Village Board - Regular Meeting

meeting on monday august 3rd 2026 this is a virtual meeting occurring both in person at village and then you can either watch our live stream now on our youtube channel or check us out later it's 6 30 so i'll call the meeting to order we have a quorum and the agenda was properly posted so we'll stand for the pledge of allegiance pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. All right, this is the public appearances public's opportunity to speak we ask that you say your name Address and limit your comments to no more than three minutes we'll start with anyone in the room who'd like to give public comment and then move to zoom and Individuals on zoom can hover over the react button and use the raise hand feature so we can unmute you So anyone in the room that would like to speak? Is there anyone on zoom not seeing any all right we're going to move on to discuss the minutes of the village board meeting on july 20th 2026. is there any comments on the meeting minutes as presented seeing none we're going to move on to consider the minutes of the village board meeting on july 20th 2026.

I move approval of the minutes of the village board meeting on July 20th, 2026. And I would second.

Motion by Severson, second by Murphy. Any other discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstain? Motion carries. Moving on to unfinished business, we have discussed the traffic impact analysis regarding Cottage Grove School, and we have our village engineer, Josh, and the director of public works, Kyla, on the Zoom call, so I'd let them unmute. We also have two documents linked in the agenda for review.

Hi, everyone. So this was previously discussed at the Public Works Committee level about two and a half months ago. But what came out of Public Works is a variety of things. And Josh will go in more to the TIA analysis from Strand's point of view. But what came out of Public Works is in discussions with Chief Gary, who was also on the call at the Public Works Committee, was that we were going to look to see how traffic ended up. playing out once school started. There was no reason given in the TIA why they moved a ride in, ride out for circulation at the Cottage Grove School. We believe that it helps traffic flow on their parking lot side. However, there is a level of service at the Weld Bridge that is failing based on their analysis. So from there, we're going to see how traffic actually flows because while TIAs are very beneficial, sometimes you never know how drop-offs actually occur with school zones. With that, I'll let you go, Josh.

Thanks, Kyla. Can you hear me okay?

Yep, we can hear you.

Yeah, okay. So like Kyla said, as part of that site plan kind of modification that they have there, Um, the plan commission and the board asked them to put together kind of a traffic analysis. They put together a technical memorandum. It's just kind of 1 intersection similar to, like, a, just kind of a. Kind of a tighter summary of just the 1 intersection, you know, we reviewed the, we reviewed the summary and they kind of came up with some of the same conclusions. We did, if you recall. The site now is going to, instead of having two entrances to the school, you only have one, the south one. The north one will kind of be reconfigured for the buses only to enter. The buses can enter both left and right, but the school entrance one will be right in, right out. So everybody will have to approach the school from the south, and they'll have to exit the school going north. That's just for the peak hours. So it's just for drop-off. and pick up. Otherwise, you can go in and out of that driveway however you would like the rest of the day. So as part of that, obviously we knew that traffic was going to be rerouted. Everybody from the north that wants to get to the school is going to have to work their way around. That's obviously going to be down Ollie or somewhere over on that side, just to the west of Main Street, and it's going to end up at the Weld Bridge-Taylor Main Street intersection. So they looked at that, and what they found, their traffic engineer found that the existing building had roughly the a.m peak is really the critical one but the a.m peak had roughly 374 trips in the morning today from 294 enrolled students some of those are people coming to school or the teachers coming to school as well the evaluation added an additional 223 morning trips or I'm sorry, 223 new students for an addition of 116 new trips. So it was quite a few new trips, but the biggest thing is the pattern difference, right? And they looked at that specifically. And what they found in the AM is that right now at Wellbridge down there, I'm just kind of summarizing, in the AM peak, So the peak hour in the AM, 16 people or 16 vehicles take a left turn out of there. Once that school peak hits, it's going to change to about 233 vehicles trying to take a left out of that intersection. So it's a big difference and a big number. And it's a stop controlled and everything else on Main Street has no control. So they have to wait for a gap to get out. And what the modeling shows is that the intersection is over capacity on that one leg, meaning that the queues get pretty long. The queues get up to 500 feet, actually, along that route. They'll probably go back on Wellbridge, end up Ollie a little bit, depending on where vehicles are coming. And on average, it exceeds about a three-minute wait. Now, again, that's for a small period, probably 15 to 20 minutes, maybe half an hour max during the day. It's a point where, you know, as we stated in our thing that people are going to probably get a little more aggressive, try to take some smaller gaps. We're going to have to monitor the situation, you know, as they try to turn out of there. In the afternoon, it's not as bad, but it still has about 175 feet. Overall, it operates a little bit better, and I forget the average delay, but I think it's in half of what it was in the a.m. So what they pointed out And here was, it was something that would have to be monitored in their traffic analysis. We suggest maybe two alternatives. You know, they looked at a stop. They looked at an all-way stop there. The problem is it doesn't, it meets warrants for like that 30 minutes to an hour, but the rest of the day, you know, it doesn't really meet warrants. You know, having people stop on Main Street for no reason at that intersection could get frustrating also just to the main north-south traffic. But that's something to explore. maybe as we see how this unfolds in the fall. The other two primary alternatives we thought was, if it gets to be real bad, one is posting an officer there to direct traffic, at least during those peak periods, which takes a resource away from the village. So maybe that isn't the best alternative. The second alternative is possibly to, you know, go back to the school and ask why maybe they only want right in and right out. You know, was the left in allowed that bad before? And is there a reason for it? I think some of it was trying to get capacity at the site.

park and walk drop-off as a backup if things get hairy. So one of the places that comes to mind for me is UMB Bank as a backup drop-off where kids already are on that side of the street and could walk up. You know, from 715 to 745, UMB doesn't open till nine. So could we have like a backup remote parking lot too, just... In our back pocket in case I think it's wise for us to see what actually is happening before we make any sort of permanent changes, but maybe just having a few. Creative ideas in the background to would help.

Josh, you mentioned reevaluating the site. How long do you give? School the. You know people to work out their routines before you start doing some type of evaluating of the site or of that intersection.

Obviously, I would say, and Chief knows this, you know, probably watch it day one as, you know, this is going to be a new condition, you know, change for the first week. But you probably wouldn't actually look at some of the cues and everything else until you're getting into the second or third week once people get kind of used to the routine and adjust a little bit on their own. I do anticipate the first few days to be just different, right? One, the school district has to get the message out that they can't turn left into that driveway. They have a circulation plan that They have to get everybody used to as well. There's new parents, obviously, that probably aren't, you know, that were at a totally different building. So the first week could be a little, could show the true, you know, what it's going to be like. I would give it a week, still monitor it during that week and have some presence there to help the situation of traffic. It's bad. And then probably, You know, Kyla, we can discuss and the board can discuss, you know, maybe after that, what's the next steps as far as do we count traffic? Do we just watch some queuing too? I mean, that's easy enough to do. How far did the queues get back during some of those peak hours to understand like how much is the delay? So there's some visual things you can just do right away and kind of get a feel for what the level of service is.

Chief, how realistic is it to have an officer there in the morning during that time?

depending on staffing, we'll do our best to have somebody present.

Heidi. Thanks. Remind me, I don't recall if the school mentioned that there will be signs for the write-in, write-out during the school drop-off times, or will they have someone out there telling people not to turn left in? I don't remember if they said, does it say somewhere here, or do you know of any signs going up?

You know, they mentioned we had some of those same comments right at Planning Commission, I believe, and they mentioned that part of orientation, some of the information that they send out prior to the school year, and then they were going to have, you know, on-site representatives that was going to help, especially that first week, I think, Heidi, you know, to make sure that everybody understands even their internal drop-off situation. So they made it sound like that first week for them, too, was all hands on deck sort of thing.

But we won't have any signs. Installed on the roadway no or right in right out only or anything like that. I'm not asking that there should be.

I just wasn't sure if they were going to be. They do not at this time, but it's definitely something that we can look into.

Is that the villages responsibility to put those types of signs up?

in this case the right out would only would be a school district sign because it would be for them uh on our end i would have to discuss with aaron because a lot of times that would be like a requirement of like plan approval and i don't remember if we ever saw anything josh and plan and the plan removal requiring that but it's something that's not an overly expensive ask that we could probably talk to the school district about i'm a contractor

Yeah, but definitely don't need to decide that.

Are you thinking permanent signs? Permanent signs or just signs that they put out?

They just put out boards, so you could put like a sandwich board out or something, but you know that always adjustments that we can make after you see the real life. Thank you.

Yeah, I don't think they probably wouldn't put permanent because they want. They will allow less in the rest of the day and left out after drop off. You know if you if you were to come to the in the middle of the day for whatever reason, right? To pick up your kid, to take them to an appointment or what. You can turn left in there. They're not restricting access during the day, just during drop off and pickup, from what I understand from the school district.

I think they do have a right turn only sign. when you're leaving CGS. They do have videos and communication that's gonna be going out to all parents that they're gonna be rolling out pretty soon and the village has been asked to share that information as well. So we'll be doing that. Any other discussion from board members or questions about the TIA?

Yeah, I guess this is just to discuss, so we're not doing any specific action. But I'm inclined to agree, certainly early on, for these first couple weeks, I like the science idea. And potentially an officer, again, if nothing else, just for these first couple weeks to make it as little chaos as possible. But yeah, if we're not doing anything specific right now, that's just my thoughts, I guess.

If there's no other discussion on the TA, I'd ask the board if they'd be amenable to having 7B and B1 moved up to continue the discussion. Trustee Stoa and myself worked on some agenda items to talk about some of the traffic and some potential measures near CGS that we could take. That's all right to bring that item forward now? All right. So we'll move on to seven B discuss traffic calming at CGS trustee Stella.

Sure. Um, so yeah, I just, It's, I mean, I think it's pretty clear to everyone that this is gonna be a bit of a mess to start with. So just wanted to talk about concrete steps we could take to maybe alleviate it as best we can. I know Cindy was curious about having similar parking signs as the right, that's like no parking during the drop off times. We could do temporary, no left turn signs. Just curious to see what everyone else thinks.

So I was on planning commission when this first came up. And during that discussion and in the subsequent board meeting, it seemed like everyone was very minimal to doing the no parking on the east side of Main Street during that drop off time frame. Because then that would help with the queue. It helps get them off the main road. So from a traffic standpoint, in case we do get a backup, We have that lane that's free that they can queue up. And that would take us, oh, I have to go back and look. I unfortunately don't have in front of me. Close to 130 cars between what's in the parking lot all the way down to pretty much close to Wheelbridge-Taylor. So most likely for that peak drop-off, there's a good chance that it could be addressed by just having the lot and Main Street all the way down there.

My thought on that, which I like the idea, I'm just curious if people who are dropping their kids off are going to see that and think they can't queue there because it says no parking during those times. So how do we tell people that there's a difference between parking and queuing? I don't know.

So I guess maybe this is a question for Chief or Kyla. There are signs out there along kind of the length of CGS that say no stopping, standing, or parking. How does that apply to a queue line?

