City Council - Regular Meeting

I don't have a dog. I don't have a dog. I don't have a dog.

I don't have a dog. Yep, I hope so. One or more, about three more.

Yeah, yeah. That's a nice car. My wife has a close track, and he gets like 30 miles a gallon. Sweet. Any long trip, that's usually what we do. Yeah. Yeah. Three steps ahead. Well, and Lindsay's in too. Which Lindsay's in. Great.

You guys ready?

Yes, sir. All right. We're going to call to City Council a regular business meeting Thursday, September 17th, 2026. It is 6 p.m. Kaylin, would you please call roll?

Council Member Borjan?

Here.

Council Member Brown?

Here.

Council Member Kuhl? Here council member my key your council member Porter. They're Phillips, I'm here.

And we do have a quorum so we'll move on item number two is a pledge of allegiance which please write. Okay. Item three is approval of the agenda. We're going to move, we're going to pull consent agenda item E off of the agenda. And we're also going to pull consent agenda item C off the consent agenda and place it on the regular agenda. Would anybody like to move any of the other consent agenda items to the regular agenda? Hearing none, can I get a motion to approve the agenda as amended? Motion. Second. Okay, motion by Borjan, seconded by Meineke. All those in favor, say aye.

Aye.

All those opposed, same. That motion carries. Item four is a dedicated work session. So this dedicated work session is for mayor, city council, and staff. Regular city council meeting will begin following this work session. And the item A on there is data center regulations. And before we get started, I'd like to summarize a few things to help everyone understand how work sessions work. and lead into a summary of my expectations from this work session. First, work sessions provide a transparent process through which citizens can observe how the city tackles challenging issues. We conduct work sessions each month and have them the same night as regular council meetings. This is done to provide some convenience to the public since they only have to attend one meeting then. While we love the public to attend meetings and get involved, Work sessions are focused on internal staff and elected officials. Citizens are encouraged to watch and listen, but public comment is generally not allowed. When the topic of a work session makes it to the regular city council meeting agenda, that's when we want the public to weigh in on that particular topic. I am confident that those in attendance will respect this work session and acknowledge the value of this transparent process. But if we experience any disturbances, I'm not going to hesitate to ask people to leave. We want efficient government, just like you. We can be most efficient when we can focus on the task at hand. So tonight we're discussing data center regulations. I want to be clear with staff on three core issues. That's water, noise, and lighting. Another item I want to recognize is electricity. However, this is not something Norwalk regulates unless it is on-site power generation. So these core issues are important to the city council and me. We made this clear earlier this year when we considered a development agreement with Tract. So Jim and Luke Parris, I'll turn it over to you two.

Sure. There you go. All right. Well, thank you. Uh, as mayor mentioned, we're going to talk a little bit about, uh, data centers, uh, growth and how we might regulate those. Um, anybody feel free to jump in at any time, Jim, Luke, I know we've all worked a lot of this Holly, if she happens to be online. Um, So the purpose of this is just to go over some of those common concerns that that are out there regarding data centers and that have become a little more apparent as opposition of data center, particularly the hyperscale AI data centers have become more of a thing. So we'll talk about some of those. Those include the four topics that the mayor mentioned. Kind of organize this each topic to its own slide. We'll kind of cover each one, ask questions on those as we go. We'll kind of talk about what our role as a city is in each one of those topics and what our jurisdiction is. Talk about what we can do from a regulation and planning standpoint about those. And then really from a staff level, we just want to identify any other priorities or things that you want us to be focusing on as we do amendments, as we work on sites and all these things with this topic. So just a brief overview of where we've been, where we're at now, and what we still have to do. In the past, on data centers, we've talked about data centers internally as, hey, what do we do if this use shows up for quite a while? That involved infrastructure capacity analysis where we talk to our partners and understand what it means to have one of those in our community. We do land use planning and growth policies to identify places where that would make sense, where we can serve it by those utilities. And then we do the capital planning and budgeting and expenses to build infrastructure to serve not just a potential data center, but the growth of the community in general. Presently, we've had an initial zoning ordinance adopted related to data centers. We've had a data center developer acquire a site in town that's been annexed, though there's no specific user identified. And as was mentioned, we've approved a development agreement with that developer Thus far, currently and things that we'll see coming in the future, we're working on zoning ordinance amendments to to firm up our data center ordinance. It's amazing how fast this kind of world of things has moved because we originally wrote a data center ordinance when everybody was like, yeah, data centers, that's the thing that Microsoft has up there. And it's yeah. You know, we all kind of knew them. And then within probably three months of us approving that, these bigger projects started getting proposed around the country. More eyes brought to those things. A different level of potential data center. Though, back to the present, would still acknowledge that we don't know who would potentially locate in Norwalk. We don't know if that's just a typical data farm, if that's a hyperscale AI data center. We don't know at this time. Other things we need to do in the future as things go forward, there's infrastructure construction that's needed. We've built sewer for an industrial expansion, so some of that's already done, but there's additional infrastructure that needs to be done. And there's still not an end user. I'll come back to that again. We don't know who would go there. There's a lot of site work and a lot of those things that are needed as far as that's concerned. So common concerns, I got eight different concerns here. I think I covered a lot of them. I've read a lot of stuff, watched a lot of things on all sides of the data center argument to educate myself so that I can help provide information to you all and do the best job I can do to write some regulations and give guidance. So we'll cover each one of those. We're gonna talk about energy, water usage, noise pollution, light pollution, air quality, water quality, the aesthetics of data centers, and then just the general idea of land consumption. And then we've got kind of lightning bolts on there. Those are the three main ones. The mayor wanted to make sure we hit on, so we will do that. So starting with energy grid rates or end rates, one of the biggest concerns that I think is at the top of the mind whenever you research data centers uh and the ai ones is hey this is going to use a lot of power it's going to have a big impact on our utility grid and that means that our customers that the rate payers of the city or um really the region because we're not a municipal uh power uh that will have higher rates right so there's this general concern that this is going to make it cost more because the status center is going to need more there's going to have to be upgrades there's going to be all this we'll have to absorb that cost. From a city perspective, we don't have a role in that. The mayor mentioned that earlier. The Iowa Utilities Commission is the one that regulates rate increases. We're part of a regional power network that mid-am operates. We don't have a whole lot of direct influence on that general concern. But for The fact that cities can exercise our zoning and land use controls and establish regulations that are as strict or as lenient as we want. So the only thing that we can do as a community is make it so something can't happen here. That doesn't necessarily address this concern, because again, we're a regional system. If we're really concerned about the impact to rates and all of those things, one city making a decision on things isn't going to address that concern. In general, it's my understanding the Utilities Commission, being the organization that has to approve rate increases in Iowa, has not done that in a very long time and seems like a user coming in that drives up some usage when it necessarily doesn't. impact that uh one thing that we could do and the mayor mentioned this as well um is consider the idea of on-site power generation if a concern is this is going to generate more power someplace else and that's going to cause rates to go up if we allowed in our community the power to be generated behind the meter on that site for its use It wouldn't have an impact to those. They wouldn't be consuming mid-AMP power. So that would be one thing we could consider to do. First question.

The federal government has kind of been stressing that. It's something that they would require, and I don't know how all that plays together, but they would require on-site power generation for those more advanced centers. I don't know. I don't know how that's going to unfold. I don't know if there's going to be some kind of federal licensing thing that goes with the state. That would be one way to address some of those concerns that people have about power usage.

To that point, there will be a lot of generating power on that scale that that's needed becomes a bigger regulatory monster than the city would have a lot of say in. So there would be state and federal things that would regulate some of that. But again, just like with the data center thing, like our ultimate control is... Kind of saying yes or no to things like that's what we really have the power to say is that's something that we would find good and useful for the community or not. To that regard, we would need to adopt and write some local generation standards where we would talk about what it means to operate one of those things and what and how that works. So that would be a.

Yeah, question. So they are going to have power generation, but in the nature of backup generators. Right, right. Do we have any say on, and maybe that fits into sound or aesthetics, but... you know, are they diesel? Are they loud? Are they not? Right. Like, like that fits into maybe this one, but right. Right.

