Board of Aldermen - Regular Meeting

I call tonight's meeting to order. If you would please stand and join me in the pledge.

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

250 more.

Pam, would you do a roll call, please? Here.

Alderman Dobbs. Alderman Peggy.

Here.

Alderman Donovan. Here. Alderman Huey. Here. Alderman Eidman. Here. Alderman Ross. Here. Alderman Prince. Alderman Steiger.

Here.

Here, we have a quorum.

Thank you very much. At this time, I will look for approval of tonight's agenda. Motion to approve. Second. Okay, I have a motion and a second. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, thank you very much. Looks like we've got a couple personal appearances tonight. First up, we have St. Genevieve Fire District Chief Kenny Steiger.

Good evening, everyone. I'm here to kind of keep my promise that we talked about whenever we made this separation. I can continue to try to give you quarterly updates what we're doing out there. I'm continuing to try to work closely with the city. I go to department head meetings whenever I can make those. And I also am working closely with the building department. We have emails back and forth. We're keeping in touch there. Day to day operations out there really hasn't changed much since we were city based. We still fight fires, we still go on calls and things like that. This year, we're at 127 calls so far this year, which is actually down 18 from last year. Budget-wise, when the final numbers came in, we actually collected about $700,000. So we were able to do our $550,000 budget, put $200,000 into a vehicle replacement plan, and still have $150,000 in reserves. So we're doing okay out there. Personnel-wise, I'm currently down two. I lost one and I gained one just the other night. In the next few months, there's a possibility we may be losing several more people, so we're going to start doing another aggressive recruiting campaign So if you know anybody that's interested in becoming a volunteer, you can apply on the website or come out to the firehouse and get an application in person. We're still working on the rebranding of the department, getting the new names and everything done. It's been a handful, to say the least. It's almost kind of comical, some of the stuff I've had to go through. The state took three attempts to make the right license plates for us. We had new helmet shields for the front of our helmets, and I had to have a couple of them made two or three times. Just something as simple as our badges. We had our badges made, and I had to have those made a second time because the vendors had messed up on all this stuff. So it's taken a while, but we're getting there. And just the other day, we got the majority of our trucks re-lettered, too. So we've only got a couple more of those to have lettered. We're finishing up the radio switchover. We have everything programmed operational. I had to send several radios and pagers off. I had a bunch of them that were sitting on shelf that we couldn't really afford to have worked on. Now we've got a few extra dollars, so I'm getting everything back up. And we've got some extra sitting on the shelf now, so we're not really being tight on that. We're working with a fire agency in Jefferson County on a donation, which will be a bunch of handheld radios that will bring us up to fully digital capable. Right now, only the officers have radios that can talk to the PD or sheriff or EMS. We get these radios in and get them programmed. Every handheld we have will be able to talk to whoever we need to talk to, and that's going to be potentially a donation of those radios, which saves us thousands of dollars. We're currently working on our annual certifications. Every year we have to do air pack certifications, compressor work, ladder testing, all that stuff. We're in the middle of all that stuff right now, and everything's going good. working on a few maintenance items around the building and the equipment. We've started setting up computer software for the first time. We've never been able to afford fancy software to do record keeping everything. It's always been by hand, so we're setting that up now. And the board hired to... Let me start again. The board hired a billing company now. So anybody that gets service from us that does not live or pay taxes within our district will get a bill. And I found out how much fun that's been because we've been messing with Union Pacific for the last three months trying to get paid for a certain derailment. And it looks like it's finally going through. I'd be open to any questions. Then once again, the door is always open out there. If anybody wants to stop by at any point, come out and see me. I'm out there Monday through Friday during the daytime. So I'm always welcome anybody that wants to come by.

On a house fire or a building fire, do you guys do any follow-up on that, or is that kind of us? We do follow-up, like, board it up and things like that?

Yeah, we had a discussion after the last one. I wasn't aware that they weren't aware of it, so myself and Dave had talked about that and talked a little bit about it with the building guy, too. So we're going to start sending emails back and forth, making sure we're on the same page there. But we've still got a good working relationship with everybody.

Lovely to ask questions.

Not during this time, no.

Okay. Thank you for your time.

Thank you, Chief. And then we also have another personal appearance tonight. We have Kathy Kreitler and County Prosecuting Attorney Wayne Williams. They're going to talk about Willow's Nest and domestic violence. Hello. Welcome.

We wanted to update you guys on what's going on with domestic violence in St. Genevieve. As you guys know, I'm the domestic violence advocate, and I have with me tonight our board president, Doug Burris, and he's going to talk about the shelter. And then I also have with me our county prosecutor, Wayne Williams, and we were going to talk about our future plans for domestic violence in St. Genevieve. So I'll let Doug talk first. Thank you.

Excuse me.

By way of introduction, I'm a retired federal law enforcement official. I was chief of federal probation for 23 years, and in that career I had a lot of incredible experiences. I got to go to the White House on eight occasions on crime reduction strategies. I served on a Harvard think tank. and also I testified before the Senate, but I have to tell you, of all the work that I've ever done, this is probably the work I'm most passionate about because some of the most good to make our community better is this type of work. So we're in the process of, we filed all our documentation, so we're the official non-profit. We got our federal IDs and everything, and we're going to start looking for ways to fundraising and grants and I'd like to give a shout out to our chief who's been fantastic in working with us. Been just incredible and he may have found a grant for us already but we do plan on getting a shelter here in St. Genevieve because now if there's a need for a shelter they could end up with their children counties away. And so we're going to try to have a shelter, and we're very, very pleased about where that's going. Some of the fundraising, we have a rock-a-thon. When is that?

August 22nd.

August 22nd.

That's our first fundraiser.

Right. And that's at the Eagles Club, right? And then our car show is going to be?

September 26th. And that's going to be at Moses Austin Park. And it's going to basically be the same as it was, except not so hot because we have trees now. To provide shade, yeah. But the services now are basically the same as they've always been. It's like an emergency shelter. So we can provide up to like 30 days emergency shelter stay. And it's everything that you get with the regular shelter. And we went to like the housing summit that the coalition, Missouri Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence offered. And we can set up like housing where we can work with the landlords and pay like four months of rent. And so instead of having last month and first month, last month rent, they'll have like guaranteed four months rent. And that gives them time to settle and get things organized, get a job and things so that they can stay in our community instead of having to relocate into another community if they need shelter services. So that's like today if they wanted to call. It's the same as we had before. It's an emergency shelter situation. so we're just wanting to get the building which you'll never know where the building is that will be confidential but we are that's our goal but besides getting the actual building which will be expensive you also have to you know pay insurance and all the upkeep but we're gonna have to educate staff and actually pay staff so that's all gonna cost money which we're hoping for grants not just cheap looking farm but we're looking farm too so and funding across the United States and in Missouri they're cutting staff and services For all domestic violence shelters, we're seeing that.

I'm probably the only guy that you'll ever meet that's been in more jails and prisons than John Gotti. Hopefully. And I can tell you that this is an equal opportunity offense. I've seen multi-millionaires in jail for it, as well as homeless people, and then all aspects up and down from that. And it's just really important work, and I'm thrilled to be a part of it.

Yeah, he has a heart for it. He has a huge, huge heart for this. So he really does. And then Wayne Williams. So we've worked together for years. And we started, well, we've been together for years. But I worked with Catherine Veneer. So she's the lead prosecutor in the state with Missouri Office of Prosecuting Services. She leads that department. And I've worked with her, and I introduced her to Wayne. And Wayne has done education through her. And then also... He educates his staff through her too, which they do like Zoom even during the month and throughout the day or throughout the weeks and stuff. They have educational opportunities. But we did the education back in January 25, but we're working on something now. We went to Springfield together to a conference that was three days long, and he learned how to prosecute cases differently, prosecuting domestic violence. I'll let him talk about that.

But anyway...

But anyway... We have plans to work with Catherine on bringing that program. She's going to make the program and bringing it here, and we actually have one speaker secured through that for that program that she's going to bring here. So I'll let him talk.