So if it reads no standing, that would affect the queue line. But if it just says no parking, then, so like on the west side, it says no parking during certain hours. That leaves the road open for the queuing and for traffic to move through and flow. So that's the way I would view it as a no parking rule.

So I guess that one.

Yeah, so that one should probably come out if that's still there. But I mean, I don't know.

So you have the curbs painted yellow wherever that sign is, I believe, Kyla, I think, along the entire school that signs in. I mean, I'm sorry I'm sharing just so everybody knows.

I guess my question is how customizable are like that? No parking signs can say no parking school queuing permitted or something like that.

I guess I would put I believe we can do that. Oh go ahead.

No go ahead Kyle.

I believe you can make that sign. It just I would recommend that it would be used in very limited spaces because it is not a standard DOT kind of regulation sign. Chief?

I was just going to say I'd use the signs similar to what are on the west side that have the hours already spelled out of no parking.

I mean, I think it's only going to be a problem for the first couple weeks, and then people will, after that, people will understand that it's okay to queue there. I just worry that they're going to see that, keep driving, and get frustrated because they're going to have to turn around. And they'll have to turn around by going from Ali to Wheelbridge.

Could we also utilize the message board sign that we have and then the police department speed sign to reinforce those two messages? And then one other thought I had was to specifically slow traffic down is using flexible delineator posts for that kind of the length of that area to also help slow things down. Just as another thought.

Additionally, I would also like to see a striped crosswalk at the crosswalk there. So it's higher visibility.

Is it not striped? The one that's right by the school? Oh.

Chris, are you looking for striping in terms of ladder striping?

Yes.

I'd be in favor of more high visibility crosswalks, and I am in favor, still in favor, of no parking. Any other discussion on this?

I'd prefer a raised crosswalk, but I'm willing to compromise and just have a striped crossing.

Let's move on to consider traffic calming at Cottage Grove School. and entertain a motion.

Okay, I'll make the motion to put the no parking signs with the appropriate times and the striped, so on the west side of, or sorry, east side of Main Street school side from the school all the way down to Wheelbridge-Taylor.

and put the striped crosswalk or make sure that crosswalk is striped up by the school i would second motion by jp second by severson debate on the motion can i just ask can i ask the clerk can i ask a clarifying cindy yep um chris just so i don't miss paint this and have staff painted are you Is the village board interested in having this one green would be the only green crosswalk that we have in the middle of a street. But since we're going to have to restripe it, I thought I would throw that out there. The green would match the bike path green that is along the bike path on Cottage Grove Rd that we just did in front of driveways for the commercial areas.

I mean, I don't. I don't know. I was under the impression that greens usually mean green usually means bikes, and that's not really. connecting bike paths. But I mean, if it's, I don't know the standards from the MUTCD, but I'm fine with it.

I was going to suggest I-Biz yellow to match the crosswalk sign that's right there.

Yellow is not a standard, so it would not be yellow. That would be conflicting with the road. I can, I will look into it. It will be striped and I will confirm if we go green or yellow, green or white, but I just wanted to throw that out there for discussion. If it's interested in being green, it would kind of throw everything off compared to every other school zone that we have. I probably wouldn't suggest it, but since we did just paint green and I know Chris, you like green.

I do like green. Do you have any leftover from the last paint job on the multi-use path?

We do, yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, I mean, go ahead, Jamie. So Chris, would you agree with the amendment to the striping to say that conforming to, this is where I'm gonna need some assistance.

Or sorry, sorry.

Would you agree to make them the change to the striping conforming with the DOT regulations or the appropriate entity, which I don't know exactly what that is.

I, I'm going to say sure. And just trust that, you know, okay.

I was nodding. So I'll make sure it's right. Okay. Um, any other debate on the motion? All those in favor. Opposed stain motion carries and then just to summarize to we do have a discussion about crosswalks with the schools and they have been sending us communication, so we're going to start getting rolling all of that information out after we meet with them. But then I'll bring in this list to of creative ideas and then also some asks for signage or just an updating them to on our discussion and then. how we'll be monitoring this and then maybe have to meet and make some pivots in the first couple weeks of school. All right, let's pop back up to 6B, which is discuss the Deer Grove EMS Intergovernmental Agreement, which has been edited.

Rick. So the draft tonight is kind of a blend of the proposal that was presented last week and the original agreement. So the original had a two hour limitation for attorney time for the EMS district for commissioners. So this reduces it to one hour, but allows the commission to vote to exceed that one hour time limit. to incorporate some of the elements of the previous draft, basically clarified that the commission chair or the EMS chief then forwards that request to legal counsel, and notification is also provided to the commissioners right away. So the other communities have not acted on this, or the commission hasn't acted on this proposed amendment. I think if it's approved tonight, it would then go back to those other entities for consideration.

Any discussion on the amendments? We can move on to consider the IGA amendment. I move approval of the Deer Grove EMS Intergovernmental Agreement Amendment as presented.

I'll second.

Motion by Murphy, second by Erlandson. Any debate on the motion? All those in favor?

Aye.

Opposed? Abstain? Motion carries. Seven, new business. Our annual review of service providers are kicking off tonight. And our first one up is Cities and Villages Mutual Insurance Company. There's a PDF linked in the agenda as well as some documents on the table for you. And I invite our presenter up. I'll let Cameron introduce, and then you just need to have your microphone on.

So just to kind of kick off, because this is our first service provider review. So again, this is kicking off that annual process for our service providers. Civ Mic was happy and excited to go very first and the only one tonight. Picked a good meeting, short meeting. One of the changes to the process this year, and I'll send out in a formal memo the rest of the providers, but I did send in an email today, was to include the general fund and water and sewer portion of the cost related to the service provider. And then kind of just give a little mini preview to kind of looking into what potential changes might be happening in 2027. So today, obviously, we have CIVMIC. On August 17th, we have Pelletier, Johnson Block, and Strand. And then on September 8th is a little bit of an extended list, but Ehlers, Baker Tilly, Colonial Club, Stafford, General Engineering, and Associated Appraisal. Associated Appraisal may be kicked back until November 2nd. but right now they're on the list for September 8th. So please ask our providers lots of questions tonight. Nothing's off limits. If you have something for staff direction for future agenda, please mention that under future agenda items on what you would want staff to do and bring back and get some consensus as a board. So with that said, take it away.

