Planning & Zoning Board - Regular Meeting

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. Teresa, please take the roll. Here.

Hill. Here.

Bowen. Here.

Procter. Here. Mattson. Here. Schilling. Here. And Carlson is absent.

Additions or approval of the agenda? Does anybody... I would like to make a motion on that. Motion to approve the agenda. Second. Any discussion? Hearing none, we'll vote. Schilling?

Yes.

Prochek? Yes. Keel? Yes. Bowen? Yes. Matson?

Yes.

How about the minutes from the 9-1-26?

Motion to approve meeting minutes from 9-1-26. Second.

Any discussion? Hearing none, we'll vote. Matson.

Yes.

Bowen. Yes. Keel. Yes. Horacek. Yes. Schilling. Yes. Bill's in your packet. Make sure this comes back.

Motion to approve the bill submitted for payment. Second.

Any discussion? Hearing none, we'll vote. Schilling.

Yes.

Horacek. Yes. Keel. Yes. Bowen. Yes. Matson.

Yes.

All right, public comment, anything that anybody's here that's not on the agenda? Nope. We'll move to visitors. Burke, we'll start with you. First off, we have Burke, and I cannot pronounce that last name.

Hey, everyone. My name is Bert Ehrmantraut. Ehrmantraut. Ehrmantraut. Yes, yes. That's like 100% German.

Bert from Beersford. I'm going to say that. Is that all right? I know he's from Beersford.

Yeah. Yeah, my name is Bert Ehrmantraut. I work for the Sioux Metro token lines, at least as of two weeks ago. Brand new in the role. And going to be helping out with economic development here in Hartford, with the city, with the Development Foundation. I look forward to working with all of you. Mayor Jones asked me to keep it to, you know, 30 to 60 minutes tonight in my room. Seconds. Seconds. But I just wanted to introduce myself. We'd love to sit down with all of you and just kind of hear about your priorities and things. And I'll be here from time to time to give updates and keep it all in the loop. But I'm looking forward to working with everyone here and seeing Hartford grow and thrive. So that's what I'm going to do.

You bet. And everyone's numbers on the website if you need to get a hold of any of us. And I would encourage you, if you can, set up a meeting without all of us individually, if you'd like, or a couple at a time?

Have you been to a HADF meeting yet? Yes, I was at one the other week. Okay, so when did you officially, just out of curiosity, when did you officially start there? Was that last week, kind of like?

Yeah, so I started two and a half weeks ago at SMEA, and then my first meeting was last week. Okay. What did you do before working for SMGA? I was working for a company called Birchlight. So we were doing housing studies, which they did. Did ours. Yeah, through a past, but yeah, so we did housing studies, shopper studies, strategic planning studies. Wonderful. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, but I will, I will judge you all by email and we'll have to get together.

Yeah, Mark's got a, he has a really varied background, which I think will help us as we move this thing forward. Glad to have you here and have you on board. Awesome.

Thanks, everyone.

Thank you.

All right.

Next up, we're going to turn it over to Captain Ziska. Is that German? Ziska.

Oh, it's Czech.

Oh, it's Czech. Captain is with the Minnehaha County Sheriff's Department and we wanted to put this on the agenda tonight to discuss flock cameras since we have a couple here in Hartford. And we wanted you to come out and kind of give us the spin and let us know what's going on.

