Village Board - Regular Meeting

recording in progress village of cottage row village board of trust on our youtube channel it is 6 30 so i'm going to call the meeting to order We have a quorum, and the agenda was properly posted. So I'm going to invite my friends from Troop 145 Cottage Grove up to the front and help me do the Pledge of Allegiance tonight. I pledge 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. Thank you. We're going to move on to number four, which is the public's appearances, public's opportunity to speak. We ask that you state your name, your address, and limit your comments to three minutes. We're going to start with individuals who are here tonight and have submitted a wish to speak forum. We'll move to anyone on Zoom who would like to give public comments, and you can do so by hovering over the React button and use the raise hand feature, and we'll unmute you. And then we also have a few online submissions to go through. So we will start with Alex. Then we ask that you just push the little individual speaking there to light up the microphone so we can all hear you. I'll hear you.

Awesome. I brought my snacks. Alex from 501 Killian Trail in the Village. I'm here to talk about, I think it's 7E, about the water. I'm here to talk about the discolored water. In this situation, I'm a victim. A victim of complacency, the idea that someone else is gonna take care of it, the idea that the problem's just gonna go away. Someone else shined light on this problem publicly, and now I'm here. I've always had water discoloration, moved here in 2012. I need to clean the tank of the toilets, and the shower pans get orange. I never had this before when living on the East Coast. In 2021, I installed a whole house water filter. This is what a new water filter looks like. This is a 30 micron filter you get delivered on Amazon, and they look the same from your local favorite hardware store. using up time. This is the filter I took out today. It is brown through and through. I installed this July 1st. This is just 47 days of use. Two people live in the house. I didn't write the meter number down at the time, so I don't know the gallons that went through it, but I did write it down this time, so I'll know on the next filter change. I did have conversations with our public works director. Thank you very much. We exchanged emails. Yes, our water test is fine at the source. The village does not test at the point of use. I did a bit of research. The standards of a discoloration are a secondary standard. Not a compliance standard like lead testing would be. People in the business know better words around that. Discoloration is much worse when the hydrants are flushed at my house. My house value went up 48%. Taxes eventually will follow. However, here's the paper towel I used to wipe the housing filter out. So this is basically in the toilet tanks and this is also coating every pipe in the house. So I would contend that my house value did not go up 48%. I'm looking to upgrade my water filter system with something that goes down to five microns. This is a big investment to protect my family and my house. I'm hoping CG can discover the source of the issue if it's not from our ground source. resolve the issue so I don't need to build my own water treatment plant. Thank you all for what you do, but let's do something more than just meetings. And in all fairness, if you're doing something, I'm just not seeing it, so disclaimer. Put me in the right direction where you're testing in my neighborhood, current troubleshooting data. I have 30 years utility facility experience. I can handle data. Residents are here to help. Maybe there's others here speaking. But speaking for me, I'm not here to complain. I'm here to just shine more light on the issue and help with the resolution. This is our community that we live in. this is the water that's coming into my house. Thank you.

Thanks, Alex. Sheila? I'll leave that one.

I'll leave that next month. Maybe next week.

... ... ... The dates of our condition of our water. My name is Sheila Jacobson Gaines. I live at 1501 North Windsor Avenue, Condo 103. Touching on the basis of what he did, we moved into our condo, it will be six years. The first few years, it was just an occasional thing. Since October 25th, Actually, October 12th of last year, we're seeing it regular. We had it three times in October. We had it in February. We had it three times in April, May, June, twice in July. And again, they did come in. And I thank them for doing that and flushing our lines on the 31st of July. However, this morning, it's already coming back. I have pictures on my phone of the dual sinks in our bathroom where one's yellow. Granted, it's not severe as the pictures you're looking right there, but there is definitely the yellow color to it. I know I've worked with public directs, public works. I've been emailing pictures and that, but it's a concern. I'm supposed to wash my clothes. I'm supposed to brush my teeth in that water. We certainly don't drink it because I would never think of it. I don't want my grandkids drinking it or brushing their teeth in it. So I really hope that this takes into consideration that we have an issue in Cottage Grove. I mean, when you're looking at the average cost of a house in Cottage Grove, you're lucky if you can find something for, I would say under 400,000, good luck, but you're talking about million dollar homes coming into our village. And we want people to move to our village, but we need to correct the issue. So that's what I have.

Thanks, Sheila.

Yep.

Mark.

I'm not here to talk about brown water, but I believe it is one of the major concerns that we do have in the village that needs to be addressed post haste. I'm here to talk about quick changes that are going on. The first is the new village board handbook that was written by the staff, not by the board. It has to be approved by the board. But with that handbook, we have a mission, vision, and core values, none of which state anything about the money. Any business, any government, the number one responsibility is the taxpayer and the money that's being put in your valued hands, your trusted hands, the hands that determine the direction our village is going in. We don't have anything in the mission, the vision, or our core values that says anything about taxpayer dollar one. That's what I have to say about that. wastewater utility. I'm still perplexed as to why we're making a change to a wastewater utility. I understand it's gonna decrease the levy, so maybe there's more money to use for different things. I can't get an answer as to what our current dollars that we're bringing in through the tax dollars, I think it's around 300,000. I think projected is around 700,000, but I'm not sure. I don't have an exact number. But what I have seen in looking at the prior research is that Strand did a study where our wastewater retention ponds haven't been cleaned forever or ever. And it's going to be millions of dollars to do that. Is that going to be part of the fees that are going to be $9 a month? I don't know. But there's a lack of clarity and transparency coming to the community. And Cindy, I had asked you about dollar amounts and your response on Facebook. I appreciate, but there were no dollar amounts in the response. So the other thing is businesses. I think businesses are going to get crushed by this new wastewater fee. While it might not go up for the traditional residents, we talk about, well, everybody has to pay their fair share. Well, when it came to the police station and a board member suggested an impact fee, nope, no fair share. It's all going to go on the existing taxpayer. Now the vocabulary when it comes to a wastewater utility is everybody has to pay their fair share. While the businesses could be humbled by the, that don't have retention ponds, could be humbled because they're the ones with the big parking lots. If we go down the track of wastewater retention even further, if everybody's gonna pay their fair share, what is it gonna cost to have every property in the village assessed as to what their fair share is actually gonna be and what's that dollar amount gonna be? And if I have a sidewalk because I live on a counter, is my share gonna be greater because I have a sidewalk that's used by the public? because that's impervious and doesn't really do much for groundwater, it runs off. So I have a lot of questions, a lot of questions why these changes are being pushed through. I have other questions about other things, minimum parking requirements being eliminated for what I think is a Dane County initiative to put smaller housing and more dense, properties in our community, which I don't think we need. But that's what I have to talk about tonight. I have a lot of questions. I don't get a lot of answers. At the end of the day, whether it's the business or government, it comes down to how the money is being used. We don't have to worry about being profitable here. We have to worry as a board and as a village that our voted elected officials are doing the responsible thing. And if I can't find out what we're paying now and how much we're going to pay later, and if I'm doing research and seeing millions of dollars of additional work needing to be done in retention ponds, and I think it was, is it Kylie? Kylie said you have a $5,000 budget to handle all these types of things. Where's the money going to come from? So that's all I have this evening, and I thank you for listening.

Thanks, Mark. Charlie.

I'm Charlie Rogers, I live at 211 Reynolds Street in Cottage Grove. I'm here about the storm water management. Unfortunately for all of us, storm water's been pushed down the road for who knows how many years. You can't do anything with $5,000. Okay, so your options are do nothing and let the village continue to have occasional flooding from storm water backup, which is not a solution to me. or put it on the levy, which means you're gonna have to cut a program to fund those million dollar projects. I think the fair way to do it is the new stormwater management system. It will impact certain people more and some people less. There's also talk about credits for having rain barrels, the retention ponds, other issues that reduce stormwater. So like I said, do nothing and let the flooding begin. Cut programs and fund the stormwater system through public works and who are you going to cut? And then lastly, like I said, I think the only unfortunate but fair way to do it is to start a stormwater system where we tax people. Thank you.

Thanks, Charlie. Is there anyone else in the room that would like to speak?

My name is Jeff Shep. My wife and I live 245 East Scottish Grove Road. It's two residents down. We've had rust in our water ever since we've lived here since 2015. I ran the spigot outside today and it's rust. I put a filter inside that helps us. We don't drink the water. And it hasn't gotten, maybe a little better. When we first got here, it was all rust and sediment. Now it is better, but it's still not right. And another question I have, and I've talked to Kylie about this, is our responsibility to take care of the ditch in front of our house? as far as it looking halfway decent. And when we have heavy rains, it's ugly. And I just was curious what you're gonna do about it. And one more thing. This road, I know we have problems everywhere. This road is terrible for speeding. Can we get a sign up here that is a flashing speed sign and coming into the village from the east? I don't know if it'll help, but people are out of control. They come in here pretty fast. And there are kids out here. There are school buses. And I know you guys are out here once in a while, but it hasn't really helped. It's actually, when they leave here, I know it's, I was young once too. But it's, you're leaving pit row. Because they all put it to the floor when they leave. And we put up with that a lot. A lot of noise. Maybe that's because I'm old. I don't know. But That's what all I got to say. Is there any chance we can get speed signs? That flash radar? I mean, Deerfield has it coming into town. Are they that expensive or is it not going to help at all? Is that what your feelings are?

We can't go have a dialogue back and forth, but we can take your comments and we'll reach back out to you.

All right. Thank you.

Thanks. Anyone else in the room like to give public comments? Is there anyone on Zoom that would like to give comment? We did have an email come in today from David Peterson about the water discoloration agenda item, which the entire village board received. And then we had one wish to speak for him from Stefan Wahe, 100 Coyle Parkway, who is a village resident. Wanted to thank staff who are responsible for utilities and drinking water. There have been a lot of concerns posted. He experiences discolored water a few times a year. That's resolved by running his faucet for a few times. And he is hoping that the board would request the utility commission document and investigate concerns and allow the utility commission to complete the work moving forward and refrain from speculation on social media. I will just ask one more time if there's anyone else who would like to give a comment. No hands. All right. We will then move on to number five, which is discuss the minutes of the village board meeting from August 3rd, 2026. Those meeting minutes attached in the agenda. Is there any discussion on the meeting minutes? I move approval of the minutes as presented. We can move on to the, remember we have the agenda. Sorry. I know, it's throwing me off too, but we'll move on to 5A, which is consider the minutes.

I would make the motion to approve the minutes as presented.

Second. Motion by Murphy, second by Severson. Any discussion on the motion? All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstain? Motion carries. We'll move on to unfinished business. First up is 6A, discuss the village board handbook. So kind of for a little history on this, on May 4th, we had a presentation from Dr. Ford from UW-Oshkosh that kind of gave governance good best practices to the kind of the new village board for this year. On May 18th, Trustee Murphy and I brought forward the concept and a couple of examples to the village board who then directed staff to create a village board handbook uh... we uh... staff brought that to us in july uh... for the meeting uh... we considered some of the feedback uh... from and give it to staff and so some suggested revisions and i will then now turn it over to uh... nettinger and they can kind of tell us where we left off uh... thanks cindy uh... that covered most of it so recommended uh...

The staff recommended document revisions are redlined in the handbook. Other requested board amendments that were discussed at the last meeting are in the handbook and with comments in the far right hand column to delineate the change from the previous draft.

So open it up to discussion on the village board handbook. Rene?

Yes, I included some comments today this afternoon that Lisa shared with the entire board, and I hope that staff, I don't know that I mentioned staff receive a copy, so I'm sorry I didn't intentionally do that, but I think staff should also be privy to see my recommendations. So I'm not going to read through all of them because there's quite a few, and Matt had asked for clarification, so... that is where I stand on the issue until I will be voting no unless we continue discussions to improve some of the verbiage.

Other discussion on the Village Handbook?

So I share some of the same concerns that Renee has and I don't know if you want me to go through them item by item or if we should because I have suggested language changes after getting the reviewed packet on Friday I put those together but didn't have a chance to get those to you if you'd rather have those in writing or if I should go through just the words, like what the process would be, but I have some suggested language changes.

I think that we had asked the staff to bring forward the red line copy for consideration tonight. So if there are additional changes that you'd want to incorporate, we should discuss all of those.

Okay, so I have a couple concerns. On page 16 where it talks about the authority of elected officials, the phrase prohibiting individual trustees from conducting investigations is a bit broad and could be interpreted to prohibit legitimate governmental oversight, research, records review, or constituent follow up. uh... so my recommended revision would be similar to what uh... renee has in terms of noting that no individual trustee may act on behalf of the village represent the villages official position commit the bills to a course of action and then basically it says something similar with this includes but is not limited to making purchases so on and so forth But nothing, I guess the big language, which I think is similar to hers, is nothing in this section shall prohibit a trustee from independently researching matters, reviewing public records, asking questions, gathering information, communicating with residents or stakeholders, or otherwise even performing reasonable legislative and governance oversight responsibilities. So that would be my suggested change for that section. Under page 18, use of staff resources, I still have a strong concern about the two-hour staff threshold that staff would set if a village trustee comes to the staff to request work, information, and I think it could unintentionally limit a trustee's ability to gather enough information to determine whether an issue warrants board consideration. Perhaps a compromise to that would be something to the effect of wording that says, if a request would require a significant commitment of staff time or materially interfere with existing work priorities, the village administrator shall discuss the scope of the request with the trustee. If necessary, the matter may be referred to the village board for direction regarding additional staff resources. I think that's a compromise position that kind of allows the trustee to talk through it with the village administrator and do next steps. Under page 26, community member comments, complaints, and inquiries. My concern in this section is that the direction that is basically pointed out that trustees should avoid independently investigating or interpreting operational issues. it could interfere with legitimate elected oversight. So a constituent reaches out that we should have the ability to talk to them and not just forward it over to staff and let them take that. We should be able to talk through things with them. Page 19, majority rule and board unity. My first comment would be to change that heading to majority rule and respect for board decisions. Because there's not always gonna be board unity. And I think there is a case to be made that when a board decision is made for those who don't vote for that, that they have the ability to talk about why they didn't vote for it. I think about the Supreme Court and when there's a majority decision, the minority is able to put together in writing their dissent and why they dissented. I also think there's a free speech element to that and there was a Supreme Court case with an elected official and their ability to speak on questions. And that was Houston Community College System versus Wilson in 2022. So I think the recommended revision for this would be something to the effect of, you know, the village board exercises its authority through formal action and majority vote. Trustees are encouraged to express their views, ask questions, consider differing perspectives and fully participate in deliberation. before a vote is taken. Minority opinions are an important part of the democratic decision making process and should be heard and treated with respect. Once the board has taken official action, trustees shall respect the legal authority implementation of the board's decision. Nothing in this section shall prevent an individual trustee from publicly expressing disagreement with the decision, explaining their vote, advocating reconsideration, proposing future policy changes, or continuing to represent constituent viewpoints, provided the trustee does not misrepresent the official position of the village. Boiling that down we make a decision even if I voted against it even if I disagree with it if it becomes law I have to follow it and respect the rule of law and I believe that's what you're trying to get at and The conduct statement, I think, when you look through it through the lens of the words board unity, it could really be interpreted too broadly if the conduct statement is ever used as an enforcement mechanism. So I think the wording in there, needs to change a little bit. I think also adding the line, we hear a lot of times, respect the staff, respect the experts. And I think a distinction needs to be made. And so I would suggest wording that says, respect for professional expertise does not require agreement with a professional recommendation. And respect for a board decision does not require an individual trustee to endorse or publicly support that decision. Pages 26 and 27, process for emails sent to the village board general email box. That section tends to say that staff will coordinate and manage the response process. And that could imply that the administration controls the correspondence directed to the elected official board. And so I have more wording that could be tied in there as well. So I know that's a mouthful and I have a lot more typed in terms of the words So I don't know if there's a way to share the actual words at this point, but Those are my concerns Other comments on the village board handbook Yeah

I guess I'm just kind of curious about process, because some of those sound fine. It's just that the thing that Renee gave us, and this is kind of the first time we're hearing it, so it's kind of hard to visualize it in the handbook. So can we improve the handbook as is and then have them come back with amendments at the next one so that we can see what struck out and what would be added so we can kind of get a better idea of what it would look like?

Yeah, I think the direction from the last meeting was to send any comments so that it could be incorporated into this draft. And so I think that these comments are coming today, so it's hard to receive something to read during the board meeting and then listen to it. If there's... majority of the board wants to incorporate comments then I think that that's direction that could be given otherwise we can approve the handbook or yeah I just don't want to keep going back to the new version of the draft

and having things like this, I'd like to get something official, and then we can come back with amendments to it. Because some of these seem fine. I just saw them, so I'd like a little more time to think them over. So to me, the best thing would be to approve it as is, and then if they want to coordinate and come back next meeting with their changes in a memo, we could take it up for a vote at that time.

Is there any other discussion on the handbook as presented?

Yeah, so thanks for your comments, Chris. And I did put in there the pages and recommendations that I would like to see made in the handbook. So I hope that that provides some clarification. And I just want to clarify, too, so accepting or voting yes for the handbook tonight with accepted amendments, I mean, will my amendments, proposed amendments, and Paula's then be incorporated into the handbook?

Speaking only for myself, I'm not comfortable approving amendments that I just read 30 minutes ago, 40 minutes ago. But I want to give them the proper thought and going through them. So I think the best thing would be to approve it as is and then give us another couple weeks to think about this stuff and maybe see what it would look like. within the handbook as like a strike through red line, whatever you want to call it.

As a future agenda item.

Yeah.

Cindy, if I may, I guess my understanding was like when we talked about the handbook last time was kind of that high level review where you were kind of looking for consensus on different sections. And so when the draft came out Friday, understanding that we were actually going to kind of go through it, That's why I put some thoughts together. So I understand wanting to, you know, obviously I just rattled a bunch of stuff off. Could we just table this to the next meeting and I could provide all of the written comments and such to the board? Rather than kind of coming at it twice? Yeah, sorry.

Again, just going back to the direction from the past board meeting was to provide any other additional feedback you had to staff in order to incorporate red line comments into this. And we had that conversation about a couple of the things that you mentioned at the last meeting as well, including the use of the two-hour staff thing. And I thought we were pretty much aligned on that, and that's what's in this.

We did, but I guess the difference is you were looking for consensus at the last meeting on those items, and that didn't lend itself to going into detail on these things. And so the approach has been from Matt and the staff that if they don't have consensus on the majority of the board, they're not going to go ahead with those items. So if it's just Renee and I emailing our comments, I don't think that staff would automatically put them in without having the consensus of the five of you. So that's why I'm saying I think we could do this process a little differently. That does look through that lens.

The direction from the last meeting, from what I thought I heard, was board members could submit any changes that they'd want and we would delineate them in this document.

Which is what we have. And now there's more comments.

And just to clarify on the use of staff resources, I struck out the word research so that, and delineated between anything that's currently being worked on through the village process, through committees or the board, any research that a board member wants to request of staff, we would do and then share that information with the entire board. It's only when there's a new initiative taken up by an individual trustee that we were proposing to have some sort of time limit on that. We set it at two hours, but that's up to the board what you would like to see. So it was just at that time, if it was gonna take a longer time period than that, that that's when we would suggest that it be some direction at the board before we spend resources on that. But totally up to the board.

I would like to see more time given to this because with respect to the staff and their time in reviewing, as well as board members, when we receive a draft on a Friday, it poses limitations for all of us, too, who don't work here full time. So I had a lot of the same understanding that Paula did, and I would agree, I would like to table this and incorporate more discussion and consideration

for the recommendations that um we were asked to provide casey so the draft that we have now on today's agenda is the same as the draft at the previous meeting with the exception of the inline you know there's some strikethroughs and some additions that were discussed at the previous meeting. I think that's kind of where the disconnect here is, is that the expectation was for edits between last meeting and now was again supposed to be in that format because that's how they have to be presented as motions to the board and things like that. So again, the one that was posted on Friday here for this agenda is all the same information except for the things we already voted on to edit last meeting. Broadly, I'm aligned with what Chris said with approving this as presented because none of this has any sort of enforcement mechanism or deadline or anything like that. These are all guidelines. I said this at the last meeting. And so we certainly can have anyone submit more edits that they would like to this, put them in the format that we can all read ahead of time and have it on the agenda. We can vote on them just as we did at the last meeting. But the bulk of this, is i is i think fine and i would like to you know approve it and and get it in place but again since there's no enforcement nothing says that we that the board can't change it later on nothing because the future boards can't change it later on like we can always do the amendments but yeah they're supposed to be submitted with the line item kind of thing and i i would be happy to submit them a red line item by our next meeting any other discussion on the village board handbook

Otherwise, let's move on to the Consider the Village Board Handbook.

I'll move approval of the Village Board Handbook as presented.

I will second that.

Motion by Erlingson, second by JP.

Friendly amendment, quickly with that. Just want to clarify on the motion, as presented with the line edits in the document?

Yes, as presented in this agenda, which has those line item edits, yes.

And I will, again, reaffirm my second.

All right, any debate on the motion? Heidi?

So just to clarify, if any trustee at any point in time, next meeting or in the future, feels like they would like to propose an amendment to the handbook, they would write out the section that they would like to amend and we can consider that amendment? I mean, that's how the process works, right? I mean, that's how we're documenting a process that we're already practicing. Any policy that...

And every new board is going to evaluate the handbook as well as the mission vision values every May as standard practice. Thank you. All right. JP.

Again, I appreciate upon a bringing forward some digital comments and I hope that they do submit it forward because I again just hearing again this is me just processing as it comes in through it sounds like there's some definitely some definitions we can clarify kind of talk through that so I just hope that you all will follow through with agenda on moving forward so we have. for discussions, but I also, part of the reason why I seconded this was a lot of, and I stated this last time, this memo kind of codifies a lot of the orientation, the training that Casey and I had when we came on board. It's not changing our policies, procedures, it's not changing our governance structure in there. And so it was really just codifying the, both written and sometimes, not fully written but practiced policies in there.

I just want people to understand why I'm going to vote no on this. The process was the process. I understand that. But I also understand the practical reality that we have a 5-2 board and that the two are in the minority and that the staff has stated publicly that they do what the majority of the board wants. So for me to take the time, and send these to staff and for staff to be able to choose whether or not to include them really isn't a fair way for someone who's in the minority to have their opinions heard. And so that's why I wanted to do this tonight. That's why I asked a table so that those could be heard. So I'll be voting no.

All right, any other debate?

Just to clarify, Paula, whatever amendments that you or anyone else submit between now and whenever in the future, they're not at the discretion of staff. They're still at the discretion of the board. That's the purpose of what Chris said, my motion, and so on. is that they can be submitted and the board views them and the board votes. There's no part of it where staff decides what is and isn't included.

