Planning and Parks Committee - Regular Meeting

I now want them creek and they do a pretty good job. They like double checked and we are live. Good. Okay. All right everybody, welcome to the city of Wildwood Planning Parks Committee meeting for Tuesday, November 18th, 2025. Um, I get a motion for approval of the minutes for last meeting, October. Well, could we do a roll call, sir? A roll call would be good. Thank you. We'll do a roll call. Chair Galani. Yes. Uh, Council Member Obli, Council Member McCutchen, here. Council member Davo, here.

Council member Rambo. Council member Crayons here. Council member Atenberg here. Council member Trudier here. And we have a quorum. All right. Now we'll move into approval of the minutes. Can I get a motion for the council motion? Second. All in favor motion please say I. I. Any opposed? Any motion? Thank you. Absolutely. And that takes us into public participation. Let's pretend we have anybody online.

If anyone um currently uh using Zoom would like to participate, please use the raise hand feature and we will promote you to a panelist. Yes, sir. Oh, okay. That takes us straight into action items on planning matters. We have four items for consideration. The first being the basin retrofit study.

Mr. Wagner is here and director Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair and members of the committee, if you didn't get a chance to introduce yourself or Mr. Wagner, come around. Todd Wagner. He is our consultant that's been working with a group of other consultants over the course of the last several years. Mr. Wagner was finally given an assignment that we thought was one of the critical projects for our watershed erosion task force recommendations and that was the basin retrofits in the upper reaches and middle reaches of the Cox Creek wershed as has been explained many times those basins generally in the older subdivisions were done at an MSD standard that wouldn't pass muster today but they're still functional and not doing what we would hope they would do in terms of the amounts of rainfall we're getting and the intensity and severity in some instances. Basin retrofits was a suggestion along with out of the USGS study potentially adding new storage basins in the watershed as well. Fix the old and maybe do the new. Mr. Wagner, I'll take it from there. Thank you very much.

Okay. Thank you, Joe.

Okay. This is a um fairly long and involved presentation that I am going to go through pretty quickly because I don't want to take too much of your time. Uh but I will leave some time at the end for questions. If you want to do a question at the end, but if you want to interject, just jump right in. It won't bother me a bit. Um that's good thing about not really having a train of thought. You can't interrupt my train of thought, right? So, um, no, it's go ahead and just yell out or raise your hand or whatever. If you have a question as we're going along, something's not clear, I want to make be sure that you feel comfortable and you feel like you're understanding um kind of what this is all about and what the what the point is um behind this study and and where you're headed uh from here. So, um so yes, this is a retrofit um study of a few basins. these basins. Uh we've been we've been looking at detention basins in Wildwood for a few years now and um we have paired these down to the ones that we felt like had the most opportunity for improvement. Sometimes if you're looking at something the worse it is, the more room for improvement you have. So to some degree that's kind of true. If a basin is already doing really well, there's not as much uh gap there for improvement. So that's kind of um one of the criteria that we've looked at is is how was the basin designed and how is it performing and what's the opportunity to improve that basin. Uh I want to clear uh make clear um pointed at the computer

is it?

Okay. If it if mine's not working, I'll just kind of see your way.

Okay. Um I want to get something straight. Um first of all, when we're talking about retrofitting basins, we have two types of basins. And so that you understand um the terminology, we have what we call a wet basin, and that's a pond. You have a lot of ponds. Uh a retention basin. Um a wet basin, we use those types of terms for something that is a pond. and that when it rains it fills up and then it drains back down to what we call the permanent pool. Um then we have dry basins and those are uh those that just completely drain out and normally they're dry and they have grass or whatever in the bottom of them. And so when we're looking at um the top we have a dry basement. So the light gray is was what we call the the designed flood level. That is flood water. That's water that only goes in after a heavy rain and then it drains out completely, usually within a few hours after a rainfall and then you have a dry basin. All of that is what we call flood control water. The more we can store, the more effective we're going to reduce downstream flow rates and downstream flooding. When you have a when they have a wet basin like most of the basins are that we're looking at today, you have a permanent pool, this dark area, and then this area here is the flood pool. And that is the area um or the volume that we're trying to increase whenever we try to um improve uh downstream flooding when we try to store more water and release it slowly. So this is the this is the range of elevations that we're trying to gain more uh perhaps by excavating on the side of the pond over here to get more storage in this range. Now when we talk about cleaning out a basin, in other words, some of the wet basins need to have sediment cleaned out of them.

That's this area down at the bottom where you might have um accumulated sediment over time and the pond has become more shallow. uh perhaps it has more algae problems, more sediment, it just looks murky or um just the quality of the water has degraded over time, particularly in the summer. You'll notice that. And so there's benefit to cleaning that out. But I want to be clear, when you clean out the bottom of a basin, the sediment, you are improving the water quality or the aesthetics of the lake, but you're not providing any benefit for flood control. The flood control volume is this gray area. And if that's the volume we want to increase to reduce flooding, this is just purely to improve the quality of the pond or perhaps improve water quality downstream by reducing sediment or by reducing uh nutrients or the algae growth would be less and so forth. Um, so I just want to make that clear that there's a distinction there in wet ponds between permanent pool and design flood level or design flood pool and the purpose of this water and the purpose of that water is is different. So when we're talking about that, keep that in mind. See if it's going to work. Now

it went a little too far.

Go. There we go. So, when we're looking at a retention pond sediment removal, this is just to so you can visualize what it might look like. Um, this is a small wet pond that was being cleaned out. And this is typically what you would see. Um, very fertile organic soils that have that has washed in over time, a soft unconsolidated soil. And so, we're going to excavate that soft mucky material and get it out of there. Um and then you are down to what we would call virgin soil. That is hopefully soil that's consolidated original soil that will be um more uh apt to not leak and so forth. But whenever you take off overburden like that soil that's somewhere down below it is bedrock and the potential for leaks and sink holes and you know as well as we do in southwest Missouri about sink holes and and carst activity. you always have that risk. And so the with the recommendations that you see in this, you will see excavate that soft um unconsolidated sediment material and then put back a layer of of bentonite clay over that to give you kind of an insurance policy against um having a leakage problem that you could expose by doing this type of work. Um, so it reduces that risk of potentially having a leaky pond when you're done. It's kind of giving us a a seal of bentonite clay. So that's that I would recommend doing that as part of the any of these um sediment removal activities um to hopefully make sure that we don't have any leaks when we get done.

Can I ask a quick question? Yes, ma'am. On the bentonite clay, does it expand when it's in the water? It does. That's that's partially how why it seals so well. Okay. Kind of like if you've ever squirted the stuff to seal your the cracks in your basement or whatever and you squirt it in and it expands and fills those voids. Bentonite is really good at that. It has extremely expansive clay. Okay. Yeah, good question though. Good comment. Thank you.

There. Um so, uh these are the basins we're looking at. Westland retention pond, Copper Lakes Retention Ponds. There's two. the harbors of Lake Chesterfield, which is the retention pond upstream of the big lake, and then Town Center, which is the one right here nearby, the Southwest detention basin here, which is a dry basin. These three are wet basins. Um, so here's the location. This is West Glenn. Uh, this black line here is the outline of Cox Creek watershed, which drains to the north. Um, and so we these are the three town center basins. Here's the one on the southwest the harbors at Lake Chesterfield and there's the two at Copper Lakes. And so those were the ones that rose to the top as having the best opportunity for a retrofit. Uh too much text on on a slide, right? But we'll we'll we'll talk about this real quickly. I want you to understand the things that we look at from an engineering design standpoint to vet and make sure that our designs are responsible. Um, so we're reducing the rate of water discharge. That's the goal because ultimately we're trying to reduce erosion uh downstream. And the more water you have, generally the more bank erosion you're going to have. So reduce that flow, hold it, meter it out at a slower rate. Reduce the frequency and duration of erosion causing flow rate. So there's a generally there's a range of flow that really beats on your uh channel walls downstream. those that where the you see erosion occurring. So we try to reduce how often that occurs and how long it occurs uh on those downstream channels. So that's kind of the goal of of designing volume and and uh release rates from these ponds. We want to increase flood storage. We want to restrict the outlet openings. We want to maintain the 100-year inundation on common areas. And that is we're not we

don't want to increase in the big floods in a 100redyear flood. We don't want it to back up and cause more flooding than it would have before. So, we have to check that 100-year flood and make sure we're not going to worsen flooding on on anyone in an extreme event like that. Obtain easements if necessary. And there might be a case where you might inundate a little bit of private property. So, that would be a case where we would want to obtain a a detention easement. um add emergency overflow to make sure we don't cause an overflow that could wash out a burm or something of that nature. Uh maintain a freeboard that is the space between the highest water surface elevation and the top of a burm. Um you don't want to fill that all the way to the top because you have no safety factor there at all. If you have any settling in your burm, you over top that burm, you don't want to wash it out. So that's a little bit of a safety factor. uh check our future conditions uh aka what's going on right here uh next door uh is there going to be any more developments we want to look at that prevent bank erosion due to changes in water surface uh pond maintenance opportunities do we have a opportunity to reduce the pond maintenance or improve aesthetics on these ponds pond dredging um has been very understand there's a lot of interest in that to improve the quality of the pond so those are a lot of different criteria that we're looking at. Yes, sir.

Uh item number seven, were you mentioned uh adding overflow capacity as needed to some of the ponds. So, are there specific ponds where you foresee that being necessary or is it just sort of a general comment?

Yeah, I'm going to go real quickly. I'm going to look at each pond and what our recommended changes are. And um they actually what partly what we're doing as we try to increase that volume of flood storage, you you might push uh the water surface a little higher for some of the smaller storms. Um so then we have to install a little bit of overflow spillway capacity so that large storm has a way to get out and it doesn't go up. you're increasing a smaller storm elevation, but you don't want your really big hundred-year storm to get any higher. And so sometimes we do that, we control that by installing an extra spillway at the top end um to make sure that that doesn't flood anybody that didn't get flooded before.

And I'm sure it probably goes without saying, but I I'll say it anyway. Uh obviously if you're going to add an overflow capacity on on some of these or a spillway, you have plans for where the water is going to go once it goes through the spillway. Uh yes. Okay.

