City Council - Special Meeting

Check into my website. So I did. Put that all the way up there.

Yeah.

All right.

It's 5 o'clock. We're going to go ahead and call the City Council Work Session to order. This is Tuesday, July 26th, or 28th, 2026. It's 5 p.m. Lindsay, would you please call the roll?

Council Member Warjean?

Here.

Brown? Cool? Here. Meineke? Here. Order? Here. Mayor Phillips?

Here. You have a form to move on. Item number two is approval of the agenda. Would somebody like to make a motion to approve the agenda?

Motion.

Second. Okay. Motion by Meineke, seconded by Porter. All those in favor say aye. Aye. All those opposed say aye. That motion carries. Item number three is a dedicated work session. So this is a work session for Mayor and City Council. We may not ask for public comment tonight. We probably will not ask for public comment tonight. This work session is to get information from Council and myself and to give direction to staff on bringing items to a regular Council meeting. where we'll ask for public updates or public comments at that point in time. So first on the agenda is legislative update.

Luke. Thanks, Mayor. I have found that the best way to go through these work sessions to get the most out of it is if you think of something, interrupt me, raise your hand, something. Jean, I think she's online. I mentioned the same thing to her. Mayor, I think we're saying the same thing, that this is very informal. So we'll get the most out of it if we just kind of engage in discussion. With that said, I do have some slides to guide some discussion, at least on some of my items. I know that Holly, Paris, Wayne, Lindsay are also going to present. So they may just verbally talk about it as opposed to have something up on the screen. First topic is about legislation. So there's really three buckets of the things that we're looking at, and we're just highlighting Some of the legislation each year, the legislator does a lot of action. These are three things that we just wanted to bring up are these three buckets of what impact us. First one being Senate file 2472. This was the big property tax reform bill. Biggest item there is the 2% growth cap, excuse me, not growth cap, 2% cap on revenue growth, TIF reform, and then some structural shifts in terms of the homestead tax credit moving to a homestead exemption. Second bucket is more related to community development, zoning, building codes, and then the third bucket is more on the administrative side, which is really Lindsay, part of her clerk roles. So the first one, Senate File 2472, this is the 2% growth cap. So the best way I can explain this is imagine that Norwalk does not issue a single building permit in a year. No new construction, no modifications of any structure. Norwalk stays the exact same from one year to the next. And it just so happens in that same year, the county assessor has to come in and say, hey, all the commercial and residential value all went up 10%. So everybody's valuations increased by 10%. In a typical year, that next year would result in us receiving 10% more revenue because all the valuations went up by 10%. Again, no new construction. This legislation limits only 2% of that 10% growth. So they're saying unless it's new growth, we're capped to only 2% on valuation increases or anything caused by the rollout. And so it exists properly.

Right. Right. Yep.

And so you're jumping into probably the best part of the legislation for Norwalk. Most of our growth comes from that new activity, the new permits, the new construction that takes place. So outside of that 2% cap, which shows up on the right-hand side, The biggest one is new construction. So for Norwalk specifically compared to the rest of the state of Iowa and some other growing areas, we have a huge advantage. If I'm small town Iowa, I probably would not feel that way and I would be concerned. But for us, for the most part, we're in good shape. Other things outside the cap where the state legislature listened to some of the concerns from local government, outside that cap is debt service. So you can still adjust that levy up and down, trust and agency, employee benefits, and our special revenues like permit fees and things like that. So the fact that we can still adjust all those things is also a positive.

So they didn't particularly limit our budget or our side. They limited back the

Yes. Functionally, they become one and the same because our budget is completely centered on what those valuations are.

Except for the new one.

Except for the new one, yes.

So this would really affect us if every current homeowner went out and added a pool to their backyard and a bunch of upgrades. Yes.

If all those would still be an advantage, all of that is still considered new growth and is not held under that 2% cap.

Okay, so it just pertains to like re-evaluation. Correct.

So all that makes great sense. At some point in time, Gene is going to jump in and give a few different strategies. Is that a hint? Because there is, there's still a lot of unknowns. We had some meetings with our bond council and it was kind of unique to have a meeting with our bond council and have them kind of shrug their shoulders and say, there's still a lot of this that we don't understand. So we're still learning more. We're giving you kind of just some little tidbits of the things that we do understand thus far. The thing that is of concern still, partly because of some of the unknowns, is a hidden trap here. TIF release is not considered new growth. So if we do, let's take Echo Valley as an example. 20 years ago, we did a TIF agreement. $90 million was wrapped up in Echo. When that TIF retired in 2024, we got to see $90 million of new valuation that came on functionally the equivalent of, I want to say, 14% to 15% of increase in our revenues. That's a big number. Under this new legislation, the retirement of that TIF, we would only be able to utilize 2% of that. That's a little scary. Wait a minute. Wait a minute.

So let's say that there's a $300,000 homeowner. It is going to pay it. not to the city per se. So now that agreement runs to an end. Or does the $300,000 homes tax bill? Property tax relief. All but 2% of it. Well, the other houses tell.

Yes.

So what you're saying is it's not a 2% growth. It's a 2% limit of access to that tax.

It's a 2% revenue limit. So the valuations can grow, but the equation you use to determine what our actual revenue is, that is held at 2%. So the missing number, you know, if A plus B equals C, well, the missing component is whatever our levy is. So if we're held to a 2% cap on our revenue, functionally that forces our levy down. To decrease. So it's not a 2% increase.

It's a 2% overall if we can get our hands on 2%. Right.

Yes. So TIF, again, under this legislation, it is not defined, it does not fall under the new growth category if we utilize that, we use that economic development tool. So from here going forward, every time the city chooses to use TIF, And if you use to the fullest extent possible, let's just say we do like a 10 year TIF agreement somewhere. And for 10 years, we capitalize on data center as an example. Let's say a data center builds and we use all the TIF we can to expand infrastructure, build some streets around that area or even other areas of town. In 10 years, the city says, okay, we're going to retire that TIF early, and we're going to give those dollars back to the other taxing entities as well as our general fund. At that point in time, we could only realize 2%. So if the functional impact of, let's say, one data center at $200 million, that would be double what we received from retiring the ECHO TIF, but we would only get 2% of it. So that would be a significant levy reduction for the entire community. So I think I see where you're going.

You're at that $300,000 home that you're talking about. Right. We're still getting X number of taxes from it. The thing is, is that that X number of taxes is going into a TIF loan. Right. Right. When... when that TIF retires, it's going to roll over into a general fund, but we can't get that. So we can only get 2% of that $300,000 growth. Even though it's considered new construction? It's not new construction anymore because it's rolled off TIF. It's been TIF. We might have to look at changing the strategy of TIF. Yes, I think you're right.

Or is there a way to play shell games? Not... condoning such a thing, but I'm just saying somebody's going to figure out a way to play games with it.

Yes. Again, that's something part of what Gene wanted to share. What's that right on there? Yes. You are correct in the way that you see that. There are some strategies being tossed around that maybe a city certifies TIF in the first year. let's take $1 of TIFs against a TIF area, release all the rest of the funds so that all that new revenue shows up in all the taxing entities. So you release it in the year when it can be considered new growth. Then in year two, you come back and we capitalize not just on a dollar, but on hundreds of thousands of dollars from that TIF district. So we pull that back in, we utilize that TIF for the next 10 years. That way we get to appreciate more than the 2%, but then we also get to use the TIF. The downside of that is the revenue is going to look really lumpy for about three years for cities, county, and the school. So we want to make sure everybody understands, hey, you're going to see a big influx of revenue in your general fund, but then it's going to drop off the next year.

Yeah, because that didn't work out when the school district didn't work out. Right.

In fact, even Jean, she, with eyes wide open, she goes, we would have to make sure that the county and the school understand what that strategy looks like.

It's no different than when corporation changes their depreciation schedule and starts to depreciate more. All of a sudden, you've got way more that first year, second year, third year. And then it starts to flatten out over time, right? It's the same thing in the corporate world that way.

So it's going to look lumpy. It's going to look a little confusing. As long as we understand and we purposefully go into it with that strategy, we can make it work. Unless they change the rules on us, right? Unless they change rigidly. And maybe the rules get changed to recognize, hey, everybody's going to use a strategy. We could work with them. Or they come back and say, hey, cities, you're undermining our whole purpose of why we did that regulation and we get ratcheted down even more.

What do you think that purpose is?

Well, okay, silver lining. While a limitation of TIF, we can perceive it as a negative that it ties up or restricts how we can use TIF. The silver lining is if the mayor had this strategy and he said, you know what, I want to bring a data center to this community and I want it all to result in property tax relief. Well, then all you got to do is do a TIF district, use all the TIF. And whenever that TIF is retired, every single one of you elected officials may choose to not be on council, not be the mayor anymore. So eight, 10 years, 20 years down the road, whoever's sitting on council under this law, this would force all but 2% to be given back as property tax relief.

Versus not doing it as TIF, and we could or could not, and then every council could have changed it at whatever time. Correct. Which is what we're talking about right now.

98%. 98%. Right. A huge number. And later on, the last item on the agenda is talking about just that scenario. What if we were to go through this scenario, giving property tax relief because of a data center? We take a little bit of a deep dive to look at what those numbers are. So I can see from both sides. I really understand the purpose behind property tax relief and wanting to be competitive from that property tax component. I've met with all of you. Kelsey, I remember specifically your discussion. You may not see it that same way. Maybe you think, listen, people come here because we do a lot. We create a lot of amenities. We have a nice community who want to continue to do that and use those property taxes. that necessarily low property taxes isn't the best sales pitch for the community. Everybody's going to have a different opinion. Moving on. So this is where we dive in a little bit more about the tax credit and tax exemption. So previously you all had a homestead tax credit. You live in Norwalk, you live in your home, you get a homestead tax credit. It was a pretty minor number, but it was kind of like you, As you're paying your property taxes at the last minute, the state comes in and gives you this credit that buys down your taxes a little bit. In the future, it's becoming a tax exemption. So at the very beginning, they lop off 10% of the valuation of your property, taxable valuation, which is different than just valuation. 10% of the taxable value up to a maximum of $20,000, which I think that ends up being on about a $430,000 home. So the benefit to property owners is they would see a max of an annual savings of about $780. Delivers roughly around $65 a month back in the pocket of homeowners. Again, great positive property tax savings. what I get a little bit concerned with, and I think I've mentioned this to you once before, property taxes operate a year in arrears. So the things that are changing today, you're not going to see 18 months to 24 months from now, because you'd see it as part of your escrow being rebalanced. Well, if 18 to 24 months from now, you've seen an increase in your homeowners, your insurance, It's possible that $65 a month gets eaten up and you just continue to hum along and you're paying about the same amount. The trend in Iowa right now is we are in a very uptrend of rise in homeowners insurance.

That would be scary if they put two and two together.

The next bucket, moving more into community development, zoning, code enforcement.

Luke, can I interrupt? Can you guys hear me? We can hear you. Can I just mention something about that Senate file that you just talked about before we move on? Yep. Okay. Sorry, I didn't know when I was supposed to jump in. I just wanted to emphasize that, you know, my counterparts, PFM, our bond counsel, we're constantly monitoring this. And there's a lot of unanswered questions at this point. There's two critical things, the TIF that Luke mentioned and then the homestead, how that affects the fiscal year 28 property tax exemptions. Analyzing this on a parcel level basis is going to be probably the most difficult task. One thing I did like about the bill is beginning September 1 of 2027, counties will be required to produce that information and send that to cities. So, you know, generally we get our revenues by January 1. We will have this information by September 1. So I think that was one decent thing they did put in there. And then I don't want to reiterate or say the same thing twice, but there's three strategies that we're looking at. As Luke had mentioned, releasing increment in 28 to offset the exemption-related revenue losses is something that has been talked about. And then recapturing TIP increment in future years. Also talked about another strategy, increasing the levy in 28 to offset the exemption impacts. Of course, that'd be a city council decision. And then as Luke mentioned, the biggest strategy that people are talking about and trying to make sure that it would be even legal to do, capturing that first year TIF, new construction is non-TIF, and then the following year transferring it into TIF. have to establish a really low practical TIF-based value and work with the county to do that and really make sure that they understand the difference, parcels that are correctly classified as TIF and non-TIF. There's also talks about, I think people are hopeful there'll be an amendment to this and yeah i think i think the hardest thing right now is just no good answers or solid answers and when we talk to the legislative people they tell us to work with our bond council and financial advisors and um so it's kind of scary to think that the legislative branch or the lsa agency can't tell us how to do it so anyway just want you to know that staff is constantly monitoring this and we'll provide updates as soon as we possibly can.

Thank you. Thanks, Jean.

You bet.

I can't imagine passing a law on e-motos and electric bikes and then having a citizen that owns an electric bike come into us and say, well, can I ride this? We don't know. I mean, functionally, that's what's happening is pass a law, but there's an inability to explain to us how we can implement that. Any other questions on that property tax reform? We've been doing that with enforcement. So the next one, this goes into that middle bucket. One of the key things is now there's a mandatory allowance of ADU accessory dwelling unit. So if you want to have a small, tiny home in your backyard, there's now a requirement to accommodate that. For some of you that remember for maintenance heights, we did kind of a test or a pilot run where we were going to allow ADUs. That doesn't really matter anymore. Now we have to allow it essentially functionally in our single family areas. The next one, this is a little bit, people may have a different opinion if this is positive or negative, Senate file 2378 did a little bit of a shift of zoning power. So one of the things that it does is it give surrounding property owners an ability through a petition to come forward and force a super majority vote of council. So in the past, like if we're doing a rezoning and it goes to PNZ and PNZ says no or recommend denial, according to our ordinances, that means council has to approve it through a super majority to overcome the negative recommendation from P&Z. This new law now gives adjacent property owners that ability to require a supermajority vote. So it gives some additional rights to surrounding property owners. You might think that's positive. You might think it's negative. The next one for variances, our Board of Adjustment is a voluntary appointed board, but they are a quasi-judicial group. In the past, when a variance or a special instrument comes forward, there's some review by P&Z, some review by P&Z, and then there's a recommendation to the Board of Adjustment. So variances are ultimately decided by the Board of Adjustment, not by council. Under this legislation, essentially, it gives some authority for council to be able to step in and overturn those decisions of the Board of Adjustment. So it becomes an appeal process, is that what you're saying? Correct. If that sounded like me saying correct as a question, that's accurate. I'm looking at Luke as I'm saying that. My understanding.