Well, good evening. Thank you for having me speak. My name is Andrew Taylor. I work with Cities and Villages, as Cameron just said. I picked the right date. I'm glad. I saw those hefty lists. I'll try to make it a memorable first one for you. So first of all, who are we, right? Cities and Villages Mutual Insurance Company is your insurance company. The Village is a 157th member owner of our pool. So we are a mutual insurance company. Our goal is to provide you great insurance and great service. It's your money, it's your taxpayers' money, that funds this pool. It is yours. Any profit, so to speak, any extra comes back to you in the form of our surplus, our ability to pay claims, or in the form of service. And so what's nice about working with CIVMG, we'd like to thank, is that all of that is your resources. I've had a pleasure of working with a number of your village staff in a number of trainings. It's nice to see some familiar faces. And what we do is hopefully represent your interest by providing great insurance and providing service. So what I'd like to do is just run you through a little bit of how that works, kind of what you have with us and how that goes. And, of course, at any time, if you have questions, please feel free. This is, of course, your meeting, and I'm happy to answer them. So I'm Andrew. I've been with CIDMIC for about 10 years. I am our member engagement manager. I'm also our full-time leadership and training trainer. So I'm the person that does a lot of your leadership and communication training. So I have the pleasure of working with all 57 members across our state, and I do a lot of the public speaking and training for them. So I'm typically working with city staff or village staff. I'm always happy to work with elected officials too, though, if you're interested in attending webinar or training. That's always, of course, open to you as well. In front of you, you've got a couple books. You've got the insurance guide and the service guide. These are the documents that we send out to our membership as well as any prospect municipalities that were to think about joining CIVMIC. Just kind of explain what we are. So a lot of what I'm talking about today you'll see in the service guide. So... First and foremost, we are your insurance partner. So we like to think that as your insurance provider, we're able to provide you a number of things that hopefully increase your peace of mind. Your primary insurance with us is probably what you think of as your liability insurance. That includes any of your liability that comes from your general liability, your auto liability, your public officials, your EPL, your HR-related claims. So for instance, if you've got... Any kind of major lawsuit where someone's blaming the village and saying that you're at fault, the liability insurance likely covers. And so that's your primary coverage. That's what every civic member has to have to be a part of our pool. Most or all of our members also work with us for their workers' compensation insurance. So you're probably familiar with the work comp side of things. as well as our auto physical damage program for your vehicles. So if you were to get any kind of accidents or total out of vehicle, that's what we're doing on the insurance side. CIVMIC also acts as your go-between to the larger insurance market. By working with those other 56 municipalities across the state, you're able to get the power of pooling on your behalf to get you better rates in the group purchase space. So you have a number of what we call group purchases where we kind of take that power of pooling, 25% of the state's population is with CIVMIC, We have almost 20,000 plus employees that work for the cities and villages that make up our pool. And so insurance providers get you a much better rate than you'd likely be able to find on your own. So you have a number of those group purchases, including pollution coverage, crime coverage, equipment breakdown, some of those. So those coverages are placed with CIDMIC. We're happy to work with you. If there's standalone policies that you need for things like a fuel tank or anything like that, we can work with our broker to secure those coverages. So that's the insurance part. Maybe a little humdrum. I don't know if that's really exciting. But that's hopefully that peace of mind part that's behind the scene. If you're looking at the book that says insurance more than insurance, the insurance guide rather, sorry, with the green cover, that's the one that kind of breaks through those coverages if you wanted to see that in more detail. So I want to just kind of walk through just real briefly. I know you want to be respectful of your time. CIVMEC is a pool. I mentioned we have 57 members. You can see on the slides here that we're sharing that those 57 are listed on the screen. Cottage Grove joined in 2004. We were very excited to have you join throughout 2023. And your policy year started on January 1, 24. So it's been, we'd like to hope, some good two and a half, almost three years of working with you. And so you can see that we are governed by municipalities. I mentioned before, we are member owned. So each one of our villages and cities has a member rep that represents your village. In this case, that's Inga. And of those 57 member reps, seven of them sit on our board of directors. And so you can see on our board of directors list, including Inga, who joined this year at the at-large seat, kind of helps represent your village and make sure that you're getting all your services so you're well represented. So we like to say our members, our pool is governed by people that are in a very similar position to your village staff. These are folks that understand the municipal needs of Wisconsin because, well, they're municipalities. So CIDMIC does offer a number of services. I wanted to kind of highlight those for you tonight so you just had a sense of kind of what we're doing for you beyond the insurance piece. Of course, our hope and I'm sure yours is that you never actually have a claim. So what are the services that you're using, right? Are the things that you're taking advantage of? So one of the big things that we offer our membership is what we call our technology suite. We offer you the NeoGov suite. So, NeoGov is provided to their members at no additional charge, that's included if being a member, and that's often how our members both post positions and hire, bring them on through onboarding, and then train them up and get them into compliance with the Learn Management System. So, that NeoGov suite is paid for by CIVMIC, that is available to all of your Village staff, and that's something that we offer right away. We also offer a risk reimbursement program. That's a 50-50 matching grant program. So as you spend things to increase safety in your village, you can submit those receipts and get that reimbursement. Probably what we're most known for is training. This is the thing that I have the pleasure of working with my fellow loss control team members on, is that we work with our cities and villages both on-site, you might see us in your break rooms or in your board rooms doing training, but we also offer programming both in the Zoom space as well as in our training center in Milwaukee. So if you're familiar with the Milwaukee County Zoo, our building is right across the street. We have what we'd like to think is a fairly state-of-the-art training center, and so we can be working with anywhere from 20 to 40, 50 plus people doing roundtables, connections, trainings, anything you name it. So we offer a variety of safety programming to reduce your work comp claims and hopefully your liability claims as well. So anything from chainsaw training to bloodborne pathogen, all the way ranging to those more HR topics including FMLA, ADA, anti-harassment training, those pieces. So CIVMIC is proud to provide you that training. We offer it both in person and online. That learning management system has all those e-learnings and programs that many of your village employees use as part of their onboarding and then as part of any other annual training initiative. We also include cyber and volunteer insurance for all of our members. By the way, this is a lot of information, so if any time you wanna jump in, please feel free. The volunteer and cyber is included as part of the CIVMIC membership, so we recognize we are in an evolving cyberspace with a lot of risk. We're seeing that roughly once a month, we have a member with what would be considered Significant or close to significant cyber breach and so we offer that proactively to our membership that comes with all that Cyber support if there is a breach but in advance as well as training we also provide system scanning for your village so that you can get a chance to have your External system scanned by a third party expert and let you know about any vulnerabilities So it's a bad day when there's ransomware any threat like that to your village We want to make sure that never happens or at least we try to make sure it never happens And that's what we offer with our cyber We're also big supporters of the law enforcement space. CIVMIC is a proud partner with Wiley Egg, the Wisconsin Law Enforcement Accreditation Group. We host their meetings in our building. We have a staff spot, a board spot for our members represented on the board, which is nice. We also have a number of training opportunities through Wiley Egg. We can connect with groups like Lexapole and other groups at our training site. More importantly, though, we're with your police and fire protective services through how we offer any critical incident support if there is an incident, how we offer peer support training, as well as if there's media training or critical incident. So on the unlikely and hopeful never event that you have any type of major officer-involved shooting or a major public safety crisis, CIVMIC steps in with that media coach and tries to provide you with all that support. We also have dedicated service team, which is working directly with your team on site. Pretty much one phone call away. I'll be brief in some of this, but that dedicated service team is what we'd like to think keeps us really connected with you as a village. So you have a number of employees working directly with you. And the goal is to be onsite meeting your needs. So we have a safety and risk management specialist that works with you to provide all that safety training, risk management consultant. You might see them doing playground inspections or ergonomic assessments in your building. They're the ones doing your fume hood testing and all that. So that's about keeping your building safe. And you can see that they offer quite a few services. We also have an HR advisor that works directly with your leadership team to help work through members with your employees, issues rather, with your employees and make sure that if there's any needs that those are solved as well. And so our HR advisors are hopefully almost an extension of your HR team. They can be on site doing file reviews, they can be helping you write policies, talking through difficult employee situations, anything like that. So I mentioned the leadership training before. We have a number of certification programs, both virtually and online. I mentioned a few of the city staff, village staff rather, in this room have attended, which is always great to see. And so we're very proud of being able to prevent what we hope are claims or miscommunication or any issues with your employees in advance. So we spend a lot of time doing training and it's nice to connect with your leaders that way. So long and short of it is we are here hopefully working with you and for you. We try to connect through our member connection forums, our round tables. providing your staff an opportunity to connect. We have a number of important roundtables that we do, like law enforcement, fire roundtable, our HR roundtable, park and rec roundtable, and the goal is to connect and stay with you, find out what you need. We do a lot of different programming, including our newsletters and our summer annual meetings, really just trying to bring our membership together to share best practices. In the greater Dane County area, a number of your neighbors and kind of communities nearby are a part of CIVMIC, including Stoughton. If we look around, kind of go around Fitchburg, Verona, Monona, Sun Prairie, Wanakee, Middleton, we have a number of Madison area members. And so it's nice when we get together and you can share those best practices and learn from each other, and we're proud to be able to provide that space for you. My last slide for you tonight, before we take any questions, of course, feel free, please, to ask if any that you have are the services that we offer to your village. You'll see that there's been a number of really successful programs here throughout the two and a half years that the village has been with CIVMIC. Oops, sorry. Let me go backwards. Just moving that out of the way. So we've done about 150 trainees and over 177 total hours of training. We've got onsite services ranging from those ergonomic assessments, salary assessor reports, your playground inspections, your sound level testing, your HR advisors work directly with your HR team for a total of eight hours. And then you've had a number of employees already go through our leadership certification programs, which is pretty special. So it's nice to work with a village that's well engaged. I would argue that your employees are doing a great job. Your village is doing a really nice job of leveraging CIVMIC resources. We'd like to think that that partnership helps keep your claims down, keep your costs down, and help your employees improve.

I do see one thing missing from there. So each year we've taken full advantage of the $5,000 risk reimbursement. So we've applied and gotten $15,000 in total over the last three years.

Thank you, Cameron, for calling that out. It's a good call. We also have a $2,500 annual law enforcement reimbursement grant, which I believe you've used as well for a total of $7,500.

Thank you. Open it up to board members for questions or comments. Go ahead, Casey.

I apologize. This is a slight curveball to start you with. Does CivMic use any sort of AI? And I'm not talking about, you know, like, co-pilots kind of built into everything Microsoft Office has, but, like, in terms of generating trainings or reviewing claims or anything like that that would be, you know, an in-house sort of thing.

Yeah, that's a good question. I think, like many organizations, CivMic is trying to figure out how is it appropriate to use AI for that type of thing. The nature of a lot of our data, of course, is that it's... fairly sensitive, right? So the last thing we want to do is get that out there, have any kind of leak. We use AI in a very minimal capacity. I won't be lying if I said we weren't exploring opportunities to try to use it more. But what we've been trying to do is train our members on AI liability. We've got a lot of members that jumped feet first with AI, maybe didn't realize some of the risks. And so we come in and do that liability training, make sure they understand what they're getting themselves into. Most of what we use AI for is that you mentioned, probably search tools within Outlook, building images for PowerPoints, basic data analysis or certain spreadsheet enhancements. That's probably about the most of it. We haven't moved to any type of AI agent or any type of deep data projects with AI or anything like that. But it's a good question.

Okay, thanks. Yeah, certainly.

Are there any services that are underutilized that you would like staff to...

That's a good question. Thank you for that one. You know, as someone who does a lot of the training, it would always be nice to see more people. I would say the village is doing a fine job. We offer a number of different things that are available as needed. So things like e-learning or streaming video are available. I would say those are the types of things we would tell any member they maybe use more of. We, naturally, as your insurance company, love the idea that employees are getting trained and hopefully making good decisions in advance. And so I wouldn't suggest that you haven't done that. You have. I think the data shows your employees have been well trained. But the hope, of course, is that they could always do more, right? That's something I'd always tell our members. Feel free to explore more of those programs and attend more of what we're doing. We like to offer what we hope is a good, enriching webinar every month. We bring in outside speakers or in-house experts to talk about evolving issues. And that's one of those things that we would always encourage more of.

Yeah.

Thank you for asking.

We do have an employee communications newsletter that goes out every month that highlights many of your trainings for the employees.

Thank you.

Paula?

Back to cybersecurity. Are we actively using their system for this?

A combination. We primarily utilize the tools that Johnson Block has, primarily because they both do the same thing. And what we do on the Johnson Block side will get us an extra million dollars of cyber coverage. So it's kind of accumulating as much coverage as possible. So what is helpful is from a policy creation perspective, we've tapped into them. We're currently kind of in progress the AI policy and things to protect village data. So very mindful on data segregation and things that we can do to protect the village's data. They also have, you have a couple things. You have the Kindle tool. That's the tool that we aren't taking advantage of currently because it's a duplicate of what is currently being done.

Thank you. And then another cybersecurity question. Are you doing anything kind of proactively in terms of like utility systems? We saw the cyber attacks on water systems in Minnesota. Are you doing anything to address that specifically?

Yeah, that's a great question. So beyond what Cameron mentioned, which was that third-party site scanning, all the carriers, Tokyo Marine, but the carrier will work with us to provide all that training and the fishing training, all the things you can do in advance if you wish. Just on Friday, we sent out a message to our entire membership. Our team and I was putting that together about 5 o'clock on Friday saying, hey, we saw a rash of attacks across the country, including Minnesota. I'm sure many of you are aware of that. And so we sent that out to our membership to try to make them aware of those types of programs. The other thing that we're doing that we think kind of an example of what we talked about before, not only are we putting out model policies and training for you, but we're also putting together a group like the IT Roundtable. So one of the things that we do is bring our membership together on a monthly basis, talking to each other about what are some of those IT best practices, connect with those state agencies, provide those training programs and support. That's part of where Kind came from, some good ideas from our members. And so those roundtables are often a great opportunity for IT leaders to speak. Whether you use it in-house or a third party for that IT contracting, we always think it's a good idea to be aware of what your IT is doing, have a good honest faith check on them, make sure that you're protected. And so that's what we try to do with our members. So yeah, as much as we can in advance, we try to. It's always a lot easier to prevent them than deal with them afterwards.

So on the utility IT side, because the vast majority of our SCADA stuff is LW Allen is kind of the contractor that works on it. So both Larry and myself get CISA notifications whenever there's any type of municipal infrastructure attack. The biggest, I would say, risk on the IT environment is aging infrastructure. So that's something where we've recommended a replacement oftentimes a year or two before the absolute latest replacement is, because a lot of it's exploiting technology, especially with the way that AI can penetrate. Dated systems because lacks the complexity, you know, it used to be eight characters 16 characters now characters aren't enough so pass key and then pass key and passwords not enough so You know, so just trying to stay on top of that So when we're we're the board has done a really good job of making sure that we have an IT budget That's sufficient to make sure that we're keeping up with that technology there are systems that LW Allen will let the utilities know and that if they're up for updates. I guess I would be curious, do you guys do any type of site, like on-site analysts for vulnerabilities? That would be something.

That's a good question. I don't know that we've had that question before. I would have to check with my IT team. I don't have the answer for you prepared on the camera. I'm sorry.

Yeah, I think the physical IT risk would be something I'd be interested in. OK.

Any other comments from board members who haven't spoken?

I have more questions. So are there, in terms of like our premiums, are there additional actions that we could be taking to reduce our premiums? And then I think of like workers comp, are there additional things that we could be doing that we currently aren't with you to reduce those claims?