So when I'm talking on site power, we're talking a lot, like the idea that there is, but yeah, there is, there is backup generation. These, one of these things that these facilities need is they need to be able to like run full time. Interestingly, some of the stuff I've read, I wouldn't necessarily call myself an expert on any of these things, but yeah, When you have a data center that's serving files, you need to preserve access to that 24-7 for your customer. If you have a data center that's processing queries and AI prompts, The need for constant use of that is a little bit different. So there's the idea that some of those might have different emergency power needs because they might actually be okay to be offline for a period of time because they can just offload those promptings and things to a different server. But if it's a full-on data warehouse, if you turn off the lights to it, the access to that file goes away, and that's not good for their business model. So energy grid, that kind of covers what I had to say about that. Any other questions?

We can always come back to. So if in fact they're ever developed a requirement for them to power themselves, do we get involved in the regulations associated with how that's composed or?

power run definitely like we we would have a lot of say in the type that they could put in there um where it was located all of the noise sound uh air issues that we talk about with the data center thing would be equably if not more important to address on a power generation thing um so the one you know one thing i would add to that is all of the mechanics like the the

actual equipment, it being constructed, where it's placed, all those things under zoning and land use laws. But the actual power that's generated, that's regulated at a different level. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I think the council can expect to see an ordinance come before them discussing this exact matter. Not so much temporary generation, but permanent supplementary generations. We have kind of co-jurisdiction along with the state, so we can kind of handle the normal zoning stuff, like Luke said, the lighting, the noise, emissions, setbacks, things like that. But the state also controls, you know, how generation works. And when it's over a certain number of watts, and I can't remember what that is, the state has jurisdiction over that. So it's a competing jurisdiction. There's an incident, I think, at Mason City where The city zoning prohibited a certain use. State approved it, and now there's litigation going on saying, well, state, you approved something that the city said no to. I mean, it's going to ultimately find out that the city has jurisdiction to handle the zoning part of it. I mean, I should get that worked out ahead of time.

Yeah.

Great.

I do have a question. So if they do on-site power generation as their primary power provision, if that requires us to have for say the fire department to have any specialized equipment or any specialized training for that, is that something, how do we get that written in so that the data center pays for it, not our services?

I believe the way that we can address that isn't so much in the zoning specifically saying you have to do this, but we can require that as part of the zoning and site plan stuff that they I work with our emergency services folks, identify what they plan to have there, and then work with them to develop a response plan and needed things.

And I would expect you to have an aspect in there where, you know, this new emergency equipment created as a result or specialized training would certainly have to be addressed in their emergency response plan, including how that gets funded. Right. Okay.

So we're not legislating it directly in the zoning, but we're saying, you've got to go work. A component of us approving this is you doing this step, and here's the things we expect out of it. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. It's massive. Yeah. When an American needs that, for other purposes, they can create that thing on themselves. Okay. They have a supposed peak load.

Okay. I wonder if they're shared in that investment.

Yeah. Might be something to... I don't know who would regulate that, though. I don't know how big it is. We have a couple of banks, but I'm sure they're within the purview of the city. Yeah. I think it's 25 megawatts.

I'm not sure how many watts they'd be looking at, but it's... Well, if it's over 25 megawatts, then I think the state... Whatever amount it is, it would be over that amount. So the state would also be regulating it also. But I think that's also a discussion point when you talk about selling it back. Is it a situation where all the power generated for on-site stays on-site or whether they're allowed to sell it into the grid and, you know, almost turn into a profit center or power, you know, another one on the other side of Des Moines.

And how do we get franchise fees from that?

Sounds like something we'd have to work with the state one to try to develop those.

Well, I think a lot of it would be with whoever wants to build that because the state that they'll be kind of I think they also kind of hands off. I've talked to the state on this subject.

And I think I think as you look at some of the new ones that are coming out, I think the the data center. Operators are starting to do 100 percent of their own generation.

I think some of the stuff I've read about in situations like that regarding franchise fees, the cities then negotiate with them as part of their development agreement or something, a community betterment fund that is essentially a voluntary franchise fee that they have negotiated with those users.

I have a follow-up question to the mayors. If emergency services is helping, working on their plan, then maybe it's a follow-up you have to take away. But as they build, have we thought about how we inspect it? Because that's very different than inspecting...

Good question. We're actively working with West Des Moines and some of those folks to understand how they do things. if we're going to try to handle it ourselves or if we think it makes sense to bring in somebody else.

Yeah. But different monster, right. Than what we're typically used to.

In some cases, yes. In some cases, no, you know, so.

But I would expect also when we talked about buyer needs to, if there's extra train or stuff that we would have to address how that gets paid in the development groups. Also, I would expect training, uh, For items, such as if we need to educate inspectors correctly, I mean, it's. It's not uncommon for larger buildings in the city that we have 3rd parties that we pass the expenses through or, you know, in this case, between pass through. But yeah, clearly there's going to be some new technical items that.

Our inspectors handle, like, the base inspections that we do for everything. But, like, when Michael Foods built, there were certain things that needed to be inspected and stuff that Michael Foods was on the hook for bringing in a third-party inspector. It didn't come through us. We didn't build them. It's just they needed to bring somebody in to look at this thing to tell our guys that it was done correctly. So I would imagine there'd be a lot of that as well.

Okay.

You were going to ask a question I had, or could you please?

Oh, mine was less technical. What's the... I mean, here, hyperscale, which sounds hyper. What is hyperscale? Where does a non-hyperscale data center fall in, and when does it become hyper?

It's just a jargon term that I don't think I have a good answer for you. It gets... associated a lot with AI generation, I think. So it's the equipment inside is used more intensely. So it generates more heat. It draws more power. It might not necessarily be a bigger footprint on the ground, but there's more of an intensity there. And then beyond that, there is just the physical. Some of the ones that get a lot of national attention, I think it's out by Salt Lake City or Arizona or somewhere out West where you would think, Hey, don't you worried about how much water you have? You know, they talk about like a five mile square mile, like data center campus, right? Some massive thing. So there's, there's that side of hyperscale as well. I don't know that it's, there's an official definition of it.

If you ask, if you ask AI, it says they typically house at least 5,000 servers across millions of square feet. Okay.

Like, the way I've always thought about, though, it's not the... It's really the company, like referring to the companies that run them, not the facility themselves. So if you think of like AWS, Meta, right? So they're like automatically, they have infrastructure there and they're going to automatically provision things inside of that. And it's kind of how they go about it. It's really not like the data center itself. It's kind of the who runs it and how they use it is how it becomes a hyperscale or not.

Excellent. In all of this, that's one thing I didn't look up. What's the definition of fitness?

I feel like I've lost it.

As we go through these, before I move to the next one, on the what we can do things, I've thrown some checkboxes on there. And those are just things that currently exist that we can do or are doing for the white checkboxes. And then there'll occasionally be a... uh yellow one which is something that jim i luke holly are actively working on that we've not brought forward yet so um hopefully this is a good just rundown of the things we're also trying to address before we even have talked to them uh to you guys about them so you're saying like that the white check box you're saying we already yes council has adopted regulation we have zoning we have land use control We can, at any time, adjust our zoning, adjust our growth policies to change our approach to any type of growth, not just data center growth. That's always a tool we have. It's the biggest tool we have to influence what happens in the community. So that'll be a theme throughout all this. There's several times where I'm going to come back to, that's the thing you can do. We can always adjust our land use plan and our zoning to go a different path.

The reason I want to emphasize that is actually not for anybody in this room. I think most of the people in this room I see, I recognize, I think there's some recognition that we've gone through and we've adopted some of these regulations. This information goes out to YouTube. Anybody can watch. What I'm hoping is that as people watch this presentation, they'll see this isn't us starting to talk about developing regulations. Some of this has already been done in advance of even tracked and that development agreement that came forward. Right.