Yeah, that's correct. Before the city council could refer it back to the Board of Justice and say, do you really mean it? And re-look at it. But ultimately, they were the decision maker. This one now, actually, it allows the council to overturn the Board of Justice.

And in some regards, Like, what would happen in the past if you as a council really disagreed with that board decision is you'd have the city taking legal action against the board. So you as a council would take legal action against the Board of Adjustments decision. So, I mean, it kind of cleans that up, but then also, like, what's the point of the board?

Yeah, why not just disband the board and just send it all to the council?

So there's some, I mean, depending on where you feel the final authority lies, there could be some positives to this. If you're more of a, hey, I like the separation, the balance of some of those duties, you might not think this is the best thing. Shooting ranges really aren't that much of application for us. House File 2800, this has to do with National Electrical Code. Some of you may recall me talking about the Central Iowa Code Consortium. That's where a bunch of the metro communities would get together and make sure that our electric code, building code, fire code, all align so that a contractor working in Norwalk doing electrical construction work then could go over to Johnsteading, do work, and follow the same code guidelines. So hey, let's all adopt the same thing. That works on some things, but again, communities are different. Some council members may like the idea of their community requiring fire suppression systems in residential. Another community may say that's a bad idea. It's too expensive. The state took a stab just at the National Electric Code saying all cities within the state of Iowa are now going to follow the exact same code and whatever amendments the state adopts. They've already specifically included some amendments on GFCI, ground fault interrupters. You plug in your vacuum cleaner and it'll nuisance trip. Some of those are extra GFCI. It's also the thing if you drop a toaster in the bathtub, it's going to trip. It's not going to cause you harm. They're making some changes to some of those GFI regulations to make sure that that matches across all communities. It is interesting that they picked out just that one building code. to match everywhere as opposed to doing with all of them, although this might just be the first step.

What electric code were we on? I think we were on 23.

We were on 23 already? Well, maybe I need to chat with the inspection. My understanding was that we follow what the state adopts. Like, so our code, I guess I've got my code open here, said that, like, Our code is whatever the most recent version adopted by the state is.

But was it with or without amendments? I don't think we had many amendments.

We'll see. We won't. I think that's probably the biggest takeaway is in the future, we won't have a choice, have a difference of amendments that would be to follow what the state adopts for us.

Because right now with the uniform codes like the other uniform codes, we follow a lot of those. And we can choose. There's been times where we said, okay, we're going to adopt this year code. The new ones come out, we choose not to adopt us. Or we adopt some of them, but not all. We make your own exemptions. So it'll be interesting to see whether they progress on top of the other uniform codes once they get this electric and see how it worked out.

We just have a few minor amendments to it, but we do adopt whatever the current one that the electrical board has adopted at the state level.

The next one is really on the administrative side. This is House Bill 2490. A key thing for meeting protocols is kind of interesting. So in the past several months, Andy, I think it was you that you had sent an email to Lindsay saying, hey, what were the changes in the packet? And so she just started to include, hey, here are the changes because we put out a preliminary agenda and packet and then a final agenda within before 24 hours of the meeting. There's actually no state law saying that we have to clearly identify what those changes are in an updated or a changed agenda. I don't believe that's within the packet itself, but it's on the agenda. But we've also been doing that explaining what the changes are within the packet.

Right. in email, but now it's on the agenda that way.

Yeah. The second one, records administration, this has to do with a little bit difference in open records requests or FOIA requests. And then the other main one to come out that vexatious requesters, best way to explain this is there are some people that will make FOIA requests for the specific purpose of just simply harassing local government. saying, hey, I'm just going to keep submitting these requests because it can take us a lot of time to put together public requests. So if you can identify that there is actually harassment occurring and they're not doing it for any other purpose other than just causing headaches, other special action city can take. Do you guys have anything else on those?

No.

So I'm going to end on a positive note. One of the bills that was actually passed by both the House and the Senate was House File 2667. And this was the SUDOS. You recall that we upgraded some of our standards requiring granular sub-base and sub-drain. And that got the Home Builder Association a little bit fired up. And they pushed hard at the state level. At first, they wanted us to have to pay the difference for that additional requirement. what they perceived as beyond SUDOS standards. So they put together a bill and it morphed over time. Essentially that bill was stepping in and saying, hey, we're gonna change how SUDOS works, create a new board and come in and change all the standards so cities have to follow statewide standards everywhere. Not recognizing that maybe the soils in Norwalk are a little bit different than the soils in Council Bluffs or Dubuque. Ultimately, the governor vetoed that bill. which was a huge win for local government, which is great. Hopefully it doesn't come back next year. Any other questions on that one?

All right, okay. Economic development incentives for hauling.

Did you email me a link?

This just goes to our economic development website where we summarize all of the economic development incentives. And then it has applications for people to dig a little bit deeper. So I'm just going to kind of run from this page. That way you know where to find it if you want to look a little bit closer. But just kind of as a high-level summary of the types of incentives we currently offer so that you understand where we're at now in case we have to come back and change some of these once they understand legislation a little bit better. We have a couple different programs. I think that they're pretty conservative across the metro and how we do things. I think we've been very smart as a city and how we've offered our incentives. So the first one is a tax abatement program. And that, as you guys probably remember a couple of years ago, we ended it for the residential side. We had kind of a partial abatement for residential. We felt there was really no longer a need to offer it on that end of things. And so we continued it with the commercial industrial abatement, which is a five-year sliding scale. So for brand new commercial or industrial developments, including additions, expansions, improvements to existing facilities, that new value that's created on that parcel or on that building, then they can have a five-year sliding scale abatement of starts at 75% and then it drops by 15% each following year. So they start out that first year, they get 75% of that new value abated and then so forth as it declines. So it's just been a nice little tool. I wouldn't say we use it in a ton across the board, but we've had people take advantage of it and it's been a good tool to have for some of those projects that don't necessarily apply for a tip package or some other type of incentive. And I felt like it was a good tool to use when you have a brand new business develop like a DMOS or some other, nice project that's going to create some good jobs and good value, but they don't really qualify for TIF. They're not putting in brand new infrastructure, but they're adding a lot of value to the community. And this just gives them a little bit of savings that first five years on one of the biggest bills, which is taxes.

It'd be interesting to see if the tax changes in any law, how that might impact or if that's applicable.

Yeah, I'm watching that one pretty closely. There's lots of debate on how it'll affect abatement. But it has been a good tool to help some of those newer projects. So that's what we have currently. That may change once we understand this a little bit better. There's some question out there on if the 2% cap applies to abatement roll off or not, or if that just applies to residential abatement, mixed use versus all of them across the board. So we'll find out more. that's one of the programs that we have and then of course you're aware of tiff so tax increment financing has been a really good tool for us over the years really across iowa it's been a great tool for growth and development and value and why i say we've been wise about how we've used it at least kind of under our you know tenure here that we the bulk of us in the room have been here um you know we've used it really wisely and i think part of the reason why every year is looked at at the state And they start messing with it, partially because they don't understand it, I think. And then partially because there are some cities that use it or use it improperly. And then the rest of us doing good things with it, we get penalized. But the way that we have used it is majority just rebate. So as a standard example, 10 to 15 year rebate, partial, anywhere between 50 to 75% rebate annually. We've had some really, really good projects with that. The city still receives new revenues during that on the beta period, but they're also getting a nice little break for those.

Generally for public infrastructure.

For public infrastructure, correct.

Generally.

Generally. We've had a couple of projects that we felt were big enough or important enough, the value add that we did an upfront portion of their tip. But even in that case, they had to build the facility, get their certificate of occupancy, and then they got a portion of their value that they're creating. So it was never just pulling funds from somewhere else and giving it to them straight out as a grant. So I think the city's done well with that. But again, we'll see what happens with legislation. We need to adjust that somehow. Still a good tool. It might just be less impactful in the future. So then we have the first in commercial development incentive. And this, it's maybe the title's a little misleading because I think for a long time, even some of our own internal city staff thought it was something else. It sounds like the first thing that comes to Norwalk. So maybe the first hotel gets this type of an incentive, but it's not. It's a first in... risk taker, basically. So it is created for development groups, entities that would come in, purchase ground in an undeveloped area, put in infrastructure that would serve other commercial and industrial developments over time. So they're just kind of taking that upfront risk, the first one in an area. So when the Housman were, you know, initially looking at going into North Shore with their hotel, they would have been the first in there, first ones to take that big jump in an undeveloped area and create some value. Diligent did that in Norwalk Central. The development group that owns Dunn Industrial Park, they were the first in down there in that area. So really what this incentive was created for was just to give a little bit of extra assistance to these people willing to take a huge risk, build public infrastructure in an area that's kind of a no man's land. And it just gave us a little more creativity. It didn't change anything that we actually offer. We've always had the ability to go up to 20 years For a tip rebate and we've always had the ability to use 100% of it, but we've never did that unless it was really, really high value and high risk to the developer. So that's what this was utilized for.

I feel like maybe a good example might be today we have a quick start in town. Let's say that North Shore is getting ready to start and a quick start is the first business to go in there. Buc-ee's. Like a business are already in town, but if they're the first in to open up a development area, that might qualify or fall into that category. Right.

So that would just give us a little more flex. Council could say, we generally like to do a 50% rebate for 10 years, but for you guys, we'll do 80% for 18 years. We'll just flex a little more for you. So that's really what that incentive is for. creative district, but in the urban renewal area. Since commercial would be planned later in that Maple Heights area, that wouldn't qualify. So yes, it's always been commercial. Some of them may end up having a mixed use and have some residential component to it, but generally speaking, yeah. So then we have the high-quality job grant program. So we kind of modeled this after the state IEDA. Many years ago, they created a program where they were incentivizing high-quality jobs, which just meant that they have a wage threshold for their area. It's Fiserv County. And then they have a percentage above that average that you would need to meet. So if you're a brand new business or your business is expanding, you're adding brand new jobs, then your wages would have to meet that that state threshold and be considered high quality jobs. And so what we did is we didn't necessarily base it specific to just that the wage threshold that the state has, but we copy basically how much money we would give her high quality job. So with this one, they can receive $1,000 per full-time job that meets the state threshold, but then they also could receive $500 per new full-time job created that doesn't meet that state threshold because there's still a brand new full-time job with benefits. To the area. So we've had a couple of different projects, take advantage of that. Notably, Michael foods and Windsor windows because when those guys came in together. They were bringing in a lot of really good, good jobs. And so they both got that on incentive.

So with the boss. Right. Yep.

Then the commercial improvement grant program. This has been a really fun one. We created this when the department was first established because we felt like we really didn't have a lot of tools for existing businesses. We had some good tools for brand new development, new businesses, but we wanted to establish something that was still value added, still a return on investment type of incentive. So we created the commercial improvement grant program where existing building owners, commercial building owners could qualify. Their building had to be at least 10 years old. And they had to be making a value-added improvement, something to the facade, permanent signage, monument-type signage, interior building improvements that would roll over to the next building owner. So it couldn't be anything where they could just take the thing and leave it with a restaurant equipment or something and have to stay with the building and improve the taxable value. And so that's been a really successful program. I think we had almost every building in our little downtown here utilize it. And the buildings look way different. I don't know if you guys have all been here the last 10 years, but they did not, some of them did not look so hot for a while there. And so they all took advantage of that and they look great and it increased their value in their house. tax-based. So that's a program that we have and it is a match. So we're not just giving them, you know, just free cash out of the gate. They have to have a plan improvement. They have to spend money and then they get reimbursed for part of it that qualifies the improvements that qualify. So it's pretty specific.

When I think about TIF and what I've always understood, the core purpose behind TIF were things like that.

taking a more slum and blight something that's been using those funds to make it improved so maybe i'll have a question that i feel like fits in here for me we've talked or i've talked to numerous people about new taxation dollars from the data center if tips can become harder to use is there a way to use some of those revenue to incentivize in different ways

Yeah, I think there could be a mixture.

Because we have other cities like West Des Moines that is using funds to attract businesses, right? Different types of programs, right?

Exactly. We just use all tip on these. But we could have a mixture. And the veterans opportunity, this one's pretty small, but we did add this into our commercial improvement grant to where if a veteran opens a business or their spouse opens a business here in Norwalk, they can get a little additional cash to to open that up so they can get $1,000, or up to 5,000, excuse me, 1,000, so there's a county, but our incentives, they can get up to $5,000 for physical business. So they open or expand, improve it, then they can get $5,000 for that. And that's really the incentives that we have. We help kind of support other statewide and county incentives we connect them to, but those are the tools that we're utilizing right now.

I don't think we're going to turn it over to Lindsey Diggins.

deal yeah i think there's a lot of confusion on right now too which is kind of scary the experts out there not even sure how it works out yeah but just to note you know these programs that we've had they've been in action i will and track back since the ed department was established but those programs helped us helped our community create since 2017 to help us create over 100 physical businesses Over 800 new full-time jobs, $209 million in new commercial and industrial values, which was a 420% increase, and over $7 million per year in new taxes. So those programs did aid in that. They did help with that on the road. Many other things, of course, have helped with that, but those had a big role in it. So it's important to keep that in mind.

Any other questions at all?

not appreciate you going through that it has been really attractive for us well then i have one follow-up question do you know how many communities have kind of whether it be from data centers or other very taxable properties their own incentives and to attract public businesses like it'd be good for us to understand like what communities of the state are going to have

We can send you, we have Emily and Chris been putting together some really good funding and we're really tracking stuff and what every other committee in the Metro does. So we have all their policies and we can share that with you guys anytime.

Andy, if I had to throw a number at it, I would say 95% of the economic development tools used across the state today are some version of TIF funding.