And keep in mind the actual flow isn't anymore, but the water surface elevation is higher. And so we're trying to control water surface elevation, but also increase the volume so that the downstream flow doesn't get more. it it's a water surface elevation and and so we just want to make sure that we don't cause any kind of a problem with over topping that we didn't have before. Um okay, so let's look at these real quick. West Glenn is kind of what we call the west branch of Cox Creek. Our blue lines over there kind of indicate um that. And so West Glenn, it really only collects um water from an area just to the northwest there. Um, and if you get your bearings, this is 109 and 100. So, we kind of see it's in the northeast of of that area. Um, so we have everything draining in this direction, but Westland only collects a small area um in this um picture. It's just this area right up here. So, it is an what we would call an incremental improvement. we can reduce flows a lot but it's only collecting water from a small area as compared to the overall west branch of of um crew. So it it's very effective at doing what it does but it is a small area and a small incremental improvement within the overall wershed. Um so this is the basin. This is our survey that kind of shows you what it looks like with the spillway. Here is the bottom end and there's a creek right here and it's that way it drain into here.

Um, so so are you saying that that small pond is going to stop the erosion and C cox creek?

Well, that's what I was saying. It's an incremental it's an incremental improvement. So the big picture is when we get to the very end, I'm recommending a number of things be done. Um because just any one thing is not going to fix your Cox Creek problem. Um unless you build another Lake Chesterfield or something of that magnitude. But um but what we're looking at are incremental improvements. Looking at what's a dollar per in dollar per incremental improvement that we see. So we kind of look at it that way. We'll look at that. Um, and this one is good in that respect, but it's not large enough to fix the problem on it. Right.

So, just keep that in mind. These are all parts of a of a large puzzle of trying to heal this watershed and bring its runoff, you know, characteristics back to more like predevelopment conditions. That's basically what we're trying to do. Um this is the outlet structure and we would make some modifications to this to make this higher to restrict this low flow more. Um and so basically this pond has a lot of extra volume. So we're going to take advantage of that volume. Right now it's not being used. It never has it never fills up. It will never fill with the outlet structure that it has on it. So we're going to restrict it more and push that water surface to the top. A lot of the top of the burm is uneven and has sags in it. So, we would repair the top of the burm, restrict the outlet. The creek has a large slab of concrete in it that has erosion problems. Would recommend um fixing that. There's rais the top level b. Um doing some armoring around the banks where you have a lot of brush and erosion on the on the banks of the lake. um some uh erosion there and sediment below the incoming pipe would be cleaned up. Uh this is kind of the the big slab of concrete that I showed you there where there's erosion. This is the type of more natural corrective action that you would do. There is what we call a boulder drop structure or something of that nature that is makes the creek function more like a natural creek instead of having the potential for erosion that could even threaten the outlet structure. The plan, a preliminary plan of what it would look like with the rock around the perimeter and some modifications here in the creek. um fixing. Here's an overflow spillway that would be added to make

sure that um we don't over top just kind of as a safety factor. And then all along this burm that would be leveled up. Oh, maybe a foot added in places to make sure that burm is nice and level right at the elevation that we want it to be. So, this is a the first pond, an example of what

So, do do you think you'll need easements for that pond? Um on this one uh because we are raising the water surface um it it touches the corner of this lot. So we have a small triangular easement there that would need to be acquired and really only in the 100year flood would you see the water get to that elevation. But um it would really be the right thing to do would be to gain the right to pond. It it would be a very minor easement though. I assume this is common ground for the uh homeowners.

The Yes. All of this property is their u the homeowner association common ground. Yes. And that that's the case in all of these. Um this is some details just to show you we've worked out some of the details to some degree u in the preliminary design. So uh we can always visit that. I'll there'll be a report that you can look at in more detail if you want to spend time looking at things like that. Um so this is kind of a summary of what we just talked about. Um the all the things that would be done to West Glenn. Um we would be able to reduce uh small to large storms by about 25 to 30%. Um and so that these are some of the uh performance numbers that we've looked at. Um it it it really really reduces the water coming through there but it is a smaller drainage area. So in the overall picture of things, um it's a small incremental improvement um that we can make with by modifying this basin. Um lots of numbers, but bottom line about $250,000 for that. It also includes uh sediment removal and hauling, which is about $10,000 there. And there's uh but anyway included in that is the um the clay bit knife liner also would be

Yes sir. Quick question. Um while this is a small increment it's closer to the start of the creek. Correct. So yeah, everything that I'm recommending is in the upper half of um Cox so that you can reap more benefits over the longest stretch of the creek. If we go further north and do improvements there, that's great, but it only helps from that point north

down at the bottom and that may not really reap you all that benefit. So yes, generally the upper reaches which is the southern half of the watershed um if you know what we often call the triple bend uh streer and

behind yeah that's correct. So that point coming south or to the uh upstream of that is generally where all the peaks are going to fall. Um, Popper Lakes is a couple basins um there inside the red circle. Um, this is on now we've gone east. We're on the east side of Fox Creek wershed. Here's Chesterfield over here. Um, and so we looked at that. It's a little different. These are all unique. Uh, so there's two basins. They flow north. There's a larger watershed here. Um but we are fairly limited in what we can do there because there are some homes that are fairly low um related to the pond and so we have to be really careful we're not ponding water up into some of the homes that are adjacent to the uh to the lake. So we looked at that and so we have our surveys and our watershed area is what the yellow is there. And so we are looking at um on the south basin it already has um uh rock around it which is pretty good. Uh but these what basically how these function are the outlet structures allow so much water to flow through that they're what I call a flowthrough basin. They don't ever really store much water. So they don't ever really do that much good. And so a couple things we would do is restrict some of these large holes in this outlet structure. We would create a notch um about 6 in lower to drop the permanent pool 6 in. And now that gives us more flood storage when it starts to rain. That's additional storage. And then by restricting it, we'd actually push the water higher. Um and so that is um some

of the changes we would make to increase that flood volume um above the permanent pool. The flood volume um there would need to be an some improvements to the overflow in this corridor right here where it would overflow in this direction and we just want to make sure that we wouldn't affect anyone that we would keep all that within this easement here. So there would be some improvements along that corridor to convey um overflow water if that ever occurred in a large event and keep it within the storm system which comes out over here. So um that's what copper lakes looks like. Um the south basin, the north pond is different. It needs um treatment around the perimeter. It does not have a rock treatment around the perimeter. It's got some kind of strange things here with posts and a pipe here. it's some kind of a dead old utility line, gas line or something. Um, a lot of problems there where the pipe comes in, needs to be cleaned up, and so there's a lot of stability issues there. Um, and also, uh, we'd be looking at a retaining wall along the north side there, uh, to keep water from getting up onto that property. uh just because of the way the land is sloped right now, water would get up onto the property. And if we start increasing water surface, we just keep pushing it up and up and up into their property. So, we would build a retaining wall there to keep that water off of their property. We could get more volume and have an overflow point here where we would add some capacity and drop it into a pipe that's right here. Um so, that's the um uh same thing here. We have a large uh outlet structure that we would block partially block. We would drop the water surface by 6 in. Um so there would be a slight change in the permanent pool, but

it probably wouldn't be noticeable. Um this is what the plan would look like. Um and it's just got an edge treatment. It's got some improvements here where it overflows to the north. This is the south pond. Back to the south pond. Then the north pond would have treatment around the perimeter with the wall at the north and an overflow structure there. Some improvements here where the pipe comes in. And there's some details which we won't look at that. And so this is the south pond and the north pond. They're different, but these are the all the different u things that I would recommend that we would do to those, including removing about 2 to three feet of sediment. That south pond um has a lot of sediment in it. So there would be a lot of material come out of it. U so this would reduce flows by 11 to 18%. We're adding 159 cubic feet of uh storage which is an increase of about 135%. So a lot a big increase in storage. Um and then we're uh passing um the large storms by adding some inlets to collect those overflow uh large flows. And so that those two ponds being modified would are coming out at about $313,000. All of these are kind of in the 150 to 300 range on the cost. uh harbors at Lake Chesterfield retention pond is right here just upstream of the big Lake Chesterfield Lake. Um just to give you perspective, the Copper Lakes ponds are right here. So these are both in the east uh half the east um branch of Cox Creek.

Do those ponds, Copper Lakes ponds flow into Lake Chesterfield? Copper Lakes. Ponds do they flow? They come in downstream of the lake. Um, show you. So, proper lakes here and here and there's a pipe that runs this way right here. So, this is right here. So, they come together here on the Catholic cemetery. That water goes into Lake Chesterfield. No, Copper Lakes does not. It it it uh comes in just below the dam at Lakechester.

Okay. And then it just settles in there. Where's it? Where's it go? Where's it flow to? The water. Then it flows to the north. It goes under Highway 100. And it just keeps on going north up to that pin up there. And that's where the east branch and the west branch of Cox Creek all comes together at that pin. And then just continues for There's no creek or anything it runs in. Just natural flow. It's kind of a It's a large ditch. I mean, there's a lot of water there. So, there's a ditch. It's down in a ravine. Okay. It's hard to get to. I've been down there and it's not easy to get to. And I'll be honest with you, the reason I'm asking because I live on that south uh lake. I got a house on on Copper Lakes. Oh, okay. So,

it's in W seven. What?

Oh, um Okay. Okay, so this is the Lake Chesterfield Lake. Um, it's a nice lake for the most part. Looks very good. Um, we do want to increase the volume and restrict the discharge again here and do some improvements. There is some erosion around the perimeter um do some um excavation um along this area right here to increase the flood volume. So, be some excavation above the normal pool. uh just kind of laying that slope back a little bit steeper to get a little bit more volume there. Um this is what the outlet structure looks like. Basically, there is very little flood storage occurring here. When the water comes in, the water starts to come up. And this is a pretty large structure. It spills over. It never really goes up more than a foot or two. You could have a hundred-year flood here and it's just going to keep spilling into the overflow and it's just not going to pond very much. Um, it doesn't provide much downstream benefit because it doesn't store very much blood water. It's kind of a pass through basin. Um, so the proposal here again would be to cut a 6-inch wide notch in this wall to lower the permanent pool a little bit. And when you lower the permanent pool, now you've increased you increased the the flood pool. So you have more flood volume available to reduce downstream flows. So that would be one u one thing that could be done. The area in red there could be excavated. It's pretty flat right now. So that could be excavated and get more flood volume up here. This area here has a lot of sediment um accumulation. And there could be some sediment removal in the upper reaches there and on the side along with the slope adjustments on this side. Um so we could get some pretty good um reduction in flows. Um there's

several spots that need some additional edge treatments with the rock to prevent um erosion. And so with the sediment removal, the erosion prevention, you would see some of this water quality um improve with less algae. Um, so there's a the plan on that something like that with some edge treatments and just some modifications there and some grading changes right in here. All that within the common area though, so there would not need to be any easements there.