Yeah, that's a wonderful question. I would say the first thing is a lot of insurance, I'm sure most of you know this already, I don't mean to say anything you don't already know, but the workers' compensation program is all regulated by the state. Every employer in the state of Wisconsin is following those same statutes. And so one of the things that we talk a lot about is our experience modification and how do we help keep your mod rate, as we call it mod rate, Lower so that you pay less insurance or you pay less premium for the same insurance So one of the things that we'd recommend of course is that you have strong culture of safety that you work together with your safety You know committee that you work proactively to try to prevent those claims. That's all something that we do with our members other lines of insurance that are more mod kind of experience mod based would be like you're driving your auto physical or So when we have fewer claims, fewer crashes, fewer incidents, then your village would see a lower rate increase or hopefully no rate increase year over year. And so a lot of the insurance partnership, and one of the things that we think makes this pool so special, is it is the partnership. When we work together and bring those service teams on staff, your staff is attending these programs, coming to our round table, sharing those best practices, we're hoping it leads to fewer claims as officers or other drivers, for instance, are more aware and more senior and more trained, that in theory we have fewer issues. So I would say across the board, attending those programs and focusing on the culture that we build, That's a big part of what we hope to do, and that prevents claims. In terms of the liability side, between the statutory protections that the village has already, there's a number of things that you're kind of already protected from. But we try to keep a real steady rate increase, a nice low increase across our pool. That's always been our model. It's like a 2% or 3% increase annually is really our goal when the business can support that. And so thankfully, historically, we haven't really had to raise rates very high in the liability space. And that continues to be our model moving forward. We're owned by municipalities. We know how important it is during budget season to keep rates stable so that you can project those costs into the next year. And so that's kind of what we try to focus on. So I would say the village is doing a good job, right? Our goal is to continue to be that partner for you and keep those rates low. But that proactive attitude is what keeps rates down. So that's great.

And since you mentioned rates, can you talk a little bit, we're currently like at $1,000 deductible, for instance, on auto. What could happen if we moved, let's say, to a $2,500 deductible and what that might do to some of our pricing and such?

Sure, that's a great question. That's a question we encourage every one of our members to explore annually is what's your risk appetite? So naturally, if you take on a little bit of a higher deductible or a higher level of self-insured retention, you pay less premium. But then, of course, if there is that accident or that incident, in theory, that you have more of that responsibility. So most of our members, especially of the size, roughly the same size population kind of budget of Cottage Grove, is probably working within that $1,000 deductible with an auto. That's pretty standard. And so that's something that we would encourage, you know, Cameron or anyone from the finance team to work with our underwriter and our insurance to help you analyze those numbers. Some communities are interested in maybe taking on a little bit more of that risk, self-insuring a little bit more in the unlikely event that there is a claim maybe so that they can save some money on the premium. So I would say that analysis is a great question to ask and is one we encourage our members to talk to our team about every year. Thank you.

Any other questions or comments? Thank you for coming tonight.

Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

So just so the board is aware, so MPIC is why we get our property insurance from them and it's kind of through CIVMIC. They are technically a separate provider. If the board's interested, we can also have MPIC come in and speak. But currently we just have CIVMIC speaking kind of on behalf of insurance. So we would just need direction to bring MPIC in if the board would be interested.

Is there interest from the board? I'm seeing shaking heads now.

Yeah.

Where am I? All right. We already talked about traffic calming at CGS. So we are on 7C, which has discussed the minimum parking mandates in the village code, which is Trustee Stoa, who's stepped out for the moment.

So we can... JP, do you want to take it or motion to postpone?

I think I hear the door.

Or is he coming back? Okay.

Chris, you're up. We're just saying. We have 7C, discuss the minimum parking mandates in the village code. There's a memo in the agenda and this is presented by Trustees Stoa and JP.

Thank you. I love everybody waiting around for me to come back. That's not embarrassing at all. Okay, I'm going to read from a prepared statement because this is too important to me to just wing, so bear with me. So this is the first one I hope is going to be a series of code changes aimed at affordability. This one would eliminate government parking mandates in the village. So let me start by first stating what this is not. It's not eliminating parking. It's not telling anyone that they have to decrease the amount of parking that they already have. It's not telling anyone that they have to redevelop their lot. All this is, I think, is starting to bring the village code into the 21st century. Property owners go through a lot of due diligence when developing their properties. They have a business model or a home building plan that they go over extensively when they are getting ready to build. They're well aware of the cost of the projects and the parameters they need to meet in order to make their business, home, or property successful. The village of Cottage Grove should not undermine their efforts by forcing them to build more parking spots than they might deem necessary. Forced minimum parking mandates mean that a business may have to either buy more land or shrink the size of their planned development to meet an arbitrary stall requirement. This can cost a lot more money either in upfront costs or in reduced income due to a smaller business building footprint. The village should let property owners decide for themselves how much parking they need to help their businesses survive. Parking affects a lot of everyday life. It determines the size, shape, and cost of new buildings, the fate of old ones, patterns of traffic, Viability of transit, life of our public space, character of neighborhoods, it affects the budget as well. There's no denying the need for parking space, especially in a place like Cottage Grove, which is heavily car dependent. We have to examine what too much parking caused by parking mandates can lead to. Parking is never free. Too much can increase the cost of a building development, which we all pay for, whether that's through increased rents or mortgages or higher costs of goods so that business owners can pay their rents, rents that may be higher due to unnecessary parking requirement. Those costs are then passed on to consumers. It can lead to the consumption of valuable land by impervious services, which also can lead to more runoff, more pollution, and heat island effects. It leads to sprawl, forcing more land to be used for asphalt instead of homes, businesses, or nature, which means to meet demand for additional homes and businesses, additional farmland's going to need to be developed if that's the way they're going. It can stifle small business growth. It's hard enough to start a small business, harder still if you have to buy more land or asphalt than you need because of government mandates. It can stifle not only new business development, but also business or residential infill. If a business in a building goes under and another business that might be a different use of the building wants to locate there, there could be additional parking spots that are required that they might not be able to afford. Or if a home wants to evolve or simply renovate to be a little larger, they might need to add more parking spaces because of its size. Simply put, we should entrust property owners to evaluate how much parking they need, not mandate it based on nothing but gut feelings. Letting property owners decide for themselves might not change how they operate, but it could. And letting people build smaller, more affordable development saves homeowners and business owners money, helps preserve farmland, and prevents sprawl, lessens runoff, and pollution. Getting rid of parking mandates is a free market decision that is pro-business, pro-affordability, pro-info, pro-sustainability, and pro-environment.

Thank you.

JP, since you are the second on this, do you have anything you'd like to add before opening it for discussion?

No, and again, I think Chris covered it very, or I say not really, but Chris really did a good summary in there. The one thing I'll just kind of expand is, as he mentioned, this is not a new concept. This is actually happening across the nation. Many municipalities, cities, villages, even towns have been making this transition And there's plenty of instances that show that it's been a positive change. There hasn't been any negative consequences to that. And the other thing is still we saw the ability to do due diligence, ask the questions, confirm with developers whether they have the appropriate parking based on their needs in there. So we can still have that conversation, but it's no longer mandated in there that they have to have X, Y, Z based on square footage, et cetera, et cetera.

Okay. Open it up to the rest of the board for discussion. Aaron?

Yeah, just had a couple thoughts. I like it. I think Chris did a great job putting this together. A couple things just to think about if we choose to go through the process here. I guess my only concern about leaving it up to the developer is that with the construction costs being so high, this could be a place where they cut corners and could go below what they actually need. Another way to do this would be to have a minimum, but write into the ordinance that the plan commission and board can allow them to go under it if they can kind of make a case to us that they don't need what's in the ordinance. But I know other places just get rid of it altogether. So it's, I think, something we can look at both options moving forward. And I guess the other thing just to keep in mind, parking lots are also often a way for emergency vehicles to get close to the building. And if parking lots get smaller, we just want to make sure we're still allowing the vehicles to navigate through them properly.

Chris? Yeah, I mean, I think we're still going to have to follow fire code. And as far as cutting corners, I think they're going to do what they need to do in order to attract the customers they need to have a successful business. I think if they try to cut corners and they don't build enough, they're going to fail. So I mean, in the end, I trust that businesses are going to do what they need to do to succeed in the village.

Heidi. I guess I'd like to see this be sent over to plan commission and maybe look at some case studies and comparisons and make a recommendation back back up to us if you know eliminating altogether or Garen another IDEA MINIMUM BUT ALLOW TO GO UNDER WITH APPROVAL OR TO TOSS THIS BACK TO COMMITTEE LEVEL TO MAKE A RECOMMENDATION?

I THINK IT FOR SURE NEEDS TO GO TO PLANNED COMMISSION. MY CONCERN ABOUT STILL HAVING A MINIMUM BUT LETTING THEM GO UNDER I think it's a half measure, and I think it still leaves a door open to weaponization by trying to defeat a development that maybe you don't like. You can use parking as a sort of cudgel to try to kill that. Again, it's just my preferred outcome would be parking maximums, but I'm trying to come a middle ground here. And yeah, in the end, this is, it's free market, right?

Paula? I have a question on the flip side of that. So what if we take this away, take this away, and a developer comes and it's pretty clear that we don't, that they don't have enough, right? What is our recourse if we remove this requirement?

Why is there need to be recourse?

So, okay, so if we take the minimum parking requirements away and a developer comes forth to the plan commission and it's clear that they don't have enough, what do we have in terms of remedying that if we remove this provision?

I mean, I guess I don't know how we'll know if it's enough. Again, that's just sort of an arbitrary gut feeling saying that I don't think this is enough. I think we should trust businesses to do what's right for their business.

I mean, I guess a worst case scenario, someone says, I don't need any parking. We're just going to have street parking. And it's a place where we don't want people parking on the street.

But then we've kind of given away our opportunity to say, no, you can't do that, right?

Yeah, I guess that was kind of my concern, and I want some kind of safeguard against that, however we choose to do it. I mean, we have on-street parking.

It's an extreme example, right? Taking this to the extreme, we have on-street parking. We have really wide roads. Those roads are not aesthetic. They're functional, right? So they should... in theory, be able to park on those roads. I don't think we're going to get another authentic that's like, I don't want parking. I don't think that'll happen because they won't get anybody. People like to park at their house, right? Or their residence. I don't think they're going to not have that there. You might get one or two room apartment, excuse me, maybe that is thinking about it. But again, if that's probably going to be on a residential street that can handle it with street parking.

I think Casey had his hand up.

Yeah, so this is sort of for Rick and or Aaron. I mean, so yeah, say there's some extreme example, you know, a very large business says we're going to have no parking whatsoever. I imagine we could still impose conditions on their plan, developer agreement, something at level, even though we don't have a mandatory minimum, we could say we could impose that even without this. Rick, you're shaking your head at me.