I'll tell you, Doug and Kathy are hard acts to follow. I really don't have the background that they have. But I will say that, first of all, from the prosecuting attorney's perspective, St. Genevieve County is a great county. as all of you know. It's a great place to live. It's a great place to raise a family. But we still have crime. You still have a prosecuting attorney that prosecutes crime. And we still have, you know, there's some degree of domestic violence. And so the problem seems to be with the old way of doing things is that We get a charge for domestic violence. We file the charge, and we don't have any cooperation from the victim. And that's usually as a result of a variety of things. The victim has fear of retaliation, fiscal retribution, or financial retaliation. Usually the domestic violator is a person who is a financial breadwinner in the family, and this person, you know, is an individual that... You know, if we put that person in prison, that's going to put financial hardship on the victim. And if she has children, it's going to be a hardship on the family as well. And not all domestic violators are men. Some of them we're finding are women now. And you see that more and more as the cases come through. So that seems to be the problem, is lack of cooperation. There's a lack of... It never ceases to amaze me when we speak with victims in our office that they don't realize that we have a great deal of discretion. We do not have to send someone to prison. Particularly if it's a misdemeanor case, we usually don't do that. If it's a felony case, we can always seek probation, have supervised probation, have a little structure in the life of the family. We don't have to destroy that family. And I think victims don't realize that. And so I hope that anybody watching tonight or here present that's been a victim domestic violence understands that you know we can do a lot of things besides just send someone to prison. A lot of times it's not necessary to send someone to prison but you have the serious domestic violence cases and St. Genevieve County is no stranger to that. We've had a fatality in the past years involving someone who was murdered here in St. Genevieve County at Country Mart and we don't want to see a repeat of that. We think that From the prosecutor's point of view, that it's worth the extra effort to try to prevent those types of outcomes. So that seems to be the problem. The solution seems to be through our training and experience. kind of an evidence-based approach to prosecuting these types of cases. And I'll make the analogy of homicide cases. Domestic violence cases can turn into homicide cases, but usually they're not homicide cases. But in homicide cases, we don't have a victim in those cases. And prosecutors are still able to successfully prosecute those cases without a victim. So why can't we have that same type of result in domestic violence cases? And the situation seems to be In a homicide case, you might have an officer that is a road officer that gets dispatched to a situation, and he determines, once he's dispatched to that location, that there is a dead body. That person at that point, you know, in homicide cases, they call the detective. And the coroner is called, and other experts in law enforcement is called, and they bring those assets to bear on that homicide scene. Those officers are used to looking at homicide cases. They're used to looking for the type of evidence that you need to secure prosecutions and convictions on those types of cases. They know what to look for when they get to the crime scene. Domestic violence cases is you have your road officers who, and I'm not saying anything negative about our law enforcement community, they do an outstanding job across the board. I've seen nothing but just great efforts on behalf of our law enforcement officers. But you have a generalist. This person may respond to domestic violence tonight. He may have a stealing case or a burglary case later in the evening. He may have a traffic stop for speeding later. He's more of a generalist and not an expert. And so we believe that the training that we're receiving from the... from MOPS that we've talked about here is helping us kind of up the game on this and maybe that will help officers see the type of evidence that we need to successfully prosecute those cases. Now, I will say that in that respect, You know, we plan on having training events here locally, and we're bringing in nationally recognized speakers for that purpose. And officers are free to attend those training events at the community center. You know, we have a little bit of an expense in bringing the speakers here. Officers have an opportunity to get their post requirements to keep their commission free of charge. Lawyers have opportunities to keep their continuing legal education requirements up to speed for the year. And it's a win-win situation for everybody. And members of the general public can appear if they want to and attend those training events as well. It's open to everyone. So that seems to be... solution to the problem and we're gravitating towards that other prosecution offices are using that successfully in other parts of the state and we want to start to migrate towards that you know like anything else it takes a little effort and you know there's a lot of moving parts and we have to move everybody in that direction and that's what we're going to try to do in the coming years uh you know we're lucky to have him because a lot of places

A lot of counties don't have a prosecutor that's going to go after domestic violence cases because they're hard to win. The conference we went to had over 300 people at it, and most counties don't have a prosecutor that will go after domestic violence cases. He's interested in doing that.

Well, and I see it as my duty as a prosecuting attorney. Once you see there's maybe a better way to do things, it's ridiculous not to try to make it better. And that leads to my final thought on this is why should we care and why should we make this effort? Well, these types of calls, domestic violence calls, are the most dangerous for law enforcement officers. These guys respond to these calls over and over again, a lot of times to the same residents. And when they respond, you never know what frame of mind the people are gonna be in. Are they gonna be under the influence of intoxicants, alcohol, drugs? Are they gonna be armed or not armed with firearms or knives or other weapons? You know, what has already occurred, they don't know. It's a dangerous situation for law enforcement officers. It's dangerous for the victims. It's dangerous for any children that are present in the residence as well. And if we can mitigate that down to where we can hold the person accountable at some acceptable level, We want to do that. The problem is, you know, without the cooperation of the victim, it's usually the victim is the only witness at these events. You know, there's no other witnesses. It's the victim and the person who's abused them. And so law enforcement officers can't testify as to what the victim told them, usually, unless there's a few exceptions to that. And we don't really see those a lot in our cases, those exceptions. So It's important to try to turn the corner on these things, to know what type of evidence to look for, and to reduce that risk and make the community a safer place for everyone. Not only law enforcement and the victims, but everybody here, and that's our goal.

So we're real excited about what we're wanting to do, moving forward with Catherine's training and stuff. And we do have Brian Grove is- been secured as one of our speakers, and he's a national speaker. He actually spoke with Gabby Pimentel's dad at this Missouri conference. We do work together a lot, like I'll bring in a client and I'll kind of prep them about what he's going to need. But he can talk to a client, also a domestic violence client, one-on-one confidentially. They don't have to go through me. But a lot of times we work together quite a bit.

A lot of times people don't realize that prosecuting attorneys, you know, I do have an assistant prosecutor now. And we've had him for about two months. But for the first two terms of... tenure here as a prosecuting attorney, you're alone, you're solo, you're by yourself. This is absolutely the worst place to come to learn how to do the job. And I was fortunate, I have a long history in nothing but criminal law. I've done that my entire 30 year career as an attorney. And when you, I've been to the board meeting, a board meeting with the Willows Nest, and that was the first opportunity that I felt like, okay, I'm a member of a team, there's other people trying to do the same things, and then the educational trainings that we went to, There's other people there to help you. Law enforcement helps us. We work hand in hand with each other on these types of cases, but we struggle with these types of cases and we would like to do better. And I think the community deserves better and we're trying to up our game on this. And like I say, hold the person accountable at an acceptable level. Not necessarily destroy a family or anything like that, But if it's a real violent act and somebody is injured seriously, maybe that's required and we would have to have those conversations. But we're getting it to where we don't have to have that victim necessarily testify. Other prosecutor offices have had jury trials where the victim did not testify in these types of cases and they obtained convictions. And we're trying to get to that point. I appreciate you hearing me out tonight.

Yeah, that's kind of where we're at. We're really excited about having the prosecution of the abusers. We're all excited about that.

This is for Wayne and Kathy. Just listening to you tonight, it seems like you guys have good working relationships. We call each other a lot. You read things about some of these prosecutors. They just kind of put these kind of ones in the basket away from them. and don't do anything with it. But it really sounds like you guys are working together really well, and that means a lot. Thank you very much.

And he's looking forward to us having the shelter, because like he said, with us having the shelter, it's going to be a good place, a good complement to what we're doing with the trainings with Catherine. And Mike Jones, I've been talking to Catherine for quite a while.

And I'll say, you know, a few years ago or before, there was a, it seemed like your caseload was really high. And the new assistant prosecutor that you guys have now, I think that's kind of helped quite a bit. So you don't hear that as much as that, you know, cases aren't getting followed up with or they're getting to court at least a lot sooner than what they used to. So I think that was that funding for that additional attorney that you guys have now. I think that was... outstanding that we're finally getting somewhere on that and you guys are doing progressive things like this.

Thank you. The simple fact that you guys are working together instead of just the prosecuting attorney out there by themselves fighting this, having two different entities involved, I think it only... help and stuff because it doesn't seem like always common sense comes into being and stuff. I did see a bill that Governor Keyhole signed today and somehow reading through the bills I had missed it and stuff but just kind of unrelated and stuff but if you're involved and if you're driving under the influence and you're intoxicated and you there's a fatality and you cause that fatality and that fatality has children you have to pay child support now and i think what a you know i mean you put that family at great odds and stuff like that now something's going to come to it and hold people accountable and make them you know help pay i just thought that was a great

I have two guys here with big hearts, which sounds silly, but they both have huge hearts for our victims. And what I've seen over and over with Wayne is he looks at the whole picture and takes into consideration what the victim wants too. So that's, I think, really important, which I didn't really have that aspect until I worked with him more. While I'm talking, though, I did want to acknowledge our board members, which Chief Halleck is one of our board members, even though he's not standing here with us. And we also have Vernetta Melton, Betty Joggers, which you guys might know. She was our lab manager for 51 years at the hospital. And then Mary Kay Bader is also, she's the vice president of St. Vincent de Paul. And Devin Melton, he's a tax attorney with an MBA. He's on the board. Who else wanted to say anything? So anyway, I just wanted to acknowledge them too. And they've been working really hard. So we're going forward and things are going good. And I'm very proud of these guys. They both have really big hearts. So thank you guys.

Thank you for filling us in.

All right.

You may speak during public comment. Yeah.

All right. Next up tonight, we have our city administrator report. So I'll turn it over to Davis. Thank you, sir.

The first three there are updates on some projects. Wanted to point out a few on four. We received the release of contingencies from McBride. Actually, it was last week, late last week. Closing on the property is anticipated on July 29th. The TAP grant we received. So if you remember, there was a TAP grant that did the sidewalk on St. Mary's. Before Happy left he applied for another one along South 4th. So basically from where the sidewalk ends on South 4th that for some reason you then have to cross the street and go to the other side of the sidewalk. It will continue from there over to Rozier where it will connect to another sidewalk. That has passed through the Environmental Services Review and is on a right-of-way acquisition. There's really only one right-of-way to acquire and eight temporary construction easements. So that work will be going on here for the next few months. The Sarah's Garden project is nearing completion. If you haven't driven by, it has a new roof structure. The metal, I was hopeful it would go on today or tomorrow, but the storm kind of threw a little kink into it, though I did get some ice and water protection put on it. Part of the electric is run, and of course the flowers were started, though the Master Gardeners have more work that they plan to do. And I wanted to reiterate down on number seven. If you remember the county transient tax passed earlier this year, myself and Aaron have been working with the county treasurer on organizing communication to all of the short-term rentals, hotels, motels that are out there. Aaron drafted a letter. We've changed up some FAQs. We worked with a member of the TTC to create a form, it was Rebecca Monia, that you can use to turn in your taxes. It calculates them for you. So we continue to work with the county to make sure it goes smoothly. That tax went into effect July 1. It'll start being collected here probably August, but most likely on quarterly we'll see payments in November and December. And then I wanted to add one little thing. If you remember a few months ago, there was a train issue along North Main and the sidewalk was damaged. That sidewalk was repaired last week. And then we also did some sidewalk repairs since Bales was out doing that on Washington Street. So those repairs are all complete. That's all I have.

