right, minutes are approved. And then that moves us along to our consent items. These items... Generally receive little to no discussion. Although any consent item can certainly be pulled off and put on Onto the action items or else if anybody has any questions on anything No, okay Okay

Okay, all right. There we go. I just wanted to make sure if there was somebody that wanted to speak about it that we opened up the opportunity for the assessment here. Yes, okay. Okay, I just want to make sure.

Okay, yeah, and that's going to be coming along soon. I didn't have any questions.

I was just going to comment on a couple of things. Of course, since we're officially accepting the gifts, donations, and sponsorships, for a while um just wanted to just thank all those donors if you look across them all there's a lot of incredible organizations and people that donate to different things for the city and i just always want to give them a special thank you um and that's so that's the first thing and the second thing just exciting to see the autumn woods park plan go in um And have that approved. It's just exciting. All those houses went in and we kind of talked about the community or the neighborhood park that would go there. And it's just fun to see it finally appear on the agenda. So just wanted to make those two comments.

Wonderful. Yes. Anything else? Okay, otherwise I would entertain a motion to approve the consent items. Motion to approve consent items. All right, we have a motion from Council Member Sheflin.

Second.

And a second from Council Member Hatfield. Any other discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? All right, consent is approved. Now we have two, three action items tonight. So we'll start with 8A, Southwest Community Park Plan Recommendation.

premier customer that i'm in front of you tonight is one that clearly we spent a lot of time talking about we spent the last couple years talking about uh... since it's such a big project for the community uh... will over fifty seven acres of the farmland uh... that will become a community park in addition to another twenty acres or so of uh... the big woods uh... area that's just south of the parker adjacent to the park that were able to preserve through development and through grants. Marshall, our parking and rec director, has been the one that's leading this project, and so he'll be giving a presentation on the final recommendation for this. We have Brad Aldrich from Confluence, who is the consultant that helped us on this process, and they'll talk a little bit about some of the process that was used for that and how we came up with a recommendation. The recommendation is to move forward with accepting the plan tonight. In addition to accepting the plan, it would be to set the budget for the project and then to authorize staff to go and basically implement it. To authorize us to go out and get construction documents put together, get a construction manager on board, those types of things to get that implemented. The timeline for this is going to be construction next summer. So, Marshall will have more specifics and I'll turn it over to him.

Great, thank you, Matt. Good evening, Mayor and Council. I'm excited to be here tonight to share with you the final plan recommendation and seek your approval for the Southwest Chaska Park Project. So just starting out with an agenda we're gonna go through and create a little bit of context just to begin with talk about park location and description for those that are watching and May not be familiar with this project. We'll talk about the planning process That's led us up here to tonight Then we'll go through in a little bit of more detail going over the final park plan site and we have some renderings to share. We'll go over the cost estimate and the funding sources to construct the park, discuss next steps and then turn it over for any questions or discussion. So just starting out in terms of park location, as you can see by the red location dot, it's a farm field like Matt mentioned to the west of downtown Chaska. And it essentially sits east of Highway 212 and south of Big Woods Boulevard and north of Chaska Boulevard. And then eventually it will be east of the future Savannah Way Road that will be extended from Big Woods Boulevard south down to Cheska Boulevard. In this next slide is a recent drone picture that was taken that depicts that. So you can see some of the development that's starting to occur south of the Big Woods area and you're starting to see sort of the outline of where the future Savannah Way Road will come into play. You see the impressiveness of the Big Woods there and then to the north of that would be where the future park site is.

Can I ask a random question? Yeah. On that slide, are both sides of the woods gonna stay there, like as you come up Savannah Way from the south? see oh yeah right here yeah that's just like a really cool entrance yeah so that's fun that those are going to both stay there i just feel like it's a really cool yeah at least coming from the south a cool way it's hard to tell in this photo but what that is is there's a ravine that comes off of 212 and goes cuts right down through there sure and so it's steep slopes and so that's what protects it perfect well it's a really cool way to like enter that area

little bit of background information on the site so this community park and preservation of the Big Woods has been envisioned for over 25 years here in Chaska and has been representative represented in prior city comprehensive plans and is currently a part of the City Council's five-year strategic plan and In kind of the larger white outline area, this was the land that was acquired in 2017, which is right around 57. Can't read that eight eight acres eight nine acres And then as Matt mentioned we did acquire some of the big woods area to the south as well Currently the total totality of the big woods area is right around 40 acres and we have acquired What is it twelve Twelve point three seven twelve point. Sorry my little I

The deal on the side is blocking it.

Yeah, 12.37 acres. And that was through parkland dedication. This northern parcel was received through parkland dedication from the developer to the south and east. And then we received a grant from the DNR to acquire the southern portion. So in total, the park site we're looking at is 70.26 acres.

And we have one more grant that we received that we haven't used yet to acquire another parcel about that size of the other two. And the thing that's also not included in the big woods total is the part that we bought with the 57 acres, which is over sort of right there. Yeah, right here. So in total, we'll end up having probably about 25 acres that we've preserved in that area then.

So you might be wondering, 70 acres, what does that compare to? So I looked it up just for context. It would equate to about 53 football fields or the equivalent of like 35 city blocks to just provide some perspective there. And then the site does also include property that is owned by independent school district 112. So they've got 5.65 acres in the southwest corner of the site with intentions to plan for a future elementary school. All right, this next slide depicts the planning process that we've been embarking on following the lead with Confluence over the last two years. And so this is kind of the flow of what we went through from exploration to evaluation, refinement, and then here we are today with the recommendation. And you can see, I'm not gonna go through them all, but the various tasks that we did throughout those different phases of planning. Initially, as part of the exploration phase, we leaned into the site to understand it better. It actually is a site that has a lot of slope within it. There's about 40 to 50 feet drop from the northwest corner down to the southeast. But we started identifying where the flat zones that existed on the site and start to kind of think about where the programming would go in relation to those flat areas. We wanted to think about the views of the Minnesota River Valley on this site and how we can take advantage of that. Because of the topography, I'm really thinking about how we're going to make the trails accessible and how we're going to route them for circulation throughout the site. Thinking about the connections to the big woods and the experience there. how this park's gonna relate to the neighborhood and accessibility, how it's gonna connect to the future elementary school as part of the overall site. And then just kind of the sheer size of this site. All started to kind of come in play to start to formulate some thoughts and some strategy into the planning process. And then we really kicked off phase one of community engagement, which included a kickoff event at the community center where there was a carnival event that attracts a lot of people. So we were there with a lot of display boards. It was really kind of an introduction to the community that we were embarking on this park planning process, building excitement, getting some feedback, and then steering those people along with efforts that we did to notify people through social media and whatnot that there's a project website and really encouraging people to participate and take the online survey along with contributing ideas on an interactive idea board. We also met with several focus groups in person, sat down, talked about the project and got feedback. That included athletic associations, families with children that have special needs, Rotary, Lions Club, active older adults, a whole host of different groups. Then we also as part of that phase one engagement Conducted a market study. We utilized pros consulting. They're a national consulting firm that specializes in Park studies and with that the primary goal was that we were trying to identify Whether or not there were any gaps that existed in our park system in comparison to benchmark data through the National Park and Recreation Association to similar sized communities as Chaska. And what we found was that there really weren't any glaring gaps per se. And that's really a testament to Minnesota as a state in general. We tend to have strong parks and recreation systems, but also here in Chaska and just how impressive our system is today and all the things that we have to offer. So that really allowed us to think about the planning process as really opportunistic and additive to our park system going forward. As far as the online survey goes, we saw a lot of great participation. There was over 4,500 visitors to the site and almost 1,500 people took the survey. We asked a variety of questions, however, probably the key questions that we were really getting at was just identifying what were the primary themes people would like to see at this park to start to kind of drive that future planning. And the top themes that came out of that were play, nature, and sport. And with that, then that becomes sort of our priority in how we were going to move forward with planning the park. Not to say that we weren't going to incorporate those other themes, but those were the three we wanted to lean into further. So then that began some further exploration in the ideation process. Here's some pictures depicting Ashley, our city planner, and Aaron, our recreation program manager, and I along with Brad at the offices in Confluence. We had the opportunity to do a design charrette with a bunch of their staff focused on the Southwest Park Plan. And then the bottom right corner, you can see staff along with members of our Parks and Recreation Commission. We spent an entire day, a couple of days going out and touring parks throughout the metro. And then in addition to that, we also planned an entire day. This is a fun event that Confluence puts on called Parkapalooza, where we invited staff from all of the various departments throughout the city to participate in this design process. So they all came in understanding that the primary themes were sport, nature, and play. And so that was sort of the goal of that day was to come up with some concepts that honored the results of that first round of engagement. And then that evening we invited in the Parks and Recreation Commission along with you all city council members to present those ideas and just get some initial feedback and some direction so we could then go forward and refine what those three concepts were gonna be to then do another round of community engagement. So this slide is depicting those three concepts that were put together. And then those three concepts were put back out onto our project website. We did another big push through social media and whatnot to let people know that those were available on the website and to provide us feedback take additional survey questions and whatnot i would point out that the goal of that round of engagement wasn't to ask community members to vote which concept they wanted or liked the most rather we wanted to see feedback and comments across all three you know things that they like things that they didn't like things that they would change maybe even things that were missing along with a set of questions that was starting to get them to think about prioritizing the amenities that they would like to see included in the park It was an opportunistic time for us to also bring those three concepts out to two of our major community events that summer our fire and ice Festival along with River City Days And we saw a lot of engagement throughout those community events Which was great to see I we got a lot of insight uh... from the results of that survey uh... but i would say one thing that again kinda helped us uh... understand the direction people were preferring uh... was really around this question about What would be a theme that they would like to see? incorporated into the into the playground elements in the park and As you can see by that word cloud there on the right nature big woods Definitely started to rise to the top And and so that was helpful for us to understand the preference that the community was sharing with us and and i think for those of you that may have been at the community events and talking with people you may recall that that that was a definitely a major topic of excitement that people were expressing and i think it is just the fact that that big woods is such a component of this park site So with that we started to think of some some ways to build on that and How we could bring in some theming and we came up with this pollinator theme and here's just a slide depicting ways that we could Start incorporating that into playground design color schemes opportunities for future education out at the park So after that second round of engagement then became what I would say the challenging part of the planning process because now we had to take all of these wonderful ideas that the community shared across three different concepts and bring it into one. So this is where aspirational and dreaming, kind of comes a little bit more into reality and it took time because we really wanted to bring forward a final recommendation that we were really confident that we can move forward with and implement And so over the last eight months, we've really been working on getting to this point with this final plan in front of you. In addition to accounting for the feedback we received from the community, there are other decisions that do have to go in to the final plan. You know, things such as the site grade and the topography that exists there today. Things such as the maintainability of things going forward. And then obviously we have to keep a budget in mind. So those are all things, and there's others that go into this final plan. um something i'd like to take a quick moment on is just honor some of the ideas that were presented this came out of our park and rec commission meeting last week that didn't make the cut but just showcasing that we did contemplate a lot of different things And those things included a treetop bridge basketball courts pickleball courts Ice skating rink and ice skating trail. We thought about refrigerated ice a bicycle pump track and bicycle skills Park skateboarding Plaza a demonstration and Peace Garden An outdoor pool a dog park We looked at a larger artificial turf sports complex and yes we even considered a Ferris wheel a little bit of our inside joke in the beginning but with that again over the last eight months we've been working on things such as Grading exercises on the site. Really trying to do our best to balance the site. It's very expensive to haul dirt away or bring dirt in. So we looked at that. The stormwater needs for the site in coordination with Carver County Water Management Organization. to meet their requirements. We did a lot of evaluation of parking, you know, so based on the programming that exists in the park, what are the parking needs? You know, that's one of those that, you know, you don't want to overbuild parking because it's expensive, but you want to ensure you have enough as well. we had several meetings with leadership from the school district again knowing that there is a future plan for an elementary school and understanding their needs and the fact that there was always going to be a collaboration for shared parking and storm water And so you may have saw that in your packet, but there is a letter of intent with the school district for financial contribution towards shared parking and shared stormwater. We had coordinated meetings with our city engineers that relates to the design of Savannah Way. Savannah Way will ultimately be the primary access to this future park. So understanding how that's gonna relate to the design and access into the parking lot. We had coordinated meetings with our community development um team as it relates to the development that is coming in on the west side of savannah way and again how access and alignment was going to line up along with some discussions and taking on some of their storm water we worked with bolton and menk another consultant firm on submitting some grant applications I'm happy to share we were successful in receiving an LCCMR grant, and that is going to be recommended at a dollar amount of $3,047,000. So that is really helping this overall plan. That's getting submitted into the next legislative session for their approval, and those funds will become available to us next year in July. We had several meetings with the athletic associations. We had several meetings with landscape structures as it relates to the playground and starting to really kind of understand size, scope, and cost of the playground, knowing that that was gonna be a significant element. of the park plan along with meetings with Ortel. Ortel became another architectural consultant we signed on with specific to the park building. And so again, meetings to talk about what the needs are for that park building and start to understand size, scope, and what the cost of that would be going forward. So just a lot of cost estimation throughout this process. And then monthly work sessions with the Chaska Parks and Recreation Commission. So they've really been a part of this process every step of the way to help in formulating this recommendation. So with that, we'll go through and just highlight the various elements on this final park site plan. I'll speak to some things as we're on this slide and then there'll be some I'll skip over because I'll talk more as we get to the renderings in future slides. But number one here, this is gonna be the main parking lot. As you can see, we're gonna begin by constructing just the northern half of the parking lot. As I mentioned, we've got future plans to work with the school district on the southern half of the parking lot. Number two, oh, another, sorry, 1A, there will be another satellite parking lot on the southeast site, and that is going to be to accommodate those coming in to play disc golf or potentially just come in for access to the walking trails. Item number two is going to be the entry Plaza. So really nice welcoming open Plaza that extends out to the various components of the park and you can see a lot of planters exist in there. So really kind of introducing people to nature as they enter the park. Number three is gonna be the Miracle League baseball field. I'll talk about that more later. Same thing with number four is the Universal Playground area depicted in the yellow here. 4A is going to be a splash pad. I'll talk about that a little bit more later. 4B, next to there, is going to be an amphitheater. So here is going to, you know, an amphitheater, it's going to be rather informal in nature. We're thinking it could include some music play elements and maybe a small stage. Again, an area for kids to be imaginative kids to be imaginative. People can relax out in the grass area and it could include an opportunity for some small programming as well. Moving on to six would be open lawn area. So think just open grass area that provides a lot of flexibility and opportunities for people to relax or do some informal play. We'll have several park shelters adjacent to those open lawn areas for people to gather and picnic. Moving on down, number eight, we've got a ravine bridge crossing. And we've got two locations, one on the far west side here, which will be a crossing that'll include a bridge similar to the wooden bridges you see throughout our ravine system. That allows our park maintenance staff and public works to actually drive over them and perform necessary maintenance and then on the far right side 8a is going to be a stone crossing over the over the ravine and this is intended to be sort of an adventurous feature of the disc golf course We are showing another option for a ravine crossing in the middle here. That would be a future opportunity. This current plan, we don't have, it's not included in the funding, but we do view that as a unique pedestrian crossing that also provides some better circulation for the disc golf users in the future as well. Number nine is depicting the Big Woods area. This is another area, too, where the plan doesn't have funding going towards it right away. However, we do see this as having a lot of future opportunities for more grants, along with areas where we can do some self-performed work through our park maintenance division. to do some ravine restoration along with restoration of the woods and the build out of some of those trails throughout the woods. Number 10, this would be a trailhead with seasonal restrooms in an overlook area to look out at some nature. We do plan to bring in utilities here should we in the future ever want to have more of a facility there for restrooms with running water and lights. Number 11 is depicting the 18-hole disc golf course. This is going to be an amenity that really becomes a destination to this park, and we're going to have a really unique opportunity to have holes not only throughout the big woods, but also extending up into some of the prairie into the center of the park. Minnesota is home to several of the best disc golf courses in the nation and there are some individuals that live in the Twin Cities area that specialize in the design of disc golf courses that we intend to work with number 12 would be a bouldering wall which we got a rendering on that moving on up number 13 Oh, bouldering. I'm sorry. It's like climbing, like a climbing wall, rock climbing.