It feels like maybe this is me being, but it feels like that's going to go down and other money is going to start to rise and we don't want to fall behind on that one, right? And so we need to be thinking about if we're going to attract and our ability to leverage Tim is going to be less, and he's been, maybe I'm wrong here, right? Then how are we going to do it to keep up with whoever to attract the businesses that Holly wants to go get? Right.

And a lot of it, we compete with out of state people, see? Yeah, but property tax is going to be one of the new incentives. We're lowering our property tax. But we're probably, if we just talk about states that we're surrounded by, we're probably still more, right?

And so is it really that big of a mess on it? we hope they actually see a significant difference by these bills. It may not be that.

I just think it's on us to start to think about different ways to incentivize beside it.

A big, probably a key first step of that, a little bit of soul searching for the elected officials is how important is it to provide economic development incentives? And if Andy, like what you're saying, if you're saying, hey, it's a high priority, we want to do as much as we can to attract business, that's going to have a relationship to our growth pattern.

I don't know. So this is even hard on me to say, right? I don't know if it's a high priority for me, but we need to have the ability to write things that we want to attract to have money available for us, right? For other things, if it's a car wash, like, great. Part of it is taxed. But if we have an opportunity to go get something, and we really want it, then we need to have some funds available.

Yeah, that's one of the things we did with tax evade a while ago is that we determined that, like, convenience stores no longer get tax evade. Right. We don't need them. Yeah. So we don't need to incent that. So why have the incentive of it?

Yeah. And maybe that's something we should go back and revisit sometime after we know how it does itself. And that could answer your question.

And knowing, as the council said, here is a land use that for a while it was, we wanted a hotel. And that was a high priority for the elected officials to bring a hotel to town. And then we're doing hotel study. And then pretty soon we get connected with some good partners. And pretty soon we come up with a very beneficial incentive program. And lo and behold, we have two of them.

Well, and that's where I would go, right? Like, let's just say we didn't have two of them right now. I would feel like we're losing out on money because we don't have one, right? Because you have room taxes that we would be getting. If people come to the ball fields all the time, it might make his job harder, but we're losing out on money as a We need to incentivize that. And so I don't know what the next thing is, but those are the types of things that I'm thinking about, right?

Yeah, for sure. And that really is the big picture thing that Holly, the rest of your staff is looking for, because if you know what those key uses are, if you have some ideas, we want to know that. We joke, remember D.T. McGee of past superintendent, he always made a big deal, became a running joke about how much he wanted a burrito shot. Well, Holly would call it burrito shops and say, hey, that's what we're making. So I'm joking there, but you get the point. If council said, hey, a data center, for example, that is a use that we want in the community, we could structure incentives to say we will be more aggressive on those types of land uses.

So I think about like we got a lot of sports stuff coming to town. We have families staying at hotels. what are the families doing at nighttime when, when. So we don't have any space to play games or do anything. So are they driving to West Des Moines to do that stuff? Are we missing out? Yeah. So are we missing out on that? Is that the next thing? I don't know. Right. But that's what we should, we should have a discussion about.

Lindsay's right back down.

I am.

Especially about, yeah. That'd be another good work set, just to have that.

Because we call people all the time to find out what they need and want and notate what people ask for all the time. And it kind of groups into certain categories, but definitely adult recreation is a huge thing, especially outdoor and year-round.

And I almost like to, it's not the people that live here, it's people that are coming and spending money here that we're seeing that on the rise too. And what are they lacking, right? Yes, and you might require an outfit from the chamber too.

We'll say a chamber perhaps.

It is a growing population here, though. Habits have been already changing. I mean, I can feel it in my house. We already don't go up to West Des Moines for all of our shopping because we have a cute boutique in town that I can get an outfit at, and I don't have to go to Jordan Creek anymore, and then that creates this opportunity for me to go to Fairway and not go to a more convenient, larger grocery store. Right, yeah. I think habits are already changing with our residents that live here, and it's only going to become more of that case if we bring in things to do here, which is why when you skipped over the gun range, it made me giggle because there's, like, indoor gun ranges. I don't know. No, they are really cool, and it's like a big thing, and there's one in Nebraska we went to with family, and it's basically like a top golf, but, like, the shooting range kind of thing. And then we lived next to one in Cleveland, which we didn't know about until after we moved in, and then we heard gunshots, and it was a very pushy suburb, so we were, like, very confused by the gunshots. But that's, like, a thing. So I was kind of chuckling inside when you skipped over that a little bit.

Maybe that's, but if you think about it, like, I think that's our adult recreation is things like, sort of, whether we like set or not, our pool is shoddy, right? We don't have water parks, right? Like, you go to Kansas City or St. Louis, right? Like you have different play places where you can play games, right? Like not only travelers here, but our people are going to start to use these things. So what is, what are that things in the destination? I think Dave and Buster's.

Yeah.

Yeah. It can be smaller, like pin-on, like gift directs, those types of things. So you're kind of looking for multipliers. Yeah.

Like some kind of activity with multiply commercial, right? Yeah.

I'll throw in my two cents. I would say you're traveling with a nice, ambitious girl to run a bike. Yeah. And so you go biking on our trails. Or if your kids, you know, you want to go biking with your kids to burn off a little more energy after they play baseball, you know, go get on your bikes and run it off.

Near the bike trail, too, so that people don't have to transport it.

Right. Yeah.

Something like that. At our last meeting, when I was presenting on the bike thing, she talked about her consortium Now they supply those borrow a bike or rent a bike things for direct. We can encourage them to put 20 of those down here. Because I've seen those where people leave it on the corner. You can jump on it, put a credit card on it, and you can ride it as long as you want, and then leave it on the corner.

I don't know how we would track this stat, right? But we know the number of people or somebody does that goes in their parks out of state or out of county into the ball fields. And we probably don't know how many of those people are staying at the hotels. And then we know we're probably not doing anything else here. So what revenue are we missing out on? So they're not eating here. They're not playing here.

So we have all the numbers to give you. This is so exciting because that's the lighting. So out the field, some of their technology that they have in those cameras, on those poles, tracks exactly what you're asking about. And we can get those numbers from our membership with Catch Time.

You can catch it. Yep. Well, even greater more partnership has been paid. Partnership.

Yeah. You probably do track.

Well, you guys get the hotel, the hotel tax too. Yes. Yes. So we probably get back to that, but I think that that's a good topic. Right. Right. For sure.

Because they did track some for some of that information. They found that everybody's looking at these sports fields to go for Texas Roadhouse.

Yep.

So that's why we're trying to track them down.

Get that TRH in here. Might love it. Wow. Yeah.

I think that's a wrap.

Oh, you have a question.

Well, no, that's what I was going to say. That's the one I haven't told you about that I haven't mentioned, but I finally got the contact from Comic Vault last week. All right. All right.

You need to buy a couple bicycles, put them at your hotel and see if they're any good.

Write them out.

You might want to give them away for you at first to see if they just use them.

Anything else on incentives? All right. As we're talking, if you get hungry, want a cookie or a sandwich, just get up and go get it. Everybody's going to keep talking and we're going to have to go back and that's fine too. Street assessment policy.

Yes. So today we have a street assessment policy where When we do a complete reconstruction of a street, what's not assessed is the street itself, which shows up in gray there. The things that we do see a partial assessment of would be the curb and gutter, what shows up in the green, as well as the sidewalks and driveway approaches. Generally, it yields about 13% to 15% of the total project. So that's about how much we get back in assessments. We allow them to pay them over 10 years. The general idea is that we're expecting those adjacent property owners to have some financial kick in when we do a complete reconstruction. What is the stuff in white? Who pays for that? Actually, it's the sidewalks. the curve and gutter. So the white and the green both is what is assessed. In the past where we've seen some average assessments, most of them have been in the Lakewood area with that average in about the 48 or about the $5,000 to $6,000 range. Our attempt at an assessment in the Bluestem Prairie Sage, which is up in Echo, the average there was about 15,000. And so you say, what's the difference? It's density. There's a lot more properties. So when you're taking an expense and you're basing an assessment on frontage and echo, they have a tremendous amount of frontage compared to small frontage within that way.

Like probably three or four properties pretty skew that last one though, right? Yeah. Otherwise it'd be more like eight or nine.

Yeah, I was just going to say 10, but you're probably right in that lower number.

And just to clarify, it's not their evaluation that, but a lot of people think the evaluation causes their assessment to be higher. It's not the evaluation lot size.

Right, like lot size and frontage. Total amount of frontage area.

You know, I'd like to see a work session on this before we get into rebuilding by the streets, right? So we don't have people in front of us with torches and stuff, right? But one of the things that I'd like to have considered is if we change the policy, how does that financially impact? Right? I'm going to get into some of that. Right. Well, I'm going to be quiet then.

And I think you're spot on. I don't know if you heard him, because I had to go subtle, right? Like 13%, right, is the number. Well, I'm going to give a little more clarification to that.

But 13%, yes, of total project. Right. 13 to 15%. So the total project cost multiplied at 13%, that's about how much is coming back in assessment. So think about like if we were applying for a grant for something, how much is it worth to go after a grant? If we're doing a $10 million project and we get a $100,000 grant, it takes us 80 hours of staff time to apply for it. Might not be worth it. Yeah. Or if you're asking for federal funds, which make your requirements for the project much higher, at some point you kind of have to balance it out. Free money isn't automatic with free all the time. The main reason I say that with this slide, the friction flywheel. So the assessments trigger residents, they get frustrated, they think it's unfair. Frustrated residents withhold the easements, which that was the main thing we ran into with the Blue Stem and Prairie Sage. So then construction logistics become even more strained because they're having to pay an assessment. They're angry. They're not working well with us. But now at the time that we're ready to start the project, we're already starting way behind the starting line. And then ultimately, the city incurs significant legal costs, engineering delays, and it drives up costs. If you recall, ultimately, the reason that we stepped away from the Blues-Democrats-Sage assessment is because we were going to have to go through condemnation. Further driving up the cost of the project, where Couch has said, hey, at this point, if there's that much pushback, it might not be worth making the investment in the area. Okay, this is one of my favorites. So the best way to look at that is, let's say that we have a $4 million project, okay? Because we're doing it as an assessment, it adds additional costs. Once you take in just the assessment cost, for example, this is an example of the Bluestem Pre-SAGE. Assessments come in at $550,000. The additional admin and engineering, so this would be staff time as well as additional engineering costs because it's an assessment project, which takes a lot more time. Lindsay just stepped out, but she knows the additional pain of filing assessments for that process. The premium for delays and legal. Ultimately, what we see as the net benefit for a project only equates to about 9%. So I would argue it's under a 10% benefit to do an assessment project. So I think that there's a little bit of what I've heard. So this wasn't like an official survey. This was me more informally talking to a number of our other metro counterparts. And what we're starting to see is it's more of an urbanization assessment. So other communities are not, for the most part, aren't doing assessment projects. What they're doing is they are assessing in the case of an urbanization. So I'm going to use an example. Let's say that for some reason we head east and we annex Twin Lakes. I think everybody... Now you're talking. There's a very narrow street. I think our fire department, quite frankly, they're probably happy that that's managed by North Warren. Because even get one of our fire trucks down that path to those homes would be challenging. So if we annex them, an example of an urbanization only would be saying, hey, we're annexing you. Your street was built outside corporate limits, not according to city standards. So the first time your street gets upgraded to city standards, that'll be an assessment. But once it's up to city standards, this is the consensus. Most of the other communities, then they're not going to do any further assessment. So they assess it then throughout that period?

Yes. And then usually not based on linear footage, just for your neighborhood or that depends?

I didn't get that granular with them. But if they're following state law, then yes, there's probably some basis on product checkbook.

That is 100% assessed. What do you think? Sorry, say that again? It's 100% assessed.

It's not just curb and counter. Again, there's some limitations of how we can assess properties according to state law.

there's only a certain amount that you can go up to according to their valuation look at the forensic rate sheet and set percent that's i think 25 percent of the most value okay uh but you know that's pretty big though they've got 400 dollars it's like you think of the ugly assessment when indiana school district decided to build out in the country what's the town and there's longs there's a stretch of gravel road and then you know said okay we're going to build the road and they tried to assess for property owners you know because they own farms and i mean you're talking It pushed a lot of money. I mean, six-figure type assessments, but still, you look at the valuation of the farm, it still didn't equal the 25%. But there's a lot of engineering ways that you can assess those costs, but usually it is based upon frontage. A big portion of it's that, but ultimately the council's got to find that it's a... It just falls back to the council does its research and finds a reasonable assessment. It's kind of hard to challenge once the council says it's reasonable.

And the questions you're asking me... I mean, we can look at what works for Norwalk. I'm not sure if the other communities maxed out what they could do or if they just pick, hey, we're comfortable with up to 10% of the value of the properties. I'd have to do a little bit more digging. It's more generally the idea of not doing assessments inside of a city that was built according to city standards, but as you urbanize an area, that's what you would implement. That's what seems to be more of the, regional approach.

And in like Twin Lakes example, like we would never do that until we were actually forced to and surrounded them or something, right? Very. And even then, you have to.

That's why Greenfield Plaza is still... You have to at some point, right?

If we created the island, so like if we never wanted to annex all the way around Twin Lakes, we would never be forced to do it. If Des Moines came down and wanted to do it, you know, as long as there's An island, as long as there's a 50-foot wide path, county ground, it's not considered an island. But as soon as the city comes in and closes that 50-foot margin, it butts up next to the neighborhood city. Whoever does that last has to take it.

So I'm going to go through a few options here. Option number one would be limit assessments to street urbanization. So this is just the example that we've talked about. Don't need to revisit some of the pros and cons there.

I took that picture from Twin Lakes.

