Budget Committee - Regular Meeting

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Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Roll call, please. Chair Johnson.

Here.

Vice Chair Gain. Here. Council Member Bowie. I'm not used to being first. Council Member Coleman.

Sorry.

Council Member Kim.

Here.

Council Member Bajos. Here. Council President Naker. Here. Seven present, nine absent.

All right. Well, I feel like our attendance is always kind of a fun thing to do. It's to make people make a lighter day. We have a couple of the presentations today. The oh-so-important street light repair and replacement update that's coming in from our new director. Director Barber, I believe this might be your first time giving a presentation. So exciting, exciting. And then we'll go on to Mill and Overlay, which will also be Director Barber and several other folks that will be joining here as well. So first and foremost, Director Barber, welcome. Welcome. I'm really excited to be a part of your first visitation in front of the body, but also just like welcome to the city. I hope you're getting settled in well. It's been great to connect with you offline and overall just excited for you to be here.

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me here. And yes, this is my first time presenting, but very excited to do so. And we've got two important topics, and I've got a number of experts in the audience here. So I will kick things off for both of the presentations, but then we'll call on them. But we also have some, if you have other questions, we'll make sure that we get answers to you. All right, so first we're talking about St. Paul streetlights and wire theft. What we know is we know that streetlights is a significant public safety issue. We know it's a big problem. I want to share right out of the gate that we were talking about how to prepare this presentation. One of the key things we wanted to talk about is what a frustrating thing it is. We do a lot of work. We work very hard. We're doing repairs constantly. And sometimes as soon as we repair a light, something else happens and it's down again and the wire is stolen again. And this is turning into sort of this repeated cycle. And so we're going to talk about how we want to ground ourselves into how we're going to approach this going forward, because we're really in a situation where we'll continue to have dark lights throughout the city, but we want to be responsive. We are doing a lot of work, and we want to make sure that people understand the kind of work we are doing. Our team is very committed to doing this, and it gets very hard for them, too, when this is happening on a cycle over and over and over again. There's a variety of lighting styles here in the city, as you well know. And I think that there are different issues with different types of lighting. Some are for residential streets, some are for bigger thoroughfares, all of that. And there's a lot of historic lighting as well. We do know that some of the lighting fixtures are affected more than others by copper wire theft. And we've noticed specifically some of the decorative, the cast iron or aluminum ones are the ones that are often the ones that are targeted most quickly. Here's a slide. We won't spend a lot of time here, but you can kind of see the percentage of the different lights throughout the city. I think the key number that I want to mention is that we have almost 40,000 lights in the city of St. Paul. And that doesn't include the alley lights. So the alley lights are managed by Excel. And so there are a lot of light fixtures in the city. So why is this happening? It's copper wire theft. It's the goal of what the thieves are after. It's very prevalent across the country. We're not the only city that's struggling trying to address issues related to copper wire theft. And it may not seem like the value is a lot, but it adds up over time. And especially that's why you see entire corridors affected at one time. where people are trying to get as much copper as possible. And the drive is the price of copper is going up significantly, and it continues to go up. Right now, currently, it's about $6.50 a pound, but it's expected to be over $9 a pound by 2028, which, again, when we talk about a problem that's continuing and will continue, that is part of the driver behind all of this. Also, when we look at it, this is something that affects the entire city. So all of you that have seen, I've heard from many of you about this over time, so I know this is happening in all of your wards. This is a city-wide problem, which is why we're really starting to try and look at it from that perspective, where we're coming at it from multiple perspectives, from repair and fix to new solutions to how do we prevent the theft in the first place. And so what you see in the audience, we've got representatives from parks and from St. Paul PD because we're all working together to try and come up with solutions. And I think that's a key message for us to carry forward as well. And before I transition over to Randy Newton, I want to talk about, so the estimate right now is over 10% of the lights in the city are out. So that equals to 3,500 streetlights that are out right now. And then we look at the timing of things. The last time when we asked our team that we thought everything was fully functional was in 2022. So this has been quite some time as we're going. What's dark today will take years to fix. And even if we come up with solutions that prevent access to all things, we still need access to things to fix them. And so it's finding the hybrid solution between some of those things. But with no changes, I think the takeaway here, it's estimated it could take at least 20 years to address the current lighting situation. So it's a people issue. It's a supply issue. It's a budget issue. There are multiple things. So that's why we're going to try and present and talk about more of this multi-pronged approach that we want to take. That'll turn over to Randy.

Thank you, Director Barber, and thanks to the committee. Just maybe touch on a little bit about this last slide, but I think the key thing here is that we are falling farther and farther behind. Since the end of 2022, every year we're falling farther and farther behind, and with the trends in wire theft, we don't expect this to change. We're going to continue to fall behind. This one has just a lot of words, but I think just a little bit, a couple key messages with this one. First is that we have a process. We get a lot of complaints, and one of the complaints that we're seeing more and more of is just, is this safe? We see wires kind of coming out of the poles, some of the complaints we're getting. So right now with our operations staff, one of the key things they're doing is actually going out and making sure that when we do get a complaint, the first thing they're doing is going out there and making sure that the power's off. and there's no immediate safety issue. We're not able to do a lot of wire theft throughout most of the year, or wire theft replacement. At this point, it's a lot of the safety checks that we're doing. When we do the repair, there's a lot of factors that come into play, and that's for the second part of the slide. Is it actually functional? Are there major repairs that have to be done to the lighting system? Some of the wire theft is causing significant damage to the lights, and it's not as simple as just pulling new wire. Some of it is, can we do some wire theft deterrents when we put it back? Some of it's how long the lights have been out. A lot of cases we've seen repeated theft. So at some point, we can't continue to go back and back to the same places if we've seen theft. That's a super frustrating thing for our staff as well as the public. In responding to the community, we do try to respond to every single wire theft response we get. We do have a standard message. I think I heard that probably because of the news stories, we had over 50 wire theft complaints over the weekend. Those all need to be responded to. We are responding to them. We have a consistent message. Unfortunately, part of that message is we cannot offer a specific timeline for when wire will be replaced. We have 3,500 lights off. 3,500 lights off. We're falling farther and farther behind. There's a lot of factors here. We unfortunately can just not give people a timeline, and I'm sure that's frustrating for our constituents, elected officials, et cetera, that we can't give a timeline, but that's the reality, and I think that's not a very well-received response.

And I have actually two questions. I saw Councilmember Kim's hand, and then I'll go to Councilmember Naker.

Just a quick, un-informed question. You said the majority of the street light replacement doesn't happen the majority of the year, I think I heard you say. Is there a seasonality to the repairs at all? I think the uninformed question is, do we do these in all weather? Or does winter make it harder? Or does summer make it harder? Is it much more about the volume of what you're trying to address versus the seasonality? Because I would imagine that I would, I'm not going to conduct that, actually. But in my head, it was like, maybe there's less in the winter. I don't know. So is there more of a seasonality to this work in terms of replacement?

Thank you for the question. Yes, there is kind of a seasonality. Part of it is just like during this time of the year, we're doing project work. There's other things that the crews need to do, as well as just it takes a lot of time to just respond to those safety checks. So there is an ability to do some occasional wire theft replacement throughout sort of the summer months. But the last couple years, there's been sort of a push in the fall doing a bunch of overtime work to try to get as many lights turned on before the winter as possible. I think what we've seen is that there's probably less wire theft occurring in the winter because conduits freeze and it's not as easy to pull. That said, we're starting to see that trend change a little bit where we are seeing some wire theft occurring throughout the winter, but It's a good time. That fall sort of push is a good time to try to get as many lights as we can get turned on for the winter. And then we don't see quite as much theft throughout the winter months. But it's still occurring.

Council Member Naker. Council President Naker.

Thanks, Madam Chair. Mr. Newton, going back to the last bullet on the previous slide, did that say that the lights are on circuits, meaning like Christmas lights? If one goes out, others go out? Is that what that means? I want to make sure I understand what you're saying there.