Like a real deal one. Like real rocks. Yeah.

Not like lifetimes.

No, not like the faux walls. Yeah. Gotcha.

We'll have to be, you know, we're not able to build it high just because there's requirements if you get high just because people could fall where you got to have staff and like you got to do the belaying and all that. We're not going to have that out here, be more horizontal type bouldering. Moving on up number 13. This is going to be a rectangular sports field that will be able to accommodate soccer lacrosse flag football whole host of different activities Number 14 is going to be a 300 foot Baseball diamond And then number 14A is going to be a 210-foot girls softball and U12 combined baseball diamond. These athletic fields are intended to be natural grass. We are gonna set them up though to have really good drainage by removing a lot of the clay material that exists there and having a nice sand base. So these will be really nice natural grass fields that'll be a little bit more playable during rain events. We have had ongoing conversations with the athletic associations and there is potential and desire on their end to upgrade these facilities which could include artificial turf and or bringing in lighting to these fields. Those still are ongoing conversations, but if they do choose to go that route, those would be amenity upgrades that the associations would fund. And so we would work with them on the front end to help finance those, but there would need to be an agreement in place for the associations to pay that back over time. I would also mention too that we do continue to look at the configuration of those athletic fields on the northern end. So I think in general, a statement that what we're viewing today could slightly change, and if that is the case, we'll be sure to keep you updated as we go. Moving on to number 15, trail nodes. So we got seating, just different seating opportunities along the trails. We're looking at 15A would be a hammock grove relatively near where the bouldering wall is in the woods. And then we've got a fire pit area, 15B, that we've got located up near the future park building. And that actually is where one of the better views of the Minnesota River Valley will be up there too.

Is that going to be a gas one that can be turned off easily, or are we talking like a real fire that could potentially spread into this big one?

More than likely we'd be looking at a gas, yep, yep. 16 is depicting the blacktop trails throughout the park. 17 would be the oak savanna restoration. So really everything north of the big woods that is sort of that yellowish color is intended to be native prairie. Which would be really neat. Number 18, we've got stormwater ponds. The larger pond in the southeast corner is taking on the stormwater needs of Savannah Way Road, the park, along with the future school site needs. And then the two ponds north of that are in coordination with the housing development I mentioned to the west. taking on their stormwater needs in exchange for a positive financial contribution to the park. and then last but definitely not least number 19 would be a sledding hill so you can see sort of those white lines coming down those are depicting the sort of the sledding hill lanes coming down and then sort of into a flatter area at the bottom And the exciting thing about that is we are working with Park Maintenance Division. They are going to purchase a snowmaking machine to ensure that there is snow at the sledding hill when people arrive because that hill is facing southeast, so it is going to get some sun.

Question, Marshall. On seven, it says park shelters. Do you know how many shelters are proposed to be in that area? And are they rentable, or is it just first come, first serve?

Generally, we're looking at three to four of them throughout the park. As far as rentability, I think we will probably initially let it play out and see, but I would tend to think that we would set those up for those to be rentable and allow people to have special gatherings.

Yeah, just curious on that.

Yep. All right, next up I'll run through some renderings.

I don't think I heard, maybe we skipped over it real quick, sorry. The actual park building, the main building.

Yep. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Number five, that is going to be the main park building.

Is there going to be like concessions in that?

So as we sit here today, concessions is not included in the park building. However, there is enough room within that plaza area for food trucks to be able to park up in there and provide some different food opportunities. Yep. Alright, so next I'll go through some some renderings. Here is an aerial depiction of what the future site can look like. And again, just want to make mention these are renderings. Things can and likely will change as we go through detailed design work, but definitely shows you the direction. That we're planning to go. So here's the Miracle League field in the Miracle League field is essentially a shorter baseball field. It's 125 foot fence and the surfacing will be a short artificial turf surfacing, which makes it playable for people with all different abilities. and that might have different mobility needs. This Miracle League field really was envisioned a long time ago to be a component of this park. This along with the playground were really kind of the key amenities of this park that we wanted to sort of position in the best location and then build everything around that. Want to take the opportunity to thank the Chaska Rotary Club. They have taken on the lead efforts in fundraising for this Miracle League field, along with the Chaska Lions Club, who have made a significant contribution towards the Miracle League field. So we thank you for their efforts and their ongoing partnership. And we're really excited about this field. Not only is it gonna provide opportunities to build upon our adaptive programming, which we take a lot of pride here in Chaska across our recreation programming and facilities, but it's also gonna provide opportunities outside of that with other recreational programming such as, kickball leagues, wiffle ball leagues, things like that. We also see it as a field where youth sports associations could conduct some practices on that turf as well.

so that'll be an exciting component of the park hey marshall yep on that picture is that sight lines accurate just making sure it's like the elevation change in the hall no okay no i was like that's interesting but it's also not going to be an overhang probably yeah that's right i mean again i just like i said some of these are rendering just a rendering and some are like really what i was trying to pull in here was the brick

You know, and kind of bringing in maybe that Chaska brick element. You know, and one thing we've talked about, too, is perhaps the grandstand could be like a miniature version of Athletic Park. Aw. Cute. And, you know, provide shade.

That would be adorable. Maybe then there would be an overhang.

Yeah. Yep. But this was just a miracle league that's actually out in North Carolina, a field. Yep. So here we're seeing the entrance into the playground area. So again, that sense of arrival, building excitement for kids and families to come into the playground area. Um, here we're seeing, um, as you come in, uh, small kids area, we got the dragon fly coming into play. Um, we've got leaves that, um, provide shade. We're bringing in some of the kind of Prairie and the flowers, um, and just sort of those color tones, um, to bring in the pollinator theme. Across from that would be another small kids area. Again, we're seeing components of butterfly. This is depicting a caterpillar. You got fun playhouses. These could be squiggly worms coming out of the ground. So just, again, bringing in a lot of fun elements for kids to imagine. Here we're viewing that playground off of the sidewalk. You're seeing us incorporate a lot of nature on the outside edges of the playground. That helps provide a buffer, helping to prevent kids from running off. But we also do intend to look at having fencing around the perimeter of the playground area as well. We are bringing in another custom piece with the bee. So this is depicting the rusty patch bumblebee and a lot of opportunities for us to have fun with the marketing. We believe there's gonna be a lot of buzz as this park comes online and just having fun with that. Here's another angle. Again, using the site topography and providing multiple ways for kids to access the towers. We've got hill slides coming down, there's ramps, there's climbing features to get up in there. So just a variety of ways. Again, making sure it's accessible for all children that may have different needs, but also making sure it's accommodating kids that wanna challenge themselves and build upon their courage as they get older to go up to those larger towers. Here's just another view. Another section will have a zip line. These are super popular elements at parks. I think this will be our first zip line here in Chaska. So excited for that. And then on the southern end of the playground area, we're bringing in a splash pad. We are planning for this to be a recirculation system. So this would mean it includes an underground water storage. It ultimately recirculates that water. It gets treated and filtered, but ultimately that is a better water conservation way of having a splash pad compared to the water going down the water or sanitary. But again, this will be another feature of the playground area that we think builds upon the destination component of the playground area. And then this is just an aerial view showing that whole playground area. It's always tough to see in renderings just how big this is, but this is right around 70,000 square feet of playground area, which would put it as one of the larger playground areas in the Metro. It would be similar to putting this all in that inside of that 300 foot fence baseball diamond as just perspective on the size of it.

So I know it's just a rendering but if you look at that like there's pretty tall trees it looks like on either sides of the walkway that goes through. Which I like for shade, but on the other hand, if you have kids playing in multiple areas, it can be really hard to see through the trees. So we may just want to think about observation points or areas that parents don't have to be running from different parts of the playground and checking on different age kids.