You know, it going back to late 20 teens, you know, we've had internal discussions of if that type of user comes here, where does it locate what what's needed for it? You know, just we're always planning for what this next thing could be. You know, we had set a meeting right before the end of the day here with some engineers and consultants about a what if scenario of how the city might grow. Um, So we're always trying to prepare for that stuff. Okay, water resource availability. So on the concern of that, the general thing you hear is these things use a bunch of water. It's going to strain our municipal supply. We don't have enough water. In fact, we don't have enough just water in the world, and it's going to suck up everything dry, and we're going to be in a bad situation, which sounds bad, would be bad. Nobody wants that. Our role in that, we're the utility provider. We deliver the water to the person's tap or their cooling unit. We partner with Central Iowa Water Works, who is the one that treats the water and provides it to us. So in that relationship, we're buying capacity, as you guys know, from Central Iowa Water Works and then delivering it to our customers. Our main role in that stuff is... planning, and so working with them at a high level of, hey, if we have this amount of use coming up, do we need to buy more capacity? And we do buy more capacity. And at times, we might have more capacity than is being used right now, but that's still water that we're purchasing that we're paying for. So we try to be wise with those capital claims and not get too far over our skis, but at the same time, be able to react quickly to development when it does happen. As far as things we can do, a lot of regulations require certification from the utility provider that that utility provider can provide the water. Less of an issue here. I have a checkbox on that. We don't technically have a code that requires that. We're considering potentially amending our zoning update that we're working on to include it. as the utility provider and a strong partner with our producer, we, on any development we bring forward, wouldn't bring something forward if we hadn't already done that capacity discussion and planning with our utility partners. We feel pretty comfortable in that. Those are some of the first things we do in anything. How do we provide water and sewer and do we have enough? So that's that proactive utility planning that we're always working through and doing just routinely. One thing we could do that would impact water resource availability would be to mandate lower water cooling operations. So rather than the traditional cooling that they have, you can mandate that they do something that consumes a lot less water. Some communities do that. As we talk about regulations with those things, where you end up on the spectrum of do something, do less, do more, will end up influencing the likelihood of something happening. So within the community, you know, we don't regulate single family homes a lot. And we have single family homes building pretty much wherever you'd want to have them. On the flip side, we are very regulatory on Norwalk Central, right? You can't just go in there and drop any old commercial in there. And that means it takes longer to develop. So, hey, sorry.

I was going to comment that before I came to the meeting here, I was watching the Fox News channel, and they had a tour of one of these plants in Illinois. That plant was cooled by air. They used a compressed air system to cool it. Didn't use any water. And so maybe, we don't know, but maybe that's a possibility where there would be no water consumption. or very low. But at any rate, whatever they could use would only be because we can provide it.

Yeah, there's a lot of options there, Ed, right? Like what you just said, closed systems that are actually data centers that don't do any cooling whatsoever, and they think it's cheaper just to replace stuff when it breaks and gets too hot, right? And so it's all over the spot.

Yeah. I think one thing also, you talked about low water cooling mandates. The council's already done some mandates on limiting water because someone who locates there just can't have unlimited water. Sure. I mean, it was already a certain amount allocated to them that they know, the city knows, that the city had already planned for years ago for water. A purpose such as this.

And we took the step further to talk to our partners again. What would it be to get more capacity for a user? And we told them, if you want it, we can connect the dots so you can go buy it. But, you know, we're not in the capacity to go buy that now without there being a definitive user.

Yeah, but the city wasn't shocked by the water amount because it was agreed to and well planned years before.

Right. And if you look at industrial users throughout the metro area, 400,000 gallons a day is not really a whole lot of water for an industrial user.

Correct. One thing I don't cover in this is... We're not really putting things into context, everything. So we're just talking about data centers in a silo. But, you know, when we talk about all of these things, it's important to remember, like our zoning ordinance allows a large amount of different uses to happen in our industrial district, some of which you could argue would probably use even more water than a data center. They use it differently. They might have different impacts. You know, they might different hours of operations. There's lots of differences to them. But it is good to remember that as we go forward, because from our planning, we've said we want to encourage more industrial growth. Our economic development works a lot on trying to encourage more industrial growth. So as we do that, all of these impacts can be something that comes up with another user, not just a data center.

I think about how many, so the Greater Des Moines Partnership, they have a line of communication with Holly, our economic development director, where some kind of large industrial user wants to expand. And she'll get an email and it'll say, hey, here are the requirements. I would say maybe if the first dozen that flowed through and there would be a water requirement and she would communicate with me and she would communicate with me and we would say, that's too much water consumption, we're not interested, or that's not something we can do. We're to the point now where Holly just understands what our limitations are. And there's certain large industrial users that we just don't simply seek them out as bring them to our community just because their water demands are too high.

So back to that proactive utility planning. There's a lot of behind-the-scenes work we're doing to make sure that we can serve what we expect and provide for growth going forward. Anything else on water?

I thought that 4,000 gallons a day was at peak over 90 degrees temperature.

Well, that is, they've explained that because they use water for cooling, it is most likely on the hottest days of the year where they would use the water. What we said to them, is that if we're gonna dedicate that kind of capacity, if a large portion of the capacity that we have is not used on a regular basis, that is also a poor use of water. So in our development agreement with them, we've even explained that it's not just reserving that capacity for you, it's an expectation that you're going to pay some portion of that water utility regardless of usage. Yeah, right.

Because of the cost of the buying capacity to build the plant. Right.

We need 400,000 every day because we don't know when the hottest day will be.

And as you guys all know, 12 entities are all trying to guess how much water they're going to use in the future. It's quite a deal, right? It is. Quite an operation to try to figure that out.

And we've learned a lot from West Des Moines Water Works with the amount of data centers they have right next door. And they've explained that early on the estimates of water usage from the data centers compared to what's actually being used is a big difference. So build all that capacity and then they don't use it.

Our agreement, make them pay for the money, whether they use it or pay for the water, whether they use it or not, they're paying for it.

There is a component of that agreement that if by a certain date, They are not using that, but they want us to reserve. Yes, they will start to pay monthly for a portion of that capacity.

TODD BANDUCCI- Luke, are you saying that that difference is not it's the difference is they're using much less than what they anticipated?

LUKE MALONE- Yeah, I'm sorry. That's a good clarification.

TODD BANDUCCI- Good. LUKE MALONE- I mean, because that's kind of a big deal.

TODD BANDUCCI- That is. That's a good clarification. The way we understand it is there's some reports that West Des Moines Water Works put out that explain that the data centers are using less, much less water than they had identified was needed capacity in the beginning.

I think two things that also I've learned is if we are really concerned about water depletion, water usage, it strikes the first area that we need to talk about is irrigation because of the amount of water that that uses. And I think we all know that now because we've talked about it a lot, and it far exceeds what data centers use. So, you know, it's like, hey, if we want to have that conversation, we need to have that conversation, great. That's probably a place to start. And there was a second point I was going to make. And I think also... When I talk with people, one of the things that seems to be forgotten is that data centers don't exist to spend as much money as they can. So they are like Emily and I, six years ago, for a few reasons, we just stopped watering our lawn. You know? And we were fortunate. We had a bunch of neighbors who they were in on it too. So that's kind of nice. You're not feeling a lot of pressure to keep up, you know. So this business is always trying to figure out ways to cut costs. They're very interested in doing that. So, you know, anyway.

Yeah, it doesn't seem like it when you see how they operate. But in the big picture, that's what they're trying to do. Yeah, they're trying. And the water works, too. You build too much capacity, that's a problem. You don't build enough capacity, that's a problem, too. So when you're looking out in the future, 30, 40 years, and you're making decisions, you know, I remember, right, there's actually water usage that's come down a decade in the measure with more people. Now, you'll have years where it goes up and down, but in general, where that savings came from, I have no idea. It's more water efficient, whatever is going on, but you've got more people and less water.

Our irrigation rates, we made some pretty significant increases. Since then, I've learned from a number of different homeowners associations because they supply a larger irrigation area. the kind of software that's out there that will look at forecasts, not just what has rained, but what is planned to be rained, and it will adjust the amount of irrigation they do. And with that being such a major water user, that has had positive impacts on usage as well. I bet that service is also to the depths.

I have one other question, but not on water. It's back on power because I was reading a little bit. On-site generation, a lot of data centers are starting to use gas to help them do that. That's Medicare, MidAmerican provided services. Natural gas. Natural gas, right? They also, if they want to change the rates there, have to go to the state to do the changes of natural gas rating as well too, right? And so even if there's on-site power generation, it kind of goes back to them working with MidAmerican. Yeah. We keep talking about electricity, but gas is another component. But that's all kind of Mid-America handled.