I'm aware of how the process works. I just am talking about the transparency, the public opportunity. I do fully understand how the legislative process works and that we can make amendments. I'm just stating that's why I'm going to vote no tonight.

right um all those in favor aye aye opposed nay abstain motion carries all right so we move on to 6b which is update on the service animal policy for the esb or the emergency services building um so this was an agenda item previously the village board directed our general council and labor council to work on a draft policy for service animals in the shared emergency services building in which we have two tenants, both our fire and EMS, and we share that building with the town. It is turning into a very good policy, I think, and it's pretty robust. We have to make some minor language changes, make sure we're inclusive of all the parties that are are in there. And so there's going to be some collaboration between chiefs and legal and walkthroughs of the building and just making sure that we're all really coming at this with a really good draft. And I think that draft will be ready for us to take a look at for our September 8th, which is a Tuesday meeting. And then we'll bring it to the joint village town meeting on September, Monday, September 14th. for consideration. So the town chair is aware of this. Both chiefs are aware of this. All of the attorneys for every single entity is also aware. So it's just kind of pulling it together and bringing it forward for the next meeting. So that's the update on that. Any questions? Then we'll move on to discuss changes to the PAA Fire EMS Study Scope and the Joint Meeting Schedule. So I have two memos in here as PDFs in the agenda. And so that first one is looking to modify the scope of the study. So we had the Joint Village Town Meeting in December of 25 where we approved contracting with PAA for our fire and EMS study to look at future facilities, future operational models, kind of the future of fire and EMS in Cottage Grove. And through discussions at that meeting, we removed the governance scope. And they reduced the cost appropriately, have moved on with the study. We've had a couple of stakeholder meetings, meeting myself, the chiefs, Steve from the town, Kim, Matt, have come together a couple of times and reviewed the study drafts. You guys have seen the drafts. We're still kind of working through that. But something that keeps coming up over and over again is governance and future service model recommendations, governance between the participating entities, governance for future hiring, governance for contract review. And in order to get all of the details that we need in the study, I think the entire stakeholder group would also agree that this needs to be put back into the scope now. And so that's what tonight's request is, is to add governance back into the scope so that we can complete the comprehensive product and bring that back for review in two joint meetings from now. So that's kind of the first part of this memo. The second part out of the second stakeholder meeting that we had was getting everyone, because we have newly elected officials on boards, on the same page with the history of fire and EMS in the village and town, issues that HAPPEN IN THE FIRE AND EMS INDUSTRY KIND OF HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES, YOU KNOW, AVAILABILITY TO ANSWER QUESTIONS AND KIND OF HAVE A LITTLE BIT MORE OPEN DIALOGUE. AND SO THE IDEA WAS THAT WE COULD BRING IN TIM FRONZ FROM PAA WHO CAN GIVE A PRESENTATION AND ANSWER QUESTIONS TO KIND OF SET THE FRAMEWORK OR GROUNDWORK FOR US TO MOVE FORWARD WITH A DISCUSSION OF THE completed study at a future date and so the request here is to have tim come in at the joint meeting on the 14th and kind of work his magic with both boards in the room and kind of make sure we're all on the same page the third part then is to then have us consider a couple of dates for a another joint meeting so we can discuss the final study in the presentation and There may or may not be action items, but it's going to at least set us up for then moving forward with some of the budget preparation that we need to complete in the month of October. And so there's three dates that I'd ask you to consider that work with just about everybody's schedule, and it's also dates that are available at Village Hall. The second memo that is listed in... Not that one. details the scope change in terms of the financials. And I think we had budgeted originally $40,000 for the PA study. We've paid approximately $17,000 of that.

We've only paid, so our contracted obligation was a third, a third, a third. Right. Because we have not accepted a satisfactory second draft, we haven't paid that second installment.

Yes, but basically our cost share was $17,267.07, and that is the total amount, but well within the budgeted amount for the 2026 study to approve this additional amount addition to the scope which would be amending in the contract for two thousand four hundred and thirty seven dollars and fifty six cents and and then also a consulting cost of no more than eight hundred so our village share would be 527 to bring in Tim for that meeting on September 14th and presentation and so my request is approving these approving the addition of the governance scope and Mr. Franz's time for that joint meeting. And then also, if there were any I guess if the town is not willing to pay a portion of this, if the village board would be interested in considering the amount in full to make sure that we can get these details done, just because sometimes that might happen. I have a question.

Since we'd be looking at government and financing, is there any reason we would need to have Village of Deerfield enter into this process?

I don't think so, because I think they would be looking at governance of the future of potential operational models. I don't think that we'll need to contract with Deerfield to get any extra information. I think that they can pull quite a bit from the previous studies, and then they can use village resources and town resources to...

So the idea being that they can analyze what we currently have versus what could potentially be there for the future? Yeah, I think so. I have no problem moving ahead with this.

Other questions on this portion of it?

I'll just echo. I think we're broadly in favor. It's still well under budget, even with this added. So that's always fantastic. And yeah, more information is always good.

I guess then in terms of having, you know, the way we have the two meetings laid out, then having Tim come and give a presentation is, if there are additional items you'd want to hear, I mean, maybe emailing me would be the best, or contacting staff and letting them know, because I think we'll work with Tim to make sure that we're putting together a presentation that is helpful for everyone on the board.

Yeah, I guess I just want to make sure. So the original budget was passed for $40,000. Typically when we sign a contract for something, what I'll do is I'll bring a budget amendment forward, especially in this case. I don't want $40,000 of budget authority when there's a signed contract for $40,000. 17 000 or whatever so whatever additional cost i may need to bring a budget amendment forward to adjust up but it won't exceed the original forty thousand dollars but again i try to bring budget amendments forward to make sure that we don't have fluff in any portion of the budget that we only have budget authority for what we need well you didn't bring a budget amendment forward though cameron for this yet right

You did, did not?

Yes, it was in budget amendment 001, I believe.

Okay, so bringing a budget amendment at the next meeting for us on this?

Yeah, and it's minor. I can loop it in with something else. Sure.

All right, so yes, I'm seeing majority yes for approving the scope change, approving the financial amount. Would that also include, is there interest in covering the full cost in the case that we need to as a contingency backup? yeah i i will be willing to do that because i want to make sure we have all the information to make a full informed decision and um when do what's best for our constituents here okay um and then we will have um and there seems to be interest in having this presentation then and topics if you guys could get that um to me or matt in the next couple of days to so that we can, topics from, for Tim Frantz to talk about the history of fire and EMS, the relationship between, you know, the history of it in the Cottage Grove, the previous study, challenges that we are facing, kind of just giving everyone on the same page. Yeah, go ahead.

It's like you read my mind. There's like just to confirm the kind of scope of the questions, because I know we've had some we're still waiting on that last draft, the final draft in here. So if hopefully we can have that draft soon, because I know I'm sure we'll have some other kind of questions come up in there. So if I just want to check, like if we do have questions based off a draft, we'll still have the opportunity to back in with PAA, with Tim, etc.

So that's number C on the agenda. So having a future joint board meeting would be for the final draft, and then that would be open for all sorts of questions on that draft, where we're going, all of those things. So there are three dates, September 29th, October 6th, October 13th. I don't know if any of those work for you. All of them work for you. Nodding heads. I want to make sure.

I can make all of them work. I would prefer not to do the 29th, but if need be, we'll make it work.

PAA would prefer the later 6th or 13th, just because I think there's some grandbabies that are happening, which is kind of exciting. Okay, so let's move on to consider changes then.

Okay, so I make the motion to approve all the changes outlined in the memo and with the addition that if the town does not vote to provide their share of funding that we will cover the difference.

I second. Motion by JP, second by Severson. Any debate on the motion?

I did have a question. So are we going to take a poll on what night works or are we going to decide now? I mean, I can make any of those nights work.

If it's okay with you, just because the town is also considering all of this, we'll see what they come up with. And is it okay if I let you all know?

Because it's part of my motion, what I'll say is make the amendment to include future communication about selecting a date in there based off of the results of the town and everyone's availability. Does that give us enough flexibility?

One other thing I did want to throw out there, I did receive an email from town supervisor wondering if the presentation, in order to maybe save a couple of dollars, would be better if it was a Zoom presentation. I have my own feelings about Zoom. I think he wouldn't have to travel here. I think there's just something really to be said about in-person conversation and dialogue and especially working through complicated issues versus are you online? Are you not online? Can you hear me? That kind of stuff and going that little awkward. Board meetings are awkward enough, right?

I mean, is it not going to be already broadcast over Zoom and YouTube like our regular?

I think it was that we wouldn't have to then pay for him to come down. Oh, okay. No, I'd also rather come down. I just wanted to make sure I touched base with all of you on that, too.

Yeah.

All right, there's a motion and a second. I'm hearing no other discussion. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstain? Motion carries. Let's move on to new business. Our annual review of Village Consultants and Service Providers continues. So we have Pelletier, Strand, and Briarpatch. And I don't know if they all rock, paper, scissored before or if we're just gonna go in order.

In order, please. Okay. So I sent out kind of an update on where we were with our service providers. I believe Pelletier is up first, so you can get ready. Do you need me to share the PowerPoint? Not a problem. So I'll get that ready. There was a correction to September 8th from the email that I sent out. There's associated appraisal list twice. They will not be here on September 8th. They'll be actually here on November 2nd. All right, you're good to go, Todd.

All right, thanks, Cameron. My name's Todd Bollenbach. I'm the Municipal Account Executive for Planetary Waste Systems. And Cindy, I agree with you, I hate online meetings. But no, we've been your waste and recycling hauler for the last couple years here since we started the contract in 2025. And I just kind of wanted to go through kind of what we do the services we offer Services we can offer and just kind of a summary of what's kind of going on in the village And some things we've seen Don't know if I could flip through stuff or if that's you all right You can go another one. We don't need to go over my Again I'm Todd Grace is ahead of our customer service. She handles a lot of the inquiries. I'm sure some of the village staff and we'll call and contact her. We have something we're really proud of. We're, besides being a local family-owned and operated company, we're just, all of our facilities are right over here in Monona. We're just down the street from you guys, but we have a fully staffed, live, local customer service team. So if any of you or any of your constituents or residents call, a human's gonna actually answer the phone and be able to help them. David Pelletier is the owner of the company. He's the president right now. His two siblings are the vice presidents. Again, they all live right in the Dane County area of Madison, Middleton, Verona, kind of right around here too. So not only is the business local, all the owners are right here in town. Keep going there. Currently for the village we do your weekly waste collection every other week recycling collection and then obviously service all the dumpsters at the different municipal locations. Some shredding services we do at the village hall and annual e-waste collection event and then we do all for 12 months a year weekly bulk item pickup. Residents can call in and I got this couch I need you to pick up things of that nature. We'll come and do that as well. Um, something as far as what we bring, some of the, I guess you call it the value added services we bring is we also like to partner with the communities that we work into. We're, uh, proud sponsors of your, you know, your community night out event. We're bringing a truck in a few weeks for your touch a truck event. So we, we try to get involved. I've done talks before and, uh, We try to reach out. We're constantly trying to get information out, recycling education. The cleaner the recycling, the more educated our residents are, the better end product we have, and that's good for everybody. Again, I touched base on it briefly about our customer service, absolutely unmatched in the industry. I always joke when I go into a new community, when you call, nobody's going to say, you know, what state is Cottage Grove in? Everybody that works here lives right in the area, so it's really nice. Another thing that we kind of bring to the table that differentiates us and something we're proud of that the village residents can take advantage of is some of our expanded recycling opportunities. We're one of the only companies that will take bagged recycling, so it's in a clear bag. We take bag-shredded paper. If you're trying to figure out what to do with those old grocery bags you can't get rid of and you've shredded your paper at home, you can tie that in, and those are separated when recycling that. Things a lot of people don't know, you've got a broken toaster. That can go in your recycling bin. We take small metal appliances. We take pots, pans, things like that that people usually just throw away or drop off at Goodwill. Those things can all be recycled. So those are a lot of the things. through our partnership with the Carton Council, a lot of the wax line, you know, milk jugs, juice cartons, things of that nature. All your to-go cups, whether it's, you know, your plastic Dunkin' Cup can be recycled, not the straw. But, you know, a coffee cup to go as long as it's not styrofoam. And something really cool as of last year, pizza boxes are now recyclable, even with a little cheese and grease on them. That was a good case of eating crow I've been going out for years yelling at people to not recycle their pizza boxes and we can do that now So that's pretty cool But kind of moving on just to kind of touch base on some things that are also available Should the village ever be interested in this is something we offer we do We offer drop-off events, you know, we can bring in dumpsters and the community can come and drop off bulk items. We can do a curbside bulk item event where we take a week and you know people can throw basically whatever they want on the curb and we can go around the whole community and pick that all up. Obviously there's a cost to that like any additional services would be, but it's pretty cool program and it's something that a lot of residents once they have they. WOULD GET MAD IF YOU TOOK IT AWAY. AGAIN, LIKE ANYTHING, THERE IS A COST. WE ALSO ROLLED OUT SOME NEW FILM AND FOAM AND RIGID PLASTIC RECYCLING PROGRAMS. This would have to be at the village level. This isn't your curbside bin. But down the line, if the village is ever interested, Beloit, Middleton, Fitchburg, all those programs where basically in one dumpster you can throw in styrofoam, packing peanuts, bubble wrap, stretch film, all your grocery bags, your garbage bags, things of that nature in one container. We're also doing the same thing with rigid plastics. Everybody's got a couple of busted lawn chairs at home or a Tupperware bin in your basement. I don't even remember when everybody had the blue recycling bins. Not recyclable. My favorite irony in the business. But now there's a program that we can take and shred those all up. But again, those are Would be like a drop off scenario at the municipal level, but just some additional programs that are available that not really anybody else in the marketplace is doing right now. Actually, if you go to the next screen, I just kind of talked about it, but it's gonna show us some of the things we can take in those different different programs. As far as resources available, right on our Pelletieri site, we have our own Village of Cottage Grove website where anybody can go on, print off our accepted recycling list, maps their accepted recycling, their service schedule, things of that nature. There's a really great RECYCLE RIGHT TOOL THAT YOU CAN SEARCH IN IF YOU'RE TRYING TO FIGURE OUT SOMETHING THAT'S RECYCLABLE OR NOT. AND WE ALSO LIKE I SAID HAVE A NEW MOBILE APP AS WELL WHICH IS PRETTY COOL. NOT NEW NEW IT CAME OUT LAST YEAR BUT A YEAR AND A HALF AGO BUT YOU CAN PUT IN YOUR ADDRESS AND IT WILL Give you a service reminder like, hey, tomorrow's your trash day. Make sure to get your cans out. Again, if you're wondering if something's recyclable or not, you can go in and type it in. It'll tell you if it is or not and even offer some suggestions. If it's not, look where you might be able to take it. Also give service warnings. You know we're still human. It's trucks break. It's Wisconsin. You know it's snows out. We can't get to an area we're able to. Anybody that has the app kind of send out an alert like hey, we're not going to make it to your house today. Leave your cartel will be there tomorrow, which is a pretty cool feature. You can actually. There we go. Marty passed that I just kind of rambled on there. But one thing I always like to talk about when I come to these kind of events is just kind of a summary, like hard, hard numbers, what people are throwing away, what people are recycling, tonnage information. But last year, total trash was over 4 million pounds that we collected from the village If you break that down per home, and these are from January to December of 2025, I just use that as a timeline. So for the whole year, and based on December of last year, we had 2,392 households that we were servicing. That's not people, that's actual physical stops where we're picking up the cans. So your monthly per home trash average, your average family in town is throwing away 143 pounds of trash. At the same time, we recycle about 1.1 million pounds of recycling, and the monthly per home recycling average is about 41 pounds. And if you're curious how that compares, if you take the approximately 45 communities that we have the privilege of servicing, your trash is a little high. You're about 20 pounds a home higher than the average household, there are some higher, obviously some a lot lower, but that's if you take the 45 homes in the area that we service. I wanna say you're closer to about 126 pounds a home is the average. The good news is that you're also high on your recycling, which is, I'm a nerd, that's the most important thing to me. As much as we wanna do landfill diversion and keep as many things out of the landfill as possible, I like to see those recycling numbers up. You're about six pounds a home higher than the average community are. That's even factoring in some that have weekly recycling. I can tell you in the communities that we do offer weekly recycling, we've seen a significant shift in lowering the amount of trash that's picked up and increasing the tonnage on recycling. Unfortunately, even though I feel like people as a whole want to do good, if you your recycling bins full, there's a better than average chance that's going to get thrown into your trash can. Just to give you an example, Sun Prairie, we switched over in 2023 or 2024 to weekly recycling. In their first year, we were able to divert about 1.5 million pounds out of the landfill and increase the recycling by about 700,000 pounds. in one year by moving to weekly recycling. So down the line, something to consider if anybody.

So funny, we timed this out intentionally. So Public Works had a discussion last Wednesday. Every year we bring to Public Works to say, okay, is our service model for garbage and recycling working? So because we have flexibility in our contract to switch between weekly recycling or every other to weekly, to bulk drop-off to e-cycle, we want to kind of reaffirm service levels. While ultimately we have direction, bring a budget that is what our current service offering is, also include what pricing would be for weekly recycling. So Public Works will have that in their budget memo and ultimately Village Board will. That is a user-based fee, so that is something that goes directly on the tax bill separately. So originally the hesitation was When we were evaluating this, I got calls from both sides. I don't even come close to filling up my recycling bin. Please keep costs down as much as you can. And the other way was like, okay, I fill my recycling bin up every week and I don't know what to do with the rest. So we ultimately went with the lowest option, knowing that Pelletier does have the option. If you call them, one-time fee for the cart, they'll then I think it's an annual charge, but for the recycling, they'll come pick up two carts of recycling. And so maybe there's a strategy of if we choose not to go to weekly recycling, that maybe that's a communication buzz where maybe we'll make sure people know that it's at least an option to have two that are picked up every week. So things that we're constantly kind of balancing out the cost benefit. Again, I do want to add and really appreciate Todd and all of his team's work. Todd's team ate two months worth of fuel surcharges. His bosses aren't listening to this. I really appreciate that when we have providers that don't choose to nickel and dime the village, ultimately we had a conversation two months into the fuel surcharge area, and it is what it is at that point, but I really do appreciate that kind of family business relationship that we have. Thanks.

Yeah. Now, it sounds corny, but one of the five key principles of the company model that they set forth was kind of treat others how you'd want to be treated. And being good stewards of the environment are a couple of our key principles that our company rests on. So thank you. And there is, like Cameron mentioned, there would be a cost. If you guys ever wanted to look at going to weekly recycling, don't hold me to it. But realistically, just based on every other community that we do, probably $2.50, $3 more a month, because you're adding, obviously, two more services altogether. But just, like I said, don't hold me to that, but just to give you a rough idea if you're ever discussing it. And I can tell you that Cottage Grove is a very heavy, like in a positive way, recycling community. But yeah, those recycling carts are just crazy. 91 missed pickup calls. 54 of those were non-missed pickups where the carts... We had a total of 20 customer complaints, 12 of which were absolutely verified. We're still human. We miss things. But of all of our services, and any missed cart that was picked up was either offered additional bags or we went back to service them. We have, over the course of that year, we had a 99.992 completion service rate, which is almost unheard of. So we're really proud of that, too, that out of almost 200,000 pickups, we missed 37 carts. Obviously, I'm biased. I work there, but that's pretty good numbers. But yeah, no, we just really appreciate the partnership we've had. One nice thing is I know anybody from the Village can call anytime. Like I said, a human can answer. Anybody here can reach out to me at any time with any questions, whether it's just hey, can this be recycled? I mean, those are the things I handle all of our tours at our material recovery facility. I would welcome anybody from the board if you guys wanted to come and get a tour of what actually happens to the recycling. I'd welcome that. I would be able to you know, accommodate something like that. But no, really just want to say thank you and welcome any questions from the board or anybody sitting here as well.

Yeah, I think this has been a really positive service change.

Yeah, I just want to touch base on response times real quick before we open up to the board. I mean, we're seeing, I mean, Grace is wonderful. We're seeing responses within a half hour, an hour of any email complaint. And sometimes I look at complaints two ways. When we hear complaints more often, I think, yes, maybe there's something that needs to be adjusted, but also it means customers feel like they can call and it gets resolved. And so the calls that we're getting are more like, oh, they're normally not here at this time, or I knew my garbage was more full than it should have been. Can you connect us? And that's been really great. So really appreciate Grace's time, even when she's off. Again, we're dealing with people in state instead of people in Texas.

She is selfishly having a child right now.

Dang her. But definitely worth noting that I do really appreciate the concerted effort for responses.

Yeah, open it up to board member questions. Renee?

Yeah, well, first of all, I want to say thank you because your services are a vast improvement from previous.

Appreciate that.

Yes, very much so. And so garbage is not glorious. My husband created and managed a recycling center in Iowa when we lived there. So I have a deep appreciation for what you do. So thank you. And I remember having the conversation last year about the additional recycling and what we're going to be doing with that, whether it be bins or more pickup. So thank you for that. But I just want to give a great shout out. It's been very nice.

I really appreciate that. Thank you.

And I don't know if I'm assuming you know or not, but.

Any resident that does want a second recycling cart, or a trash cart for that matter, can call us and they pay us an annual fee, which basically just lines up with what their normal cost would be to have it picked up, and we deliver a new cart and we can service it.

I just wanted to add, so I also very much appreciate your service, and you'd mentioned already your sponsors for Community Night Out coming up here. Do you guys, are you having an actual booth there? We are not. We're a donor. That's fine. I just, if you were, or if someone's going to come by, the Dane County Trash Lab is also going to be there. Super. I thought that might be cool.

Yeah, we work in conjunction with them all the time. Pelletier is actually the largest hauler to Dane County Landfill.

Yeah, they also, they had a presentation at the Chamber of Commerce a little bit ago, you know, about all their services in Trash Lab. They, you know...

talked to them about some of your guys services as well and so it was just lots of good joint partnership all around so appreciate that yep and i would echo the same comments you know we go back a couple years ago and my neighborhood that people were calling from his pickups all the time there was trash everywhere so um i really appreciate the the diligence um of all of your staff um i think providing a great service for the village. I guess one thing I'd be interested in maybe hearing about is a bulk item event. I took some stuff over to the Dane County landfill and there were nails everywhere and I was a nervous wreck to see if I ended up with flat tire after going there. So I think an event might be a good addition to at least consider a quote from. And then my other question is, are people throwing away things that they shouldn't? Is there anything else that you think we should help push out? Once I did see a garbage truck on fire, not one of yours, but someone obviously threw away something.