Yeah, and I think part of it is making sure the trees are trimmed up too as they get older. But yeah, being mindful of different sight lines. Yep, that's a good point. All right, here is a picture just depicting the big woods. And again, just the awesome opportunity we have to preserve this remnant of big woods and create opportunities for people to experience the nature of the woods. With walking trails, I foresee educational program opportunities as well. Here we're seeing a depiction of the 18 hole disc golf course and how that could look throughout the woods. Here's that rendering of what a bouldering wall can look like.

Like you need like current one on community parks.

Yeah, the actual grips.

Yep.

Now you're seeing the depiction of what a hammock area could look like off to the side. Here we're seeing the variety of trail nodes that I mentioned. So again, just opportunities for for seating. Here's another hammock grove in the lower left. fire pit area and park shelters. So really these sort of social hubs where people can come and gather and have fun at the park. Here's a rendering depicting the sledding hill. That was another big goal that we had when putting this park design together was how do we ensure that it's year-round and providing activation opportunities in the winter. And just based on the site conditions, sledding is definitely kind of the opportunistic thing to have at this park site. Here's a depiction of what the sports fields can look like. And again, just kind of showing more visualization and context of how the rectangular field looks next to the 300 foot field. And then over here at the top would be the Miracle League field. Here we're showing the opportunities for walking and snowshoeing throughout the park. And I really think this is gonna be quite popular here. You can see just the varieties of loops that exist here out at the park site. And I think it's fair to say you could accumulate several miles just walking the trails throughout this park site.

Do you think there's an opportunity in the, maybe like in the more wooded area for some cross-country skiing even at some point? I mean, cause I know you have to prep the trails kind of specifically.

Yeah. Yeah. That starts to get into another, you know, level of maintenance because you got to have grooming equipment and things like that. That's typically going to be more in your regional park system. But I do think snowshoeing is going to be a really awesome opportunity out here. And then also in talking with Brian in Public Works, he does intend to maintain and essentially plow this center loop trail along with access to the neighborhood and then over to the school. So there again, people throughout the winter could walk the trail too if they don't have snowshoes. And then lastly here, this is depicting what the future park building layout would look like. So it includes in the upper left park storage, IT and AV needs. We've got five restrooms, including one down here that's larger and includes an assisted restroom and shower with adult changing table. We've got mechanical and electrical storage. And then this larger space at the bottom here would be indoor programmable area with a small kitchen off to the side and some storage. we view this as a an opportunity for us to host another extreme kids summer campsite throughout the summer so we would really designate this space throughout the summer months to build upon that program It's very popular and we are seeing waiting lists for that summer camp over the past several years. And then I think in the spring and in the fall, sort of the shoulder seasons, it could be a rentable space along with programming, different programming we could bring in. And then in the winter, the intent would be to convert that to a warming house to accommodate the sledding activity.

Is there a plan, and it may be too costly, I don't know, but since it seems as though there will be a gas hookup for the fire pit, to have like a fireplace in there for like a true warming house or ski chalet feel?

Potentially, yeah.

Just a gas fireplace that would be... On the inside?

Yeah, yep, that's a good idea.

I just want to comment that I think you guys did a nice job with the bathrooms. I know that there's a neighboring community, they have a universal playground, but they didn't budget for restroom facilities or it just hasn't happened yet. It's really challenging.

It's been the number one complaint they get about it. People love the park, but they just really struggle with not having facilities.

Right, and I think in the circumstances of the intention of the park, that's got to be a priority as well. So I just want to recognize that this is really nicely done.

It's nice that it's planned for right away. No, their park is out in the middle of the neighborhood, so there's nothing around it.

Yeah, and I know the Park and Rec Commission, we're really strongly advocating for the year-round building to have heating and cooling and the restrooms.

Just even the adult changing table, that just shows the real intention that's been thought out very, very well.

Mm-hmm.

Great.

Alright, so moving on to the cost estimate. Not going to go through every line item here, but we can jump to the bottom and see that we are currently. At $23.8 million. As an estimate and then. The way we would fund that, as I mentioned earlier, we have the LC CMR grant funds. at $3,047,000. And then the remaining amount we would seek bond financing and then put together a 20-year schedule utilizing a variety of sources to pay the annual debt service, which we estimate at $1.5 million per year over 20 years. And I realize I forgot to copy over the sources. Yeah, I was just going to say. But I will read those out loud. Those sources do include park dedication funds. Sale of excess property at Highway 212 and County Road 44. Sanitary and water connection fees as contribution for utilities to the park. MSA contribution for Savannah Way stormwater. Development stormwater contribution. The independent school district 112 contribution for the parking lot and stormwater as indicated with the letter of agreement. The fundraising dollars that Chaska Rotary has been assisting with. And then allocations from the general fund and enterprise funds. So it'd be a mix of those over a course of a 20 year schedule.

Yeah, so just to clarify, the $23.8 million, you're talking about the source from those funds that you listed off over the course of 20 years.

Yep.

I think it's important to kind of clarify.

Yeah, all but $3 million. $3 million should just be cash from the grant.

Yes, so I think it's good to, because I know sometimes community members kind of don't exactly know, well, how do you get the funding for these parks or building this? So I think it's good to touch on that.

Yeah. Good. All right, so as far as next steps go, we would be looking to put together an RFQ to contract with this construction management firm and really bring them along with Confluence over these next phases to develop detailed designs, then take those designs to create construction documents, which then puts us in position to prepare bids. for construction. So that's kind of the next key step is to be bringing on that construction management firm. They're really good with understanding sort of what works out in the field and then also helping with ensuring that we're staying within our estimate as we go forward through detailed design planning. Just like to take the opportunity to recognize the planning teams that have been working on this over the last two years. So Confluence is the lead architect with Brad here, along with his staff Mamata and Mo. Stantec has served as the civil engineer, and so I'd like to thank Eric Lemke and Alan Offerman for their input into this. Ortel would like to thank Andrew Cooper and his staff as it relates to the park building. With Bolton and Menk, I'd like to thank Ashley Hudson and her staff for the assistance with the grants. I'd like to thank the LSI design team along with Brett Altergott at Flagship Recreation for the ongoing work with the playground. I'd like to thank Tim Sunbee with Carver County Water Management and his staff as it pertains to the stormwater. And then lastly, but certainly not least, our city staff project team. That's included Ashley Colley, our city planner, Brian Jung, our public works director, Aaron Link, our recreation program manager, Matt Clark, our city engineer, Matt Podorowski, city administrator, and Nate Clark, our community development director.

I'm going to tell you and call them Nate Clark. Sorry. Nate.

He's going to be very offended by that.

Sorry, Nate. Yeah. Yeah. And then I'd like to thank the Chaska Parks and Recreation Commission throughout this process. They have served as the task force and again has been in monthly meetings over the last two years to help formulate this final recommendation for you. I'd like to thank you all as the city council for your support and direction throughout this process. And then also thank the community again. Their participation at the onset and throughout the community engagement process really helped shape this overall plan. And I think we really struck a good balance with what we're showing here. in this final plan. I think it achieves the goals we set out for. It will be a destination park. It's gonna draw people from across the metro and get people to experience all the great things Chaska has to offer. But day in, day out, it is also just gonna be that park right here in Chaska for residents to enjoy on a regular basis. And then kind of lastly before I turn it over to you just wanted to recap The meeting we had with the Park and Recreation Commission last week Tuesday where I presented this final plan to them Wanted to share, there were residents online and there was a resident by the name of Tim who shared concerns with the potential lighting of sports fields along with concern with the current traffic speeds that exist on Percheron Boulevard. We did talk through the sports fields and the lighting and that's still kind of a yet to be determined. thing I did you know mention that the technology with lighting has come a long ways which is helpful you know and then also reiterated that you know city ordinance would require lighting to go off at 10 o'clock p.m. so it's good to talk through and And then there was another resident, Sarah, who also concurred with Tim regarding traffic speeds along Percheron. And just with that understanding that there will be people likely parking along Percheron and then just how we're making sure it's safe for people that are living in that residential area who want to cross Percheron to get over to the park. So I think those are things...

Marshall, was that like current observations of the speeds?

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah, I can understand that, right? I live in this area. I go up and down those roads. It's just a bunch of housing developments right now. So I feel like people tend to feel like they can just drive faster because there's not much there.

Yeah.

This certainly will help with stuff being there and having developed. um because really realistically only one side of the road is houses being built and others wide open so and it's a long straight stretch so i certainly can understand if you're you know going down there you're probably going fast my hope would be as it gets developed people will not treat that as like a route out of town or right they see more people around yeah yeah but i can see that i certainly understand that but yeah that's probably a little bit what's going on there yeah yeah

Yeah, I just wanted to bring their comments forward for you.

Yeah, absolutely.

Additionally, Park and Rec Commissioner Danelle Hayai did share her disagreement with the inclusion of a splash pad in the final plan. She had a variety of reasons for that that she went through. She certainly supports the overall plan but kind of from that perspective she was in disagreement with the splash pad. There were a couple of other park and rec commissioners who generally agreed with the point she made as it pertained to the splash pad. However, they did also express that they felt that overall what's being presented in the park plan is achieving the goal that we set forth. and that the inclusion of a splash pad isn't negatively impacting everything else that we wanted to plan for the park. Park and Rec Commissioner Chair Branch expressed a lot of gratitude and thanks to the community for their participation along with his gratitude to his fellow commissioners. They talked about how it was difficult talking through all these things and Kind of weighing out the different options and he just appreciated everybody having a voice throughout the process and working through some of the difficult decisions along the way. But overall, they expressed just a lot of excitement about this final plan. They're very supportive of it. They appreciated the process and they really appreciate being a part of what they think is a legacy project here in Chaska. And so with that, the Park and Rec Commission did pass a motion unanimously recommending city council approval of the motion that's before you tonight. So with that, I will turn it over for any questions or discussion. And before you there are the motions we're looking at.

Does anybody have any questions for Marshall?

do have a question because i think it's maybe something that we've kind of taken for granted or i've asked or maybe i just missed it the name of this park because i hear like southwest chaska park yeah southwest chaska community park yep directionally directionally we had to call it something is there a plan that's first i guess the easiest question yeah are we calling it southwest chaska park or community park are we going to name it is there a plan to name it something else like what is what does that look like that's a really good question i agree i just echo that what they said here like i get worried with the words community park because that is by definition what it is based on how we classify parks But that will get confusing to other community parks. Yeah, that's the question. I'll let you answer it.

So we started out always referring to it to Big Woods because that kind of seemed obvious. Big Woods Park, which I think could be a potential name in the future. But we didn't want to just assume that. And then also we were kind of thinking about directionally. We have to explain it all the time where Big Woods Park would be. So that's why we... We kind of transitioned to calling it Southwest Park for the time being, but we do have a park naming policy that was developed by the Parks and Recreation Commission. So once we know that we're gonna move forward, that would be something we will have a process for and an opportunity to engage the community for them to submit ideas.