Yeah, so we've been doing, well, first of all, thanks for having me, but we have been doing a lot of talk That's what I call it, over the last three or four weeks. We actually started using this technology in June of 2025, during the time we took it from the commission in a public meeting and advised them what we were going to do. Our initial buy-in did not cost the taxpayers of this county money. We got our money from a federal GA firm's grant, which we applied for a two-year, and we signed up for a two-year period at that time. After we gave that presentation, three of the local Sioux Falls police outlets carried our story about CLOC, what we were doing, and about the same time, the Sioux Falls Police Department started utilizing CLOC as well, and they did multiple stories on it. Until about three months ago, we never heard anything negative about it. We've been using the technology since then, but we do also acknowledge that it's been a big deal to public, public trust and things like that. So, I don't know if you saw the I thought the sheriff and the chief of police and the state's attorney did a great job of explaining the value of FLOC, the Fourth Amendment issues, whether or not there is any. They did a good job of explaining what it does. But I can do that again here. Basically, what I handed out to you is something that we created. We haven't put this online, but this is specific to our agency. The PD has one, too. And the Sioux Falls Police Department, who has many more cameras, we align our policies almost identical to them. The one primary difference is they retain records of license plate captures for 30 days. And we retained ours for 14 days. So we cut it in half. We thought that was a more appropriate timeline for us for various reasons. And so we didn't follow down that rule. To be more transparent, I don't know if somebody's controlling this, but on our public-facing website in the County Sheriff's Office, we have something called the Transparency Portal. to our page and shows you all the facts about our license plate readers, what we're doing, how many searches we're performing, and how many alerts we're getting. It's important to point out there's two different things that Black Camera does. One, it runs license plates that it's taking the picture of through the National Criminal Database, and it can come back with an alert only if there's an alert attached to it. The alerts that we search for, we actually limit to stolen vehicles, protection, NCIC entered protection order violations and warrants. So that's all we're looking for. And then amber alerts. So when a deputy will drive around, they'll have it open on their desktop, not continuously looking at it, but they'll get like a damer response that they set and they'll know to look. They can see what camera this vehicle has crossed and it correlates to their location. So we can start looking for this. That's the alert side. The much more valuable part of what we are using these cameras for is for investigational purposes. So somebody breaks into the storage unit down the way here and then they leave, they're likely to pass through one of our flock cameras. So when we get the report in the morning, we're able to go and solve that. These cameras have allowed us every one of our cases that's a criminal case gets reviewed by our detective bureau and work outside of the cities that will come in and do their investigations but we use what's called solvability factors that most places in the united states use to determine whether or not we're able to solve a crime so we look at the number of leads that we have and we weigh that against the any evidence that we have or suspects that we have and sometimes there's just cameras are grainy, we run out of solvability factors, so we close the case without the case being solved. Sioux Falls Police Department and Minneapolis County Sheriff's Office, we have above average rate of closing, and it'd be on the Minneapolis County Sheriff's Office page. Is there like a tab for it? Yep. Okay. On the left-hand side.

And so what am I looking for on the Minneapolis Sheriff's?

On that page?

Screen, I can't get it for you because I didn't see it. Sorry.

No, that's fine.

So. Transparency portal. Go to their website, the sheriff's office, it's on the left hand side, it says transparency portal.

So this takes you to, this is our page, up at the top it has our mission statement that we're overusing the cameras for, and as you scroll down you're able to see various things about our camera system, but this primarily alerts reading. So this is alerts going to our cars. We're going to install the vehicles, install the plates, the sex offenders protection orders, and warrants, and then just slow down on that a little bit. I think they're for more category. Missing persons. So missing endangered persons, I'll give you an example of that. They're entered into NCIC as a missing endangered person, say a person with Alzheimer's that walks away from their house, or I'm sorry, drives away from their house. We're able to find these people quicker using that type of alert. Uh, that's our data retention. We have eight cameras total, two of them are located here in Hartford. One's in the city limits. I think one's just outside of the city limits. Uh, my, my want or my wish was to get it to get the plates that are coming into your get-go because that is the highest rate of call-on that we have in the city. Um, and... Coffee cup. The coffee cup, right? Yes. Okay. The coffee cup, the one by the interstate. Because we have people that come in and off the interstate, um, that have committed crimes or are driving stolen vehicles or are intoxicated or causing trouble over there in the middle of the night. And I wanted to be able to gather that info. We weren't able to do it because of the construction. But our plan is, and we wrote into our contract, to have that camera moved. So we just haven't done it. But we will get that camera moved. It shows the number of searches. So those searches are, in the last three days, those are our in-house searches. So 88 reflects how many searches they've done. the number of hop list hits. So a hop list is when they're doing an investigation, they can add a plate that will then come back to them if it correlates with that case. And then just go down a little bit more. These are the types of searches that we're doing in order. So that last one, that's probably a DUI driver that they're trying to stop. We would see a little of those traffic infractions. that's gonna be as a road rage incident where they're trying to track down the person that's responsible for that in short order. Drugs and narcotics, so they're doing drug and narcotics investigation, larceny, theft investigations, that would be your stolen vehicle or property. And then our number one usage by far is by our warrants task force trying to find people that actively have warrants. Just going down a little bit farther on that, you'll see some our policy. The biggest thing to mention that I think it is mentioned enough is what it doesn't detect. So we don't pay for camera service on that. All that it's collecting is a photograph that's using AI to check against the criminal data. AI, in a sense, is not a learning computer. It's just taking from a picture and putting it against the database, and that's what we mean by AI in that context. We own the data. If we, after 14 days, want something for an event for us to get. We can't get it through Flock. We can't get it through anywhere. And the big thing with Flock is this is their entire business model on this side. So if they found out, if we found out as the public that they were monetizing or somehow scrambling and monetizing our data, they would just be not a business virtually overnight. So they stand on the fact that this is deleted. We've seen no evidence of that and it's also in our contract multiple times that they don't hold onto that data. We have access to that data in-house. We also limit the people who can search our data to Sioux Falls Police Department and the DCI here in the state. No one else can look into our database. We have access though to about 480 databases throughout the country that have allowed us access. But until we get legislation rolling, we really don't want to add the whole state. Because I don't know what Madison, South Dakota, or Eagan, South Dakota, or Lake County, I don't know what their policies are. And if they don't try with ours, we don't want them in our system. So until there's some legislation regulating that or they use our policy as a model, which we've already offered, we offered up during the press conference today, then we can be sure that we're not using it inappropriately. The biggest thing on this is there's a public search audit. So this is going to give you limited information, more limited than my audit. My audit's very comprehensive. We require multiple points of data to be able to search someone so that we can audit it easily. But if you click on that, it'll open a, spreadsheet, and it'll show you all of our searches in the category of the search for the last 30 days. It's a rolling list, so you can always click on that and you can always see what we are looking at.