It would depend on where you're at at this stage. So if let's say somebody has a parcel that's zoned just like rural holding and they come and they have a proposal to rezone it, At that point, we could potentially look at imposing a requirement as part of the rezoning condition. But if the parcel's already zoned for their use and all they need is a site plan, really we can only apply the ordinance standards that are applicable when they apply for their site plan. So there's gonna be less, if you don't have a parking requirement, you can't impose a parking requirement as part of the site plan.

I had a couple other questions for Chris. So do you have an example of another municipality in Dane County that's implemented this?

Fitchburg.

And was it recent?

2025, I think.

So do we have any sort of feedback or data that can be shared in terms of how that's gone?

I don't have it on me. I'm sure we could ask. I mean, at this point, probably 2025, there might not be enough data to be worth anything.

Yeah. I was just kind of doing some checking, like Sun Prairie, Wannakee, DeForest, Madison all have those minimum requirements, and so I just kind of wanted to kind of get more information about that.

I hear a lot that we don't want to be Sun Prairie, so...

So the other question is perhaps we put this in the comp plan survey You know I know you're talking about modernizing different things with code before we get to the comp plan, but I think Personally I think the the feedback from the public should inform our code decision-making and such so maybe if we Put it in the comp plan survey and get some feedback on it.

That would also help us My thought is we got feedback in April

Not on this particular issue.

We had three people elected in April.

On this issue? I don't remember ever hearing about this issue.

I talked about it, but that's what the trustee model of representation is that they trust you to represent them.

No, and I get that. I'm just saying we're having a comp plan and we're doing a survey to the public and hopefully we get oversight on that survey in terms of a governing body. And, you know, I think that's an opportunity. I guess I have some concerns about this. You know, I think if there's spillover into neighborhoods, the problem is that that a future correction could be costly or it might not even be possible. I think that we don't have mass transit. So if I look at a municipality that has mass transit, this makes a lot more sense, right? That we could reduce parking lot sizes and such, but you even said Cottage Grove is car heavy. That's a concern of mine. The different land uses have different needs, so we kind of take that piece out of it. And again, I think we should be getting feedback from the community through the comp plan process before we make code changes, is my opinion.

I mean, there is a public hearing requirement for code changes, so that's part of it. And like I said, excuse me, Cottage Grove is car heavy, and I think developers understand that, and they're not going to just skirt any parking. So I think they take that into account when they develop here.

Do you think the next steps are having staff direct language by having a conversation at Plan Commission. We're not going to be able to get this on with documents on the agenda for Plan Commission next week, but if we could have the first discussion at Plan Commission just as a discuss, and then if there was draft language to take a look at at a future meeting. I know there has to be a public hearing at Plan Commission, and then everything would come back to the board. Is that kind of the path that you have here?

Yeah, that's kind of what I was hoping for.

Casey?

um i would just add on to that i mean um i've you know done a lot of research on this as well you know looking at like the uw annex and then other municipal white papers and things like that um but i imagine that i would hope that we could uh include as part of the staff direction to have some of that research take a look at you know where this has been done what the results have been you know jpu alluded to some of this and we could have that at plan commission and then in turn back to the board um I don't know if that would be part of whatever motion we'd be putting on now, but that's my suggestion.

If there's no more discussion on the item, we could move on to the consider staff direction on the parking minimum mandates. I'm seeing nodding heads. So to entertain a motion.

I'll make the motion to direct staff to do the research draft, potential languages, kind of take those next steps regarding removing the minimum parking requirements in village code and place it as a discussion item at an upcoming plan commission agenda. I'll second.

Motion by JP, second by Erlandson. First off, is that clear to staff?

Yeah, I mean, we can have it on the agenda next week if we can just use your memo.

Yeah, that's fine. If you're able to get any research on other municipalities, yeah.

All right, any other debate on the motion? Otherwise, all those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Nay. Abstain? Aye. Motion carries.

Did you get all the votes?

So we'll see that item on plant commission for their next agenda, which is next Wednesday. We have, moving on to 7D, discuss direction to draft emergency services building service dog policy. I wrote a memo that's in the agenda. Basically, we have a collaborative draft from May that our HR and some staff have looked at. We have not run this draft past legal, so I think the direction that I'm looking for tonight is to... take the current draft, but then allow employment law to kind of finalize a professional emergency services building policy for a service dog, and then bring that back to the board for discussion and consideration at a future meeting.

Can you clarify for me what draft you're talking about? Because I know there's a couple floating out there.

Sure. So there was a draft from May that both chiefs had sat down with, but also had worked with our HR, with Inga and some staff. That was edited, I think, through fire commission, which is another agenda item tonight. And we can give all three drafts to our labor attorney, but it needs to go through a labor attorney in order to write a village policy. So is, okay, so this is not the ESB policy, this is a village policy? Well, this is an ESB policy, building policy, but it's written with the village in mind, since that's our entity. And I can let Rick weigh in on that as well.

Yeah, so basically the ESB, right, and I'm not qualified to review the policy, so it'll go to the labor person, but the The ESB is jointly owned by the village and town. I guess we have two tenants, right, which would be the fire district or the fire department and the EMS. So basically, if we were to come up with a policy that would apply to the ESB building, it would need to be approved by the village and town. So each entity can have its own policy that it wants, right? I mean, EMS could have its own policy that applies just for EMS. Fire department could have its own that just applies to fire department. But I guess the goal would be to have a policy that would be agreeable for the town and all parties involved, just as sort of like a collaborative policy that governs the whole building.

And Steve's been made aware of this.

So the fire department's attorney took that original draft from me and kind of beefed it up quite a bit in terms of including, you know, ADA process, written accommodation requests, that sort of thing. So it feels like he's done a lot of that work already for us at the fire department's expense, right? So... Is our labor attorney just going to kind of look that over and go yes or no, or is this something different, or do we not agree with those recommendations from the fire attorney?

I don't know how the labor attorney would look at it, right? I mean, it's not a contract, but there could be differing opinions on best ways to handle it, or they're looking at it through the lens of the village as the owner of the building, right? So who knows what the labor attorney might view as important for the policy to have or things that may or may not be included. But I can't speak to that. That's sort of outside my wheelhouse.

And is the idea that whatever policy is instituted for this also is for all village buildings then as well? Is this got implications beyond just ESB, I guess?

So I guess the agenda item tonight would just be for ESB. I don't know if the village already has a policy in place regarding service animals, but just given the unique nature of this building, that it's a joint jurisdictional building, it may be that the policy that they've proposed is perfectly fine, but we don't know unless the village's labor attorney has looked at it.

Any other discussion on the drafting, request to draft the service dog policy for ESB?

I feel like we spent a lot of time on this at JFC. I know that their attorney tried to connect at that meeting. But to add to what Paula said, their attorney did put a great deal of thought and consideration into this, which is really following the ADA guidelines, which had a large component. So I'm interested in where are we going to go if the labor attorney, I feel like we're all not on the same page. Casey?

I think that given that this is a very unique building that is jointly leased and, sorry, jointly owned, and then also in turn jointly leased by two further separate entities, I think it is very important that we have a labor attorney and specifically someone who's familiar with ADA case law and so on that drafts this and reviews this. I watched the fire commission meeting. I appreciate that the fire department attorney put forth their draft and put a lot of work into it, but there are many, many different types of law, and labor law and ADA is what's relevant here. They're attorneys for a fire department. They have maybe some... information in that, but it's not their expertise. So I think it's most appropriate to have this done by a labor attorney. So in general, I'm in favor of this.

Any other discussion? JP.

Irrespective of whatever policy kind of moves forward, either way from a process standpoint, we are going to need a policy that is approved by the village board in conjunction with the town in order to be applicable to ESB. So I feel... Like, yes, again, I said this in the Joint Fire Commission. I really did appreciate their letter bringing forward the draft. There are some questions I have about it, just things that need to be clarified, and I know further discussion is happening there. But either way, we need to take the next step forward in having a policy brought forward that is approved by both the village and the town so that it can be enacted for ESBs specifically to... I think just in case there is any points of conflict between the two entities that are currently occupying the building, having that process laid out so that everyone agrees a policy that kind of helps oversee that and is fair across the board that follows the ADA is absolutely needed.

Heidi. I would just add on that I think ESB policies and procedures, this would definitely be one of those to document, like JP was saying, if there's how to handle those kind of interdepartmental. And so there may be some additional policies or procedures that each entity within Might feel is also applicable like just within their entity and then kind of bringing those together So it they all may be, you know the same or similar but there might be additional considerations as building owner versus employer so I think the best course is to have our labor attorney and work on this with specialty and ADA. And then if we can distribute that to all the stakeholders in the facility draft so we can get any concerns addressed throughout the process.

Cindy mentioned Steve Anders knows about this. Is the town board also going to be doing, running this by their legal counsel?

He didn't respond.

He didn't respond. Okay. Because I'm thinking, I mean, ideally we also need to have something that the town's going to agree to. Is it better to try to do this as a joint effort rather than us running it through paying the full cost and then them basically saying up or down, um, I would think this would be a joint venture and a joint cost. I hate for us to, basically, we have a document that kind of does a lot of this. They could certainly take that July 27th draft from the fire department as a beginning point, right, for the labor attorney. But at the end of the day, if the town doesn't agree, have we just thrown money away?

I mean, I think that protecting our village employees with service animals and there's public spaces there, there's EOC that can occur there, there's other entities that are coming in there and making sure, at least from a village perspective, that we have our bases covered is important. This has also been going on for, Like 5 months and it needs to be wrapped up and we need to, you know, move this forward in the way we can move this forward is by having our labor attorney. Take a look at, you know, take all three drafts and the information and work for us to to make you know an actual policy. Any other discussion?

Correct me, I'm asking for legal parameters, but the fire district, they also deal with ADA concerns regarding fire districts, so I kind of feel like maybe it is a duplication of services, but I don't know. Rick, can you answer that?

It basically comes down to the village's comfort level of relying another attorney that doesn't represent you to draft something on your behalf. So if you want to have your own attorney review it, just see that it is in the village's best interest. That's what I'm always going to recommend, but that's just because I'm an attorney probably. But that's basically the comfort level of the village board, though, if they want to rely on the work of another lawyer that represents a different entity.

I kind of feel like we're asking that of the town, but you haven't had a conversation with Steve, so I kind of feel like we're almost at an impasse here. I mean, I agree, this has gone on for a long time and this does need to be resolved, but it feels like there's a lot of back and forth and I'm wondering how we can bring it together and work together. I know that the fire chief and the EMS chief have worked put a lot of time and effort into working together to resolve this.

Any other discussion on the item? In other words, we can move on to consider direction to draft emergency services building service dog policy.

I'd make the motion to send the emergency services building facility service dog policy to our attorney specializing in labor and ADA, sending all previous drafts of the policy along in the package to the attorney.

Do we have that? I'll second. Motion by Murphy, second by Erlandson. Any debate on the motion?

I was just going to say, could we, maybe either in part of the motion or the direction, utilize the July 27, which is the most comprehensive version as the starting point for that person to review?