It's usually a battery. The rechargeable batteries are just a nightmare in the waste and recycling industry. A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, THE COLUMBIA COUNTY RECYCLING MURPH BURNT DOWN. THE WASTE MANAGEMENT WENT DOWN IN MILWAUKEE AND IT'S REALLY BAD. WE'RE ACTUALLY REVAMPING OUR RECOVERY FACILITY. WE'RE DOING A HUGE MULTIMILLION DOLLAR UPGRADE. WE'RE PUTTING IN SOME KIND OF HEAT SENSORS WE CAN IDEALLY PREDETECT BEFORE A BLAZE STARTS. Yeah, no, as we see more, we try to reduce our contamination in our recycling and a lot of the stuff that we see in there that's a contaminant are still our number one contaminant is still plastic bags. Polystyrene, your styrofoam is still a huge contaminant issue. But a lot of the stuff isn't just blanket apathy. It's, you know, what we call wish cycling. People are like, I hope this is recyclable and they put it in there. Obviously, you know, it's a classic bell curve. You got, you know, 80% of the people that are just trying to do their best 10% of the people are the ones that take the little plastic off their windowed envelopes before they put it in there. And then you've got 10% that just don't care. So, you know, we try to push them a little bit more and make sure that everybody does what they can. But really in the waste and the trash, it's things like batteries or like people try to sneak in a lot of yard waste, grass clippings, and put it in a black bag and stick it. That stuff is actually banned from the landfill. We obviously can't go through and We're not opening up every bag when we pick it up, but that's, I would say, you know, batteries, things like paint that cans itself, painting them and yard waste is probably our biggest contaminant in the trash stream.

The only other community feedback I get, especially in our senior residents, is it's hard to bring bulk item or e-waste item to the site. So I put my head together trying to figure out a solution to that. Don't have a good idea outside of us actually going around and clicking up. I don't believe we have the staff to perform, but that could be a partnership with another organization. you know maybe we pay for the service as long as they can pay for the vehicles or something but just something in the back of our head that it is a service that people have asked about thank you for coming you bet thank you for allowing us to service the village oh sorry jp did you want to say something important

Yeah, sorry, Cindy. Just want to say and echo the appreciation across the board. The one thing that has been stated that I also really do appreciate was the e-cycle event that you all did. I was very impressed with the village and how we turned up. I know I'm putting you on the spot a little bit, but do you have, in comparison to how our event with other communities?

It was heavy. It was a ton, sorry for the pun, ton of tons of of material. It was shocking to me actually, but when you bring that event into a village, I work here for a living and I probably got three old VCRs and computers in my basement that I just haven't gotten around to taking somewhere. So when that's presented to people, those first couple of years are people cleaning house. So even though you want to encourage as much e-waste as possible, it's a cost per ton sort of thing that we do when we take that material in. So I think you'll probably see it taper down and kind of even out a little bit. Usually those first couple years are pretty heavy, but I apologize I didn't bring that information. I can provide any of that. We've got all the tonnage. I think Kyla sent that to you.

We have the tonnage, and just for comparison, in 2025, we filled almost two full semis, and this year we were just shy of two full semis full of e-waste.

Yeah, that's double what I normally see in a community this size, which is good. I've been a little pricey for the village, but it's a really awesome effort. Yeah, it was pretty impressive.

Can I ask where that stuff goes?

You can. That is... We have an entire division that's kind of located just outside of Watertown. I apologize, I didn't know who asked. Oh, sorry. But we've got an entire division that's dedicated to basically finding a home for stuff. All of our electronic e-waste versus some other companies that pick it up, those are all cleaned. Everything's separated. The glass is taken off. where exactly each part is sold off to or what companies are eventual end users to that. I apologize, I do not have that information off the top of my head. It's not a secret.

I'll let you mingle with the audience. Yeah, thank you for coming. We're going to move on to other service providers. And if anyone is interested in additional information, the library, you did a great presentation for us last year, and we can roll that back out. We have that on our YouTube channel. But in order to move on with the agenda tonight, we'll move over to, I think Strand is up next. Come on up to the hot seats.

Thank you, Todd.

Either one, or stand.

I'll try to share too, if that's okay.

Thanks again, everybody, I'm sorry.

Give me a second, there's a bunch of things on my screen now from Zoom I can't see. Okay. Hello. Well, I'm happy to be here again tonight for the annual review of the engineering services for the village. Um, my name is Josh Draka. Obviously we're Strand Associates. I know most of you, um, we've been the village engineer for the past five years now, went pretty fast, honestly. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about us, cause I know there's some, some newer board members and then, uh, get into, I like to kind of just show what we've done over the year. and then kind of what's coming the following year as part of this. I thought it would move, but it's not moving. Here we go. So a profile of our firm shows organizational strength assuring the village of a long-term partnership. We were established in 1946, it's our 80th year anniversary. We're a multi-disciplinary engineering firm, 12 locations nationwide, more than 550 employees, and we're employee owned. Madison is our headquarters, about 230 staff at Madison, so pretty big office. A lot of people work out of that office. We're a full-service engineering firm. We offer services in municipal, transportation, wastewater, water supply, building and facilities, both electrical, mechanical, and structural, green infrastructure, and aviation. So our engineering firm is pretty multi-disciplined. Our team provides the village with numerous engineer connections. I've always found this is important. It's not just me, it's a large team. And every year I just kind of put a view of the people that have been working in the village over the past year. Myself, some municipal engineers, Nate on the water side, some staff, field staff. Stormwater engineers dance here with me tonight to talk about the stormwater utility So his face is on here and this switches year in and year out It's not always the same people a lot of times it is and it's it's all about building connections for staff one So that if I'm not available there's others that are also working on projects and just to to have a better swath of people covering and their expertise at the village for topics Daily assistance provides an extension to the village staff. What are we doing? We're providing on-call assistance when needed, bi-weekly meetings with staff. We attend some of the early development stuff, obviously to vet some of that. And then monthly meetings like this, assistance with budget and a little bit of GIS help when needed. We also do projects, right? Our recent project demonstrates our ability to serve the village's needs. It's a variety of things. We have a bunch of site reviews that we're helping Aaron with and staff. There's some major ones are listed there. Sometimes there's some smaller ones as well. Some of the bigger developments like Hay Day, Juniper Fields that was recently in, Amazon, off-road stuff, all that stuff we're helping with reviews to that. Your park projects, your public works and utility projects, the main ones I listed there and I'll talk a little bit about tonight as well. Starting with the 2026 streets and pedestrian improvements. So each year we've been going through and we've been doing street improvements, right? And new pavement projects, path projects, sidewalk stuff to just kind of help with connectivity. This year I just kind of showed some of those project locations and I always kind of do the before and after. You know, before here's Parkview and Cottage Grove Court or Cottage Court. Looking north, pavement's in bad shape. A lot of times we're fixing pedestrian ramps and bringing everything up to ADA, as long as the curb and sidewalk as needed. So before, after, looks clean, it looks nicer, at least to an engineer it does. And the ADA ramps are important throughout the community. Again, just Nightingale Lane looking east. And you'll notice we picked that Jeep up, we paved the street, and we put it back right in the same spot. It was hard, but they were able to do it. But there's kind of the view of that street now. And again, just each street like that we do year in and year out. We're kind of going to move to maybe more of a two-year cycle now, which is going to hopefully help us kind of stretch that dollar. The bigger the projects you create, sometimes the better pricing that we get as part of that. Also the paths, there was quite a few paths that were connected as part of this. Around the school specifically, Damascus Road path, redid that one and then we did one along Cottage Grove Road that kind of connected between the school and Hay Day and then the bus road path. So that whole connection over there is all in place, ready for the school year. We're excited to kind of make all those connections because as you know, We finished the one on Cottage Grove Road that filters back here to end and now kind of everything's really connected north, south, east, west in the community and it was exciting to see all that done. We still have the path over on Johnson Trail A Johnson health tech path that's going to happen in September So that's the one thing to finish on 2026 streets. We had the farm interceptor That was the big sewer that went in through the old farm golf course starting from Cottage Grove Road down to Vilas that happened mostly in the winter and early spring of this last year helped to relieve some of the Sanitary sewer flows that are already created to the north of that and then also help with development in the future. I County trunk TT, Gaston Road, Watermain. This was a loop that was down on the north side. So by that roundabout, the northern roundabout, loop back along TT, there's a blue line there, cut across the interstate. This was planned for quite a while. When they redid the interstate, there was a casing underneath the interstate that allowed us to then open up each end and put the pipe through and then come back on Gaston Road and connect in at Johnson Health Tech. That helps with water quality over in that area, and also it's a redundancy that you just don't have one line that goes underneath the interstate. You now have two, so if something happens to one or one has to be taken out of commission, you have kind of that belt and suspenders. Gaston Road before was in pretty rough shape. I think we knew that as we were talking about Creed and the development out there. When we started construction, we noticed it was pretty bad and underneath it, it kind of fell all apart. I think there was a lot of conversations about that. So as part of this project, we were already gonna pave half of it. We went around the corner and paved the other half and it turned out really nice. It's a much better road. And we worked with the contractor to kind of come with some good solutions in order to do that cost effectively. Shady Grove Park, so you see the park there at Shady Grove. This is kind of a schematic from the bird's eye view. Playground, shelter, that has recently been opened. There's a few punch list items that still need to be taken care of as part of that park, but it's mostly functional and people are using it. Effective engineering produces efficient construction. The idea is the dollars, right? And each year we kind of go over this and we make sure we're using the dollars appropriately, well. And it starts on the engineering side. We come up with an estimate. We put plans together. We get a bid cost, like in 2026 streets there. The bid price was under. It was a low bid. We're trying to be good on the budget side to make sure we can fit the right budget. And then while we're in construction, we're working hard to see if we can either hit that number or be lower than that number, which is a task. Construction costs typically run 5% over. There's change orders. Nothing's perfect. That's just part of construction. So when you see it under or around the same amount, that's time in the field with just staff and our staff trying to make sure we can do it right. Farm, the farm golf course, there's a price of 1.4. We thought it was around bid one, three that went just over that additional was laterals that were put in for some of the development there. And I think those were paid out by the developer, um, TT and gas and road. We were thinking that was going to be closer to 1.3. The bids came in just over one. That one was a little bit more, about $30,000 to extend that and stretch some of that paving, which I thought was a really good deal. When we started talking about that, we thought it was going to be a lot more. And we worked with the contractor to come up with some solutions on how they could do that efficiently and effectively.

That one was 1.7. So again, we demonstrate here the passage of time. So when we do the prioritization plan, there's additional levels of contingency. And as the project goes through the process, that 30% contingency turns into 20% contingency turns into the final 5% or 10% contingency. And this is really... in my opinion, the difference between when we had estimates with MSA and with Strand is we're hitting or exceeding almost every project that we're doing, we're performing much better than anticipated, which allows us to make sure that we're not trying to find ways to pay for additional project costs. So again, appreciate your team here. It's always better, I think, so the board members don't get a sticker shock if all of a sudden we're saying something's $200,000 more. sometimes that changes the calculus as if you're gonna approve a project or not. So we'd rather add projects back in through our alternates or other things than have to take projects out because it doesn't fit into the grand scheme of the project.

Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, it starts in the budgeting side when we're working with staff trying to come up with it. You've got to envision during the budgeting sense, we're all just kind of planning and assuming and trying to make it the best we can to understand what it could cost. And when you get into design, there's another refinement. When you bid, there's another refinement. During construction, again, you're working on that. So it's been going well, and we think we're doing it appropriately, and staff has been a big help on how we set that up and how we work through that as well. And then, like you said, you know, sometimes we want to make sure we can bid alternatives as part of that too, and maybe even stretch the dollar a little bit if we can, if we get good pricing. what's coming up in 26 i guess the rest of this year in 27 we started working on county chunk n and main street reconstruction ollie street reconstruction well number two was actually bid last year but it was pulled out and you're going to see that building finally go down here shortly fifth addition to west lawn estates that's that phase six of that should maybe start this fall into early next year just depending on development time time frame juniper fields phase one juniper fields park planning and just other stuff that gets approved as we go into 27. Just a quick look, N and Main Street looking north, so it's the south side of N and the village limits. New pavement, curb and gutter, sidewalk, sanitary water spot, storm sewer gonna be replaced there. We're gonna look at the typical section a little bit. Maybe there's a chance to narrow it some, talk about parking a little bit on that street. That will be going to Public Works, and then there will be public informational meetings about this as well. Both this one and on Ali Street, again, because there's a lot of residents there. Same thing, pavement, curb and gutter. Sidewalk, right now only on the west side. I went down that street again thinking, could you fit it on both? The east side is pretty tough. A lot of impacts, some retaining walls, a lot of tree removals, and steeper slopes. So I can see why they only put it on the west side the first time as part of that project. Something to note about this is we'll have to watch the school traffic and how that is because that affects how we bid it and how we contract it the next year when they construct it as well. So something we'll keep an eye on. And then just well two. I showed this last year, but this is the building that will be going up at well two. Pretty simple. Matches the other well two facilities. Or the other well facilities, I should say. So with that, again, I want to thank working with the community. We try to support a lot of the events you have as well here. We enjoy working in Cottage Grove. With 220 people or so in our Madison office, we have staff that lives here too as well and does a lot of the youth programs and is involved in all the stuff that you do. We care about the community, and I really enjoy the staff. I work for a lot of communities, and I love the staff here. They're great to work with. And the board members and the committees, you guys are, this is a fun, I always say a fun community to be part of just because of all the stuff you have going on. So I appreciate it.

Questions from board members? I think we work with you all the time. Yeah, you guys see me a lot. Yeah, but appreciate you, Josh.

Yeah, I'll just, yeah, I'll say it formally. I mean, it, um, you were not village staff. Because yeah, we do see you all the time and your staff as well. But I really appreciate in particular, I mean, what should be from an engineering firm, your attention to detail on things. There are so many times when you're presenting something about an issue or a development or whatever it is, where you say, oh, and here are some other things that we wanted to make sure we kept an eye on sort of thing. It's very reassuring that you guys have, in fact, double-checked so many things. And I see that a lot, and I think it's important. So thank you.

Thanks.

I just have a question. Well, first of all, I agree with what Casey said. You are very pay attention to detail. And I haven't reached out personally, but I've watched interactions. But one question that I have is, Since you work really closely with the village staff, when you meet with developers, how are those costs factored in? Is that something that's put into escrow for the developer, or are those costs passed back on to villagers? Could you describe or explain that, please?

I could probably take that one. So we have cost reimbursement agreements with all the developers. So typically, when you start out with the Village, you kind of have one meeting to conduct business. And then after that, we require a developer to sign a reimbursement agreement. So then at that point in time, all legal time, all engineering time gets charged back to the developer, which I was gonna comment after your presentation, I sent the board only numbers that are either the levy or the engineering support for water and sewer. So last year passed on to developers, there was about 200, in 2025 there was $286,000 of work and review that did from an engineer perspective and passed those costs on to developers that were looking to do work in the village.

Yeah, we track it all and we set up job numbers and then we make sure that, yeah, things are passed to the right individuals and it's not just going on general tax dollars or something like that. So we're pretty diligent on that and we work with staff. once those things are set up to make sure that the hours spent are going to the correct place.

So if we have a developer who is used to doing business here, we don't require an escrow because they're used to the monthly cadence. If it's somebody who we haven't worked with and haven't developed that relationship, we may require a down payment just to cover if they walk away. We can pull that before dispersing any funds. And then you have massive projects like Amazon, for example, that are required to pay us a larger deposit upfront to make sure that we're recovered. Worst case situation, if they own the parcel and they choose not to pay, we'll assess that on the property tax bill. We'll charge it as a special user fee to recover plus the interest. that has accrued. And that's kind of part of the risk analysis when we determine for those agreements that if they don't actually own the property, that's where we might lean towards requiring a deposit.

Any other questions for Josh? All right, you're done for now. All right. How about Briarpatch? We saved the best for last. So thanks for being here.

Here we go. So Dominic Smith is our program manager, and unfortunately she has a five and a seven-year-old that are both sick. So I was just coming to provide moral support for her, but now instead you're stuck with me, and I just... drafted Cameron to be an honorary Briarpatch employee for the next 10 minutes to walk us through our presentation. So thank you Cameron in advance for keeping me on track and nudging me when I'm going in the wrong direction. So again, for new folks to the board, we've at Briarpatch had a over 20 year relationship with the Village of Cottage board Village of Cottage Grove to provide restorative justice services here. And it's been a wonderful relationship. Briarpatch as a whole has been around for 55 years. Despite popular belief, I have not been here for all 55 years, but I have been there for 38. So I do hang my hat on the fact that it's been really cool to see how villages like Cottage Grove have embraced the concept of restorative justice, moving away from retributive models, of how we work with our young people. We work with over 2,000 families and young people every year throughout Dane County through our services at Briarpatch. And it's my privilege to talk specifically about one program. We operate 10 at Briarpatch, but this is one that the Village of Cottage Grove has entered into an agreement with us. The cost overall has not changed much. In 2004, I believe, was the first year we did this, we asked for a $5,000 contribution to support our services. In 2020 currently, you're providing $6,000, so we've increased by $1,000 over 20 years. So I think that's keeping our costs down pretty well. We do lots of fundraising, lots of other work to offset that cost, so there's never been really an increase in that. The restorative justice program aims to make youth feel supported throughout the restorative justice process while also being held accountable for any harm caused. Restorative justice services shift the focus from what rules of law were broken and punishment to specify what harm was caused and how to repair it. We include the parents, guardians, families, and the youth support as much as possible in the restorative justice process. The overall goal is to assist youth in repairing any harm caused to all parties involved. Often our youth do not understand, and when I speak about youth, I talk about our Cottage Grove youth. Full disclosure, I'm also a Village of Cottage Grove resident, so they're my youth too. do not understand how the community or individuals are affected by their decisions or actions. Our restorative justice services are a voluntary program which serves as an alternative to the traditional youth justice system. It exists in Cottage Grove to address minor misdemeanor offenses, municipal violations, through restorative justice practices, through a restorative justice ticket from the Cottage Grove Police Department. So that was new in 2024. I believe, Chief. We switched from Judge Hetfinger having kids participate in it to it's a direct referral from the police department that we work directly. It's been awesome how that process worked. We can communicate directly with the Village Police Department and it worked out really well. It's increased the numbers of participants through that process as well. And I can, you can ask the Chief questions if you want related to that from their perspective. But from my perspective, it's been awesome. As I said, RJ offers youth ages 12 to 17 an opportunity to have their offense violation facilitated through a circle process. It's an alternative to paying the municipal court citation. Restorative justice uses community support volunteers to participate in facilitated circle discussions about what happened and how to support the youth in moving forward. So we get a ticket from the Village Police Department. We contact that family. We do an intake with them. We talk about what restorative justice is, what the process is. They meet in a facilitated circle with other peers, with other community members, with other volunteers. And from that, they come up with an outcome to how to address what the ticket was about. And then we monitor that over a period of three months. Are you keeping up with me, Cameron? Sorry, I wasn't looking. The process to success. Restorative justice, for those of you familiar with it, and if you're not, think of it as a triangle. It involves three different legs of the triangle. One is community safety, one is competency development, and one is personal accountability. The community safety piece is that the community has the right to feel safe, right? Something happened, something occurred, community as a whole has the right to feel safe with that. There's an accountability piece, a young person Does something they're issued they're contacted by police they need to be held accountable That's fair and then the final leg of it Which I think is the most important piece and that's the competency development piece and that is that our young people should be leaving our systems Whatever that system is if it's a municipal court system or a youth justice system better than when they came in they need to have skills and Competencies that are developed to support their work as a young person the goals and impact The goal of the Restorative Justice Program is to explore accountability and impact with youth and to support them in moving forward. We understand that youth make mistakes. The RJA process is designed to learn from the mistakes or actions and to provide an alternative to help our youth repair any harms caused and to make better choices in the future by using a restorative justice framework. Measuring of the program's success is done through the youth's ability to follow through with the outcome of their circle process, make better decisions by utilizing the tools provided to help them be more productive in the community, and their ability to accept accountability. This is shown through a decreased recidivism rate among youth. So from the community perspective, I mentioned community safety, right? It's the most effective when it's practical, it's relatable, and it's empowering rather than solely rule-based. It encourages young people to take responsibility for their environment and make confident and safe decisions. We want to try to connect our young people to their community. We build community through service projects, service learning projects. Youth in Cottage Grove participate in many service projects that we do throughout Dane County. Some of them are based with working with older adults in the community garden program. We work closely to provide meals to residents of the Beacon, which is an adult homeless services on East Washington. Our youth make those meals. We deliver them to the usually older adults that are there. We work really closely with all kinds of nonprofits to do service projects. I've worked with Sean in our village to kind of identify projects that we might have from the park and rec perspective that we could do community service projects with them. And so that's kind of where the service project comes in. Also, we do groups, workshops that are all based on decision making, de-escalation, mindfulness stuff with our kids. We have an agreement with Summit Credit Union that they do financial literacy. So for instance, it might not be uncommon for a young person who has a retail theft Occurrence that we might work with them the reason why they stole they said was because they don't have money So we work with financial literacy to kind of help them more process through that and help them find employment Through our other programs at briar patch from a victim perspective when offenders hear directly from victims They better understand the impact of their actions firsthand as a young person when I did something wrong, which was never very common for my dad to make sure I went over and apologized for whatever it was that I occurred and Restorative justice acts really similar that victims we want them to talk about what happened if there is a victim involved we contact them they provide either a statement if that's what they'd like to do or they can come and Participate in the process themselves and talk about what happened and how that impacted their life So that's always a part of what goes into the circle process as well this often leads to more genuine accountability and willingness to make amends and Provides different perspectives. The center focuses on harm again. We're repairing harm, right? We're not trying to punish We're trying to repair harm that happened and then develop a repair plan From the offender perspective competency is promoted by helping individuals build the skills awareness and confidence Needed to take responsibility for their actions and to make better choices moving forward that includes self-reflection emotional awareness and decision-making skills key messaging Restorative justice program is voluntary. This provides the leverage of getting youth to take the first step of accepting accountability. Their choice equals an invested commitment to the restorative process, choosing the process rather than paying the fine. Restorative justice is an alternative to their traditional municipal court system. The focus of the experience is to have youth understand the impact that this offense has had on their community, themselves, their family, and their future endeavors. If a youth chooses to not accept the restorative justice ticket or does not follow through with the agreement, the traditional model of municipal court citation is followed. So in other words, if I'm the 15-year-old, I have participated in the process, I have my agreement, I don't follow through with it, it reverts back to the village and the fine is still expected to be paid. Thus far, in 2026, we've had 19 kids come through the process, and this is as of July 31st. So out of those 19 kids, nine of them have been closed successfully and one was unsuccessful. We still have nine that are still, no. social worker masks, sorry, eight that are still pending or in the process. That means that we have our advocates that are still working with them. When a young person goes through our process, they work with us for a period of three months. So we're doing everything to ensure that they're staying on track with what the agreement was. They have access to all of our Briarpatch services, which includes services for runaway and homeless kids. We have services for employment. We have parent support groups that all go on. Those are all things that through this process, kids have access to during their time with us. Restorative justice circles take into account, again, the community safety, the competency development, and accountability. Restorative justice programs consistently show high satisfaction rates among our participants, especially victims. In fact, some studies report that up to 90% of victims who take part, and this is Dane County-wide, not just Village of Cottage Grove, up to the 90% of victims who take part in restorative justice sessions feel satisfied with the process. More victim engagement continues to be the focus. 95% of youth participants in the restorative justice process described feeling satisfied with the outcome of the circle. Data results have shown that youth who participate in the restorative justice process are less likely to reoffend. Past tracking of this statistic has shown that only 8% of youth that complete their RJ agreement reoffend, compared to 25% of youth that choose to go the route of paying their ticket. able to compile that through our work with the juvenile court system. So what we do is every kid that comes through our process we kind of compare to kids that are getting in trouble with the formal youth justice system. So what this is saying is that only eight percent of the kids who had participated in restorative justice would find their way into that system as opposed to kids who just pay the fine that figures 25 to 30 percent. So it's pretty significant. I have two testimonials that I'd like to share from two individuals from the village of Cottage Grove. One is a male who is 14, said that participating in Restorative Justice Program was one of the best decisions I could have made. Not only did this experience help me make better decisions, it may have saved my life. Pretty bold statement. Before the restorative justice process, I used to vape on a regular basis. To me, vaping was a tool to look cool with. I didn't understand the underlying damage it was doing to my health. Now that I'm fully knowledgeable and in tune with myself, I found other positive outlets to look cool. So vaping, we had a huge rash. I think we had five or six tickets that came through this year related to vaping. And so what we're trying to do is kind of come up with alternatives one of the solutions We're meeting with Madison public health Madison Dane County public health and they do programming related to vaping and helping kids understand the effects of it how it affects your body how it affects other parts of your life the cost all of those things so we're going to be Partnering with them and that will be one of the things that will have kids participate who come through us with that particular offense Another testimonial is from a male, 16. My takeaway from my experience as a restorative justice participant would be the importance of a community. All my life, it's only been me and my mom. No real family structure. My mother spends most of her time providing that there is barely time for communication. I'm thankful for my RJ advocates. So again, our advocates are assigned for three months Whilst they're involved in the program, we process with them. They're participating as a mentor. They're participating in support for them. Who personally took the time to get to know me and listen. He didn't talk to me or judge me. He heard what I needed and helped me find ways to redirect my anger. I really enjoyed attending the open circles and connecting with other youth with similar experiences in life. The feeling of supporting each other made me feel a sense of belonging. Today, I feel like I'm a better person because of this opportunity. I am not only living for me, but I'm also striving to make my community proud. So the open circles, again, are something that we do on a weekly basis, and kids participate on a regular basis. So to wrap it up, why restorative justice works, victim empowerment. Victims have the opportunity to express how the offense affected them and what they need to happen in order to heal and move forward. Offender accountability. Through the RJ Circle process, youth participants actively participate in creating and establishing an outcome that holds them accountable through meaningful agreement. Youth receive support from the RJ team during the completion of their agreement. Community healing and safety. The RJ process can and does involve members of the community, peer engagement to create a sense of shared responsibility and support. And of course, the lower recidivism rate that I just talked about a little bit ago. And with that, do you have any questions? Sorry, I talked a little bit too fast.