Are you able to click on that, Teresa, or is it probably going to take some time to load?

we have them and then our full policy. I'll tell you how important this was to share. This is the only public policy that we have. We haven't been asked to share it, except for by a few people at commission meetings. But we thought that it was that important. We want to be transparent about it. There's nothing that we're hiding. And as a matter of fact, it's so robust that we thought we should share it with the public. So thank you.

download of, is it a PDF so it doesn't allow me to open it?

So I'm not here to self-lock. I am here to advocate for the use of ALPR cameras. We're trying to get Flock, the name Flock, out of the zeitgeist here because it's really not Flock. There's an axon who we get our tasers from our body cameras. They have the same exact system, similar system. It's called Sentinel. And it's the same thing. There's also a company that the state uses called Vivian that's on the interstate corridors that they're in use right now. But they don't look like black cameras. We probably wouldn't know that they're there. They're long-range ALPRs. The Sheriff's Office first started using ALPR technology in 2011 when they outfitted some old Crown Vicks with ALPRs on the trunks. You probably saw them. They had the big wing on the back. We had a couple of those cars driving around collecting And so I think this flock specifically became a company in 2017 in like a rudimentary way and quickly got to this. Now they're into drones and things like that. There are companies out there that do facial recognition. There are companies out there that can tell you a person, they can tell you what they're wearing, where they work, and you can go back and look at that data. We in South Dakota, we don't believe in that. That is something that we are not invested in, but I can tell you Minneapolis is. If you're downtown Minneapolis for a game, you're on their system. in-depth, like, forever. And it's just they needed that for their public safety, but we could never justify nor would we try to do that here. There's no Bluetooth trigger on it. There's nothing that tracks your phone. But there are companies that pay and monetize and sell back in a different form, sell their data being transmitted off your phone, specifically your GPS. There's a traffic company that can tell you speed and traffic counts on any given road. in the United States. We did a demo here in Manitoba County with them and since they told us since 2012 every car or every person transiting in a car most likely has the ability or is transmitting data out. They take that data, they atomize it so you're not getting who's who and then they sell it back to us or state governments as a traffic counter and speed. When it was compared against the county highways numbers, I was talking to the superintendent, it was almost one for one. So if they go out and physically lay the strips, either for speed or for traffic counts, it was almost identical. That's how good this technology is. So ALPRs, although are new and are in the news right now, us being able to use them provides us so much benefit that we feel strongly that we need to keep using them. However, with robust controls, with robust policy, and with public safety in mind. By the time you're 25, you statistically have been a victim of crime, whether that's a vandalism, a hit and run, a burglary at your house. So if you think back to something that maybe affected you or something that was in your family and that case wasn't solved, how you felt about that. And then would you be okay with assaulting that same case with the use of flat cameras or ALPRs? That's the real question that we have to ask ourselves. The sole reason for plates, well, besides for the tax reason, I won't say the sole reason. One of the reasons why people have plates on their car is for identification. So law enforcement can identify who's dragging that car over that car loss. That's why they're there. And then there's the tax part of it. We need license plates for many reasons, but we've never had the technology to be able to run every plate. And that is what we need. So that's my shield. I don't know if you can tell, but I've been in it about four or six times. I'm very happy to do it. I'm very much a proponent of ALPR technology. I don't care if it's blocked. I don't care if it's axed on down the road. I don't care. We only have a year left on this contract, so we'll see how that goes out.

I've got a couple, sorry, Mayor. I just have a couple questions.

Our local resident, Josh Phillips, he's the one that told me that we should... have you come, so.