Yes, thank you, Madam Chair and Council President. Yes, essentially, if you pull a light and you break the circuit, multiple lights come out at the same time. So it's similar to what you're saying. You break the circuit, more than one light goes.

So it might be the case, just to follow that thread, that lights could be out and wire could still be in them. It's just that one key light wire was stolen.

Well, correct. wire can be stolen from multiple but typically they're pulling strands of lights at one time but yes like if it gets cut like something if you were to cut it um all the lights would go out on that circuit and how sorry how is this the first time i'm hearing this so how many are all of our lights on circuits and when we're talking about a circuit is that how many lights are we talking about on a given circuit uh i don't have that question i have to defer to staff i don't know if i'll just look into mike did you know how many lights are typically on a circuit So just so everyone could hear, that was between 20 and 80 lights on a circuit.

The questions are just going to keep coming. I'm sure. I'm sure. As you're talking through, we actually have two additional questions as well from Council Vice President Yang and then Council Member Jost.

Yes, Chair Johnson. I was just wondering if you can give us a refresher on whether this is as big an issue in other cities too. It seems like I don't often hear about it, like neither from Minneapolis. So just wondering if you can give some context.

Thanks for the question, Madam Chair and Council Member. Yeah, our understanding of this is an issue everywhere. I think it is going to be different in different municipalities, just by the way they're framed. I mean, my understanding is Minneapolis does not have the same investment in streetlights that we do in St. Paul. So they have a lot more Excel-owned or wood pole facilities where St. Paul has more actual streetlights, like decorative streetlights that we have. But I think this is a nationwide issue.

Council Member Jones. Thanks, Chair Johnson. I just had a question about Council President's question with the way that the circuits are wired for the lights. Is there a different way to wire them such that, like, so that they're in, if they're lighted, like, in parallel? Or does that cost more? Or is there a way to provide more redundancy around the way that the circuit is made?

Thank you for the question. I think we'd have to take that back to our team and get more information on that. But I would say that this has been a challenge that we've been looking at for five years. I think there's been a lot of creative solutions that we've come up with. That's not one that we've discussed that I'm aware of. I'd defer to the team.

Thank you, and I'll do, just, I wanna keep us moving along for this, so, and I know that there's quite a few different slides around it, too. Councilmember Kim, is this a question related to this slide, or is it kind of more related to kind of the general topic at hand?

It's more of an overall question, but I can.

Okay, I'm gonna have us go through, and if you have questions related to the specific presentation, I just wanna make sure we get through each and give the time in, and from a facilitation standpoint, wanna give you a chance to get through some of the additional slides that you have.

Well, maybe the last thing I want to say with this slide, just partly that I know there's frustration throughout the city. I know our residents are frustrated. I know our leadership's frustrated. But I do want to paint a picture of our staff that's working on this. We have staff that we share that they go out and do this all the time. They're putting in lots of hours of doing overtime. And in a lot of cases, they're seeing the wire stolen within days. So you imagine as a frontline worker, you're working all weekend. You come in on Monday or Tuesday, and you find out a lot of the work that you did over the weekend has been already removed. That's a super hard spot and not a great place for morale. And then at the same time, they're hearing complaints from the community and requests like, why aren't you replacing our lights? So it's not a great morale place for our frontline workers. This slide is really just to show all the things we did. I won't name all of them, but I really want to show the width and depth of the thing we're looking at. It's not one strategy. We're really looking at multiple things across multiple lenses. And we've done a lot. I think there's been a lot of creative ideas out there. One of the things is early in the process, we're now using a reduced wire size. That was allowed because of our change to LED lights. Because of safety, our crews were putting out, kind of came up with a plastic base plate to cover these up. Unfortunately, those have been damaged. So one of the things we're seeing is a lot of these things work, maybe for a period of time, but then some of their effectiveness goes away. And we'll talk more about some of those. But some of the other cool things, like we are doing a lighting pilot project on Pleasant this year. It's kind of a cool thing. I will tell you, this is not the solution for the entire city. I'll just be blunt. Like, it's a great tool to maybe have in the toolbox. We'll have to see how it plays out. But this is not, like, solar is not something where it's going to work throughout the city. Tree canopy, et cetera, there's other issues. But it's a great thing to have in the toolbox because maybe it works in certain locations. You know, high-access poles is something that we tried. I think we've seen a lot of damage to some of the ones that Parks has put in. So it works in some situations, not in others. But there's a lot of different cool things that have been done. Even one of the other things that we're working on and our staff is working on when they have time is meter replacement. A lot of our, we pay Xcel for lights. Some of them we pay for power, others we just pay them based on the number of lights. If those lights are out, we're still paying them. So one of the things we're trying to do is actually switch over to meters so that when lights are out, we're not paying that fee to Xcel. What we've learned, there's a lot of lessons learned, and this is not a great story here, but there's a lot of challenges. One is scalability is super important. I mentioned solar lighting. We have 40,000 lights. If we said solar was the option, the cost and time it would take to replace all our lights to solar would take forever and would be a massive expense. So we really have to come up with solutions that can be scaled and actually can change over a larger part of our system in short order. Those are hard to come by. These are resourceful, innovative, and determined, quite frankly. Everything that we've done has had some success, but over time it seems like it loses some of that. So this is a picture of those high access poles. We've had some success with it, but thieves are finding out ways around that. They're willing to do more damage to our poles, so sometimes when we try to secure them so it's harder to get in, they're just breaking through it and actually doing more damage to the poles. I think the other part is some of these deterrents are great but there's still a lot of our systems huge and they can just sort of go down another street or a couple blocks away and the wire is more accessible. I would say the other one of these problems is the reality for our operations folks too is every one of these strategies as we try to keep a thief out it actually makes it harder for our electricians to do their work. So there's a really balance in here of how do we come up with solutions that allow us to do the necessary maintenance and necessary repairs when we need to, but also has that positive deterrent effect. And the fact of the matter is we just can't keep up. I mean, we are falling farther and farther behind, and I don't think we see that trend changing. And we keep looking, but there is really no silver. We have not come across a silver bullet to fix this problem. This is you know, just kind of quick like what that fall work that we were talking about So this is sort of a summary of what was done in 2025 sort of number of circuits and lights that were brought on board and just the number of hours that were worked and Maybe a little bit of a story about the street lighting, the funding for street lightings. So folks probably know a few years back, we lost our ability to charge street lighting fees. So all the funding for street lights was transitioned to the general fund. We did get like a one-time funding for 500,000 to support wire theft repair in 2024. but since then we had budget cuts in 2025 where we lost an electrician that's been carried over into 2026, and there really is no dedicated funding for wire theft repair. So really we're just paying this out of our street lighting budget, and it's really coming at the expense of deferred maintenance on our street lighting. Our street lighting system is getting older and older, and there actually is a lot of repair and replacement that needs to occur, and that is all being deferred right now. And I think the final thing is one of the things that has been talked about is that we are starting to look at a street light and improvement district.

Not all that different from the sidewalk improvement district.

It's kind of a summary of the amount that we spent on wire theft. Unfortunately, our numbers for the last couple years are not great. Partly this is due... some of our changeover in software systems as well as the cyber attack. But you can see, I think I said at the end of 2022, we thought we were kind of at sort of a net zero in terms of wire theft out. Even though we've spent increasing numbers of dollars, we are falling farther and farther behind. So even with putting more investment here, we are not keeping up. Kind of as we look forward, I think we've always had this approach where this is more than just a public works issue, but sort of as we move forward, this is not a problem that public works can solve by itself. There is multiple lenses that we're gonna have to look at it for, and we're gonna have to maybe get more creative in those lenses. This kind of talks about some of the things that we've done through each of those lenses and then those those different lenses. I think infrastructure, that's kind of public works. What can we do with the lighting system? I think police and enforcement play a strategy here, a big part of this. What is the deterrent? Are we trying to go after and catch wire thieves? There's the legal aspect. There were the changes to the route. laws around selling wire, but I think those need to probably even be strengthened. Some of the policy, do we have the policy desire to sort of change some of those rules, change funding, et cetera? And then even the community, the community can be a little bit of a watchdog, understand this issue a little bit more. So these are kind of the five layers that we're looking at.