Yes. We did not four or five years ago have an issue with um the main drag of That's not the main That's not the main Okay, that's what I wanted to ask. This is the pond just upstream of the main lake. Okay. At this time, we're not proposing. We could do something there, but we were trying to kind of avoid it because the leaking that has just been in the main lake. Okay. Thank you. Um,

so, uh, anyway, these are this is kind of what I just, uh, explained. And so, we reduce downstream flow rates by 10 to 20%. And that's what flows into Lake Chesterfield. Then, of course, there's more flow reduction from Lake Chesterfield. U, but it's all again part of the puzzle of trying to reduce flows ultimately in in Cox Creek further downstream. That one comes in at about 227,000. Um, and so, uh, we get some pretty good benefits from it. Now, the last one is a dry basin. This is the big walled basin that you have just to the south of here. Um, it's right here.

Is this underground? No, it is. It's above ground. It has a fence around it, but it's vertical retaining walls. It's dry. It now has a lot of trees and stuff growing in it. It's big. It's like a giant bathtub sort of. But um

anyway, it is very effective. It's a newer basin like all of your basins here in South and Town Center. This one and the 20 East site, they're very effective. They're dry based to the newer standards. U but we could improve it some. All of the volume in that basin is not really being used. So I would u restrict it even more. I would also clean out the trees because those roots with modular block retaining walls, they don't play well together. And if you start having root intrusion into the foundation of those retaining walls, um, they may not necessarily hold together very well. You may be having some big problems down the road. So, I would recommend a full-blown clean out of sediment and trees out of the bottom of that basin to kind of restore it back to its original condition. Um, that's really maintenance, but it's still something that you could do while you're in there restricting the flows and trying to improve flows. It's also important, I think, with the new development going in, which is kind of here, um, to help reduce flows as to kind of counter the new development there, which is going to be adding some flow in the future. So, so yeah, here's the basin. Here we are up in the build our building. Uh uh so we're in this building and there's the basin and the new development is going in right here and everything drains out this direction and flows that direction. Um and the other two orange areas there are the other two basins but there's really not a whole lot that I could find that we could do to those to really make a lot of improvement. So, I didn't have those included. There's what the basin looks like with um it actually I think that has more growth in it. Now,

survey the watershed area. And so now this is what it looks like. Um this is the control structure top of it. That's about 13 feet square I think something like that. Pretty large structure. It could be restricted more. we could clean out the bottom and gain back a lot of volume that we've lost because of just sediment and uh just the stuff that's in there.

So that's the and this is the big picture. You can see there it's pretty large and it's got a lot of growth in it that's tree growth hard woody woody growth which is a little bit worrisome. So that's the recommendation for the southwest detention basin. Uh here at Town Center, uh downstream benefits, you can reduce flow rates by 50% um and get an additional couple feet of storage by pushing the water higher by restricting the outlet. Um and so that's that's kind of what we're looking at for this basin. Um over compensation for the additional development there. So we talked about that. So this one's not as much. It's mostly excavation work on that on the soil and 185,000 um on that. And so when we look at all four of these um that I just talked about, this is kind of how they line up. Um these three include pond sediment removal. Uh it's about 175,000 that's estimated when you add the cost of pond of sediment removal in these three four ponds. Um, so it could be less, but I understand that's a high priority probably for these subdivisions to see some improvements to their lakes. Uh, so yeah, if you include it, you're you're you're knocking at a million dollars on all flows. Um, this is kind of a summary. There's a lot of numbers here, but this is an evaluation of the effectiveness. So you have the drainage area, uh, how many acres drains into it. Of course, more acres that drains into it, the more effective it is overall. Um, how much volume you have in cubic feet. Uh, what's the volume per acre? And these are probably a little too technical to try to explain, but these are metrics that I'm using to try to evaluate which is most effective, how much volumes

being added. There's a total of what 400,000 roughly cubic feet of volume being added by all of these. So, that's not bad. Um, bottom line is you look at cost estimate. What's the dollar per cubic foot added? What's the dollar per volume added? Um, there's not a huge difference there. They all come out fairly close. These two are a little better, a little higher. Um, but, um, that kind of gives some metrics on how effective that these are. Um, so here's where I'm going with recommendation. And I'll try to wrap up here is Joe kind of asked me, "Okay, what would you recommend if we were to bite off um bite off a couple of these because of the amount of money you have to work with? You probably don't have a million dollars to to work with," he was suggesting. And but what if we could bite off one or two of them? What I would recommend is what we have what you have as far as how the watershed is set up. you have a a west um watershed sub branch, the west branch and that is what we are in now. That is what um town center and what westm are in are the west branch and then you have the east branch which goes through lake chesterfield that's copper lakes and that's harbors because one of the effective ways of trying to reduce downstream flows is when you have two large subbasins to offset the the peaks. In other words, try to make one peak sooner than the other so that the peaks don't line up and maximize the peaks, right? So, we're kind of offset those peaks and instead it comes up and it kind of flows flat and then it goes down instead of peaking more. So, I would recommend if you were going to pick two, either

pick the two that are on the west side or the two that are on the east side and focus on that one and offset those peaks a little bit. um to some degree if you picked one in each side you kind of they'd kind of offset the effectiveness because they're still lining up with each other. Um, so my first thought is going forward I if I was going to pick two, you can see they're both fairly they're all fairly equally effective um and cost effective you might say. But if you picked um uh Copper and the Harbors and put those together, you would that would be the most effective or West Glenn and Town Center together would be the most effective because they're in the same branch. And so that would help offset that those peaks a little bit.

What would your recommendation be?

Uh well, let me show you the last couple slides and we'll get there. Um, so here's the illustration. This is kind of the watershed. Again, this gray line is the watershed for Cox Creek draining north. You can see the red is generally the west branch and the green here is generally the east branch. And it all comes together at the top. The little squiggly blue line at the top there is the triple bend. So this is the upper Cox basin. This is where we're focusing our efforts. Um, and if we do something up here, we see benefits all the way down. Um, so that's what I would recommend looking at it in pairs in that regard. Now, hold that in your back pocket. Look at one more thing that we talked about with Joe that he mentioned and that is what if we looked at in addition to this because these are incremental and honestly those four basins are not going to solve your problem. Okay, but they're incremental improvements moving in the right direction. Another option that you have is to look at what areas do I have that are not currently detention basins? Those are retrofitting existing basins, but do I have some areas along my waterways where I could build some type of a regional detention basin? And actually in this case, you could go from no volume or very little volume to a lot of volume in some of these areas. So this is a waterway that runs through here. West Glenn is right up there. So you kind of get perspective on where you are. This is a waterway that comes here. Um there's a waterway here that's draining through here, but this is a an area that's undeveloped. This is an undeveloped area because there's a waterway that flows here. That's West Glenn. There's a waterway as we looked

at. They drains right into a waterway. There's an area there. Um, and so these are all open areas where the water flows. They've been set back off of well planned subdivisions that set back off of these waterways. Um, but we could go into these areas and build dams and pond water up whenever there's a rainfall. And just imagine if you had a small dam here and here and another one here and a couple here and a couple here. And when it rains, all of these are all filling up at the same time. And all that water that used to fly all the way up there to Cox Creek, west branch of Cox Creek is now being held back and being released slowly. And you could see that this would really, really be effective in the overall watershed reduction along with partnering with these other basins that we're retrofitting. It's all part of this puzzle. So, this is the west branch. And these are there's there's a few more, but these are some that that I looked at that could be very effective because they have access from the road because they have the right topography. Um, they have a large enough space that if you just built a burm or a wall across the waterway that it could pond water for a period of time and then um actually drain out over several hours and so forth. Um, and so this is the west branch. A very preliminary look at what some regional detention basins might look like. On the east branch, this is the north end of Lake Chesterfield right here. Just barely see Lake Chesterfield. Copper Copper Lake comes in right here. Lake Chesterfield comes in right here. Now this is the I saw it was owned by the Catholic das

dascese and they do have a um cemetery there but there's a lot of space here that's in the flood plane that is not being used. So there's quite a bit of space there and then there is some space up here looking at but this area here I believe was owned by St. Louis County if I remember right. Um, and so anyway, there there's these two and there's a few others on the east branch that could be um used for uh regional detention basins with some type of a structure installed in there to create some storage volume. Last slide. So, here's the recommendations. choose either either of the two uh currently proposed retrofits. We looked at four or four and a half if you want to call copper one and a half. Um look at either two the way pairing them the way I described um in either the west or the east branch. Uh pursue the regional basins in that same branch either the west or the east. So focus all your efforts let's say year one year two year three this is kind of your early approach. um focus on one side or the other to offset peaks. Um where they come together, you would offset those peaks and have more downstream benefits. Pursue other then then come back after that's done and pursue the other branch and the other two proposed retrofits and get more of an overall holistic type of of improvement. This would allow you to maximize your early improvements and then this would be more like completing the overall plan um as you're going forward, you know, a few years down the road. Uh and then pursue those regional basins on that branch, whichever it is,

east or west. Um and I really believe I'm working on I just did some real preliminary modeling is how I came up with this approach, but I need to get more detail and I'll put it in the report when it comes out. how much total benefit you could get from implementing all four of these with those regional detention basins that I had showed you there. But I really believe looking at the size of the watershed and the volume that you could get from those which was on the order of 5 to 10 million cubic feet. Remember these these four basins we looked at they had about 400,000 cubic feet of volume. These regional basins could give you 5 to 10 million cubic feet of additional volume. So that gives you an idea of how much more benefit you could get from the regional basins. Um

can can you explain what you'd have to to do to the current land structure to make it a regional basis?

I will let me let me wrap this slide up and then I will I will address that. It's a good question. Um so I believe the cumulative impact is significant towards slowing and stopping the progression of erosion in the Cox Creek channel um with all of these um in place and you know these might this is probably two to three million worth of work. So you might be looking at 5 to 10 years down the road to actually accomplish all this but in the big scheme of things that's a pretty uh that's a pretty significant improvement over a fairly short period. Do you have costs for that uh regional basins?