Questions for David regarding his report?

I don't know if you want this now. The repair by the... St. Mary's Road by the walking bridge where that ATV caught fire. Are we getting that repaired?

We plan to. We've done one or a couple truckloads of asphalt, but that one was minor. But it is on the list. You are talking about the roadway, right? Yeah.

It is on the agenda.

Any other questions? No? All right. Thank you. Thank you. I'll move along to staff reports tonight. First up, we have Robert Sullivan, Community Development Officer.

Good evening, Mayor, Board of Aldermen. Tonight, you got before you my June staff report. I'll be fairly brief with it so we can get to the next item, nuisance properties. So we had a June Historic Heritage Commission meeting. I'd like to thank Administrator Vova for taking over farming for that meeting. I was out of town that evening, so he took over farming. I appreciate that. Our next meeting is this month on the 20th. here at City Hall. Planning and zoning, the next meeting will be next month on the 6th, and we are going to be discussing short-term rentals and zoning setback regulations. All the other items there, unless anybody has any questions, are our family standard for our monthly activities. Lots of calls back and forth. We did meet with an ISO representative, which is related to the city's insurance rating. and that also includes fire department they didn't do the fire department with us this time but just did building code and we're working through reports and finishing up stuff for them unless anybody has any questions i'd like to move on to the nuisance property list that you have in front of you Okay. So at the last meeting, you all asked for some activity and list on some nuisance properties that we have. This list called it an action log. This is, well, it seems lengthy. It is a very short action list. It's like the last few items that have been done on each property. So the first property listed there on South 8th Street, It's been declared by myself as a dangerous building. We followed all of the requirements up to now to that process. As you can see listed here, that's going to go before the Heritage Commission, whether it's through the owner of the property or through us as the city itself requesting from the Heritage Commission a determination on what they'd like to have done with the property because it is a historic home. We've been in contact with the owner. They're cooperating, so we're working through that one. That's the most dangerous one on this list. All the utilities have been shut off to the property. Everything around the property is being taken care of, but it's the building itself. The next one on the list on Market Street is unoccupied fire damaged home. And as the fire chief mentioned earlier about boarding up properties, this one is boarded up to a certain extent. Lower level is you can't get in really anything from the lower level, but the upper level does need some more boarding up in case somebody wants to grab a ladder and try and go in and get something out of that home. So we're working with the owner on that one also. We've received word that the owner may be interested in really selling those properties instead of dealing with them anymore. So again, we went through the required process. It has been posted. So we haven't been inside that one to do any interior. So most of that stuff's all been from the exterior. So he's agreed to next week to let us in to do an interior inspection. And then based on that and the exterior, it'll likely be declared a dangerous building after that inspection. And then we'll move forward in the process of that. We won't have to do heritage commission on that one. or the next one who's also owned by the same owner right next door to it. It didn't have a fire, but it's in a large state of deterioration. It's unoccupied as well. It is boarded up. You can't get access to that one. Basically, same basic concept as the one I listed before. He's going to let us in at that same time next week to do an interior inspection. Based on that, we'll decide if we're going to determine that one is a dangerous building or not. So the next one is a home that's on Market Street, went into foreclosure. It's currently unoccupied as well. This one, we're constantly mowing the grass on it. We've done some other activities over there related to the exterior of the property. The exterior of the home is fairly decent for now. A bank is in charge of that out of California. So that makes things a little more difficult when we don't have somebody local to work with. Since a certified letter has been sent to the lending institution requesting access to the interior of the home, because given what had happened in that home, we want to see what has happened in there to see what the condition of it's like before we make any further determination on that. Hopefully, because the lending institution has it, they'll want to see it move on quicker than what it could if somebody didn't want to get rid of it so moving on down we've got a south main street home no one's living there it's got some roof issues really that's minor compared to the rest of them but again it's it's an issue so we're moving forward with that certified letter to the owner and all interested parties the reason i say interested parties is because we have to determine who all would be interested in this piece of property. When I say interested, it's have interest in. So like if it's a bank or something like that, we did the records research to determine that to make sure everybody's notified that needs to be. So we'll get that one taken care of. I'm fairly confident without much problem. We got one on Walnut that's unoccupied. These next three That home was damaged by fire on Walnut and was posted. That one most recently happened, as you can see by the date there. That one has not been boarded up yet. We were hoping they were getting stuff out of there a little quicker than what they have been, so we hope that they would be faster at that. They haven't been, so we're going to be ordering them to board up that piece of property. So that will be taken care of next week also. The next two, Maple Drive and the one on Leahy Street, those are interior conditions only. The building inspector went into those on those dates that you see and determined they were unfit for occupancy and requested those people move out. They have moved out. They're both vacant. um no action has been taken since then they weren't actions where we're going to declare the building dangerous it's just basically a vacant home at this point but we still consider that a nuisance since they haven't called us back to do an occupancy inspection but that's the current list of our nuisance properties related to buildings

When I look up 148 South Main on the map, it shows the Presbyterian Church. Is that there?

No. No, the 148 South Main is across from the Bolduc House.

It's next door.

Yeah, it's next door to the church. Yeah, it's next door to the house. Two houses up actually, yeah.

Is that the one that's always boarded up? No. It's a commercial property there?

No, that's 48 South Main.

It's been like that for 100 years?

No, it's not that one, but that's on the list.

Yeah, it's on the list. Yeah, we got some more stuff going to happen with that one too.

You said the occupants moved out of the house?

Yes.

Are they the renters or owners?

Renters, those are renters.

So you've been contacting them?

Owners, yes sir.

On 1034 Maple Drive and stuff, there's some stuff around back that smells terrible. That's rotting meat. They cleaned out a refrigerator and put it in a little trailer. I went out there and checked it. I got a call that something on the outside needs to be done to clean that up because that's not healthy. Okay.

We will check that out and make that happen.

I appreciate this.

And again, it's extra. This is just a short snippet of what all is there. I don't want to bore you with all the other stuff related to it, but you can see just by that first one there, That's just a short little last-minute piece that happened. So there's a lot that has to happen to make all this come together. I wish we could snap our fingers and make the stuff just go away. Unfortunately, we can't do that. We've got to do our due diligence and make sure everything's followed and everybody's informed. But we're moving forward in the process, and I think if you look at most of these, they're either posted or people can see that the city's doing something about it.

I think that'll satisfy several people that complain now there's action going and we've got this now they can see.

We've actually had a phone call today about another piece of property that we took action on and worked something out and it's all about working with the people so we worked something out with those folks and they took care of the issue like we asked them to and we've made an arrangement and they kept up their end and the person that had the issue with it called and let us know that they no longer have an issue with it, that they did what they were supposed to do. So that's good to see and good to hear.

Robert, could you go through the process of taking care of something that's losing property? I know you go talk to people, then you send them a letter.

Yeah, so the first action, obviously, would be that we'd want to go out and, you know, see if we can catch somebody there, right? Because we want to talk to whoever there, whether it's a renter, owner, whoever it might be, that's causing the issue to happen. And then we document the issue while we're there. If it's a renter, we'll go back two or three times to try and catch the renter there. We'll also get cooperation from the police because they're here 24-7, so sometimes we're not here during the time people are home. So we'll get them to make contact and have them contact us at that point. Once we make contact, then we decide, okay, what is the issue and what do we need to do to fix it? So depending on what that is, so let's say it is something bad enough that we're going to make the building dangerous and they have to get out. Then we proceed down that road. If it's a renter, the owner's involved. And sometimes then that's when we have to do the records research to see if there's a lender that's involved. We involve the bank or whoever is listed on there as a party of interest. We have to notify those people and they get a certain number of days to respond to us and then take care of it. If they don't take care of the issue at that point in time, We turn around and so let's say we declared a building dangerous. We notify them of that, that we've done that. Tell them what they have to do and we give them a certain time to do something about it. When they don't abate the situation, then that gets brought here before the board and the board will set a hearing date on when they can come and talk in front of you all and make their case essentially against the building department of to why they shouldn't be held accountable for a dangerous building. whatever you all decide at that point and tell them that they need give them an order to abate it however that is where it's fix it or demolish it and then give them a certain number of days they follow that order if they don't follow that order then the city goes and does that whatever the order was so let's say it was to demolish the piece of property we'll demolish the home have a contractor do that all those costs We'll get certified as a lien on the property, and we'll take that and have that recorded. And then whenever the property sells or something happens with the property, that money comes back to the city at that point in time.

It's a long process.

Yes, it's a long process, yeah.

43S, he said he's going to come to the board. When can we expect that?