Keep going.

So we have been partnering with the St. Paul Police Department. I think Senior Commander Hallstrom is here. And as a resource, they've been doing a lot. I think one of the strategies that was there was that these theft technology, what was the, might not be on here, but there was a technology that was looked at that had motion sensors and that that was tried and done in a few locations. Part of the issue, I think that has gone away. I'm not exactly sure the reason why that one went away, but I think there was, ultimately the resources weren't there and the mechanism for communicating out and to quickly respond to those was not something that was viable. So it was one of those things that we tried and ultimately didn't work. One of the things that we are currently talking about with police is the expansion of cameras to try to provide an ability to identify and help with the capturing of thieves. Legal strategy, so in January 1 of 25, there was new legislation about selling copper wire. I think we see this as a huge win in terms of being able to better enforce the wire theft that's going on. Unfortunately, one of the things that we just haven't seen is a lot of the focus on the actual policing of this rule and actually trying to enforce at the sellers or the Recycling centers and that's I think a focus moving forward and how do we exactly do that? I'm not sure how much that is in our control as a city versus like we need help from our external partners From a policy standpoint, I think we want to look at the street lighting improvement districts. Are there new ordinance or legislation that can happen that can be strengthened around that scrap metal and how we actually enforce it? Are there additional resources at the local or statewide level? And then just really pushing for higher prosecution penalties. I think we have had some success prosecuting. But I think some of those penalties are are still not that significant and is it really are those penalties really? Enough of a deterrent to keep the wire theft from occurring And thank you.

Mr. Newton. We have a question from council member Coleman.

Thanks chair. Thank you so much I just could you say a little bit more about the streetlight improvement districts since it's come up a couple of times I know it would be similar to a sidewalk improvement district but understanding more about what that look like would look like would be helpful and

Could you repeat that, please?

Just the streetlight improvement districts. Can you say a little bit more about what that would look like, what the cost would be, how that would increase our ability to scale our response?

Thank you for the question, Madam Chair and Council Member. I don't personally have that information. I think that's something that we want to talk about and move forward. I don't know if we've done any. Director?

Madam Chair, Councilmember, thank you for the question. It would be similar to a sidewalk improvement district. We don't have numbers yet. We're working with the policy team, through the mayor's office, and also with the city attorney to come up with a framework because we do need a legislative change in order for us to do this because of the lawsuit a few years ago. And so I think we will be working out numbers over the next few months. And that is something we can certainly bring back to you as we get this program or a proposal for this program built together.

Council President Aker. Thanks, Madam Chair.

I mean, this is more of an overall question. I can hold it till the end if you want me to.

That's OK. It's fine.

OK. Well, I guess I really am grateful for the information. I am not hearing the innovative strategies that the director mentioned. I'm hearing a lot of things that have been tried, haven't worked, the frustration of staff, the frustration of the public. It feels to me like we need that strategy. And if it's not going to come from the department, then we need to know who is putting that together. I will be really straightforward that a streetlight improvement district, for example, is not something that is a solution to this problem. It is a way of asking our residents to pay more for their wire to be stolen. That is a non-starter for me until we have a way of actually addressing this problem. So I'm seeing a lot of things that aren't working. I certainly hope that we're not continuing to put wire back into foals that is going to be stolen on Monday when it's put in on Friday. But I'm not hearing right now either what we are doing or what we are planning to do to figure out a plan.

Thank you, Madam Chair, Council President. We are actively working on trying to come up with a plan. I know that's not the answer that everyone wants. I opened the presentation with, this is a frustrating problem. And because that was the conversations we were having too and that's why we really feel it means to be an enterprise approach and talking with leaders across the city and different organizations including with parks and with st. Paul Police Department Because if we have to come at it from many different directions, we have to continue looking forward options that are deterrent technologies themselves and we will continue to do that and deploy them in different areas to see what works and as Randy had mentioned, the main problem is there is no solution that it will work everywhere. And so the creativity, one of the key things I think as I've come in is even having a new position that is traffic safety and operations focused where that is all under one structure will allow for more focus to get on some of these targeted areas, including streetlights. And it's because I see it as a true public safety issue. I think that this is something we can focus on. We're more than happy to come back as we work on this. We're fairly new into some of these roles here, so we're still getting the groundwork laid out how we're going to do this. But we do know that we want to work with partners across the city because it does matter for... It's a frustration for the department. It's a frustration for the citizens. It's a frustration for all of you. And we know that, so we will be able to come up with good plans. But part of what we wanted to share today is what really the state of affairs is, and we wanted to be blunt about where we have a situation that is very hard to work ourselves out of right now.

Thank you. I'll just say I wish there was an easy solution. This is a super, super hard problem. I think we were, as the director said, we're going to really have to focus on this and really push ourselves to see if we can come up with additional strategy, additional solutions from the public works side, but we really do also need it to be an enterprise approach. It does not appear that this problem is going away. In terms of community strategies, I think we've done a lot in terms of putting together programs If folks haven't seen it, our web page on Public Works about all the things that we have done, sort of the state of affairs, like frequently asked questions. There's lots of ways for people to report wire theft. And I think one of the things that we've heard from police is it's super important, and we're trying to share this out, that folks that see, they share as much information as they have. So the more information they can provide on the details of what they've seen certainly helps in the enforcement or going after the thieves. And then some of these other best practices, keeping garage lights on, just watching the street and reporting what people see. From an infrastructure strategy, we're going to continue to respond to complaints. I think our plan from Public Works is to continue to repair streetlights as we can. I think part of this is, well, there's a high expectation from our constituents that we are continuing to replace, even though we continue to see the wire theft happen. We are looking for other wire theft deterrent strategies. I think, again, we've had some successes in this realm, but they seem to be short-lived. This is a picture of the Pleasant Avenue solar lighting. We'll see how this works and whether or not this is something we could use in certain locations that maybe are more prone or have a more open tree canopy. And we're going to continue to look for those strategies that we can implement and implement on that larger scale basis. So just kind of in summary here, we see this as a significant community and public safety issue. We have tried numerous strategies. I hope that's come out here that we are really trying. This has been a really challenging problem. We're looking to continue to look. We're not giving up. We're going to keep looking and seeing if there's other options that we can implement and push our teams to try to find those innovative solutions. Kind of our current situation is not sustainable. We are falling farther and be farther behind. And unfortunately, we're going to have more complaints about wire theft being out or lights being out and not the ability to replace it. And ultimately, if we're going to be successful in this realm, we're going to need more resources and a broader approach across the city. This is not a problem that public works can solve by ourself. We really need some of that leadership help, some of that policy help from police, partners in parks, et cetera. With that, we can take any questions.

Wonderful. I see a couple of council members' hands as well. I know. Thank you guys for waiting. I do have a quick question as well. Could you talk about the cost of maybe some of the solar lights, just so we can understand some of the numbers of how expensive are some of these mechanisms that are seen or deemed as potential alternatives that you're looking at? what are the costs for the average person that's not necessarily in the realm of the work? What is the cost of the solar lights? What are the costs of the different types of replacements?

Thank you, Madam Chair. I'd have to maybe get you more information later, but I'd say for the, because I don't have it readily available, my memory is that the solar lights probably were a little bit more on the upfront end. The other thing that, part of the reason we're calling this a pilot is there's maintenance things that we aren't aware of with solar lights. For instance, there's batteries. Part of this is a battery that's holding the charge from the solar. That has to be replaced on a regular basis. We don't have to do that with our regular lights. Same thing with the solar panel. How long will those solar panels last and how often do they need to replace? I don't know if there's a big difference. There is a difference on the capital cost. I think there is a slight increase for the solar, but there is sort of a different maintenance that comes with them that would require some relatively significant investments as you like in maybe the 10 to 20 year life where with our wired streetlights, there's ongoing maintenance, but it's not a big investment that's needed at different, I'd say that 10 or 20-year point in the life cycle.