Option two. Oh, by the way, I did talk to the homeowner association chairman for Twin Lakes that went through the process of assessing for a recent upgrade they did for the road. It was a fun conversation. I felt like he was one of the first just completely like private person that wasn't in government. that was saying all the things that we're used to. It was kind of refreshing. Anyway, okay, option two would be just to eliminate the assessment policy entirely. This is more of a just, hey, streets are just, hey, ultimately they benefit everybody. Everybody pays property taxes, so we need to do the repair. Just use property taxes to pay for it. The pros there, of course, that maximizes community goodwill. Homeowners would readily grant easements, said be the hope, accelerating construction timeline and reducing some friction. Some of the cons, we'd miss out on some contribution. The example I gave was the 9% loss. Could be more, could be less. The con is it removes financial deterrent against requesting road work. Wayne has specifically brought this one up. As you can imagine, his office gets a lot of requests. Hey, my road's in bad shape. Why don't you redo my road? When they can tell them, hey, we could put on the list, but realize you'd be paying part of the bill. That will sometimes deter folks. So without having that assessment as a tool to deter, that could be a possible difficulty for public works. Option three. Mayor, why am I thinking that this was your idea? I'm trying to remember who came up with this. Maybe you introduced this as to counteract what public works said as a concern. You would say to the citizens that are complaining about their street, hey, we could bump your street up if you and all your neighbors got together and agreed to a voluntary assessment. So if everybody comes in and says, yeah, we'll pay 10% towards the project, that means a lot because that's everybody on board. So it's not like your typical uh, fight of an assessment and they're willing to put some money in.

But then you still have to run it and then it costs time and staff the same. And what does that 10% really work at all?

Right. So, uh, this is kind of comparing the trade-offs. I'm going to be very clear that, um, the urbanization starts to make a lot of sense. That it comes at a time when you're going through annexation. However, I also understand the reality of when we're doing an annexation, to do an annexation at the same time that you're telling all the property owners that you're going through an annexation that, hey, we're going to do an assessment on your street. Generally, those things don't go over very well. Our annexation agreements oftentimes have provisions that right up front say we won't do assessments for improvements along these roadways. So we can say it sounds good, that it makes sense, but in reality, it also is going to face a lot of challenges. The one that kind of jumps out, Jean and I, we were kind of laughing about this because cost recovery. So if you see the three big dots, because I tend to fall within that option two category if I had to just flat out say, hey, here's the best way to go. It's community goodwill, administrative efficiency, and project speed are all positives. But the biggest negative would be for Gene on the financial side, that's the one that's just the most costly to make it work in the budget.

But it feels like option one, like the urbanization, like we would, as Twin Lakes is our example, why would we ever want to do that, right? Unless they were going to pay for that, because that'd be a huge amount of dollars, right? So like my opinion as I look at this, why wouldn't we do a combination of one and three?

Right, because you could combine those two. You could set this policy and we could set our code to be however you want to outline. We're giving you the options.

Important question.

I know what you're going to ask.

Stone Ridge is at an X a long time ago. So is that, in this scenario, is that and a road previously built before annexation that you would pay an assessment, potentially.

I think that we have, the ones that jump to my mind, three or four examples of locations where the urbanization would qualify and we would still do assessments. All of Lakewood, which where we've been doing them, but those streets were designed, built outside corporate limits. your Stone Ridge area. And also, I think it's directly east or northeast of you. There are private streets that go in there, but they're right near that lake. I forget if that little... That would be an area that would fall into that category. And then private streets. Because private streets, even though they were built within corporate limits, they may not necessarily, at the time they were established as a private street, been built up to city standards. So those are kind of the four areas where, yes, under that urbanization, you could still argue you would assess your property.

It's fine. What is is what is, Pete. But on the private streets, say like the one by McDonald's, Can we come in and redo those too?

If just today I had a conversation with an individual that said the city should take over our private street. And I said, well, you'd have to keep in mind that it would have to be upgraded to city standard and paid for by the adjacent property owners. That's an attempt for somebody to turn over a private street. As long as they remain private, it's not the city's responsibility.

We mentioned private roads. I thought private roads were before they came into the city.

Or before they wanted the city to take it over as a public street. I should have heard.

Or having a volunteer at a station like Point Lake. They'd look at that and go, oh, my God. Yeah. The question I had is, okay, we're talking about the supply industry. Is this gonna also then apply to sidewalk?

As of right now, if a sidewalk is out of compliance, Luke, please jump in, Wayne, Jim. Right now, if a sidewalk is out of compliance, like somebody has something that's broke or there's a certain separation, the adjacent property owner is responsible to fix that.

Okay, if no sidewalk exists. like where we're going through Lakewood and putting in streets and sidewalk equipment as a general policy. So this applies to both the sidewalk and the street.

This does not apply to the street. Only the curb and gutter, sidewalk, and driveway approaches.

But if we change the policy, then that could affect the whole thing. Cool. The city council could make the decision of assessing for sidewalk or not to assess. So that would be within your discretion. And within the scope of what you're talking about here. Okay.

So those places we haven't developed yet, so they haven't put in sidewalks. Then there's something like this policy applies to that. I mean, could you take this and apply it to those sidewalks?

Yes. I believe you could.

Okay. So we need to be careful how we wrote that in that report too, right?

if you wanted a so you're talking about um like the founders district right where there's sidewalks don't exist but it's developed right and if we come in and say we want to put in sidewalks you're saying could we go in and just assess the cost of installing that sidewalk right because it's a new thing you could have a sidewalk policy that's completely i would i would expect if you had a unique sidewalk policy that that would be separate from

The assessment policy is for complete road reconstruction.

So then we want to break out those sidewalks away from that policy that are adjacent to the street. Because we've been kind of running through the same thing.

It'd be a policy where there's no existing sidewalk and we'd want sidewalks in how we're going to treat that.

Right.

Right.

But I think this, correct me if I'm wrong, but for this assessment policy that we're talking about is for complete reconstruction. Correct. So when you do a complete reconstruction, That includes curb gutter and sidewalk. So you're taking out the sidewalk. That's where we've been doing it, yeah.

I think you're more or less talking about kind of a new concept.

It could be differentiated this way, right? Where if we're remodeling the sidewalk, we're replacing the sidewalk. Okay, it comes under this kind of policy. And if it's a brand new one, we're going to treat it differently. We're going to treat it where we do it. I mean, to me, it would seem like that would probably be a fair setup.

That'd be consistent because you're talking about rules that were not signed to meet city code. Well, technically, if there's no sidewalk, then it doesn't meet city code either. Right, that's correct.

Now, the Founders District was within corporate. I'm not fresh on my history, but I do believe all Founders was within corporate limits. So in that particular area, under this kind of urbanization only, we wouldn't assess those sidewalks if we wanted them in.

Right.

But if we wanted sidewalks, you don't have sidewalks in your neighborhood. So if using George as an example. Yeah, we make George put on a sidewalk.

I bet you'll be regretting that.

If George is... If all of Stone Ridge, not George's, if all of Stone Ridge had great streets and they did not need to be reconstructed, but the city said we want to put in sidewalks, then I think that's the policy discussion you're talking about. There, yes, we would do an assessment because it was done outside corporate limits.

Well, let's say a developer is in process. They built streets, but they didn't build any sidewalks. All of a sudden, they're popping businesses. Now the sidewalks are going to come in.

You know where we just had that happen recently?

Yeah, that's what I was going to bring up.

And that wasn't an assessment. We just said you have to put in your sidewalks.

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, it's kind of a short version of it, right? Yeah, so I guess in my mind, I would agree that I think that would be the smarter policy to do the street and the sidewalks both that way. Your stuff, you know, you're paying for it, existing stuff, okay, we'll go. And then that treats everybody the same, just depending on where they're living.

So again, if I'm hearing you correctly, it sounds like you like that urbanization. I do.

And, but the thing is, if you buy it, let's say we're buying it to Lacey, or not Lacey, Rick. Okay. So, When those were built, they were built inside the city.

Correct.

So we would cover that. Okay. But if it was built like the Lakewood Park before it was in it, right, then we're going to assess that.

Right. Does that go too deep on this, but like that, that ridge property has larger sidewalks than our standards. We'd have to talk about that too, probably. Right.

yeah right because that'd be different yeah and different intended use etc right so and that may be something where um hey we have to take out a six foot sidewalk if you want it to be six foot okay you know paper right because yeah through golf carts on streets yeah right yeah that does I'm going to guess in that situation, if we came down to it saying. What are our sidewalk requirements? 5 foot. 5 foot with yeah, so if they have. 6 or 8, 6 or 8 foot, we might say, hey, here's the additional 3 foot cost to take it up to 8 foot. I'm guessing the golf course is going to say, hey, we need these for our golf course. They might pitch in and say, this is our portion to upgrade it to that luxury wedge.

One other question. You were maybe a proponent of option two, but then Wayne's like, then how do I stay people off with sticks? Have we thought about if we were to do that, how do we prioritize? Is that a council decision to prioritize? Do we take that pressure off city officials or?

The final decision is absolutely elected officials. As Wayne's department gets them, if it's a full brief, I think they put it in a CIP event. And that's just part of that process.

And we try to guide them with a policy to give them parameters to make it easier for them. You know what I mean?

I think Wayne would go through and say, okay, here's the top five CIP. Which one needs it from? needs it the most. Yeah, that makes sense.

The issue we face normally is we do, we get complaints. We'll go out and do maintenance. Homeowner will say, I'm going to quit maintaining it, just rebuild it. Right, right. That's what they'll say.

A lot of time, do panel replacements.

It does a lot of good.

But you've got a pretty detailed analysis process, don't you, Wayne, that prioritizes street rebuilds?

Yeah, there's nothing formal or like... There's no flow chart on it, but yes, it's a lot goes into it.

And do we get, do we, does the MPO come through and do like this drive over the streets to see what conditions are?

Yeah. Yeah. They contract the DOT every four years. They do a, get a PCI rating on it. Yep.

Okay. That's on all the streets or just? Just 28 or?

No, they try to get all the local streets, anything that grabs a little bit or if there's a project on it, some reason they can't go down, they won't give it to you.

I guess I've heard a couple people be outspoken on their direction to go. I've heard, Andy, you're kind of an urbanization, I should have left that up.

Hybrid.

Yeah, kind of the hybrid of urbanization and maybe that, kind of like the idea of maybe the voluntary fast track. I felt like Ed was saying urbanization. When Jason met with me, I felt like he was leaning towards that urbanization. Kelsey, George, Mayor?

Yeah, I'd be doing that urbanization. And then, you know, how that fast track would work, but I'd be buying. I think let's take a look at that as well. So if somebody wanted to put some money up, just get it done. Not sure how that would apply. It'd have to be 100%.

Maybe not. Fast track it, yeah. They all have to be on board.

Fast track.

Kind of protects the city, too. Getting stuck in something. You know what I mean?

Yeah, it does. hybrid model, but not organizations. Makes sense. Yeah.

One, three. You want that too? Yeah, good. Well, we'll start working on some draft. Wayne, I know you would have interrupted if you thought there was something additional you wanted to add. Any comments?

Nope. I would say it's probably I have one point of view, but it takes all of us to make a decision. Financially, it probably makes sense to have it, but from a public works point of view, I just want to get the project built. So what makes my life easier is eliminating it. I don't respond to the citizens about political fairness. I don't get the money like Gene does. So I'm happy with it. That's great.

I just feel like one is a protection factor, right? That urbanization, like we could spend a lot of money very quickly if we could have that factor.

And one thing is that using the other communities as a comparison, because I think this is important. We have two people here that live in Lakewood. And in the past, we had even more people, we've had elected officials that have been partisan assessment. And when I learned from some of these other communities about the urbanization, one of the things that I think we need to be able to explain to Lakewood folks is your street was built outside corporate limits, was built to a lower standard, ultimately a lower cost that equates to the value of property, what you paid for it and so on. So I think for somebody to say, hey, you made us do an assessment, you're not doing this other area. Yeah, that's because that's according purposeful to the policy. And we're following a purposeful decision that we didn't just make up. We're following a bit of a trend that we've seen from our own elementary.

I just think that's a hard thing for somebody like, I still believe that. Somebody in Lakewood buys a house, they're in the city, on a city road, and they didn't know that, right? And so that's the angst, right? But I totally get your point.

Again, it's a thing that's easy to say right now, But when you're actually in that discussion with somebody right there, you're going to say, well, I didn't know it was built to a different standard.

That's why you don't want to do that.

Right. This is a good time because we don't have any projects. In fact, even Wayne has mentioned he just went on a tour of several streets in town. And he said, Luke, I hope that we have some resolve to this, whatever direction we're going to go, because we do need to start talking about some street replacements. And let's have this ironed out before four. HAB-Masyn Moyer- We know what streets are going to be.

HAB-Masyn Moyer- We know we have to be.

HAB-Masyn Moyer- All right. HAB-Masyn Moyer- Yes, I have the direction. Thank you. All right, good. HAB-Masyn Moyer- See 14 update Lindsay.

Yeah, you pull that one up. Yeah.

HAB-Masyn Moyer- Okay, um, We just really wanted to give you an overview of our C4 team, what we do, what we've accomplished, how it functions during emergency and what we have left to do. So some of you may or may not even know that we have this team, but it's the mayor, Luke, Jim, myself and Ty. The overall objective of the team is to help the city respond to emergencies as far as communication aspect of that and to make sure we're legal when doing so.

Go ahead.

Yeah. So what is it? It brings together leadership, legal communication and community support functions that surround an emergency response. It centralizes official information so the public receives clear and consistent messaging. That's a big deal for us. Consistency, if we can. I think the most important thing to note is it does not replace emergency services, obviously. It doesn't replace fire, PD, emergency operation centers, Warren County emergency management. We still need all of those things. Those emergency responders, they manage incidents for us, obviously. The C4 team manages the broader scope and the communications and trying to keep the public informed of what we're doing. Go ahead.

I guess I should flip, too, and you flip.