Well... so my my plan currently would be that he's going whether it's him bringing it to the heritage commission on the 20th of this month or or me um we'll take it it'll go through heritage commission on the 20th after that point we'll we'll let him know hey this is what if he's not there Because he's out of state. So we'll let him know this is what Heritage Commission has decided. Then from there, because he knows that. So from there, then we'll bring it back at the next available board meeting to say, when do you want to have a hearing? And then once we have that date, whatever date that's set, we'll have a public hearing on that.

Okay. Thank you.

So in that particular case, because there's a supposedly historical structure and stuff, I mean, will we actually, as a city, get into disassembling that thing or something?

Well, so if he doesn't... Let's wait on that until it's before the board.

Yeah, sure. And I don't want to prejudge the case, if you don't mind.

Any other questions for Robert?

Tough act to follow.

I'll save you. Tough act to follow. What's it say about that? He hired me, so. Thank you very much. Thank you, guys.

Appreciate it. Tough crowd. Tough crowd.

All right, Aaron, are you sure? Yeah.

I've been marinating over there. I was going to say tough act to follow. I will say I've been very impressed with Robert and his time here. I think he's a gem. Thanks for hiring them. This is Numbers Day. The first couple of pages of the report are those KPIs I put together at the year-end review. I'm trying to put them in a little dashboard that makes it easy to read. The first two come just from our Placer AI data. Our marketing performance comes from the The numbers we get from our webmaster, he tracks visitation to our website. And then marketing efficiency is mostly from the ads that we put out with McDaniels Marketing, but also that first number, that marketing cost engaged session that is computed using the numbers we get from McDaniels and the numbers we get from our website to kind of see you know kind of how we the soft conversions we get because we can't really tell right now how many people visit our website actually visit St. Jim but we can track their activity on our website and so that's where that comes from just going to go through some interesting things I want to say this is also year-to-date. You'll see some Placer AI reports towards the back. That's just for quarter two. So you'll see the numbers are a little bit different there. But interesting thing, last year we were down 10,000 unique visitors. This year, today we're already up 6,500 unique visitors to our downtown. And visitation is up nearly 15%, which is, you know... you see visit frequency here has gone up so um basically last year our visitation was up but our visitors were down this year both our visitation and visitors are up so i like that a lot um in marketing performance uh which is on the second page um Actually, I look at marketing efficiency. What's great is we're getting a better click-through rate. So basically, when someone sees an ad, are they going to click and go to our website? Both for our Google display and our meta ads, that is up. So that is a huge positive. And then I'd like you guys to switch, go a couple pages to the Facebook, Instagram demographics. Earlier this year... When you think about marketing to people, a lot of times we go just for proximity, even with our overnight markets. So that's why you'll see Tulsa, Oklahoma in there. But I wanted to try out our hand with people that would have some sort of... you know, reason to come up. So we added New Orleans as a market and already, and this is just on Facebook, Instagram. We left our Google demographics the same, but already that's jumped to number two, our second highest click rate for destinations. And they have a quarter of the people Chicago has, and the Chicago area has. So that's been really huge. I'm pretty excited about that. Any questions?

I got a question.

Sure.

We're number 16 in Missouri. Who do you have to leapfrog to get to the top 10?

Yeah, that's a good question. I'm going to have to look at that. That's another thing I wanted to bring up. On that destination performance, Placer AI just added these kind of rankings. So where you rank nationally, which I think we've jumped up almost 150 spots in our national rank on most visited places from 651 to 506. But we're still holding steady at number 16. So we've got to see how we can leapfrog some people I don't know.

Those summer destinations are pretty tough to beat. Do you know what is that one?

Say again? In the handout, where is that one? It's the very first page on that destination performance. Number one, it's the bottom two. The last page. No, it should be the first page. The third page. Oh, it does show it on the police area report, too. Oh, yeah?

Do you know who number one is?

I don't, no. This was something that I just pulled, you know, I just got off of vacation, so I pulled this real quick, put it in a report, and then, yeah, I need to look it up.

I'd have to say probably St. Louis or Kansas City.

You would think so, yeah, and then you got what? You got Branson, you got Lake of the Ozarks, probably a bunch of little towns in there that get a lot of visitation.

Like Columbia being a university town, probably.

Probably a good one as well. Everybody loves to go to the Capitol in Jefferson City, so, you know. We can get to the top. Yeah, we could get in there. If we did, I think that'd be quite cool.

I'd just be curious to know the gap, too.

Well, yeah, exactly. And if you look on... So, like I said, the place where I report is quarterly. So on that very last page, you do see that ranking overview at the bottom. And for the last three months, you know, our 2025 ranking was 17 in Missouri, and we jumped to 16. So, yeah, I wonder. I mean, it can't be...

too much, but we'll see.

Yeah. Set our sights.

Any other questions for Aaron regarding this report?

Great data.

Thank you. All right. At this time, we will open up the floor to public comment. Just a reminder to state your name. and address if you can for the record, and please try to keep your comments to five minutes or less if possible.

Good evening, city officials and aldermen. My name is Josh Wright. I own a business here in town called the Bedford Group. It's a wealth management firm. We're located at number 39 and number 57 North Main Street. And I'm here tonight representing a new economic development organization in St. Genevieve called Prosperity St. Genevieve. We are affiliated with the Missouri Main Street organization that helps create and incubate and then ultimately accelerate small economies, you know, smaller communities that are in need of having some economic development and some revitalization organizations to kind of help advance the cause in those communities. So we're a young organization, less than a year old. We're very excited about our mission and the opportunity that's in front of us and our board is a very entrepreneurial board. that is working really hard and what we would like to do is, number one, just make you guys aware that the organization exists and let you know a little bit about what we've been up to and what we hope to accomplish in the near future. But number two, we're very hopeful that we can be part of your planning and funding process whenever you think about economic development initiatives that you want to undertake as a governing body. So our board, in the short time that we've existed, we've gone through all the necessary steps to incorporate, get our 501c3 status and some of those sorts of things. But we've also started to make some tangible progress in terms of providing resources to property owners and business owners in town. and then to also help make our community more marketable to folks for whom we could all benefit from their attention and their economic activity. So a couple of kind of things I'd like to highlight that we've done so far. Number one, we had a site visit with some connections that we were able to make through the larger statewide organization. And we did some rendering work on a couple of key locations in town that we think are kind of highly developable. We got incredibly good feedback on the work that we did that work was done at no cost to the property owners Who we did the renderings for? And some of those owners have indicated that they intend to move forward with some of the recommendations that came from that process We also have compiled a pretty significant amount of economic data that we think could have real value for folks like residential real estate agents commercial real estate agents for business owners in town but also for folks who might be considering locating a new location for their business and maybe might not have recognized saint genevieve as a potential a potential location for maybe a new a new location for their business we have disseminated some of that information on a very kind of cursory level but one of the uh One of the outlets that we communicated some of that information to is the St. Louis Business Journal, and they were very interested. So we've had some attention from an editor there who is potentially looking at running a story on some of the data that we've created. So that would be really fun if that happened, and it would dovetail really nicely with one of the goals we've identified, which would be to market our community as really a great place to do business, a great place to find employees, and where those employees can enjoy a really nice quality of life. for a very affordable price. And that also relates to some of the data that we've accumulated, which compares St. Genevieve to some of the bedroom communities in the Metro St. Louis area. And as I'm sure all of you would guess, we stack up not just very favorably, but typically we're number one when it comes to things like cost of living, proximity to a critical care hospital, proximity to a top-rated public facility. uh school system and also proximity to a a highly rated private school system so even whenever you look at communities like kirkwood where i also spend some time webster groves clayton ledoux we stack up incredibly favorably and that's part of the information that we shared with the business journal So just want to make sure you guys are aware that we're out here and we're working. We love the partnership and we'd love to share some ideas with you guys. Any support that you could offer would be greatly appreciated. And any input that you could give us, we'd also be interested in too.

and i don't mean to but this is a continuation of what aaron has been working on with josh and the rest of that board uh we've been going to those uh main street connection uh conferences and being part of that group so this is the kind of kind of putting boots on the ground um with josh's uh efforts here and the rest of that committee so They're complementary to what the Chamber is doing, to what the downtown St. Gen is doing, what Aaron is doing in the tourism department. So the Progress St. Genevieve is kind of that fourth tier to kind of really put this together and kind of be an economic development engine for St. Genevieve. So within less than a year, they're just getting started, but it's getting there.

We hosted a site visit about three weeks ago with a group of eight business owners from St. Louis. Those eight business owners represent about $150 million a year in annual revenue and about 215 employees. None of them had been to St. Genevieve for any more than just a pass-through. They spent a full day here that included a walking tour with Aaron where they got to hear a little bit about some of the Placer AI data that Aaron's compiled. And we got... overwhelmingly positive feedback and i was actually mentioning to some of the folks from the economic development committee of the psg earlier today um that that group has i've gotten a text from at least one person from that group daily since we had that that meeting um getting some sort of either question or feedback uh about that experience so I think we've got a real opportunity to make our community a little bit better known to some of the folks who are making decisions about things like where to put factories, where to buy second homes, and potentially, you know, where to move their families. So, you know, so we're excited. So thank you guys. Thank you, Jeff.