Okay, I'm gonna go with Council Member Bowie, because I know this will be your first question with the group, and then I'll keep going with the hands that I see. Thank you.

Thank you, Chair Johnson. Thank you so much for the presentation. I just have a question particularly related to the enforcement in the holistic strategy slide. I'm just curious to know what has been the partnership, particularly with the city attorney's office and also the attorney general's office, particularly around looking at heightening or enhancing some of our enforcement statutes. I saw that I believe wire theft is now considered a felony charge. I'm just curious to know as well, I mean, obviously we should be using every tool, but if there's any relationships to some of these vendors that's accepting the wire system? Because similar to other copper wire thefts, obviously the thieves are incentivized by some of these companies that they're selling the wires to. So I'm just wondering if there's any accountability or enforcement for those companies that's receiving that as well.

Thank you for the question, Madam Chair and Councilmember. Kurt, do you want to come up and maybe speak to this?

I'll start while he walks up. Our police force has been targeting people who have been stealing wire. They're not necessarily within our structure to go to the people who are taking in the wire. I do appreciate the comment about the attorney general. I don't know that we've done that. I'd have to ask. I know we've had some charges through the county, so I think they're involved, but now I'll defer to you.

Welcome, Chief Hurston. How are you doing, Chief Hallstrom?

I'm very good. Thanks for the invite. Great question. It is a very complicated matter when it comes to actually charging and holding offenders accountable. There's only three recycle yards that are in the city of St. Paul. The rest of them are scattered across the state. So we do have legislation and ordinance in the city of St. Paul, but you are exactly right. 100% correct that we need a statewide approach. There are jurisdictions across the country that have established a statewide wire theft task force. Louisville, Kentucky is one that comes off the top of my head, where they have coordinated efforts across the state. Unfortunately, Wisconsin's right across the border from us. But that is an approach that I have been in conversation with the mayor's office on the next legislative session. There's also some changes, I think, that we've made a lot of progress. Copper wire theft, or not copper wire theft, catalytic converters was a big thing. The state law then changed that that has to be registered on an electronic database. The law now states that you have to record these sales transactions on a journal. no law enforcement agency in the state has time uh... to visit the site to to to scroll through pages and pages and pages of these documents all of those would be suggestions that i would make going forward uh... on that front and we have made some arrests it's been uh... a bit since we've made some uh... it's very difficult to to get a case uh... from arrest to charge uh... mainly because we are behind on what it is that Is out and what is current so we have to be able to say that the light was working when the individual caused the damage To the light, but we have been able to make some successes in the past, but it's a Comparatively speaking a relatively low level felony Anyway to begin with

Oh, OK.

Yes, Council President Maker. Thanks, Madam Chair. Just quickly following up, I'm glad you brought up catalytic converter theft, because that, I know, we had put a lot of stock in the legislation that passed on copper wire theft, because after the legislation passed related to catalytic converter theft, we did see a dramatic reduction in those thefts. So can you say a little bit more about why this is proving to be so different?

Well the catalytic converters is they are recorded in an electronic database called leads online and That that is a different database than than what is included in the copper wire theft the copper wire theft Requires the the seller to have a license that's free and issued by the Department of Commerce or there's a nominal fee associated with it and then the law says that they have to record a the weights, the vehicle, and the driver's license information when they make the sale. But it's not in a searchable database. With the world in which we live in today, you walk into a restaurant, they remembered that you were there last week. To say that we're recording this data on a cloth-bound journal that's kept under the desk, it's not efficient for any law enforcement agency to be able to go out there and say, this person has been here 15 times. in the last two weeks. So those are the leads that will definitely help law enforcement come to an idea of who is doing this. And it's not just copper wire theft. It's now air conditioning units. It's cell phone towers. We see this statewide. And it's a much bigger problem than St. Paul.

Thank you, Chief. I see Council Member Kim's hand as well. And then we'll go to Council Member Joseph and Council Vice President Yang.

Yeah, similar line of interest and questioning. So the bill that was passed was by two of our St. Paul representatives, my representative, Athena Hollins, and our retiring senator, Sandy Pappas. And I think that they'll be interested in even weakening the language next year. So I'd encourage our colleagues to consider if we were to amend this bill so it works stronger, what recommendations we might make and how we want to maybe adjust our own legislative priorities for next year. But one thing that has come up time and time again is your exec point, council president, is like, how are we sort of tracking this information? And one of the best parts about the catalytic converter theft was also that they required to show an ID and prove the VIN number of the catalytic converter and that they had possession of it. And so there isn't sort of a similar regulatory space there, but one idea that had come up previously was limiting the number of times someone could sell it. Because even looking at the numbers that you posted earlier, if I were to even times by two the numbers between January 1st and June 30, we are on track to have 1,581, which situates us right between 2024 and 2025 in terms of the number of lights that are out. And so I would just encourage us to think about not just putting it on our list of priorities, but what is the language that we want to change to ensure that it could be enacted statewide? I don't know if they need to show an ID, but it's just to state it legitimized the market, but now we're seeing issues where it actually doesn't then quell the theft. So that's a thought for my colleagues. But then the follow up around the numbers, it says reported. The number that you are offering us is a snapshot of reported wire theft, and recognizing that it's a report-based system, in my mind, based on the number of complaints that our office gets and how much of a hot topic this is, could one infer that actually the number is quite larger than the ones that are being reported?

The number is much higher than what is being reported. So that number that you see for that street light map is just what is reported and gets reported. logged into through complaints through Zendesk and some of those things. We know complaints come into parks, come into public works, come from constituents through your ward offices to us, to complaints to the police department. So we know it's much higher than that. And that goes to a couple of things that D.C. Halsh was saying. One of the things that we need to be able to do, and this is an active thing that we need to do on public works, is have also a record of the assets of which lights are on. So you can have the proof that the light was on and it's no longer on to help with that. But also, as we were talking, this multi-pronged approach, part of it is going back into the legislation because the problem isn't just Tracking of the records, it's even where they're selling it to is sometimes out of state. And so that is a huge problem here because, like I said, we've got three in the city, but that's not necessarily where the wire is going to. Anything to add?

We're going to do Council Vice President Yang's question and Councilman Bridgel's question, but then we're going to transition to Mill and Overlay. If folks do have additional questions for Director Barber on that, I think it's going to be really important for this discussion, I think, to echo some of the things you've heard here, too. I think being able to share some of the information regarding the issue is really important. But what's equally important is being able to show, especially on the budget committee, some of the things that we've talked about is just like, what are some of these things going to cost? What does it look like to have an innovative strategy to address the issues that we are seeing? Because doing nothing, obviously, is going to lead to further degradation of this and also just like a bigger problem in the long run and a more expensive problem for the city. for our staff or our St. Paul Police Department, basically, to fix if the state doesn't come and save us, which they often don't. And so just thinking about what the strategy looks like in the short term and long term, I think it would be really helpful to be cued in on that. I know that the department is doing a lot of internal conversations, but I don't necessarily know to what level those conversations have even reached us as well. And so I do see us as allies in that work, especially when it comes to the budget season. I know we had a slide that was on some of the dollars we have given, but not necessarily how it was utilized or just what's the breakdown of those funding sources. And we talked about deferred maintenance and just how that's been the money that's been kind of scraping through, but then also that maybe even more dollars hasn't actually led to a decrease in the theft that we've been seeing. And so I think that's some of the questions that you're seeing of just like, if more investment doesn't necessarily mean that the problem is solved because we're trying to come up with a more comprehensive strategy, then I hope to see that reflected in the budget ask for the department as you guys are going into budget season. Because doing nothing or even just being able to put Band-Aids on the problem doesn't seem to be working for us.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Doing nothing doesn't work, and that is definitely not our intention. It is currently, we'll get you some additional numbers for how the funding has been spent after the past couple of cycles. One of the, I think, and that was before my time, so I think the half million dollars that was allocated, that was that slide that went to a lot of extra overtime and electricians to take a big push at trying to fix a bunch of things a couple of years ago. But we do need to look at the ongoing funding structure because where the money comes from now is from deferred street maintenance to pay for street lights. And so it is the right question to be asking, and I'm really glad you brought us here to talk about it because we all recognize it as a complicated issue, but it's good to have partners that are interested and want to help us solve the problem.