But usually um I did look at that and um and I'll addressing your question. I'll explain that would explain why the cost is what it is. Probably you would put in a burm or a wall. Um probably a couple of those at each of the regional basins because here's the slope of those areas. And if you put in a five to 10 foot high burm, it's going to pond water up to here. Well, I still have more space up here. I could put another one here and pond water up here and have a two-tier storage area in say a,000 foot long common area. So, that's what it would look like. And it would just be a burm or a wall probably looking at a hundred $150,000 each to do something like that. Um, so when you look at five to 10 of those regional basins, you'd be looking at one to$2 million probably to do all of them. And so that that those are really rough um just initial looks at what a cost might look like.

What would those basins be composed of the existing? Right now they're mostly just valleys with trees and stuff in them. They might have some erosion in the bottom, but that mo for the most part they would remain as is. But you would go in that strip of land maybe 30 to 50 feet wide would go in and put in a burm. Okay? Then you would go 300 feet up the hill and put in another burm, but in between all of the trees and all the land would remain as is. And these are all areas behind people's homes. That's why I was asking. I would not propose to go in and strip out all those trees because that's why they buy these homes, okay?

Because of these nature areas, it gives them buffer between them and the person across the way and so forth. My brother is in Baldwin. I'm staying with him this weekend. And that's exactly what they have. And it's like I can't imagine recommending taking out everything behind his house. Right. But you don't need BMS. And and no, there's that. That's that is overdoing it for sure. just trying to slow down the water and there's a lot of water quality and runoff benefits to those trees remaining. So I would want to keep as many trees as possible but build impoundments to pond water in a tiered nature. That's that's my vision for what these uh these 10 or so regional detention bases.

So does that solve our problem with erosion? Uh I think that would be very uh would provide a lot of benefit towards slowing it down and stopping. Um I don't think it it's not instantly going to heal the triple bins of the world where you've got you've lost 100%. Yeah. But it'll have like you said a significant impact on the but I think it would have a significant impact in slowing it down. So the people down beam will will be happy I guess with hopefully guarantee it will it will reduce gravel load is a big problem.

So you have those massive amounts of gravel moving down from years decades of erosion and it takes decades for all that gravel to move downstream partially these things now they'll have to be maintained. somebody unfortunately Rick or somebody might get stuck with doing some maintenance on them, but they're going to collect gravel as you have erosion. They're going to be traps to prevent you from having a lot of extra gravel being introduced into your creek and the gravel piles up and then the water diverts around it and scour out the bank. And so there's a lot of mechanical things going on there that could be um reduced and improved by introducing some uh impoundments like this in in several locations. Um if I had to choose, I would choose the east branch. Um and if it may not be a choice that everybody would be happy with, but I would choose the east branch, the Lake Chesterfield copper lakeside first. um it's a little further upstream, so the offset would be more effective because it's a little further removed from the main channel. Um it also it um it comes together at Highway 100 right there downstream of Lake Chesterfield. So you would see benefits from that point all the way down. The West Branch comes in quite a ways further north. So if you work on the west branch, you're only going to see benefits from where it hits the main channel all further down. So there's a longer reach that you would see benefits by doing work on the east branch than on the west branch. And I think the offset would be um uh more effective. Now, all that to say, I think they're close. They're very close. The way I would look at them, they're both pretty equivalent. Um, but that if I'm looking for something to separate them,

those are the things that would separate them a little bit in my mind that say I think you'd have more effective improvements over the entirety of Cox Creek uh channel if you worked on the east. And I can tell you living there um the residents do have a concern about those because there's a lot of sediment in them. And uh so you'd benefit probably more residents than than you would on the west branch of it. Uh so and I know there's factors here that you may run into that I may not be aware of like cooperation level and so forth, but so if you didn't go this route and you went with the west side first,

it's not the end of the world. it's still effective and still would be a good thing. But if I had to choose and if you all had to choose and you might have to with budget concerns or whatever, that's that's what I would recommend at least making your best effort to try to go that route. Yes, sir. Um, so I have a question not for you but for the group here. I don't recall what ward this is in, but I'm there's a gentleman I think it's on Evergreen Forest. That's four. Four. Five. No, it's five. That's five. Five. Yeah. Where his patio is doing this. It's um beginning to sink. Uhhuh. Well, it's already sunk.

Okay. Yeah. So, what would this if we went with his recommendation, would that help address his issue? No, no, that side wouldn't but and I don't want to. It's your guys thing. I I've had conversations with several of the folks on the watershed task force. Greg

is on it and he is whose house you're talking about. Um, and you know, we've studied this a lot and Mr. Wagner has done a great deal of work for us as has the USGS. And one of the things that seems to be pretty unanimous among the task force members is doing one or the other of these things certainly helps but it doesn't really do any like it doesn't actually do anything for us. Whereas if we were to, as we've talked about in some of our other meetings, like allocate certain parts of, let's say, the reserve to fixing Cox Creek, you know, it's going to take a while to figure out, you know, how we're going to do these extra retention basins, but it's very necessary. There's a little bit of a weirdness, if I remember right, Joe or Melanie or Rick, about the town center one because somebody else owns it in some sort of weird text thing. So there's there are issues but the idea would be you know we have Cox Creek is one of nine watersheds. So we have lots of other work to do. This is just uh kind of our main one that we've studied. So the idea would be this becomes a proof of concept. MSD is starting to come in. So the project at the Burgers House as well as down in Wild Horse subdivision

that's right here. Yep. Is going to be it's upstream of what we're talking about here. So we go. So they're going to be um MSD is taking care of those projects, but they're doing that on their own. That's with part of this money that sort of we the city gets, but not exactly. Mhm.

And so, um, everybody I've spoken to, which is most of the members on the task force, is is feels very strongly that we have an opportunity to do good work, have proof of concept in one watershed that we can, if we can do them all sort of relatively simultaneously, that gives us a chance to then actually study how it all works and then apply that to the other areas of town. Um because one of the things we have to think about is more or less everything west of 109 won't qualify for any MSD money. That is just going to be on us. And one of the other conversations that we've had which I think isn't an incorrect one is, you know, whether it's the triple meander or some of these other areas of concern that we have the end of the day those are are actually MSD problems more than they are city problems. Like I don't want the triple meander to get punched through and knock out the bridge at Striker Road. That would be certainly very bad, but it's if we had a bunch of money laying around, I'd love to fix it. We don't. And so that is that falls under the I think falls more under um the control of some of those other entities that are having it. So this is something we can do as a city. This makes sense. These are, you know, city subdivision type areas. And if it works out well, we can then very easily apply that math to other places. There are places out in, you know, Ward one and W six where it gets a little bit more complicated. Um because that's all there are no HOAs, so that's really all kind of private space. This, you know, we can make Westman Farms happens to be my pot, so I can just tell you guys right now. You can start tomorrow. I don't care.

Why didn't that get you to fix the guy who's fallen in MS? That's right. MSD is doing that. So that's and that was the that's sort of the frustrating thing that we've had because I mean Joe, correct me if I'm wrong. like we spent a lot of time and energy trying to figure that out and then MSD just sort of came in and we're like no we'll take care of it and so what we don't want to do is spend a lot of time and and resources figuring out things that somebody else is going to step in at the end of the day and just be like we got it don't worry about it and how are we going to find out what MSD is actually going to do are they sharing with us the information

we're getting a much better idea Rick had a graphic recently that showed the four immediate projects that they're going to fund with their new sales tax revenue. Two are in Ward five. One is up in Ward three, Pine Creek, and there was a another. So, we're getting a much better idea. And are you getting a timeline, Joe, Rick? Well, the initial projects that they have slated have timelines associated associated with them. Yes. But they're not next year. They're within the next say five to six years. Okay. So, how is that going to help Mr. Bur? I mean, it it doesn't it doesn't.

His is the double check on it. I mean, there's still a place for stream bank stabilization projects here. If you have something that's an imminent problem, you petition MSD or do it yourself or whatever. Yeah.

But that this isn't going to say, "Oh, Triple Ben's about to go into the daycare, but this will fix it. I I wouldn't say that it might slow it down. It might stop it hopefully, but you're still going to have an issue there. And once once the wound is opened, this is the way I look at it, the the creek is wounded. It's like a gash. When we strip off the the protective banks, uh, vegetation and so forth, and it starts cutting, it's hard to get it to stop. It has to be healed. But at some point we have to stop the cutting and allow it to heal. And that kind of is what we're doing here. But that cut can continue to cut for some time when I say sometime years or decades before finally it's going to start to heal itself. Um, so there could still be a place and we've noted we've walked the creeks in the last few years and noted several places where wow, if this if this bend keeps cutting, it's going to become a problem for them or them or whatever. And those are probably places that you need to keep an eye on and it might need to have that bandage put on it so that it can start to heal. So it it's it's not there's never one easy fix to these types of super complex urbanization of a watershed type of problems. There multiple fixes and we hit them in a lot of different ways but there's still a reason for MSD to do some of these projects. So what you're adding

uh somewhere between two and three is what I'm estimating. Yeah. I mean we just haven't dug into the costs on these regionals. Um, but if you're going to do to what Joe's talking about back here, if you're going to try to accurately measure the value of what it's going to do, so to speak, for the future kind of like you piece it over the course of yourself way, you know what I mean? like put the tape on a leash.

Yeah. And if you're uh talking about Bonome or um what's your other one on the west of 109? Box Creek. Fox Creek. Fox Creek. There's a couple there that are lesser developed. And you know, you have some large estate areas that probably never will develop, but then you have some that will I suppose. But this is a this is a retrofit of a watershed that's 90% developed.

Those you have a different approach because you're hitting them early on. And what are some more preventative things I can do so that I don't ever have to get to this point. So to some degree there's different strategies for different watersheds depending on where you're at in that development process. Okay. So, we have two different projects. We've been talking about this for six, seven years now. Um, we're about 15 if you're happy.

Yeah, more than that. Um, we're talking about a million dollars. I would um recommend that we do both projects over the course of the next year to two years if we have funding sources to do so. Um and then monitor it as you suggested and see what kind of success we have with those two things. Because as you said, if we put a band-aid here, water's going to move on down the road anyway. So looking at what you're saying, I don't see any reason why we wouldn't do it to both spots and spend the million, a million and a half and get it done.

Yeah. And that's that was just purely if if if you all had a half million to work with, here's what I here's what I would do first. But I'm not saying the second one is a lot less important than the first. I was just trying to help you with budget. But yeah, if you have a million and you want to spend it on those four basins, I think that would be a good approach. I'm going to make a motion to do that. that season.