I'll try to be brief. Ernest Kobach, local St. Jen hostel owner, soon to be. I wanted to bring up the reiterate the truck route and weight and speed signs. If there's going to be any talk of that, getting something like that posted. I know we just got a new big sign for the dump. I don't know what that costs, but the signs we need for a truck route are much smaller and will probably cost a lot less. And then I want to bring up the trash service issue, which has been kind of the buzz in town about getting the city to pick one trash service. And I, you know, I get that. But, you know, there's elderly people that don't create a lot of trash. Are they going to be able to, like, no, say opt out, you know? I mean, because... We got a lot of elderly people in town that don't have to pay a flat rate going into their water and sewer bill. And as far as the trash trucks themselves, does anybody know the different sizes of trash trucks? You see them around town. I won't mention any companies at a public hearing, but two of them have much, maybe an 8,000 pound more weight to them. That's loaded or empty. you know, as they fill up. So if we had a statute or a municipal ordinance for weight on our trash trucks, it's going to narrow down a few companies, but people would still have the freedom to pick their own trash companies. And we still have good roads because they're not getting ran on by overweight trucks for our infrastructure. They're just too big. We don't need that big of a truck going down over our sewers and our new water lines they're putting in. It's pointless. So a municipal ordinance would really be helpful to just limit the weight of the trash trucks. And we're talking about fully loaded. I mean, 8,000 pounds on a street is a huge difference when the other one weighs 8,000 pounds less. And I'll just say it's the tandem-based trucks, the ones that have dual axles on them. It could be that simple. It's a statute that says, hey, this is what you've got to meet to get into our trash service. And then the old people wouldn't be complaining and coming in here and probably lining up out the door because there's one of them. Okay. And if you did vote on a trash service, would this be a public vote or a board vote? That's a question.

Yes, this isn't a question to answer.

Okay. Okay.

Well, it's out there. Aaron, I just thought I'd mention to you that you might mention the Muni Band in the website during the summer months. You might get some more people to come out for the live music. It wouldn't hurt. You know, I mean, not that we don't get a good crowd, but that's why I got to get up here and run. I got to go to do a concert. My last, this is a question because I need a phone number. Somebody can email me or call me. A lot of you guys got my phone number. Which group regulates ethics of elections? You can email me. You don't have to tell me right now. I got some thoughts that need to be addressed.

Expand on that just a little bit more. What are you asking? For example...

somebody decides to run for office, last minute they switch parties because maybe they feel threatened by the other person. So, I mean, that's ethically wrong. I mean, that's just dirty politics, if you ask me. It is, it is. I mean, if the other person has just as much ability to do the job, you don't switch parties just to monopolize on the, not the election, but the primary. To me, that's dirty politics. I'm sorry. Four more concerts. If you guys can ever make one, I gotta go. Thank you for your time.

Good evening.

My name's Guy Luttrell of 399 North Main. This is just fly-by-night. I heard it was a meeting tonight, so I came here. First of all, the trash service. I know it's city ordinance that if you have water, you're supposed to have trash. I just found that out. I don't have trash. You know, I'm divorced. I've got one bag. I've worked in the city of St. Genevieve since 92 as a plumber. I'm in a lot of these houses, a lot of these homes. There's a lot of older people that just have one bag. So they talk to me about it because they see it, but I know they've got a little paper out now where you can give your idea, but these people can't get to it. They can't get to the voting thing. It can't be done. I don't know why the city wants to get involved in the billing. I figured that they'll get bids from the companies. The company that wins the bid can do their own billing. But that's part of the trash. I am a licensed plumber in Jefferson County. I wasn't retired now. Bonded everything. I know the code. I've got an associate's degree in plumbing. I went to Rankin Tech Institute. And I'm asked now to be an expert witness in certain cases, and I go on them. I was on two here in St. Gen. Our inspector is a wonderful person. And I don't know, you can tell me now or not, if he's required so many hours a year to keep up with the different fixtures and materials in the plumbing code. But there was a house built next to mine. I was asked to look at it, and absolutely nothing would have passed the code that this city has adopted. Nothing would have passed. but it was approved and it was poured. Now, it takes a lot to know these codes. You know, you just can't get somebody off the street to know them all. I'm fully aware of the electrical code. I know the electrical code. There's homes in city limits that I cannot work on because the capacity of the wire is wrong, it's all wrong, and they're still getting occupancy permits. I was called here a year and a half ago to a two-story home. Very nice couple bought it. Got seven kids. Not seven, maybe six kids. Young kids. And they had a city inspector come down and look at it before they purchased it. They purchased it. Our inspector looked at it. Then they called me. It was $5,000 worth of work that needed to be done to that home to make it safe. Okay. I took pictures and I brought them to City Hall. We really have to be aware. This family was just irate. I mean, they tried their best, but a single wall pipe on a furnace has got to be 18 inches away from combustible material. It was nine. I grabbed the floor joist and broke it off. The pop-off on a water heater has to be a certain distance off the floor. Harvard University said 60 pounds of water coming out of a three-quarter inch line won't spray in a two-year-old's face. They're figuring a two-year-old is able to walk. Drainage fixture units and scouring action are really important in the sewer systems. We're starting to grow now. Is anybody aware that they hit a gas line on Lehey today? Yeah, that could have been catastrophic. code is you call Dig Right. This company didn't call Dig Right. I don't even need to know. I don't even need to ask. Dig Right marks everything. If they can't find it, they won't let you dig. I had talked to this customer, Macklin was his name, and he said the whole block smelled like natural gas. That's serious. Natural gas is lighter in air, so it goes up. But if it's that dense in the humidity we got, so I think we need to look into our inspector to Just to help him out. You know what I mean? Because it's going to happen. You know, we got the impassity of the wires wrong. We got old screw infuses. I'm just seeing too much work done that I can't follow behind. You know, and so I'm just bringing this up. St. Genevieve is... It's full of some of the best contractors in Missouri. Our bricklayers used to be, our electricians, our carpenters. So don't be scared to ask. You know, I was on the Landmarks Board. I was on the Parks Board. And it's going to happen. Somebody's going to sue the city of St. Genevieve because they got an occupancy permit and something went wrong. And then I like to get to... I live in 399 North Main. I call it ghetto number one, but I live down there.

You have about 30 seconds, too, by the way. How much time I got? You got 30 seconds left.

30 seconds? Yeah, I know. It goes by fast. I'm a yakker, aren't I? I just want to say we need to speed up our enforcement. I'm in a lot of basements. I see a lot of child trouble. I see a lot of cars parked on the side of the road with two flat tires. Been there for three months, and nothing happens. So, thank you. Thank you.

Thanks, Ed. Any other public comment at this time?

Yeah, but I might have to get up. You're good, man. Take your time. Get my Porsche out. No, no, no. For a reason, huh?

Yeah. Jerry Klein. Wait a minute. Jerry Klein, 699 LaPorte Street, Ward 1. thoughts are concerning recycling about a month two months ago republic services stopped recycling in town and i think recycling is important and i mentioned to several city officials that i thought maybe the city of saint genevieve could provide recycling now My figures are right. I waited a month for Republic Services to send me a bill showing me what my deduction was after they removed recycling. It amounts to $8 a quarter, which, if you just figure the homes in St. Genevieve that possibly would or did have recycling, that are paying the $8 a quarter. I'm gonna break this down and say that if there's four wards and there's 100 homes in each ward that would do recycling, that would be eight times 100, $800. Based on a year, that's $3,200 a year per ward. And if the city would just think in terms of doing recycling once a month with Ward 1 maybe the first Friday of the month, Ward 2 the second Friday, the third, etc. I think we have the capacity to have our workers increase their time or whatever and pay them to pick up recycling in these wards We've got a great county recycling center. And recycling, in my mind, would have to be profitable. And that would mean that it would just be plastic, glass, and aluminum, because those are the three that I find are the most profitable. And those could be put in out at every home using a a grocery bag the plastic grocery bags because when you pick them up you could tell if it's plastic you could tell if it's aluminum you could tell if it's glass wouldn't have to be different colored bags it would be very simple just asking you guys to think about this because the city should be providing more stuff services for our residents i know that as an alderman back in 2000 we were trying to get the area behind the city park that's not in the city to come into the city and the thing was they simply said we don't offer enough service you guys don't offer enough services uh we've got water and stuff recycling may be one of those things that would attract people I'm going to quit. Thank you for the opportunity.

Thank you, Jerry. Thank you.

Any other public comment at this time?