No matter how you do it, something has to happen on the site to make the power. Exactly. And yeah, that's going to be a product that someone supplies. Okay. Noise pollution. So the concerns around noise pollution kind of are two different sides. One, you've got these large buildings that are cooling in the summer and you've got their HVAC systems running 24-7 producing that kind of constant fan noise. And then there's the generator testing and the noise and hum from the generator testing. A part of both of those is this idea of a low frequency droning sound. So as you read more about sound, which I've read a lot about lately, there's how we perceive sound in my voice now and right and everything. But those low frequency sounds like they don't get blocked as easily by a room or by trees or the land even. So they they permeate farther such that you can have something pretty far away still be an impact, though maybe not from a distance. volume perspective, but from a constant, maybe a rattling of a window or just even sensing that sound. So that's a big topic that's been brought up a lot in regulating data centers. And so our role in that is regulatory. We can set noise levels. We don't currently have anything in the code about noise levels. We can limit hours of operations on backup generators. We don't obviously have anything related to that right now. We do allow backup generators for a lot of different users in town, including ourselves as a city. And then we use our zoning, just good land use practices and good zoning practices policy practices trying to keep things away. Again, understanding that that low tone frequency maybe is a little bit different, but in general, we try to keep separation from things to just not have the sound be an issue in the first place. So then when we do get down to that site and we're trying to address it, on the low tone frequency, there's this idea that you regulate what they call a pure tone and you limit that decibel rating. functionally the way it works is it can be 10 higher than what your speaking decibel would be. So we could set limits to that type of thing. We can set limits to when they can and can't do their generator testing. A lot of regulations have them limited to once a month for a certain number of hours. And I think the EPA even limits generator testing to 100 hours per year. So there's even some additional rules that we don't have. um related to that uh and then buffers we have buffer standards right now i think our buffered standards are pretty um pretty thorough we can always revisit those there are concerns about that um but We do have buffers.

These are all in operation perspectives. Like I think some of the people that have came and spoke, right, have talked about during construction phase. And I don't care if it's a data center or if it's a paint factory or whatever. We need to think about that as well, too. So there's kind of in operation, but there's as we build this thing, as the whoever is the occupant.

Yes, we could. Don't we currently have standards that limit construction time a day? No, I don't think directly. We tell people to not.

We have a noise ordinance that says noise that causes unreasonable distress to the occupants of a building nearby is a violation of the ordinance. And as a city, police and code enforcement, we've determined that it's reasonable to make noise between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. And it's unreasonable to make noise after 10 or before 7. So construction noise between those hours is reasonable and therefore not a violation.

Can't some of that be addressed in the issuance of the permit to the construction permit?

I mean, we'd want to have the rule in place to be able to kind of put that on the permit. So, yeah.

You know, I think we can certainly address that. I mean, you're also going to see, like, lighting will apply towards construction also because that's an accompanying question with your noise during construction. It would also be lighting during construction.

Dust would be an issue as well during construction. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, so we can take a closer look at construction things for sure.

It is a really good point that the construction phase of a data center is completely different than just the operational phase. It's a good point to bring up.

Yeah, and not just from the noise and light, but... you know, impact through our traffic and roads and, you know, where they're going in and out of town and do we need to set a truck route and that's where their vehicles go and those types of things.

It feels like on some of these, like water, it probably doesn't apply as much, but on the other ones, we should make sure that we're thinking about both perspectives, right? Sure. So,

Luke, really quickly, just to notate on the construction timing and the regulatory side of that, the faster they can get done, the better. And so also considering what types of restrictions we put on that, if it strings it out further. So the timing of that.

And that's not just a data center thing. I mean, frequently when we have neighborhoods, complaints about construction noise, it could just be even a house building. Yeah. It's always a yes. And we can do that, but it will then go on longer. Right. So, you know, just understand that. So that's valid. Any other thoughts on noise? So light. Concerns with light kind of twofold again. 24-7 security lighting, the site being lit at night during operation. Construction would be concerned about that as well. And how that trespasses onto neighboring properties, right? How you can see it and view it. So that's kind of the direct local one. There's also the idea of dark skies and night sky plumes. That's the idea, right? When you drive into town at night, you see a halo from town. Our sports complex with the uplighting that they do so they can play games at night and track balls creates that kind of glow above the field. Those are other types of impacts that aren't as direct about the neighbor properties, but a lot of concerns about are we taking away that night sky and those types of things. So from the city, we do have and we can expand lighting regulations. We can again put in hours of operation requirements. We review all that stuff at a site plan. So you guys get a chance to look at it and confirm or ask questions or require more if you can. We regulate foot candles right now. We do one foot candle at property line is our requirement. I've educated myself more in this topic. That's brighter than I initially thought it was. Foot candle? It's a measure of light. Oh. Yeah, I know. I like that. That was pretty good. I think it's equal to like a thousand lumens, if that helps you.

Yeah.

So one foot candle, I think the way they describe it for normal people to understand is, which I mean, that's not a shot at anyone. I don't understand it either, is a dark, the edge of a dark parking lot at night.

Yeah.

So like you can you can pull out your phone or a book and you can't really read, but you can see the book and you can see the words on the book and that type of stuff. So that's as opposed to like you're out in the farm field in the middle of the night, you know, in a rural area. you pull out your book, like it's just black, right? You're not seeing anything. So there's a big difference between going from one foot candle down to that. We're used to one foot candle in town and it tends to be something we're okay with because we're in town, right? Your neighbor has a light that comes on during the evening on their back deck, right? As long as it's not shining right in your window, you know, it kind of lights things up. That's the light level we're used to in town. As we grow out into the country, there's different expectations from the neighbors that will be out there of what those levels should be. We can look at amending those things and trying to find something that makes sense for a user that would locate in that area. One of the things that a lot of codes do is have mandatory dimming and shutoff requirements. So the idea being that if this facility runs 24 seven, you know, you don't necessarily have people accessing the full site at all times. So maybe the parking lot lights come on during a shift change and then go off. And then the security lighting only pops on when it detects motion of the security personnel walking around. Right. So we can mandate those things. And then again, the thing that we do and that I feel like very important to how city grows is we utilize our land use policies and our zoning rules to cite things in areas that we can, address and have the least impact when we do have to get down on those sites. So not to say that no one's ever impacted. It's unfortunately impossible to find the perfect spot for any use that's not going to have an impact for somebody. That's why we have the regulations. But we try to spend and use our zoning authority and land use policies wisely to minimize the need to use those regulations. Any questions on light pollution?

I think one other thing on light pollution is not only do you look at the standards, but also everything that Luke and I have kind of looked at, you also have to address how is that enforced? Something clearly, you know, you say you have one foot candle at the edge, but how do you know that that occurs? And there's engineers that do that. There's testing that'll do that. So I think you would expect, if you were to consider that, the enforcement aspect of it also.

Yeah, and that's a good point on the noise and the light. They're kind of the same kind of nuisance area of a data center operation that an adjacent property owner would be worried about. And so whenever we're dealing with regulations that we feel like are gonna be brought up more often, we always wanna try and think about how we enforce them, right? So, am I going out to the data center at night with a decibel meter? I mean, if you guys want me to, I'll call you while I'm out there. But, you know, we can require studies. We can require the user to take on some of that responsibility in proving to us that they're meeting our requirement.

For example, in York Central, the ball fields, that lighting, supposed to be top, upper line. It doesn't have much leakage in my mind, but I don't live by it either. So I can't really say. If somebody else might have a different opinion, I know you can see it, obviously. The players in the field can see it. What kind of leakage is there? Would that meet the standard, I guess?

Well, and that's the thing is our current requirement is that at the property line, it's zero foot candle. We have a lighting plan for the fields that says... These lights, when they operate, produce this spread of light across the area, and it's got every foot, it's got a dot. Maybe that's where a foot candle comes from. And then at the edge, it's one. So I look at that and I say it's compliant, right? We don't have an inspection process to go out there and look at that. I guess we don't necessarily confirm that what they submitted to us is compliant. the thing operating at 5% or the thing operating at 100% and what are they operating it as? So we could do more with that as far as, you know, analyzing those things.

That might be a good test one. Just go, if you get some expert that does this type of thing, I don't know if it's worth the money, but just test and see if this is what it actually is. Probably could do the football field too while you're at it. That one might be a little bit more out of the plan.