Yeah, I think it'd be a fun potential timeline in between stuff happening out there, right? Because we're going to have this gap, and now that gap's going to go quickly, right? But it would continue to build up momentum. But okay, that helps me. Like I said, I'm familiar with the policy regarding naming. But I was just curious because I had concerns with Chaska, Southwest Chaska Community Park in general because of the confusion. And then like I said, it's got the nice little logo that says Southwest Chaska Park. I just was like- do we ever just assume that's what's going to be called or we're going to name it so it sounds like we're going to name it which is great and we'll you know obviously that will be a fun process as well no questions just this is obviously very exciting I said it when I walked in the room it's kind of fun to get to approve two parks in one night

um so valuable in our community and this is particularly exciting to see it just being something that we were talking a lot about many years ago to actually be here and have real plans and um the feedback that the community the park commission and us have been able to give over the whole process has been amazing to see how it's been shaped and it really has been shaped by the community which is really special to get to put a park in you know they're almost always shaped by the community but this one really was such a large effort with so many different you know opportunities for feedback that it really feels like you know the residents this is their park um so i just think it's very exciting so thank you for all the work um both to confluence and the parks and rec team and the parks and rec commission task for everybody um for all the effort they put into it because it's just exciting to finally have it on paper and get it approved so thank you

I'll add, I live in this really close proximity to this park, and probably my neighbors or when I'm out in the community, it is probably one of the number one things I get asked about. I've been in that neighborhood for eight years, and for eight years there's been a sign at the end of that road that said, future home of potential lighted ball fields. which the former mayor, who we saw tonight at a different event, was very proud to put up because he said, put that sign up there so no one asks questions later. And it may not have lights. I appreciate the commentary on there. But there is a lot of interest and a lot of excitement building. And I just think it's really exciting to see. The other feedback I hear when we start talking conversations about the industrial park is like, oh, why can't we just keep open spaces, right? People get used to open spaces. And this is a really good opportunity of evaluating a space, keeping it active, keeping some open spaces, preserving the big woods, which I think is really a good fun way. And I really like what we've done with the big woods acquisitions through grants, because I usually will tell people that cities can choose to preserve open space, but that also means owning it or buying it. And that does take also cost money and you take tax dollars away from tax revenue. So really creative ways of like using grant money to purchase land to preserve areas is really a great way to continue to support those open spaces too. So I'm just excited. Really it has been, you know, thank you to everyone that you have. I do appreciate your very thorough job of making sure to go through the list of thank yous. i'm sure for many people in the community this has been a long crazy process where they're like why isn't this built yet but again you gotta you don't get many opportunities as a park board as a city as a council to build a park of this nature of this stature and you and you want to get all that feedback and you want to get it right and you want to learn so i think it's it's going to be pretty fun and pretty exciting so appreciate all the work

I would just add to that too, it's really nice to see Cheska, as we come up to being fully developed, continuing to add things that are going to make people want to stay here rather than, you know, just more homes. Not that there's anything wrong with homes. but you know we have some great amenities already in the curling center and the down course and you know some great private entities like Hazel seen to bring a lot of people up this way but something like this that can attract just families who aren't coming to actually pay to do anything or sport just actually coming to enjoy what Cheska has to offer is is exciting because it already happens at fireman's a lot and you know, in Carver for the creamery, you see tons of people. So something like this is definitely going to attract people from around the area to play at it, utilize it, whatever. And it's exciting that we can make that part of our end of growing.

Good. You're a man of few words. So sign up a good council when the mayor doesn't really have to say a whole lot because it's all been echoed and said, I mean, I, this is, I guess you've done a great job of presenting everything, all the amenities and thanking all the parties, and I think we all share that heartfelt thank of the time and dedication, but I also want to recognize you, Marshall. You have spent a ton of time on this, and you have worked this plan and reworked this plan, and and I know this is you have a large role to play with all the different park and recreation entities that we do already currently have and this is a new endeavor and so thank you for pulling in all of the ideas engaging all the feedback within not just the community but our staff as well incorporating public works perspective to make sure that it's going to be well maintained and um and like i said like i shared the thoughts of everybody else here that the community you know is going to have a place that creates that sense of community pride and a legacy for our community so thank you so much for all your time on this um i'm excited that we are here at this moment and we're here to go ahead and make this happen. And so with that, we have a motion on the screen. Two motions, actually. Well, two motions, but I can read the motion off, or if somebody wants to...

take rain they certainly can as well but we do have two motions in front of us all right first one is motion to approve the park and recreation commission recommendation for approval for the southwest park plan and budget along with authorizing staff to continue working with confluence and yet to be determined construction management company to develop detailed designs construction plans and prepare bids all right so a motion from council member shovelin

Second.

A second from Council Member Graw. Any other discussion? All right. Hearing none, all those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? That motion carries. And now we have another motion.

I make a motion approving and authorizing the city administrator to sign a letter of intent with Independent School District 112 for joint stormwater and parking facilities to serve the community park and planned elementary school in Southwest Jessica.

All right, we have a motion from Council Member Hatfield.

Second.

And a second from Council Member Benesch. Any other discussion? All right, hearing none, all those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? All right, that motion carries. All right, let's go build a park. Awesome.

Maybe I'll have my shovel tomorrow morning.

Any extra dirt, you can fill up some stops and bring them my way from my backyard.

Yes, thank you for being here. Thank you.

all right well with that we'll move us down to oh i gotta dig out the agenda here uh 8b or 7b no ap let's read the first time around uh public hearing to consider certification of 2026 delinquent utilities and adopt resolution 2026-88 approving certification of delinquent utilities

Mayor and Council Member, the item in front of you tonight is something that you guys see each year. As we go through the course of the year, there are some who become delinquent on their utility fees, and there's a number of different categories of that. And if we don't receive payment by a certain point, it's important that we're consistent on making sure that we're specially assessing those fees against the properties to make sure that we're treating everybody in the community equally with that. So we don't have a ton of delinquent utility bills in 2026. And quite frankly, most years we don't have a ton, but we do have a few. and you'll see the list that's included as an attachment of everybody that's included on there. In total, we have delinquent utility fees of $9,534.12. That's broken down into things with stormwater fees, electric fees, sewer fees, water fees, and we don't have any sort of miscellaneous fees that are out there. And then we send out these notices saying that we're going to assess if we don't get payment. A lot of times we do receive payment in before this actually comes to you. So after the payments that we've received, we still have 21 accounts that are still delinquent. That total $7,800. So we were able to bring it down a couple thousand dollars by people making payments before we actually got to the meeting tonight. So the motion in front of you tonight is to approve resolution 2026-88. that would approve certifying these delinquent utilities, then what would happen is then they would go on the 2027 tax bill for next year. And myself or Noel or Erica could certainly answer any questions if you have any.

Does anybody have any questions for staff? I know that you're right. This is something that we see. Go for it.

I was just going to say, quick question. If I remember correctly, once we certify it, if the individual wanted to pay it and they have to work with the county because of the taxes or what would be that?

There's a certain number of days that they have to pay it directly to us.

Yeah, typically when you approve a successful loan, you can... Okay. And sometimes we do see that where

You know, people may not understand that. No, we are actually certifying, you know, going to be certifying these. And once action is taken, sometimes we see more people actually come in and pay their bill because they don't really want them to go into their, their tax bills.

I have a, we, I think we all got this email from this one. I don't even see their name on here. Like this, they wrote to like the entire County, all of us.

Oh yeah.

That one. Is that on here? uh i don't see it on there but i think because it's a utility customer well yeah i mean it's everything so i just wanted to make sure if we were talking about them we're taking it out and reading the email first before acting

Yeah, so so there are us yeah, so if they're not showing up on it doesn't mean that we're not having issues And doesn't mean that we're not dealing with it But we haven't exhausted everything to get to a point to actually put it on their assessment.

Yeah, it's an active situation still so um Going back, we do see this every year. I just want to give thank you to Utility Billing, Noel, Erica, you guys. They work incredibly hard and you see the reflection of it because there are very few names on this list. And I give them a lot of credit because that is not an easy part of their job. Sitting on a disconnect day and hearing kind of the phone call interactions and the guidance that they give and the resource options that they give for people to pursue. That is, Those are always hard conversations. They do them very well. They do them with dignity. They do them with customer service and care. And again, like I said, it's reflective because we see very few of it. A recent addition to the CAP board agency, which has energy assistance as part of their thing. And so being able to direct people to those sort of resources that they have those funds available that hopefully can help people that are in need. That's part of that process.

Yeah, I I double that that what Noel staff does down in utility billing is That is thankless work. I mean they that is very difficult to hear very difficult stories which are very true real stories that people are going through and to be able to deal with it in a professional manner and be able to come up with payment plans or ideas or those types of things and Every day they're sitting down talking with people about that, and they're just very good at what they do. Yes, they are.

So I just want to make sure that that gets passed along to their department, that that work is recognized, because that is challenging work. All right, with that being said, we do have a motion for approval of Resolution 2026-88, approving the certification of delinquent utilities and miscellaneous unpaid charges to Carver County for collection with payable 2027 property taxes.

So moved.

All right, so we have a motion from Council Member Graw.

Second.

And a second from Council Member Benesch. Any other discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Aye. all right motion carries all right that moves us along to action item 8c which is adopt resolution number 2026-82 adopting the proposed 2027 maximum property tax levy

What was that? I just heard a noise.

We don't have any Kleenexes up here. I would offer one to you. You were trying to hold it back again.

That must have hurt. All right, well bless you. Thanks. All right. Well, Mayor and Council Member, the item you see in front of you tonight is something that we've talked about for the past about month and a half or so. Under the truth in taxation process in the state, We have to go through a two stage process of establishing our tax levy for the following year. The first stage involves adopting a preliminary tax levy by the end of September, which we then certify to the county. And that ends up being what goes out on the truth and taxation statements in November. And then in February, That's followed up in December with the truth and taxation hearing that we hold the first, which is December 7th of this year, first Monday meeting that we have. We can't take any action that night, but basically present the budget, take any feedback, and then we use that then to establish the final levy, which would be, on december 21st of this year so this is the preliminary so you once we set this uh you can go down but you cannot go up on on the tax audience so that's why it's sort of important for us to to understand that the impacts of it as we go through um you know because we are limited beyond this point so next slide um so where we've been uh next slide So our budgeting objectives really focus us in on what ends up being our main goals for budgeting and setting our budget. So being the best small town in Minnesota, that sort of drives everything that we do and how do we provide our services to do that. Maintain existing high quality service levels. We want to fully fund the maintenance and replacement of our vehicles, equipment, and physical assets on a regular basis. We only fund new programs after existing necessary programs are funded, so we need to make sure that we're taking care of what we're already doing first. Develop long term budget plan that's sustainable to support our service levels. Residents expect not only now, but going into the future, Fully fund the needs of our street reconstruction program and then budget with a plan that avoids draw down on our city's general fund reserves. And that's something we've been working on the last six years. Next slide. So our tax levy policy is pretty simple. It's really new growth. So whatever new growth we have in the community plus inflation plus any new services that we'd add. So we really limit our tax levy to that. The new growth, we always want to make sure that we capture that because if we don't, in essence, if we did not capture new growth, our existing residents would end up paying for the new residents coming into the community. I don't want to say it's free dollars, but by bringing in the percentage of new growth, we're in essence capturing those new values into the community, which is more people to spread that across. And so it keeps everybody's taxes lower while still keeping up with services. Inflation, obviously we have a number of different things that we purchase or staffing that we have that's impacted by inflation. So we need to make sure that if we're going to continue with consistent service levels that we're keeping up with whatever that inflation is. And then new services are just if we're deciding to do something above and beyond what we've normally done. The last four years, that's been our building improvement program. We've finished that now. Good news is we have no new services proposed for 2027. So that ends up not really being a factor in the tax levy discussion this year. Next slide. So the key budget items we worked on last year at this time, so we used our tax heavy policy. We continued to work on our camp program, which is where we reinvest back into our existing assets and Last year, one of the things we did is we added on inflation because it had been a million dollars since 2017 and things obviously continue to get more expensive. So we use the franchise fee revenue from Excel and Minnesota Valley Electric Cooperative that we put in place last year to add on inflation onto that million dollars so we can keep the same buying power. Last year again was the last of four years for the building improvement program and we're done with that now. And then we continued to work on balancing or building up our general fund reserve balance and Not only have we budgeted for the past few years $300,000 that goes specifically to our reserves, but we've also had some pretty robust years for building permits. And so it's allowed us to really build up our cash balance. more quickly than I would have expected. So we went from having a fund balance when we started this process at $1.9 million in 2020 to about $4.1 million in 2025. So I think we heard the last time we sold debt that maintaining that rating that we had, this is a big part of it. So next slide. So where we're at now, We're still not getting any.

We're going to take that slide out next year.

But I still like to say that between 2026 and 2003, that's a million dollars a year that we didn't get. So that's like over $20 million over that time period that we've had to go without. So it has had an impact on us. Next slide.

And 20 years ago, a million dollars went a lot further than it does today.