So what have we done so far? This started in April of 2025, so we've been working for quite a while. We've done active shooter tabletops, countywide exercises. Most recently, well, in January of this year, we did a school-focused planning session where we brought the school in to do a work session with us. And then most recently, just a few weeks ago, we did active shooter exercise here at City Hall. And that involved the C-14, PD, FIRE, WESCOM, Warren County Dispatch, Warren County Emergency Management. Did I forget anybody? I think that was it. But that's quite a few entities. I think it was the most eye-opening thing that we have done so far. Mayor, correct me if you think I'm wrong, but it definitely helped us kind of learn where we had maybe gaps or things that we needed to work on. Yeah. We've kind of moved beyond simply creating a plan. We're testing it, identifying gaps, like I just said, and building relationships before emergencies actually occur is one of our goals. Other work that we've done, we've scripted statements that we use or will use in emergencies so we don't have to think about them on the fly. They're just there. We fill in a few blanks and so we can post those to our website and our social media. Working with schools on that too, to make sure that if it's an incident that happens at the school, that we would be posting consistent information. Creating checklists with quick reference guides. I think that's it for that slide. Move on. I've said that 100 times, so I'm not going to repeat myself. But during an emergency, information can move very quickly and inaccurate information can spread just as quickly.

And the right slide.

Yes, thank you. The C-14 coordinates the city's official communication through our emergency response hub, which is a website on our website that Ty can activate when we go into that emergency response.

And that... fire. That was an example of this team coming together, right?

Yep. As was our Central Iowa Water Works water ban with the nitrates. We activated it with that.

Yeah. That was probably our first time, wasn't it? It was. Yeah.

We did it the year before the first time that we had irrigation limitations. So last summer we did that also.

It was almost for... We kind of, the mayor said, well, let's just get together, do it just as kind of practice. Maybe that's not quite emergency. But since then, the mayor said, you know what, let's just do that.

But I think a lot of like what I hear you talk about is consistency of delivering the message, right? When we have something big that's going on, we have to sit in and all about it, right?

Like this is the, this is the. Yeah.

are being trained or are learning where to go for correct information yeah and what we learned i think at least for myself this is just me speaking but from the fire we learned that we were maybe a little behind the eight ball with notifying people so then we got to see the effects of like rumors and misinformation and right yeah yep yeah it's i i

Yeah, out of that, I think we learned that you can't pull the trigger too early. You've got to pull it really quick and just to get together and start talking what's going on. I'm really glad you could do it.

It sounds familiar. This is a command training, right, that I took?

Yeah. I think we've discovered that we're better at calling it to get together. And it would decide it's not needed. Oh, well, we've got together as opposed to. Have it not getting together and regretting it later.

Mm.

Hmm.

Yeah. So so this is in addition to. To what you're talking about, so on site, there will be an instant command. Usually fire or police will set that up. We're going to be somewhere else with the C 14. If. the EEOC gets activated, the Emergency Operations Center gets activated, then I get to start driving between the two because I need to be in the EEOC, C4 will get together, maybe they'll go over to the EEOC as well or in a different room nearby. But yeah, it's part of In addition to whatever we yeah we're we're we're kind of supplementing that and and we are under under eos under the instant command stuff that we call the JIC joint information Center so we're kind of a pre JIC type team that's getting together yep.

The next slide, I think, is the most important one, if you kind of want to know how we handle it. But in the first 15 minutes, what the C4 team is trying to do is confirm the emergency, assign responsibilities to people on our team, and designate the spokesperson, which is more than likely always going to be the mayor. In the first 30 minutes, we're connecting with the EOC, as the mayor just said, Warren County Emergency Management. Miranda is going to come in super quick to help us with those kinds of things. We activate our website and prepare an initial public statement and establish schedules if we can for next statements. And then during the first hour, the team begins evaluating different community needs, whether the mayor needs to do a proclamation of emergency or if we need to talk about a reunification center, depending on the emergency, all sorts of things, housing assistance, any other support that might be necessary. Go to the next one. Um, so the biggest thing we have left to do, I guess, in my opinion is determining how the city is going to manage donations, which is something we learned from the fire. We have a very giving community. That's one thing I learned. Everybody wants to give, um, which was great. It's just the city can't take money. So we, uh, we asked Nana to do it, which they did graciously. But I think if it were a larger level, um, emergency, like maybe a tornado or something to that nature, I think NAMA would quickly get overwhelmed and not really be able to do that. And it's not really their specialty, I guess. So we have talked with a lot of other places, Warren County Economic Development Corporation, Impact, NAMA, WeLift, they're all these nonprofits or organizations that can help us. We just need to determine kind of who we're going to use for that. Did I say that correctly, you think? Okay.

The big, the key thing, I think Jim really brought this up. If we're going to recommend to Joe Blow Citizen to go out and donate money, we have to be sure that's going to a place you can depend upon, trust, and they're going to ensure those dollars go to the use of it.

I know, I'm sorry, what is rounding up for ALS?

I just noticed that yesterday. That's the one they rounded up for the... Yeah. Yeah.

HAB-Jacques Juilland, The fire yeah and they reached out to our C 14 and fairly said hey we have this money, where do we send it.

HAB-Juliette Boone, To jams and. HAB-Jacques Juilland, We did.

HAB-Jacques Juilland, hindsight we're thinking there we might want to do a little bit more. have a little bit more assurance we're sending it to the right place.

Talk communities that were devastated by tornadoes, right? Like I remember Parkersburg back in the day. Right. Whoever, right? Yeah.

We're more like Polk County. Yeah. For Polk County emergency management, they use impact. Okay. So that's kind of the direction we're kind of shifting to right now. It seems like that makes sense, right?

Yeah. And they're already set up. I mean, they have everything set up. They have an online portion that you can go and just donate.

I don't know. I don't know.

And we already have two other agreements with Impact for our Norwalk NICE funds and then just their general services agreement that we have with them. So it could already be, yeah. And then two unused funds, right? If they don't give back all the funds that were raised, we want to ensure that those are earmarked for another Norwalk emergency.

That's probably going to come into council as a policy decision.

Yes, it absolutely would, yeah.

Absolutely. Listen to Lindsay talk here. It never occurred to me, but imagine if C4 was put together when we were looking for the staticated, and when we found the baby, how much better off we would have been with the message.

Yeah. I think that situation is one of, I hope that Mayor, you at least give a little bit of background on how this all got started, because I think that it's neat when you tell that. But those two, I want to say they were fairly close, but you're absolutely right. We learned a lot of what we did wrong.

I think that was a motivating factor for me to begin to really buy in. Even discussing it in the office, I felt as bad as I, you know, I'd like to say maybe drop the ball because there, you know, here's this meeting was in pain. We were kind of like, well, it's not our job to worry about that that much. You know, we, you know, everyone else, you know, we were upset like everybody else, but You know, 100 days later, like, you know, we could have done a lot more to aid the community dealing with that.

Yeah, the whole C4 process came out. Well, we had the, we had the tornado that hit. I immediately got in my vehicle and went and drove through this, where the damage wall was, which is wrong. We need to set up the UFC. And so, you know, I had to Looking back, as I did my own debrief, it's like, okay, I did that wrong. You know, and so we started to review all of the documentation that we had for emergency management and what we need to do during an emergency. Started that process and then Perry happened. And one of the things that came out of Perry that I saw somewhere along the line as far as, you know, a document goes, it was the active shooter playbook. What do you do in case of an active shooter? Forwarded that to Luke and he took care of, you know, he took it from there as far as, okay, we need to get, what do we need to do to get a whole playbook going? And that's where the C-14 pretty much came about. Yeah. So we are learning, we're evolving. And so, yeah, but I think if you talk to Miranda down at Ford County Earth Management, she says that we're way ahead of anybody else in Ford County as far as figuring this stuff out.

If you talk to Tammy Madsen, director of Central Iowa Water Works, she would say we're way far ahead of many of the other member communities.

Who does C4 mean, Sam?

It was a, so this, the active shooter, the.

Mass shooting playbook.

Playbook, yes. That active shooter playbook. So that was across the country. All of the different schools and cities that have had to deal with mass shootings or mass casualty events, they all convened. And they all worked on this playbook to say, here's everything we learned from our horrible situations. So you, city, take this playbook and put it to good use so you can be prepared if something bad happens. So that's where it came from. In the C4, I think the general concept was kind of your central four people in terms of communication is where that turned. we've kind of adjusted Jean, uh, Jean Kelly was involved early on as finance and talking about it. And she felt like this may not be the best fit for me. So we've kind of adjusted who sits on it, but the C4 term just stuck.

We're C5.

We have Jason also kind of call also for like, not necessarily the emergent moment, but yeah, To help us with community events, community control.

Yeah. When we have to establish a reunification center, something happens at the library, we have to reunify them with parents. We thought having somebody like Jason be at the reunification center so as parents come in, they can guide them a little bit. where they need to go and, you know, if they're sitting around, you know, you need to follow our, you know, to help them out through that situation on site. Yeah, more empathy than insults, right?

Yeah.

He does. He's really good at that.

Be a woman.

I think the term we're using for him is our advocate, community advocate. Yes.

So then we'd be at C6. We just figured C4, we'll just stick with that mass shooting playbook.

It's just stuff. The last slide, Luke, is just questions. So we're kind of there. But does anyone have questions, suggestions, concerns?

You're going to have to have a line. Oh, yeah. Because you're talking about pulling the gap before you pull out the UFC. The other thing that always used to cause me concern for volunteers. Right. It's kind of like donation. I mean, you want to help, you're coming in. Yeah.

Yeah. We've talked, yeah, we've talked about that and warning people that that would be part of our job as the C-14 too, to warn people, not don't pay people ahead of time if they are offering to provide you a service or.

Or, okay. You have a team, you know, If you want to get a team together to volunteer to help do whatever, contact these people. So we're the line that says there's a place that you were contacted. Yeah, here you go. And how to get in contact with those people so that they know how to disperse volunteers. Right. Because likewise, there's a lot of legal issues.

If we have somebody trying to get a hold of the chief during an intense moment, He says, don't call me, call C4. Call them. Go to this communication page. Any of the emergency services, no. That's where our communication is flowing through.

Yeah. I can't remember if it was my hometown or county or where I was, but there was a bunch of downed trees. High winds happened. Volunteers wanted to help. I remember this volunteer, like my dad wasn't involved with it. Volunteers running chainsaw, chain come off, cut his leg. He didn't want him to sue the city or the homeowner or whoever that he was volunteering for. It was like, Well, you're a Colby, but he's like, I'm part of this. You said I could be a volunteer and be part of this. That's a big deal. So I get your other volunteer plan too.

I can feel the good you're doing about this on Instagram.

Yeah.

Yeah. I'm the Instagram generation. That's where I get all my information.

Perfect.

I like it. Every time we get together, though, it's learning. I mean. yeah you know you learn more and you get better at it we're confident what you're doing but also every time you do it you realize how much you don't know yet yep i just yeah you just reach out it's the documentation yeah when you get where you're going and you think you're just about there then you got to think about okay what happens if i'm out of town yeah yeah there's my backup because people

We have our backups listed. They've just not sat in our seats yet, which is a little bit worse.

The primaries are still trying to figure it out.

They do know their backups.

Yeah. Just to put a plug in. I think we're so our tabletop exercise that we just did that we were all in this building running back and forth with rooms and, and where people were staged. I think we're going to do a larger operation next summer, I think, is when it's going to occur. So if you guys want to, the zero will be a part. That would be great. Yeah. We'll need actors. We will need actors wherever it happens. So, yeah.

When you guys get everything all settled, I think

having like if somebody were to come into city hall like having something where we could do some training with our employees as in an emergency would be terrible i think yeah and i think we'll probably like if it's going to be a school shooting incident i think uh we'll probably invite the other school districts from the morgan county in so that they can observe or be a part of it maybe any whole police fire police fire so they participate as well

That's always nice when you can invite the entities that you'll be working with.

Yeah. Well, and it's like Lindsay said early on, part of it's building relationships so that you know who you're talking to and you really know who to talk to. Yeah. We're going to get stuff and we're going to get there. Yeah. Who can I talk to that's actually going to get something done? All right. Done with that one. Here we go. All right. Geotech reports, Wayne.

I don't have slides. It shouldn't take too long. Just so you know, also, we have a proposed subdivision. The developer hires a geotech company. They go out to those sites, and they do a bunch of borings, and they come up with recommendations for pavement thickness, or if they need sub-drains. They have footings for any, or a recommendation for community development for home foundations. They have a bunch of data. Generally, everything that pertains to public works, the recommendations never exceed the Pseudops minimum. We always have everything generally just Pseudops, seven inches of pavement, no rock, no sub drains. With the exception of sometimes intersections, they'll say intersections might maybe be eight inches generally Pseudops minimum. Once in a while, they'll reference sub-drainage and sub-base, and I wrote this verbatim. One of the recent ones we got, it says, pavement sections could also be supported on granular sub-base for additional drainage enhancements. So they don't recommend it, but they recognize the value of it and say it would improve things, but they don't say it's necessary. The issues we see are generally the stability of the pavement. We get a lot of premature cracking, premature pavement failure, Some communities you'll see staining of the concrete. We even have algae growing in some urban gutters because it's just wet all the time. So that's why that was the main driver. Those are the main drivers for changing our subdivision standards. Last year we made the change. We don't generally see any issues with like water mains or sanitary sewers. It's usually the pavement. With our new standards, I don't think we're going to have the issues we've seen in the past, but when we went through adopting those standards, there was a lot of discussion on the geotech reports. Developers want us to not require geotech reports because we've enhanced our standards to the point where why even get the geotech report? There was discussion about the city taking over the geotech reports. When we have traffic studies done, we hire the engineers to do the traffic study, and they give us the report. And then the developer pays for that, but we're the contract owner for that. We're a discussion beforehand and geotech reports similar to that. And then of course the third option would be keep doing what we're doing now, require the developer to do a geotech report, but maintain our elevated standards so we know we're getting a quality product. So there's discussion, we want to have discussion tonight on if council wanted to change how we're handling it. I don't really, the downside to us taking over the ownership of the reports or then it's just more effort and work. It's more government work. I don't know if we're going to see anything different. I talked to Tony Blizzi today. He said he didn't think we would get a different report from geotech firms with us owning the contract. I think some of it is just an industry of copy and paste reporting. We get copy reports and I look at Hackney Hills as a perfect example. That was a geotech engineer retaining a lot that failed twice. Sometimes it's just we don't get quality work from that.

And Tony, the point that he brought up today, because we just talked about it earlier meeting, even if we manage the geotech reports for all the streets, the people that do those reports still work for private developers. So that's still a customer. And we're concerned that they still realize that even though they're not directly reporting to them on street standard type reports, it's going to impact the developers.

