City Council - workshop

Good evening, everyone, and welcome. I will call our Bloomington City Council study meeting to order. Tonight is Monday, October 19th, 2026. Thanks to everybody joining us here in the chambers and to everybody watching online tonight. Council, we have two items on our agenda, both under organizational business. Our first item is item 3.1, which is a review of the draft 2027 through 2036 capital improvement plan. And item 3.2, we will go through a bevy, a flurry, a gaggle of budget possibilities. Exactly. These are all of our external services teams. We're going to go through those department b

Motion and a second by Council Member Carter to accept tonight's agenda as stated. No further Council discussion on this. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Opposed? Motion carries 7-0, and we have an agenda. And we will dive right into it. 3.1 this is a review of our draft 2027 2036 capital improvement plan. Laurie economy shoulder is here. Good evening and welcome.

Thank you. Thanks for the information. And thank you for the work that goes into this. I know this is not a small task especially as you're looking out a decade and what possible projects there might be and knowing that there are plenty of unknowns as well that will really determine how that how that list ultimately does look. I appreciate it. The couple of questions that I had were more along the lines of the economies of scale. There's a lot of city facilities in there, and I'm just looking out and knowing that we have a number of additional fire stations that we still have to do. Is there a

UNDERSTOOD. Okay. Thank you. Council, questions on this? Council Member del

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I was just curious if any, it didn't seem so, but I didn't want to assume that anything moved in or out of the 27-28 plan as a result of the most recent meetings that you all had. It felt like the like you said that there's a couple of things that have moved around over the last couple of times we've looked at this but in this particular case it feels like the things we talked about last year are still the things that are at the top of the list this year. Am I reading that correctly or were there material changes made to the recommendations from your teams as a result of

Okay. And speaking of the inflationary changes, council Member Rivas and I were both having the same question. I think when we've seen the animal shelter in the CIP over the last ten years or so, it's probably been pegged at about five. It's in here at seven. Is that mostly inflationary reasons? Did our conversations on the shelter like revise that upward or how did that move?

Okay, very good. Thank you. That's all my questions. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Council Member Nelson.

Thank you, Mayor. Good anticipation there. I had a question. Bry Park was noted for a playground on there. I thought we replaced the playground a few years ago. No, not Brian, Bri.

So, and I guess the second part of that question specifically was we have a parks master plan and that was one of the decommissioned ice rinks and were there other improvements that are actually in there not the playground that I believe has already been replaced but again you can get back to me on that because it's coming back to us right so yeah just get back we'll come back that's fine I appreciated seeing the tennis and basketball court reconstruction because one of the questions I had when I originally looked at it is, you know, we deferred a lot of maintenance and I know maintenance gene

So this is just normal infrastructure improvement that cities do all the time to support businesses so they have a place to park and things like that.

Absolutely. Thank you. The last thing and this is more of just a comment and I'll probably follow up with the city manager on this. There were a number of items in there for the BCA. And I am just I got more questions about those that I don't think we need to answer considering the amount that we spend there and we're going to invest more and I'm curious what the long-term business plan is for that and how we kind of wrestle that budget under control a little bit better. Those are my comments.

Very good. Thank you. Other council questions? All right. I won't make the statement, but I always do, and I think it's always important because we always have this conversation because we talk about this 10-year plan, and somebody without the full context could look at it and think, oh, my God, they're going to spend a jillion dollars. And that is not the case. The CIP is a planning document. There is no guarantee that anything in this will be built. It's contingent on council approval. It's contingent on funding availability. It is a planning document. And it actually includes things as well

Thank you so very much. Council Item 3.2 on our agenda is our budget discussion on the external services team departments. Last week we talked to the internal operations services teams. I'm not getting that correct, and I apologize for that. But this is the external-facing departments within the city of Bloomington that fall under the auspices of our Deputy City Manager, Kathy Hedin, who is going to kick this off, and then we're going to have a number of folks make presentations based specifically on their department. So thank you for joining us, and thanks for being part of this.

Mr. Anderson, good evening and welcome. Good evening, thank you.

Only questions of clarity and then we'll dig into it at the end.

If these are not questions of clarity, tell me. So I was just curious why the overall public works revenue budget is going down by 10%

And then for the wastewater increase of 9%, Is that because the capital balance is going in the red, or is that capital balance actually reflects a 9% increase, and it's still in the red?

Okay. Okay. So I assume that it's absolutely necessary then for... kind of the long-term sustainability of that fund and the projects that we have.

Thank you, Councilmember. Any questions, council? All right. Thank you, Mr. Anderson. Before we plow forward, I'm going to break protocol for just a moment here, and I'm going to say hi to our four gentlemen who are visiting us today. Why don't you come up to the microphones here? Come on, come on. Glad you're here tonight. You are our only visitors here this evening. Appreciate you being here. If you could just tell us who you are, and I'm assuming it's for a class, otherwise you've just got a weird Jones for... you know, council meetings or something like that. Tell us who you are and what y

Why did you choose Bloomington and not a city closer to home over there?

Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, good. Well, good. Well, welcome. We're glad you're here. Hope you learned something. Thank you. It gets really exciting later, so stick around. It gets really exciting. But welcome. Glad you guys are here. Thanks for being here. Thank you. Yeah, exactly. Thanks, Council, for indulging me for just a moment there. Next up, Bloomington Police Department, Chief Hodges.

Sorry about that. You're sliding behind Deputy Chief.