Yeah, and I think just so you all know, and everyone who's watching, but also city staff know, when a topic is brought to the budget committee this year, it's symbolic of the feedback that was given from this council. So you're here presenting because a majority of the council, if not all of the council members, actually vocalized an interest in supporting it. And so just really being able to hear from you all is really helpful, beneficial, And I think when we're thinking about the budget season, just know that you have allies in our work. And we are watching because we see the maps. We understand. We hear the calls. We also see the complaints. But on the plus side and also on the other side of things, we are invested in trying to understand what the innovative solution is and what the strategy is and how we can support that as well. beyond the complaints and beyond the work that our staff and our team are doing, the volunteer overtime that folks are taking. We essentially also share the same common goal of addressing the public safety issue, which is when we have street lights that are stolen, we have streets that are dark. We have folks that don't feel safe walking down the street, walking around the lake in some cases. And so just really making sure that we are also able to mitigate that with investments I think will be really important. And if we don't know that ahead of time, you see things like positions that maybe you're hoping to fill or are part of the strategy not getting funded. you see things that are part of the strategy not being funded because we aren't aware of the strategy. So that piece is going to be really important this year. I'll kind of end with two questions. Council Member Jones, did you still have a question or was your question answered?

I just had a comment, but weren't you going to go to... Yes, we're going to go to both. Yeah, I agree with what Chair Johnson said. I think that... You know, we're talking about an issue that to solve it is going to take a really long time and it's probably going to cost millions of dollars, just guessing. And I think we do need support from the state government. We can't solve this problem alone. And so what I would also, like Chair Johnson said, what I would really like to see is, you know, from the strategies that you have, what is the cost? What is the timeline? Are we looking at short-term strategies versus long-term strategies? And what is the difference in how many lights that that's going to keep on in our city? I mean, as I'm sitting here, I'm thinking, like, why don't we make them all inaccessible to everyone? Will that keep more lights on? I'm not sure. But, you know, I think there's, I share your frustration in trying to think about all these options and also knowing that, you know, the feasibility around some of them and the time that it'll take when we're talking about 40,000 streetlights. So I really appreciate the presentation. And I think more of that information even no matter how big the cost is You know how much you maybe don't even like it or love it Just seeing what those options are so that as chair Johnson said we can work on making decisions or even adding some of these things to our legislative agenda are going to be really important because this is such a huge issue and if this goes on for another 20 years because it's going to take that long to fix it, we're going to keep spending $500,000 to $1 million every year until it gets fixed. So I'm for, no matter what the cost is, wanting to know what it is and figuring out how we can get it paid for now because it's just going to cost us more money later and as everyone knows, it's a huge public safety issue.

Thank you, Councilmember. We will work on some of those numbers. I think that it will be a high number if we're looking, especially if we're, there's one thing to fix the 3,500 lights. It's a different thing to deploy across the 40,000. lights across the city, right? Because as we've seen, the thieves will move as we implement things. But I think that we're having the right conversations with St. Paul PD as well. So I think we're kind of working together to figure out both the fixing and then also the theft prevention. And so we'll put a focus on talking about some numbers and trying to get you guys something of if we had all the things to be able to fix everything and to build in prevention strategies, what that would be. It will be a big number, and we know it. That's why we wanted to be very blunt and honest today.

Thank you. And Council Vice President Yang, I'll end with you on this particular presentation.

Thanks, Chair Johnson. I want to take a moment to recognize all of the work that our staff have put into problem solving this issue and just trying to be really innovative about it from public works to our police department to Parks and Rec and all of the other departments involved in this. And I say this because one of the things that I, when I reflect on just how far along we've come, on our city's stance for repairing the street lamps and how important it is. I'm just really proud that we are where we are today. Because I remember during the pandemic, there was a presentation done about this. And at the time, the rhetoric was, well, having a street that's more lit doesn't make it safer. But I believe that our residents are very clear about what actually is safety to them. And they do want to make sure that they're going to business corridors, to a park that is well lit. And they can see where it is that they're going, whether it's a few feet ahead of them or many feet ahead of them. And so, again, I'm really proud about that. And I really commend you all for your work. I'm sure it's very disheartening to our residents and to our leaders here in the city, too, whenever we do hear about the wiring getting stolen again. However, I also know that it's even more disheartening and discouraging for our staff who are the ones doing the hard work of putting the wire in. so i really appreciate you all um one thing i wanted to uplift is i wonder if and this is just a suggestion out there i'm talking out loud you know when i say this i wonder if there's some sort of partnership that can happen between the city and especially our business corridors because in my ward payne avenue has been without lighting for probably over a year now and that's the one i hear the most complaints about I also share a desire in getting that business corridor lit up too because I know that we can just bring in more patrons into the businesses when we can accomplish that. And so the idea I have in mind is I wonder if there's some sort of recommendations that even our planning and economic development department can put out to businesses that are facing this issue. Because I see some businesses where they just hang up their own string lighting and the lighting is really great. on the corner or the area that they're in. And even though that's not going to be a permanent solution, and we don't want it to be, because it'll also drive up energy costs for our businesses, if it's something that can be done for the interim too, I'm sure that there are many entrepreneurs who are ready to spring into action and try to do something in the meantime. So that's something I want to put out there. I think it would definitely be great if PED can talk about that some more in partnership with other departments here.

Thank you. Madam Chair, Council Member, that's a great idea. And I will definitely bring it up with PED. And even within the assistant mayor's group, there could be other departments who might have a role to play as well. Thank you.

Thank you. And thank you, Mr. Newton, for being here. Thank you, Chief Hallstrom, for being here as well on this item and for making time for it. And the entire Public Works staff team that's here, too, are related to it. We appreciate you guys coming out to talk about this. We'll transition over to Mill and Overlay now.

Yep. All right, back again. Madam Chair, council members, we're here today to also talk about a mill and overlay program within the city of St. Paul. So we're going to talk our agendas, talk a little bit about what is mill and overlay, the funding sources, projects over the last few years, some of the benefits and the shortcomings of it, and then challenges and kind of what we see as a budget priority. So what is Mill and Overlay? Mill and Overlay is a street rehab technique, and I'm going to show a little video if I can get this to work. But now, how do you make it to sound?

You may have heard the words mill and overlay used a lot lately in St. Paul. But what exactly is mill and overlay? We asked Chris Anderson, St. Paul Public Works paving supervisor, for an explanation.