Yes, it does, yep. Household growth, so in 2025 of our population estimates that we got were 30,513 people with 11,292 households. As of July 1st this year, we have 150 lots immediately available, and we have another 158 lots, which was actually the picture that Marshall just showed you, that are just coming online now. So we have about 300 lots that are available. I put that in there because we're not going to have lots forever. We have the McKnight area that you're going to start to see some stuff come back over the next 12 months, wanting to move forward with that. But there's not a lot left out in southwest Chaska for housing development. There's a lot left for commercial industrial development, but not for housing. Next slide. So our building permit revenue, we always, I remember when I first came to Chaska back in 2001, we thought a million dollars of building permit revenue was a really big year. number of years like that before we hit the recession in 2007-2008 timeframe and we went for about four years after that where we are seeing under $500,000 a year. You compare that to what's happened since 2020 where we've been $1.5 million or higher. And we expect that we're going to end this year at that number two. So it really shows you how dramatically, how fast growth has occurred over the last five to six years. Has occurred at a much faster pace than what we were seeing back even before the recession when we were still seeing pretty high growth in the community. And a lot of that, the building permits are higher. Not just because we are seeing a lot of residential growth, but because we're seeing a lot of industrial businesses in our industrial park, Beckman Coulter, others that are adding on to their facilities. So a lot of those are larger building permit numbers because we're seeing more than just residential development that's going on.

What made two years ago so high? Costco.

Costco. So we saw Costco, and then we also saw a big industrial building, too.

Well, like the apartments, right?

Yeah, we saw 600 units of apartments being built. We saw another one of the Oppenden buildings being built.

I forgot about Costco. That makes perfect sense. Yep.

So that was a big year.

Would we expect that next year with the Nordic spa thing?

I don't think so. We're budgeting for 1.5 million. There's some indications that the housing market's slowing down a little bit. Certainly with existing housing stock, it's slowing down. I don't know that things are going as fast now as they were over the last couple years for housing. So I don't think we're going to see it stagnate, but I don't think we're going to see it as fast as it's been. Next slide. So this shows our market values that we work off of. These are the market values as of January 1st of 2026 for taxes payable 2027. So you can see that the overall increase is, I think that says 3.28%. overall increase in market values. The largest amount of increase that we've seen has been in that commercial industrial area, which again, that sort of goes back to what we're seeing with building permits too, is that we're starting to see a lot more growth in that area. Which is great because it does obviously have a real positive impact on property taxes as we bring more of those units on. As far as residential growth, so the percent, it was about a 50-50 split between what's new growth and what's growth in existing homes. So the percent change for market values, that's existing properties. So the typical home in the community saw about a 1.5% increase in their market values. quite a bit less than what we've seen the last few years. And that, to me, is sort of indicating to, you know, sort of what we're seeing in the housing market in general.

Why, so then, I mean, maybe it's a question you can't answer, but then commercial and industrial was 4.4%.

Yep. A lot of the higher increase in existing industrial is because there's a shortage of industrial.

Okay, so it's supply-demand.

It's a supply-demand thing. So that's why we're seeing out in Carver they have an industrial building going up. We're talking about the one here in Chaska going up. There is a shortage of the type of industrial that companies want to go into. So the industrial now, ceiling heights are much higher, garage heights are much higher. Generally, they're built with a lot more room than the older industrial buildings. So there's not a lot of those in the market, so that's what drives up the existing prices. But the other thing to point out on here is the new construction. So new construction made up 1.63% of that 3.28% of market growth. So that is the percentage that we use for new growth in the community when we're determining the tax levy. Next slide. And then this just breaks it down as far as this chart has not changed for several years, which I find sort of amazing just given the amount of residential growth we've seen that the percentage of commercial industrial apartments and residential have remained about this at this level for several years. But a bedroom community, you'd see a lot of blue on there. We have some mixed colors in there, which is good because it really sort of diversifies our tax base in our community.

I feel like though, as we've added more residential, we've done like an even amount of adding both commercial, industrial and apartments. So it's probably has evened out in the last several years. Yeah.

I mean, apartments, the 600 units that we saw and resident or a commercial, we saw, I mean, three of those opt-in buildings go up. So, I mean, there's definitely been that growth. Next slide. And then this just sort of graphically looks at the market value history. And you could really see 2010 was right about when we were just starting to come out of the recession. And market values always lag about two years behind what we're actually seeing in the market. So you can see that even though 2010 is when we were starting to come out of the recession, our market value still continued to dip for about two to three years. And we actually didn't see what isn't shown on this chart, because it's so far back now, is 2008. We didn't hit the same amount of market values in the community until 2016 compared to 2008. That's almost 10 years that we went with the property values actually being less than what they were prior to the recession. But since we've recovered from the recession, you can see how dramatically it went up. And then 2022 doesn't surprise me a ton because if you remember during COVID, there was a lot of housing sales that were going on.

Or like construction remodel. Yes.

There was, and a lot of it had to do with how low the interest rates were at the time. I mean, they were under two and a half percent. There was stimulus money coming in. So we saw a lot of building type activity occurred then. So that's what I think that represents. And then it sort of created our new normal. Okay, next slide. And then new construction growth, this just sort of shows that even in the years back in the recession time, even when we were seeing contraction on market values in the community, we still saw new growth occurring. In fact, 2012, 2013 were two big years for us when we saw United Health Group Data Center and we saw the 212 Medical Center. go up at the same time. And then we've seen, like we just talked about, a combination of housing and commercial industrial and apartments over the last three to four years. All right, next slide. This shows what's happened with our electric fund. Now keep in mind, our electric fund, we have two components of a transfer to the general fund. The first component is identical to the franchise fee that Minnesota Valley and Excel customers have, which is a 5% franchise fee that's charged to them. On top of that, we do a 5% transfer of dollars to the general fund to help support bringing taxes down. So what the numbers you see on here represent 10% of what our total electric sales were in the electric department. So you can see from 2008 being $2 million going up to You know, getting close to $6 million this year, that's really going from an operation of $20 million a year up to $60 million a year in just that time period. So we've seen a lot of growth in our electric fund. Next slide. Just some of the key environmental factors that we look at when we're putting this together. Population of households increasing. Trying to capture the projects that are coming online. You know, permits have continued to be a big part of, you know, to keep up with the budget. We've continued to see development interest, and in particular, new industrial interest. And, you know, the one thing that maybe we're being a little bit more cautious of, you know, going into this year is, you know, not budgeting as much for the building permits because we think it's still going to be good, or lots of growth, but not as much as it's been the last few years. And that we're just sort of planning for slower than the past few years. Next slide. So where are we going for 2027? Only two things we have to focus on this year. So our continued tax levy policy and then our camp program. So with the tax levy, we can go to the next slide. With the tax levy program, so our expenditure inflation number that we're using is 3.8%. It has run over 4% over the course of the last year. We have seen it come down a little bit over the last couple months, so we used 3.8% for that. New growth is the actual number that we take from the county's new growth, which is 1.63%. considering we'd have no new programs in there that would say that we would have tax of the increase of five point four nine percent which translates to a three point three four percent increase for the median value home in the community and we'll look at that a little bit more detail and One thing I will point out, and Noel just shared this with me today, Chanasson did a survey of where sort of property tax levies are coming in for quite a few of the surrounding cities. I think it ended up being like 16 cities that they looked at. I think we were the third lowest for the tax levy increasing. Eden Prairie was lower, and then there was one other lower one too. but it's uh i think even prayers are like 2.9 so high that surprises me but i guess well no but they're they're yeah the percent they're increasing yeah so but i point bringing that up is that um in this you know you guys you guys have had to do hard work the last few years and and it it you know

It's time that you don't have to do such hard work.

So I think we're very competitive with where people's levies are coming in around the area. And certainly, when you bring in new growth and the impact on existing homes, it's going to end up being an increase that is less than the rate of inflation. That's awesome. Next slide. Camp program, so this is, again, the million dollars we started back in 2017. Last year, like I said, we did start adding inflationary increases in that, and we do all types of projects with this. The overlay program, trail resurfacing, neighborhood park rehabs, all kinds of things of our existing assets to make sure that they're staying in good shape. Next slide. So this is sort of looking at the next three years. So next year we're going to have a little bit less in the program because we had to put a little bit more in for Bavaria Road to do this year. But Brian actually just shared with me last week that that's actually coming in lower than what we had budgeted for. So we may be able to shift more dollars into the camp program for 2027. Probably into more street overlays, so maybe being able to pick up a little bit more of that. We're trying to focus on the industrial park next year because it's in pretty bad shape and hasn't had anything recently. Every year we do three miles of trail resurfacing to keep up, and then we have a resurfacing of Pickleball Court. Looking into the future, we have a few parks that will be included, including McKnight. playground Riverview Park down at Riverview Terrace and then the Bavaria Hills playground all three of those will get replaced coming up here next slide and we established that Riverview Park was in Riverview Terrace yes yep okay yep This just talks about just by fun. There's not a lot. There's one department I'll talk about, but communications, we are moving to bring the video production assistant person who's here currently in part-time up to a full-time starting July 1st, said at a cost of $20,000. And that's really because we've just seen more and more demand to get that type of stuff produced. Human resources, they get slammed in the summer with our seasonal and part time, and so we're looking at bringing an intern to help, especially process the paperwork that comes with that. Policing, so we have three sworn officer positions that we'd be budgeting for for next year. I'll describe it more in an upcoming slide. Beyond that, we need to equip a new squad car and then some work with our drones, replacing batteries in there. Next slide. Fire, this administrative assistant position is one that we had planned for actually when the public safety facility opened up. But we decided to sort of wait to see how did it function before we decide whether it was needed or not. We did decide it's needed, especially that position ends up processing a lot of the financial paperwork for finance to be able to process through for our paid on call firefighters. And it's just with having to respond to calls and do that, it just is not working super hot for being able to stay up on that timely. So we did put that in as an April 1st start for that. And then $11,000 to create a second step in our fire inspector positions. So this is, we've lost two inspectors in the last year because we don't have anywhere for them to move into. And they've moved to cities who have positions to move into. We have five, six years before our fire marshal retires. We need to be focusing on succession planning. So it's a pretty small cost to be able to make sure that we can have some retention within those positions. Park and Rec, these are two positions that we have had in the past, but are recommending that we bring back. And we talked about Marshall, he's got a lot of things going on in his department. And so, especially with the pending retirement of somebody within his department that provides really sort of administrative support. We're like, this is probably the appropriate time to bring back the Assistant Park and Rec Director position. And really, especially with the new park, and then we have the community center renovations coming up, that there's going to be a lot going on there. The other one is more of a tech support position. And especially with, now we have Finley Sports and these programs, They're designed to provide ways for people to register online and pay online and all those types of things, but they're not just plug and play. You have to configure them to whatever you're doing for your programming. And I think we had that position in the past, and we're finding, especially as we switch over to this, we're really missing that position. and quite frankly, I sort of view this as sort of our cash register of our park and rec department because this is where we collect the fees to be able to pay for the recreation functions. This is an important position to make sure that we're doing this most effectively and that people are getting registered for classes and things like that.

Does it seem weird that that person is going to make more than the assistant director?

Keep in mind, though, that one starts on April 1st and one starts on July 1st. Yeah, so it's just that they're starting at different times. I got you.

Yep.

And then the Nick Mason recreation scholarship. So this is one that we've had for, I think Nick passed away maybe about eight years ago, nine years ago, something like that. His family started this recreation scholarship fund. It's been very popular. It's allowed a lot of people in our community who may not, kids who may not be able to afford to be in programs to be in programs. We've run out of money in that now because we've used all the dollars and I'm like, you know, we really should be setting aside dollars to help support people to make it possible for them to be part of programs. I did check into it. Part of our system is that Chester residents are looked at first before residents from other communities.

When Matt and I met to discuss before, I met with him before your work session because I wasn't going to be there. I said we should just make sure that Chaska residents are receiving these scholarship dollars since it's coming out of our general levy.

Yeah, I didn't know it, but apparently that was already part of the program.

I mean, I just feel like that's probably fair.