No, it was great. I know we worked on this starting in 2024, I think is when we started transitioning it from the model we previously... There's so much good work that happens and it's something that I'm so proud that this village board like moved in this direction. And I think it's obviously impacting a lot of youth in the community. So that's great. And I think those numbers are double of what they were in 2024. And the one testimony, so Matt and I had met with Tanya, school superintendent, and the vaping is a major issue in our middle school, probably in our high school too. And... I think that there has there's definitely needs to be some resources you know and the school is looking for those resources too and I know we had mentioned working with Stoughton Health but if there's a way to connect resources to our SRO and kind of bring everyone together on that I think that that's a big focus for the 26-27 school year perfect that's great other feedback or questions you all have.

Yeah, I do. I want to say thank you, too. I'm a huge advocate for Briar Patch, I guess. And my question is, I don't know off the top of my head, and maybe I missed it, the amount that the village donates or what is that annually?

$6,000.

$6,000. Okay. Thank you.

And then that all... We have a written memorandum of understanding with the village to do those services.

And then you clarified how you acquired your numbers with the juvenile court. So thank you for sharing because that was a question I had.

And those are numbers that not everybody can get because we have other contracts with the juvenile court system to work formally with youth justice involved kids. So we have access to those data points that most folks probably wouldn't have access to because they're juveniles.

So with the restorative justice and the monies from the village, how much does it, you know, what's an average cost per incident or per?

So like a cost per client or youth that participates, if you want to look at it that way. So I feel very comfortable sharing the overall budget for restorative justice programming with our agency is about $350,000. So we have a dual contract with the YWCA of Madison that we serve City of Madison clients with as well. And then we also operate in the Village, or Village, City of Sun Prairie. Interestingly, Cottage Grove is keeping up with Sun Prairie with the number of kids that participate despite being a much smaller community. So it comes in, if you looked at the numbers for this year with what just the Village would contribute, it would probably come in at about 100, $150 per kid. But obviously we do a lot of fundraising and other things that bring the cost into a different perspective so that it's not all laying on our municipalities to do that.

Thank you and it would be interesting to learn more about the homeless teenagers and what Briarpatch offers.

Yep, we have a full 24-7, 365, unfortunately, and I say that because I wish we didn't have a shelter that services youth experiencing homelessness. We currently have, it's an eight-bed shelter in our office or in our agency. We've been averaging about five and a half young people per night at the shelter, so that's 12 to 17-year-olds that don't have a safe place to be, and that sucks. I wish we didn't have it.

I wish you didn't either, but I'm glad that you do. So do you ever turn away youth?

Nope, it's all voluntary. So that's different for some of you who might be familiar with the youth justice system. There's also a youth shelter on Atwood Avenue. Those are kids who are court ordered to be there. These are all voluntary kids. They come in, they have the choice, which is kind of hard sometimes for parents as a 12 or 13-year-old having a voice to say, I don't think I want to stay at that shelter. That doesn't feel comfortable to me. We can't keep them there. They can walk in the front door and walk out the back. However, our staff works really closely. Like I said, we have kids coming in at 2 o'clock in the morning. Please bring kids in. We're meeting them at the agency, providing intakes with them. And again, it's up to the young person if they want to stay or not. And if they don't we always look for the alternative safe place for them to go up might be going to another relatives house Or a friend's house, but all that work happens in the wee hours of the morning or in broad daylight Unfortunately homelessness doesn't work nine-to-five Yes, thank you Any other questions for Jay?

Just real quick Jay I mean the testimonials and the data really show that you're making a great impact on youth in Cottage Grove and across the greater area also. So I appreciate your work and I'm very happy that we have this partnership.

Yep, me too. Thanks.

Thank you. Thank you. Oh, no, sorry.

Just echoing the same. I don't have a question. Just also want to say how much I appreciate this. My mother was a social worker. My father was a public defender and family law attorney for 20 years. So I have I CAN'T TELL YOU HOW MANY STORIES I HEARD FROM BOTH OF THEM. THIS WAS SOME TIME AGO WHEN THESE PROGRAMS WERE BY AND LARGE NON-EXISTENT. I MEAN, THE NUMBERS SHOW IT BUT The preventativeness of this is so important. We all hear an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And this is so true for programs like this. It saves lives and it helps our community. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you for what you're doing. It's wonderful.

Well, thank you, and I do want to, again, shout out the chief because a lot of police departments don't always feel comfortable doing things this way, so I do give a lot of credit to your willingness to continue to stick with us, even though I can be a pain in the behind sometimes.

Thank you as well, chief.

Thank you. All right, that wraps up our service provider updates for this board meeting, and you can catch us at a future board meeting for the next handful that come through. We'll move on to 7B, discuss amendment to NETFIG landfill agreements. This is linked in the agenda. I'll let Rick introduce it to us, but it's from a previous board meeting, direction given. This was also discussed at the town, and it's on their agenda tonight as well.

So this amendment to the NatVeg landfill agreement is fairly straightforward. Right now the agreement requires the committee to meet at least quarterly. So the three changes to this agreement are basically changing the word quarterly to annually. So the committee can meet more often as needed if they need to, but the agreement would just say they only have to meet at least once a year. So pretty straightforward.

Discussions on the edits. We'll move on to consider amendments.

I move to approve as stated or presented.

Second. Motion by JP, second by Severson. Any debate on the motion? All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstain? Motion carries. 7C, discuss insurance deductibles. Two attachments in a recommendation from staff are in the agenda for tonight. Turn it over to Assistant Administrator, HR Manager, Inga Cushman.

Yeah, Cameron and I are both going to talk about this a little bit. After the service provider presentation from Andrew Taylor from CIVMIC at the last meeting, it was requested that the board wanted to review the deductibles. So we provided that information in the packet. It's a summary of the loss history over the last two years that we've been with CIVMIC and then Obviously, this year's not done yet, so we don't have that included. But based on that loss history and the premium estimates provided, we're not recommending a change in the deductible at this point. As we get more loss history data in there, I think we can review it again. But at this point, I'm not looking to make any changes. Happy to talk about it with the board. One thing that they did do differently this year was they provided an option to kind of pull out the police squads just because they're seeing a little bit more loss with police squads in their membership right now. So that was an option, but still just not quite seeing the benefit of moving to that. So I don't know if Cameron, you have anything else you want to add, but I think that's the long and short of it.

I do not have anything else to add.

Open it up to discussion from board members.

Real quick, the option to pull the police vehicles out, that would be then that the police department would find their own insurance for it?

No, I'm sorry. I'll clarify. So the deductible would just be different. So all of our vehicles right now have a $1,000 deductible. Squads would have a $2,500 deductible.

Okay, so it would be just adjusting the deductible for the police vehicles. I see. Thank you.

Thanks for clarifying.

Paula? So I know I'm the one that asked for this, but after looking at this, obviously I agree with your assessment on the difference. My question, my bigger question is, we had two claims and then we jumped to six. And so what are we doing proactively to try to minimize the claims going forward?

So one of the big claims last year was a police squad. Some of the other ones are minor damage here and there. I think a lot of members in CIVMIC are going through kind of the same thing where they're seeing an increase in losses. So just trying to talk with our officers, our drivers and public works and everything about making sure that we're looking all around and all of that and trying to do a little bit more training with CIVMIC too. And I don't know if any department heads have anything else they wanna add, but.

All right, any other discussion on this agenda item? Thank you for bringing it forward. Let's move on to discuss short-term rentals presented by Trustee JP and Trustee Arlington.

Yeah, so during the July 20th village board meeting, Brett came forward to present as part of the tourism commission and identified that there was a gap or a need to potentially look at short-term rentals. Currently looking, when I did a cursory overview of our village ordinances, we only have short-term rentals kind of governed in regards to a hotel tax. And during that presentation, Britt and I think Cameron also mentioned that there was some compliance issues that we had to follow up on in there as well. So with the Housing Chapter Committee kind of looking to potentially allow accessory dwelling units, ADUs, which are commonly known or kind of can be used for short-term rentals, Just kind of wondering if this board would be interested in kind of taking a larger look at if we want to do a little bit more code changes regards to short-term rentals, what kind of works best in there. And Britt literally just emailed me today with a couple kind of updates. in regards to one of her tasks was to go and do some additional research with other communities through her network. And so she was able to connect with Manona, who they have limits about the length of stay in there, a registration period with a permit fee in there as well that requires fire and home inspection, as well as the Dane County health inspection. They also utilize special software to detect unpermitted operations. McFarland also has a new ordinance requiring minimum stay of seven days too, but know that some people are bypassing this by charging a nominal fee for those additional days, one, two dollars. uh to keep costs down for the users even though they block it off for seven days um and so really the whole purpose of this is bring forward for discussion see if there's something we want to do whether it's a registration more additional code discussion in there with the idea that we would then bring this through the committee process with the plan commission in there

So full disclosure, my husband and I have an Airbnb short-term rental in our home. So with that being said, Dane County Public Health does an annual inspection and we pay, it's just under $400 a year annually to make sure that We're up to code. As far as adding more registration and restrictions per village, I don't think that's necessary. I think that's duplicative. And I'm happy to answer any questions. We have additional insurance that we have to abide by rules and regulations for short-term rental as well. So I'm happy to answer questions and continue the dialogue with any concerns that you may have.

I have a question, just so I'm clarifying. We're almost close to our housing chapter, right? We're almost there. So if the ADU piece of that goes through, is it your intent to make anybody who ends up building an ADU register somehow, even if it's for long-term, like my mother's moving in or something, how do we kind of manage that? Can you say more, please?

Yeah, so I am not proposing any actual change of ordinances in there. I'm just asking if this is something we want to bring forward for discussion. Just because, again, I picked ADUs because that's probably the most or one of the most common ways that people have short-term rentals besides renting out their entire house. there and so the whole purpose is do we want to find a way is there do we want to do a more kind of governance in regards to it do we need to have a registration process to ensure that we collect the hotel tax especially as you've seen some of the news there are people that are just doing the Airbnb but not are kind of following the steps that Renee just mentioned in there and so because those whether it's Airbnb, Vrbo, other entities might not have the same kind of level of checks and communications with other municipalities in there. And so kind of the whole intent of this is like, do we want to take some steps at whatever point to kind of monitor short-term rentals. I am not saying that if someone goes through an ADU, you automatically have to register. I think that's overly restrictive in there. Personally, I would say if you want to go forward and do a short-term rental, and then at that point, then you would have to kind of go through the registration process, go through all the checks in there.

Can I just follow up with a question? Sorry. Do you have data, or does BRIT have data about the number of

airbnbs and who's actually paying the taxes like have we found that we've got airbnbs in cottage grove that aren't paying taxes um i do not have the data um like i said this is something she brought forward in there and i figured it would be worthwhile conversation um though i think i see cameron's guy's finger on the pulse there so i'll jump in

Yeah, one of the fun things I get to run. So on a quarterly basis, if we take a kind of step back, so when you utilize a service provider such as Airbnb, such as Expedia, Home Away From Home, that service provider is required to remit on the owner's behalf room tax. Where this becomes a challenge is if that agency doesn't know that there's a room tax. What sometimes you see is it can be a letter from Cottage Grove. We had asked, and I don't know if it ever was formally at the chamber, because we don't have the resources to be going and doing enforcement, if they could tip us if we need to, as the municipality, need to send to Expedia or Airbnb or Vrbo that there's a property that we don't think they're getting captured. The problem with these national organizations, they don't know the difference between the town and village of Cottage Grove. Like, I'm constantly trying to, like, when I get these monthly or quarterly reports, trying to make sure it's reasonable. Because it doesn't come any, there's no detail with it. Outside of comfort suites, I don't have any detail to what Expedia pays, what Home Away From Home pays. But I want to make sure whatever we do doesn't take the, indirectly takes the responsibility away from that service provider, because that's in state, I believe it's in state statute, maybe Rick, you can tell me. Or not even state, it's a national thing now. And so where I've seen this talked about more, especially in the Dells area or the Dar County areas, is it's crushing workforce housing to have rentals be such a problem. It's not an issue in Cottage Grove, but there is other communities that have issues with short-term rentals increasing the average cost of housing. the community. So I view these as two buckets. There's either a bucket that we want to address room tax compliance is one bucket we could investigate. The other bucket is, do we want to create some registration process to help the board understand how many of these we actually have out there? So if it ever becomes a problem, there could be an ordinance, and I think there's some thought about, well, do we get ahead of any possible issues in the future by having an ordinance? Rick, I don't know if you had.

So state laws actually kind of spells out exactly what you can and can't do for restrictions on the amounts of stays or the numbers of stays. So if it's less than six nights, like the example was given, you can say we're not going to allow for short-term rentals of less than six nights. You can't prohibit if it's more than seven and less than 30. And you can say that you can only rent for a 180 day period. You can establish licensing or notice requirements. But basically if it's a, If the property is located in a zoning district that allows for single-family housing, we can't prohibit short-term rentals. Some things that I've seen other communities do is try to incentivize it in some places versus others within the community. So if you have an established downtown where you want people to stay there and go there, you make less restrictive requirements. And in other places, maybe not as restrictive requirements. So that's just... that's one potential thought. But otherwise, we're fairly restricted in how we regulate the use. Like I said, we can't prohibit it, but there are certain restrictions that the board or the village could consider.

And of course I'm going to come at this with more of a biased statement because we own one and when we travel we also do Airbnb. However, we do pay room tax and As I mentioned, we're registered with Dane County Public Health, so Dane County remits our taxes for us. So as far as more government oversight from the village, I don't know that Obviously I can't vote, but I would not be in favor of more restrictions. It doesn't seem to be a problem. And in bigger cities that you were mentioning, Rick, where they have more limitations, it's because a lot of developers are buying up homes and renting them out. So then obviously that limits places for residents to live, and I don't foresee that in Cottage Grove. and I had another thought, and it is escaping me at the moment.

Sorry, point of order, Renee. You said you're abstaining from this vote?

Sorry. If there was a vote, and there's no vote. It's up for discussion, I believe.

So there will be a vote for this. There's a consider item.

I'm not voting no, obviously. I'm not going to vote.

Okay, are you going to excuse from the discussion as has been established as precedent or no?

Sure.

I'm just asking.

So it is a personal decision of a trustee on whether or not they want to participate. And obviously we haven't weighed in on any ethical issues or haven't been requested to, but it's a personal decision for a trustee that's not really an enforceable thing by the board.

All right, other discussion on the short-term rentals?

So just adding to the discussion, I seconded this to be added to the agenda. This is the stage where this is like the research where we're directing for staff resources to say, hey, what could we and could we not do? Are there enough of these sorts of things in the community that it's necessary, that it's cost effective, et cetera? But this is that stage, like JP said, there's no ordinances, no registration or regulations being proposed now. What's being proposed now is to have staff, legal and so on, look into this and say, are there things that we could do and should we do them? What would be the outcomes of them? So voting on this now is to get us the information to do so.

I mean I think there's value in looking at comparing the who's paying room tax to just doing some website searches on the various websites to see are four entities paying taxes and yet we see that there's 15 entities in the village. So I think there's value in that. I don't think we need to go quite to the level of registration, certification, that sort of thing until we kind of have some data in that regard. So, I mean, I'd be comfortable kind of as a general consensus like saying, yeah, let's take a look at the room tax report and do some web surfing and see if this is an issue.

I think last year sometime, Dane County Cities and Villages had a roundtable discussion about short-term rental ordinances, and I know I've talked to some other colleagues across various municipalities. Most of them have a lake or some kind of lakefront properties, which seems to affect those areas maybe first or maybe just due to the nature of their proximity to our wonderful water resources in Dane County. So maybe some things won't apply to us because we don't have a large body of water in Cottage Grove. But it might be interesting to maybe reach out to Dane County Cities and Villages Association to see what other communities have put into their ordinances, like if they documented that roundtable discussion that they had, kind of just to see if there is something that perhaps we aren't thinking of that we may want to put into some kind of policy. Just like kind of an information gathering at this point on how, maybe we don't need to reinvent the wheel. Maybe someone else has come up with something great or maybe what we're doing works fine for our community now but just kind of get that kind of overall perspective of maybe what some of our surrounding communities are doing that might be a good idea.

Other discussion on this. There is a consider short term rentals in the village and it seems like maybe we're looking to direct staff resources to investigate some area ordinances and kind of the current state of short term rentals in the village. Nodding staff can weigh in on that. How do we make this more clear direction more clear for you.

I guess for me, Erin and I will focus on this a little bit differently. From an enforcement of current room tax, I'm not sure I can require somebody like Expedia to remit the detail of the properties that I can maybe take like the average cost per night and the number of nights that they reported to kind of get a ballpark on how many rentals. So that's where I struggle on what I can do. I think maybe if we wanted to formalize the process of actually doing a review and annual submissions to the various providers to make sure that they're being captured, I'd welcome that from a short-term route. broader housing stock perspective and accomplishing that, I think that would be Erin's domain.

Yeah, I think that that was one of the big gaps that was established during that Tourism Commission presentation was just that we don't know. And I think was that there was like two that were inputted onto the spreadsheet, but I think that having a formal process that we go through in order to determine and evaluate every year is important. I don't know whether that comes forward in an ordinance. I'm interested in seeing that move forward. Aaron, what direction do you need?

It sounds like we just want data on what's happening in the village right now, and then we'll move forward from there.

Okay. Do you want to plan on bringing that back in a future meeting then for more discussion? Yep.

Okay.

Can we do that here, or is there any... Here, plan commission.

It's up to you. I mean, if it's... for heading towards an ordinance that kind of regulates the effects on neighboring properties and things like that, then that's more of a zoning issue. If it's just registering and capturing fees that might be separate from zoning, it might be more of a direct-to-board issue. So it kind of, I think we find the data and then decide.

So come back to Village Board, perhaps you'll see it at Planning Commission Friends in the audience. Okay. Is that crystal clear moving forward?

Yep. Just kind of where we are in the calendar. So September is really heavy budget. So I guess I don't want the board to feel like we're not bringing it back right away. Just know that we're prioritizing the budget and then we'll bring this forward as soon as we can.