So, there's a lot of I don't know what else to call it, but there's a lot of kind of like offshoots that um Cox Creek will snake in and go around other houses, but it's not technically tied into what you're doing. So, how will what you're doing, if you do it, affect those little offshoots that they'll run behind people's houses or whatever and causing problems. So, how would that affect?

So, you so in if we look at the blue lines there, if you can see those, it's kind of like a tree, right? And I think what you're referring to are all these little branches off that tree. Those are tributaries or offshoots. And so um if it's down if if one of those is downstream of one of these regional areas because these regional areas are here and here and here here and so forth u then they'll get benefits but every tributary it is doesn't see a benefit. Um every tributary doesn't necessarily have an opportunity to really get in there and do anything to it because some of it is just people's backyards and you just you're limited there. you just can't really do much with that. But so yeah, there are places where it'd be awesome to go in and work on every tributary, but um cost prohibitive and practicality, it's not necessarily even possible, but it's a good point. Every every

some everyone doesn't necessarily get benefit from this. It's f the main focus is on the trunk line is on the main channel of Cox Creek and trying to control that. All everything contributes to helping with that problem. Some of the tributaries will receive some side benefits too if they happen to be in an area where some of these improvements are going to be. So yeah, that's a good good thing to realize that everyone doesn't necessarily get a benefit. It's a communitywide benefit. That's what improving Cox Creek is.

Mr. Chair, I forgot to ask one more question. I'm so sorry. Um, has there been any discussion about um having any of these um subdivisions contribute to the cost of doing these things? Well, they're like they like mine has to pay to maintain the pond even though we don't see it or have anything really to do with it. So, the idea, my understanding would basically be we would go in, you know, retrofit it as necessary and then it would still be up to the HOA to care for the pond, which is not an insignificant amount of money.

No, I don't. Yeah, I'm sorry. Too many meetings. I thought this was 6:30, so I apologize for showing up late. Um I you mentioned west of 109, which is where I live. Um there's Hamilton Car, there's Tavern Creek, there's Fox, there's um um Bonham, a lot of waterheds. The the disadvantage there is it's rural, but the advantage is that it's rural. And um a lot of this you don't need to store this for 6 weeks where it's going to kill all the trees. We need to store water for 2 or 3 hours and slow it down for the most part before it gets down to the lower end where it's really done tons of damage in particularly in Fox Creek which is my wershed. I have said this many times that I think it'd be incredibly cost-effective if we could find some land owners with otherwise, you know, pastures and areas, you know, wild areas and so on and so forth that are along the mainstream of the the stream bed. In my case, it's Deer Creek that feeds Cox Creek. And just say, "Hey, let us maneuver a little bit here and there. We can add acre feet of storage that visually will not impact you whatsoever. But when the flood comes and you have hundreds of feet of water this deep um on your land, we'll make sure some of it is this deep and kind of triple the storage. And it really seems like a cheap way to do things and then we do some stream back stabilization and everybody wins. And I kept throwing this out. It's kind of has died on the vine, but I I kind of backed out of participation on the watershed task force because I had a lot lot of other fish to fry and it wasn't going to come to my ward anyway. But I'm asking the

question again, have has Joe has the committee or have you does number one, is that a is there a potential potentially workable solution there? If we look for altruistic land owners, um have you looked at it? How much retention do we need to try to find? Um c can somebody answer some of that? So I mean specifically not exactly but the idea would be like what the USGS said and what Mr. Wagner is saying is if we can increase the retention and detention like you're saying this should dramatically reduce the flow. So and cheap I mean it'd be much less expensive.

Right. So well let me just I'll throw this out there then you keep discussing it but generally we don't need to discuss here if it's been discussed in the other thing but really short just because we have looked at it um waterersheds generally if I was to start at the top of the wershed they're generally shaped like this hole shape they start out steeper and they go flatter and then you get down to the bottom you have these big flood plane areas and often that is a great approach to excavate out a field two, three, four feet and create massive amounts of storage in these large flat flood planes down here at the bottom or just burm it up so that you raise the water level, right? I mean, you could do that as well. You could you could Yeah. Um

less disturbance

further north is it wild horse? Uh right to the north. So when we looked at Wild Horse, that was kind of the concept was excavating out some of the flood plane down there to create these large storage areas. The reason that wasn't included here I'd talk about it was because the thing is if you do that you benefit wild horse and I'm trying to remember is there even anything downstream of wild horse maybe a little bit down there before it goes into bottom and into the Missouri River but all of this up here doesn't benefit from that. So it has benefit to it, but I was trying to focus on the upper watershed. The slopes are steeper. You don't have big wide flood planes. It's more like damning up. That's more of the approach of a tiered damned up approach. And then as you get down to the bottom, these wider flood plane flat areas. That is what you're describing. That's also

Sure. Sure. Sure. But but also there's most of it is already got three acre minimums and there's a few people with larger areas and so forth. It's not going to change as much, but they're having problems. I mean, people their homes get flooded out and the stream bank is collapsing and so on and so forth. And so that could definitely be part of the solution. Yeah, it just seems like a very proactive way to spend a few bucks. You're talking about rural area.

Yes, I'm talking about the No, I understand that. It was just it was the opportunity to ask the question. See, that's where I talk about Fox might have a totally different approach or a quite a bit different approach than what Cox might have because of that. And so anyway, that's a good point, though. I mean, these are all just things that help us all kind of understand the nature of what we're dealing with here. So for these four particular projects which I think it's a great idea to proceed kind of proof of concept um not being an expert in this some of these numbers you know increasing the fluctuation during storm events two to three feet of normal pool I assume that you guys have you know calculated the tributaries that would not impact the dense residential areas that's around these particular mean like flat water causing it the water to back down.

Uh yeah, it's there's quite a bit of fall up here. So when you raise the water surface a couple feet, it will back up maybe up into the pipe that drains into it, but really not going to affect anybody's but we do look at the inundation areas. We look at um we have great topographic information. We can say what would the new inundation area look like if we raised the floodpool. And that's where we checked every one of these. There was only the one on West Glenn where we inundated a little bit on someone's property and we were saying we need to get an easement here. But all the others we were able to keep it within the common areas. So the aggregate effect would not negatively impact any of these restaurants.

No, they're really in that regard they really all kind of act in isolation each other. But yeah. And so what is the direction that motions? council. Okay. Made a motion. I said to do all all four, right? I was saying so we do the motion to recommend X and that goes to council. But it's new money, right? I mean, it's we have to come up with a million dollars that would be reserve versus

obviously we just it's a budget cut budget. So we take out reserve. Mr. Chair, the 2026 budget capital improvements have $500,000 for watershed projects. And I'm becoming more and more confident we're going to see the $300,000 from MSD. Maybe not right at the start of the new year, but certainly thereafter sometime maybe in that into first quarter, but take a couple hundred thousand. That's the budget adjustment mid year. No, the ones that Rick was mentioning and I described at least two or three of them. That's MSD spending the sales tax.

So potentially we could have $800,000 with what has been budgeted and what we would receive from the sales tax. Correct. So we're looking at basically taking a couple hundred thousand out of again. That's a probably a great question for Mr. Lee. Yes, that is okay. We have a second on that. Oh, Frank's got Rick's got a comment. No.

Well, thank you. I just wanted to mention all these would require final design. So, you've got to hire an engineer to do the final design plans, run that through MSD, and look at a number of issues like easement acquisition or agreements with property owners, HOA. There's a lot of work that has to be done before we get to construction. So your immediate concern in my opinion is to look at funding the engineering effort, the final design plans for whatever these projects are. We do have a a size a lot of money budgeted that could be done for that right now.

So I think we need a cost for that so we know what our initial point. Can we amend the motion then to say that at this point the motion is to move forward

so that we can it's kind of hard to push the project forward million Mr. Chair. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, Mr. Wagner did provide an estimate for engineering services. Each each one of these these are project cost estimates not just construction. So we have a in West Glenn's case there's a line for possible easement purchase. Here's a line for engineering, survey, design, inspection, modeling, geotech, etc. 18% of construction cost. So the cost and then a contingency and cost uncertainty of 20% has been added to so trying to be pretty conservative to give you an idea of what total cost would be to

why I was moving that's why I was moving forward with proposing. We got a motion on the floor then. Do you want a second? I'll second. Second on the floor. Any further discussion on the motion? What exactly is the motion? The motion is that we move forward for but we just said that we need to have the engineering cost. The engineering is included. It's included. Now, as far as timing goes, there's there's work that has to be done. Yeah.

Um but uh let me add this too. Uh I meant to say this and did. Um on these uh four I don't believe there would need to be any uh core permits. I I would not think that a core engineers permit would be necessary, but they're all modifying detention basins that MSD would have to approve approve. I feel pretty confident that that would be doable. It just would take some time. Keep in mind the regional detention basins. They would some of them would need to have core permits, but also some of those have FEMA flood planes in those areas

and and a FEMA flood plane ma remapping effort would need to be. And I just wanted to point out these would be fairly quick to do those regional basins, although I kind of recommended you work on those too. Just keep in mind those there is no there there's not any engineering that's been done. There's a long process of regulatory approvals that would have to be done. So just keep in mind that these are quicker, easier projects to get done than those regional potential. The goal for my motion was to move forward with these four locations or four recommendations that you provided. Yeah.

So that we can assess. While we're doing that assessment, then we can begin looking at your second recommendation, what the costs would be associated with using those spaces, what kind of work would have to be done in those spaces, all of those things. That's kind of, in my opinion, a phase two of multiple phases as we go through this. And that we could that we could possibly do during next year's time frame to determine if we wanted to set aside funds in the 2027 2028 year etc to do the longer range additional overflow locations for lack of a better term. Just for clarity, I do support the motion, but your proposal on the efficacy of these is based solely on these projects. It is not including or anticipating the regional basins. Correct.

Uh the regional basins would enhance anything that Yeah. I mean the I would consider these are pretty close to ready to go as opposed to the regional that's been that's a very conceptual at this point of these projects is solely on this. Yes Katie I have a I have a simpler motion. Okay that I know Melanie's writing that over there. Yeah.

Uh tell me if this makes sense. move that the parks and planning committee recommend to the city council that staff be authorized to proceed with the development of the four priority retention detention basin retrofit projects including preliminary design cost refinement and implementation planning. Further, the committee recommends that staff be directed to explore the potential use of applicable reserve funds to support these improvements if necessary and to evaluate opportunities for adding regional storm water basins where feasible. Staff shall report back to the council with funding options, feasibility, findings, and recommendations. Perfect.