Council Member Lohman? So I saw on the opening slide the 68... Firefighters, are those part time or full time? Does that include the ten? 68 includes the ten. Okay. That doesn't include the ten. I was curious about that. I figure I just throw it in here now since I've got you here. I am curious. We saw the police chief talk about comparisons to Rochester and Duluth, and I'm not putting you on the spot here at all, ever. But I'd be curious about if we tried to compare ourselves to those other places.

Thank you Mr. Mayor. Good evening. Quick clarification on the if I remember correctly when we first started this conversation the run rate meaning from call to showing up was over 12 minutes on average is that correct? Do I have that number right? I know it's gone to nine and now we're trying to target seven and a half, but I feel like we've made progress. And I was just curious what that original number was, knowing also that we're running with four people at a truck as opposed to, so there's two things that are improving as a result of what we're doing. The number of people on a truck and th

Right. Okay. So we've gone from over 12 to 9. We've gone from 1 to 2 to 4. And we continue to try to drive it to 7 and a half and 4. Is that the right goal? Yes, it is.

UNDERSTOOD. Those are our goals. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Others? Thank you very much. And I have to echo Chief Hodges. Disappointed that Mr. Half-Century isn't up here doing the presentation.

Clarity. I will ask one for clarity. So I'm under cost recovery and, and, that type of thing. I know there's a lot of moving pieces here, and as diverse as the center for the Arts all the way over to the ice garden, the community health and wellness center, and I know you're looking at each of those individually, are we going to have the conversation about how it all works together? And all the different pieces come together to increase this financial sustainability that you talked about that, frankly, we don't ask any other department to do.

Thanks Mr. Mayor. Can I have a follow-up question on that because your question intrigued me. So where we have looked at enterprise programming to date as kind of, to your point, self-sustaining, right? That on an operational basis, we are looking for net break even or better, right? So what you are thinking about doing now is, ooh, I don't know if the right word is peanut buttering, but the idea is that there are certain roles within the department that can be incrementally utilized across those enterprise funds. So are you expecting that we will, knowing, for example, that we're generally in

That's a lengthy question for clarity. I'm sorry. But no, I appreciate the question.

I felt like I had to kind of provide the context because I didn't want to just like slam the aquatic center for no reason. Just kidding. I know how important it is. I'm just teasing.

Okay. So that makes sense to me. And so where would we going forward as you guys look at this, where would we talk about the community benefit as it relates to the line items here as we think about going through the budget process in the next couple months?

Thank you, Dr. Kelly. Council Member Carter, questions?

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Dr. Kelly. Well, first, thank you for addressing the vaccine issue because I completely agree that we want to be preventative on that part and not be responding to outbreaks. But one of my clarifying questions, the professional and medical services that were decreased, can you speak to what that included, and do you think it will have a – negative impact from a public health perspective in the community or were they kind of some of the low hanging fruit?

Other questions, counsel? Very good. Thank you, Dr. Kelly. And last but not least, Ms. Bergen.

Any questions of Ms. Bergen regarding community development? Very good. Thank you. So, council, discussion, direction on this. I think my takeaway on it, it comes in the first couple of slides that we actually saw when we listed public works, police, fire, park and wreck, public health and community development. And you've heard me say a million times that five of those are basically the building blocks, the foundation of what city governments should be doing. And frankly, public health is the odd one out there, but I can't think of a more important department over the past half decade here an

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. One of the areas of opportunity that I didn't hear tonight, but that's because of the nature of the presentation, not because y'all aren't thinking about it, but a couple of years ago in our parks department, one of the things that we talked about was level of service implications for our different parks, and that we were, for lack of a better way to put it, putting it in kind of a tier structure where it was like, these are our most used, programmed you know, need to be the most actively managed parks, right? And those fell into more of I would call not parks, but recrea

Okay. So timing wise obviously not for the 2027 budget but you're thinking is this part of the 2027 plan for 2028 impact potentially then?

Right on. Awesome. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Thank you mayor. I have one question with regards to public health. Obviously we share the costs of that program with edina and Richfield. Will there be any changes to that based on changes to state and federal funding for grants? I know this is a heavily grant driven environment.

Can we do comments, too? Please. I'll just be super quick. I appreciate the presentations, appreciate the work. Was very excited to hear the ideas on increased revenues that aren't tax sources. Park and Rec talked about that most specifically, but even hearing about the police taking a look at it and things like that. So I'm really happy to hear about what the police department is doing to support our officers. It's a tough job. They see things that – I assume fire as well. They all see things that – have to haunt you for a while. So I'm glad we're there for them. They're human beings too. So

Thank you, Councilmember. Other thoughts or comments, Council? Oh, all right. House Member Lohman, do you want in?

So, I think you really outlined it quite well earlier. Basically, we have a real balancing predicament when we talk about fiscal responsibility and then also affordability and there are tradeoffs with that. And so, the thing that I think staff did a phenomenal job, bringing this and putting this together, you know, as always, this is, you know, each year, I wonder how they're going to top it. And this year they topped it again. So not a whole lot of questions in terms of that, but the question I kind of, you know, as a policymaker kind of struggle with is, you know, for the little gal or a lit

And I agree with you completely, Councilmember. Thank you for your comments, especially as you talk about cost recovery, and in particular in park and recreation. And I do know that they have a sliding scale. They have assistance for folks who might need it. But, yes, sometimes you do wonder if we push so hard toward cost recovery, whether it's in the pool or in the parks or at the ice garden, are some people being left out because of that? And you're right, it's a balancing act. Anything else, council? If not, I want to say thank you to the staff and for everybody who pulled the information t