That sounds good. I don't think we need a formal motion. This is just direction. So we can move past the consider. All right. Did Renee step out for this part of the discussion, if you want to just tell her that she can come back in? Because we're going to move on to E, discuss reoccurring water discoloration concerns, investigation of potential causes, water quality and distribution system testing, and development of a correction action plan. So I'll turn it over to Trustee Severson and Trustee Buenzo. You can outline your documents. And then I know Kyla had a document that she sent to the village board, but we'll also have her read that to us as well, and then open it up for conversation.

okay thank you cindy um so the reason um dr renee and i wanted to just bring this forward is just really to get to the answer the brown water at the end of the day and this has been an ongoing issue for several months although some residents that have lived here a long time has said it's been years. I think one resident in particular, and this might have been before the two new trustees were on the board, emailed the board during the November episode that it's been going on for eight years on and off. So this has been going on for a while. So my goal here tonight is just to really talk through what we know, what we don't yet know, what additional information or work might be appropriate, and how we get residents a clear answer. I know my memo is long, it was seven pages, but part of that was to be able to give the new trustees kind of the background of the last nine months. And really this water concern started actually the day before Thanksgiving last fall. And a number of residents reached out, from the Damascus pheasant run neighborhood about brown water that they were seeing and concerns. People coming over for Thanksgiving and not knowing if they can serve the water. And so obviously that was followed up by a July social media post that kind of took off from a resident and through another social media post from another resident this August. So I just want to, at the beginning, I want to just be really clear about what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that our drinking water is unsafe. I'm not alleging a drinking water violation with DNR, PSC, anything like that. What I'm really trying to get at is why is the water periodically turning brown? Is there a recurring pattern? Can we identify the cause? Can we reason anything be done to prevent or reduce it? And then how do we communicate the answer transparently to the residents? So the good news is from the reports that Kyle has presented, as well as what's on our website, is the village is meeting applicable drinking water standards in terms of DNR, PSC, I think there was another one that you had in there. So that's good. And I want to just lift that up. So regulatory compliance is kind of one piece, but then the other piece of this is really the recurring brown water is kind of a separate service quality question. And so while we've been assured that there's not bacteria in the water and different things, we don't necessarily still have, as far as I know, an idea what's causing the brown water. And on our website, there's a consumer confidence report on our village website. But specifically in that report, it doesn't ask for test results for iron, manganese, turbidity, or sediment. And so again, we are testing some things. But I think those are things that should be tested. I expect to hear that this belongs with the Utility Commission, and I agree that the Utility Commission should have a major role. I guess two just kind of side notes of that is, first, the village ordinance in Chapter 312 talks about the Utility Commission and its assigned role. But ultimately, the Utility Commission is answerable to the village board. So, in essence, the buck stops with us, right? So, when this started in November through today, I've looked back on past utility commission agenda items and I haven't seen a standalone agenda item on this. There's been no comprehensive utility commission discussion of complaint history, geographic patterns, testing, possible causes. And I know that Kyla has given verbal reports as part of her director's reports, but for the utility commission, they haven't taken the comprehensive look that I think we should take. I know that Kyla mentioned in her email today to us, and she actually had emailed back on July 27th about testing with Hawkins. So I'm going to have some questions on that as to what exactly they're testing for. One of the things that I also have questions on is really understanding the scope. So how many discoloration complaints, inquiries have we had since November 2025? Are there any repeat properties, streets, neighborhoods? Have we mapped out the complaints? I know a resident on Facebook did a little map kind of based on the comments in the Facebook thread, but I don't know if we've done anything to that degree. And then also comparing the complaints from residents with, you know, could it be an issue that's coming from the pipe into their house, right? Could it be that that pipe is iron, right? So could it be water main age, main material, dead ends, pressure zones, those types of things. So again, I mentioned that I think We should be testing for iron, manganese, turbidity, and sediment. Those particular things can lead to brown water. Iron by itself is not necessarily harmful. Manganese does have some health concerns to it. The two in tandem can... work together to, in essence, have deposits, right? And so that the two, and that's outlined in Kyla's memo, that our aquifer kind of lends itself to iron and manganese. you know, let's look at that and just kind of measure those things. So I think tonight the bottom line that I want to get to just kind of with this conversation is do we have enough information today to explain to residents why they're experiencing the brown water? And if yes, let's talk about that. And if no, I think that's where we need to really do some additional testing and investigation. And so I'm not asking the board to diagnose water chemistry. I mean, I'm not an expert in that. But I would like to ask for a clear process where we can do testing, present results publicly, and empower the utility commission to work with Kyla to conduct a comprehensive review of the discoloration that I kind of outlined my memo, and then report its findings and recommended corrective actions to the village board within 60 days. So that's my recommendation. Let's do this deep dive. Let's test for those four items that I mentioned that I haven't seen on the other tests. Maybe it'll be in the Hawkins test, I don't know. But I really think it's time that we really dig deeper than we have been And we may have been from behind the scenes, but in terms of what's been communicated to the board and the public, I think more needs to be put out there. So again, that's why this item is brought up. You know, people run into me at Piggly Wiggly and talk about brown water and they go on social media and I know not everybody reports it. I know that probably in our apartment buildings, people have brown water and they report it to their maintenance guy or property manager, but I think it deserves a lot of attention.

Renee, do you have anything you want to add?

Yeah, I do. I agree with, I was going to raise several similar points that you did, so I'm not going to repeat what you said, but after reading your memo today, Kyla, I'm really even more convinced that a systematic review makes complete sense because the staff, you've identified 17 reports since June 1st, and I don't, the intent wasn't to come across as a criticism of the utility staff. This, I think, is more of an opportunity, an information gathering that the board and utility staff, Public Works, and our residents working together. Paula and I are not coming across that this is a criticism. So I guess I would ask you, Kyla, what are your recommendations moving forward?

Kyla, do you want to read your memo?

I can read it, summarize it kind of quickly, some of the things we've talked about already. Do you want me to read it verbatim? Because I think we need all the information. Okay. Our utility staff takes great pride in delivering high-quality water, maintaining reliable operations and infrastructure, and providing timely, helpful customer service. The Village Water Utility currently serves 2,647 customer accounts and operates with 2.65 full-time equivalent field staff dedicated to managing and maintaining the system. As previously communicated, the village's water utility is regulated by the Wisconsin Public Service Commission and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. All drinking water compliant sampler results are publicly available through the DNR's drinking water system portal. The portal includes bacteriological lead and copper, fluoride, and other chemical sampling results, all of which are analyzed by the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene. I'm going to add a side note that wasn't included in my memo. This portal also includes lead, magnesium, hardness, a bunch of other inorganic chemicals that are listed on the portal. Attached to the required compliance sampling test that must be achieved for 2026, that was given to the village board. The DNR portal also identifies any regulatory violations. Cottage Grove Water Works currently has no active maximum containment levels or secondary maximum containment level violations. Since 2010, there have been three instances where the samples have been over the maximum contaminant level. On August 8, 2014, there was a lead sample that was measured at 15.8 parts per million at a distribution sample source as part of the lead and copper rule for the three-year residential in-home piping sampling requirement. The public water service material was not lead. Due to the age of the home, lead and copper originate in plumbing materials specifically in lead solder. These plumbing materials were banned in 1984. The lead and copper rule requires sampling a percentage of customers specifically with buildings built before 1984 and report the results to the owner with a consumer notice provided by the DMR, which includes steps to reduce and eliminate the exposure. On May 3rd, 2023, fluoride was measured at 10.1 milligrams per liter at an entry point sample location. It was determined that summer that the sample was taken at the long rotation and was a user error, and this resulted in quarterly testing at well three for a year. On June 9th, 2026, lead was measured at 60.1 parts per million at a distribution sample source as part of the lead and copper rule for the three-year residential in-home pipe sampling. Requirement, this residence was promptly retested and measured at 2.99 parts per million. This resident was undergoing private plumbing updates and is now under the MCL. In addition to the required third party compliance testing, utility staff conduct daily chlorine and fluoride residual testing to verify that all drinking water standards continue to be met daily. Utility staff are continually monitoring the chlorine and fluoride residuals at various locations throughout the system to confirm levels of chemicals being administered at the wells is reaching the entire distribution system. Annually, staff complete the PSC annual water report, which for the year 2025 was filed in March of 2026. In the attached report, which was given to Village Board and the Utility Commission, and can also be found on the PSC website, information can be found on number of fire hydrants and valves the village has and exercised over the last year, in addition to the quantity and age of existing water mains. The village receives our water through three wells that are located throughout the village. Based on geographical location of the village and the depths of our wells, we receive water from a sandstone aquifer. This type of aquifer Aquifer is known for producing natural occurring mineral sediments including iron and manganese. The village water utility is unique that it operates a relatively new system with the majority of its infrastructure having been constructed alongside continuous development over the past 20 plus years. While growth brings many benefits, it can also create challenges for water distribution systems, particularly where dead end water mains and limited system looping exists. These conditions can persist for years due to undeveloped parcels, future growth areas, or boundaries with the surrounding town that limit opportunities for immediate connections. To address these challenges, staff are proactively planning future capital improvement projects that incorporate system looping whenever feasible. Expanding and connecting the water distribution network in this manner will improve water circulation, enhance system reliability, and support more consistent water flow for customers as the village continues to grow. i joined the village as the director of public works and utilities in june of 2024. since the fall of 2024 we have implemented a more aggressive hydrant maintenance approach to our staff with our staff by conducting scour flushing this process involves forcing water through the distribution mains at high velocities for extended period of times to remove accumulated mineral sediment iron deposits and biofilm from the system Under normal operations, fire hydrants are flushed annually, typically in either the spring or the fall. Hydrants are located on dead-end mains, receive additional attention that are flushed twice per year due to their increased potential for sediment accumulation. This spring, knowing that well two would be out of service for the remainder of the year because of construction activities, staff made a concerted effort to flush every hydrant within the village. In addition, tower two was taken offline to complete the DNR's annual 10-year required inspection, drawdown, and cleaning. The condition of the tower was encouraging, As cleaning revealed less than two inches of accumulated mineral sediment indicating that the tower has remained relatively clean over its service life. Our staff are committed to responding to customer concerns within 24 hours and in many cases within just a few hours of a report being received. Reporting of water quality concerns allow staff to investigate conditions more effectively and provide the most timely and accurate response possible. From time to time, routine operational activities such as fire hydrant flushing, water main construction, valve operations, and water tower maintenance can disturb natural occurring sediment within the distribution system. When this occurs, customers may experience temporary water discoloration at their homes or businesses. While these conditions are typically short-lived, timely notification from customers help staff assess the situation, determine the cause, and take necessary corrective action. When a discoloration concern is reported, staff investigate the potential causes within the village's water system. However, several factors on the customer side can also contribute to discoloration, including the condition and maintenance of water heaters, water softeners, and household plumbing, where mineral and sediment buildup may occur over time. Prompt reporting helps staff evaluate system conditions, identify potential causes, and provide appropriate recommendations to restore water quality as effectively as possible. In late November of 2025, several homes within the fourth edition of West Lawn, specifically on Pheasant Run, experienced discoloration in their water and reported the incident at the time of occurrence to the water utility. Within less than two days, utility staff determined a valve was closed that should have been opened. This incident was reported and discussed at the Denver-Sember 12, 2025 Utility Commission meeting. Since June 1st, 2026, the utility department has received 17 reports of discolored water. Of those, three were associated with a condominium-disbuilding fire suppression system, two followed a main break, and two occurred at locations served by dead-end water mains, where lower water turnover can contribute to sediment accumulation. The remaining concerns, 10, reported they were not experiencing currently discolored water at the time of contacting the village. In these cases, although temporary discoloration can occur for a variety of reasons, each concern is taken seriously and investigated to identify potential causes and ensure continued reliability and quality of the village's water supply. At the time of drafting this memo, the utility does not have any customers currently reporting discolored water. As part of our ongoing commitment to water quality and operational due diligence, I arranged for an independent third party Hawkins Chemical to collect and analyze water samples from the village's system. Sampling included raw water and entry point samples from each of the village's three wells, as well as a distribution system sample collected at the Bylas Lift Station. The samples have been analyzed at Hawkins Chemical Laboratory in Minneapolis, and we will share the results and final report upon receipt. This additional testing will help further validate the quality of our water supply and provide other layer of assurance regarding the performance of our water system. I've met with utility and village leadership to proactively enhance our direct communication with efforts with residents and customers. Planned initiatives include messages included with the utility bill, a dedicated section in the monthly village reporter newsletter, water quality and infrastructure updates in the village stay in the no mailers, and an expanded village website webpage that will provide more comprehensive information about the water system, including testing results and related resources. These efforts are intended to improve transparency, keep customers informed about the water utility operations and projects, and provide easy access to information regarding the quality and reliability of the village's water system. We will continue to monitor our system closely, share the information openly, and take appropriate action whenever concerns are identified. If you have any questions or concerns about the water utility, please do not hesitate to reach out to me. Your feedback is important, and we are committed to ensuring residents have access to timely information, confidence in the safety and reliability of their water system.

All right, so this discuss is reoccurring water discoloration concerns. So we obviously have documented concerns. There's no current reports of discolored water. We did have a couple of public comments tonight there are still ongoing concerns. So how are we going to address this? How are we going to mitigate this? Is this telling the utility commission that they haven't addressed this and that's what needs to happen, is that they need to take this up? Do you need direction from us? So how can we move this forward for everyone?

Couple things with public comment and the lab results. So the lab results are available on the DNR public portal website. You can click through in organics, you can click through a bunch of variety of different information and all of our lab sampling results are on there. Two things to note is I printed out, we had our inorganic chemistry samples completed that is on the website, on the DNR portal in May, middle of May of 2026. Our iron levels at all three wells are under the standard, secondary standard limit of 0.3 parts per million. So our results were 0.06 0.1 and 0.19. Iron is a secondary limit, so it's all aesthetic. So iron perceives no health harm to our water. The same thing is for manganese at a limit of 300 parts per million. We were at 19.7, 12.9, And 44.0, the limit is 300 parts per million. So we're under all of the limits, secondary limits, and both of those are aesthetic. With a sand aquifer that we have and we pull our water from, discoloration can be normal. There are a couple places, like in condo buildings and plumbing, where if there is plumbing work done in a different part of a building and residents aren't known and the system isn't flush, sometimes that causes discoloration in an apartment building. That's not something that I'm always going to have privy information to, which is why we ask a variety of questions when residents reach out. We ask a variety of questions, both me and my utility staff, of is it the hot water? Is it the cold water? Is it only one faucet? Where is it located? Sometimes if it's only, you're seeing it only in one faucet. The little screen thingy, if you take that off, clean it off, and then put it back up, you'll see that your water is running clear. There's a variety of questions that we ask. No home, no business is the same. We do always then help flush with the system as well. And we are currently working on a unilateral flushing as well where we're closing valves and forcing water as I spoke with the scouring aspect. Filters are great. Filters that are a rust color mean they're actually doing their job. They're filtering out the additional iron and sediment that are coming from your water. Um, I've worked in the consulting world in the past, um, for nine years before I took this job, you can ask Josh as well. Discoloration in water in Wisconsin is typical. I'm not saying that it's good. I'm not saying that that's what I want to stand my life on, but if our utility staff is not made aware of the situation at the moment it's occurring. I can't backtrack what was going on in the area from them. So timely reporting gives us the best option to continue moving forward. And while we flush fire hydrants, we provide questions, we are looking for feedback. If residents and customers are not reaching back out and providing feedback, if there is still discoloration so we can continue to troubleshoot it, I don't know that answer.

And I think that we've, obviously I've been a part of the discussions with staff and it's been all hands on deck, drop everything to have these meetings and talk to the utility commission chair and I and staff have met to talk about what can we do to make sure that we're getting information out? How are we responding? What is the protocol? What questions are we asking? What is the appropriate responses? How quickly are we responding? How many complaints have we had? Where are we going today with this? It was drop everything and immediately make a change to the utility bill so that every single utility customer, all 2,700 of them, got the same information of exactly who to contact. And so I think those have been good changes. We are going to continue to update the website with more FAQ, and we have that additional testing coming through. I want to make sure that the communication that goes out to the village is equitable and that every single user has access to that information which is why posting on Facebook can be problematic, is that you're not hitting every single one of those individual users. We've got almost 10,000 people that live here, and those 2,700 customers we need to make sure getting that information of how to report out to all of them. And that's the utility bill, that's the village mailer, that's the e-newsletter, if you sign up for it, we can get that information that's targeted directly to the people that need to get that. And I don't know if the village board has other you know suggestions of how we can be disseminating and you know making sure that people are contacting kyle because that is the number one way to get you know to start to troubleshoot issues and if we have zero on record as of today we need people need to report that so that we can go back out into the field and figure that out i'm just a comment i think the other thing where board members can help too is um you know kyle has been sending um

in the last month or so when this, between middle of July until today, four pretty notable updates to the board and utility commission on this. So we're definitely not asking you all to answer all the questions when you receive them, but I think relaying that to people, but mainly to refer them back to Kyle and her staff so they can address it as quickly as possible.

Heidi. Thanks for your discussion about this. I live just a couple of houses from houses that were experiencing the water right before Thanksgiving. And I think that example shows the tremendous pride and how much our staff care deeply about providing. reliable quality water to residents continued to follow up as they communicated with the resident and I guess that's the key piece the resident kept communicating with each other until found you know that in that case there was you know a valve that needed to be turned and so I think I think that really shows, right before Thanksgiving, how dedicated staff were to get to the bottom of the issue. Whatever we can do to, if you see something, say something, that applies to so many areas. If you have a question, to reach out to the utility staff and continue to follow it. that our staff doesn't know that there's still a problem if it's not being communicated. And I think also the DNR portal that talks about all the different things that are tested. I remember I was on the Utility Commission when PFAS were at the front of the news, and we did additional testing for PFAS in water. So also communicating out the results of those in our water system. There's so many resources and data that is available to residents, and maybe they don't even know that such a thing exists. So that's, I think, another good thing that we can do. But yeah, it's always, if you see something, say something. And I know that our staff is ready to diligently work to make sure all the utility customers are satisfied. So I guess that kind of seems to be a theme here.

Paula. Yeah, and I appreciate, Cindy, you mentioning the work that was going on behind the scenes and the all hands on deck. And I think that's important to know. But more importantly, that's important to see and to be communicated to the public, right? Here's what we're doing. Here's what we're testing for. Here's all the things. I feel like I was a little bit in the dark as a board member as to what was going on. I know you were having the conversations. I didn't necessarily hear from you, right? You know, at the end of the day, I think one, there's just one overarching question, and why do we have brown water? I just want to, why?

Let's talk about that. What are the... So we have an aquifer. Can you speak a little bit about that?

But I want the data, not just that we have an aquifer and that sort of thing. I think we need the data. Why do we have brown water? Is it sediment? Is it turbidity? Is it manganese, iron?

There is naturally occurring minerals in our water, in our aquifer. The scour flushing is what helps. Think of a water main. Got little particles everywhere. I'm going to try to explain this. and eventually they settle out. When you put a fire hydrant on full flow and flush it as hard as you can for 20, 30 minutes until it runs clear, because we do have naturally occurring sediment, when those water particles come out, that's what is discoloration, is the naturally occurring minerals in our water. It's the aquifer in Wisconsin, it's the aquifer that we pull our water from, from all of our well water. Data shows that all of our lab results meet all federally required standards. Iron is an aesthetic secondary limit. I can't explain that. I'm not a water chemist. I can do the best I can. Speaking of Hawkins, Hawkins took samples, as I mentioned. We have not received those results yet. They were looking at the very specific water chemistry of the makeup of our water. We have received verbal communication back from them that there are no concerns with our water quality at this time, but we have not received the formal report. Hawkins Chemical delivers chemicals across the state.

And I appreciate that all I do. I don't hear of other communities near us that hypothetically would have the same aquifers having brown water issues. And so, again, my recommendation, and I'll just, since she read her memo, I guess I'll read part of mine. My recommendation is that the Village Board direct the staff and the Utility Commission to prepare a comprehensive report addressing the following. Complaint history, compile all available water discoloration, odor, sediment, and similar water quality complaints for at least the past five years and longer if records are reasonable Reasonably available. Number two, complaint mapping. Map complaints geographically so the board and utility can determine whether recurring clusters or patterns exist. Number three, incident chronology. Compare reported incidents with water main breaks, hydrant flushing, fire flow events, construction valve operations, and other significant distribution system activities. Number four, distribution system analysis. Identify whether repeated complaints occur in areas with dead end mains, low flow conditions, older infrastructure, inadequate looping, or other hydraulic characteristics that could contribute to sediment accumulation or disturbance. Number five, valve verification. Review and confirm valve positions and system configuration in areas experiencing repeated complaints, particularly following water main breaks or other system work. Number six, well source analysis. Determine whether complaints correlate with particular wells, source, water characteristics, or operational conditions. Number seven, operational testing data. Provide the board with the parameters currently tested by the utility beyond mandatory compliance sampling, together with sampling frequency, locations, and recent results. Discoloration specific testing. Determine whether current testing is sufficient to identify the source of discoloration and whether additional testing for iron manganese, turbidity sediment, or other relevant parameters should be conducted. Flushing program, provide information regarding this village's flushing program, including frequency, methodology, areas flushed, and whether changes to the flushing program could reduce recurring discoloration. Resident notification, evaluate whether residents should receive advanced or immediate notification when village operations are likely to cause discoloration. 11, water usage credits, develop a clear policy regarding whether customers should receive an adjustment when village staff instructs them to run substantial qualities of water in response to a distribution system problem. 12, corrective options, identify operational changes, maintenance activities, or capital improvements that could reduce or eliminate recurring discoloration. An independent review. If staff cannot identify a probable cause or appropriate corrective strategy, provide the board with a scope and estimated cost of an independent distribution system wide evaluation by a qualified water system engineer or water quality profession. Those were my 13 recommendations. And I just want to say a note about the water usage credits. With the November 25th episode, residents were told to run their water to clear it out. And we had one particular home owner that ran their water for hours upon hours upon hours. and then sought out water credit from the utility and was told there will be no water credit. So I think these are all the things that I would love to see in a comprehensive plan and an activity that the utility commission takes on. And then all of these things put out publicly. The parts you had in your hand, the University of Madison, I don't remember getting those or seeing those. So just really making all of this transparent for people in the community. So that is my recommendation.

Josh, can you, I know at the very beginning, Paula mentioned that this doesn't occur anywhere else. You're in other municipalities. I don't know if you have any insight that you can maybe give the board. I'm assuming maybe, I don't want to put you on the spot.