You guys are the only municipality that has a camera in the city. And I know you guys had had those conversations before we put them there. I've told all the other municipalities that without their permission, we wouldn't go forward with that. Hartford's unique. It's one of our biggest cities. We always have police here all day, every day. And so we just, this is where we're trying it out to save less. We have eight cameras total, so we're trying to see where the best value is in these cameras our model moving forward could be you know cost sharing it could be we expand it could be we contract it could be we move the eight cameras to more ambitious places right that's the study that we're doing essentially appreciate it yeah appreciate it because i so i'm i'm on x which is twitter and i saw this goal about three months ago before that nobody knew anything about flock

And then it just, you know, obviously it's been kind of boiling. So just a couple of questions. And I've had many people talk to me, what's your position? I'm like, you know what, I'm open. I just talked to the mayor on this a couple of days ago. I'm like, I'm open because, you know, you hear people over here that are very strongly against them. And they may or may not have legit reasons. I mean, I was just looking at some data before this meeting. There's been 69 cops or sheriffs throughout the entire country that have misused these sites. That's been what's reported. 69 out of...

There's approximately 100,000.

So you can do the math on that. So a couple of my questions are going to go down to, there's always bad actors in every trip, whether it's a cop or a sales guy or a tax guy, whatever. What are your internal policies? Let's say if a sheriff deputy is using this for tracking his ex-girlfriend, right? That's a story we all hear. What are some of the, do you guys have internal policies or ramifications or repercussions for somebody who's using that in a negative way internally?

Yeah, so the police are very, we're very adaptive and used to handling sensitive information. We have access, all of the deputies have access to the National Criminal Database and local database. The local database is like everybody's file. It's ever called, you're in there. We have controls on all of this data. We have audits on all this data to make sure that it's not being misused. There is no single mechanism to stop it from being misused. Nothing can prevent it, just like I can't prevent a cop from going too far on a traffic stop or committing a crime out there in the wild. What we did do was we developed this policy where we restricted the search ability down to our detectives. our supervisors. So when you see our deputies out here, the majority of them cannot search a car themselves. They can't see a car and start to search it. So those people are out of the equation. What's left is about 20 people with command staff that can search the vehicles. And within that, We have locks auditing services turned on, so it's constantly looking for inaccuracies or repeated late checks. That automatically shuts them off and sends an alert to the command staff that says, hey, you need to check what this person is doing. They also have to put in a case number or an offer service number in every search. category type, which is what you'll see if you pick that up, you can go look at it yourself, and a category type like warrants, missing person, and then a detailed free form description on what exactly they're searching for online. Because it could be a deal where we're looking for a warrant subject, We know Warren's subject drive is his mother's car. We know the mother's car's plate. We're going to look at that, the mother's car's plate, to see what hits we have. But that needs to be exactly described because when we pull on it, which is once a month, we pull a random 10 out at a minimum, besides checking the laws, and then we check that against. We go out and hunt down every single one of those through our database and make sure that it's legitimate. If there's a question, we ask. But the sheriff is very vocal today about it, and I have been at the other city council members, that if somebody misuses the ALPR system, similar to our NCIC data, they can't be employed. We may not kind of share ourselves, period, because it's akin to misusing our data. And then prosecuted, if it's either following their ex-girlfriend or they're giving information to their girlfriend for another guy or girl, These are stocking type issues. So if we can go down that road, we will. However, there is no law against misuse of the OPR in the state of Dakota. That's what we're hoping there's legislation for.

Yeah, but there's policy issues where you could say, hey, you're using this in a negative way. You're not a fit for our culture. You're out, right? Okay. Like I said, I just had a conversation with somebody today. So one of the – and I thought this was kind of interesting – So one of the rumors or whatever I've heard just in general flock is, and I think, because you guys said you guys, so Minneapolis County shared, so you guys have eight cameras. You guys actually own that data. You have it for 14 days. After that, it's gone. There's nothing. You can't call up Flock and say, hey, is this saved in the cloud somewhere? So I think that there's concern just generally amongst people I've talked to who are against these things or whatever, is that Flock is taking that data, kind of what you were talking about, where they're taking that data and monetizing it or doing something of that nature. So what is it? I guess a little bit of articulation and on public record to What does it mean that you guys actually own that data for 14 days like that means like I guess explain that to What does that mean that you guys actually own that data? Versus WOC, I guess.