Can I go now, sir? Come on up. Hello. My name is Terry Sushin. I am running for prosecuting attorney. A lot of people are asking how I'm qualified. I have a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, and a Juris Doctorate degree in law. I took the same bar exam as the incumbent took. I passed it with a very high score. I passed it the first time I took it. I've been an attorney for 36 years. Before coming to St. Genevieve and working here, I've done many, many, hundreds or even thousands of criminal cases in private practice with my alderman brother in St. Louis. Came here about 13 years ago, and the judge appointed me on the spot when I walked in there as guardian ad litem, and I think I'm about the only one that he's appointed since then. I've handled most, if not all, child protection cases In this, in orders of protection in this county, for over a decade, I've done a volunteer without a cent. I'm not asking, I'm not even accepting campaign contributions. What I'd like to see is more child, alleged child abusers prosecuted in the investigations. I know they're expensive, I know they're timely, but our future generation and The future of this county depends on that. Now, this has to be done within the parameters of the Constitution, however. And that takes me off to another subject. I'd like everyone here to realize this county's in trouble. It's in a lot of financial trouble. Look at our hospital. We've lost, they don't have the money now to deliver babies. They're laying people off. They sold three vehicles. They shut down home health care. Part of the reason, in my opinion, is there's a lot of civil rights violations occurring here. And I'd like everyone, everyone in that camera and everyone in this room, to please take a look at CaseNet. And I'd like you to search the Sheriff's Department and see how many lawsuits, civil rights lawsuits, have been filed, serious, time-consuming, costly civil rights lawsuits against the Sheriff's Department right now. And I believe this is a terrible thing that's going on to the county, and I don't see how the county is even going to handle it financially. I think that things have to... The civil rights alleged violations have to stop, although I have noticed that most officers are very good. They try to do their job. I've also heard some serious comments. People are calling me about alleged civil rights violations, and they want to file lawsuits. They look to me as the only civil rights, experienced civil rights person in this lawyer, in this county, and I don't want any more lawsuits. I want all civil rights violations to stop. I want no more warrantless entries, if they're occurring, alleged warrantless entries, absent An emergency that involves serious injury or death inside, I mean, I just dare all of you, please, take a look at KCNA, see what's going on here. Things have to change. And I, more than anybody, want child abuse to stop. I want those people prosecuted. If they're guilty, I want them properly punished. Now, I'm going to treat everybody fairly. Like I said, I'm not accepting any campaign contributions, although many have been offered. I'm doing it because I want to treat everybody justly. I'm not going to be beholden to anybody, and there's not going to be any special favors, no matter what they do. I'm fair, I'm honest, and I'm experienced. Is there any questions? I really appreciate your time. Thank you.

Thank you, Terry.

Thank you.

Any other public comment at this time? Okay. If not, we will move along to tonight's consent agenda. Move to approve. Second. Okay, I have a motion and a second. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, thank you very much. We do not have any old business to discuss tonight, and we do have just one item of new business. That would be a first reading of bill number 4732. This is an ordinance amending chapter 210, offenses of the St. Genevieve Code of Ordinances as set forth below. Motion to approve.

Second.

Okay, I have a motion and a second. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, thank you very much. Any other business to bring forth at this time? Any discussion between the board? I would like to thank our Alderman President, Alderman Steiger, for filling in in my absence a couple weeks ago. Thank you very much.

It wasn't easy, Mayor.

But I appreciate that. It's good to be back with you all. And just a reminder, we've got the county fair this weekend, so everybody enjoy responsibly. Hopefully the weather cooperates. But if there's nothing else, we'll go ahead and adjourn.

A work session to order if everybody's ready to go.

At this time, I'll look for approval of tonight's work session agenda. Motion to approve. Second. Okay, I have a motion and a second. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, thank you very much. Work session item number one is regarding personnel and of course, there is an option to close this.

Mayor, Are we, there's a potential also looks like for a real estate, you might want a closed session for that, the last one, the review of economic development. Is there any thought that we might be moving that one to a closed session too or not? Do we want to move the agenda and do the forward?

The reason I put that first is so that council could stay here with us.

Okay. Move to go to closed session for personnel matters.

And I'm sorry, can we add real estate? And real estate. Okay, so I have a motion to move into closed session for personnel and real estate. And we do have a second? Yes. Roll call, please.

Alderman Fahey?

Yes.

Alderman Donovan? Yes. Alderman Huey? Yes. Alderman Agnew? Yes. Alderman Ross? Yes. Alderman Steiger? Yes. Motion carries.

Thank you.

Thank you. 🎵 🎵 Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. 🎵 🎵 Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

The first hour room.

We need you. The closed session minutes. Is that what we need to know?

No.

I don't know, but... Oh, man.

I think next meeting we're going to have something on, or trash, or proposal.

I have people telling me what they want from trash. And I say, you know, we haven't put anything together yet.

There's public comment and all that. It's more exploratory. I get it. I'm glad they're providing feedback. Okay, welcome back.

As we come out of closed session here, we have one final work session agenda item. We are going to review...

our economic development plan and some other topics related to job descriptions, resources, partnerships, budgets, etc.

So you have a staff report in front of you. It basically just goes over the items I want to talk to you about. We've talked about this since I took the job actually. This is a revamped version of the tourism marketing director job description and then you also have an amended version of the Assistant City Administrator. It inserts economic development. There's a few other changes just to kind of clean up the job. I took Tourism Advisory Council out of errands, cleaned that up a little bit, changed Roberts to talk about the changes we've had in code enforcement and GIS, and added these sections on economic development. What this does is basically it takes Aaron and puts him in charge of not only promoting from a tourism standpoint but from a development standpoint the city my version of what he would be doing is promotion marketing packets for economic development purposes both gentlemen would be probably attending a few conferences that's in the budget that I provided you some of that would be providing attending conferences to learn and some of that would be attending conferences to sell the city And then he would also be doing some reporting to you on kind of like he did tonight on tourism, but economic development later. How many hits he's getting, things of that nature. I don't know about click-through rate, but things of that nature.

Yeah, we'll find something.

And then Robert would be doing more of the projects and planning, which he does part of that already from, like, say a developer comes in and wants to talk through the process. I've got to go through Heritage Commission. I've got to go through planning and zoning. but this would be more economic development related. Business retention and expansion. The three of us would all work together on this, but we would talk about ways that we can not only attract small businesses, but also retain the ones we have and how we can help them. maintain the website there'd be an economic there's economic development on there right now but it's very bare bones how we can boost that and maintain it and then he would also do some reporting on how we're doing attracting those businesses to town and keeping the ones that are here I put that he would kind of focus on developer packets so something you would hand to someone who walked in and wanted to open a business versus Aaron would be more handling going and getting people to want to come to town and open a business. And then we would all three work together on this process. That's the first part of the presentation. Any questions on the job duties or thoughts?

Yeah, so like on assistant city administrator, like one of them, the second set, serve as the primary liaison for business. I think I would really rather have that as your role. You be the primary liaison for some of that. My question, or not, I don't know. How can we free up more of your time, Dave, so that you can kind of be the face on some of this stuff? Because I think you represent the city really well, and I would like to have more of your time. That was in your other role. This new role, you're doing pretty good.

Yes. Yeah, we can make that change. I mean, this part of the job, the whole thing excites me. But yeah, we can make that change.

And so that's my question is because not that Robert's not qualified enough, but with your history and your skill sets too, I think having the city administrator be the primary on some of this stuff. I think that lends weight to when a developer calls or when an industry tycoon calls. I'll send you to my assistant and you can talk to them about buying 200 acres. So that would be one change that I would have there. I like the, my other comment is on, I've never understood, I haven't asked publicly. We call, we have a tourism marketing director. Why are they not just the tourism director? Why is it a tourism marketing director? Why is marketing in there?

I can't answer that question. We can make a tourism director, because it would be something other than just tourism. You're marketing the entire city. No, I went city. It's a marketing director.

Tourism and marketing.

I don't know if... I'm fine with whatever.

Do you like marketing director or tourism director?

I think I'd probably rather tourism director, since that's kind of... I don't know, I think that's a little bit cleaner for everybody to understand. Marketing director, what do you do? Tourism and marketing director, but also when I go to write this out, it's tourism and marketing director. Tourism director's fine, you know?

I'll tell you what my old boss used to tell me. We can call you whatever you want, but we're still going to pay you the same.

Well, all right. Let's shorten that. Let's get rid of the marketing. All right. It saves me some minutes.

I like the tourism marketing director.

I'm just asking why it was. It's a mouthful. I don't know if it matters.

You're marketing the city to tourists.

I think sometimes when I go to like let's say the governor's conference on tourism and it's like tourism marketing director they're like oh so you do something other than you know what I mean like it gives me a little bit less weight there that's where it might give me more weight in other rooms anyways just a little perspective there what is the other tourism yeah they're all just tourism just tourism directors like most most communities it's just tourism director yeah correct

Do they have a separate mark? Like another arm or another person that handles...

I couldn't tell you. I haven't got everybody's card there. Well, I'm just curious. Yeah, St. Louis comes with their entourage, but maybe their marketing director stays home for that because they're doing... You have people that have a whole sports marketing... arena of their kind of economic development or tourism arm. So St. Louis, absolutely, Kansas City. It's all dedicated to sports marketing, Columbia. So that's an interesting thing. But yeah, I'm not sure if they just have marketing directors.

Slide back over to Assistant City Administrator. Conduct business retention. It's like about the third or fourth. Conduct business retention and expansion outreach. I've just made aware of a business now that may potentially be leaving. And, you know, we pull up this Venn diagram that Aaron made for us a few months ago, six months ago, maybe, I don't know, how long ago did you? It's been a while, yeah. You know, and where does the city sit on business development with that? And my question is, know we have the chamber I know we have downtown st. Jim this is not a downtown business so it wouldn't fall into their purview private how do we do more business retention at the city level I think the chamber reaches out and does their thing too and but how do we also supplement or complement what they're doing and that's my question is I don't know if we want to put that on the assistant city administrator I want to take more off your plate so you can do more high-level stuff because this is stuff that's never been done before. We've never done business retention and we've never done... Well, economic development just hasn't been, yeah, it hasn't been at the forefront.