They know who's doing the project anyway, right? Right. So if we had the geotech report done, and we follow what the geotech report says, and the street fails, is there an error omission type thing that you can go after them for?

My experience is it's all finger pointing at that point. Like we have up there on Autumn Sage, the developer says, oh, there's a pumper truck sitting there pumping over the building for a pool. And that's what caused it to fail, which is ridiculous. That's not it at all. The pumper truck didn't move spots 15 times and ruin all these panels, right? But that's the argument. It's just finger pointing. And then, so we've tried to get, we have an issue on Saddle Ridge, or I'm sorry, Saddle Creek. We tried to hire a geotech company to come in and evaluate why all that payment's failing, and they won't do it because they know it's going to litigation. So we have an original firm. We have one that turned it down or two that turned it down. There's only three primary firms in town that do it.

Maybe a value of us not managing the geotech reports is if we find ourselves in a situation where we're drawing upon a bond or forcing a contractor to redo, then it's up to them. to bring a suit against geotech or somebody else for improper guidelines.

I guess the only reason that I ever brought this up to begin with when we were talking about it before was like the traffic study thing, right? They make certain assumptions when they do those studies. I don't know what it's like with the geotech report, but I would assume there's some kind of assumptions there too. And I was hoping that we might be able to control what those assumptions are. I mean, you're not always realistic. Right. Right.

One thing I've thought about, I don't know how we could do this, was require them to analyze the site with saturated ground, full irrigation, assume full irrigation. Yeah. You know, maybe that's something we could try with fire or have them elevate the... Yeah, I guess I feel more comfortable.

It's controlling those assumptions that I get about, you know, who controls... Because you know the developer's going to go for the cheapest assumptions they can, right? And it may not be realistic. But because they're handling it with that paycheck, okay, we'll go with it. I mean, I think that's what happens a lot of times. So, yeah, maybe we're going to take a look at something like that.

Is there such a thing as a geotech firm ever coming back and recommending more than or is there more than Sudas?

Occasionally. That's pretty rare. I can think of two spots along the intersection up here in the Hackney Hills and a few areas in Brody's. I think a 200 foot section they put in sub-during. But I think a lot of the issues we have though is they analyze the site pre-homes and it's a lot different when we're all done. They move dirt 15 feet, 20 feet, and then everybody irrigates, boom, not everybody. Certain neighborhoods irrigate a lot. Well, that's a condition they don't see when they've done their boring two years ago. And that also, I think, when they dig down for road, they're making channels and areas for water to go. And I think water is our main issue, sub-drain, sub-base. That's why we have that now in our subdivision standards.

The only way you can really get a non-conflicted geotech report would be you'd have to, like, resolve somebody out of town or out of state.

Right. You'd have to have a national firm.

Whether we hire them or not, we know that developers probably would It doesn't go their way, I suppose.

Yeah.

Or they're firm.

Well, I would think number two. Our current process plus add some assumptions of saturation and curves.

Yeah. I like that. Since we've adopted our new standards, we really haven't gone through a full process yet of going through that. So I think we'd be making a change before our last change even had an effect yet. So I think that's a great idea.

So do you have assumptions on like lot value where people start for water with regards to one?

We looked it up. I can't give you a value. But it's true. Timber view, I think it was 50% of homes. And then value was 10% of homes irrigated. Are you talking after sod is established? 10% of homes had irrigation meters. I don't know if they're even though. And other neighborhoods have 50%.

Larry, you can't, right?

So yeah, I thought that too, the lot size may affect if we want to have the assumption of more saturation.

Lot size or lot price.

Yeah. I think we can work that into there, make that change.

HAB-Jacques Juilland- What's our everybody agree with that. HAB-Jacques Juilland- Thank you yep. HAB-Jacques Juilland- All right, we're up housing density discussion Luke and Paul.

HAB-Jacques Juilland- All right, made a slideshow. HAB-Jacques Juilland- So you did.

HAB-Jacques Juilland- Yeah.

HAB-Jacques Juilland- Yeah, we go. HAB-Jacques Juilland- Notebook. HAB-Jacques Juilland- I know.

HAB-Jacques Juilland- That's why I did it. HAB-Masyn Moyer. HAB-Masyn Moyer. HAB-Masyn Moyer.

HAB-Masyn Moyer. HAB-Masyn Moyer. Of course, AI just likes to make up end images, so we don't have any Norwalk stuff to look at. Okay, so we want to talk under this topic about how we can utilize high-density development to kind of have some stable growth across our housing market and the different housing types we have, and then how that also affects the commercial activity that we have in the in Norwalk. So Holly and I will kind of cover both of these. Before we jump into things, just as a starting data point, I've got a spreadsheet that keeps track of the number of housing units in each kind of category of single-family townhome and apartments starting in 2004. So our kind of mix in 2004 was 73% single-family home, 6% townhome, and 21% apartment. So as we've grown over the last 20 years or so, we're sitting at about 70%. This debt I have right now, I've not updated it for the more recent stuff. So it's about a year old. But 70% single family, 13% townhome, and then 18%, I guess 12% townhome, 18% apartments. So we've really expanded those townhome options over the last, 20-plus years, and that's kind of eaten into the single family. The apartments kind of dipped a little bit, but I want to say that that wasn't real inconsistent with kind of what Norwalk was before. It's like every six, seven years or so, we approve around 120 apartment units, and then we wait every six, seven years. We get another 120 or so in. The

Apartments above commercial classified apartments in your math?

They would. Yeah. I mean, we've got three. Yeah. Three new ones.

Well, we showed a picture of... Yes. Yeah.

So, again, we're going to just talk about, you know, how the different things that we've done in town with... regional attractions, trying to get commercial development by bringing people into town. We talked a little bit about that earlier about these people coming to town and then how do we capture their money and all that stuff, right? But then also how high density can kind of help support that as we grow.

Traditionally, the city of Norwalk and not maybe had a huge appetite for a lot of high density residential For various reasons. But over time, you know, as we've done a really good job collectively and getting really high value quality businesses to Norwalk, we're listening to them and what their needs are now at this point, because we got a lot in a short amount of time. And so the business owners, the developers are telling us more about what they're going to need to survive and be successful here. And of course we want them to be successful because they've reinvested community, they expand. So as Luke was saying, there's, you know, we have, These really good attraction and nodes in Norwalk with our central sports campus field house to national random wells now. So they bring a lot of outside dollars outside people coming to the community. So that's really, really good for brand awareness for Norwalk or new generation of everything that's opening in Revenues, of course. But the problem with that is that traffic is temporary. So it's weekend-based. It's cyclical. Sports industry, we know, is cyclical. And then, of course, it's seasonal. So then our businesses have invested a lot of money, a lot of time. They need to be successful. They're left with these really low months and these smalls throughout the year. So now we're looking at listening to them. What they need is that daily foot traffic. You can live here. And one of the best ways to do that is just to have a really good high quality, high density of multifamily products that can come to feed that year round, feed our businesses year round.

Yep. And so what that, Holly talked about like the, the side of people coming to Norwalk and, and the businesses being successful during that time. And then we've kind of got this lull, right. And also feeding that lull is, the kind of transitory nature of the community, right? Like we're a bedroom community, people leave and go to work somewhere. I mean, I see it every day because I drive into Norwalk and Highway 5 out of Norwalk, very busy. Coming into Norwalk, not as much. So as you have that transitory nature of people leaving, they're kind of purchase dollars go with them, right? Like the real easy one is like lunchtime, right? Like you're not coming back to Norwalk for lunch. You're staying out at Jordan Creek or downtown and you're spending those dollars there. So then our restaurants that need that kind of daytime traffic, we're not getting that. Similarly, other retail businesses, right? Like The fact that people are leaving during the day, it's just putting them within a radius of other things and other stuff so it's easier for them to go to. Kelsey, you mentioned earlier, you feel like you don't do that as much anymore because you stay in town more, right? Right. But that's a great example of that changing in your personal life, right? So how our residents interact with the region can kind of interface with how successful our commercial can be. So what can we do to try to have more people here is to have more people here, right? Every dwelling unit that we bring into town is just somebody else that has a chance. They might have a job here. They might work maybe an off hour somewhere and they're here during the day. So we're just increasing that number of folks that can be within the community and patronize our businesses. The other part of that is the type of retail and commercial that we've been wanting to get so this is focused more on like a Norwalk Central type thing where we're wanting to have people come to this area we want to have people walk you know that very first image that we had right like you'd like to have lunch there with these people walking by and everything. And consultants always put images together like this and it's never what you end up seeing, right? Because there's never that many people walking there. And that's a function of the amount of people that are around, right? how many times you see somebody walking down the street in front of Cooper's, right? The patio might be busy, but you know, you don't have that activated street front. And it's really just a simple, there's not as many people there. There's a kind of general number of a thousand housing units. I think this has a 5,000 resident within a half mile or a 10 minute walk to sustain local commerce. Now that number is very much related to the, it being self-sufficient, right? We already talked about, we're already pretty successful bringing people in. So we maybe don't have to hit these real high thresholds of like a very urban place where you want to have all the businesses be able to be supported by the people that are around it. But certainly it illustrates the need to have more folks around. When I did an analysis, I did a quick look at like, What that means for our current commercial that we've had, we actually do have a decent amount of density on the Highway 28 commercial within kind of a radius of that. The problem is Highway 28 itself, right? And we've talked about that with an overpass or what can we do to get people across there, right? That's a barrier like that's people don't want to send their kids across there to go to a quick start. People don't want to send their kids to walk down to the field house. So one side, we can have more stuff develop in the area east of the highway that's vacant and maybe have more housing units and more things happen in there. But as we'll talk later, you know, maybe there's some things we can do that aren't necessarily housing related that we can capture some of the people that are already here and make them more engaged in our commercial base.

High-density residential as an economic infrastructure piece. This, as we've just mentioned, the employees have within that captive audience, daytime, year-round, within a 10-minute walking audience. That daily foot traffic that fills in on Monday through Friday, the commuter void, year-round survival, retail survival, sustains of local restaurants and shops that residents want us to have here, that ask us for when we work hard to get here. And so we need to make sure that we're doing everything that we can to help them be successful all the time. And yet we've been listening to them. And now that we have this kind of thing in the black businesses, we want to make sure that we're taking that next step. That next step now is to increase the residential, our residential base. To again feedback into that system, so that in a couple of years, we can look at that next new influx of businesses. It's just having those that's likely to those population, you do this type of retail and qualify for this type of retail and this continues to step up. So the missing link that high density residential is the essential economic infrastructure required to keep Norwalk's commercial doors open and locally owned businesses profitable. And then the need. maximizing the municipal return on investment. So if you kind of look at the two different categories and how they compare, so the traditional low density expansion, which is what we are going forward here, we have great low density residential neighborhoods, building nice houses, bigger yards, but that we then only get the standard residential tax yield per acre, which as we know, is really kind of under that 50% mark. So it's a pretty low based on that cost that it is to serve them. So the infrastructure efficiency, it's a high capital cost to extend and maintain until these operators large to grab some of this. But then when you compare it against the targeted high density areas or nodes that we're looking at or closer intensive look out with our commercial. Our commercial developers input. So classified in the modern state legislation as a commercial tax base, which yields much higher property tax revenues per acre. And then it drastically lowers that profit and maintenance costs for water, sewer roads, and emergency services in those concentrated areas. So there's just a big difference in the financial, I guess, requirements of the city with high or low density.

The other thing that's kind of inherent in these nodes is the amount of land that's consumed as well. And so it's kind of reflecting the idea of maintenance costs, but in general, like if you do a single family subdivision for 120, I mentioned 128 apartment units every few years, right? We do that all the time in residential and at our standard kind of development pattern, that's about 30 acres of land that we consume to put in 120 homes at an apartment level, that's like six and a half acres, right? So, it's not only just the efficiency of serving it and the return on investment that we get from that and the tax base side of it. There's also a land consumption thing, right? Like we only have so much land and we can, you know, get some value obviously by having higher density on those lands. I think I would say like more stuff, less land, right? Like that's my mantra. Hopefully you guys maybe agree with me.

Mantra.

That's what I try to say. I don't know if you heard me say it before. This is when you or me.

This is you.

Oh, wait. No, I did on my screen.

I did on my screen.

You can ask questions anytime, Ed. What do you got?

Well, I guess what I was thinking in my mind is that I know rooftops and numbers are what developers are looking for. There's a bigger... There are more things involved in this than that. Because let's say we built all kinds of new apartments from an apartment crazy. We could be just housing people that drive to the point. So the piece, and I agree with you, to have somebody around here during the day.

Yep.

So the other part of that is employment here.

100%.

So it's a hand-involved thing. It's not just one thing. two things, three things that are going to make a difference. And I'm glad you did this, the percentages, right? Because we talked about this for a few years ago. And this community has a certain personality to it. Every town has their own personality. This one's got one. In the past, what I've seen is when communities get people have moved here for certain personalities. So, percentage-wise, and I think we talked about this before, I'm more comfortable that percentages stay about the same. As the town grows, yeah, the number of apartments should go. But it would be about the same minute.

Yeah, totally. Does your opinion differ by FJ somewhere here? Sorry to say again. So Jason has the idea of the villages of Norwalk, right? And maybe one village has more single-family homes and others have more identity. Oh, yeah, yeah. You bet. That's quite as entirely possible. Yeah, yeah.

But people move to a place because they have a certain personality. Yeah. And they stay there because of that, I think, to a large extent. So all I'm saying is in this whole discussion, right, I'd like us to keep that in mind

As we go through, we look at things.

I don't want to do like they did up, what was it, Urbandale?

One of those communities. Grimes, I think you're probably thinking of.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, they've built apartments up above. Right. They've got a problem.