Simply put, mill and overlay is a way of adding life to old pavement. When a street surface deteriorates, it can be rehabilitated through mill and overlay. It begins with the milling or removal of the top layer of asphalt. We remove about one and a half to two inches of the top layer of the old pavement. The old material that is ground off by the milling machine is then recycled into new asphalt. The milled pavement is then swept to remove any loose debris. Next, a tack coat is applied to the newly milled surface. The tack coat helps bond the new layer of asphalt to the existing asphalt. Then the pavement is ready for a fresh layer of asphalt. St. Paul uses a variety of asphalt that is stronger and more resistant to wear than other commercial grades of asphalt. This asphalt is produced at the city's own asphalt plant. The pavement is given a final smoothing with a trio of rollers. the new pavement can then be open to traffic within 15 minutes of completion all said and done the mill and overlay process is done in two to three days and the street is set to last for several more years so mill and overlay i think the key thing that to take away from that is it is a way to help extend the life of the road so as we know we have some challenging corridors within the city

It is not the cure fix that a full road reconstruction is, but it does extend the life of the road. And this is what looks before and after. And then this one, this slide was put in by one of our asphalt experts, and it's a good way of understanding kind of where you want to be in the cycle of all of this. So the PCI is the pavement condition index that just tells you the condition of the surface and the structural integrity of the road. So early on in the early days, it obviously should be good. There's a point in time where things start to deteriorate. And that is actually where you want to start doing some of the mill and overlays or repairs earlier in the cycle. So before you're here, you really want to be spending the money on this preservation here. And so one of the key things in the long term look and plan that we need to build out, and I think there's a lot of, There's been work being done on this, but it's really figuring out how we stage the construction and the mill and overlay and street repairs so that we're hitting that sweet spot more rather than just responding to things. Mill and overlay is really cost-effective comparatively. You can see the cost on about $4 per square foot. Now, so this is only the... operational piece of it. So there are some additional funds required for the other pieces. When we do a mill and overlay, we also go in and fix, do concrete work, build in the ADA accessibility, some of those other pieces of infrastructure at the same time. So there's some additional costs associated with that. But overall, it is a good, cost-effective way to approach street maintenance and repair. All right, so how is it funded? So the funding sources come from a variety of places. So there's street reconstruction bonds, which are issued for residential mill and overlay, general fund for arterial mill and overlay. We'll have our city engineer come up and talk about those two different programs a little bit more. There is assessments that are applied to use to service bond debt on the residential mill and overlay. It covers a portion of future costs, and a larger portion is actually used for reconstruction. Now I'm going to transition over to Nick Peterson, the city engineer.

Thank you.

Welcome, Mr. Peterson.

Good morning. Nick Peterson, city engineer. So I will start with arterial, street, melon overlay, and... work through the residential program that's relatively new. So every year, about three to five miles of arterial streets are paved through the mill and overlay program. It's going to depend on the types of corridors and the amount of funding that's available. If we step back in time and look at not only a decade ago, The city had a whole lot more money budgeted for this kind of work, but it was really kind of falsely budgeted because there are some legal challenges that were imposed on the program and the way that our projects were funded. And fast forwarding back through time, now we find that we've got $4 million of general fund available and $1 million of assessments. So related to that, there was also less maintenance funding that was available, a similar legal challenge at the same time. So less mill and overlay work that helps extend the pavement life, and then also less ability to keep up with those potholes. The pavement preservation, as I said, it's going to extend the life of the road. It's going to serve as a seal on top of the pavement. It's almost like it's so much more than this, but it has the effect of paint, right, that it will keep water out as well. So not only does it add structural integrity, it actually adds load carrying capacity to a pavement, but also helps extend its life. When these projects occur, there's also concrete work that happens. So in the video, we saw the bituminous operations. As a part of the larger project, there's also a lot of concrete work that has to happen. Sometimes curb has to get replaced. Ped ramps have to be brought up to ADA standards. And there might be bump outs that are introduced. When we look at arterial streets in particular, they're going to have higher volumes of traffic, and as a result, there's more risk associated with crossing those streets. And so there's also a focus on pedestrian safety improvements that happen with these projects as well. So traffic calming, and because there's this ability to kind of reconfigure the road since all the striping disappears, and we've got a bigger project, then bike lanes might be added as well. So that's a consideration on the project. So historically, arterial and melanin overlay work, a contractor has done the concrete work. And then our forces, city public works forces, would perform the actual new bituminous placement, and we'd work with another contractor to mill stuff off. So kind of a hodgepodge, but generally speaking, historically, the talking point has been that we've done the arterial work in-house. Starting this year, to simplify things a bit, we've kind of switched that around where our own forces are going to do residential mill and overlay work. We'll still have specialist contractors doing the concrete work, but the bituminous work on residential would be done by our forces. There's less coordination. It's a more efficient operation for our folks. And then the arterials, because there's so much more that happens with those, would be done by a contractor.

Council President Naker.

Thanks, Madam Chair. Do we perform work on, I assume the answer is no, but I want to make sure. We don't perform work on state and county roads within the city, correct?

Madam Chair, Council President, we do on occasion, but we do that via cost participation policy. So I'm anticipating kind of the root of the question. that we do have some maintenance responsibilities on county and state facilities. Just imagine if we had, I know it already feels like we often have a whole lot of stuff going on. It seems like it's uncoordinated. And imagine if we had the state and the county doing a lot of that stuff on their own. So we have some maintenance responsibilities, and so we will do some of that work, but we will make sure that we are made whole from the state or the county when that work occurs. We have cooperative agreements that come through council on occasion for that.

So the cost participation is 100% on the owner?

It will vary by the type of how it's delivered, but I would offer, I would really like for those cost participation policies maybe to be more amicable in the city's favor, and we're working through that with Ramsey County right now.

Thank you.