I I'll fe No. No. So like it's more like if we go to approach somebody for the an additional basin and they're just like no we don't want to do it then that would not be a feasible project to go or we just move with ahead with the other isn't saying we don't have the money or any of those things this is I mean with with what he was talking about with the extra basins

I get that we don't know anything that was The BA So is that saying where the basins are feasible? So where you could put them? Okay. Not fungy, but basins. Yeah. Like the additional ones. So like the one over by Greg's house, it that Todd marked out, those kind of like yellow spots. Those are the feasible locations for these additional basins. That's where we're looking at. And we're not mentioning in the motion that we need additional funds. No, we I mean that's we got to know all the I mean we know basically how much it's roughly going to be. It'll be you know three million. I'm not making myself clear. So what I we have a budget.

Okay. But what I heard you say was then that we would need additional funding if we could find it basically. No. To explore the reserve if it's necessary. Okay. Got it. Yeah. So like report back to the council. Yeah. So, like, you know, as Joe said, like we have $500,000 in the budget. So, if if it's determined that to do these four things, it's going to be $2 million, then Tom or whoever will come back and go, if you guys want to do it this year, I know it's not going to be this year, but if you guys want to do it, you got to take a million and a half dollars out of the that's the decision.

But we're just making a recommendation for the staff to explore it like you're probably do all this. It's going to have to go to council, right? Yeah. But but I I heard something different as far two different phases of it because I was hearing more of the money than the actual project is what I was hearing. Sure. No, you don't need to rewrite the motion. Is that AI? Yeah. Basically, at the end of the day, it's once again, we're not literally just recommending that

putting it all together. So the recommendation to the council will be basically the parks and planning committee thinks these four b these four basins are good and additionally they should explore retrofitting additional or creating additional basins and if necessary tapping into the reserve if that's what it is but then the council gets to determine whether we're actually going to do that. I think you could leave the reserve side out of the motion. The motion is let's start looking at this. The idea, the only reason the reserve thing is in there is just so they can come back and go this this is more than budget. Yep. We've got $500,000 budgeted. You then we're not trying to take a million and a half out of something else. And what about the regional? That's all part that's all part of that's all part of this.

Yeah. Yeah. Because I think as Katie said, this is going to be over multiple years that this goes on. So this is just Yeah. philosophically this is what we're doing. So if we don't do something with that motion to that. Sure. All right. Are you councelor France? Are you good seconding that motion? Uh, you'll have a problem with an easement because I won't. No, I'm kidding. I'll second since it's war. Go away. I see. All right. So, we got a motion on the floor. Yes. Second. Any further discussion on the motion? I think we've had pretty extensive discussion. All in favor of motion, please say I. I.

Any opposed? All right. Thank you very much. Thank you all. Appreciate the discussion. Thank you. All right. That takes us into items number two which is strategic review and modernization of advisory bodies reporting to the committee that was presented by Council Farmer myself farmer put together the write up and presented that. So I better to join us and Sure. like what you put together and explain it to everybody. That'd be great. Yeah. So um the general concept is and we're we're doing this admin back.

Can I stand back there and talk during uh master plan meetings? It's hard to hear the microphone. So thank you.

Uh so we're we're Mr. Gotti and I are trying to do some things in conjunction so everybody's working on the same page. So, one of the things that we've talked about is basically just looking at and assessing all of the boards, committees, commissions, all all of our meetings and stuff that we have and having the staff basically kind of just say, you know, here here's the point of what it is. Here's where it originated. Here are the numbers. The other thing that we have to take into account now, which was not in place before, is our term limits are starting to kick kick in. So, we have um members where that's kicking in. We have volunteer members or committees where that's kicking in. So, we're starting to kind of use some brain power, so to speak, and some different things. And so, it's just trying to assess, do we do we need all these things? Are they necessary to meet every month? Um because it also theoretically would then free up the staff to do like their actual jobs instead of just making agendas facilitating. So the general concept and Tom me a little bit about it today I know they kind of talked a little bit about this on the staff is to basically get some information back more or less next month kind of breaks down these things and then we can start to assess especially when we go to do our calendar events for our meetings and stuff like with EDC we talked about is EDC going to be every month or is it going to be every two months or with the watershed it's currently technically scheduling every but we meet like three times a year. So, it just kind of helps take pressure off of what is going on and just helps give us all a better idea of what our individuals are doing because we've got a whole lot of committees with a whole lot of different things and all of them are very important but you know they're not usually very good at saying we don't really need to say anymore.

Let's put our expertise somewhere else. So, it's trying to figure all that stuff out. So you're suggesting that we remove committees

maybe the idea is to yeah just to prioritize them. So to bring you know bring back the list say hey this should stay as is or this should this should stay but instead of being every month it should be every quarter or one like we can't get quum or or you know in some of these cases like what people aren't always showing up. I know I've had I've had a conversation with the mayor and it's not always to get people like, "Hey, I want to sign up to be on this committee." Um, I had Colleen sent me a list, not count them up. I think we've had like people this year that have said they'd like to serve on something and most of those were at the mayor or somebody. So, it's not like people are just super excited about, you know, into service unfortunately. Um but you know it's understandable sometimes how that works. So it's not really it may mean that we're eliminating committees. It may just mean that we're adjusting them. Um or we may get a report back to say hey all these things are functioning.

And what about sharing information? So is that part of this sharing information between? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So, so that's the other thing is like right now, you know, because we have like there are um I would say that there are like we have park planning and admin, you know, there's sort of sub communities underneath those. And so, you know, kind of right now sometimes we're having like we're doing dual work or one hand doesn't know what the other hand is doing. And so streamlining that in a little bit better way where we're not getting, you know, pieces out of left field all of a sudden or whatever it is is super helpful. So that's one of the reasons Mike and I were having this conversation because it doesn't work if if you guys do it on your side and then I'm like no I think we're good on my side of things on the admin side but then we're just going to do it as a collective group and we're going to try to do a couple of those things where you know all the members a lot of times we're switching committees every couple years anyways but like you guys have a have an understanding of what is going on here where when we get to a council meeting half the people aren't sometimes getting that information for the first time so we're just trying to streamline Yeah, this will be real quick. I have thought this from the beginning. Um, maybe this is a structural issue. Um, in the following sense, there's a report in here. This is simplistic, but there's a there's a report in here that that the department took some time to write about golf carts, and all it says that status hasn't changed because we haven't gotten the letters back, but that takes some time for the department. There are lots of things like that that could just go on a list and put a refresh date. This is when it happened. This is when the last thing happened. This is when the next thing we expected it's going to happen. Here's your report. And um it would save the staff enormous time because I I see that as job one for this effort. And you guys probably do too. It wasn't explicitly stated, but we can we should sort of restructure our request to say, "Guys, tell us how we can make

you more efficient and and give you some human cycles back so that you can do your actual job instead of writing stupid reports about things that haven't changed. Is that kind of part of this?" Part of one of the things is to look at like even look at the agenda as a whole and go how much of this is repeating every month. Yes. Yes. And if it's, you know, if it is 80% then do we then the conversation is okay do we do we take that 80% and we say we're putting very fixed dates on these like you said or is it hey we don't like we're talking about the same thing over and over and over and over.

I think we talk about enough new stuff that a monthly meeting seems important especially if I term out I don't want anybody else to be able to meet quarterly you know I want to make them meet not these meetings all the answers. No I I get it. That was just being silly. But like you have some you have some committees like in boards where there might be minimal agenda. Yeah. They still have to meet more sense. But yeah, it's like meeting just to meet doesn't serve. Right. Right. Right. Right.

But I would like these guys to be able That's a great thing. and you know well so it wouldn't be much different than I can't remember the the report name but it's the one that they add and read what is new to the developments is that what you're talking about well I'm suggesting that that's a little that's effort in and of itself as well and if there's nothing material to report it could just be you know they could change the date on the list so we know it's been they've looked at it but we meet about the things that are important and we don't have to, you know, talk about, well, this hasn't changed. Just put it in one another committee. Just get rid of that third committee and just have two. Can't you do it that way?

Well, there's we can do whatever we want. I'd like to make a motion that uh we direct the staff to evaluate what issues or what meetings we have outside of this committee, how much time spent on them, whether we need to continue to have them or not, and that you report back with something to us by the second or third of December so that when we have our December meeting, we can have a a salient discussion because right now we're we're poking it. We don't know. And I mean there are some committees that are like made by charter. So there's

it's possible there's things there's nothing that we can do about I mean this committee admin public works are by charter economic development is too. Yeah. So there's so the idea is exactly. So Tom I mean I think Tom's got there's real specific questions like how much time on in general are you guys spending on setting up a meeting that then you know we don't have a quorum or whatever it is and so that time is wasted time. Don't you think it's tough on the staff? They're supposed to come back and tell us what's not important you know. Yeah that's unfair to them. We should decide ourselves what's important. But that's from their perspective.

I was requesting that we we have something to work from at our next meeting that we understand what flows out of this committee and additional commit subcommittees beneath it. How often do they meet so that we can do a better analysis prior to our next meeting of what we need to keep, what can change its consistency. And I bet Joe could just tell you that right now off the top of his head. Well, you just had another council member say that we need to decide that stuff. We shouldn't just discuss it.

Well, it's is it fair? It's fair. It's a fair thing to ask, I think. Isn't it? The only thing I was and Miss Dodwell addressed it in the motion in the paperwork. It said December 1st. That's the Monday after Thanksgiving holiday. Yeah. Second or third is great. Basically, you guys time that week, but we have it for a week and talk about it. Yeah. But like I said, I just saw that and I thought, "Oh, maybe the second would be a little better." So are we trying to eliminate some of these meetings or or maybe unburdened staff? What what are the meetings we t are we specifically talking about? That's what we're going to get from Joe and his team.

Recommendation. Okay. So you're good with that. Not that important. It's where can we be more efficient? Like we have overlap. We have committees that might meet every month that don't need to meet every month because you have a meeting every month. You're meeting the meeting and then talking about you can consolidate one quarter a meeting instead of meeting every month. I go to three meetings a month. That's thoughtful conversation. Three meetings a month is not a burden on me. That's all I'm saying. I don't Yeah, Jean, we're trying I think we're trying to save all the documentation and the backdoor stuff or back back office stuff that they have to do in order to have those meetings. That's my interpretation is that

side of it is I don't I mean I I mean Katie and Deon you were proper too when we were doing two when we had two council meetings a month a month sets of all these other things that was an intense amount of like I don't have a problem going to meeting I don't not that I do this but I don't need to go to a meeting here right Right. Right.