My version of business retention from the city, and maybe, you know, the chamber could do some more. I think they're working towards doing more. But my version is that we offer, you know... grant applying help. Yeah. We explain to them that we're trying to become an opportunity zone. We give information out there to them about how they could either save money, apply for grants, help them apply for grants.

Do the TIF, you know, we're taking advantage of the TIF, you know, and I think people are scared of that, you know, the beast of taking that one. And we have that tool and we're not really using it, but two businesses. We have an applicant.

Oh, great. That's awesome. But that's my version of that. It's not as much as you might think, and maybe we come up with more between now and that time, but I do think that's more of a chamber role.

Didn't we have a dual-handed person before that was tourism and marketing? It seemed like to me one takes more priority over the other one. It's hard to balance them out. I guess my question is, I think there should be one and you should do it 100%. But we need marketing. We need tourism.

We have tourism marketing, full force. This is a little different where we're marketing the city as a place to open your business versus a visit.

Come to the city and build a factory or does that fall under the same thing?

I think our focus will be small business, but we would also have a branch of that where here's some property that we don't have a lot of property available for a factory.

Just to kind of speak to that for a second, one of the kind of economic development wins I think I have under my belt is the ferry, right? And, you know, it kind of shows how hand-in-hand some of these things go. Who would have lost the ferry I mean, you know, would it have made as big an impact as I'm thinking it would have? I don't know. But data shows a lot of people were coming across the river via the ferry from Illinois to go visit the wineries to come stay in town. So at that point, when there's like, you know, we could backslide, I had to kind of step in. and use whatever connections I had to get that funding from Illinois and we got it. Is that a tourism activity or a marketing activity? Maybe not, but it had to be done. That's how this economic development goes hand in hand. If I'm trying to bring people to town and we don't have the right businesses, enough businesses, businesses that are armed with all of the tools that they could have to market for themselves, well then, you know, I'm kind of throwing money into the wind. You know, so... And then it's also... You know, if I have somebody who's doing that, and it's not me, I'm not a big part of it, well then we're kind of, we don't know what the, the right hand doesn't know what the left hand's doing, you know? And it kind of has to be a concerted effort, in my opinion, you know, so.

Wouldn't it be a problem, like, you should be going to a marketing meeting or something, promote San Genevieve, at the same time there's a tourism the opportunity there to promote St. Genevieve. How do you mean? Well, I'm sure there's conferences and different things you would need to go to on marketing of trying to sell St. Genevieve.

Oh, yeah, sure, to businesses and things like that. Right. Yeah, right.

You know, I'm just wondering if there would be any conflict there. It seems like that may have happened before. that that was the conflict, you know. Which one do you attend? What are you trying to push? And what are you pushing? You know, as far as getting people to take a look at St. Genevieve. I mean, I know they go hand in hand, marketing and tourism.

But it's a little different marketing. Marketing visitors versus marketing businesses. But I see what you're saying.

But we don't have anybody marketing businesses. That's what we want to do here tonight. Exactly.

yeah so with this this is going to change it so my next question then on this is funding right so we just passed the transient tax uh we have the the agreement with the county um do we have enough staffing to do some of the things in the tourism department to get all those things done because aaron has a lot of goals and now we just put a bunch of more goals on him and on robert and on you so um how do we get how do we fund these things and do we have enough people to to accomplish these goals so i did not put a person in there because i thought we'd try this with the three of us to begin with

but we're going to have help from the chamber, and we're going to get to that here in a minute, and pro-St. Jim. What you see there is my attempt to kind of give you an idea of what I would imagine as first year costs. Location One is a well-known website where businesses list property. We have a membership, but we could upgrade that. That's about $1,500. Advertising, I put $5,000. I could be low-balling that a little bit. Advertising, again, we're not advertising to tourists. We're advertising to businesses. Window Cleans, I think ProSaintGen probably will tackle that. But what I mean by that is not the public works building, which we will work on. So you say. So you say. So empty buildings downtown that want someone in them, we would put a window cleaning that basically looks like there's a business inside it. Call this number if you're interested. Professional business development information packets. So that $2,000 is a combination of working on that, and then printing those. Conference attendance, you see there's an asterisk there, so I gave you some examples. Obviously, Erin already attends the Governor's Conference, but there's also a Main Streeter, so not a state Main Street America, but a national Main Street America conference. And then there's a national economic mobility conference that actually I'd like to attend. These conferences would involve not going to Branson, but going to Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, wherever that is, not tons of them, but some of them if we want to put our best foot forward. So I put $4,000 in that line. Possible website upgrade, I don't know that that's needed, but I put it in there because I want to give you a full picture. That's $2,000. Those totals come up to $15,500. That's a pretty good deal. That does not include an additional member of personnel, an additional employee, but that would be good. And then I want you to think about support, in addition to that $15,500, support for the chamber, Parkland Ready, Pro St. Gen. So we had a gentleman here tonight asking Mr. Josh Wright about help for Pro St. Gen. We give the chamber $6,000 a year. We paid Parkland Ready $5,154. or we will by the end of the fiscal year. That's $11,154. Do we want to repurpose some of that into this program? And then of course, as Alderman Steiger mentioned, we have money coming, we will have money coming in from the transient tax. I'm going to guess by December because those quarterly payments will come in by then. And I think, you know, some of the short-term rentals may struggle with those first initial payments, just getting their payment made, getting the information. But I do anticipate by the course of the end of the fiscal 27 budget year, the TTC and tourism marketing will have another source of income that can help with some of these costs. So to kind of wrap that up, do you see anything in here that you'd like us to budget or not budget for If not, or if so, then you'll see that $15,500 included in the budget figures that you see in about a month. And then start to think, or we can talk tonight about, do you want to repurpose some of the money that's currently going to the other economic development organizations out or keep and grow? I'm going to give you my suggestion for one of them, and that is Almost a year in now, I don't know that Parkland Ready is benefiting us.

They're going to land a whale or they're not, and so it's like, do you keep hoping that they're going to land a whale?

Do they do? They do a much larger version of what I was just saying the three of us would do. They go out and they market, but they're marketing industrial development centers, large amounts of acreage. Which we don't have. For multiple entities as well. For multiple entities and multiple use. How much goes to them? $5,154. And we are also paying the county's portion of that bill.

I don't see any reason to stick with it myself. That's an easy one. You haven't done anything yet, have you?

I mean, they're marketing us.

I mean, that's it.

We can do that.

You can do that, yes. And then we talked about the chamber too. And then we talked about the chamber and the money we give them. It comes up every year.

Please find out what just the city portion of that would be. If you know what it is. So, because right now we are trying to help the county out on that and kind of keep them involved, which is...

Okay. Everybody got their marching orders? What about the chamber?

what we talked about, quit funding them. Let's see what happens.

I do think they're putting a foot forward. They're reaching out about expanding their website and their IDC website to incorporate more listings. They recently did a survey where they're asking their membership if they want more kind of the things I talked about, more classes on how to apply for a grant, classes on how to improve your social media presence. Do they want that?

They updated their brochure, so similar to what you're wanting to do for like a business development information packet, so that would be good to kind of look what they did because they're trying to do that, or they have, they completed that. They do look pretty good, so that would be a good template to use. So I've been going now regularly. We haven't had somebody from the board go to their board meetings, and I've been going pretty regularly. I've missed one or two, but I've gone to most of them. You know, we ask them to really put their foot forward to do some economic development and kind of show us what the results are. To Dave's point, you know, yes. I'm always frustrated with any, you know, so take what I say with a grain of salt. I think they could do more. And so I don't know. Are they utilizing that to the best of their ability? I don't know. So I'm going to be trying to watch over the next couple months because it's coming up. October will be here before you know it. So in August and September are the months for our budget. So tonight I wouldn't say yes or no, but I'm teetering. I'm like,

Would you like to see something from Pro St. Gen from the Chamber that says, this is what we will do with the $6,000, whatever that money is?

I mean, if you just said, hey, put out a request for proposal. If we have $6,000, we have $10,000, it says, hey, we want to partner with somebody to do a project for economic development for the city of St. John, and we're doing a request for proposals that says, and give us your best stump for your idea of how to pitch the city with $5,000 or $10,000 and submit a proposal to us. I hate to pit these against each other, you know, or if we're plan ready or, but I mean, I would like them to kind of in a way compete with each other.

Maybe you end up funding some of both.

Yeah, maybe. So I think, you know, a request for proposal ideas, interesting way to go about it.

I think that's a good idea. Yeah, I agree. And see what they do. You know, are they going to support us or not?

I think particularly the chamber has its own members and charges dues and many cities do not give money to the chamber. This pro-St. John group is sitting there just starting with no funding. I am more inclined to support a new group with new ideas than I think money we give to the chamber fund just goes into the general operating fund and you've not set any expectations for it. I would just say after we gave them, Alderman Roth last year proposed cutting their subsidy by half and ending it. Never came to a vote. The next thing was in the budget. The first meeting I went to, it was a discussion about annexing Mississippi Lime and was told, well, the chamber who had been We got here and spoke about how much they supported the city. Well, they were neutral on the city's attempts to annex Mississippi Lime. So how much of a partner goes neutral on our single biggest economic impact that we're working on? So I would like to look hard at how much money we give them and not make it, if we do give them some, that we have real expectations of how that is going to be spent. And my favor is to support the pro-St. Gen.