Yeah, so it goes into the cloud. So all of our videos, all of our recordings, everything that we have now goes into a cloud router, even our local databases, instead of hybrid hard drive cloud systems or just network systems locally. Because while they're slow and they're hard to access, almost harder to account for data because IT has access. You can't control IT's access to networks. So we prefer the cloud. So in theory, all that info is located on some company's cloud. They use the best encryption to hold that data onto whatever local cloud server that they're using for us. And the reason that they would get into it is to have their computer system checking against the database. And that's all they're using for. We've had conversations with our representation as well as their technology advisors, like recent, leading up to this whole thing, conversations where They gave valid points why they wouldn't want to do that and why they're not able to do that. But one of the things they did tell us was if we put a 14-day limit on our number of days that we can archive, it is gone at that 14 days. The only way that we can keep it is if we locally download it. Because it's part of an investigation, we download the image. or we download the information from our cloud and save it onto our local records now we have it indefinitely because it's part of an active criminal case so That's the tough thing, right? Because I think there's a lot of confusion even within, amongst our group is something goes on in the cloud, it's on this company's cloud, well they can do whatever they want with it. But I don't think that's the case. They're not a physical user of our data and it doesn't make sense that they would be, like I said, because this model is used so broadly within the law enforcement community that If that was the case and they betrayed all of our trusts, our contract alone is multiple tens of thousands of dollars. And so losing that all at once would be really tough. I think some of the block shutting off the system is mischaracterized. I think there's a lot of pauses going on. places like LA, they're not able to snap to like we were and make sure we're being transparent, because we're being transparent on our side. I've never seen anybody come up to a podium, a post block, and say the things they say with a piece of paper in their hand, proving either that it's a violation of somebody's rights, or that there's Bluetooth triggers, or that there's space for recognition, because they don't exist. There are nothing. There is nothing. So they wouldn't really have a want to do that. However, if they did, we'd be the first ones to be able to plug them out. If you go to Shields or you go to Home Depot or Lowe's in town or nationally, they all have lock camera systems. Now, I can guarantee you those are owned by private businesses. They are for sure monetizing that in some way, shape, or form. If you go into a Shields today, I've been in their back room, their control center. We joke they have the best cameras in the city because they do. I have a command post that's constantly monitored by their security. There's a guy sitting there every hour that they're open doing casework, calling us. They have the data. They own the data of every car that enters their parking lot for the purpose of loss prevention, but they did a demo at a conference at the Sheriff's app recently where they had the head of executive security protection for Target stores They said, hey, how good is your system when it comes to tracking people? He said, let me see, does anybody have a Target card? And somebody pulled up their Target card and gave it to him. And within a minute on his computer, he was able to show that person themselves checking out at a self-checkout line. That's crazy. And I'm not saying that's scary. I'm saying that because these private companies, there are no restrictions no controls right and they are monetizing all your data points because when you walk into that shields or they think you're going to shields they're going to start sending you like hey have you thought about you know these new sunglasses it's getting sunny you know that is how commerce works today we saw you looking at the ray-bans yeah yeah we saw you strolling but we don't have yeah we don't have that nor do we need or want that and again we're in south dakota We take people's civil liberties very, very seriously. The sheriff will tell you he works with people who are heard off for the Constitution. He's not doing much of that. Public safety is what we're being asked to do, and we feel like AOPRs are public safety. And those benefits go way out of the way to people's, I don't want to say people's fears, but people's concerns, because we don't see the same. We don't see it the same.

But we're happy to respond to it. All right. Anybody else got any questions? I really appreciate you coming out. This is what I hope to accomplish with this. I wanted you to come out here and stand at our podium.

I will tell you there are residents in Hartford with concerns. They can always be forwarded to us. We're more than happy to have this conversation. I've talked a lot so much.

Are we the first city council outside of Sioux Falls, obviously, that has invited the Sheriff's Department to come and talk? You've been to Dell's, right?

Garrison, Dell's, and Valley. Well, Valley wasn't fortunate because what somebody did was they went on a website called BFLOC, and they put... In one hour, one single user, they put flop cameras all over. So everybody thought there was all these flop cameras. And Brandon and Aspen, and there's no flop cameras there. So there were people actually driving around taking pictures of devices on telephone poles that we couldn't even identify. I don't know if they were weather or what they were, but I'm like, I've never seen one of those. But there's no cameras there. And it was really unfortunate because those people were pretty upset. And I went and I explained to them the same thing that I explained to you.

So you mentioned early on the one that's up here by Interstate 90. The bridge was under construction. You were considering moving that?

Correct. Gotcha. Right. Right. Because that would...

if there's a fear with the citizens of Hartford that we have one at the city limits, that would leave it, because if you move it across, it would go, yeah, it would go, it would no longer be in the city limits, depending on where we plug it in.