Yeah, I mean, without speaking about other municipalities directly, I would say this isn't an uncommon thing, right? Everybody deals with this during their flushing operations, during their valve operations, different times of year. Kyla's right, we're all pulling from the same aquifer. It's sandstone, limestone aquifers. They're sediment. Sometimes it's just sediment. Sometimes it's manganese and iron, exactly what Paula's pointed out. Sometimes it's easy. This is a difficult one because sometimes it's easy. Sometimes we have what Heidi had up on her street and you get a variety of people all at once that have a problem. That's easier for Kyla, I'm sure. All of a sudden they see, okay, this is happening. It's happening to several people all within one spot. They can go and they can kind of isolate and then they can solve. Some of the other ones I see in communities that are harder is when I think some people spoke tonight, they have individual kind of big problems, right? And they've been maybe historic or bigger problems, individual maybe to their house. Maybe they're not though, Paula, as Paula was saying, maybe there's more in that same area, but those are things that you'd have to kind of look at and try to kind of sift out. Sometimes when they're isolated like that, they may just be driven by that property. Not that they're doing anything wrong, but it could be a connection to the man. It could be something else. They could have some contamination going on. You never really know, but these aren't easy to just boom, fix overnight as some of the residents have probably seen and I can feel for as part of it. But it's not uncommon to get some of the same stuff happening in a lot of the communities and actually the Midwest. A lot of us all pull off the same aquifers and

Then there's a long list of requests from Paula that are in her memo. Can we get some clarification, Rick, on roles and responsibilities between Village Board and Utility Commission so we're not overstepping or doing anything illegal?

right so by ordinance the villages exercise statutory authority to designate the utility commission as the entity responsible for governance of the utility system in the village like i believe paula mentioned that but it's also correct that the village board has oversight of the utility commission so that's usually done through like ordinances rules regulations things like that So as far as a process goes for any action taken tonight, I think it would be to refer it to the Utility Commission for further analysis. It's really up to the Utility Commission on how they address that direction. And they can report back, or the Utility Commission member can report back. But just the way that the Utility Commission and board is structured, it's really sending this back to utility commission for further action, then they basically report back what action they're taking or steps that they're taking, if any. So it's somewhat of a confusing role, but that's how a lot of utilities operate in Wisconsin, where the governing body specifically delegates management of utilities to a separate committee or commission that just has oversight of that. So if there's any action tonight, I think that's, you know, as frustrating as it might be, the village board doesn't take direct action. It's just to refer it back to utility commission.

Chris. So I guess my question is, let's assume that, and I don't know if this is the case or not, but let's just assume that the discoloration is elevated but naturally occurring levels of iron. What's a solution for that? Is it really just the individual houses have to get a filter, or what? Because I mean, we might understand that it's aesthetic, but I don't think if you put elevated levels of iron cup in front of somebody. Anybody in this room, or I don't think anybody in this room or outside this room is gonna actually drink it. And I don't think anybody's gonna wanna shower in it. And I mean, I don't know, does that stain clothes in the dishwasher? In the washing machine? I don't know. And if it does, that's a problem. Maybe it's safe to drink, but if you can't wash your clothes,

There is an iron removal process that you can add two wells. We have three wells. The process, I do not know enough research on it, but in speaking with our DNR rep, because I did reach out to our DNR rep last week, the village of Cambridge put in an iron removal system two to three years ago for $3 million for just one of their wells. So you're looking at millions and millions of dollars for an iron removal process.

You're typically, just to chime in, you're typically seeing that more when, Chris, when you're getting close to those limits, right? And some communities, even larger communities, are blending their water, meaning that some wells are pulling higher iron, higher manganese, other things, and they're making sure that they pump it to a different part or they pump it to different things and they blend their water quality. If it was higher levels, you'd see staining in things. So you'd see staining in fixtures or other things. And you'd see staining sometimes on the outside of people's homes when they water yards. Sometimes you'll see it on the lower part of their house where they water. That's not uncommon either in higher iron water. You will see some of that. Sometimes it's addressed, sometimes it's not until it gets closer to that limit.

to confirm the way our system works and every water utility is set up differently. Some water utilities from the well pump directly to the tower and then from the tower into the distribution system. Our wells pump directly from our well into the distribution system to the tower. So when the tower levels go low, the well turns on and then we are distributing water into the system and also simultaneously filling the tower. So it's a little different, we're not blending water, we're taking water, we're treating the water at the well at its source location and distributing it to the system.

And when I said blended before, I wasn't suggesting that the village blend their water and change their operations because their limits appear to be, I haven't gone through them all, appear to be on the lower level of all those others, you probably aren't in a blended situation. We can get a water expert here and we can talk more about that, I'm just throwing that out there.

To be honest, I was hoping you'd say there's an easy and cheap way to do this.

There is. There are other options. There are additives that can be added to the water that, in essence, you know, different phosphates and sort of things that keep them from oxidizing and forming particles. And I don't remember the exact term, but there's something that actually suspends the solids that you don't see it in the drinking water, but you will see it in the filter so i think there are much less expensive options that we can investigate as rather than going all the way down to the big filtration system but again these are things that let's have a conversation about them and i absolutely agree that the utility commission should be the one i mentioned that earlier so i'm all on board for that okay jp

OK. Again, I appreciate the conversation and all the hard work that Kyla and the public works and utility staff have done in regards to this. And so I feel like we're getting in the right direction that this needs to be investigated. But Paul, I got a couple of questions, and I'm open to a back and forth here for this. I just want to make sure I have a clear understanding of the full ask. We've talked about direction, but you also have two attachments that I believe you included into the memo. Is there a reason why those were included?

Yeah, so iron and manganese are two elements that can turn water brown. And so it was just purely informational that iron isn't, as we've noted, it's not a health concern, but it is a discoloration. Manganese is a health concern. So that was a Department of Public Health publication for that one. So it was just purely informational to the elements that can be causing the discoloration.

OK. Thank you. And then the other thing is you said you just want more data in there. So is, I think, one of the big things for data Are you looking at it for, I know you went through these whole points, but I think one part that was kind of missing is, what are the other ways that we can get more data? For us, I think I've heard loud and clear from Kyla, who's studied this now over numerous board meetings, is we need residents to report. And so taking that step, putting in the water utility bill is absolutely great. And I know that there's other conversations to put this in other places, such as the guidebook, Village Explorer, monthly newsletters. I mean, we can go down the list in there. But again, I really want to stress two things. In order to get that additional data, we do need people to report in there. so that we can have that better map of what's going on and kind of see where are the commonalities, trends, things along those lines. Facebook comments are great, but that's a starting point. The utility really needs to hear it from them. Another thing I really want to stress, and I think it came through here, but I want to say it loud and clear, especially since there was a recent Facebook, thread that I had a few residents reach out to me. And I also had one of our neighbors who works for the DNR and kind of works with the water utility. I really want to stress that based on all testing, inorganics, et cetera, that our water is safe to drink. in there and yes there can be issues with cement etc due to water main breaks that was one example i came up before looping things along those lines in there but those are the things that are about the system that we need reports for so i really want to make sure that it's absolutely clear that there's no um misunderstanding based on all the testing that we have so far pending hawkins that our water is absolutely safe to drink

So, yes, and Paula and I have both made that very clear tonight. We are not accusing, we are not saying the water is unsafe. So that's, you know, to keep having this conversation feels frustrating. We just are wanting to know why is there brown water? And, you know, There's, I'm sorry, I forgot the resident's name in the audience has been wanting to say something for a bit of time.

Yes.

We can't do the back and forth with resident dialogue during a board meeting. But please report, you need to report this to Kyla and she will make sure that her staff know to come up. We can't do the back and forth though. The report, she will follow up tomorrow on it. So where does the village board want to go with this? It sounds like giving direction to the utility commission is the outcome of this conversation.

I have a point of information question for Rick first. Can I yield my time to the resident for them to be able to speak?

It would basically have to be a board vote to suspend the rules to allow public participation.

I mean, I'd personally like to do that, but if the board wants to vote.

So elaborating a little bit.

We can have a discussion on this first, though.

Oh, sorry. Are you making a motion?

Sure. I would like to motion that I would yield my time to the resident and the audience that wishes to speak. I'll second the motion.

So does the two-thirds vote, I believe, to suspend the rules.

But the motion was to yield time. I mean, we don't really have time allotted. I mean, we're suspending the rules. Is that more correct?

I'll fine-tune my motion that we would suspend the rules to allow the citizen and the audience to speak.

All right, roll call vote.

Benzo? Aye. Erlingson?

Aye.

Cal Nelson? Aye. Murphy? Aye.

Severson? Aye. Stowa? Aye. Villavicencio? Aye. You have three minutes to come up.

So I've been listening tonight and you talk about we need people to report it. Okay, I walk my dog, North Windsor has all new condos. So I talked to a lot of dog owners. And ever since the Facebook in the Grove Post came, I mentioned it to them. Oh, we thought that was the norm. They don't realize that we have an issue. They think, oh, we just have yucky water. So how are they gonna report it when they don't even know? I guess is my question to you. You want them to report this yellow water, or brown water, but they don't have an idea. And most of us on that block, or that street, our condos are six, seven years old. So they're not that old, and yes, condos circulate different people. They stay for a few years, they might sell. So you get new ones in. They think it's the norm. So how do we communicate, communicate to the community that this is not normal? You saw my pictures. Would you drink that water? Would you take a bath? in that water, would you do your laundry? Because that's what I face. That's what my neighbors face. That's it.

Ma'am, do you have a condo association?

I'm sorry?

Do you have a condo association with contacts? Yes. Can you please give that to our public works director?

She has it. I know they've been in contact.

And how many times have they reported it?

I have had reports from this resident and two others. We flushed their fire suppression system, and that was the cause of the situation the last time it was reported to myself. In condo buildings, a lot of times, if it's isolated incidents in one area, our follow-up question immediately is, have you contacted building maintenance? Because we do not know what goes on in building maintenance. And from there, I would expect that communication would continue to be followed up with myself But again, have you heard from building maintenance? Not since I reported to building maintenance. We worked, me and Dave Uris and Jeremy, my utility staff, worked with building maintenance and their fire suppression system and flushed their fire suppression system at both condo buildings two weeks ago.

On July 31st.

Yeah, at the end of the month. And I have not heard anything since then.

But it's obviously, we just saw pictures that's back today. So we need those, like the pictures are unacceptable. So we need to tomorrow go in and we need the building maintenance contact. We need the HOA maintenance.

The dates are listed, you know, because they're through the last nine months on each of the pictures. This morning, we have yellow back in our water, even though they flushed it 17 days ago.

So it's ongoing. It's today. So we need to go in tomorrow and look at what's going on.

It's not severe, but I figure it's already starting to show. And it was great. For 16 days, we're like, oh my god, this is great. But then wake up this morning, and now we're starting to see the yellow. Maybe it'll disappear.

but so i think follow up with building maintenance tomorrow morning needs to happen that's direction that should be given absolutely thank you so moving forward then we need to uh alex okay i'm like alex so we're we need to give is it the village board interested in giving direction to the utility commission to have some type of utility commission direction.

Sorry, raising your hand. No, you're OK. So yes, but before we get that, so I was going to say to extend what JP had been saying about reporting and to build on what you said, Sheila, It is good that we clarify what reporting means and why the timely ones are important. These issues are literally fluid. It's fluid dynamics. Things change from day to day, from week to week. It can be more severe, less severe, as you said, as others have said. As JP alluded to, there'll be residents posting on Facebook, oh, it's been this way for years. You'll talk to neighbors and say, oh, we thought it was normal kind of thing. All of those different conversations, the only ones that the village can act on are the ones that get to Kyla. And I know that that's frustrating that you might say, hey, I've talked to somebody. I've talked about it for years and years. But to actually troubleshoot an individual issue or a regional or systemic issue, we need that data with the timely reporting. And so if you're sitting in the audience or sitting at home watching this on YouTube or whatever, and you're thinking, well, I've had it for years. Do you have, I want you, we all want you to then have Ongoing thread of like every month or every week like yes, it's still happening. It's still happening. Here's you know Whatever because we can't we can't go and test your properties We can't go into your house not without a report and asking hey Can we come do that and get permission and so on we can only test the systems at at wells and lift stations and so on and I think it's also important with Kyla's summary of the reports since the July, like the viral posts, the news coverage, and so on. Yes, there's been an increase in reports, which I think is part of that same effect of, oh, hey, I didn't know that this was a thing I could or should report about. I just sort of dealt with it. So of course, we're going to get a spike in those. But of the ones that we've received reports on, and of the ones from the Thanksgiving last year, we've either found village causes on small scales, a valve that needed to be turned, or at a third party scale like the condo that had the fire suppressant testing, and that caused the issue for that. none of those indicate a systemic issue the fact that our aquifer just is a sandstone limestone aquifer and just has iron and manganese that's systemic but that's expected um and we can't you know We can't make another aquifer. The geography is what it is. So I'm more than happy to give direction to utility commission, as we're going to do here. This whole thing, it's important to clarify these lines of communication. When we have Facebook posts and so on, or residents coming and talking to us, we should be directing them. We should all, as one, be directing them to Public Works, because that's the only way that they can get documented. We can track. The issues like that, because they do already do that. They take down address. They take down time and all of these things. So a number of these items on your memo are done. We might not have known about it as individual board members. Residents might not have known about it, but they are being done. The iron and manganese was already and has already been done for years. You can go onto the DNR portal. Maybe we should put that portal as another link on the public works website. Great. But as Kyla mentioned, just this May, we did iron and manganese for all three of our wells and all these other all these other things. So there is information there and that's the reason that it's important that this all goes through the relevant department is so we are all providing the correct information and not providing conflicting misinformation kinds of things. Again, I want to iterate. We want you to report these things not just to be a squeaky reel that gets the grease, but because that's how it gets solved. And if we did find that there was some sort of systemic issue, or we decided that the natural iron is a systemic issue, it is our responsibility, our fiduciary responsibility to decide, okay, how much are we willing to commit to this? Because if we have 17 customers with actual reports, you can add in 50-odd Facebook comments and things like that, but that still leaves thousands of residents who aren't experiencing an issue and may not want to pay, whether it's $3 million or some lesser amount, whatever that amount is, they may not want to pay for that. I'm not saying that that's what I would argue either, but we... we need to consider as well, you know, when whatever these results are comes back, how much are we willing to do to, how much are residents willing to do, I should say, you know, is this a pull out all the stops? Yeah, let's do a well treatment kind of thing. If that's what people want, great. That's what we'll vote for. But the blurring of this between like, oh, this is a village water issue versus, oh, we have a lot of reports That is an important distinction and it matters and I don't think that's been being done. So I wanted to say that.

I think that we need to move on from the discuss and is there a consider, move on in the agenda then?

I would put forth a motion to direct the Public Works Director in coordination with the Utility Commission to conduct the comprehensive review of recurring water discoloration outlined in my August 13th trustee memo and report its findings and recommended corrective actions to the Village Board within 60 days.

I'll second the motion. There's a motion by Severson, second by Buenzo on debate on the discussion.

I do think that the 60 days does convey a sense of urgency. I would say that utility just met last week, and that kind of only gives two meetings to get all of these items. I think maybe an update on findings. I mean, I would like to know something in that amount of time, but I don't know that they would be able to complete every item within 60 days.

Yeah, no, and that's a valid point. I do think, though, a lot of the testing and the complaint tracking and stuff has probably been done. So if they're not able to complete the full corrective actions and such within 60 days, fine and update is acceptable.

JP?

As part of the motion, I would also... prefer like to include the direction of the staff to continue to put information on how to report concerns and any communication that is relevant in there to help get the word out.

i would take that as a friendly amendment to my motion and i i sincerely agree i think that you know making sure that we're putting out messaging um is wonderful if renee seconds that yes okay all right um all those in favor on the motion aye aye opposed abstain motion carries all right discuss village board review and approval of the comprehensive public

plan public survey prior to public release. Trustee Severson and Buenzo.

Sorry, I'm shifting focus. I forgot these were back to back. Basically, and I outlined in this memo that, It came to our attention that the draft survey for the comp plan was being reviewed by the staff. Once complete, the survey would be made available online for businesses, residents, and public at large. And so I asked the question at the August 3rd board meeting about the survey and was informed that the board and plan commission would be provided an opportunity to submit feedback. So the board did receive the draft survey and were able to review that. The Planning Commission had not as of last week. And so I appreciate that we got the ability to provide comments. However, I think that a very important process like the comp plan, which is going to have years and years of land use and different things, really should be a process that's really carried by this body or the plan commission or potentially an ad hoc uh... task force much like we did for the housing task force it was the members of the task force the ad hoc housing task force uh... that worked with both aaron ruth and olivia from dane county to come up with the questions for that housing survey So they're really, from my perspective, needs to be transparency in this project. Because at the end of the day, the people here are responsible to the citizens. So I think that we need to have better government oversight on this. I think that we should, as a governing body or appoint the plan commission or someone to review those questions. I raised a number of concerns in an email to Matt and Aaron and the folks from GRAVE about some of the wording in the survey and how I believe that there needs to be kind of a review of the language, the framing excuse me framing effects and so just really understanding that this survey really needs to be neutral and doesn't lead residents one way or another based on you know perceived benefits or you know consequences if you will and so what i'm asking for is and i've listed a number of those examples in my memo what i'm asking for is for us to either review and work through that survey and those questions together or that we appoint either an ad hoc committee to do that or ask the planning commission to do that, but that some governing body has authority over what goes in that survey and gives the final blessing on it.

Renee, do you have anything to add? Yes, and I agree with your points, Paula. And other Dane County communities have also incorporated governing bodies into their process as well. So I don't think that the village needs to reinvent the comprehensive planning. I think having some formal elected or appointed, or ad hoc, oversight into public engagement

can help us decide what structure makes sense for the village um i know grave is online if there are any other questions are there any questions from other board members or comments i mean i'll say first off uh when we all gave our feedback to grave i assume that you gave similar feedback on on these questions paula or otherwise because most of your changes are already there Um, like the building upward, you're more neutral version, you know, allow tower buildings, more compact development. That's what it says. Um, on page nine of it, the, uh, density and walkability neutral version would be allow higher density development. That's what it says. Um, so I think they have, they updated those. I mean, I'm looking at it right now.

So maybe they have made changes.

Yeah.

OK. So that's great. I'm glad. But I still think, again, it should be the governing body that makes those decisions in collaboration with staff and such, but that we are going through that survey question by question, just like we did with the housing task force, making sure that the questions reflect the information and data we want to gather.

Yeah, so, I mean, with regards to the specific ones you all listed here, again, the majority of them have already been changed. The ones that haven't are, well.

Those were just examples. That's not the comprehensive viewpoint. Yeah, I just wanted to give some examples of what I was talking about.

Sure. I mean, the other facet of this, too, is the prior examples. And the theme of it, for them, you're saying is that it's not neutral in it. is kind of leading for it. I didn't find that to be the case really in any of them. I found that they just added context or explained what these sort of things mean because most residents are not civil engineers or planners and wouldn't necessarily correlate density with walkability or how that's done and things. happy to review them and put through feedback, but I think, again, we did that when they had their presentation, when we met with them and gave them the feedback and the full scope of work and everything, and I don't think it's feasible to assemble a full subcommittee or task force prior to community night out this Wednesday, for example, when this sort of thing's gonna be out or when we want to you know, in a timely fashion in order to still get this done.

I hear what you're saying. I guess my question is, ultimately, who approves what goes out on the survey? Is it staff, or is it the governing body? That's all I'm asking.

So I think we approved the public participation plan in July 20th. We obviously contracted with Gray for a reason, that this is their role in... facilitating comp plan um updates and like case said we are this is being rolled out in two days um and uh i i don't think that the i don't have a problem with the survey questions the way they were presented i gave minor um feedback in terms of just like clarifying some word changes and some library specific things uh but i

And I guess a point of clarification. I mean, ultimately, to answer Paula's question, who approves it is whatever the board wants. Staff wasn't approving it from the standpoint of, The board hired the consultant to do the work, and they're presenting, and we can call on Gray if they're on here so they can speak to their kind of library of questions that they put forth for certain types and sizes of communities and things like that, so they can speak to what's behind that. And the idea was we'd get feedback and incorporate the themes of the feedback, which has been done.

Yeah, and I think there's a bunch of different, there's a lot of different tools that they are gonna be using to get all different types of community feedback, and it's not just the survey. I think I was, you know, looking at qualitative research, which is not my favorite thing, but it is, you know, is it properly, is it a properly designed study? Are the, is the range of responses appropriate, which I thought definitely were. In terms of as being like leading questions, there are specific ways you design study questions in order to engage With the population and the type of question that you're trying to to answer and I think that the survey accomplishes that I'd be mostly concerned with Sample size making sure that we get this out and we have people respond to it That's the hardest thing to do in community surveys and so that I mean, that's my concern with it I don't have a problem with the way it's presented and I want to roll this out JP. I

Yeah, just to build upon what Cindy said quickly, I think from a survey methodology, one of the things to kind of look at, and I think it can get confusing if you haven't had the opportunity to go through some fun research classes, is There's a potential for confusion of what's leading versus what is the actual intent of that survey question taken within the larger scope of all the questions in there. So some can mean leaning, but the intent of it is to dive into that specific part, knowing that there's other questions that are covering other elements that may be for some folks the main they may perceive as the main intent in there um and so many of these questions are intentionally designed and then cross tabbed in and out with analysis on how do the responses go in there so again it's a very intentional design question there and like cindy said looking at it from a whole i did not have any concerns with those questions

Other trustees? Heidi.

Yeah, thanks. I mean, I absolutely support a neutral survey, which is why I support having our professional consultants be responsible for the survey methodology. I want to hear what our residents actually think, not what the seven of us decide that we think they should think. So I think by us inserting ourselves into becoming the survey designer, I think that actually is less professional and less neutral than having our consultant do that for us. Planning staff or not utility staff or not engineering staff. I think it's most appropriate for Us to you know, we provided comments to our consultant They have incorporated them as appropriate and I think you know We need to move forward with this portion You know covering different ways to get information from people will help broaden The information that we get and that's already part of the design because some people feel more comfortable Coming to a open house and providing their feedback that way some people feel more comfortable in a survey some people may send in comments some people may attend a meeting and this this whole public engagement process is taking that into account and so we've hired our consultant they you know develop the engagement tool of the survey and i think that we need to roll out that portion of the engagement process to stay on our plan any other comments

I guess I can just say this sort of conversation is not unusual for a survey like this. I think there's a tendency to want to put some context and background to some of the questions that helps people maybe think about them in a different way, but I think to Paula's point, that can sometimes look like it might be pushing them one way or the other. We did pass Paula's comments on to Grafe, and I think they were able to... address a lot of those issues while still getting the information that we need and want to get.

We specifically asked them to re-review the questions through the lens of making sure things are not leading, that there's not language in there that's leading in any certain direction.

So moving on to the consider portion of this agenda item, I'm not sure if there's anything to consider.

Do we need to consider this survey going public?

Yeah, I suppose that could be.

I would make a motion to approve the current survey to begin as scheduled.

I'll second.

All right, motion by Murphy, second by Stoa. Any other debate on this motion?

I guess I would just say, since I brought this up, I'm going to vote no on the motion because In essence, this is the biggest piece of the comp plan, because this is the data that we're gonna refer back to time and again, and that's what we did at the Housing Task Force, is referred back to the data and the number of respondents who said they wanted Sigel Family Residential and so forth. This is the linchpin. This sets the whole stage for the comp plan. And I think that by not having the data the village board or planning commission or an ad hoc, the people who are closest to the people go through these questions and understand them. Yes, we can definitely have professionals give their feedback, but none of our village staff that are in management positions live in this village. I don't think the Grafe people live in the village. So again, we've just handed over to them Please write this survey for us and we're the folks that are gonna run into people at Piggly Wiggly So I just I think that we should take a different tactic And that's why I'm going to vote.