Next slide. And then this is with the police staffing. So I had explained this at work session that with our new station in place, we're really trying to move to being fully staffed, to being able to have a three car minimum with a supervisor on every team. We, for a number of years, ran at the two car minimum. And that can get really challenging and has gotten more challenging with how big the city is getting and then being able to station people. And, you know, we didn't always have a sergeant on every shift. And in the past, we weren't as concerned about it because we had such seniority of people that they'd been doing it forever. They knew what they were doing. Not that they didn't ever need a sergeant, but we had one on call that they could call and say, here's the situation, how do I deal with this? We have a lot of young officers now, and with that, if we're going to be responsible about that, we need to make sure that we're supervising them responsibly. So the sergeant position just becomes all that much more important with having younger officers that are on board. Doing this will allow us to meet that three-car minimum and then have a sergeant on each team. So basically there's four teams that are made up of four officers with a sergeant, and then they rotate their shifts around in their 12-hour shifts. And then there's two what they call power shifts. So a power shift includes a supervisor and a patrol officer. Those people work from 3 to 3. because that is our highest volume time that we have during the course of a day. So it ends up being sort of that extra sort of surge of support when we need it. And then when we don't need it, we pull back and then we can go back to that three cart minimum. So by doing this, we've completely built out that team. And we've talked about this a little bit over the last few years. I know Ryan came in probably three or four years ago talking about sort of ultimately where he thought we needed to go. Doing this gets us to where sort of his vision was a few years ago.

So if I'm understanding right, at any given time, there are five officers on, although one could be on PTO with that four car.

Yeah, there would. There's always five police. There'll always be at least three. There should be five when there's nobody on vacation. Yep. And if somebody is on vacation, usually four. But what it says is that we will never get to a point where we go below three. Okay. Yeah. But most of the time it's above three.

It's three and a sergeant. Yes. Okay. It makes sense for a city our size. Yeah.

Yeah.

All right, next slide. And then this just looks at the equipment. So we have a schedule for every piece of equipment and every vehicle that we have that we replace them on a given schedule so that we keep up with it. So this just goes through, talks about cameras in the council chambers need to get replaced. Camera system in three parts, not flock. The tanker truck, I pointed this out in the work session, but typically this would be the year that we'd replace a tanker truck. And that's about an $800,000 to $900,000 expense to do that. They have found a way to refurbish the truck for $115,000 and make it last another ten years. So that saves us about $700,000 over the course of that ten years. Next. And these are all replacement vehicles with the exception of the Tahoe for the battalion chief. That was with the expansion of the duty crew, so this would be one of the paid on call. One of the paid on call firefighters is now a battalion chief. So again, like a sergeant with police, they're there to supervise that team so that we have enough teams to be able to cover 24 hours a day. So I mean, I think about when I came to town and the number of hours that we had people that were within five minutes of being at your house and now, I mean, It's pretty incredible where we've come with public safety. I mean, the response times and the types of calls that we're able to go to in a very quick time period has been greatly enhanced over the last few years. And quite frankly, now having a public safety building has really allowed us to go to that next level and do that 24-hour service. So a real benefit of that. Next slide. So this is what you guys saw on August 3rd, and I just threw it out there because it got better. So we thought it was going to be about a 3.99% impact to the median value home, which is now $419,300. And if you flip to the next slide, so this is where we're actually going to be at. So we got back the final numbers from the county, looked at what type of impact that that has on the median value home, 3.34%, $4.75 per month or $57 per year. So that's when people- Obviously not every household is going to be the same. This is if somebody had what is the median value home. But it gives people sort of a benchmark to sort of know what to expect from their taxes. And this shows sort of where, how, you know, it's basically sort of a third, third, third situation for where tax dollars go. The other represents metropolitan mosquito control district, you know, transit. Those types of things are in that sort of other category. And... And then this just sort of is a graphical interpretation. But I threw it in there because it sort of shows the red is the building program. So you can see what the building program did over that time period and then where we're at for 2027. And then when you look at, next slide, where we fall in the median, I'm sorry, where we fall in the tax levy per capita in the metro area. So when we started the building program, we'd anticipated that we'd end up at 44. We're at number 50, which puts us almost in the lowest two thirds, or lowest third, I'm sorry. Almost in the lowest third, we're at about the 60th percentile or thereabouts. But I guess, yes, our tax levy per capita has gone up, no doubt because of actions that we've taken. We can still confidently say that we provide a really good value when we compare ourselves to other cities across the metropolitan area. And the one thing that we have going for us is that we really sort of took on that big chunk with still about 15 years of growth to occur in the community, which allows us to start to absorb those increases within the new growth and hopefully over time have less of an impact on people.

And this is... where our 2027 budget would put us no this is 20 26. no we we're providing you with actual numbers so you know exactly what it is we're not we're not projecting we're not projecting we're putting ourselves in here but we don't know what they're at yet okay yeah but again i think the read there is in 2027 you would expect that number to go down down yeah because we hear because everybody else is going to be suffering prairie sounds like yeah yeah yeah so

And then, like I said at the beginning, we're taking action tonight to establish that preliminary tax levy and budget. We'll also have to do that with the EDA too. But I will say when we look at the tax levy per capita and when we look at the impact, that includes the EDA levy. So we're not separating that off from the others. Because at the end of the day, residents don't care. I mean, they don't care if it's EDA or city. It's all one bill. And then October and November, the second meeting of October is when we're shooting to have a work session to go over the recreation funds. And then the second meeting in November, we'd be shooting to have the utility enterprise funds to go over projections and budget for next year. December 7th is when we'll have our truth and taxation hearing, and then December 21st is when we'd adopt all of our budgets and final tax levy. So with that, I can certainly answer any questions you might have.

Any questions for Matt?

no questions but i always think it's good to remind those that are watching that the council has seen this a couple times and have opportunities to ask questions so we've been able to kind of work through those and work sessions those are also open to the public but um you know after today was the public safety open house and it was so it's a timely day going over and setting the preliminary um Levy and the budget. So just to think back to the last four years and what the community committed to and putting those buildings in place to really continue building a community that is that fits the number of residents we have now versus. Many, many years ago, 30 years ago in some cases. It's really incredible to get to see people experience that today and then come here and set this budget in a little bit of a reprieve from the last few years. And we said this every year, but we didn't take it lightly. That was true every time. But it does feel a little bit better this year to just know the impact is lower, but also to look around at our communities and know that there are communities around us going through something we went through the last four years. anticipating the needs of their community understanding that it will save their community a lot of money in the in the long run by doing it now versus later and setting themselves up for success so this was a much more palatable presentation this year but grateful for a community that recognizes how important city services are on your daily life and always when it comes winter and those snow plows come out that's when the real message comes out of how grateful they are to live here when you have something you know god forbid bad happen and police or fire is there in a few minutes that's when you really remember how lucky we are to live in a community like this so um great work to staff uh i know that you guys work really hard on the budget uh and that you don't take it lightly either and that you really crunch the numbers to make sure we are being good stewards of these dollars um and that makes it really easy to sit up here and say yeah this this looks good after asking all our questions so thank you to staff too for the work you did yeah absolutely

Yeah, I echo what Council Member Hatfield just said.

I think, you know, I will tell people when they ask me or they tell me that they think our taxes are too high, that I also would like to pay less in taxes. I certainly understand that. But there is that perception of value of what you provide the community. And I think tonight you echoed it well. A good example of people coming out and celebrating that new building. And there will be some new buildings, other buildings coming that will garner that same value. a success i will also say i never take lightly whatever that percent is because that percent means different things for different people right so i'll never take that or that vote or anything like that likely and understand um it is interesting to watch the journey chaska's been on as his taxes and then kind of now watch around us Things do get more expensive and cities do have to react and I think you're seeing some cities You know the North Metro call out any names, but like North Metro where they've had low taxes for a long time I think they celebrated that and they have a really big number up there Start almost starting with the two in those type of things and it catches up it really does if you're if you're not kind of staying active of the piece of that too, so I appreciate, again, a lower percent, especially lower than inflation, is certainly something to be happy about, but understand that it impacts everyone differently.

Yeah, I will share in those thoughts As you continue to have conversations with people, you know as we messaged The building improvement program being four years and that that was the intention was to provide Continue to provide excellent city services and I think I always say, you know Our goal is to continue to have Chaska be an affordable place to live and still provide the high-quality services that our residents not only expect, but they deserve. And so I think that that is a case in point. And we hear, like you had touched on, both Councilmember Hatfield and Graw, that being at the open house and being able to show the community what the space looks like and seeing their enjoyment at being in that space. But also, not only that, but hearing the stories of, we've had two structure fires that are adjacent to the homeowner property of the home themselves. that our crews have responded so quickly that they were able to put out the fire before it impacted their home. And they're still in that home today. And those are things that are important. And I was going to say this at the very end, but we just welcomed three new officers last Friday. We swore them in. And at a time when recruitment and our police departments all over the state or maybe even the nation is so it's so impacted right now that we are able to welcome through officers that really want to commit themselves to our community to serve our community and to keep our community safe i mean that's just you know one of the services as well that behind the scenes that these are the things that you know are reflected in our budget and that are important to provide to our community. So it is great, though, that in the message of the building program, we said it was four years and that was it. And we were very forthcoming with that and forthright. And now we're seeing the reflection of that. That's here we are. And so this is This is great for us to be able to pass the preliminary at the level we're at. So yes, thank you to staff for all of your hard work and all the departments that put together their department budget in order to show that reflection of being good stewards of our tax dollars. All right, I think that's all I have to say at this point and we. Further down the line we have the truth and taxation statement and then and then the ultimate path. So this is kind of first step in the budget process. And so with that we have a motion to adopt resolution 2026 dash 82 adopting the proposed assessed 2026 payable 2027 maximum property tax levy. entertain someone to make a motion. So moved. All right, so a motion from Council Member Benesch. Second. And a second from Council Member Hatfield. Any other discussion? All right, hearing none, all those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? All right, motion carries. All right, that moves us off of our action items. Thank you, guys. And on to bills. Does anybody have a question on a bill?

No questions. No questions.

Yeah, I mean, I was just going to say, being that we were on the 31st, I'm sure that reflects in that. All right, well then, if no one has any questions on any bills, I would make a motion, recommend a motion to pass that bill.

Motion to pay the bills.

All right. Motion from Council Member Graw. Second. Second from Council Member Shetland. Any other discussion? All right. Hearing none, all those, or lease roll call. Sorry, I went out of file over there. Council Member Hatfield. Yes. Council Member Benesch. Yes. Council Member Shetland. Yes. Council Member Graw. Aye. Mayor Hubbard. Aye. All right. So that means bills are paid. And that moves us to other business.

Council Member Shetland.

No.

Well first I guess I spent an hour and a half with public safety before this and it was very exciting to see the community get to see and walk through and just engage with our public safety facility and the officers so that was really fun. Nobody that I talked to had any you know questions on how it was funded or had any negative thing to say everybody was extremely positive so it was really exciting to see that I know you know obviously building new buildings is expensive but when you can see how they turned out and the benefit that they have to the community I think that's amazing and even with the rain there was a nice turnout and then I tomorrow night is the first library task force meeting it is at six o'clock here in the council chambers we hope maybe to keep it to two hours so I think the invite said six to eight but I'm excited to start that work to get that off the ground I saw Lisa Anderson at the Public Safety Building. I know she's representing Carver County there, and she's also very excited. We were talking a bit about that. So I think more to come after the meeting, but this is really an exciting first step in what will be another amazing building in our new collection. I'm sorry. I thought the meeting happened.

I don't mean to put you on the spot. Tomorrow.

Tomorrow. All good.

Okay.

Wonderful. All right, Council Member Bennett.

I just want to thank all the police officers and firefighters that put on the public safety open house tonight. They did a great job. We had a really good turnout despite the weather. It actually turned out to be nicer than it looked like it was going to be. It was a really good time to see everybody come and experience the new building and get to meet and intermingle with our police officers and our firefighters because they do an amazing job. That's all I got.