But basically we're going to apply the same standard

to whatever yeah right yeah right well you can do both ways we can have specific standards for a specific user because we feel like that one needs to have more attention to it or you can just we could adopt a broad brush hey everybody's going to have a different standard now so you know two ways you can do it the football field as well as the central so that might have a

I live near Norwalk Central, and the way the lighting is designed that I've seen personally is that there isn't a lot of bleeding out to the side. Modern LED, I mean, it's the most modern lighting there is. It's all Moscow lighting and everything like that. But there's a plume going up, but that's intentional because it's such directional lighting. If you use traditional lighting, the bulb literally disappears when it gets up in the air, when it gets above the lights because there's no bleeding up. So they actually have to have lights facing up so they could see the ball when it's up in there. Otherwise, it just disappears on them. So that's intentional. So there are times when it's cloudy out that I look over my hill, look to the north, and I'm south there, and it glows. It's like, what is that glow? First couple times I saw it, and it was the ball fields.

But if you put your head down and look at it, you can see that. Wear a ball cap.

Okay. Okay. air quality. So we've gone through the three main ones for count that the mayor identified. We've got a few more here. I'm going to breeze through these. So the air quality concerns are local and then regional. Locally, a data center itself is a relatively benign air quality user, but for the generators that it has on site. So when it fires those up, it goes from not a lot to a pretty good polluting thing, even though it has its certain standards. Luckily, those are limited in time, and we can regulate that further. So that's how we would address that. The bigger concern that you see with data centers is because they use a lot of power, they're going to have to have a lot of power generated for them. And it might not be in our backyard, but in the world of air quality, we're putting more things out into the atmosphere, right? So that's a concern you'll see. We don't have any role in that, again. That's that regional power system. We don't have any real say in that. All we can really do is regulate those generators. We can regulate the type and technology. Andy, you mentioned that earlier. We can do that. We can regulate their hours of operation. I've got a checkbox there. That's one of the things that we've been investigating. If there was a desire and a thought that we, as a community, need to do something to address that broader concern, focusing on, again, allowing them to do something locally here, and if that was a cleaner product than what would be generated by mid-air out here, it would be arguable that the city could make some headways in that air quality concern area. Again, that would depend on the type of power generation that you allowed to happen locally.

Yeah, because if you're using diesel, there's going to be some particulates going up in the air. If you use natural gas, it's much, much, much cleaner.

If they build a massive stack of solar... that would be a whole different ballgame, right? There's not enough land down there. Right. And my last slide is about land consumption, so that's a good part of that. Air quality. Water quality. Again, some of these concerns that twofold, one being the wastewater that's discharged, and sometimes there's misunderstandings that the wastewater from the cooling isn't going to a treatment center and being treated. And some communities do their own treatment, and they might not be prepared to treat the type of wastewater that comes out of a coolant system. They add stuff to it. There are things that they do to make it more efficient to cool their air. So those can be concerns. We operate, again, in a regional system that already has data centers discharging wastewater to the WRA. They have standards. There's a lot of things that WRA requires when somebody does anything in the city that we've got no say over. And so we just tell them, go work with WRA. What they want you to do is what you're going to do. So on the treatment side, that's that. The other side is it's a large site, a lot of impervious surface. What about all that water runoff, right? What about when it rains? Where does the water go? We have our detention requirements as we do for a subdivision single family home all the way up to any industrial. We would still apply those in this situation. I would note that we had made good strides on developing some best practices and implementing those to make stormwater better and release rates better, and the state has removed our ability to do that. So at times when we want to do more and be more responsive and do better things for the community, we aren't allowed to do that. So what we would do, again, continue to work with WRA, use our standards. WRA has pre-treatment things. I've not verified exactly what they would require pre-treatment wise, but Another way to think about pretreatment is every restaurant has to have a grease interceptor, right? So they're doing a little bit of addressing the water quality before they put it out into the system to be treated at WRA. Aesthetics. People don't like the look of data centers. They're a big windowless box. They've got mechanical equipment. It's very industrial. At street level, it might not be something that you want to live next to or drive by. City-wise, we've got our architectural codes we can use to address those. We can require screening things, and then our landscape buffering. And those are all things that we currently do now. We can certainly enhance any one of those that we wanted to. but just using our current code, we'll get a standard of industrial building that you've seen around town. And so if that was something that we felt needed to be a higher level, we wanna go back and address those. From my perspective, the one thing that we've done in our current data center ordinance that we allow is we beefed up what the view from the street needs to be. So there's a little bit more berm requirement fencing requirement, landscaping requirement, those things. Not only allow them to address security in the way they need to, but to also address what we think it looks like from the street. Because the reality is these things are going to be set pretty far back. So if we can get some good berms, get some good fencing, when you drive down the road, hopefully it's not as this There will still be people that live up above it on the side of the river or a valley view would probably have a good view down at some of them. So there's still some screening things and stuff that we'll want to do with the building. We won't throw out rules entirely for the internal of it. But that's what we do with aesthetics. And then lastly, land use and consumption. This is very abstract, but... There's concerns that these things use so much land, and especially in Iowa, our farmland's valuable, right? So maybe we shouldn't allow things to develop because of those large footprint. Or if we do allow them to develop, what happens when it's no longer a data center? How does it get repurposed? And we do that through our combination of planning and zoning, right? And so we balance those things to ensure we have good tax growth of the community and we have to take risks and assume certain assumptions about hey yeah this might be challenging to redevelop the data center that went away i don't know that i'm sure there's probably some cases out there of how it's been repurposed but it's kind of an unknown right now but uh every industrial user likely goes through some kind of reuse at some time. If you drive into downtown, a lot of the cool places people like to go to now in downtown Des Moines are old brownfield sites from old industrial that have been repurposed and reused. So it's not a new thing with data centers, but it's not something that we shouldn't at least acknowledge and know that that's something we'll have to deal with in the future. It's not a reason to say no. Not necessarily a reason to say yes, right? But it's something to be aware of. The things we can do with that is, again, we can always change our growth policies. We can always change the direction of things that we're doing. We have targeted growth corridors. So we try to encourage certain types of development in certain types of areas. And we've been very upfront and try to be very upfront with where we plan those things and involve the community in that. And then the last thing we can do, particularly if we start exploring on-site power generation, is the idea of requiring things to be decommissioned. So one way to address reuse is the thing goes away, somebody else buys it, and we find a way to use that structure. You can also require certain things to have bonds submitted and decommissioning plans put into place so that the thing is actively removed and the site's cleaned up so that it can be then reused. I've not heard as much about that. We've explored that more on the power generation side than we have the data center itself side. But I've read a few things about cities looking at requiring decommissioning for the actual data center itself as well. With that, really just any thoughts that you guys have beyond those main topics the mayor mentioned at the beginning of our work session, feel free to discuss. Let me know. We can move on. You can talk more at me. I'm happy to talk more about it. 7 o'clock. I killed it in those last eight minutes. So... Yeah, really what we're looking from you guys is any direction on things that were missing, any checkboxes that we didn't have in there that we should have had. I wrote down construction as something that we'll make sure we take a second crack at. I know, as Jim mentioned, we did in some areas, but we didn't in others. So we can go back and be more comprehensive with that.

And we are already doing some research on the transportation impacts during construction. Right. Granted, that's not really regulatory. That's more how our public streets adapt to.

Jim and I are in about version five of our revisions to data center zoning. So we'll be bringing that forward as we kind of do some of that stuff. I didn't want to get into too many of the details in this discussion. Frankly, we'd talk for another hour. So if there are other things... And you feel free to direct us.

You mentioned earlier about we talked to West of the line and extend that out to other communities. That's one thing to change that you didn't do what you should have done or in our current ordinance from those schools.

Oh, ask them from those communities. I thought you were asking me. I'm like, man, that's a heavy question.

If they had to do it all over again, what would we do?

Right, right, right. I know Dean O'Connor well. He would be willing to sit down and have a conversation about that for sure.

The mayor and I were invited to participate with the Hubble Environmental Law Group. It's associated with the University of Iowa. And they put together a data center checklist. I think they're still working on kind of some final versions of it. But they pulled in us as a community that is just getting ready to consider a data center. They also had several communities involved that have several data centers active. They had utility representation. So that was them kind of doing really what you're talking about, pulling all those perspectives together and say, hey, make sure you consider all of these things.