That's the biggest thing. Meeting to me doesn't make any sense and it doesn't move anybody. Purpose of the meeting should be to conduct business and move things forward. And if that's not happening, we don't need to all get together to find out. Hey, we're still waiting on information. If we don't, but we're just trying to vote here to allow the evaluation. Yeah. Let's get to that point. We second. So, can I ask a question? Yeah, we got a motion. I will second it. Okay, we got a second. Okay, motion possible.

So, what you just said, Joe, it just like triggered it in my head.

We have one council meeting a month and I don't know about everybody else, but that is a lot of information to cover plus do your other committees. And I felt like just personally I was doing a much better job when we had two meetings a month for city council because you could spend more time digesting and looking and if you needed to do some research, you had time to do it. But when you've got an agenda like this for one meeting a month, I think it's it's a little difficult. And I personally don't feel like I'm doing a job that I was elected to do because I don't really have time to dive into all the information once once a month.

This evaluation could create four meetings a month. I mean it could create more. It's not the goal is not to reduce meetings. It's just we have we could have meeting every day. the other side like there are things let's go for that man you're you are not allowed to make and like one of the things that is helped to kind of spur this idea along is when we made the decision to go from two meetings to one meeting there was a reason to do it and we all many of us voted to do that and so that's where we're at

and so but what we didn't then do is go back and look at how we do all of the other stuff to go what is how does this trickle down in this direction and come back up. So in this way what it if you are in my opinion if we are if it comes back that we are having less meetings a month for our staff then that buys them more time to and us more time to prepare for the actual council meeting when we're having these decisions take place. The other side of that which is more of a kind of mechanism of how you know each of us you know there are three chairs of different committees in here run it is our meetings is you know for meeting like the first 30 minutes is just recapping whatever we talked about the last time which is great for new people to get caught up but is not always a necessary thing because the staff is taking so much time to put in the background and okay we did this there's all these pages Now we've changed two senses. So let's go. Let's

No, I agree with that.

So this is all kind of built to try to figure out how all of these processes should work together, including the agenda that we have at the council because, you know, I'm not I think having one meeting makes a lot of sense. I also think we wind up sometimes rushing through stuff because we're wasting time on something. But I also think that I was going to say too like in the council meetings though as well I mean number one a big portion of the agenda on that proving expenditures for the mayor this contract I I feel like the reason why we we get frustrated in our council meetings um is because we're super inefficient at managing the agenda for this meeting and next meeting. Christmas the last meeting

we pushed we held that that situation with the lot split for a whole another month for absolutely no reason. We knew a thousand% that nothing that they said or did was going to change and there was nothing the city would look at differently, but we pushed it another month. Guess what? We had an hour of public participation and safety to say the exact same thing over again for absolutely no reason. But there is a reason. So how it works the democracy. You got to listen to the public, Michael. Exactly. No, but you know the same thing and it makes no difference in the council.

You make them happy thing no information at the December meeting that we didn't have the November meeting. We know that a thousand% but we push it another month and those same people are going to come back and say the same thing over again and we're not going to have anything different to you. So when we talk about having one meeting a month and we should have two because we don't have enough time. Well, we do that to ourselves. Yeah. No. Are you finished? Yeah, I am. Okay. But so do you run the risk if you with various committees if you go to every other month that then you run the risk of possibly not being able to act on a particular piece of legislation on a timely basis.

So I don't I I mean that's part of what will come back to this information. I don't really think so because there are there there if there is something like specific to the subcommittees I don't know that there's anything they can't really make a decision without us making decision. So if there's something that is super urgent, like for instance, if we had a watershed thing, you know, I Joe would call me, we put we go, "Hey guys, we got to have a meeting." Everybody would either come or if it's a situation where like we have to make a decision about spending money right now that can't do that anyways. So then it just goes to the council or whatever and we have an emergency meeting as we normally would. the the real idea is like if there's like an I would say if there's an emerging issue and I think Rick does a good job of this with like the public safety committee like that's technically I think scheduled every two months now but if there's nothing to do then he sends out a message like literally saying hey we're not we don't have this but if there was some urgent thing at the same time he would go with this safety commissioner and be like hey We're having a meeting next week. What?

So, I see two ways you could do this. One is regardless of what the committee is if you go to every you could go to every other month or you could do it the way I think you just suggested, which is keep it on a monthly basis, but about a week ahead of time, decide whether or not you actually have the meeting and then cancel it so that everybody has enough time to understand that it's been cancelled. The premise of this though is for the department to go back and take a look at it. Bring us back some data that we can look at and then have everything you're saying makes sense but we don't have the data to look at because it may be that there's some you know ad something whatever like yeah we don't need this anymore. Okay, great. There's other things like my assumption I I tend to celebrate Wildwood meetings, but like I would imagine, correct me if I'm wrong, as we're getting closer to that, those people would love to be in there probably more than once, whatever it is. So like it's almost it's almost letting instead of us setting this without having the information like we get the information and then if it's like yeah they're going to do monthly meetings for Celebrate Wildwood for this four month period of time the rest of the year it's every two months right whatever it is. Yeah,

I'm all for it. If you keep doing things the way you've always done it, that doesn't necessarily mean you need to do it the same way going forward. It might be different. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, with water and because that seemed to be one that did this like there was a period of time where we were just waiting for the USGS. So, yeah. And we didn't know exactly when that was going to come. So it's like all right well when they when they tell us it's in we'll have a meeting if if we don't have the information we don't have anything to talk about so we don't have to do it. Um and like the chairs I think actually the chairs can kind of do that maybe not the other chairs can do it but I also think that there is a sort of um unnecessary pressure to the people that are on those committees to be like well I'm on it I want I want to go I want to participate I want to do these things which is very good but then they wind up getting burnt out because they're not

they don't they're not productive there like I I know again with the watershed thing part of the reason I was here tonight. Like there are members that have been on there, myself included, for seven years, and these guys are like, "When are we digging a hole in? I'm tired of talking about I'm tired studying this." And I'm like, "I get it." So, you know, I kind of want to be able to let all of our other committees and commissions do that. Um,

and I do think that, you know, there is a real thing that we haven't figured out as a city yet, which is this term limit thing, which is it is kicking in now. So people that were on these committees a long time ago that have a great deal of knowledge and understand this stuff. They aren't able to serve, we don't get a huge number of new people wanting to serve on them. So if you have to have 16 people on to make it happen to all those kinds of things. I think just kind of looking at how they're all constructed. It's worth doing at least every couple years.

But we used we had term limits in effect always. It was it just wasn't in the in the charter. It wasn't voted by the people. I mean, we've always had a rotation. It's not I mean, they could go for what, Joe? How many What was it? Four, eight years. And then they could sit out two and then they could come back. Sit out one year. Only sit out one term. One year. Yeah. So, we've always had a rotation. He's talking about the subcommittees and things more so than the council. But the council is on subcommittee sometimes. But can I say what I wanted to say? Yeah, I was gonna call on you. Okay,

I'd stop talking. Um, no. I'm I am all about civil servant and serving the people. So, if the people come before council and say, "Please put this off for a month while we x, y, and z," then I think we should put it off for a month. It's not making it's not going to change our decision or our vote. No. But we're there to serve the residents and they elect us and if they want us to wait a month while they do whatever they feel like they need to do, there's no harm in us waiting a month. We're doing what our residents ask us to do. They want to hear the question. What if they then come back next month and say

well then we can say yes or no

depending on what I mean we're elected to represent them. It's not the other way around. We're tableabling something where we have to operate within what clity of the council. So if what's before the council strictly to decide does this need code or not and that's the only thing that we're supposed to analyze. Then residents come and say well we think this might affect our indentures or we might have xyz that has nothing to do with what the council has in front of it and they say we want you to wait while we go explore if 31 atlas is a spaceship or a rock. We don't wait for that. We our only thing with that situation was to decide does this the the the zoning had already been changed. Does this lot split meet the code for the current zoning of that property? And the answer was yes. And so that was the only thing in front of us. So

I understand that. But so if they said wait a month while we go have a meeting to talk about XY and Z that's relevant. We didn't clearly articulate our purview to the residents. That's the message I have. We allow them to dictate to us what we were articulate that we only talked about it. We just brought a different narrative to the table and we allowed them to dictate. No, I agree. I agree with you, but I think we could have been strongardless though the historical buildings. Yeah. Yeah.

We let that now we delayed that for a long time and listen to the residents. So we we do uh delay things that because we could have denied the the the that destruction demolition of that one building a long time ago, but people kept coming up saying, "Can you give us another month or two? We may have somebody interested in buying it." So we do delay and it's we that's just my example. It's it's we the people. We're supposed to be doing government as the resident.

I know we Yeah, I apologize for allowing the staff. A motion here is strictly to have the department analyze data, bring back a report to December to let us know what the different committees are doing and where we can potentially make some adjustments and efficienc. We got a motion on the floor. We have a second. Do you have a second? We do have a second. All in favor of motion, please say I. I. Any opposed? Any abstain? Thank you. Can we put the decision on this off until next meeting? You're not you're not a resident. You're a council person. Next item on the agenda is the utility.

Mr. Chair, Mr. Brown has been kind enough. He's scheduled discussion at board of public safety. That'll be the first week in December. So, if you're interested, that's where the discussion will start in terms of responses to our request. Any questions? All right. Okay. What month? What month? Glad to see you. Last item under there is the recent development trends. Anybody have any questions?