And on this slide, we're kind of looking back over the last, not only five years here, over some of the work that's been performed on the arterial network. And so we've got 21 through 25 indicated. These corridors show up in our five-year plan. Really, we're trying to be more dynamic, and we're not planning for these five years in advance on a lot of these corridors. We don't have the funding to do that reliably, because we'd have to do it sooner. We don't have the ability to do these things on a rigorous and shorter term schedule, so we're trying to acknowledge that some corridors can be worse than others. And so we've only got really the first couple years of our five year plan has actual placeholders in there for specific corridors, and then we've got a bin of the corridors that are at the end of that. So we can see there's a whole lot of projects that have been performed. The far right column has The street maintenance bituminous costs included there. There are also concrete costs that go into these, as I noted, and then, of course, the administration, engineering, and inspection that goes with these. A rough rule of thumb is that the concrete cost is nominally the same as the bituminous cost. That's not a perfect science, but Generally speaking, as a rule of thumb, you would see in that first row $1.5 million roughly multiplying by two to get to what that total construction cost is and then adding in engineering and those administrative aspects, testing and that sort of thing. So just want to give some background here. As we progress through time, it's not a perfect science, but as we progress through time, our funding has decreased and we have issues with these You know, every entity has projects throughout the city. Sometimes there are scheduling challenges that come up where something takes longer than was anticipated. In our window, we ask for and usually need a fairly narrow window to do our work. And we don't wanna be, you know, as a good partner, we don't wanna be, asking for too egregious of a window, being too conservative in that. But on occasion, the window will pass. And so we see corridors like Ruth get slid a year and then another year because there are big things that we don't want to get in the way of our partners' important work as well. there there can be some bigger some bigger impacts out there and then the the last row here is 2026 and in our next slide i'll talk about saint anthony but selby is is a i'll say i don't know they've ever used the word fun before council before but it's kind of a fun example of partnering with with one of our agency partners out there to do work on on selby Metro Transit had some money that was available and it had to be used to enhance their, it was attached to a specific project, it had to be used to enhance that service offering. And so that transit facility was along Selby. They offered to pay for the two minutes work there. So we let them, you know, hey, we're all on board with that, right? And then we have to, then part of the agreement is we take on the concrete work and the cost that would go with that. It's our street. So a good partnership and, you know, making its way through the process here. Now, St. Anthony, this is going to look a lot like kind of procedurally It's very similar to what had happened on Concordia Rondo somewhat recently. This is a corridor. It's a frontage road that kind of struggles with that identity. Am I a one-lane road? Am I a two-lane road? And this project would propose to narrow the lanes down from two to one, make it much clearer as to how it should be driven. it's complicated in the sense that it crosses county roads and MnDOT facilities, and the opportunity, as I noted before, comes up to do so much more. So we have to do ADA enhancements, and then there is also the opportunity to look at traffic calming and to You know look at adding a bike lane facility. So the project proposes some bump outs and bike lane maintains parking on the one side of the road and You know should make things safer in the long run and it's it's not a reconstruction So it's not as robust as a reconstruction project would be one that all the curb is getting replaced but you know, it's sort of a happy medium and Then transitioning into residential mill overlay. So this is a relatively new program that started in 2023. It's funded by street reconstruction bonds. The budget for this is $3.5 million on an annual basis. And the order for these projects is determined going way back in time when these streets were reconstructed. We're going back and milling and overlaying these roads in that same order. So there's an aspect of being consistent with that. And we took the multiple pages of those areas that were done, originally called the RSVP areas, and just working forward through that in that same order. So making good progress on that front. It's focused on pavement preservation because these corridors are residential streets. They don't carry the same volume and have the same risk associated with arterial crossing. So there's more of an emphasis on pavement and less on the other areas. safety aspects. And as I noted before, this is a case where our forces are going to do the bituminous work and they'll be subbing out the milling, the removal of the old pavement on top. This is a map of what the program initially looked like when we kicked it off. There's actually maybe one element of pride I might point to on here. Our next project on this slide is area number five and that's actually been moved up to this year. So it's progressing a little faster than anticipated. And this is, this has been challenging because of the, you know, there's, there's a set dollar amount every year. Um, but these projects are all going to be very different in size and in complexity. And then, uh, again, another sample project here, the Ivy Birmingham project is, uh, you know, residential mill overlay. It's going to do some ADA work and, and, uh, take care of a whole lot of stuff in the area at one time as best as we can. City forces will do the button-up work at the end. So back to kind of big picture here, mill and overlay benefits. It's one of those very few affordable options. We don't have as much money as we wish we did to be able to fund this kind of improvement, but it is one of the few somewhat affordable options that we have. It imparts structural benefits to the road. It actually increases carrying capacity and helps it live longer. We do have the ability to assess these projects. The city can assess. There are limitations on that. We can get 25% on these projects. and it's a super effective way to improve the pavement condition versus reconstructing. We're not going to go out and reconstruct a road just for the sake of having a smoother riding surface. So it's significantly cheaper than that. You get a really smooth, quiet surface. We can reconfigure things with new paint markings and kind of change up the use of the roadway at the same time. And every time that mill and overlay work is done it reduces the maintenance demand. The number of potholes and the severity of potholes in particular will go down dramatically, at least on that corridor. So that's an important flag. I mentioned the ped ramps and the safety improvements that go with them. They're a part of the five-year plan. There's a lot less disruption that goes with this, generally speaking. The concrete work can take a bit longer, but we're measuring this in weeks and not months. A conventional construction project would be months. And this process can be done multiple times. There are limitations to this. It's not the right thing to do on every road. know there's there's a whole lot of a challenge that goes with um you know the funding limitation that we have so um you know some roads are really old they've they've maybe they weren't constructed uh consistent with the demands of the you know the current current times here but uh You know, it's one of the best things that we can do. If you've got a road that's super degraded and it wasn't constructed correctly or it's just simply old and the materials are just tired or broken, failed, it doesn't make sense to do it. If there are utility needs, it doesn't make sense because we need to dig it up anyway. Why go through the process of doing just the surficial work when we could do so much more? And it doesn't address the underlying issues. Pavements tend to fail from the bottom up, you know, in a catastrophic fashion. Transitioning into our departmental challenges. So this is where maybe I make a sales pitch for different equipment kind of a thing for the operations side of Public Works. But the equipment that we use to perform this work, it could be more optimal. It's not as big as it could be. We could have bigger equipment that is more efficient. It can cover more area at one time. It could impart more energy into the work that it's doing to have a more solid product in the end. Would be kind of nice. And then the trailers that we use, we're routinely making rounds from the public works facility back out to the site, whereas contractors will have bigger equipment that they can mobilize more readily, more quickly. And then we want to move into really making sure that we've got top notch products out there rather than using a qualitative method that's been used for a long time, but actually using technology to do that. When we're all doing this, one of the things that I have to always forewarn is it's the same people doing the work that would be filling potholes. So it's either overlay operations or pothole operations due to that staff limitation. We do have our own asphalt plant. It's a thing of pride every spring when I go out to the public works facility and I see all these trucks from other cities that are queued up waiting to get our asphalt because we're the first shop in town. It's a thing of pride to see people do that. We've got some control over that. Of course, it's intended to be self-sufficient. The plant's aging, and it's going to need some serious attention here. We've been kind of noodling how we deal with that.

Mr. Peterson, I'm going to have you finish your last two slides here for us. So we have a couple of times for some quick questions from council members before we have to adjourn at 1130. So if you could just quickly finish the last two slides that you have.

So the impact of decreased funding for mill and overlay, if that happens, the road's going to accelerate its decay much faster. Director Barber presented a slide that had a graphic that showed that a road's going to decay a lot faster as it ages. And if roads don't get attention in time, water gets in and it just creates all kinds of problems. We've got increased costs that I mentioned and then claims and complaints and all kinds of things that come up from the public. It's one of a number of strategies. Some of these are relatively new. Obviously, we're talking about mill and overlay. Reconstruction is pretty clear. Reclamation is something where it's kind of a hodgepodge of the two, so to speak, that we're trying to ramp up. We did a couple projects here in the city somewhat recently. And then looking into new additives that would help our roads last longer. And then, of course, we have maintenance things that we do. So with that, Public Works is happy to stand for questions.

Thank you. Council President Baker.

Thanks, Madam Chair. I will combine all of my questions together in one. Well, not one question, but at one time. The two slides ago is definitely my favorite slide because it talks about sort of some of the needs and ideas to make this work happen more efficiently. I've never heard about the need for the different equipment, but I hope that there will be follow up with how much that would cost and how much that would save. I'm curious why we don't use contractors or consider an apprenticeship with the trades, potentially, so that we're not using the same workers to do potholes and mill and overlay. If it's just a labor issue, how we're thinking about solving that. Do we have plans to make our asphalt plant MnDOT certified? And then finally, I never hear about seal coating anymore. Do we still seal coat? And what's the value of that to the life of a street versus mill and overlay and other processes?

And that's all of them. Let's take a couple of them. We want to start with the MnDOT, if there's a plan for MnDOT being certified.

Madam Chair, Council President, I'm going to try and go in reverse order here. I wrote them down. And I'm trying not to get distracted. The seal coat is something that is a preservation tool, and it helps slow the decay. And we pulled the plug on, do you want to jump in anywhere? No, go ahead. Okay. Got to make sure I'm... The seal coat aspect, it's to help prevent decay. And we got to a point where we were doing one-eighth of the city every year, but we'd done that for so long, we found our way into having lots of seal coat layers on roads. And we pulled the plug on that because at some point it just didn't make sense anymore. and it it could cause more more trouble than benefit at that stage of time so it'll be reintroduced but it'll be reintroduced on roads that are most appropriate for it at some point um am i supposed to okay all right i'm just going to keep going and then you're going to tap me on the shoulder um the plants Okay, all right, so then I'll skip the plan, and now I'm totally forgetting what the rest of the questions are, and I apologize.

Contractors to help with paving and filling projects simultaneously, or ways to address that labor issue?

Well, I'm going to have Cha address that one, I think, actually, because having a contractor to perform maintenance purposes would be an operations aspect. Is that it? Those are the...

Hi, my name is Charlie. I'm the street maintenance manager. I can answer the MnDOT question. We are working on trying to get it certified. Some of the stuff that we will have to do is we have to build an extra, they call it wrap, recycled asphalt to add to our plant. So once we work through all of the costs and we'll bring it forward to the council member to support us, But we are trying to get it MnDOT certified because a lot of other municipalities, they do their projects, they need MnDOT certified products, so we are working on that. And as for the contractor, we did look at one time. It costs us to hire the contractor more than what our force could do. But if we do have the budget, I would support going for a contractor. Thank you.

I think, again, just overall, Director Barber, I really do appreciate both presentations. It would be really helpful to see the actual finances behind what is being presented. It's a little hard to follow. And I appreciate the arterial presentation pieces. But my questions remain of the amounts of resources that are actually allocated. I appreciated the $4 million and the $1 million. But that doesn't actually translate for me of what we're spending, what we need, What is the dollar amount behind the work that happens? And I think to the piece of just equipment, I think my biggest question around equipment any time is how that benefits residents and where we're making those investments is one thing. But investing, if we're in needs of millions, I think when we think about just what it would ultimately look like to create some relief for people so they're not just covering the entire piece of the mill and overlay process. I think that would be helpful to know where the revenue sources of some of these projects come from as well. Just like where the money comes from, where it's being spent, and numerical numbers. I love spreadsheets. I love numbers. I love all the things. And that's why I really wanted to be budget chair. And so we review those. And I find them a little bit missing from the presentation. And I just wanted to be able to share if that's available in a follow-up. We'd appreciate it. I'll go over to Councilmember Jost and then Council Vice President Yang.

Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Director. I have two questions. One about the, you mentioned the rolling equipment, and I also would like to see what that would cost. I'm going to assume that the rolling equipment that you have is providing a sufficient rolling of the asphalt. But it also sounds like if we had better equipment, it would provide a better roll to the asphalt. And then there would be a cost benefit associated with that around the longevity of the asphalt. The mill and overlay so that's kind of my first I don't know if you know what that would be or what the improvement would be in the road if we had better equipment and then if We could if you could get the cost that would be helpful.

I'm a bunch of friends. Thank you Madam Madam chair council members who have some of these answers So I'm gonna step out of the way and let them answer. Okay Welcome, Ms. Haas.

I'll start a little bit, and then I'll let Jericho finish, because he's really more the expert. So I've been the operation manager in public works for a whole two and a half weeks in a room. So this was my crash course in mill and overlay. But one of the things, asking some of the same questions that you guys are asking, and One of the things that Jericho lifted up to me was that the rollers take four passes where we can rent equipment currently, or if we purchased equipment for about $200,000 to $300,000, we could do double and do two passes as opposed to four. So we are looking at those numbers and the efficiencies, and Then the next question I asked Jericho, and he can talk a little bit more about this, is, okay, well, what would that mean for staff hours and efficiencies and time, and how much more could we do? So we are digging into those things right now to see where the actual dollars align and what the benefit would be. But, you know, top of my head, the benefit is we can get it done quicker and get more done.

Okay, and then my other question, and I know Council President Naker asked a similar question about sealing cracks in pavements. It's my understanding that that would be a maintenance strategy in addition to mill and overlay, that by providing the sealing of the cracks in between mill and overlays, You prevent water intrusion. You get more life out of the asphalt. You don't have to. And that's kind of a part of that maintenance. But is it my understanding that it sounds like we're not currently doing that. We're only doing mill and overlay. Could you clarify which of the pavement improvement strategies we're actually doing right now?

Madam Chair, Council Member. There's a distinction between seal coating, and I apologize. I thought the council president asked about seal coating specifically. And then there's crack sealing. Yes. And crack sealing is still performed, you know, throughout the system. And that's, I think it's still, it's funny I'm saying this, and Jericho could probably, you want to touch on it?

You're here.

Jericho Hugger. I'm the superintendent for street maintenance. So with seal coating, we're not doing that. That's where we would put a full layer of a coat on the street. Cracks, we do feel most of the time we're doing that when we're doing repairs in the area if we know there is a big crack there. Most of the time we do that when we're doing cuts, which is when they cut a square hole in the street and stuff like that. Yeah, we do put a ceiling in there. But as a city overall, like just going out doing every one, at this time, we are not doing that.

Okay, so you do the seal the cracks only if you have a project in the area. It's not part of the general maintenance of all of the streets?

As of right now, no. Okay.

And I guess I'd be curious, if we were to do that, what would the cost be and how would it prolong the life of the road and what would be the cost? If there's a cost savings, that would be important to know, too. That would be fair.

The cost part, I can't say anything about, but I will say with doing it, water is the enemy, so it prolongs the stream. Right. Okay.

Thank you. And thank you, Madam Chair, Council Member. We're taking all this information, and so Lisa is frantically writing all these things down in the audience, and so we'll come back with numbers so you have them, too.

Thank you. I really appreciate being able to hear from folks that are doing the work at hand. I just really appreciate that piece too. It adds like faces behind the names. I would share, you know, just as a feedback point as well, like I look forward to kind of being able to share some of the work that gets done that may or may not be like, that staff may or may not be getting current credit for. And so we get a lot of complaints with a lot of folks that go through and maybe they're focused on that one particular road. But also if we are seeing that work, you know, and we know that staff is doing the roads nearby maybe the roads and the streets that aren't on the the quote-unquote list of things to do you know how we better tell that i think it's going to be really important just because that like i didn't know that if you go out to a project you also look at the neighboring streets and other places too i think that's a really valid point to share with people

Thank you, Madam Chair. You're reading our minds. Yes.

I'm really excited about what's coming. So the state maintenance team has been working on, as you know, proactively kind of circling the area to see what they can also fill. And we're working on a map that can be shared with the public. It's not ready yet. We're still getting the kinks worked out. But it is showing the response to complaints, the number of potholes that have been filled, and then adding in that information too about those potholes that we're proactively filling as well. So it's coming soon to, you know, city website near you, but we're not quite there yet. Because I think it's impressive to see the number of potholes that actually are being filled and the work that is being done. And when I looked at the map, I went, wow, I didn't know we were doing such a great job.

Well, and while you're here, Ms. Haas, thank you and congratulations on your new role with the Public Works team. And yes, that's, you know, very, very excited for you. Any person that can make trash seem exciting and durable the way that you can can definitely make sure that the story is told around our operations work here at Public Works, which I think is so important that we are Are you able to accurately reflect just the work that folks are doing? It's hard. It's manual. And it's labor. So we appreciate that work, too. And I look forward to being able to share that map out when we get it. Are there any other questions from my colleagues for literally the entire team? No. But multiple people that are a part of it while we have them. OK, quick question from Council President Baker.

Thanks, Madam Chair. I actually wasn't going to ask it, but then with the invitation, you know I can't resist. No, two minutes. It's fine. Any very, very quick, before I get in trouble, update on the new mix that allows us to fill potholes in winter?

As you can tell, thank you, Madam Chair, Council Member. I have the best team, so I'm going to turn it to them.

Like with the real stuff, not the cold patch.

Well, the first thing I wanted you guys to know, too, something that isn't on our, we're not able to put on a list for you. A lot of times, we go to areas that we haven't got calls and take care of that area, where people in that neighborhood may not call in and report. So that's something that is not tracked that we want to let you know, too. We do look at every area and make sure, even though they're not calling, we have supervisors driving that section. The machine you're talking about is our Beghella. So what that process allows us to do is we have a lot of, or not a lot, we do have some waste when it comes to asphalt, like if the truck's done at the end of the day and they dump it in one of our yards. So with this machine, we're able to take it mostly in the winter and put it in this machine, and it'll heat it up and recycle it so we can use it again. How that helps us is to less waste that we have to pay to get rid of. The other thing is we make cold mix. Cold mix isn't a permanent thing. So we're able to use a more permanent fix with recycled asphalt, putting it in potholes, and then the next, in the spring, it's still there instead of the cold mix, comes right back out, then we have more potholes that we have to take care of at that time. So it helps in the way of, yes, less waste and a more, I shouldn't say permanent, because potholes you can't permanently fix, but it helps in spring so it isn't coming out of the hole and we have less reports.

Thank you.

Well, we really appreciate all of your time and for folks being here today and just being able to answer the questions and interact with us in this discussion. Again, the reason why these two topics were brought up was because they were echoed similarly amongst the council as priorities for this budget cycle as well. So I do want you guys to know that we see the work that you all are doing and want to continue to invest in it. We understand that the problem itself takes time of both the street light repairs and the mill and overlay. It's like multiple years in process, but we hope to see and be a part of the strategy with you. So thank you guys so much for making the time.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair and Council Members, for having us here today. It's important for all these great people who do great work to be able to share some of what they're doing. So thank you very much.

Appreciate it. With nothing else in front of us, I just want to give a shout-out to Council Vice President Ying. I hope your budget engagement event went really well last week. I mean, yesterday, sorry. And I look forward to hearing about it. We'll continue to promote the others from it that are coming up as we enter into budget season. Thank you, guys. We are adjourned.