That might answer a lot of questions, too, you know, as that gets refined.

We have a development director roundtable that we do monthly, get together and talk about topics like all of our other folks do. And we're talking about data centers in October. So it'll be a good time to bring some of that stuff up. I imagine I will be doing this presentation for them because I offered to be the one to talk about it.

The other thing I think is interesting, probably less for Luke, but as it starts to get built, how do we make sure that the people that are working on there are eating here, staying here? Because that could generate a ton of revenue for the businesses in the city, right? And so I don't know if that's worth, how do we think about that or partner with whoever, whether it's business incentives or something, right? Or making them known, here's like, we want you here. But PD checkpoints.

How do you put a pack together? Here's where you can eat. Map. Here's where to stay, here's where to eat.

I'm sure some of the construction workers are going to bring trailers and they're going to want to stay somewhere, right? Others are going to be more mobile and they're going to want to stay at hotels, right? But I think as much as we could be helpful to say like, Like maybe you can get, maybe our businesses would be willing to say they're getting a 2% discount or a 5% discount or like, so we should, we should engage commerce and talk about that.

And we do have a guide put together already that lists out all of the restaurants with a cool map that's interactive, leads to their websites and our hotels. So yes, we are all over that.

Awesome. That'll probably play into like the transportation plan to the construction site, avoided vehicles and, where they travel and they don't like that.

Okay.

Anything else, Luke?

Oh, I've got a point.

Thanks, Luke.

Oh, great.

Thank you. That was pretty good, especially that definition on the, well, anyway.

Item number five on the agenda is welcome guests and public comment. Thank you for seeing our work session. It's great that you both in here and online and on YouTube are participating and watching because we want to be transparent and show what we're up to. At this point in time, we welcome guests and public comment. As I said, If you want to address council, myself, staff for non-agenda items, now would be the time. We'll give you a three-minute time limit. Realize we can't take action on those things tonight since they aren't on the agenda, and taking action would be a violation of open meetings law. Also, we'd like to comment on any item in the consent agenda. Now would be the time. And come on up if you want to for that, though. We did receive an email today from Vaughn Breeze, who is an Indianola resident, and that email will be in your packet at the next meeting under correspondence because it came in after the stated deadline.

Didn't we have one last time, too, like Holly asked? Okay.

Anybody want to address council here online? Nobody? We'll move on. Item number six is a consent agenda. Can I get a motion to approve the consent agenda? Motion. Second. Okay. Motion by Brown, seconded by Kuhl. Kaylin, would you please call roll?

Council Member Borjan?

Yes.

Brown?

Yes.

Kuhl?

Yes.

Meineke? Yes.

All right. That motion carries. Item 6C is... from the consent agenda is a street closure application for Fairway Frank's first anniversary celebration. It's Saturday, September 19th, from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. You've got a revised printed application in front of you. This has been changed from a street closure to a special event. The event is for 12 hours. Our code allows for six hours, but the council has the ultimate authority to prove it for a longer period of time. Other changes that have been made, they are no longer requesting police patrol. They will have a catered food truck, which is allowed as part of the special event station. We received updated maps of the area that indicate where the street will be closed. Main Street will be closed from North Avenue to just south of their building. Church parking lot entrance will not be blocked. And lastly, they have applied for an addendum to their current liquor license that will allow alcohol in the closed off outdoor area. Holly Johanson has spoken with the state and they've indicated that they will approve that application. And that application doesn't need formal council approval since it's an addendum to their current license. One thing that need to be aware of is that they are going to have a DJ playing music outside in the closed-off street. The street's closed until 11 p.m. While it doesn't state it specifically, the permit grants Franks the ability to play amplified music outside in the street until 11 p.m. This would be a departure from our recognized time limit of 10 p.m. You might want to know that because the surrounding residents might have issue if it's going to go past, if the music playing is going to go past 10 p.m. And you have the option of being able to change that to 10 p.m. if you want to. Actually, 9 p.m. or 8 p.m. or 10 p.m. You got the option. Let's see. Holly, you got anything else to add?

Yeah.

Okay. Questions, discussion from council? Any public input?

So all the department heads who reviewed this, I see, and they're okay with it operationally. Yes.

We are. Police specifically had some issues with the original application because it lacks some detail. That's all been rectified. The last question was they have five music. The I'm not opposed to it as police chief. I just think it's important that council recognizes that approval of the permit grants them permission to play outside until 11, which isn't really an issue. Music Fest is 1030. Blocking the road for 12 hours really isn't an issue. It's just something that's different from what we normally do. We've done this kind of thing for Music Fest. Blocked the whole intersection, for that matter, for an entire day. RAGBRAI came through the whole street was closed for an entire day. But because it's departure from the norm. I just think it's important that you know that way for you prove it operationally I don't have any sense.

And fire near messes good with.

Yeah, you as well.

They have been the neighbors or is that.

The code requires 75% of the neighbors in the closed-off area to agree. There are three addresses in the closed-off area, one of which includes Frank's. The other two have signed not opposed.

Those are those two houses right down the block, right?

Correct. It's the church and the daycare, and I think there's one house across the street. The other house across the street actually fronts. School so that now because it's and it's outside the close section.

Second. Motion by my key saying that by or Sean any further discussion. And would you make would you call roll remember where John yes Brown yes well yeah my yes. All right, motion carries. Item 7 is old and new business for consideration, discussion, and possible action. Item A is a resolution approving the First Amendment to the Maple Heights Water Main Development Agreement with Lone Tree Communities, LLC. So Maple Heights is a 128-acre mixed-use commercial and residential development just north of Beardsley and east of 50th. The financial environment was different when Lone Tree started this development, and they are now finding the cost of capital is such that it's difficult to obtain sufficient capital to start moving ground. The developers also mentioned that some of the unique housing styles are less common and cause challenges for their lender. Norwalk has been encouraging mixed density and mixed use. However, it is unique for our area. At our August 20th meeting, We discussed this amendment to their development agreement to include financial participation from the city to get water and sewer infrastructure built. As an aside, the city would normally be responsible for constructing this type of infrastructure. We're doing this development agreement because Lone Tree needs this infrastructure built before the city was willing or able to install it. So this resolution is for water infrastructure. Next resolution on the agenda is for sewer infrastructure, but the agreements are almost identical. Holly, I'll turn it over to you.

I think you covered it pretty well, Mayor. But yeah, just a really good group. We're excited about this development because it'll be sort of the first development to open up the northwest side of Norwalk. And where they're developing will end up connecting into two other large areas that will have very high value development like North Shore and Stark Ground. And they've been just great to work with. So we're pretty excited about this.

Great. Any discussion or questions from council?

some clarification yes excuse me you're right the initial agreement second one we're being we're going to recoup through the district these are that's kind of silent on do they recoup their half

The original agreement was that they were going to recoup originally when they were going to advance 100% of it, what that is. They were going to recoup 100% of that through district fees. And even if the district fees didn't reach 100% of it, the city would actually pay them for the remaining 100% after like a 10-year period. The difference on this one is instead of them advancing the 100% in getting reimbursed 100% over the 10 years, they're going to advance 50%. And the city is going to pay for 50%. And they're going to get 100% reimbursement of their 50%. And the city has set the fees so that we should be able to reimburse ourselves also that amount.

Okay.

So really the difference is they were always going to get reimbursed except they were just paying it early instead of because the city normally pays those type of fees. So they were advancing it, going to get reimbursed. Now they're going to advance 50% and get reimbursed for their 50% and the city will pay for the other 50%. So really it's almost just more of a time value of money because the city is going to pay for it either way.

Kind of incentivizes them to move right along in that development. Yes, absolutely.

And They go out first or is that pro rata? How's that all work?

It's pro rata. So as we go through, you'd see in the agreements that they will approve the plans ahead of time, make sure it satisfies what they want. Engineering specs will go out for bid. They'll approve those before they go out for bid. And before the city signs the agreement to commence construction, they'll approve that too. The city will be the contracting entity that owes the contractor or the builder that money. So you may ask, how do we ensure that they come up with their money when it's due us? Because we're entering a contract to pay 100% of it. That's our obligation with the contractor. And what we do is we will require either a surity from them.