All right, Council Member McGraw.

Before Council Member Hatfield, I'm going to steal some of her thunder, I think. I was wondering who would get it first.

I was doing like a zigzag method.

Yeah, I won't repeat everything that was said about the open house. It was a great event. lamented that my kids have started getting older and were less excited to come to things like that. I force mine. My 14 year old did not come.

I tried to get her son to go on a fire truck ride and he wouldn't do it.

Yeah, I asked my 11 year old and he said no. But my 11 year old, I did witness take two selfies with two llamas. And the llamas were around the back of the place. And I wanted to take a picture of the drone. And then we refused to let him try to do the walk with the goggles because he's just got his cast off and he's not supposed to fall, which he didn't really want to do. Not that it was unlikely he'd fall. So that was a great event. It actually also, just the conversation with the police and fire reminded me just to acknowledge the 25th anniversary of 9-11. That was last week. It's been interesting because like my kids are learning about it in school now and that's the generation we talked about. There's an old generation that doesn't even know what that was, right? And it's, you know, I remember sitting in my homeroom class in high school and all that conversation. It's just a memory of that and a recognition of that. A couple interesting things that caught my eye actually in Matt's report was the Mount Pleasant, I lost it here, Mount Pleasant Cemetery Project. I won't go into the details, it's in the notes, but kind of a really cool reality of an individual coming forth saying, hey, I think we should do some of these gravestones and I have a passion for this. And then our city employee and city, you know, Brian reaching out and working with them and having this project, it just kind of is a, again, This sounds corny, but I'll say it kind of, again, is why being the best small town? That is what community is, right? Someone comes forth, puts their time in there for the day and says, hey, I have a passion. I have an interest. I think we should do this to honor that site. And we put it in action and do something about it, which I think was a really cool story to hear that update. Anything you want to add on that?

Yeah, I would say that the tombstones that were done this year really look nice. And, I mean, these are tombstones from the late 1800s that, I mean, these are the pioneers, the founders of our community. And so to give them some respect, you know, and, you know, we started talking about as we walked through about, Wouldn't it be cool if we did have a walking tour through there that had signage that identified this person started this business in town? I think this gives us the opportunity to do something like that because now you can actually see the tombstones in Credo.

Don't forget, I did have someone approach me at Night to Unite that wants to help. They are part of an organization with Legion, and they, I think, have the... They have funding and manpower, I think, to help. Perfect. Don't let me forget about that. I just unlocked a conversation I had had that night.

Perfect.

And then last, this is where I want to steal the thunder for Southwest Transit here.

I'm literally the chair. You want it? No, you can have it.

We'll split it. We can both talk about it. You can add here, too. So State Fair ridership for Southwest Transit was a record this year. 120,158 passengers were transported with Southwest Transit. Even more amazing because they increased our ridership even though attendance was down a little bit. So then they also look at fluctuations and they ultimately calculate a market share. What was the market share? And Southwest Transit also set a high of about 3.14% of that market share. So again, and if you talk to anyone or anyone ever asked my opinion on how to get to the fair, it's take the bus, take Southwest Transit. It sounds, like I said, even with a little down attendance, it was great to see that people continue to go and it's a lot of people. I mean, that's, yeah, that's like.

I didn't realize that the fair was down in attendance.

It was slightly down.

Just slightly. Just slightly. It probably had something to do with breaking records.

They broke records for daily attendance records the first few days. It was probably related to school. And honestly, they were like really close. So it could just be like a natural fluctuation in attendance. It wasn't like a huge difference. School started in the week before. Yeah. School probably affected a little bit. And it was really hot. And it was just, it was really close. Probably just a natural.

Yeah. Oh, okay. No. All right.

Anything else you want to add there? I just told all.

Just that thank you to the community and the Southwest Transit staff for working their butts off during the fair. They worked really long days to make that happen.

And there was like, I went to a concert during that, so that was like you had that and you had people coming from Minneapolis, you know, doing their normal commuter route. And you had the Viking game yesterday. You had Renfest.

They are busy.

A couple of safety shuttling today.

Yeah, we're very lucky to have them in our community today. or to for us to be of joint powers with that um and so just thanks to that team because they really did they were working long hours and i'm talking everybody works long hours like ceo coo everybody there you probably saw one of our executive staff if you got on the bus because those were the people that were standing there ushering helping load strollers and things like that so big shout out to that staff um for safe, comfortable rides to and from the fair. It was definitely the way to get to and from the fair this year, and every year, to be honest. We did have to, as most industries are seeing their staffing shortages, so we did pull in Rochester City Lines this year to help us transport everyone to the fair, and that was a really amazing partnership. So we'll potentially continue doing that. But we didn't lose any of our identity in that. It still very much felt like the Southwest Transit experience, and they had very comfortable buses with safe drivers that really immersed themselves in our culture to take that on. So, yeah, just grateful to the staff and good report on the ridership.

That is all I have.

You keep going. I do have a few things. Southwest Transit was one of them. The public safety open house, I mean, a lot's been mentioned. I just want to also add, I got to talk to quite a few police officers and firefighters while I was there, and every single one of them shared kind of a piece of how they made today happen and just the care that they put into and how excited they were about today and the community getting to come and see it was really special because literally everyone I talked to mentioned you know something they had done to prepare for today and And how they were just there and showed up to get to welcome the community into that facility was really exciting. So that's awesome. A few things. Last week, no, week before, We welcomed a new small grocer to downtown Cheska-ish in the Cheska Tech Center. Spice Rock opened, posted about it on my Facebook, and I think the mayor did as well. I think it's probably the most likes and comments I've ever gotten on one post.

Yeah, I had like 200,000 views on mine.

People are really excited.

People are very excited.

Yeah, people are really excited. It's a great, it's a small business. Keep that in mind. They're still getting adjusted to being in there. But, you know, they're business owners. They also own Edible India. Edible India, right? Yep. Okay, I was like, wow, that sounded wrong for a second. It's almost 10 at night. um so they're just uh they investing in chaska and downtown is um just really amazing and there's literally everything in there uh like they have a great meat section produce um produce you wouldn't maybe find elsewhere ice cream really good ice cream not and like some fun flavors beautiful cakes the cupcake was amazing so um just really cool so check out spice rack if you haven't but uh grateful to them for welcoming me or inviting me to their um ribbon cutting where is it in this the tech center it's right at the front so it's uh it's number 111 yeah it's right on the front they have two doors they have one a door on the front and then a door on the side um and they have a little seating area in there and everything it's really and it's really fun because i talked to the owners of the gluten yeah bakery gluten-free bakery only girl i'm sorry did them dirty there and they there's a partnership already formed there so it's really cool anyways yeah carry on no yeah that's it was there they're great and wanting to be a part of Jessica and everything that's happening downtown so our last farmers market is this week which is really sad But it's been amazing. So I just wanted to thank staff for all the work and effort they put in. Not that this is the goal, but I was hearing that some vendors were dropping out of other farmers markets so they could do ours. Again, not the goal to steal vendors, but I think it is a testament to just how successful it's been. And then I also just wanted to give like a special thank you to Meadow Spring Church because I'm positive it was an adjustment for them, for their parking to become a public space. parking lot but then how they have just taken the farmers market and really invested in themselves they've been open every week handing out bottled water being a reprieve from the heat when it was really hot out giving tours so they you know that was an adjustment for them with their parking but then to also just say we're excited about this being here and we're going to open our doors and invite people in was really cool so i just wanted to give them a special shout out also red bench bakery andy over there doing um additional music and just you know it'd be easy to be a business owner next to that and be grumpy about it happening in your space but he really just opened and welcomed everybody in to say you know people were parking in parking that would be for his customers obviously he got some customers from it too but it would be easy to be grumpy if you were next to such a big event and he's just welcomed it as well so wanted to give those special shout outs with as we come to our last farmers market And it's from noon to six? No. Four to seven. Four to seven. Four to seven. Something in there. And then after that, the Downtown Business Alliance is gonna start hosting a fall market September 26th, October 3rd, 10th, and 17th from 11 to two. There'll also be a sip-in shop, so you can grab a drink from Size or wherever in that specific area. So that's gonna be awesome with that fall market. They have some vendors lined up. Then October 24th is their Trick or Treat in downtown. I think that's also when St. John's has their Trunk or Treat, so it's usually all in conjunction. And then I also just wanted to update the council on kind of some exciting news. For the first time in really the eight years I've been the liaison to the Downtown Business Alliance, there was a significant change in their board. So I just wanted to give you guys an update. The former board did a great job and many of these people are staying on the board. But the president is now Steve Ritz. So Dan Keyport served in that role for many years. He is now moving to a member at large. Steve Ritz, who is the owner of Fitness First, was the vice president moving into president role. And then Ken Cramp, who is the owner of Size, is stepping into the vice president role. He's been very involved. Stepping into the secretary role, which has been vacant for a little bit. is Sarah Munson, who has Hayloft Studios. She'll be stepping into that role and is also already very excited, has been telling me some things she's working on, getting SOPs together. Just very exciting things. And then a couple new members at large, Shawna Burdick, who has Faith Woven, new business owner downtown, is a member at large. And then Ann Jones, who owns Jones Coffee, also relatively new, stepping into a member at large. So there's a lot of exciting things happening with the Downtown Business Alliance, a lot of getting really organized and moving together and coming up with new ideas and it's just very exciting. So I wanted to thank all of their board members who put a lot of time into it and just welcome and update you guys that there are some new board members. so um that is for downtown um latin music and food festivals um on friday friday friday um there'll be fireworks six to ten fireman's park but fireworks are at eight eight yeah but the event goes till ten nine fireworks are at nine nine but at least i said eight and they'll just be an hour early instead of an hour late okay So that's always a really fun event. So definitely come down. There's a lot of really good vendors with really good food. And then let's see. The Loop released its fall rates. So if you haven't golfed the Loop, now's a good time because they have their fall rates. So that's exciting. And then the last thing, I just want to shout out stuff. Chaska Today is something I was in my mailbox when I got home from vacation, and it just is such a good one that I wanted to bring it and talk about it. But this is something that was really born out of several... strategic planning sessions where we wanted to especially with the loss of the Herald make sure information was getting out and this was such a good one it taught you know it has about voting and budget season which we talked a lot about tonight and several other things proposed developments you know all sorts of things nominating someone for the Human Rights Award so if you pick this up out of your mailbox and put in your trash don't do that go get out of your trash and read through it because there's a lot of really good information and it goes to all the doors in Chaska and so you don't have to feel like you're have to be on social media to find out something because it's a lot of it you're gonna get from the city perspective delivered to your mailbox so I just wanted to thank staff for putting this together it's was a long time coming but it's probably one of my favorite things to be that i've been a part of on this council so i want to shout it out and this is awesome and i love that it says the best small town in minnesota in the bold letters and the upper left so anyways um i think that's all the things i had yeah all right uh very good very good uh at least

The only thing I want to mention, obviously a big thank you for everybody for the public safety open house tonight. But the one thing I did want to point out, I don't know if people noticed, but typically in the past it was the fire open house. And now it's public safety, so now it's police and fire. But the thing that made me feel great was walking around and seeing each one of our departments up there. So we had our water and sewer department that was doing demonstrations and our electric department and our public works and all was over with the community or the... Crime prevention fund. It's just to me that it's a big deal that is just a long time making just to, you know, take something that, you know, was just sort of. you know a siloed sort of thing and and now it's the whole organization coming together to say hey we want to celebrate this all together and stuff so huge thank you to all the uh people in other departments who took their evening tonight to do that i think they had a blast uh doing it talking with them so it was it was just a lot of fun

Yeah, I agree. One of our, well, our deputy chief, he was like talking to Sarah Cody from the fire department. He's like, oh my gosh, there's so many people here. And he was just so excited. And it was also great to kind of talk to Sarah and, you know, cause it had been a couple of years. I mean, they'd had, I was reminded by her that they had had their open house, but it was over here at the park and it's just, I mean, it's still a great event, but it's just different. It feels good to have it in the space in which they're operating out of, and they can really showcase that.