Yeah. We've got a few more to get through. I think, to your point, a big part of what it is, like, what does it look like, right? Right. Clearly, the The grimes, like let's do, you know, large block apartment complexes one after another is likely not where we see ourselves. But you make a great point about the employment side of it, right? Because you're in a bit of a chicken and egg at times. I'm sure Holly can mention it. Like, you know, we want to attract, you know, these big high quality businesses, right? they need to have employees, you know, and like how much work did we do to try to make sure that Capital City Fruit and Lafredo could get workers in here because they had transportation concerns, right? Like if we provide housing for those folks, you know, we solve that concern for our businesses and then future businesses as well.

I agree with you both. And Ed, I agree with what you're saying. I just wondered if a way to do that would be... I don't know the zone, actually zoning, where it's falling into, but you restrict your apartments to a certain location, and then anywhere else, out. Not gonna happen.

Right, that's right, yeah.

So if you wanna, in the Norwalk Central area, where you want your people, young people, because they can get into retail jobs, or they might be driving, or they might be driving down here to work too, or whatever it might be, they tend to wanna get out and do something, and they're more active walk, if they're younger. And it's available. Well, yeah, I see. I'll walk away. I twisted my ankle, so I can't walk through my chair right now. But that's how you restrict it. And instead of, you know, the worst thing you do is you get your apartment building, you get one of the levels building up there. It's not occupied yet. Yeah, it can't work. And, you know, just when you think, wow, this is going great. Boom, they're building one over here. And now everybody wants to have one for whatever reason. Oh, my goodness. What actually gives an indirect incentive to apartment builders, if you say, this is the only place we're going to have apartments. It's right here. So you don't have to worry about that cornfield over there. It's somebody putting in a big apartment. It's not going to happen. It's going to be residential. So you can keep your small town feel out here where your low density is, but then concentrate high density in one spot. but do it in your zone.

And that way you're not going to have the heartache because if people are buying houses, those apartments, they know that those apartments are ready. Right? Yeah. They're not surprised.

Yeah. Or if I'm building a house and I know there's a cornfield by me, I know it's at least a stock to be in an apartment. That was a joke.

I think what you guys are talking about kind of really leads into...

It's fun.

You mean like a sub, like a sandwich? Substation. Oh, okay.

First, now we got to build all those freaking little houses.

I think that would be, it'd give a cool look that, that whole area right there. Because that one we're going to build and then we didn't build in the circle. And quite frankly, that should be over there in my personal visit.

Yeah.

and actually work with whatever, I guess, medical people.

Before we move on, I have a question about the previous slide. It's not really directly related to this, but how do schools fit into this? Like, I know that that's a little outside our realm because we're not voting on things like that, but it is something I like to take into play because a lot of people do, I would say, a huge majority of people move here for schools.

Yeah, and I think... You said this slide. I think this slide also plays into that a little bit because I think the way that people have to acquire their housing now, it's different than it was even 20 years ago, right? So it's a lot harder for the young family to go in and buy even a townhome. So I think you have to expect... from a city like Norwalk that's strong for schools, you have to expect that when you put in an apartment complex that there's going to be a decent percentage of folks that decide to live there with the family.

A lot of it depends on the kind of apartment complex.

Of course, yeah.

I would just be interested if there's any data behind the previous apartment buildings that have gone up and how per 120 units Apartment building. How many children does that equate out? Right.

I could imagine the school district probably does that.

I'd love to lean on them on this topic and hear where that would come into play because that would be a huge concern of mine.

There is our school district. I have not heard this from them recently in their more updated demographic reports. in past years, which I think we've been growing pretty consistently, our school's main concern is they are a student rich, value poor school district. So for them, high density housing, this is not helping the discussion of explaining the value of high density housing, but from a school perspective, they've been a little bit concerned that if we have high density housing that brings in an influx of a large number of kids all at once, That can be challenging for the school district.

And that's the data I would like to know before ever proving anymore.

That's probably five years ago. If I remember right, I think what they found, what the data shows is a surprising number that it's much less than what they thought it was going to be.

I think one of the issues is that they likely see with that. So if you compare, we're going to approve the 30-acre subdivision with 120 homes, or we're going to approve the apartment with 120 apartment units, this takes longer to get to 120 than this does. The apartments likely probably meet that 120 within a six-month timeframe, right? And then the school has to react. So even if this is 10% of units have a home and this is 50%, Well, you still have 10% that you get dropped in your lap that you have to then try to figure out how to deal with, and likely before you start seeing the value of that apartment complex come in to the school district. So there's a little bit of a cart before the horse.

We can also control some of that, but the type of apartments we're about to build, right? I mean, some apartment complexes are constructed in such a way that they're not helpful to families. Right? Well, yeah. They're also apartments that are built that are senior apartments. Yeah. I mean, there are ways to control the influx of numbers in Africa.

Right.

And I'm not saying that we shouldn't do it. What I'm saying is that's something that could be coordinated with the school.

I think.

So they'd have an idea, you know.

Yeah. Part of with the type of things are, you know, we want to be sensitive to, you know, on Holly's side of trying to attract business. and talking about this housing life cycle, right. Is people that, if we want to attract young professionals to come and work in businesses, we want to try to get some office stuff going or get something going, you know, we've got to be willing to have a place for those folks to be able to locate here. And at the same time, I, you know, we have such a good community and school district that people want to be in, I would speculate that people likely sacrifice the size of their living unit to be able to get their family into the school district, right? So maybe you've got a family of four that says, I'm going to live in this two-bedroom apartment and make it work because it's important to me to be here for my kids' education, right? So even if we try to control some of that by unit type, I'm not sure that you necessarily can. The positive and there's negatives to having a great school district.

There's a fine line on how far we can go. That becomes almost a market. The market drives what those units are going to be. We have some limitations on how far we can go.

We're in a good position right now. We're planning in advance for this because we're at that certain stage now in Norwalk. Where we need to be looking at this, we need to have this kind of diversity of housing types. As the slide talks about the housing life cycle, we want people to be here through all those stages of life. So young professionals coming here, young families that are now putting smaller dwellings to the seniors that are downsizing. We want them to stay here. We want them to go to a senior apartment somewhere in Des Moines or something like that because there's something here. available for them. So that's also a big piece of it is just people here all the way through their lifespan. So in addition to keeping our businesses, have they been the next slide?

Right?

Yes.

Right. Asked the question with council. So George mentioned the apartment building on the circle. One of the the primary issue that came to council with that was to put in studio apartments and not require balconies for studios.

Correct. Well, and it was the density. Their unit count was above what we allowed. Their argument was, but a significant number of these are studios, which you would anticipate would be one person. So the number of people in this thing is actually less.

So, yeah, if you're looking at like new teachers, new people just coming out of college, new cops, whatever, younger folks, that's a great price point for them to get into as a studio. Is that something that you think we should cut? Because it must not be codified as far as no balcony for the studios.

Yeah.

That's something that should be codified.

I mean, I think as we kind of get to the end here, we've got some different code things, and that was not one that I had on there. But I think those are the types of things we'd want to think through if we're going to say this is something that we think that there are target locations that we want to try to focus on and find ways to do that. What are maybe some of the hurdles in our code right now that we could look at and taking a second look at and seeing if, if it makes sense or not, or how do we make that stuff? Um, so are you doing this one or is this me? This is me. Okay. Sorry. I don't remember what numbers I told you. Um, so, so one of the things, you know, we hear a lot about is just, um, the kind of common thought of a high-density project just around, right? It's not a Norwalk thing, but people equate high-density to crime, right? I mean, that goes back many years, you know, back to public housing and all these different issues. You know, what we've seen here, and I think what you see with most modern multifamily, especially new multifamily things, is... You might have a higher call volume because there's just, you know, again, there's more people. There's 120 housing units in six acres instead of 30 acres. So you've got a higher concentration of population on top of each other, which results in a higher call volume because people, when they're near each other, tend to have issues with each other.

I have a question here, though, and I go back to something George said. Maybe that's your opinion, but is that Norwalk's opinion or is it, I don't want it by me because there was never one by me because it's been single family homes and they're scattered throughout our community. And it's like, well, I don't need another one here. Like, why aren't we centralizing that is I feel like that's more of the problem when people said like, I live all around single family and now you're going to put high density here. Right.

Right. I mean, that was certainly with the circle, right?

I mean, that was, I think that was across Beardsley and that development that Humble's doing too, right? Like there's a whole bunch of houses on Echo. And maybe even over by the other old golf course where they just put a new apartment building in the center of nowhere, right?

That's been the case. Anywhere a new development has gone in where people were just looking at nothing.

Right. Or it would be like that was going to be single family because that's what's around here, right?

In general, we've tried that when we have a project that has density in it, we have seen better success with lack of concern about it when the high density gets built first. So Brody's Landing, what you're talking about out there, that was built before they got the roads down to it and all that stuff. I don't. other than the one neighbor in the county that made some very questionable statements at the PNZ meeting, I didn't hear any complaints about that proposal, right?

You know. I guess the way I think about it, I don't think about it as a crime perspective at Norwalk.

Right, and that's just one.

I think about it as, is that the location we really want it? Because there's nothing else like that around here is my personal opinion.

Andy, I will tell you one of the, Some of the most intense up until the data center discussion, some of the most intense that I saw an adjacent property owner or multiple property owners was when a single family residential development was going to go in in an empty field across from their house. So it's, yeah, we hear people complain about high density housing, townhomes.

It's really anything that takes bare ground.

It's really anything that takes bare ground.

We have people that get angry.

Right. So, you know, in that regard, you know, the best we can do is the discussions we're having now. It's the planning that we do, the long-range planning that we do, you know, the zoning and PUDs that we do well ahead of time. And then just hope that people call my office, right, because –

Or take a look at the conference. Right.

We're an open book. Right. We're an open book. Like, I want to make sure that you're informed when you are talking to, you know, looking at buying this house and like, what's going to be in my backyard? Right. Well, what's what do I think is my backyard is really somebody else's property. Right. So, yeah. That's the best we can do to address those things and try to make that stuff as publicly available as possible. Most people don't do that. Right, and that's the life of public service, right? You know, to some of those things, certainly when something does get proposed near someone or really even just if it's a greenfield site, right? Like what can we do to have our neighborhoods and have the building age such that it retains its value and that it doesn't become a problem in the future? And that's, you know, some of the things, Mayor, you mentioned, should we look at again? Maybe not, you know, like what do we do design wise to make sure that things are the way that we want them, right? Prior to that data, I think prior to 2004, when we were at our highest percentage of apartments related to single family and townhomes, the biggest apartment complex was probably the Fish Creek one over there, right? Since then... We've had more of what I call suburban complexes get built. Fish Creek's maybe a little bit like that, but, you know, High Point Legacy Landing, the Brody's Landing Project, you know, all these big 30, 40 unit buildings that are kind of set back from things and You know, they look kind of monolithic and everything. Maybe that's not the right scale. Maybe all the apartments that we built isn't the Norwalk that people want. Maybe that's leading them to feel like we don't want apartments. So maybe if we can find a way through design standards and some of this to scale back down, still have some density, but, you know, make it fit within the character of things.

Yeah, that's probably true. Yeah. Yeah.

And so that design-wise comes back around to when we looked at Peninsula District and we looked at a lot of the different things we did, there are ways that we can have density fit in a neighborhood context and have it not be offensive to the guy that lives next door, right? Or have it be as much of a concern as long as we're having good design standards. Right.

Wouldn't that be great? Yeah.

Right. And then, you know, As things age, enforcing our codes to ensure that we're doing our rental inspections, we're going and we're looking at things to make sure that minimums are met for rental safety and quality. We're making sure they don't become nuisances and we stay on top of that stuff. There's just a lot of work we can do on that side to not let them become the issue that they might have in other communities or maybe even at times in Norwalk. So, Mayor, to your point and some of the things that we kind of were tossing around with ideas on regulations and reforms that we could look at, yeah. Certainly looking at the density amounts that we have, maybe if we want to target things in a certain area, maybe we say you have to have a certain amount of units. Like, you can't come in and do single family here, right? Like, the minimum you have to do within an area that's an eighth of a mile from Norwalk Central is eight units an acre, right? So... We're saying this is where we want the density and we're going to require you to do the density there. So that'd be one thing we could look at. Right now, our setbacks and open space requirements and everything kind of push us towards legacy landing style apartments. So if we look at the apartments that we have around and we think, we would like more neighborhood scale things, then we need to look at how our codes are written and how feasible something neighborhood scale is, as opposed to more of the large block complex.

Yeah. Sure. The way you kind of got the percentages here. If we said, okay, when we built this, when we held it, Like I was talking about the same personality and the same, you know, right?

Yeah.

And then we're talking about locations and I think that's right. And I think also the appearance of those places. And that's right.

Sure.

I think all those things are part of it.

Yeah. I don't, I mean, you wouldn't necessarily codify that percentage, but I think the council could certainly have a goal and a policy that we can, I mean, I keep track of it every year. It's not that hard to say this is what we did and this is where we're at.

And if we decide not to do something, it's because of...

Right. I mean, the big question you would have if I were to forecast out five years where we're at with that would be, are you going to say no to the next single family development because it messes up the percentage, right? Like, I don't...

Right.

I don't know. I don't think you would do that, but I guess that's your guys' decision.

Does that present a legal problem? No. I mean, as long as it's... I mean, the only time it would be a legal problem is if it's some sort of... Arbitrary. Arbitrary or discriminatory type situation. But, you know, you're not saying no low income. You're just saying, you know, this is our mix, proper mix. This is a proper mix. There's ways to be able to do it. We like this when we...

But Peninsula had some model, some big apartment buildings. Yeah, they did.

Yep. But they had some four unit as well.

Yep.

Yeah, they had a couple that were like 20 plus units.

The design really made it blend. I felt like the design of some of their structures made it blend in. It didn't have the appearance. You mean there's 36 units? Yeah. I remember looking at that and thinking it looked like maybe there were four units. Right. What is this? An insulin neighborhood. This is in Iowa City. We did a bus tour. Oh, that was nice. P&Z and some with council members.

Yeah.

If you ever get over there, we can tell you where it's at just to go drive around and take a peek.

Oh, yeah.

Real interesting.

I don't know if you want to go there or not. My daughter lives in Tipton, so I get close to that.