Yeah.

You know, usually a guaranteed line of credit is what we have, a guaranteed letter of credit from them that we can draw on if they don't pay it. So we'll make sure that we're well secured on their 50% before the city obligates itself for the expenses of that construction.

But once it's done and the money starts coming back the other way.

Then we receive that money. But under our agreement, then we will redistribute it out. That's not unlikely. We've done that in other developments. Exactly. Yes.

And it's per rata?

Oh, the distribution, I believe it is, yes.

Okay. Other questions? Motion. That's good to me.

Yeah. Okay, so I got a motion by Brown, seconded by Borjan. Any further discussion or public input? Galen, would you call roll?

Councilmember Borjan?

Yes.

Brown?

Yes.

Poole?

Yeah.

Meineke? Yes.

All right. Motion carries. Item 7B is a resolution approving the First Amendment to the Maple Light Sanitary Sewer Development Agreement with Lone Tree Communities, LLC. So this resolution is for the sanitary sewer infrastructure. Any discussion, questions from council? Motion.

Second.

Okay. So we've got a motion by Poole, a second by Meineke. Any further discussion? Kaylin, would you please call roll?

Councilmember Brown?

Yes.

Poole?

Yeah.

Meineke?

Yes.

Borjan?

Yes. All right. Motion carries. Item 7C is resolution ordering construction of certain public improvements, approving plans, and fixing a date for hearing thereon for the Pine Avenue, Center Street, Elm Avenue, and Main Street sidewalk and ADA improvements project. So this is to construct sidewalks from Cherry, the Main Street, which is part of the Safe Routes to School effort. Carissa, I'll turn it over to you.

Yep, that's correct. Thank you, Mayor. So there are some sidewalk ramps included in this to the east of Ovia Elementary on Main and Pine. And then connecting some missing sidewalk pieces over down to center and across Elm. So this will help us accomplish part of the greenways master plan sidewalk connections, which one of the project number for this is priority project 2.4 and just fill in some of those gaps.

That's it. All right. Discussion or questions from council or any public input. Second. All right. Motion by Maynard. He's seconded by Brown.

Mayor, can I interrupt one thing? Sure. No. I'm taking back to the sewer agreements. Because I answered your question that it was pro-rat all the time. And I don't think that that answer was totally correct. Because there's going to be some credit in there where most of that's going to be their development. And they're not going to be required to pay out 100% of their district fee and collect back only 50%. So it won't be pro rata with regards to that amount. Okay.

In the end, if we're short. Yeah.

We do, but keep in mind that before the end of the 10 years, we are going to have to make them whole. As long as they meet certain development standards, we will make them whole whether we're whole or not.

Okay. All right.

Like on the sidewalks, there are no sidewalks in these locations today, right? I was looking at the map.

The pieces that we're doing are the missing connection pieces. There are some existing, but we're connecting the pieces together.

And the homeowners that don't have them haven't voiced any opinion?

Actually, I would say the ones we heard from were in favor of this. We had a public meeting for them to attend, and they were all pretty supportive because the kids are already walking through their yards anyway. Great.

4-foot or 5-foot?

5-foot, I think, is the answer.

Very good motions, right? Yeah. So who made the motion? Meineke and then Brown. Brown and then Meineke. Yeah. All right. Any further discussion? Good question. Kaylin, would you please call roll?

Council Member Kuhl?

Yeah.

Meineke? Yes. Borjan?

Yes.

Brown?

Yes. All right, motion carries. Item 7D is a resolution expressing support for the Growing Iowa's Economy Coalition and authorizing city staff to evaluate city participation. So we discussed this at a previous meeting, and at that time there was support for the city to participate in Growing Iowa's Economy Coalition. The coalition's purpose is to ensure accurate information about data centers is researched, available, and published. This is the formal step to direct staff to officially look into participating. We do not believe there is going to be any cost associated with our participation. Holly, I'll turn it over to you.

Yep, you're right, Mayor. We do not have to participate financially. We could choose to if we feel that there's value in that, just in the sense of making sure that the public gets information, that they are able to easily access the resources across the state. And this group that's working on this, this coalition, they would be doing the work for that. So if we choose to do that, we can, but we don't have to. Just being a part of it is good. We can collaborate together on the information.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

And then... The interesting thing about, one of the interesting things about this coalition is that it is both businesses, utilities, economic development organizations, and there's a lot of unions in it as well. So it's a pretty bipartisan group. Wouldn't you say?

It's very bipartisan with all the trade unions and the workers. So it's really people who work in the data centers, people who work on data centers, the energy companies that provide power, water providers, various cities that have data centers. So everybody who just even touches the industry will eventually have some part in this. And that way, yeah, members of the public can hit every single aspect, ask any kind of question, have the facts provided to them, and then kind of make their decisions from there, how they feel about data centers.

Discussion or questions from council?

I think it'd be great anytime we can raise the visibility on what we know and what we understand and roll that curtain back. We're going to be ahead of the game.

Any public input? All right. Can I get a motion to approve resolution?

Motion.

Option one. Okay. So motion by Brown, seconded by Kuhl. Any further discussion? Katelyn, would you please call roll?

Member Meineke?

Yes.

Borjong?

Yes.

Brown?

Yes.

Cool?

Yes. All right. Motion carries. Item 7E is a resolution approving the architectural site plan amendment for Sunset Strip Retail. The owners of Sunset Plaza are looking to upgrade the building's fascia, the soffits, and paint. Luke, I'll turn it over to you.

Yeah, pretty simple. That's what it is. The building at Sunset Center here has currently kind of a green parapet facade that they're going to be updating with a more neutral toned type of material. And so that'll stretch. There's, I think, on the second image there below the map, there's kind of an image with red identifying the area that'll be replaced across the front of the building.

That would be a good upgrade. So I was at PNC when this came, and I brought up, and Holly jumped in. I don't know if they reached out to you, but for some of these improvements, sometimes when we offer funding, they should. This is the middle of our town. I think an upgrade like this is great. Yeah, 100%.

We have the Commercial Improvement Grant Program, and Chris has spoken with them and given them the application. So we would love to help them out with it.

Like, I don't want to say it looks dumpy, but it kind of does. And if they're willing to do this, like, it's a big upgrade, right?

So the material they're proposing to use in this meets our standards. It does, yeah.

Out of curiosity, Luke, are they redoing the Brite 2 facade?

I do not believe so, no.

They're painting the brick.

Oh, painting it. There you go.

Okay. Any public input? Got a motion by Meineke, a seconded by Borjan. Any further discussion from council? Kaylin, would you please call roll?

Council member Borjan?

Yes.

Brown?

Yes.

Kuhl?

Yes.

Meineke? Yes.

All right, motion carries. Item 7F is the second reading of an ordinance adding and enacting a new section to Chapter 104 to establish the Dunn Trunk Sewer Service Area Benefited Sewer District and to adopt connection fees therein. So we are now significantly complete with the Southwest Sewer Interceptor and the Trunk Sewer from the Interceptor to the Dunn Industrial Area. Our next step is to set up the Benefited Sewer District to help pay for the sewers by establishing connection fees. Tony, anything to add?

Um, I do mayor, um, uh, for our, uh, first reading, uh, Mr. Meineke, um, I believe we increased that increase per year from $100 to $150. So I went back and looked at the rest of our districts and they're all pretty similar in the cost per acre. We have one that's significantly higher on the northeast service area and then the Middle Creek one where we just paid a portion of the cost of that sewer. That was a WRA sewer and we didn't pay for all that. That's our lowest district at about $200 per year. But They were all established with an increase of about 2 1⁄2 to 3% a year right now, and all of them except the Middle Creek one. The Middle Creek, again, that's at about $200 per acre right now, and that goes up $5 a year. But the rest of them all, we had some consistency there and made them all increase at $100 per year. So if you look at all those districts, They were originally established at an increase of about 2.6 to 3%. Since that's been an even rate for several years, now they're all increasing at about from 2.2 to about 2.5%. So I established the increase on the Dunn trunk sewer benefited district, kind of using the same process, started at about 2.5% or $100 per year. Now, the CPI over the last running 12 months has been 3.4%. It's really varied a lot over the years. But looking at a cumulative CPI over the last eight years, it's been a little over 3.6%. So you could argue that that could be more. But I guess just to keep it short here and answer any questions anybody has, My recommendation would be to go back to that $100 per year until we look at all the districts and decide on a process of how we want to look at that rate increase moving forward for all of them.