No Yeah, I guess I'm a bit confused by that line of reasoning because The village board was elected and we reviewed it and we're about to approve it. So it seems like that fulfills our

Well, we didn't go question by question, and I sense that you folks don't want to do that tonight, and that's entirely fine. But that's what I'm talking about, a collaborative thing, just like we did with the housing task force. It was very collaborative. It was conversation with staff, but it was also conversation with the five of us who were appointed.

JP?

So I think we had the opportunity to provide, we as a village board had the opportunity to provide feedback. We also, comparing it to the housing chapter committee is a little bit different because we were asked to draft that. Unlike here, part of the request for proposal was to develop a survey act on our behalf. So like previous points have been brought up, In many ways from a research design Having folks that are outside and not paying attention or close to it like us that have a stake in it from the personal standpoint is actually Better and unbiased because whether we intend to or not our biases can come into a design the other thing I just want to remind folks about is the surveys and the end-all be-all this whole Process is a true mixed methodology including the town halls among other sources so this is not going to be the only source of information that we and we'll be able to square it and compare it and do some fun things with the data uh this help create the story of what to do the residents of the village of cottage grove say in regards to the complaint

I just want to add one last thing, that I did review the survey and provided my comments to staff regarding the survey. So I did go through all of the questions and review them. And I believe we all had the opportunity since last meeting to do the same.

Just echoing what you said, Heidi, verbally, I also did go through every question. I mean, whenever we get items like this, we go through them. you know, line by line very thoroughly before we come to the meetings. So yes, I did that as well. We all did.

All right. There's a motion and a second. So all those in favor? Aye. Opposed? No. Abstain? Motion carries. All right. Number eight, reports from village boards, commissions, and committees. First up is the Joint Utility Commission and Public Works Properties and Sustainability Committee with a few action items here. Chris.

Okay, we had a joint meeting of the Utility Commission and Public Works Properties and Sustainability Committee on Wednesday, August 12th at 5 p.m. After we called both committee and commission to order, we approved the minutes for public works, and we had a presentation by Strand on a stormwater utility feasibility study. And then we... uh we um voted on feedback the public works was deadlocked 2-2 and didn't pass any recommendations utility commission was i believe 4-0-1 to recommend approving it after we talked and voted on the stormwater utility the utility commission adjourned IN THE PUBLIC WORKS PORTION WE TALKED ABOUT PILOTARY WASTE MANAGEMENT SERVICES FOR FUTURE BUDGET CONSIDERATION. SO KYLA IS GOING TO LOOK INTO WHAT IT WOULD COST FOR WEEKLY RECYCLING AND MAYBE A CARDBOARD DROP OFF SO WE CAN TALK ABOUT THAT AT A FUTURE BUDGET DISCUSSION. WE TALKED ABOUT RECOMMENDATION TO, OH, NO, WE DIDN'T ACTUALLY TALK ABOUT THE ACTIVE TRANSPORTATION PLAN BECAUSE THE MEETING RAN KIND OF LONG SO WE POINTED THAT TO THE NEXT MEETING. We did recommend approval for the hydride easement agreement for the DNR trailhead lighting project on Glacial Drummond Trail. We did not get to talk about the traffic calming policy and the accompanying application for traffic calming measures. So we will be hearing that at hopefully the next meeting in September. And we had the directors and engineering report and adjourned. So there's a couple of consider action items, one being the hydrate easement agreement and one being the creation of a stormwater utility.

All right, let's talk about the hydrate easement agreement for the DNR trail lighting project.

You and me.

I can go. The easement, the DNR Trailhead project was approved in the 2026 budget processing. It includes five light poles that will be installed at the DNR Trailhead. That land is owned by Hydrite. It is on a DNR easement. So we are working to get approval for the easement location as a general five locations for light poles, because if I gave an exact location with my luck, I'd have to move the light poles a foot over because there's a utility conflict and the associated conduit. From there, we will then receive agreement from the DNR. And everybody is on board with the project. Great.

So as Kyle mentioned, this is just sort of a blanket easement, so it doesn't identify the specific areas. But I believe Hydride has already signed it. So just allowing the village to put up the five light poles and the fixtures that go with them. And DNR, if it's approved tonight as is, I think we have basically their sign off, because they have to consent since they have an easement. But as long as it's unchanged, there shouldn't be any issues on the DNR side.

All right, comments or questions from the Village Board? All right, seeing none, let's move to consider the committee recommendation.

I move to approve the committee recommendation regarding hydride easement agreement for the DNR Trailhead Lighting Project.

I'll second.

Motion by Severson, second by Erlandson. Any debate on the motion? Chris.

Sorry, I stepped up for a moment, so I don't know if we mentioned this, and I don't remember from the meeting, but is there a date or a time frame for when this would get installed?

Great news. The light poles, after saying they are a 12-week lead time, in fact, was not a 12-week lead time. I just received them last Thursday. Considering I did not know when I was going to receive them, I did not lock in officially with electrical contractor, but it is on our agenda for hopefully this September, assuming everything is going to be signed here today as it just passed.

All right, there's a motion and a second. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstain? Motion carries. We're going to move on to the creation of a stormwater utility. We've got all hands on deck for this one, invite you up. And also, while you're getting set up, I'd tell the board they can stretch their legs, take a little break while we get going. All right, we're just missing Crystal, so we can get started. I'm just kidding. He has heard this already. All right. Now we're going to talk about the creation of a stormwater utility with a presentation from Strand.

And Dan's the stormwater engineer, so I'm here for support. But he is going to walk through the presentation.

Sounds good. Hello everyone, I'm Dan Johnson from Strand. Met some of you before, but yeah. Been working on the stormwater utility study for the last little bit here and wanted to kind of summarize the findings and go from there. So as an agenda item, as the agenda for the day, we're gonna start talking about the stormwater planning overview, kind of what we've done in the past, what's led us to this point, talk to the permit deficiencies compared to the nearby communities, kind of give you kind of a a sense of scale, doing some governing ordinance updates, and then do an overview of the stormwater utility, talk about the village development shifts, nearby stormwater utility comparison, the stormwater utility credit policies that could be enacted, and then also discuss the ERU implementation options. So this kind of figure here on the right hand side is the village that has all of the impervious and pervious area delineated across the village. So yellow is impervious area. Green is pervious. We'll talk a bit more about the nuances of all of that. But yeah, just wanted to give you a kind of a sense of it. So the village is governed by their MS4 permit, their municipal separate storm sewer system permit. This is the kind of storm water permit that the village always has to follow. We'll talk a bit more about all the nuances of that in a minute, but one of the things that it requires are these storm water quality management plans and these updates that periodically have to happen. I gave a presentation on June 10th to the Joint Public Utility Commission. No, Utility Commission and Public Works Committee about this. And then it really summarizes where the village is at now, where they need to get to for permit compliance, and then how to get there. And one of the key items that was kind of the takeaway is that development really helps pave the way. So then you need to fund, you need to have monies to work towards permit compliance. And that's one of the items that could happen to do that funding is the stormwater utility. It's a common method. So that's the study that we did. We'll summarize the findings here. So stormwater permit deficiencies compared to nearby communities. So Yajaro Winds is how all of the Dane County communities that drain to the Yajaro River kind of achieve compliance currently. So they buy into a program, they get credits. You can see the city of Madison buys in at $779,000 a year. Currently the village buys in at about 12,200. With the new update that we just did, they'll be going down to 9,200. So there's definitely a big gap between communities, but there's definitely a decent gradation. So the governing ordinance and then kind of their updates over time, the Dane County ordinance is kind of what is the most stringent in the area. It's more stringent than the state standards typically. And then the village typically, at least on the stormwater side, likes to follow very closely behind with that. The Dane County erosion control and stormwater management ordinance was effective August 22nd, 2002. There was a minor update in August 2006, but since then it's remained largely unchanged. But the kind of the driving factor now is the Rock River TMDL, which was issued in 2011. And this is the most strict requirements. This is what is causing all of those communities to buy into this, the Yahara winds. So this is kind of where everyone's striving to get to now. So one of the ways that certain communities in Dane County have kind of worked to fund this permit compliance is a stormwater utility. Let me just see if I can move this. There we go. how a storm utility started is you do a impervious pervious delineation across the entire community. So here's just a random snippet of kind of some single family residential parcels in the village. Um, you can see the right of way is excluded. So sidewalks, roadway, none of that is included in the parcel and it's not going to be billed to the parcel that's adjacent to it. It is just what is on the parcel itself. SO BY OUR COUNT THERE WAS 1,846 SINGLE FAMILY RESIDENTIAL PARCELS AND THEN WITHIN THAT 7,503,220 SQUARE FEET OF IMPERVIOUS AREA. SO HOW ALL OF THESE STORM WATER UTILITIES ARE SET UP IS AN EQUIVALENT RUNOFF UNIT AND ESSENTIALLY TAKES THE SINGLE FAMILY RESIDENTIAL The total impervious area within those and divides them together and that's called an equivalent runoff unit or an ERU So for the village, that's four thousand sixty five square feet of impervious area per single-family residential parcel on average Most communities stop there and just say okay all residential parcels no matter the size no matter the impervious area are all going to be billed the same and We'll talk a bit more about kind of some of the different billing nuances that could occur and the implementation behind that. But this ERU is the kind of the classic methodology. And once you have this ERU established, you can now go forward onto all the other land uses and have like an equivalent unit that you can apply. So if there's a new development or a development that had, 40,000 SQUARE FEET OF IMPERVIOUS AREA. YOU BUILD THEM TEN TIMES MORE THAN A RESIDENTIAL PARCEL WOULD SEE. IT'S ALL BASED ON HOW MUCH IMPERVIOUS AREA YOU HAVE BECAUSE THAT IMPERVIOUS AREA IS WHAT GENERATES THE STORM WATER RUNOFF. THIS IS A WAY OF SEEING HOW FINDING A MORE EQUITABLE WAY OF MAKING SURE THAT STORMWATER WORK IS FUNDED BY THOSE WHO GENERATE THE MOST RUNOFF SO AS YOU CAN SEE ON THE KIND OF LEFT-HAND SIDE THERE'S THESE BAR GRAPHS HERE AND GENERALLY SPEAKING THE RESIDENTIAL PARCELS HAVE LESS BUY-IN WHILE THE OTHER PARCEL TYPES TYPICALLY HAVE MORE BUY OR NOT BUY-IN BUT LIKE PAYMENT TOWARDS THE UTILITY Um, the, uh, one of the obvious ones is the tax exempt. So there, yes, they're tax exempt, but they still have impervious area that generates runoff. So the stormwater utility is typically one way to make sure that everyone's paying their fair share and that is, has been adopted by certain communities. So the village in general has shifted from a largely residential property base to a more of a mixed base. You can see the numbers here, 78.3% in 2000 down to 58.3% in 2026. And like I said, the focus is on every property paying their fair share. So we did the study, Cameron and us worked hard on kind of figuring out what an appropriate fee would be AND THE VILLAGE PROPOSED FEE WOULD BE $8.90 PER ERU PER MONTH. SO IF YOU WERE TO GO WITH THE APPROACH OF EVERY SINGLE FAMILY RESIDENTIAL GETS BUILT THE SAME, EVERYONE WOULD PAY $8.90 A MONTH. YOU CAN SEE HOW IT STACKS UP ACROSS OTHER COMMUNITIES HERE. One thing to note is that the 890 we have set as a 2027 rate, we're not gonna do this in 2026, we're projecting to 2027. All of the rest of these numbers are for 2026. And also some of these communities haven't recently updated their stormwater utility. So one of the ones that recently did have an update and a big jump was Sun Prairie. So they saw a large jump and it typically, it's been trending higher and higher. So yes, we're projecting kind of in the middle range and you may think, well, you're higher than some of these other communities that are definitely larger, but some of these communities haven't updated their stormwater utility in a long time or in a while and plan to do updates in the future that aren't accounted for here. QUICK SIDE NOTE THAT WE'RE TALKING ABOUT IN A SECOND HERE IS THAT MADISON AND MINONA USE TIERED SYSTEMS. MADISON'S AVERAGE IS $12.71 A MONTH. IT'S A BIT HIGHER, BUT THEN MINONA DOESN'T PUBLISH AN AVERAGE. STORM WATER UTILITY CREDIT POLICIES. THERE'S THE SINGLE FAMILY RESIDENTIAL CREDITS. THESE ARE THE RAIN BARRELS, THE RAIN GARDENS. IF YOU HAVE ONE, YOU CAN HAVE A CREDIT. THE TYPICAL APPROACH IS A ONE-TIME CREDIT. At our previous meeting, we talked about doing an annual credit. It's going to be a bit more administrative work. You need to go out there and make sure that you haven't put the rain barrel on and then got the credit and then chuck it. You want to make sure that they're still using it. It's a bit harder to enforce, so the administrative side is a bit higher. But all the other land uses typically follow something like the table here, where you can get up to 50% credit. um based on different bmps that you have because those bmps help reduce the impacts of the impervious area that you have on site so there might be some infiltration or there might be some wet ponds that prevent pollutions from going downstream or runoff from going downstream so that can help and that can give you a credit and typically those are easier to see from an aerial so they're typically annually credit annual credits And then kind of the last step going forward, and this is where we can kind of get into it all, is ERU implementation options. So the typical approach, the standard approach, is that all single-family residential parcels are billed the same amount. tiered approaches have been used before in a number of communities and this kind of based on either parcel size or more recently what you could do is also build it instead of on parcel size on impervious area distribution. So you could say the first third or the lowest third has one, the middle third of impervious area has another rate and the upper third has another rate. So that's another option that could be entertained. And then, One other option is a kind of a site-specific approach. So every single residential parcel is billed exactly how much impervious area they have. And one nuance I wanted to point out on that is that when we did our impervious-pervious delineation, we train a software to look at imaging data and it gets really close to accurate, but it is not 100% accurate. Shadows. and different things can skew it. So typically, the site-specific approach would require more administrative costs upfront to go in and make sure every little bit of sidewalk, every paver is accounted for correctly. Because otherwise, you could have someone come in, look at their parcel, and say, well, actually, you overcounted impervious area, or you undercounted my next door neighbor's impervious area. So there are typically need to be more administrative costs there. And then that's all for residential. All the other land uses are just build how much impervious area they have. There's no tiered system. There's no averaging. It is just how much they have. And those can be often pulled from, especially like newer developments, those can just be pulled from the plan sets that are submitted. So you can get exact measurements. You don't have to rely on aerials that are maybe not as in date as possible. So you can get exact numbers there. But yeah, next steps are kind of finalizing the residential ERU billing method.

finalizing credit policies compiling a stormwater utility implementation document and then adopting ordinance and beginning administration and potentially 2027. so yeah let me know if you have questions just to make just to make sure because this was a comment that was in um public session when you referenced sidewalks like in the last change that would have been private sidewalks because sidewalks in general aren't in that that calculation. So I just want to make sure we're abundantly clear. Public right-of-way, including sidewalks and streets, are not included in that calculation. For an approach, we did get extensive feedback, I think from the in-person session and Public Works, that we feel as staff that we have the resources to be able to move forward. board would like with a tiered approach. What I don't appreciate about the standard approach is there's really no disincentivized to reduce pavement. So obviously if pavement's causing additional runoff concerns. We wouldn't want to say a house that has a massive patio and deck is gonna be treated the same way as a property that has no impervious area. So we felt from a sustainability approach that the tiered approach makes some sense. And when I looked at the data for the actual calculated ERUs, we were ranging right about the .7 on the low end all the way up to about 1.86. So while that doesn't make a material difference, I think that warrants a two or three tiered approach as far as charges. Back to how the ERU dollar amount was calculated, it's important to note we kind of took the, management plan that was completed, and then we took what our ongoing obligations will be for the utility to come up with operating the utility with minimizing debt, so basically saving up for projects. So we do that on an annual basis. So dredging is not considered a capital expenditure, but it's a very large expense. So to dredge a pond's roughly about a million dollars. And so this budget would allow every four years, there would be $250,000 annually saved up until you have a million, we'd go and dredge a pond. Every year we'd have about $50,000 to do culverts, miscellaneous, minor repairs to address residents in real time. In the ERU calculation, about $65,000 of the cost that we'll generate would go towards eventual replacement of the street sweeper, which needs to be replaced about every five to seven years. About $200,000 of the annual cost goes to replacing the roughly $11.4 million of stormwater infrastructure that the village currently has in the ground. And that figure does not include contributed infrastructure because we're following the same rate principles as the water and sewer utility does, where if we didn't pay for the infrastructure, we're not gonna build it into our depreciation recovery. And then it moves roughly $145,000 of general operating costs out of the general fund into the stormwater utility. And that's primarily the operations that are used to support street sweeping. What I will note is right now the current operating budget, again, this would be considered by a future discussion, is roughly $778,000. You figure a little bit of interest income on the cash we have in our accounts and you get to a balanced budget. based off of our taking our total ERUs and kind of accounting for credits, we kind of factor in about 7,160 of recoverable credits. So that means for every $50,000, we either increase or decrease the budget that impacts the monthly rate by 58%. And there's some decimals here. Some other indirect impact to this is while we'll see a reduction in these expenses in the general fund for street operations, we'll also see a distribution of water and sewer costs. So we would be dividing water and sewer mail cost and credit card processing costs and other direct costs related to billing separated from the water and sewer utility. Again, I always look at this as an all-in bill to residents, so regardless if it's coming from the taxpayer or user rate, but just wanna make sure there are corresponding decreases. What becomes very challenging when we're describing kind of what are our current costs and what will be here in the future is we've never really differentiated like stormwater infrastructure directly into those annual debt service numbers. And so obviously we pay in our debt service fund in this last budget, it was like $1.5 million. I went back, about five years to kind of get an average. And on average between what we would be reallocating from the general fund and debt service payments, it's roughly about $400,000 a year. And then again, what we're adding to this now because we're not doing it now is saving up for these capital expenditures. So kind of as we're discussing this tonight, I want to make sure it's very clear that if you want to move forward but you want to see a $5 or $6.50 cost, those are things that are all achievable. However, that's going to mean sacrifices, and I can give recommendations on where I think we could reduce the rate on, but knowing that that could mean in the future we may need to borrow for this piece of equipment or need to borrow for part of this dredging. With that being said, I will give it back to this group and let you ask them directly questions about the study and then I will try to answer my best any questions from a financial perspective.

Can you just clarify one thing for me for the implementation option? You said that if you had a parcel that was mostly impervious versus one that isn't they should they should be treated different differently in a tiered approach but the tiered approach on here says based on parcel size so do we want to do it on parcel size or would it be right so the typical approach that's been done in the past has been based on parcel size but because

The aerial imaging has gotten so much better recently. The impervious area delineation has become more accurate. So you can now start to, instead of doing it by parcel size, you could do it by impervious area instead. The presentation is based on what is typical. But there is an alternate method where you could base it on impervious area. And that's absolutely more equitable. It's just partial size is like, Impervious area, like I said, isn't perfect. It's very good, but it's not perfect. Parcel size is the parcel size.

So looking at these three, standard approach, tiered approach, site-specific approach, we're more leaning towards a site-specific approach?

Tiered with the using not parcel size hybrid approach. I was very against the tiered method when we were talking about parcel size, because to me that didn't, it was like, okay, we're doing kind of similar approach from a property tax perspective, bigger parcels, typically more value. And so by looking at the actual impervious surface and doing a tiered approach, what I would envision a small, medium and large. I think it's more equitable. It's like a hybrid kind of.

Exactly.

So you basically have a machine learning algorithm software that you've trained in?

Right.

What's your error rate on that?

I have my GIS person who knows all of that. Essentially what he does is it's an ArcGIS Pro. You can bring in the aerial data. It takes fourth band, which is... infrared, and then you can train the software to look for what looks like vegetation and what doesn't look like it for vegetation. And it gets, it's very good, but once, and then he can come back in and retrain it over and over again to get better and better. But the reason why I have this one up is you can see zoomed in here in these shadows, there's definitely some loss of clarity. So you can see there's maybe some impervious area back here. Maybe it's a gravel spot that wasn't picked up in the aerial.

And do you find that to make a meaningful change in the ERU calculation?

So typically under the standard approach, definitely not. Everything gets averaged together. It doesn't matter. Under a very site-specific approach, it would matter. And you would need to do some further tailoring. Based on this hybrid tiered approach, it probably wouldn't matter as much. And maybe you would go in to the .05 on either end of the range and just do a little bit more cleanup around that kind of dividing line just to make sure everyone's kind of in their allocated spot. But you can see, 95% of the impervious area on here is the roofs, the driveways, the sidewalks. Those are all picked up perfectly. It's the random little spots here or there that someone might get charged a little more or a little less, and that's where you've got to be worried about when you get into these dividing the lines.

I think there was a conversation at Public Works, too, about a two-tiered system and then potentially moving, if smaller homes did become more of a commonality in Cottage Grove, that you could then... re-evaluate and move into a three tiered system.

And I think that was also potentially based on the parcel size discussion, not necessarily impervious area discussion. It would probably, well, three is more typical.

Based off of what I saw, it's the most statistically meaningful to do three tiers because there's enough difference in the amount of parcels that are 0.7 and the parcels that are closer to that 1.6.

Yeah, just think of it as the average over the entire community was 4,000 square feet of parcel. Probably your first tier is 3,000, your middle tier is 4,000, and your large tier is 5,000. If you're close to that, you fall into those buckets. In a simplistic form, right? The program, if it's off by a few square feet here or there, you're not going to go from one bucket to the other bucket. It's harder to argue that fact. If that makes that simple sense.

A lot of the parking is machine learning.

Heidi. I have kind of one other question on this, and then I have a couple other comments. So how does it work for, like, real large parcels that don't really have impervious surface, like undeveloped properties that are within the village?

Those typically aren't billed under this.

They're just, like, agricultural land is typically ignored.

I mean, there's, like, some, like, let's say they have a farmstead, right? And that would be... you'd be billed for that, but the large undeveloped area or agricultural area would be left alone. It wouldn't factor in.

So then as it's developed, then it would start to be into the calculations.