Just a couple other things that we've been toying around with. I think every time we have a... project proposed to us. Parking's always been a concern from the developer side, particularly our garage requirement. So, you know, that might be something we want to take a look at, especially if we start getting to these mixed use areas where we're trying to promote the residential above commercial, you know, what do we require for that? Luke's pulling up some images of the Peninsula District there. And then lastly, kind of to the school thing, is there a desire to just agree and understand that we are a family community, people are going to want to live here as families, and should we, on the flip side of what Ed was saying, where maybe we say we want to do smaller units so that we don't burden the school, should we be more open to three-bedroom units or requiring more larger units in our apartments to allow that to be an easier thing for people that want to have that option in Norwalk. That'd be something we could consider.

I agree.

I don't think that's the direction. I would say two bedroom, one bedroom studio over three.

We need the mix. We need the mix with that because we have so much family larger space availability between that mix that you're talking about.

I think the trick is we have a large swath of unit types that meet that. I don't know that we have a lot of the three plus bedroom unit type at something where two folks that are taking entry level jobs in town that have kids can make that work in maybe a townhome, but townhomes are getting so pricey now that those get tricky. You want to talk about economic incentives?

We can get a little bit strategic about how we do this. We've been able to watch the other communities in the metro and how things maybe didn't go so well or some have done them really well, so we can learn from that. But we can offer incentives if we find or type we really want or where we want it to be, we could consider some sort of a tip structure or some kind of economic development incentive to help with that, offset some things. But we don't have to, but we could. Because again, if it feeds our business district, then it's worth it. And I think it's really important that as we're putting this together, whatever kind of barrier, the boundary we put on this, that we are working directly with our business community and the market, because they're going to know, because we can dream up what we want, all we want, and then we can sit there and never happen, because it still has to be driven by other people's money. And we need to listen to them. What is that?

And TIF has changed a little bit in relation to school go. I don't want to bring in housing and kids that don't have tax dollars following them to the school district.

Well, now they get the TIF.

There's a $5.40 shift. Have you touched on the 6%? That might be a good time to bring that up as well. But there's now an additional $5.40 that will go to the schools that will not be available to us through TIP. So that helps.

It helps, yes. But it's not 100% of what they would get if it was not your credit.

But I think the argument, you can make very economic value by limiting the amount of land you can put apartments on. And then, period. So if there's 30 acres in town that you can put apartments on, I don't know what number would be the saturation point or not. But if I knew I could build an apartment there, and most likely, I know that's not going to last forever. Go back to Ed's percentage, just say, well, Based on our percentages of what we want, it's going to be 20 years before we open up any more apartment grounds. Oh, sounds like I might have a pretty good deal here. I might be able to build up an apartment and not worry about just undercutting it constantly and just overbuild, which is the normal case. And then everybody has a really off years to be chasing that. Likewise, you're going to have enough competition so they can't jack up the price either.

But when you look at the commercial areas, yeah, focusing more on those commercial nodes or, you know, around Michael's employers in those areas.

Yeah, I think that's where I would kind of recommend things is, you know, as we identify next areas where we want to have a good targeted commercial growth area, then stepping back and saying, okay, what's the density we need to have around that? And then stepping back and how does that go into the rest team?

But it's even a panel plan.

So you're master planning out the S curve? Yes. That'd be a good time. It would. Okay.

I like how you think, Mayor. Yep, 100%.

Oh, you're having some discussions.

Yeah. Just some other incentive type things. You, Mayor, mentioned like, you know, maybe pulling back in some areas or alternatively, You know, you can leave everything as it is now, but we can say, look, we'll be willing to flex on this stuff if you do these other things for us, right? So we can give density bonuses and allow them to do more, which is kind of what we did on the circle. We said, look, you're going to have this higher quality building and you're going to have it look this way and we're going to let you go and do above and beyond. One day, someday.

I like east of city center, like over where the new school would be and each of our stuff over there too.

Yeah, that'd be a good area.

Yeah.

We're looking at that. Initially, we thought to do this just really focused around the north central area, which that is part of that. And then it looks like, let's just put this wide open as a discussion in general and kind of see where it goes. So it might be north.

I guess I would be more interested in that kind of thing. And being able to offer some kind of an incentive that way as opposed to tying it directly to a residential or apartment thing. Because I kind of agree with the mayor. We've had a policy for years that kids don't go to that school unless where they're living is part of the tax. Right? So they got income from it. And I think that served us pretty well. And so if we can figure out something like that where there's some give and take and we It would take a little bit different areas, right? And that would be a very good thing.

Timeline. Timeline. The Eshleville property would be where they might be talking about putting a school by the large tower. That would probably happen faster than the S-curvy.

Yeah. I mean, the thing that Holly and I talked a bunch about, right? I don't know how many of you guys have been out and coming to see it, but the commercial below, residential above. Yep. Right. Like we, I feel like we need some of that because we need to get in lower end commercial. And that gives an opportunity for them, somebody to have a small space and start up a business and then grow into some commercial space that they can afford that we have.

That was some of the stuff we talked about up here.

Yeah. So what Andy just mentioned, I know there's been discussion about staying away from tip on residential. But that is a land use that I continue to hear collectively people saying that's the type of land use makes a lot of sense. I'm not suggesting you just jump in line and say, oh, yeah, let's sort of tiff at that. But if we were talking about incentivizing something that included residential, would that fall into line?

100% for me, and especially in Milwaukee Central, because we want that to be walkable. And now it's shop, shop, shop, apartments up above. I think that's great use to ensure it. It's more like a lifestyle center. Yep. back back apartments behind that stuff right yeah it would be a good place to put apartments that would be a good place to do that right yeah and thankfully if we ever got to work on the other side of the hill yeah i'm thinking hard about that one too

HAB-Jacques Juilland, This word well what we're given a baby to the place cross street right. HAB-Jacques Juilland, The apartments across the two apartments cross street yeah.

HAB-Charlotte Pitts, Yes, we got a real abatement. HAB-Charlotte Pitts, To the. HAB-Charlotte Pitts, For the bottom. HAB-Jacques Juilland, All across.

HAB-Charlotte Pitts, City. HAB-Charlotte Pitts, Okay, but we can do, we can do that as an incentive to a commercial favorite. Oh, yeah.

Make it a little bit bigger, because that's the one thing that we run into, the barrier we run into with development groups is they love the idea too, but it's really hard to make that a successful product for whatever reason. So maybe the incentive takes off a little bit of that edge with them, whatever that price point is, just making it difficult to do.

Yeah, just there's, We've got a lot of tools to bait them in.

But remind me, what did the diligent folks tell us that kind of allowed them to do? Like there was a whole bunch of different kind of code stuff. And I don't know that, right? But they were told to change code so they could have those be different there, right?

All stuff I was willing to do.

Yeah, I think their main point. Their main point, yeah. We've said, we'll do the same thing here. It's what they've said. One of the main reasons they were able to make it work there is that Diligent managed it and controlled all of that. So there's no competition that, hey, if they do something unique here, somebody comes in and pops something that undercuts them right across the street.

So just to wrap this up, Not specifically related to new housing things, but just especially as we're talking Norwalk Central, as we talk around realigning the S-curve, just remembering that a lot of this is putting people near things so that they can walk to them, that we have short commutes, that we have those people within that thing, and finding ways to not create barriers in new housing. roadways and new developments, but then also just continuing to look at ways that we can make Highway 28 not be the barrier that it is. And that's really challenging because it's not our road. There's a lot of different things that we'd have to do with that, but there's certainly options out there. With that, I feel like we've hit the stuff we wanted to talk about. So if there's anything else on those three items, we're good.

All right. Last topic. Data center effect on resident seven tablets. One page. One page. Yes. And AI generated that.

Using the medicine. Chief told me make this under three hours. So I've got about 16 minutes. Okay. One of the topics I've heard from a few folks, the mayor's been pretty forward lately about talking about this idea of what would it look like if new property tax revenue from the data center was used to do reduction of property taxes for the rest of the community. So to give you a little idea of what that looks like, right now today, about 79%, about 80% of our tax base comes from residence funds. That's a lot, I would argue we're still in that unhealthy category, the bedroom community, I've heard that term come up. If we found ourselves in a position of seeing over a 15 year cycle from today, let's say that we have two data centers that go in and the result is approximately 500 million of new value. And in this scenario, that happens roughly around 2032, when those would come on the tax rolls Norwalk would see our tax base from residential around 54%. We would go from- We would be like West of Long. We would jump right past West of Long. All right. That would be considered a very low base from residential. Most Iowa communities, even those that are doing really well, are still in that 60%-ish range. Which is scary too, though, right?

Yeah. Yeah. To have that kind of a shift. Well, because then we're so reliant on those two. I think we think they're going to go well. I also am in IT. I don't think they're going to go away. They're not going to outer space, but that's a reliance on.

So if that were to happen in that scenario, and again, all this is predicting the future over 15 years and trying to estimate, so realize their variability there, just to give you an idea. So 15 year projection, looking at those two dials in the top right-hand category, Without a data center, we most likely maintain about a $14.88 levy. That is quite high levy within the metro. With the scenario of the data centers with a build out around fiscal year 32, could be sooner, could be later, we don't know. If we took 50% of the new value generated and turn that into property tax relief, So only 50% of it, it would drop our levy down to 1129. That would put us in line kind of in the average or in the middle of what we see in the Metro for our competition. What does that mean to a property owner? On a $400,000, 400,000 value home over a 15 year cycle, that's about $10,700. The annual tax would drop from $3,500 down to about $2,600. So an annual savings would be pretty significant. And for example, like a $5 million commercial property, over that same 15-year cycle, they would see about a $200,000 savings. And I realize when you take one-year comparison, you carry it out over 15 years, There's a reason you've got to look out a certain distance because it takes a while to construct the data center for them to come online and for all those tax incentives to take effect. Now, if our elected officials said, we want it all to go to property tax relief, well, you could set up a TIP district, identify it for 10 years, whatever you wanted to do, and under the current law, That means when that TIF is required, 100% of that would become property tax relief. So you have options. Some of the first times that some of the elected officials during some of our recent one-on-ones, when I stepped through these scenarios of, do you take a third of it? Do you take 50%? Do you not give any property tax relief? Setting a policy is really difficult. Because you can't tie the hands of a future council. You can give them guidance and say, hey, this is what we hope you do. But ultimately, when it comes time, it could be a whole different council making the decision. That's why I come back to that TIF, that under current law, that is one way that you would lock in a future council.

Yeah. And again, we can establish goals and targets. And that doesn't necessarily try to restrict a future council. It would suggest it. I got my butt chewed playing golf about the ridge. Yeah, I did too by the same person. Okay. I know what you... When they went in on that, they said we're going to get tax relief on the runs off. And we couldn't do it because of what the state was doing to us at that time. Right. We wanted to do it, but we couldn't. We didn't do it. And old man, you know.

The other thing is, 20 years ago, when the city was considering TIF for Echo... this $90 million of value, we didn't have 20, how many officers? 22 officers to pay for it. Right. And so, yeah, it's really easy to say back then that, oh, we won't need that $90 million of value. But if you've been building your community to accommodate all those new residents, there's a certain cost that goes along with that.

That's why targets are a good thing as opposed to maybe setting a policy. Even though a policy could change, but a target is just a suggestion.

What is the 2035 goal under Indy's? Gold would have been bad anyway.

Debtless advocate, lowering taxes is only going to raise risk values, just getting farther away from affordability.

We're all linked.

They're all linked. It's like the scale and leverage situation.

And I'll point out that there's a 282-acre site we've talked about. And we're saying $500 million. That is extremely conservative, I would say, because I looked today, 110 acres for Microsoft Osmean out by the interstate, and that valuation is $750,000. So if you double that, you're at $1.5 billion.

plus as far as probable valuation, but I... We have the hard numbers and it's a huge investment. Well, the investment is, yes, but the final valuation... That it's valued, yeah, it's more than $500 million.

So I'm curious, throw out, I have, this is the spreadsheet put together, throw out a number, let's just put it out another couple more years, another $200 million, another $300 million,

I think there's, I think easily another 500. I don't know how to count the fittings here.

Well, I got to put this in. So let's say 18. All right. All right.

said the lie yeah but it would be building some houses yeah but that's the devil right like what we want though too right well okay so you mentioned the pool yep um you could you could if you just were taking half agreed the other half could you could easily put in a pool incentives 30 30 million dollar pool happy incentives build out parts have 14 different splash pads in town, 14 pickleball courts, whatever. So, yeah, at least 14 pickleball courts. And indoor.

Just a windfall, just like a family, if you found oil in your backyard, you take some and save it, take some and invest it, take some and go take a vacation, enjoy it, whatever. Not just, I'm going to hoard it, whatever. It's also

and the future potential it's going to bring to its due.

So that additional 500 million, it drops the levy down to 970 over that same 15-year cycle, understanding that I put it out in year nine, so there's only about five or six years of realizing the value takes that savings up to about $14,000 over a 15-year cycle. I mean, those are big numbers, and Gene required me to say, to all the department heads, please don't bank on that amount of money coming in in fiscal year 32. So I spend that on all the department heads.

But I think locking in a volunteer makes no sense for my personal opinion, right? Yeah. I think we should

I think that's right. Yeah. So I know we can't, I know we can't make it, we can't codify it. Do you want, do you want to have a serious discussion at council table about implementing something like this to say, these are the guidelines that we want future councils to take? You don't have to, but you're going to have to have the discussion. If you're not going to take them, you better have a doggone good reason why. to give to the public.

I think when we do goals and targets and things, I think that had that effect on it. As long as we publicize it and we let people know this is what we're looking at. Right. So when the next gate who's come in, if they want to do something different, they'll probably catch hold of hell. Right. Because they didn't do what, right? Right. And they'll get yelled at on the ball court.

So I think I would like to see us do that.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's a good idea. And that's a story that we can tell to the public right now is that, okay, this is what this council is trying to achieve. And these are real dollars. These are real numbers.

I definitely wouldn't want to make any specific promises of like how much we can lower things.

I'm glad that you say that. I'm an over-delivered kind of gal. Yeah, throwing numbers in here can be dangerous.