I'm with Patrick on that. What's going to benefit the city the most? You know, shaking up the chamber a little bit or pushing on what our idea is of pro-St. Gen. It's just like that. To me, my money is on you guys.

I agree with that.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, we've got a few more months left before we have to, you know, but I think it's worth talking about and it's worth thinking about right now.

The only other thing on this to think about, so we've talked about the job descriptions, you know, talked about the budget and what you'll see coming forward is, you know, think about... Incentives or grant assistance. So we have a TIF, but a small business that wants to go into a lower level two-story building downtown and sell groceries is not going to benefit from TIF, right? So we have a program now where we reimburse people for half of what they spend on a sidewalk, up to a certain amount. Can you take that and fashion it into rent for a small business. So just keep those thoughts in your head. I'm gonna try to come back to you with some ideas. There are other economic development tools out there like a neighborhood improvement district, things of that nature, but they're really for larger projects. And I think what I've been hearing is we want more retail. Now we can't, we've talked about this, we're not gonna get Walmart to town. I don't know that anybody wants Walmart to town. we can get smaller retail. If you didn't see, read, view what Pro St. Gen through Missouri Main Street presented about two weeks ago, what are those diagrams called? Is it a VIN where the word's bigger?

Oh, no, yeah, it's almost like a scatterblot.

Yeah, it's almost like a scatterblot where they take all the responses, they put them in a slide, and the biggest word is the one that got the most votes, okay? And, you know, honestly, we have our share of restaurants. It was restaurants, clothing. I can't remember the third one, but they're not big retailers that most of the votes were they were for smaller retailers. So just keep that in mind as we go forward. And if you have any other thoughts, let me know.

And if anybody would like to see that information, I've sent out an email, but pro St. Jen is doing a breakfast next Wednesday at 8am at Audubon's. It's free for anybody to come and you get, you get breakfast with it. We have to RSVP. So if anybody wants to go and didn't get that, I can say that again.

I want to touch base a little bit on the chamber deal and stuff. You know, we attended that meeting that day and you outlined a lot of things you felt other chambers were doing in other cities and stuff. I mean, has there been any more progress, discussion?

I've reached back out because I made both points that day. We talked about packets for lowering businesses. We talked about a portion of their website where small businesses could go to, like some other chambers have, and get information. We talked about classes on how to apply for grants, how to do better social media, and we talked about attending conferences, just like we've talked about here tonight. Again, I think they're putting a foot forward, but there hasn't... None of those are complete.

I don't know, Joe, what have you... You've attended their board meetings. Surely there has to be some discussion about those bullet points.

Yeah, some. There's been a lot of changes over there. They moved into a new building. They're going through a new computer system with a license office. They're getting ready. They had some changes on their music series this summer with a couple bands. So there have been some other things going on. They worked on that brochure. And that, in a way, is pretty positive because that helps us in a general way. I don't know. If I had to say it splashed right all over the face and said they're going hardcore for economic development, I don't know if that's really their mission either. They're here to support business retention and growth. So we're looking for... business growth. And so, I don't know, I'm still on the fence to say that they've really pushed it hard.

You know, just before we just up and vote on, you know, changing or cutting, I think we need to revisit a meeting with them and express our concerns and, you know, have that discussion again that we're coming up here in October and it's going to be a topic and stuff and we need to talk about it.

I certainly hope they're fully aware that it's going to be a topic. But you are 100% correct.

I can tell you I, in the last five years, have started three new businesses in town in terms of restarting the Main Street Inn, taking the abandoned factory building and making the antique wall, and then taking space and developing the RV park. I never got one phone call from anybody from the Chamber of Commerce. I never helped promote it. Good idea. It turns out later I found out there's grants available if you take an old factory and convert it into a new business for funding from the state. But I found out about too late. Nobody would think that somebody in town should be aware of those kind of things and somebody starting a new business that they would be proactive trying to help them in the development and then active maybe in promoting them once they opened up.

Okay, good point. One last thing, if you don't mind. Go for it. Okay, under other business. Yeah, yeah. Real quick, Robert is going to go over some stuff to do with changing our ordinance on animals. We're not going to make any decisions. We're not going to discuss it long because it's not on the agenda, but he's got a few questions for you. We've had some complaints. I'm sure some of you have heard about it, about the number of animals in certain properties. We don't have a number. We do have a rule that you can't have livestock, and that gets enforced sometimes. But anyway, Robert, go ahead.

Did you have pigs in town?

We did.

um so i would say around because he's he's involved with this too um so i've researched multiple cities uh where i came from most recently was crystal city and animal control was under my department there and i can tell you from that aspect of it animal control took up way too much of my time it's a constant issue I mean it's always something not that you know we don't necessarily get all those calls here in City Hall so we may not even know about a lot of these but as the administrator said there that that we don't have a number so if we go we get called out to a house and they've got 20 dogs in the house unless it's violating some other part of the ordinance, which you would think if there was 20 dogs in the house, it would probably be violating some other ordinance, right? But it is possible that it's not. Do we want to let somebody have 20 dogs in the house? That's basically the number that we want to kind of get to and think about. Most cities are anywhere from three to five total animals. When I say animals, I'm just including dogs and cats in that because other small domesticated animals such as um i know people aren't gonna like this one snakes um birds rodents all those are considered so small that and we wouldn't even know they're there they don't necessarily come outside with people so um those are kind of out of that number that three to five is mainly related to dogs and cats chickens are off by themselves because there's the movement to have chickens we've already got that taken care of here and other livestock is already taken care of here so it's that important you know, three to five number that we need to decide on what number if we want to have a number. If we don't have a number, there's not a whole lot we can do if we get somebody with 20 dogs in their house. Like I said, other than it's causing another issue.

So before we put an ordinance together, are you interested in this ordinance? We could certainly debate it at that point because it's not on our agenda tonight, but is that number five? That's kind of where we landed, I think.

If we said the number's five, are there enough? Are there homes that have a lot more? Is this a one-off, or is there five or ten houses that might have?

I can tell you there's no homes registered with the city. that have more than two animals. However, I think this would affect a handful.

Some that are starkly violating this. And I think what our plan there would be, you know, if you've got somebody, let's say, with three dogs and three cats, well, they're over the five, right? So they're at six. Well, we don't want to be the ones that's going to go and tell you you've got to choose which family pet you're going to get rid of, right?

Are they grandfathered then?

Correct. So, you know, they would have to come and register them though. So right now, we may not even know that there are six animals at all in that area. So they register those and we'll give them a time frame to do that. Whatever time frame you guys want to set forth, we'll set that time frame. We'll get all that out there. We'll promote all that and give everybody the opportunity to decide. you know, hey, if I want to retain these six animals, I've got to go get them registered. If I don't, I just want to run the risk that one of them might get out. Next thing you know, somebody's at my house knocking on my door and they see my six animals, then I'm not grandfathered because I didn't register them.

Are you talking about just animals on the property or are you talking about animals in the building?

Animals total. So if they're at your property, And I don't mean like if I come and visit you and you've got five dogs or six animals and I'm bringing my dog over for a visit, we're not counting that. It's those that are there on that property, they belong to those owners. And believe me, I've been involved in several cases where It's very hard to determine who owns what.

So if I have a dog that has six pups, I got it.

That's different. There's a provision for that. Normally, some cut it down to weeks, but most of the places are at six months. So they give you six months from when the dog has pups to... Take care of those pubs.

This mostly arises from neighbor complaints.

Is that what sets off? So, for instance, one particular house here in town, the dogs were running loose. When we go over there, they're actually jumping out of the window of the house.

And there were 19 of them.

Yeah, and there were 19 in this particular house. And when we show up, they all go jumping back in the same window.

So now you know why we're here.

Yeah.

right it's not what about like in my house we have two feral cats that we domesticated i guess you'd say sure but any given day you can look out there and there'll be four or five feral cats out there wanting fed same time so the feral cats are another issue cities have handled those in multiple different ways some have wrote ordinances that if you're feeding them

They automatically become yours. I'm not a big fan of that method, but if that's what the aldermen want to do, then that's what they want to do. Others have gotten themselves involved with programs that people put up. They've got groups that go around and they spay or neuter these cats. They catch them, they clip their ear, put a triangle clip in their ear, and then they release them back where they got them from. So they won't reproduce anymore. But they're going to put them right back where they got them from so they can live wild. And they're just going to be living wild until they pass away of old age. Thought process is there. They're not going to reproduce, so you won't have as many of them. But we still get the complaints that we got before. It's not that the cats are breeding. It's the cats are in my flower bed, and they're making a mess, and they're doing all that, and we don't want these cats here. And cats go from 2 to 20.

So I'm feeling that we just need to work. Yeah. Questions, then we'd be done. But that's okay. We'll bring it back to it works. Yep. Not enough.

Okay.

All right. Are you back?

I don't know what the season on fair. I'll catch.

I said, I don't know what the number is. It's not three.

You can make us some nice jackets. Thank you.

Sorry to cut you off. It's been a long night. Appreciate everybody's. I just want to comment. I want to thank Robert for this because You know, 5 of the 8 properties are in Sam and I's ward and stuff. That's a big help. But if you can update this, you know, it's something.

Anybody else got anything they want to chat about right now? I want to go over. Okay.

Then we'll adjourn. Thank you all.

Thanks, guys.