I think it's important context to have the other versions that were worked onto. So I think the whole package of all versions should be sent and they could see that they're dated the most recent, I guess.

I'm just trying to reduce the legal bill and work more efficiently. So working off one of the drafts, but yeah.

Any other discussion?

Yeah, that's a good point. It's becoming like a, I don't know, $20,000 dog.

All those in favor?

Sorry, Cindy, you mentioned three drafts.

So I think there's the already approved EMS commission draft. There's this draft that is from the Joint Fire Commission from the last meeting. And then there's the one that our staff worked on that had some of the... important village related language in there. We want to make sure that all three of those go to try.

Got it.

All right. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Nay. Abstain? Motion carries. All right. So we're going to move on to, I scribbled all over my paper. Discuss 2026 WBC election security subgrant. Lisa. Lisa.

Thank you. There's a memo in the packet that explains a little bit of what the grant is. We have had the opportunity of applying for this two other times and have benefited from it. Again, they have funds that they are opening up to municipalities, so we're asking for permission to apply for this grant.

Any discussion on the grant or questions for Lisa? All right, seeing none, we'll move on to consider the 2026 security subgrant.

Make a motion to approve the 2026 WEC election security subgrant as presented.

I'll second.

Motion by Murphy, second by JP. Any debate on the motion? All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstain? Motion carries. Number eight, reports from villages, boards, commissions, and committees. We have the Emergency Management Committee. JP, you want me to do that one? Yeah, I will. OK, so the Emergency Management Committee met on Thursday, July 23 at 2 o'clock PM here at Village Hall. This is the first time this committee makeup has met, and with our new name, and our new website, and our new plan, and all the things that we approved earlier this year. We didn't have any public appearances. where they appointed me as chair and Paula as vice chair. We just approved the minutes from the old committee. And then we talked to Lieutenant Wagner and gave him some direction on committee expectations and some objectives. And a couple of those that came out were you know, making sure he has dedicated time to work on his to become a certified emergency manager and continue with trainings and come up with, you know, budget requests, et cetera. As far as, you know, emergency management in the village goes. We talked about um priorities for planning and coordination of training exercises um and kind of landed on that we would do some um at our next meeting which is most likely going to be quarterly um do a little you know exercise training with the committee after each of those meetings and working up towards live exercises and additional tabletops throughout maybe 2027 We talked about, Lieutenant Wagner gave an update on the natural hazard mitigation plan and our participation, which opens us up to new grant funding and also training opportunities. We discussed recommendations for the emergency management website and what we'd like to see up there, and we gave that direction to staff. We talked about budget and capital needs for emergency management within the village, and if we continue to do additional exercises and trainings that most likely this board will see increased budgets coming forward for the next year. We talked about our tornado sirens, their placements. We have three of them in the village now that are all operational. And eventually looking forward to an additional, in future budgets, that could be another potential capital request. And we scheduled the next meeting date for October 29th at 3 p.m. Anything to add? Any questions about Emergency Management Committee? All right, Parks and Rec Committee, Heidi.

Yep, thank you. We met on Thursday, July 23rd. We had a relatively brief meeting this month. Sean's still working on gathering information about cottonwood tree ordinances that any surrounding communities may have or any feedback for the committee to talk about. as that came through the committee from a resident. We also talked about the Shady Grove Park update because they were finishing up the shelter and kind of the final checklist at Shady Grove Park. We talked about the Juniper fields, parkland update, and just updated the committee that the board approved to go ahead with the master planning process. So we're going to start that, uh, in August and then went through Sean's report of all the excellent activities, um, the recreation departments putting on and, uh, happenings in the park. We did have a report of some vandalism at the lion shelter. Some of the facilities had been smashed inside. So those, I'm not sure if they're repaired yet. They're working on repairs. And, you know, Sean's consideration from the committee was to perhaps close that shelter a little bit earlier since we don't have cameras at that facility future agenda items working on the juniper fields parkland and then the cottonwood trees update ordinance update it's kind of like if you would treat require treatment of cottonwood trees or just policies like we wouldn't plant them on um, municipal property. Um, and our next meeting is moved, uh, to Wednesday, the 26th, the day before our usual meeting, um, due to, I believe the 27th is the rocket and back in. Um, so our meeting is at five o'clock on the 26th and that about wraps it up unless Sean had anything to add or if there's questions, open it up to questions.

Hearing none, we can move on to landfill.

Heidi. Yep. Landfill met on Monday, July 27th. And we approved the bills. There were no new monitoring results. We talked about the committee meeting frequency. And so the... The town had come. We were three member committee that evening because Steve had an unexpected event that he was late to the meeting. So but they did bring forward that the town agreed to reduce frequency to an annual meeting where we would go over annual testing results and the budget for the next year. And a special meeting would be called, if anything, came up that needed urgent addressing from the committee, which is kind of how it would work now anyway. We generally wouldn't wait two months to meet if there was something urgent that came up. So that's kind of the direction. It sounds like we would need some kind of adjustment in the agreement, so that's still pending if that agreement does get changed.

Any questions about landfill? All right. Um, uh, cottage grow fire district commission, Heidi.

Yep.

So after also invite chief up to the front or unless you want to stay sitting there.

So right after Nat big landfill, um, joint fire, uh, commission met, um, we had the chief's report, which was attached in the packet. If you're interested in the stats for the year, um, and up a little bit there's statistics about the types of calls responded to times of day information about vehicles and staffing we then talked about the roof vent prop mou which the department and The commission approved using Pleasant Springs funds to jointly purchase a kind of training prop. It's a trailer that has the ability to have training events built on it using a various pitch of a roof line so you can practice different training. um, scenarios, um, on it. So, uh, back in March, the, um, the commission approved, um, using Pleasant Springs funds to fund half of that. And then, um, the Cottage Grove volunteer firefighters, um, paid for the other half and, uh, looking, so the, um, volunteer fire department is looking to enter into an agreement about the use and ownership of the roof vent prop. So I wrote a memo. I'm going to go through the rest of the agenda and then we can come back to that. So we discussed that at length. We also talked about the service animal policy. And then we talked about a plumbing maintenance item approved, the use of funds to do a plumbing repair, kind of a Roto-Rooter situation. We talked about the length of service awards, which the village board had been in favor of. There's a state matching for length of service that would go into a retirement type account for firefighters. And through feedback from the department and the town hasn't always been as supportive of moving forward with the LOSA, we decided to not include that in next year's budget. So we also talked about the paper call and how that's affecting responses. We decided that maybe we'll collect more data and see how the how effective the pay per call is at increasing turnout. We're going to keep meeting at town hall because ESB has EMS training on the fourth Monday. And we did move a couple of meeting dates in September and October due to a few conflicts. So that sums up the meeting. Um, and then we can go back to the rough event prop, um, ownership, which I did include a memo that kind of summarize that history of the. equipment, which, um, as discussed at joint fire, um, is the ownership of miscellaneous equipment and personal property not described above shall be determined by the district, um, which is in the agreement from the volunteer fire department Inc. Um, so, you know, that's kind of where this MOU started, um, under the understanding of that portion of the agreement. But I would welcome Rick's input on that.

So I believe that's correct. So the fire department agreement, so the agreement basically between the municipalities and the volunteer fire department, because the volunteer fire department is a non-stock corporation. So that agreement says and sort of lays out these different scenarios of how ownership of the equipment is determined. So basically everything is supposed to be based on our funding formula for like major equipment purposes, purchases, specialized equipment for the town is owned by the town, specialized equipment for the village is owned by the village. Then there's sort of this sort of catch-all phrase that says any other equipment will be determined by the district. So if this was strictly a purchase by the volunteer fire department, I would say ownership is clearly volunteer fire department. Here, because you have sort of like blending of funds, I think best interpretation of it is that it's set by the district. So I guess the village could provide direction to say, look, we're just going to treat this as a volunteer fire department asset. Or it could say we want to treat it as a district asset. If it wants to go that route, I'd probably just want to make a couple of changes to the MOU. I haven't spent a whole lot of time looking at it. But I think just clarifying the ownership in the MOU of how that would work out for the entities involved would make sense. But basically it's just a policy call for the village to, well, technically it says district, but the village can sort of make its opinion known about how it views the ownership of the asset and working with the volunteer fire department on how to either structure the MOU or just basically say, no, it's yours regardless of, we just treat it as a donation.

And that is something that I was going to point out earlier. That was something that we talked about at the commission as well, that perhaps the other option exactly that we could consider just the owner is the department.

Did we contribute funds?

The Pleasant Springs funds were half.

But those aren't our funds. Those are coming from fees from the town of Pleasant Springs. Those aren't coming from our taxpayers, right?

So the way that basically agreements all work together, believe it would still fall under the general ownership structure for the district. So even though it's the Pleasant Springs funds, they are contributed to district capital. So the capital equipment that's purchased by the district is the ownership percentage is based on the budget apportionment.

My understanding of the Pleasant Springs agreement that was signed in 2014 by Diane Wiedenbeck and Chris Hampton is that it allows for the department to make the determination where to spend those funds. So I guess my inclination is just to say, let the fire department own it. I mean, they're already providing the insurance and all of the things that has to do with it. It's a specialized piece of equipment. I don't think the police are going to train on vent prop, right?

Actually, the fire department offered for us to be able to utilize it as a training aid.

Well, that's nice. Good. Yes. But I mean, from a village perspective, this is really a firefighter piece of equipment. I guess, and given the fact that it came from Pleasant Springs Funds, which comes from their user fees, we didn't put any money towards this. I don't think we should be taking any ownership of it. That's just my opinion.

I think it came before the commission and then to the boards because that is kind of a gray area that in the that we're able to determine the ownership through the agreements, that we can determine that. So I think that's why we're talking about it.

So in looking at the Pleasant Springs funding, the remaining fees should be applied towards capital expenses. But is the training prop, so it's a miscellaneous, is that not considered capital? And should those fees actually not be used for this purpose? I don't know, legally.

Right, so it's basically the Pleasant Springs funds go first to the operational expenses of actually providing the service. And then after that, it would go towards capital expenses. But the capital expenses, I mean, basically the capital expenses are equipment owned by the village and town based on the fire district agreement itself.

And then there's a capital plan that was presented last year that has the capital purchases that are upcoming for the next 10 years. Am I making that up? but this wasn't on the list.

Chris. What's the lifespan of it and how much did it cost?

92,800 and I believe it's a metal structure. So I mean, outside of the boards being replaced, I would do like 40 years.

There's no, I haven't found any data that says how long they're lasting because they're pretty new. So, I mean, Depends on how well it's maintained. It could be up to four years. It could be 20. Depends on how bad it's used.