And if the city didn't want it there, we would not, we absolutely would not. Ultimately, the people will have to decide, the people will have to decide whether or not the LPRs continue. Right, right. I mean, there's the nine examples. I had a kid. He was stopped on six miles. His dad hadn't installed a front camera on his car. Reached in the car, had some words with the kid. The kid did not respond back. And he ended up punching him in the head, getting back into his car, and leaving. We have access to those pits. Red topper, F-150, not a unique vehicle. We were able to find that one at a Minnesota plate. We were able to run the DMV search on the non-law enforcement search and get a picture of the person who owns that car, and it was an exact match to this person who had assaulted this little, this guy, this kid. And we were able to make an arrest. God knows what, down in Omaha. They were also able to cordon off a section of the interstate to make that stop, that felony stop with their guns out more effective and safer because they were able to get cars out of the way. That's where, that's the sensational one. The little one with the kid that got assaulted, I mean, that kid wouldn't have gotten justice. That guy, he didn't think, he thought what he was doing was okay and he'd never get caught and it's not okay. We have a victim in our county and we want to take care of that victim.

Well, that's good. Well, thank you. We appreciate your time. Thanks for your service.

Like I said, don't be afraid to reach out any time.

Oh, don't worry.

I got wall here all the time.

We like Alex. We run him up the pole once in a while. He's still new. I'm going to break him into pieces.

We got through scooters with him. It'll be fine.

You know John, but... We got our scooter over that's passed for him, so now he's... You know Damien?

Damien, yeah. I know Bell's is going on theirs too, I think, very soon. They modeled after Brandon, and I think... Yeah, we did too. How were you confused a lot about him?

All right. Do you want me to introduce you visitors or just let you just sit here? Because I can do that. We have Tessa Schwan here. We have Megan Jenner here. We have Rick Bonander here. They are all running this fall. We appreciate them coming out and setting in. I've had a chance to meet all three of them. Glad to have you here. All right, let's move on down to applications, agreements, hearings, resolutions, ordinances. First up, special event application for a small petting zoo at the Goat. She's there.

Ironically, there will be no goats. No, there will be goats at the Goat. There's goats at the Goat.

Yeah, you can come up here, sure.

Your time to shine.

We are literally just wanting to have like two and a half, two goats and a baby goat. Yes, yes. They put down a tarp for them, they drop things, they give out animal crackers to the kids to feed the goats. We're just trying to go about things the right way.

Oh, I'm glad you did. Yeah, we would hate to send somebody up there to arrest your goats. That would be really not.

That would be a bad look. Are there other events going on?

No, we're just pairing with Dakota Goat Squad.

They rent out their goats to do like lawn care. We're just trying to do something different in front of the kids. Cool. I make a motion to approve the special event application for a small petting zoo at the Goat Bar and Grill.

Second. Any discussion? Hearing none, we'll vote. Mattson?

Yes.

Mullin? Yes. Keel? Yes. Orochick? Shelly?

Yes.

Orochick, yes. Chill? Yes. Thank you for coming.

Sounds fun.

Oh, sorry.

I'll tell you what.

We're running behind time. We got to go. All right. We got to go. We got to go. So to speak. Next up is second reading of ordinance 777, which is our 2027 budget. There has been a minor change. Teresa, do you want to run through that?

Yeah, the only thing that's changed from the first reading is that I got contacted by the county. They got in their assessment values on utility. Those usually kind of come behind towards the end of the month. And when we originally did our budget, we didn't have those numbers. So in essence, it raised our assessment values. It allows us, per the formula, it'll give us an extra $7,000 and still keep the mill levy the same, which I think was our objective during budget. So that extra $7,000 has been added. Still keeping the mill levy the same, so just wanted to point that out to you.

All right. Action from the council on this. I'll make a motion to pass the reading of ordinance 777, the 2027 budget ordinance.

Second.

Any discussion? Hearing none, we'll vote. Schilling? Yes. Horacek? Yes. Keough? Yes. Boland? Yes. Mattson? Yes. All right, we will move down to reports. First up is the fire department report. This is their off month, so the report is printed and in the packet.

They have somebody new doing reports.

Oh yeah, they're getting, they're fancy enough. Sorry, I'm scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.

Looks like the public safety day was... Public safety day was great. Happening.

That was really a nice event. All right. What's 958? 958 is there, is that the service area, is that? Where do you see it, 958? Oh yeah, I don't know. Do you know what that is?

I do not know what that is. 648, do we know, that seems more, quite a few more than last year.

I will tell you, when we were down there, kind of mid-morning-ish, there was a lot of people there. That's the first, our kids happened to all be home, so we took the grandkids. They had a blast. All right, we'll move down to Kyle's report, building inspector code enforcement. Looks like the code enforcement list is fairly small and manageable. Anybody got any questions for Cobb? If not, we're going to keep wheeling through her. Let's go to the most exciting time of the evening. City Engineer's Report. Michael.