Exactly. Okay. Yep. Okay. So this is all based on kind of a, um, like the village is growing quite fast. So the amount that you would bill into the future, it can be reevaluated. And Cameron has kind of talked a lot about that and that relooking at things upon development is definitely valuable just to make sure everyone is still kind of where they need to be.

and that will help mitigate future rate increases. So development goes in that doesn't materially affect our operating cost. We would hope that we could hold it, like you wouldn't necessarily see like a pure inflation every year. There's also gonna be inherent unpredictability in year one. So we might be like, oh man, we actually are, collecting thirty thousand dollars more than we should um and so we would want to make sure the subsequent weights are only what we need it to be so my approach and again i know some communities rather would just not like to see up and down is if we ended up calculating an amount that was too large to just adjust it and reduce the rates next year because so we have a story we can paint this is the cost we need and this is how we're recovering

Okay. Then I just kind of wanted to take a step back at a higher level because I think we're getting into a lot of the details, but some people haven't really been paying attention until just recently. And so I also sit on the Capital Area Regional Planning Commission. We talk a lot about the Dink County Water Quality Plan. We see the Urban Service Area Amendments. So we talk a lot about stormwater ponds. There's always a lot of questions about what's the maintenance agreement for stormwater ponds and when they're dedicated to the village or municipality, then they're responsible for maintaining these ponds you want to make sure that they're You know removal of total suspended solids that their infiltration rate is performing as designed and so these are really important factors in whether our stormwater ponds can handle large stormwater events as they were designed to do and So if we're not maintaining those up to the standard, you know, we could find ourselves having you know flooding events that we weren't expecting because the ponds aren't performing as needed. So rather than putting these projects just on the levy or geo debt paid by the levy to distribute these costs and burdens to maintain these our stormwater infrastructure across all of the properties that are eligible i think that's why i support and why we're you know why and you know we need to figure out these details of developing the stormwater utility because i think it's the most fair way to make sure that we're um you know, maintaining water quality. We're, you know, trying to do the best in flood mitigation. You know, it's hard to predict, you know, you can have 500-year flood events, which, you know, some of these ponds weren't designed for, but, you know, we need them to, you know, operate at their optimal level. So I just wanted to take a minute to, like, step back for a second because... I think that that could get lost in now we're talking about all the details of it. And this has been such a long process to study this that maybe people weren't following back then. So I just want to take a minute to do that. And I have a property where I added more impervious surface in my yard, and it's fairly significant. I have a ranch home, takes up a lot more of a property than someone who's much more efficient and builds a two-story home that takes up a lot less of the lot. So I've been leaning toward actually calculating each property, even though I know that's a lot more work. But I guess this hybrid is something that if it's much more If it's better for the system. But I think having more impervious surface on my life, I think I should probably pay more because I'm contributing more.

Yeah, and I think kind of what Deanne was alluding to, if we go down like I originally wanted to and then I was talked down from that cliff, you're going to have people that are fighting 10 square feet of area because they got out there with a measurement. And so my intent was, okay, what's a happy in between from an administrative overhead that we're not generating the need? to hire a part-time person to go do this all summer to make you know invalidate what can we do with our existing in-house resources so it's kind of a happy in between but yes i wanted to get to that level um what is one of the thoughts that i would like to do is when we redo the utility master planning which we talked about kind of in general every 10 years ish was having them run their model and see how close we still are is our distribution right making sure we keep that data as accurate as possible, because I kind of review that as a revaluation. Like if somebody submits a permit to our building inspector, they can tell me what impervious areas created, but if somebody goes and just does it, we're not gonna have enforcement staff walking around and making sure it's captured. And so that's where having the model do it again and seeing how far off are we from our data is important.

Other things that I want to let other trustees ask questions too, but the credit policy, sort of the, is it, you want feedback on that tonight too? Annual versus reoccurring? Is that kind of the, or is that utility commission?

I would like, because we have a sustainability portion of Public Works, even if it's the Utility Commission that's assigned these roles and responsibility, I think the Public Works weighing in on that. I do think there's, so we talked about ways of allowing that credit year in and year out by just doing a sample. We're not ever gonna get every home in one year, but sampling, okay, if there's 500 credits claimed, maybe we go out and do tests and make sure 30 are actually there. If you don't, unfortunately, if you don't want us to come and check if it's out, we would disallow the credit. Kyla talked about the businesses a little bit and the stormwater management agreements that are in place. So we would need them to basically prove that they're maintaining their ponds that they own to the standard that they're supposed to. And again, this is me not talking as an engineer.

Yep, so every property, any new business or commercial residence has a maintenance agreement. It's one of the things that we require to be recorded with Dane County. So as a part of that, we would create a form where all of the businesses that have their own rain garden or bioretention basin wet pond would have to confirm by a professional engineer that their maintenance is being required annually and then they would have to return that form to the village and then we'd be like good job

So Strand is undergoing an expansion where we had to put in new BMPs. We have a maintenance agreement with the city of Madison. And every year, we have to go out and inspect them, submit our inspection to the city. And then they will review that form and tell us. I mean, we would know ahead of time. But they would tell them that you need to perform maintenance. And if you're claiming a credit,

you don't perform that maintenance then that credit can go away and that's maybe extreme but that's kind of the point and i tried to emphasize this at the utility and joint public works we need as much lead time of january one implementation of possible for development of the credit policy for reviewing parcels that are on the fringe for making sure that we get this right we're not we're going to get resident complaints as part of any process. And so we just want to make sure that we have all the answers and that we are doing everything that's in our power leading up to implementation.

Yeah, thanks for mentioning sustainability. It'd be great if they could also maybe incorporate this into that resolution that's outdated from 2020.

You betcha.

JP.

Along the same notes, just a note to pass around, pass along. When Toby's Auto came up, one kind of credit that's kind of unusual was the previous pavement in there and then the whole maintenance element of that. So just encourage them to have that conversation because that is something that could be coming down the pipeline pending final approval here.

Anyone else? Chris.

You sound very happy.

I'm sorry.

Oh no, it's totally escaped me. Come back to me, sorry.

All right, any other discussion on this, Casey?

Yeah, so I guess this is sort of for Cameron. So, I mean, you've answered this at like the public hearing and stuff, but just to clarify, so this is, you know, we're not changing approaches, this is largely a budgetary and accounting move, correct?

Correct. I use the term funding mechanism. So really, we know what all of these costs will be to maintain and take care of our storm. This is just a solution on how to fund it to the level to make sure we continue to work towards overall compliance.

Right. And so I heard both of the public sessions some resonant feedback here and elsewhere. People talking about how... Hey, Chris, it escaped me too, the thing I was gonna say.

My God, it's contagious.

Yes, dang it, that went completely gone.

Go ahead, Chris.

I've been up for 19 hours. I don't know what your excuse is, but that's my excuse. So I just wanted to clarify the role of the Village Board versus what the Utility Commission is going to do. So tonight we're looking at approving it. Are we just approving the creation of it, or are we approving the creation of it and the rate?

So you are approving direction for the steps to create it as of January 1. Those steps include the ordinances have to be updated to formally lay out oversight of the stormwater utility to the utility commission in that case. So remember, the village board is responsible for ordinance. You could decide that you want to hand over to the Utility Commission what you would like to see as a credit policy, or you can direct, maybe that's what you wanna see. You could direct the Utility Commission that you don't wanna see an ERU rate above 890, or maybe $7, or you can set that initial, well, if it's technically created by the Utility Commission, you would have to give strong recommendation, again, they're answerable to you. So let's say they set a rate of 10 bucks, well, that would be obviously not in what the direction that you're providing. Again, when we talked about overall how we structured this, because the utility commission budgets and operates very similar to how the proposed funding mechanism is, they're used to seeing like, when we do a road, that's treated as a capital expenditure. So that ends up hitting the income statement, which is budgeted for. For water and sewer, that's actually like a business type activity. And so we only budget for income statement items formally. We put in the memo projects that we're doing. So the utility commission is used to kind of not seeing those big million dollar items on the income statement, but they are aware that they're happening and they're aware of depreciation recapture, and less reliance on debt funding. And so that's why it was recommended ultimately. It could stay with Public Works. I don't think that from a operations perspective gives us a lot of efficiencies. I would recommend that it goes to utilities. But ultimately, up to the board. But from a village board perspective, it's just deciding, do you want to move forward or not? what if you want to move forward tiered standard site specific and then any post implementation or post approval steps that you would like staff to take between now and then including some communication items we could likely bring back september 8th if you want to move forward a formal communication plan regarding this that the the ward could consider and we could do that, otherwise it would just kind of be laid out with what was the expectations tonight.

Okay, so we could make a motion that would say, motion to approve the utility, or I'm sorry.

Do we have any other feedback or do we wanna move on to the consider portion?

I did remember my thing and I'll make it quick.

Okay.

So residents would bring up things like, well, hey, how are we currently, what are we currently paying for stormwater? And it was sort of a difficult question to answer because of how we currently fund it. This sort of thing is going to make it much more clear in the future that, like, hey, we have stormwater specific funds and we're not pulling a little bit from general a little bit from debt. Right? This clarifies those sort of matters more.

Yeah. And think about it as we're only going to go into the as much detail as as we need to. So if we're loving for just public works, I'm going to call it public works. Well, public works is actually trails. Right. Streets, sidewalks, curbs, storm water. So the data's there. It just takes, and I understand as residents that's very frustrated not being able to get that this is the exact dollar amount. Right. And what we would do is we'd clarify and refine those communication points between now and the end of the year and make sure it was very clear.

Right, but I'm saying if we move forward with creating it, this makes that clarity easier.

Yep, it does.

And similarly, and I imagine, and I'm hoping you confirm this, because this allows for this kind of savings approach as opposed to this just pulling what we need or what we ask for kind of thing, I imagine that this reflects better on things like our financial ratings, debt ratings and stuff because it's, again, more of the forward planning, saving kind of thing that like Ehlers and other auditors look favorably on. Yes? Yes.

So what I can answer is when we provide our 10-year capitalization plan, prioritization plan to our rating companies, obviously the more projects that are included in there, if it's above a... again, and this is depending on who the rating analyst is, they may look at a certain project deck as more unfavorable. They are also gonna go and pop in our financial statements and look at what our depreciation is on our assets, and that is separated on there. So if we don't do anything, like let's just say it never gets prioritized, we're still gonna get hit with it, because our financial statements will show, okay, well this is a deferred maintenance item, this is coming. And so that's where they would, again, depending on the rating analysts, they would likely reduce our kind of deferred maintenance liability in this aspect and kind of correspondingly look like, okay, they're not as reliant on a debt instrument for future improvements.

Okay. No, that's, yeah, that's the sort of thing that I was expecting from these and I think that's, it's good to highlight that this is, this does a lot of little behind the scenes accounting things that are good on top of just broadly saving the average resident money, so.

Is there any other discussion on the creation of the stormwater utility?

Because it wasn't put publicly here, I just wanna make sure, so I have in my memo, it talks about TIDs. So as this board's aware, obviously when we create a TID, all the increments that's created stays in the district, does improvements. This funding mechanism makes any business paying for, paying stormwater right away. You don't have to wait for it to hit the tax roll, and that was obviously not the intent when this was brought forward, but there's obviously a large property coming online this upcoming year that would roughly contribute around $60,000 towards this, and that's the meaningfulness of the dollars, and so before that infrastructure that's serving that area needs to be recovered by taking out debt, trying to make sure we're recovering those costs,

Let's move on to the consider portion of this. Chris, if you want to.

Yeah, I want to see if I can get this right. So I'll make a motion to approve the creation of a stormwater utility with a tiered hybrid method. and recommend to the Utility Commission of a rate of $8.90 per month per ERU.

Could I recommend not to exceed $8?

Not to exceed $8.90. And to come back next month with a communications plan?

Can I just suggest that the communication plan include a handout for businesses?

Sure.

Specifically.

And I would second that motion.

Motion by Stilwell, second by Murphy. Does there need to be an inclusion of any type of feedback for the credit policy at this point? And the adoption of an ordinance by January 1st?

i'm sorry just going through my mind so um i've already uh solicited feedback from public works uh parks on some updates since we're in the ordinances um i will formally now with this direction schedule a meeting with rick to start if again if this passes to start hammering through an ordinance um it won't be sept i know it won't be september 8th we can bring the communicate we can bring a general communication plan for the board to consider on September 8th and then depending on how long it takes for a public hearing and everything with the ordinance, we'll let the meetings kind of flow naturally. One of the things I thought about more, ideally in a perfect world, we'd be adopting a stormwater budget on September 16th. That will likely be subsequent actual ordinance being approved. So that would, again, with this direction, we would have kind of a trailing budget that would be a little bit later than our normal scheduled Cadence. So there'll be, and we accompanied in this, and Dan and Josh are gonna do a great job of keeping under budget on their feasibility plan. But we did a plan, roughly $15,000-ish of implementation-related things, mostly ordinance, because codification of ordinance is very expensive, and we're touching three kind of bigger sections in our ordinances.

Is the motion, ALL INCLUSIVE OF THE INFORMATION YOU NEED TONIGHT?

YES.

DEBATE ON THE MOTION FROM OTHERS? CHRIS, SOA.

YEAH, I JUST WANT TO THANK YOU GUYS FOR PUTTING ALL THE WORK IN FOR THIS. I REALLY APPRECIATE IT. YEAH, THANK YOU.

Just want to note that I was one of the two at Public Works that voted no. And my two biggest concerns are the impact on businesses and then also just as a governance standpoint, once we approve a new user fee, it can be difficult to eliminate that in the future. So I'll be voting no for those reasons.

Any other discussion? All those in favor?

Aye.

Opposed? No. Abstain? Motion carries. Utility Commission agenda reports. Thanks, guys.

So Utility Commission met just before the joint meeting at 4.30 on August 12th. Approved the minutes, approved the vouchers. We approved the Violet Sanitary Sewer Design Engineering Project. We had a presentation about the water and sewer long-range cash flow and rate analysis plan and approved that. And we got the directors and engineering report. And we adjourned right into the joint committee.

All right. Any questions for Chris?

I know it's been a long meeting. As part of the long-range cash flow analysis, we did approve pulling a conventional rate case. So that is on the radar. More information to come.

All right. Move on to plan commission. We had a plan commission meeting on Wednesday, August 12th. We had no public appearances. We approved our minutes. We continued discussion of a potential ordinance amendment related to the use of bird safety glazing in the future. development in the village. Ultimately, we didn't choose to do action on this, so Aaron did a really nice job of providing kind of a case study using first choice dental estimates on the storefront. You know, window glazing is anywhere between 50 and 150 square feet, which is about a 5% increase in the total cost of that building. I think the conversation the plan commission had about code enforcement, not enforcing through the ordinance, looking to really be pro-development and in favor of really just encouraging others through information rather than an ordinance change. And so really gave a lot of good credit to Ellie Meng who brought this forward and had us do a lot of this research and it was really nice to at least have a little bit of action where we can do some education including out to residents too and like what they can do to prevent bird strikes into buildings. We then talked about discussing potential elimination of minimum parking requirements. So this was a STOA request. We talked about this at Village Board last time. We had just a discussion at Planning Commission with the idea that we would then have a public hearing and an actual consideration at a future Planning Commission meeting. Meeting we There's a lot of pros and cons and good discussion that we had so on the con Side of things there was you know discussion around safety being vehicle heavy in Cottage Grove Losing we lose control over have it if we got rid of parking minimums We wouldn't have control over. You know what those developments parking WOULD ACTUALLY BE IMPLEMENTED. WE AREN'T A CITY. WE TALKED ABOUT ALTERNATE SIDE PARKING, OBVIOUSLY BEING IN WISCONSIN, WORRIED THAT THIS COULD BE A FREE-FOR-ALL. WE THINK THAT SEVERAL COMMISSION MEMBERS, I WON'T SAY WE, THINK THAT THIS WORKS WELL. You tend to go to places a lot easier, obviously, if you can park right next to the place. There is an opportunity for a variance application, and then there was a discussion, too, about electric charging and whether that is a new requirement. And obviously, ADA was also discussed. Pros on the pro side, really increasing walkability. We do have that bike ped plan. Flexibility for development. It really puts, you know, gives the developer the right to do what they want to do with their business. Talking about heat sinks, environmental wildlife impacts, salt usage, increasing the amount of green space was a pro. Increasing affordability is something we talked about and increasing kind of assessed rate too on the parcel. There's some really good literature, including some nice text books that you can rent from Trustee Stoa and some literature that was in the agenda as well. Future agenda items, some of the comp plan, open house September 3rd. So moving forward with that public participation plan, zero lot line applications and a church might be upcoming on an agenda. Otherwise, we are meeting September 9th. All right. I wanted to make sure I was thorough on that request from the Planning Commission. Um, reports from village officers, village attorney.

Uh, nothing for tonight. Aaron and I are working on the federal housing bill, so, um, we did not bring that forward tonight.

Uh, village administrator, Matt.

Thanks. I was going to joke, Rick, that you're drafting it. Um, The police station is really starting to come to shape. The exterior framing and steel construction are nearing completion, should be complete in the coming weeks. And then roofing will start soon. So that's moving along well. And then I would like to... praise our staff that are leading the effort for the community night out on Wednesday. There's a lot of staff involved, but there's definitely several that are kind of carrying the weight and leading the effort, and that's Lieutenant Waig, Sergeant Jess, and Deputy Parks and Rec Director Trissa Taylor. So thanks to them, and also it's a joint effort with the Chamber, so thanks to Britt as well. And then I'd be remiss to not also thank our sponsors. So there's no tax dollars going into this. It's all sponsored base. And six of our consultants, including several that were here tonight, contribute. So I don't know if they wanna be mentioned or not, but there's one still here and one presented just a moment ago. There's a clue on there. And then as well as a notable new business, Amazon contributed several thousand dollars as well. So happy to take any questions on anything else.

Questions for Matt are on the tracker. All right. Cameron, update us on the budget process and all your budget amendments.

All right. So the next big budget item is tomorrow. Budget review committee will meet for the first time. I guess I just want to let the board know there's a little bit more variability this year compared to most years. Most years, we know what our final assessed value is going to be. Why that's helpful is from a tax impact perspective, that allows me to kind of put an overall impact right in front of the group right away. I'm working on communicating with the county, with the district, and the tech college on trying to get a more precise estimate updated for what our residents can expect. With the revaluation, I'm seeing a little bit more I'm seeing a lot less, 41%, which is about the average for residential, and a lot of you know, 27, 52 variability. So I'm just, I'm putting some thoughts together on kind of a communication, especially for those who are in outliers on their changes from their revaluation, because again, if they're looking at what they anticipate the tax saving to be, I want to make sure that the messages that we're putting out there is easily digestible. And then obviously the village board will look at the financial management plan for the first time in September, With that, there'll be a slide that I'm working on refining due to where the fire study is. There's some recommendations that I don't have, again, future governance structure and things, so I will kind of put tentative high-level cost and things that we can expect, but it definitely changes even in draft form where we're at some things that we need to consider over the next five years and kind of prompting those conversations that we can have with our partners. And then the first budget will be actually adopted on September 16th, which will be the water and sewer budget with Well, that will be recommended difference between adopted and that being said, there will be some reductions that I'm I'll be working on calculating and will describe in the memos with Kyla on the 16th. If you'd like me to jump right into the.

If anyone has once to know where we are in the budget process, there's a nice website to that they can go to.

Yep. All right, budget amendment. So I was asked about kind of upcoming budget amendments and what I kind of anticipated. What prompts a budget amendment, especially for the TIDs, are we going through that annual process of updating for joint review board, or sorry, Yeah, Joint Review Board, with our overlying taxing jurisdictions, along with, I'm happy to announce that we will be issuing our TID-5 audit on September 3rd. It's going to be finalized, which has been a huge effort behind the scenes. Going back 20 plus years of information, is definitely time consuming. I appreciate, obviously, Baker Tilly and all their hard work. That being said, I'm gonna tackle five to five, eight, nine, 10 on the amendment. These are all reflection of actuals. The difficult part of doing, we passed the budget in November, but I don't know what the final tax rate is until December. And so what ends up happening, especially when we're calculating on some of our PAYGO incentives, there's slight differences between what the actual amount is for an incentive payment and what the final is. I will note TID 8 is actually not an increase, it's actually a decrease amount due to contractual obligation. TID 9 is, we already are committed to purchasing that property. So that's on here. The park development fund on here is, again, prior board action, but it's just reducing budget authority of 25,000 for the playground removal that will happen in 27, and adding the juniper fields of the 30,000. And then the last one's just an accounting function. The way that it was presented in the budget was a $30,000 expenditure. This is an 80-20 grant, so technically the proper way to account this is $150,000 of expense and $120,000 of revenue. TID 6, again, I wanted to present this building memo on kind of the strategy through kind of the final steps here till the eventual dissolution of the TID. So just asking to take the formal forgiveness per the memos that are in the agenda here today. After we... do this today, if we move forward, there'll be one more forgiveness, which is gonna be roughly about $77,800 to kind of close out some costs that were TID eligible, just didn't have TID resources at the time when those decisions were made.

All right, questions for Cameron? This is also a consider.

And I promise I don't put budget amendments intentionally at the end of long meetings.

Motion to approve the 2026 budget amendments as presented.

Seconded, although do you need to add dash 004? Just making sure Lisa's got it. OK, seconded.

Motion by JP, second by Erlandson. Any other? Discussion. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstain? Motion carries. All right. Number 10, communication and miscellaneous business. Approval of vouchers with the bills list. And a pay application to take a look at. Questions, comments? Snide remarks. I'll make a motion to approve the bills list as presented.

Second.

All right. CKN, Erlandson, any other discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Staying? Motion carries. Correspondence? No. All right. Upcoming community events. Budget review committee meeting tomorrow. Oh, that's not a community event. Community Night Out on Wednesday.

That is correct. Community Night Out Wednesday. See everybody at Bakken Park.

And then Rockin' at Bakken 90s on August 27th. 5.30 is the food and 6 o'clock is the music. And if you didn't think I could combine Taylor Swift with the 90s, I did. On my shirts.

I regret to inform you I can't make it. My son has a daycare thing.

Listen to the 90s in the car. I will. Other community events. I mean, those are the only two.

Open books coming up. We got, so open books the 20th, 25th, and 27th. And then we have Village Voices, Reval Talk next week too.

Next week is going to rock. Future agenda items. We're gonna have discussion on, so first of all, our meeting is gonna be on Tuesday, September 8th, so check your calendars. Polling location change will be on that agenda. have small budget amendment for PA study at some point come back. So we will continue with our service providers. The Colonial Club did come in March, and they presented, I think, twice. And I don't know if the board feels like we could give them an out this year, just because they

Maybe a broad discussion is like frequency. So like if we don't have primary providers, it might not necessarily be necessary to have every provider come every year.

It's just we redid the MLU and then she did come and present in March. And so if you have questions, obviously we can reach out to Colonial Club. But I think that if we could maybe give her a pass on coming to present to the village board. I see nodding heads, so thank you. Yeah, I'm sure we'll have a lot of other stuff to talk about on September 8th too. Oh yeah, FMP. It's gonna be awesome. Okay. How about number 11?

Motion to adjourn.

Second. All right, non-debatable. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Really loud. Thank you.