I thought it was interesting. They had to stop the tours. There were more people that wanted to tour than Chief and Chief had the ability to give.

Yep.

So they were taking names for, like... Showings on other days.

Yeah, we actually for that we had a poster up there where people could do a QR code and sign up so we're doing once a month tours up there from now until People stop signing up for it. So we have one coming up on September 27th We're sort of switching between daytime and evening hours. So the one on 27th is a 1 p.m And then there's one on October 28th, that's at 7 p.m. So just people can get on our website. They can go to the link and put their name in there, and then they'll get contacted with details of when the tour will start and where and stuff like that.

Right, so that was fun, and then I think it was fun. although maybe your son didn't find it cool anymore, the amount of younger kids that were riding fire trucks and parents that were riding fire trucks. And it was just very fun to see.

To be fair to my son, he did do that when he was young as well. So he did find that enjoyable at that age. I mean, but it's cool to ride on one of those. It doesn't matter what age you are.

I mean, maybe it will inspire them to become a firefighter. Last but not least, and I never say his name right, Mike Taneck. And he was the one that, yes, was very excited. He was so excited about his goggle experiment, his walk in the sobriety line, and his Funny enough, his 11-year-old son can do it with the worst goggles on perfectly. So he was like, I don't know what that means about my son. Special skill set. Yes, special skill set.

Comes in handy in college.

It was very interesting. I guess I maybe am just uninformed, but I did not know how they use all those. There's three field tests that they do before they do a breathwiser. Yeah. I was not aware of how all of that played into deciding whether someone was. So I learned something. And he was very good at explaining because there was a group of us together hearing him. So not only was he really excited and had kind of a fun exhibit, but I learned something at it. So it was very helpful.

The police puts on a citizen academy. They didn't have the numbers for the fall, but they will do it at their normal time in the spring now. And that is one thing that you do. You should do it. It's really very, very informative. And you'll have a lot of fun doing it. Can I add something about the public safety? Yes.

I just want to say thank you to Victoria Fire because they provide a mutual aid. You stole my thunder. Take it back. Go ahead, Mayor.

Okay. I felt like there's not a whole lot you guys left room for me to say about this event. Pretend I said nothing.

I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Oh, wow.

No, okay, I wanted to touch on, yes, the other outside agency partners that made time to set up like the mobile command that the Carver County Sheriff's Office, some other organizations, agencies, non-profit groups did. To see them all there excited, ready to engage the community is wonderful. I also wanted to give thank you, obviously, to our fire and police active, but I wanted to give a thank you to our retired firefighters. I saw so many of them there. In talking with other communities that run their fire pension program through PARA, they don't really have that same level of connection with their retired. And that's one of the things that makes Chaska unique, that we have still actively engaged our retired. And to see them there and serving the community is just wonderful. And they're proud to and a part of it. And then also to thank the mutual aid. Victoria Fire Department because uh you know obviously our crews are busy giving the tours and showcasing the different elements of the station and having them ride in our trucks and everything so thank you Victoria for being on site and being ready and prepared and they have their own open house for their new station next Monday so I'm sure it will be reciprocated with us to them.

I have one more thing to add about the public safety thing.

Okay.

I was talking to a police, and I forget which one it is now, so don't ask me, and there have been a rise in the amount of dogs that they are finding. They caught three this year. They got called. They captured three, but they got called. Like lost or whatever? Yeah, and obviously they all looked very well cared for, so probably someone's pet. Sad. But If you're out walking your dog or you have a dog or whatever, just make sure that you're watching out for said animal. And if you're interested in adopting, they have these dogs in rescue homes or foster homes right now. If they're not claimed, I assume you're saying. It's after a week. Two of them have been. Sure. A week. So they just said that always check the website if you have lost your dog or, you know, one of the things people, I forget who did this demonstration, but one of the things you can do is microchip your pet, have a tag on, because two of these did not have tags on, so have a tag on, and then if you notice... Or some have microchips, but the pet owner doesn't actually fill out the information, so do the last step there. Just saying. But anyway, yeah, so if you have a

have a see a dog out there or cat or anything the police also help there and then they have a little place where they keep these little puppies until they can find a yep no it's good good yeah good public safety announcement so um yeah i mean that wraps up the open house it was fun to cut a ribbon and cut it successfully on the first right now the two of us have yet and scissors yeah so very exciting thank you everybody thank you staffing to everybody who help facilitate this uh... just a couple of couple things kind of related to policy deal with i'd mentioned it earlier but i want to give them formal recognition that we welcomed to police are three new police officers math and he's carter house and Mason Boatmaster. So welcome to our police department. So it was fun to swear them in last week. I can't wait to see them out in the community and probably in the chamber as well. So a couple other things. I attended the Southwest Corridor transportation coalition it's a mouthful they met today at the arboretum um they had invited our local legislators to attend and so it was nice to be able to sit down to our local legislators at the state level both senate and house and discuss uh transportation-related topics. Many of them are on transportation committees in the House and Senate, so that was very fortunate as well. Some of the things that were discussed, just so that people are aware, obviously the Bavaria Enrolling acres a part of the highway 5 arboretum transportation project and then 41 You know north and south of highway 5 they were supposed to do they're still planning on it that flip-flop, you know So right now they're working on Bavaria, which is you know south part of 5 and then north, you know in the Chanhassen side of 41 they had they've had major delays with the private utility companies and They are still planning this construction season to do the flip. And so the Bavaria is set to be open. So Bavaria Road is set to be open next week. And then it will flip and they will shut down rolling acres. And they aren't going to be able to get everything on rolling acres done this year. So they will have to go back in March and do some of those other components of it. But the 41... So 41... North or South. Sorry us. That's our side of 41 of five will shut down and that will probably be in early October just to kind of give people a timeline. don't have a definitive timeline to like the stoplight you know where the 82nd Street yes thank you yeah so I mean you know it won't be okay Yeah, it won't be. It will be impacts. But yeah, so and I think people living off of the very role would be very happy to have access on Highway 5. So but just to know that that is still something that's happening. Yes, and then they still, the following year, the Highway 5 project to have Highway 5 closed and have it done in one season. That's still lots of talk about Highway 7, but the biggest thing that we talked to these legislators was about e-bikes, about... forms, you know, trying to get something in works with that. And then also, you know, advocating for Southwest Transit to make sure that our opt-out suburban transit stays that way and we don't get consolidated in with Metro Transit. So that message was read loud and clear to those legislature folks there. So... And you know I did actually to add to that I did submit if they're on the recent TPP comment for the Met Council when they talked about the allocation of I did send a letter from the city of Chaska's perspective that you're right that those dollars should be evaluated and looked at and they that Southwest Transit like has a seat at that table, so Yes, that was done as well a couple weeks ago. I You mentioned it, Council Member Hatfield, last farmer's market. I also think to add to that, it's the last two were an introduction into the sip-in shop. So that is a component that is going to be a part of this last farmer's market. So people that are curious what that looks like, yeah, come down. And then, yes, thank you to staff because you took the dream that we had and you made it into a reality. And I'll tell you this. Two years ago with my engagement with community members as I've gone around and had lots of different discussions, the conversation of downtown and where things are at is drastically different two years ago than it is today. and um i'm not saying that everybody feels that way but it is definitely a a very collective uh perspective and thought and the farmers market when i asked like okay you know perception wise like why you know why do you feel that way and like what you know what do you feel like is working and that is one thing that's pointed to and that's something that we all with those activation plans that were done and everything all that stuff all the all the paperwork and studies and task force you know identify that you want to bring people back you know week after week and this is one thing that's worked so thank you for all the hard work into like sydney and aaron and um you know kevin uh for helping make you know the farmer's market possible on the lease so yeah uh Let's see. Oh, Latin food. That got discussed. This Saturday, oh, I should pull this up. Okay. This Saturday is the Minnesota Reads Together event at the library. And if I go really slow, I'll be able to find it because they sent me an email about it. Oh, there it is. Okay. but I sent it to the wrong email box of mine so it's a it's a community event at the Minnesota reads together event in Chaska I think it starts at noon and it is down at the library so I'm sorry one o'clock one o'clock to two so if you love to read come down join in the event Next week we have a council meeting, September 21st. Yep, because Labor Day threw us off.

Because Labor Day is two in a row.

We have a work session? No, no work session. No work session. No.

Okay. And it's basically just the planning items coming from the planning commission.

Just the planning items. Yeah. No, but that's fair. And I think that that's it. We do have an EDA meeting following this, though. So last call if anybody has anything they forgot to talk about. All right. Well, with that, I entertain a motion to adjourn.

Motion to adjourn.

All right.

Motion from council member, he kind of mumbled it a little bit.

And then second from council member Gra. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Opposed? All right. Council meeting is adjourned. And then that means we're going to go right into our economic development authority meeting. So I call this meeting to order. 10 o'clock. Roll call, please. Commissioner Hatfield? Here.

Commissioner Benes? Here.

Commissioner Shevlin? Here. Commissioner Groth? Here. President Howard? Here. All right. Next, we have adoption of the agenda. Any additions or corrections to the agenda? Motion to adopt the agenda. All right. Motion from Commissioner Hatfield.

Second.

Second from Commissioner Benesch. All right. Any discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? All right. Agenda is adopted. And then next we have approval of the previous meeting minutes. These meeting minutes were from August 3rd, 2026. Any additions or corrections to the minutes?

Motion to approve the minutes from previous ED meeting.

Okay. We have a motion from Commissioner Grah. Second. Oh, and again a second from Commissioner Shevlin. All right. Any other discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? all right that one's done as well and then we have our action items which are our discussion items uh we have two uh adopt uh eda so a adopt eda resolution number 2026-83 establishing a preliminary chaska eda maximum levy for payable 2027. Motion to. No, we got to do. Are we going to do or no? Yeah.

So I was a little confused. I was a little confused when I looked at that.

But OK, so it's written very wonky.

So the EDA, just like the city of Chaska, has to take action to establish this maximum levy. We use the same percentage, and like I said, we include that in our comparison when we look at other cities. The increase is the 1.63% for new growth and 3.8% for inflationary increases for a total of 5.49%, which brings up the levy by about $13,600. One thing to just point out on the budget for next year, it is decreasing by a little less than $200,000. The reason for that is that last year we had to replace the roof on the old Peacock Inn, which is owned by the EDA. We don't have that expense this year, and so the budget decreases by that amount. Just like in the city, we establish a maximum, so we can't go any higher. We can go lower, and we follow the same process as we get into the December time period, too. So staff is recommending approval of the EDA maximum tax levy.

All right. Any questions for Matt? As you mentioned, I mean, this is, yeah, kind of a rinse and repeat of the previous action item at the council meeting. So I would entertain a motion for approval of EDA resolution 2026-83 for the preliminary maximum property tax levy for 2027. So moved.

All right.

Motion by Commissioner Benesch. Second. Second from Commissioner Shevlin. Any other discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? All right. And then we have another action item here, amending the 2026 EDA fund budget.

Okay, so the item in front of you tonight actually goes back to our audit each year that we do to make sure that when it's all said and done that we're reflecting our expenses in the right accounts. We determined through the process, the audit, that we had a little over $2,000 that should have been an expense from the EDA fund into our general fund. the administrative charges that we charge each of our funds for providing things like HR and payroll and all those different things. So we don't have to have separate functions in each of our different funds. So small change, but it's one that needs an official action to take. So staff is recommending the proposed resolution.

All right, does anybody have any questions? Seems pretty cut and dry and entertain a motion for approval of the mending the EDA 2026 fund budget resolution number 2026-81. So moved. All right. Motion from Commissioner Graw. Second. Second from Commissioner Hatfield. Any other discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion carries. All right. That brings us along to other business. Anybody have anything PDA-related that they'd like to discuss? Okay. All right. Well, then with that, I'd entertain a motion to adjourn.

So moved.

All right. Motion from Commissioner Benesch. Second. All right. Second from Commissioner Shevelin. All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? All right. We are adjourned. Thank you very much.