Good evening, Mayor Jones, City Council. The report is in your packet. A couple quick project updates for you. The Root Lane and Diamond Trail intersection reconstruction began today. Started removals, stopped by before this, and looked pretty clean and neat so far. So I'll continue to stand on top of that and ensure make a progress and keep that area tidy. On top of that, did get letters out, door hangers and emails to affected businesses along Rood Trail, construction as they are, building those homes back there along Opal Lane, and then did reach out to the Deer Hollow Apartments just to provide an update on the project so that they were in the loop and can reach out with any questions. One new project on the list is the Sagehorn Lift Station Rehabilitation. that is a rehab project removing the process piping equipment and whatnot from the lift station up on Sagehorn Drive. It's about 30 years old. It's at the end of its life. Craig and Jessica are spending a lot of time and effort yearly maintaining that. Intent with that project is to take all equipment possible from the decommissioned Mickelson Road lift station and install that in the Sageport lift station to reduce project costs. And currently we have reached out to Sioux Valley Energy for information on the power supply lift station and have reviewed the equipment at the Mickelson Road lift station and lastly reached out to Dakota Pump just for project specifics for that lift station as it doesn't have any record documents. With that, happy to answer any questions on those project updates or anything else in the report.

Any questions for Michael?

Not the other, maybe I'm jumping ahead here.

I was just going to ask a question about the quote, but I think I'm jumping ahead.

Did we not get information on the payout?

We didn't, no. Okay, so that's...

All right, down to interaction items. They have review, approve, options, and quotes for the lift station. Landscaping along Highway 38.

Yes, so as previously discussed, we reached out to quotes for that screening of the welcome sign near the new lift station at 465th Avenue. The four quotes received are summarized there and included attached to the letter. One thing to notice is just based on the company's ability to do the work, some only submitted both for the plantings, whereas some did the full scope, which included some of that landscape rock, landscape edging, and the wheat barrier fabric itself. I do see Teresa's recommendation is to approve new family farm codes, which came in under budget. Just note for the council is that is plantings only and that would require city staff to procure and install the landscape.

And I did talk with Craig about that and he does that the city staff can put the engine and the mulch in there with, you know. without too much expense or effort.

Did those other companies just not provide that part of the quote only? They gave us a whole budgeted or a whole project price? Did we request plantings only in addition to the entirety of the project?

The request from council was for the full scope, admittedly. So that is what we requested of those companies. However, the family farm is local and I believe they are the ones that supply. We felt it prudent to include all those, considering it was a good deal at the original, better be receptive. Perfect.

And I believe they can get this, are they planning to move them yet this fall? That is my understanding. Okay.

and that those plantings obviously match what, you know, there's been no change in the scope, you know, of the site.

Correct.

And then they'll go in there and actually install them as well. They'll move the trees there, yep. We'll put, the city will take care of putting around the fabric and the rock and they will, they'll plant

on those lines. Gotcha.

All right, action on this.

Make a motion to approve the, I'm looking for the language, I think I've got it here. I make a motion to approve the quote approved from the, make a motion to approve the quote from the family farm for the plantings for the substation. Throw times a charm Travis.

Scott Nelson just flashed through my brain.

We have a second.

Any more discussion?

That's what you call shooting from the hip.

Shooting from the hip.

Hearing none, we'll vote. Mattson? Yes. Bowen? Yes. Keel? Yes. Rodchick? Yes. Shelly?

Yes.

All right. Anything else, Michael?

That's all I have, sir. Any questions?

Justin, you want to throw anything in just because you're here? I think I spoke a lot earlier. Okay, good. Okay. Craig is gone.

He's at the Water and Wastewater Conference. That's right. They left this morning.

So his report is also in. and didn't see anything that...

I will make a comment. I was up at Lions Park this week or the weekend, and it was amazing. The bathrooms, the pickleball courts finished. There was actually a wedding happening there, which I thought was incredible. There was parties there. Oh, yeah, they were shooting pictures down at Turtle Creek, too, on the bridge. They do it up on the bridge? Yes, they did. And then I was there with my kids, and they were playing, and then there was some younger couple visiting from another town. I... And they were just like, this park's amazing. It's kind of like, we have a really beautiful park and they've done a phenomenal job. And that bathroom added in down there is incredible, down by the pickleball courts. I used it. I had to.

All right.

We'll move down to Karen's report. You got any good words for us, Karen? I like the fact that you're keeping us ahead of last year. That's good.

So we have 10 million in the bank. Is that accurate?

11. How's it today?

Awesome. Good job.

Because the ACH went in. Creeped just over 11, though.

Oh, I think we're going to figure out ways to spend some of that. All right. Thank you, Karen. Teresa, you got anything to add to your report?