Just one thing on that. Again, as you know, you you authorized in the imposition of a fee of $50 for each zoning authorization. Right now, we're at about $38,000 in collection. That was through October. We expect to hit about a thousand authorizations this year. So, we're going to be very close to that amount. We um had estimated about $50,000 in revenue from the authorization process. So, just wanted to kind of give you an update there. The salaries. I'm sorry. That helps pay for staff salaries. Sure does. The next item is under um

parks and that was another one Mr. Farmer did. Yeah, I'm happy to go over that. This was basically um on a similar level and we talked about this. I think Mr. Lee brought this up but it's more or less to put a adoption of a prioritization that life cycle review framework for each thing that the committee would you know recommend going forward. So more or less a scoring matrix to say where does this fit in in our strategic plan from a cost perspective from a needs perspective um and just go through and and once again the goal is to kind of standardize the process so we're not just you know I think I'll use an example of of something that we talked about for a while was the hard court and the pickle ball that so that was something that came up and originally came up because council flasher at this time was passionate about it and really wanted and and there was a lot of good components to it, but we started talking about it and and we went back and forth and went through all these different designs that everything had turned out working out over here in town center. But long story short, from a cost perspective, I think it was $400,000 and was it really something within the strategic plan that that kind of money should have been spent at that time? And maybe I'm not saying it wasn't, but I'm saying if we have a specific matrix that we go by every time we have something on the table that we're interested in and we can go through and use the exact same analysis flooring matrix to say this is what it goes here, this is what it means here. Then everybody's on the same page and then we can use that as a means to move things forward, push them to the side, table them for a later point or or you know whatever it is that we're going to have. a more standardized process as opposed to just an emotional I think we need

this or or few people feel strongly about it maybe not so much so once again not to say that I use that as an example just because it's something that would have been a perfect deal plug in right and that everyone can use that same story matrix and answer these questions to say what benefit what community need or value strategic goal does this represent thought differently. you can look at the survey results and use it as a easy way to look at something say hey this falls really low on the scoring matrix or this is really high that that's really the just

and again where does the residents fit into that this is strictly for for committee so this is it won't change like when we have things on the agenda at least the hard work right now that came up in committee and we started talking about it and the department went through great length in getting different proposals, looking at all these different things. We retoled it multiple different times. Then we talked about it for a year and a half. Um, and then after all of that, we decided to move from community park to town center. I'm still not sure how that happened, but okay. And then and then we were able well because we the developer over here, which was originally the Greenberg development, right, that they were going to start

they donated land for us. We were renting the properties, not the same thing as donating the for.

Yeah. But the the moral of the story though is more so that we went through that entire process that took a lot of time with staff and we went a lot of time in conversations in committee and we never really had the direction we were following. We're kind of just going by the cup and you know the emotions of who wanted this there and what. And if we would have had a more standardized way of looking at this, it might have scored really high where we said we got to get this done right away. put it in a high priority or we might have said you know what this is breaking at two out of 10 we need to just table this and not talk about or spend time on it right now because along with our strategic planning initiative and our budget theory concern this is not something we need to be spending our time so I think not just in this committee but this is going into other committees as well where everybody across the different committees of the city are operating on the same matrix as far as looking at different things and I think along with what Joe was presenting earlier with mitigating you know things that are overlapping and that kind of stuff this type of matrix can also help keep the agendas of the meetings that we are having more in line with what our strategic initiatives are and what the budgetary and goals of the city are. So we're not spending three hours on a committee meeting and an hour and a half and us talking about things that really are nowhere at top of the list of things that we need to

but you don't know I mean but that's what support honestly the the hardcore things came from the community it came from residents and it wasn't just Mr. Flasher is that not true yes we had gotten a lot of for years

I'm not saying it was just Mr. No, but I'm sure I'm going going somewhere with this. Okay. So, it came it came from the residents. If we have I guess my my thing is I see this more as business versus government. That's what I see. That's my perspective. That's what I government's what I did for a long time. And it just seems to me like we're going more down a business path than we are staying with the government path. Um, and I mean we we have to have discussion. We can't just line it up and say this is a number two, so we're not going to talk about this because it might be important to a thousand people out there.

It might be, but we have to also start looking at the fact that we're running on dollars and moving forward. So resident demand resident feedback demand is a part of what I'm saying just because you have a handful. He's not suggesting this in place up. spend two hours and five meetings pursuing getting bids and proposals and everything. And we're going to have to become more efficient with and more like a business honestly as far as being able to manage our time and the city staff because we we waste so much of the city staff working and running around in circles on things that aren't really important. And just because some people might think they're important doesn't make sure it does. No,

it doesn't. We have to look at it to say where does it meet on the strategic level of the city as a macro because just because a 100 residents out of 35,000 think it's important doesn't it's what is going to best serve the city as a whole and we have to start looking at it from that standpoint because we're going to go bankrupt. I understand I understand the money perspective but this but city of Wildwood was developed for a reason and one of those was the residents are the ones who brought things forward. We work for the residents and I understand about the money. Okay. But to us to have a matrix to go down and then we fill it out doesn't mean we're going to fill it out the same way that the residents would fill it out.

Prioritization matrix. So it means that if it scores low, it doesn't mean that we tell them we're never going to talk about it. It's a bad idea. We're done. It's just saying it's a prioritization. So if something's a 10 and something's a two, we're going to focus our time and energy on the 10. Who decides who decides who it's a 10 and a two? That's what the metric is for. Exactly. And that's not the residents. That's what we've been doing as a council. Can I say something here? I have my hand up.

So, I I think we're getting lost here in this discussion. A matrix is not infallible. It can be a tool that we can use to make the decisions as as you mentioned, but that does not preclude the residents from coming in here and expressing their concerns. And who knows, as council member McCutchen mentioned, they may come to us with some information that we haven't considered or that isn't captured by the matrix and we could still override the results of the matrix. It's a guidance matrix. I think there's safeguards in this process. It's to guide our focus. Yeah, I appreciate your comments, but you're not going to change my mind. I I think this is short changing the residents.

That's fine. Um All right. Do we need a motion on this or is this just more of a I move that we use this kind of process in order to clearly understand what our priorities are as the parks and planning department committee.

And just so you guys know, the advent public works committee and the capital improvement program are already using this matrix the same. I I'm I'm not sure about administration public works, but as you know, we have that matrix that we cycled all of the capital improvement projects through in advance of the budget discussion. Y available assume we'll use that or some version of it alliance. You made a motion.

I made a motion. Um, any further discussion? All in favor of the motion, please say I. I. Any opposed? Opposed. Any obsession? Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. If you're not keeping track, we're past 7:30. I think part of that is Mr. Wagner did a very thorough job. Did. I think it was important for him to do that. If we are going to use the matrix probably the next couple of items can hold off. I would ask if you objections we can postpone the next items and take them back up in December.

Okay. So you don't have anything urgent. There's a obviously the trash receptacle in the enclaves they that's obvious we've already told them no. It's just asking us to reconsider. The others are more forformational and the rec schedule. Since we have the new approach that we're supposed to use the life cycle life cycle evaluation template, I we should do that, but we're putting the schedule out for your consideration. So, you're suggesting that we could delay um under parks matters items 1 through eight until next month. 2 through eight.

Oh, two through eight. Okay. All right. Is a motion required to that effect? If you don't mind, please. Okay. So, I'll make that motion that we delay considerations. Okay. Perfect. And a motion to adjurnn after. All in favor of the motion, please say I. I. I. Any opposed?

No. Executive session. The only other matter was under other matters for consideration and this is something that council member Farmer and I were discussing the committee in light of the budgetary presentations that we've been having significant adjustments that we've had to make to the budget and knowing that moving forward we're going to have to continue to make considerations reserves and do a lot of different things. One of the things that Wildwood prides itself on is parks. You have significant amount of parks neighboring communities and you got fabulous parks, but the thing is with the parks is they're expensive to keep up and you got to constantly be investing money and we know just in some of the up conversations we've had with bathrooms and other things that get very costly. And so the conversation piece around this was a putting in a definite moratorum on building any new parks or adding more to parks we have. That's an investment because that's just creating additional expenses that we're going to have to address down the road versus being able to focus on maintaining the parks and facilities that we have at the highest level moving forward which he knows is already going to be a burden. Council So I'm in general agreement with everything you've just said. I one question I would have is I know there was some discussion from some time back small maybe it's not a small project dollar-wise but in the various parks with the restrooms are changing out the changing tables in the restrooms to something with a higher weight bearing capacity. Are we still planning on doing that? Yeah, that would be part of maintenance.

Actually, Miss Ripto and I have been working with Office of Community Development at St. Louis County. We have a bid out for it and we're going to use some of the funds we have from past years to fund those improvements to community park. Community park to start with. Community park to start with, which is our most popular park in terms of attendance and views. So, we're using outside funds to basically move forward with that. And there was also a consultant that came in and said what we needed to do to bring the parks up to ADA requirements and a few other things.

And so, the idea would be with the support of Office of Community Development, each year we'll have a set of projects to upgrade and meet new ADA requirements and make them more universal into in terms of the utilization. That's outside. That's outside of the scope of this moratorum. Correct. Yeah. And you pulled um I know you're going to use the matrix for the dollar project. Is that Oh, the dedication the um trail the trail where the parking space. Is that a part of that outside the

This is that the Ridge Road property that the open space council is pursuing with a state grant and private donations. Yes. The direction from the city council was to basically plug that into the matrix and see how it scores relative to all the others. They have to be outside. Yeah, that's a dedication donation. But but what what happens with this if somebody comes in and gives the city I don't know a million dollars to just to construct a park.

Well, this doesn't take away the council's ability to this is just indefinite moratorum that the council like we'll recommend it to the council and the council will have to approve it but the council can lift the moratorum chooses. It's not it's not going into the charter or changing. There's no like law being created that says we can't just everyone agreeing that this is the path we're going to take for the time being. But at any time in the future that the council chooses it can lift the moratorum and build a park. So what's the point of the moratorum? It's just to say that moving forward because we are trying to be fiscally proactive that we're going to take this off the table and develop new projects as opposed to taking care of parts of the group.

Can I make a motion? Yeah. I' I'd like to move that the committee present to the council as a whole that a moratorum on any new park purchases and/or implementations be placed on hold for a minimum of five years to re be reviewed by council should an opportunity arise or should additional funds funding sources occur. then we can re-evaluate it. Um second motion a second. Any discussion? Sure. Okay. So that would

Fortner Park Route 66. Yeah. Yep. For the short for near term. Y I'm sorry. Who was the second on that? Thank you. All in favor of motion, please say I. I. Any opposed? Opposed. All right. Well, that leads us to our next meeting on Tuesday, December 16th. My I'll have to bring a cake. Any closing? Wish you all a happy Thanksgiving. Yes. You as well everybody. Thank you to the department for all the work you do.

Do we want to cancel that meeting in December? What's that? We want to cancel our December meeting. No. Is it Christmas? It's December 16th. If you don't want to, we've done that with council before. Yeah. Okay. I'll draw I'll make a motion to adjurnn though. Joe, can I talk to a minute about tomorrow? Yep. All in favor say I oppose. Thank you all very great. I learned a lot.

Take it out of the actually. Perfect. Thank you. Good night. Good night, Steve. And I'll be Thank you.