Yeah, I think, so I think what the fire district here is that, you know, the volunteer fire had donated funds. So what they don't want to have happen, and I know they're sitting behind me, is they don't want us to make a decision that we're going to sell this asset and they're out the 40-some thousand of their contribution. So, you know, when looking at an MOU, I think spelling out that any basis that would get from a sale would go directly back to them. I think that makes complete sense. I think as far as an asset ownership perspective, It doesn't really matter. I would say the fire district is serving the Cottage Grove and Pleasant Springs community. So that asset and the way those assets were fundraised for, that was the purpose of those funds. So I think when we're looking at this and other examples, I think we're going to want to be consistent in the treatment of assets like this. Furthermore, in any budget request, I do think the VILLAGE BOARD AND TOWN BOARD SHOULD BE AWARE OF ALL PURCHASES BEING MADE REGARDLESS OF FUNDING SOURCE BECAUSE I THINK IN THIS CASE PRESERVING THE FUNDRAISING FUNDS FOR OTHER MAYBE MORE OPERATIONAL PURPOSES THAT ENHANCE THEIR SERVICE LEVELS WHERE THIS IS SOMETHING THE TOWN AND VILLAGE COULD HAVE CAME TOGETHER AND Contributed the entirety amount and so having those conversations during budget cycle, especially going on I think is going to be very important so if we do keep it as And I'm going to use different terms here a fiscal agent asset, which is a town and village asset I think there definitely should be an MOU in place on what happens if at disposal of the asset and If it's gone, goes as a volunteer equipment, I would say we would also want similar protections that if the fire district got rid of it, we would want our proportionate share of the basis back. So kind of in consideration, just something to consider.

Other questions? Casey?

Rick, I'll put you on the spot, and if the answer is, I don't know, I haven't had time to read it, that's fine. With the MOU, so it lists the purchase option and basically giving the fire department right of first refusal that if it were to be sold, sorry, if the MOU is in place, first of all, and then if it were to be sold, they get right to purchase it, but then also mentions earlier under no unapproved transfer that it shall not be sold without the written and unanimous consent of the village, town, and the fire department. Does that kind of preclude the right of first refusal if the fire department has to sign off on it first? Doesn't that make it not get to that point?

Theoretically. I mean, maybe there's scenarios where basically you want to make sure that it's not sold without their consent, right? So this at least gives them a legal right, like an additional legal right. So I don't see anything wrong with including both.

Okay. I wasn't sure if it was redundant or one of them nullified the other in some way, so that makes sense. uh well i guess i'll sort of echo the cameron that what you said and sort of said the fire commission i don't know if we could put anything in writing for this but yeah we should not do this going forward this way of purchasing and funding things because if there's any way to make that more forceful or some sort of memo or recommendation i think maybe that's worth considering so we don't do this again because yeah this is a mess it was definitely talked about at commission that um

this kind of arrangement is not, probably wouldn't go about that again. And then I wanted to give Chief Archibald, I know you've been waiting a little bit, a chance, did I miss anything from the,

um from the discussion there that you wanted to touch on no i mean you summed it up pretty well it's just if if the agreement is decided that the fire department has to give up their ownership of it we just want protections that one it's not sold without our permission and two like the use of it just because we put a lot of money into it so like If somebody just decides next week that we're going to sell it, the fire department doesn't want to be out all that money without any kind of repercussions. So that's really all it was about. And to your point, Casey, yeah, we've already discussed we're not going to do anything like this again. We're either going to buy it outright ourselves or we'll put it in a budget item for the municipalities to buy it.

And I think, Nick, to that point, as we talked about, it would be helpful for the village and town to know what all the purchases are, because we wouldn't expect the fire department to come up with $92,000 of equipment. We want, obviously, those to be enhancements of funds. The intent is never to have your association fundraise for everything. So that was another part of this, is kind of getting better visualization of what those requests are. Sure.

Rick, you mentioned that if we went ahead with the MOU, you would want to make some changes. What would those be?

So I haven't spent a whole lot of time looking at it. The first thing I know is just it doesn't spell out who actually owns the equipment. So just specifying who owns it is the biggest thing that jumped out to me.

I guess my recommendation was simplification, just asset ownership as X. If the asset is sold at the sole discretion of the fire department, Inc., the village and town would return the proportionate share of proceeds, just a two-liner, something very simple. I think we start talking about tax treatment and other things, and I think that we start to get into an agreement that's much more complicated as opposed to just saying, It's up to them. They have the first use of the equipment. They are the sole deciders on if the equipment gets sold. And if it does get sold, they get their funds back.

Can you, and this is maybe where a disconnect is happening to me, where you're saying that if they sold the piece of equipment that the village would get their share back, but we didn't put any money into it. That's where the disconnect is for me.

Yeah, so Kim calculated by year the Pleasant Springs funds that were calculated and calculated what technically is the villages and what's technically the town. i don't like the pleasant springs funds how they're treated i think they should offset operating costs and then we don't these funds that are being held by the town are creating these additional conversations that frankly i think you could these can just come in budget requests so my my personal opinion is if you have an operating budget of 350,000 from the fire department. We should just be taking out the funds that are getting received by Pleasant Springs and that's what our community should be levied and then we just levy for Capital requests as they come in because right now what's happening is this pool of money is being held and both communities have to approve how it's being spent and it's creating an extra layer of organizational administrative work and And where that further gets complicated is now that we're transitioning sort of from the volunteer model, the operating costs are going to be starting to increase incrementally. And so that model of having that Pleasant Springs bucket just build up, in my opinion, doesn't make sense anymore. I don't think it makes sense to have something just be sitting in an account. especially because we've talked about the intent or the spirit of those funds are for equipment that should be responding to Pleasant Springs. And so when we start tying more and more of administrative strings to funding, it just makes it harder to manage those funds. And if you have turnover at municipalities, remembering what all of those little functions are, if that makes sense.

It does. I guess I see this as when we're talking about pouring it back into the vehicles or whatever capital servicing Pleasant Springs, I think about this as a sinking fund where we know that our engine, we have an engine coming up I think in the next couple years where we basically take these funds, set them aside, and that replaces the engine and there's a direct benefit to Pleasant Springs. So I think that's a bigger conversation, obviously, than this one, you know, piece of it. But I 100% agree.

And I think When we talk about that, I think that's something we could even do from a mechanic perspective. Those funds don't necessarily have to be held by the fiscal agent if we want to be dumping it into a sinking fund. Because as you'll see in the monthly reports that Kim provides, she does calculate in a village portion. and a town portion of that asset. But we obviously have no control, like I can't say Kim cut a check for $230, $239,000, I wanna use it for the ladder truck, even though you guys wanna wait and use it on a squad or X. So I think opening up that flexibility, whatever it is, is something I think should be considered.

Pleasant Springs uses 2% dues to help pay their contracts. Does that factor into how it can be used? 2% dues can only be used in capital. Is that my correct understanding? We've got an expert in the room.

Capital, inspections, certain training, apparatus. I always ask April because she's the one who knows the most on it. I mean, I think to that point, though, you talk about things that are inspection, and there's enough costs. I think they're, what is it, $50,000 a year? Yeah, a contract.

Yeah.

Yeah. So good comment. Thank you. Any other? But I definitely think it's worthwhile when we have a joint meeting to talk, have a discussion about the future of this.

So we move on to consider ownership of the roof vent prop.

I would make the motion that we allow the Cottage Grove Volunteer Fire Department to be the owner of this vent prop equipment.

I'll second the motion. Motion by Severson, second by Buenzo. Debate on the motion.

I guess I would just ask that maybe we consider having a similar type of agreement to have funds go back in the Pleasant Springs account if it's sold. Like a similar kind of agreement, proportionately.

I would amend my motion to include that if the fire department were to sell the asset that the Pleasant Springs portion be returned to the Pleasant Springs fund.

in fuller with it is there a depreciation 50 because the asset was split 50 50 so 50 of the proceeds be returned to the pleasant springs thank you yes i would agree do you have that lisa and then my follow-up question is that something that we need to draft something on to be signed or

I hate overcomplicating things. Yes. I mean, for something to be like that legally enforceable, yes. I mean, we don't control the asset, right? They own it. From a logistical standpoint, it probably comes out through the budget process. So we could put something together if that's the direction the village board wants. Otherwise, we're just sort of doing a handshake agreement that that's the way it'll be done.

Is the town board talking about this this evening?

Maybe as part of their report, it wasn't a certain agenda item.

I feel like to prevent any interpretation, especially looking at our agreement with the fire department, we should have an MOU that states that we are officially giving it to them so that it's all cut and dry. I know one of the biggest concerns, too, was registration of it. That's how this all came up. For the department, they went to go to register and they couldn't. really couldn't because of all this gray area so like it needs to be explicitly clear for all elements in there that we are giving them the ownership and at the same time we're asking for the similar protections in there so i just ask

So I'll amend my motion to give them asset ownership to have the ability to return 50% of the proceeds to Pleasant Springs Fund in the event it's sold and yeah, institute a memorandum of understanding that outlines the two measures.

I agree. Does anyone need that read back to them? Is everyone in understanding what they're voting on? All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstain? Motion carries. Law Enforcement Committee, Chris.

We met on July 28th at Village Hall at 530. We approved the minutes. We got a police station construction update. We approved a new sex offender appeal board form. We went over the year to date budget status and how much of that has been used. Talked about community night out August 19th from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Got the chief's reports and we adjourned.

Questions for Chris on law enforcement?

I don't necessarily have a, well, I don't know if you can answer this, Chris, but I'm just reading through, and maybe this is more of a Chief Geary. I'm looking through the rolling summary numbers, and the check property is really high in comparison to the other numbers. Is that an accumulation of, I guess, can you explain exactly what check property is?

Simple terms, proactive policing.

Okay. Can you explain what that means?

It's checking properties throughout the village.

Is that like people calling?

Residences, businesses, whether people are calling village property, all of the above.

So people are calling in and asking for property checks?

There's vacation checks. There's business checks. So, yes. Okay.

And if anyone's watching online, you can go on their website and you can fill out a form and then they come and look at your property and they appear on your Ring camera.

And I will say that I appreciate it when they stop by the banks proactively and credit unions.

With the police update, there is on the village's Cottage Grove transparency portal a project page dedicated to the police station that we're updating monthly from a financial update. So we'll update pictures on there. So to kind of supplement Chief Gary's monthly report at LEC, we're updating on a monthly basis the financials. And I was going to try to share my screen, but I'm not going to make it. So we don't have to wait for me. Go to the next item.

which is reports from village officers, and we'll start with Rick in the hot seat right next to me.

I have nothing for tonight. Hopefully I can have the federal housing bill update for the next meeting. It's fairly comprehensive, so I'm just going to do sort of like a high-level overview, and if there are further directions or look into things after that, we can explore them.

Village Administrator Matt.

Thanks. A couple of things from the projects tracker, Juniper Fields. Construction is planned to start this month, potentially in a couple of weeks. Our 2026 streets and pedestrian projects are on track to be substantially complete by the end of the month. And by and large, all of our capital projects, as I sent to you guys, happy report, are coming in at and many times well under budget. And then highlighting staff years of service, for the month of August, Forester James Rothman is in his 27th year with the village.

Any questions or comments for Matt?