Just two little updates. I put in there that I'm trying to get a meeting together for the second one for the sidewalk committee. We do have that set now. We're going to meet Monday afternoon and meet the mayor, Daryl, Michelle, and myself again. We're going to continue pushing forward with draft ordinance for maintenance of sidewalks. And then we're going to talk about our next steps as far as filling in sidewalks. So we're going to keep moving that committee forward. I also... just wanted to let you guys know as far as our pool you know mb is no longer going to offer the lifeguard training or any of the swimming lessons um i have found out there are a few places i won't say several but a few places that does offer the lifeguard training so i think we are covered there midco's are a lot of places going on here but madison has a program brookings has a program whatnot so i think there are places where they could get training The biggest thing now is just figure out if there's a way we can get lessons here and what that would entail, what the costs would be, insurance, if we can do it, if we can get enough certified lifeguards that would take the extra classes and whatnot. So we're going to continue to work on that before next season to see how we can... maybe have something here, so still working on that.

Do we know how that change is going to affect our neighboring communities, Montrose, Coleman, trying to think of other communities that have a pool, Salem. Are they scrambling, are they in the same spot? Is there an opportunity for us to... maybe spend a little bit more money to get some staff hired and trained so that we can conduct that.

Yeah. So I have reached out to other communities and I've got some information from Brandon and T and whatnot. A lot of them or a few of them They offer the classes by basically offering to get the Likert certification. To be able to teach, you have to have the instructor classes. So that's extra classes they need to take. They do pay those Likerts more for that. A FEW OTHER THINGS THEY HAVE IN PLACE AS FAR AS, YOU KNOW, THEY'VE GOT TO STAY THE WHOLE SEASON AND WHATNOT. AND EACH COMMUNITY IS A LITTLE BIT DIFFERENT, BUT THAT'S HOW A LOT OF THEM RUN IT. THEY RUN IT THROUGH THEIR OWN LIFE BIRTH, BUT KIND OF THINGS I WANT TO LOOK INTO, TALKED A LITTLE BIT WITH THE MAYOR ABOUT IT IS, YOU KNOW, how insurance-wise does that affect us? You know, is it gonna be more insurance risk on us or whatnot? Just some of those nuances yet there.

I think that's how most small towns offer swimming lessons is through the WSI. If we're gonna do that, there's usually less things have changed drastically, not a lot of I mean, there's quite a few lifeguard classes, but the actual WSI classes are more much, it's like a whole weekend.

Yeah, it's more intense and it's more training, yes. It's definitely more involved. So we want to plan ahead, that's the... They're concerned. Me and Amy talked about this four or five years ago maybe or whatnot, and she kind of did a survey. I said, you know, because we thought maybe even doing it besides having even Envy do it, you know, because there's something we could do. We kind of, at that time, the guards we had to see if we had any of them interested, and we could only get one or two guards that would even contemplate doing that. So that's kind of my fear is that getting guards interested.

Do they all have to have it or just the one doing the teaching?

Just the one doing the teaching. So I mean, he'd have to figure out how many classes they offered and how many guards we would actually need to have. You know, maybe instead of having two sessions, maybe we've got to split it up to three or four sessions throughout the summer because, you know, we're going to take so many at each session, something like that.

So, you know, when MBIE brought their guards, are they all, I'm assuming they're all certified, right? Because they would bring, man, they'd have eight or ten. Because they were teaching a lot of classes. Okay.

So we'll continue to check into that and see how we can move that forward. And then I put in there just a note. I think at my last packet report I had, we will assess that 12th and Oak Street assessment. at this meeting here. Actually, we have to wait until after October 1st, give them the chance to pay what they want to pay, and then at that next meeting, we'll look at passing that assessment, because they've had their year timeframe to make any payments, and I don't think anybody has paid anything. We got one, so I can't hear you girls, but that'll be at the next meeting.

Okay.

Okay, that's all I have for office.

All right, any questions for Teresa? Thank you. No old business, we'll move to new business. We have one item, Hartford Hometown Christmas, requesting their 2026 budget allocation of $10,000, which we approved last year for this year. It's within the budget.

Yeah. We put this in the budget. Lisa Helvig was going to be here. She had something come up that she notified me today, and so she couldn't make it, but yes, they just would like the release of their... Then we expect Sherry Goble.

Yeah, usually it's both of them. What the heck? Okay. Motion to approve release of the 2026 budget allocation for the Hartford Hometown Christmas.

Second.

Any discussion? Hearing none, we'll vote. Schilling? Yes. Rocha? Yes. Gill? Yes. Mullin? Yes. Madsen? Yes. Anything else? Anything we need for exec? Not that I can think of.

I don't have anything.

I'd entertain a motion to adjourn. Motion to adjourn. Second. All in favor? Aye. Look at that. We got out of here before 8 o'clock. Wow.

Can you call me tomorrow afternoon?