Sounds good. So where'd we end up at for rate?

$3,995 per acre. That's taking the total cost of the improvements, including engineering, and dividing it over the gross acres. And we're recommending a 2.5% increase each year, which would be $100 per year.

Okay. Thank you.

Okay.

Any other questions?

Any public input? I get a motion to approve the second reading. Motion. Second. Okay, so motion by Kuhl, seconded by Borjan. Kaylin, would you please call roll?

Council Member Brown?

Yes.

Kuhl?

Yes.

Meineke? Yes. Borjan?

Yes. All right, motion carries. Item 7G is the second reading of an ordinance amending the official zoning map of the City of Norwalk, Iowa. By amending Chapter 175A, General Presence, General provisions and Chapter 175 B district regulations regarding showroom retail and e-commerce fulfillment uses. So as Norwalk grows, we have the opportunity to get new and different kinds of businesses to open up in town that we'd probably like to have here in town. However, sometimes our zoning is restricted enough that it wouldn't allow those types of businesses to come into town, even if we'd like them to. So on August 8th, Council sent this to Planning and Zoning Commission for discussion, and they approved this zoning amendment with a 30% retail space provision. Luke, anything to add?

Nothing new.

Questions or discussion from Council?

Do we have to have three readings on this, or could we just be done after two?

No, we'll have to have the third. That's what we didn't put, and possibly more.

Second.

Second. Okay. Motion by Meineke, seconded by Borjan. Any further discussion? Taylor, would you please call roll?

Council Member Kuhl?

Yes.

Meineke? Yes. Borjan?

Yes.

Brown?

Yes. All right. Motion carries. Item 7H is a second reading of an ordinance amending the official zoning map of the City of Norwalk, Iowa. By amending the Hughes Century Crossing Plan Unit Development Land Use Parcel E, allowing three and a half acres north of 1601 Chatham Avenue to those uses as allowed or permitted in the R3 district. So this area is behind NutraSport over by the new water tower. This is to rezone the 3.5 acres to allow for R3 medium density residential. Luke, anything else? Nothing new. All right. Discussion, questions from council or public input?

No.

All right. Anybody want to second it? Second. Okay. Motion by Kuhl, seconded by Brown. Kaylin, would you please call roll?

Council Member Meineke? Yes. Borjan?

Yes.

Brown?

Yes.

Kuhl?

Yes. All right, motion carries. Item eight is future agenda items. So the purpose of this is for council to give direction to staff by way of motion to have items placed on future agendas. It's not for discussion of the merits of the subject matter. Any future agenda items for tonight?

I don't think we, I don't know if we officially did it, but I put a, for a future agenda on those fees for the sewer and water.

Yeah, we did last year.

I think that's already on there.

Yeah. That's on Lindsay's future agenda docket.

Yeah.

Anything else? Hearing none, Item 9, Council requires a staff update. Staff updates. I'd like to remind everybody that this portion of the meeting is much less formal. You're going to hear some back and forth banter, general jokes around. believe that this can build camaraderie and cohesiveness between staff and council jim nothing nothing ed nothing there wow luke you guys heard me talking off eric not tonight uh wayne nothing chief um i just want to let everybody know that um august 30th through september 4th i was at the national fire academy

doing my second of four sessions for the executive fire officer program. And now I'm starting on my pre-course work for the third session, which is focused on community. So I'm really excited about that. I'm engaged in some community interviews and surveys and that sort of thing. So I hope that we can use that in the fire department for some planning and that sort of thing. So again, thank you everybody for the support in that. It's a really neat opportunity.

All right. Tony, you got anything?

Nothing else. Thanks, Mayor.

All right, Chief.

Quickly, just this week, Ali, our office coordinator, created a new report. that we'll produce quarterly on our automatic license plate reader usage. We've put that on the police page of the website under activity reports. There are three links there that are new. One is a link to the flock surveillance company's transportation transparency portal, which gives information about Norwalk's license plate reader camera program. And then also at the bottom of the page is a link to the quarterly report that will do each quarter. And then also that's new. We've turned on the we've put a link on that allows people to map our crime reported or reported crime over a set time period. You just click on the link and put in the time period and it'll pull up a map of the crimes that were reported in Norwalk. It puts a little dot on the map and the general location where those crimes happened. It doesn't give addresses or anything. It doesn't give any real pertinent information other than it was a theft in this area. But that's new. We just turned that on. So if you have a chance, feel free to look at it and give me any feedback that you have. And then next, lastly, I'll be leaving town next week or the week after next to attend my niece's wedding in Maryland and Lieutenant Lewiston will be here at the meeting on October 1st. That's all.

Great. Thank you. Holly?

No, sir.

I wanted to introduce you to a new event that we're hosting this year. We're calling it Fall Family Fest. It'll be out at the Mackinac Sports Complex on Friday, October 2nd, starting at 530. We'll have some different fun things to do, bubble machine, balloons, yard games, photo booth, that sort of thing for families to enjoy and treats. Don't forget treats. And then once the sun sets, we'll show a movie out there on our big inflatable screen. So people can come for the full evening or a portion of the evening. We have sponsorships so far from the Lions Club and Quickstar. So we're thankful for that. And then a couple other sponsors in the works that once we finalize those, we'll add a few more fun things to the list. Hope to see you there.

Thank you.

Nothing. Thank you.

All right. Lindsay. Lindsay.

Just one thing, you may have seen the flyers around with the QR codes for the council meeting tonight. As long as no one's opposed with that, we'll probably continue to do that. Just another way for people to be informed.

That's all. Thank you. Andy, till the coming week? My son's a freshman and was on the homecoming court as the guy freshman attendee or whatever. He had to get dressed up, which he didn't think was too cool. And I just maybe had a question for the chief. I drive by to sign every day about the emotos and all that stuff. Just any update, anything happen or any activity there?

Officers are, when appropriate, stopping and warning and recording who they warn in a spreadsheet. Last I knew there was 14 entries The anecdotally, I think everybody has noticed a lot of helmet wearing going on. I talked to a police official in Hiawatha, Iowa on the phone today and they were very complimentary about you all putting in the helmet ordinance. We're unique in that and the kids are following the rules. And then also the number of complaints to the police department about Reckless e-bike usage is down without having a statistic to give you. It seems like it's down. And I will say as a person driving around town, I see less. I see less of them out there. So I believe the restriction on the age and the 750 watts and the helmets has made a big difference. Great. But again, I don't have any statistical data, but it just seems like it's doing what it's supposed to.

And I think if we sign up as people drive through, I think that's going to be great too, right? Like people that are uninformed, right, are hopefully informed and can go look at the city website.

And just so you know, that sign is probably going to stop doing that probably at the end of this week. Yeah, that's good though. It was up for a good amount of time.

Anything else?

Nope. George?

I missed it last time, but I went with Carissa and Dakota on a park tour, which some of you probably already have done. But if you haven't, you should, because I didn't know we had so many parks. And it was very entertaining. It took a long time, too, actually, about an hour and 45 minutes. Yep. It wasn't like we were at Luke's. Very nice. Yeah.

Good. Luke? Yeah, just one item. So budget. or fiscal year 28 planning is just around the corner. And I'm happy to share that Jean and I were starting to see a little bit of clarity from the property tax legislation, which is good. Certainly we're still learning a lot. Just so you know, as we start to do some of our pre-planning, my general idea or what I understand from council moving forward is we should continue to shoot for at a minimum maintaining the existing levy. I know that there's always appreciation if we can lower the levy, but at this point, the way that we're moving forward is doing our best to hold that levy steady. Obviously, all that stuff comes forward to elected officials. You have a chance for input back and forth, but the pre-planning we do, just understanding that perspective of council helps. Great.

I really don't have anything tonight, so I would entertain a motion to adjourn. Motioned. Okay, motion by Borjan, seconded by Brown. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed, opposed, same. We're adjourned, 7.40 p.m. Thank you.