Paula? Yeah, I have two questions. On your monthly briefing that you emailed out, you mentioned that a draft survey for the comp plan is being reviewed by staff, and then that grape attends to put that public. But are we going to get the opportunity to comment on that survey? Because they're only doing one, right?

Yeah, I believe it's one survey. Aaron's going to be sending this week plan commission and the board for you guys to submit any kind of comments that you have, and we'll certainly incorporate themes of responses.

Okay. Yeah, because we did that with the housing chapter update, as our committee kind of worked on that survey, so it would be nice to have that opportunity. And then the second question I had was on the development projects. You said the water main looping project was completed on July 16th. So I know that more of East Gaston was paved than just the looping area. And I know that was a bid alternative from the Utility Commission. But I know we never got a developer's agreement to get them to pay for that. So now that $172,000 that we spent on that paving, who's going to be paying for that?

I believe that's a utility for the short term, and I don't know if Rick or Cameron can jump in, but we can potentially recover that through any upcoming development that comes in the area, because there's likely, depending on the type of development, since this can be probably more intensive use, there'll probably be more substantial roadway improvements out there.

And I guess I don't remember the extent of the paving out there on Gaston, but the pre-annexation agreement still has those requirements that run with the property. So any future development is still on the hook for any improvements that were placed. I don't remember the specifics, but basically they involve Gaston Road and feature water main looping through that property. So those are all requirements that run with the property.

So just kind of a little bit of history. It's really good that our water and sewer department works really well with Public Works. It's kind of a joke because it's one person, and that's why I would never recommend separating it. In many communities, unfortunately, if water and sewer are separate, sometimes you have projects done where the utilities are done, but the road's not planned. And unfortunately, it's Essentially the utility if it's a utility only project the utility ends up paying for the cost of the road In this case we do have an option as Rick mentioned to eventually recover a proportionate share of that that cost So I'm working on keeping track of that. I do know as part of that some of the backfilling of that of that change order was a little bit higher than The road cost was a little bit less, but the backfill and the granular fill was more to stabilize the actual looping. And Kyla knows way more than I do. But it's issues dropped off by now. So we'll get an update.

Any other questions on the village administrator report?

So I'm trying to mentally catch up. Was this originally part of what was to be the creed? Is that part of what he, the developer, was agreeing to pay for?

This project was always going to be done regardless. It was just like perfect timing that if that project happened, we could get them to pay for something that we already knew we were going to pay for. So it was kind of like a benefit of just working in the same area. There's gonna be additional work that needs to be done out there anyways, eventually, but this helps create that kind of a looping and that infrastructure in that area, a little bit of redundancy. But when this project was originally proposed, CREED wasn't even in the picture, I guess to put people's minds at ease. This was not the looping portion of the project that we would have done or the additional looping that we would have done, we didn't do to service the project because the project didn't move forward. Does that make sense? We didn't extend the utilities as part of this project as if we would have had to if the CREED development would have happened.

Okay, I'm confused because I just remember having that conversation when, before CREED, when we were having, before the development agreement, and the board, I don't recall approving that specific, I don't know that the board ever approved that.

The utility did, it's a utility project. So when the utility, tears up a road to put the utilities and they're responsible for fixing the road. This was an opportunity to lessen that cost because the timing of development going in the same time.

I guess I should have clarified not the water looping. I know about that. I'm talking about the extra paving that went up and around beyond the water looping as an obligation of the property. Okay. Yeah.

All right, we move on to the Assistant Administrator, Finance Director presentation of 2026 Q2 budget to actual reports.

Okay. In the packet, you'll see the quarter two interim reports. The first half of the year is going well in comparison to the budget. In August, we'll get our final tax payment from the county of about 3.2 million. As Matt said, most projects are coming in favorably. And just a couple updates. The stormwater management plan is with the DNR for review. Once it's approved, then we'll request funds for the grant. And then the DNR streetlight project hasn't started yet, but it's actively being worked on. So that'll start soon. Is there any questions that you guys had?

Yeah, so the DNR Trailhead grant, there's just some things that, with some of the decorative lighting, it takes a little bit, so we ordered those waiting on it. Alliant is actually running that whole project for, so we'll get invoiced approximately 49,000, and then we have assigned MOU at DNR to return the remaining 30,000. I'm really proud of all of our staff for managing the really turbulent first and most of second quarter with increasing in price, like major increasing in prices and proactively managing those costs. Really the only thing we saw was a little bit of fuel surcharging coming from garbage and recycling and a little bit of fuel costs, which we're able to eat here. So really happy about everybody's kind of group mentality for improvement there. While, as we kind of mentioned with the capital projects, really we schedule a lot of our projects to finish up with substantial completion in August. So typically what we see is a first financial management plan that doesn't include a lot of unspent bond proceeds or debt proceeds to offset future costs. And then in September, kind of when I feel a little bit more comfortable about presenting a number, that gets added in to reduce the tax impact. We're on pace to significantly beat what our budgeted numbers are, especially in vehicles. So excited about that. Obviously, we can kind of loop the budget cycle, the next kind of agenda point under my item, because they kind of go hand in hand. So we had about 369 vehicles $.8 million of net new construction. Obviously, a vast majority of that's attributed to the Amazon warehouse facility. 23.924% net new construction. If you don't include Cottage Grove, the Dane County average is 1.7%. What is kind of a better statistic that I like to look at is our residential equalized value in 2025 was roughly 72% of our makeup as a village, and that has now been reduced to 58.33%. While I understand the Amazon facility is not hitting the tax roll for the general tax roll next year, this will really provide relief. And this is a much more sustainable percentage than 85%, 87% just 10, 15 years ago. So making sure that we kind of have that diverse tax base to spread out the cost. Kind of if we're looking at our next budget meetings, WITH THE BUDGET UPDATE, THE FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT PLAN WILL BE PRESENTED TO BUDGET REVIEW COMMITTEE ON AUGUST 18th. AND THEN COME HERE TO VILLAGE BOARD ON SEPTEMBER 8th. SO RIGHT NOW THAT NET NEW CONSTRUCTION IS BEING FACTORED IN. SO WHAT WE'LL END UP DOING, YOU KNOW, BRINGING FORWARD A PLAN THAT'S CONSISTENT WITH THE capital prioritization plan. And again, starting off with being conservative on the unspent debt proceeds, but knowing that that will likely get added back in probably closer to that September 8th, just with the way deadlines are due, but make sure that we're describing that process. Any other questions? I'll kind of loop those both in with the quarterly report or budget process update because we're going to meet every day in September and October.

Questions for Cameron?

Paula? So do you expect any departments to kind of run over budget year end? And do we need to, like, are we going to get more budget amendments? I know it's forecasting, so...

So you'll get, so I anticipate a larger, so the next budget amendment that will be coming forward is primarily TID based. So it will true up kind of all the final TID related activity. I do anticipate there being a budget amendment for recommendation of of essentially unrestricted reserves. So once we kind of have a clarified area of where the general fund's gonna end up, there might be a budget amendment recommending either a transfer to debt service or capital project fund. There could be, Right now, everything else is tracking, but interest income is one that is likely gonna end up more favorable than anticipated. I think we avoided a lot of the capital project change orders, so I'm not really worried about diving in there. We're sitting really good in our building maintenance fund. Yeah, so doing really well right now.

And I know our legal fees are kind of trending over budget. Is that mostly court driven?

So yeah, municipal courts is always one that it's a little bit easier because there's typically corresponding revenue that offsets the municipal court cost. The cost for municipal court is trending a little high compared to where it is, mostly because of a relatively large January invoice. The general legal line that's sitting under financial and professional services is actually sitting, because it's aggregated with a whole bunch of other professional services, there's things that have come significantly less than budgeted, so that line should be okay, just depending on the rest of the year, if there's any major issues. Definitely something, I put some thought from a budget perspective, like should we be beefing up ordinance lines or trying to pull things out so kind of the board has a better feel of what funds are available for certain initiatives and kind of proactively planning as part of that budget process. But yeah, we should be okay on the professional services.

I can just give a little comment on the prosecution as well, because the January invoice, like Cameron mentioned, was higher. But that was because we had sort of a rare event where we had to go do a circuit court trial. So there's just added expense with having to go to circuit court. That was in the five years that we've represented the village. I don't know if we've maybe had one other one. So they're a rare event, but they do happen if we're not able to resolve it. And like Karen mentioned, it's kind of hard to tell. I mean, if a lot of tickets are written and we have a lot of people contesting them, I mean, it's hard to really judge how the municipal court how that will go year over year.

And I'll say this a million times, no one ever makes money on municipal court. No matter how many tickets, how many parking tickets, it's not a revenue generator. We're lucky to break even on municipal court. Um, you know, Rick and I talked to about some efficiencies in, in municipal court, you know, possibly if there's another avenue that is more prosecutor focused, um, something that could be explored as well. And I appreciate that, that recommendation, Rick.

Any other comments for Cameron? All right. Uh, communication and miscellaneous business, uh, discuss approval of vouchers bills list in the agenda. Any discussion on the bills list? Otherwise, we'll move on to 10A1, consider approval of vouchers.

Move approval of vouchers as presented.

Second. Motion by Murphy, second by Severson. Any debate on the motion? All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstain? Motion carries. Correspondence? Anyone have anything?

You betcha. We held a public information session on the stormwater utility. I have seen a fair amount of questions kind of come up. We're planning on putting a Q&A together. We'll add that to the board. Didn't want to be too far ahead of it because obviously the board hasn't heard any presentations on this yet, but we'll work on getting some Q&A frequently, questions and answers added to the website. Certainly forward any questions that you have to us as they come.

Anyone else have anything for correspondence? Upcoming community events.

Community night out, August 19th, 5 to 8. Come on out and see your neighbors.

Rockin' at Bakken is August 27th from food carts at 5.30, music from 6 to 8. JP.

And then the library board's final Music in the Grove with Angela Porta is happening on Thursday, August 20th at 6 PM at Dublin Park.

And then lastly, we established this past week, October 1st will be the budget listening session. We have one morning session from 11.30 to 1, and then an evening session from 5.30 to 7. Again, that's October 1st. And then we have the budget feedback form already available on the website for suggestions. So please, if you're talking to residents, have them fill that out, because that really helps.

Okay. Future agenda items. Rick's gonna be busy, because we have the landfill amendments, the minimum parking requirement language, the ESB policy for service animals, and the MOU for the prop.

And the housing bill presentation.

Oh, and housing bill presentation.

So you didn't forget about that, Rick. Yep.

And then we also have the edited handbook coming back for approval at a future meeting, other future agenda items.

As a follow-up to the SIFMIC, I'd like to discuss the deductible, the 1,000 versus 2,500.

We could put a little presentation together next. It's not going to be super, it's just going to be here's the options at different premiums level, at different deductible levels for the next meeting.

Can you put that under your finance director agenda?

We can put it under our HR communication manager update. I'm going to delegate.

All right. Otherwise, we can move on to number 11. Motion to adjourn. second murphy and jp non-debatable all those in favor all right thanks everyone