Commission - Regular Meeting

under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

We begin, as always, by acknowledging the land on which we gather as the territory of the Ottawa and Chippewa peoples who have stewarded this land through the generations. We thank them for their strength and resilience in protecting this land and inspiring us to uphold our responsibilities to do the same. As said, this is a study session, so there will be no action taken tonight. And so with that, I will have Sarah do the roll call, please.

Right.

Commissioner Anderson? Here. Commissioner Bomer? Mayor Pro Tem Ness? Here. Commissioner Treadwell? Here. Commissioner Shaw? Here. Commissioner Funk? Here. Mayor?

Here. And then we will take some announcements from the deputy city manager, please.

All right, wonderful. Well, good evening, everyone. For the week of June 8th, just want to give a quick update that last week at the county board of commissioners meeting, there was discussion in regards to the government center and some essential repairs that are pending based on the assessment that was done by machine engineering. And just wanted to confirm that we're moving forward with addressing those issues. And my understanding is that county is moving forward with establishing a contract. And we anticipate that there will be no need for staff relocation during the repairs based on an assessment we received today from Ms. Shin. So we'll keep you all posted. But at this point, we should be able to move forward with phase one. And we'll find out what the total cost will be from the county once that's prepared.

Great.

That's all I have this evening. Thank you.

And Sarah, announcements from the city clerk, please. Sure. Just a couple of meetings this week. The Board of Zoning Appeals will meet on Tuesday, June 9th at 7 p.m. in the committee room. And the city commission has two special meetings on Thursday, June 11th, Friday, June 12th for interviews for city attorney. And both of those start at 9 a.m., is that correct? Both of them start at 9 a.m. and they are not televised. They will be in the training room. Great.

Okay. And now we'll go on and start on with our topics for discussion.

And Deb, I'll have you kick it off with our infrastructure update. Certainly. So our first item has to do with, as the mayor said, critical infrastructure update. The Director of Municipal Utilities, Art Krieger, is here. And also Mark Huggard from Jacobs will talk about the city's infrastructure performance during the spring 2026 weather events. So Art?

good evening commissioners and mayor art krieger director of utilities with the city this is a more one of the most fun types of presentations for me to show what you've supported in the past as a board and how it's paid off through a unsuspected floods such as we had in I'm sorry April this year so today I'm gonna go over some of those winds and we can have a question and answer time after and I know there were some questions submitted late today and I do have a few of those answers but maybe we just go through the presentation first then we can come back to those it sounds good So looking at that flood event here recently in April, it was a lot of things kind of stacking up on top of each other. We had frozen ground conditions initially, so runoff wasn't going down into the soil. We had, you know, so runoff and melting. Then we had the rain events on top of it. And just there wasn't anywhere for that water to go but flow downhill. We had a near 500-year event, which is not to be interpreted as, oh, we did it once. We don't have to worry for 500 years. That's not really how that works. It's a percent chance of it occurring annually. So that's only a 0.2% chance that it could happen each year. And basically if you take a 500 year or a 100 year and you just do like the math inverse of that. So one divided by 500, you get that kind of percentage. You can calculate it out. So we did have historic levels in the river, Boardman River in our watershed. There was a lot of flooding upstream. As you know, when you heard about the infrastructure at Keystone Road, wiped right out along with a stream gauge at that location. That was basically recording flows. It went down with the road so to speak so that data wasn't actually captured at that point after that station washed out around the time that road washed out at Keystone. So looking upstream further, I did some checking and there's an old gauge station further up above Brownbridge Road, and records started back in 1949, but there was a gap in the data for some years after that. But the previous record at that gauge station, which is near Ranch Rudolph, if anyone knows where that is, was only 583 cubic feet per second. So that's a measurement of how much flow is coming down the river, but that's upstream quite a ways from the city. So April 14th, compared to that high record in two thousand fourteen it was actually one thousand one hundred twenty which is about a ninety two percent increase uh... over that seventy seven year record and that's just unheard of to break a record by ninety two percent so we did get a lot of water coming our way and all the way down to you know to our city here and out to the bay um... fish Water levels approached, like I said, that near 500-year elevation. Apparently, it was like 0.5 inches below, like a hydraulic model, what it said would be a 500-year elevation.

So why does this matter?

Infrastructure investment, well, we saw it pay off quite well for the city. Flood like this puts a lot of pressure on sanitary sewers, collection systems, the wastewater treatment plant. It's connected to the river. It needs to outlet the effluent from the plant to the river. You know, river stabilization systems we've seen along the wall, the river wall downtown. There was instability and things and we did some projects to help there. Stormwater can be overloaded stormwater collection systems because they're really based on a very low probability of storms. They're like a 10-year storm design and that's from old records, old standards. We know that rainfall has increased quite substantially over the last several decades. So a 10-year storm back then, maybe when a sewer was designed for stormwater, is not much compared to what we're seeing in actuality in storm events lately. Electrical and treatment equipment, Mark will go over some of that at the treatment plant, put stress on our UV system, our channel, and just public health protections. So here's a list of some projects that we did complete, except for the last one. 2026 wasn't, it isn't done yet. It's part of the large project upgrade at the wastewater plant. But the UV disinfection in 2021 at the wastewater treatment plant, we had raised up the electrical system so that it could handle more flow. And Marco, I'm not sure if that's in here. Yeah, he's covering part of that too. So we did spend as a city and it came out of the sewer fund about 240,000. And what we had happened prior to 2021 was a large scale flood event came through and it rose so high in that UV channel that it shorted out the electrical system. So the UV was kind of knocked out for that storm. So EGLE, the state regulators, they put a, ACO together that we accepted the board approved that's administrative consent order where we said, as a city, we will agree to raise this electrical equipment up out of the way in in the near term, which we did in 2021. And then we will also, by the end of our service life of our current UV system, we will replace it with a new updated one. So we're in that next stage now, replacing that UV system, and that administrative consent order will be met. So that's where we're going with that. In 2023, we had the sewer relocation and river wall stabilization along the river there on the 100 and 200 blocks. We spent about $2.7 million there with a CWSRF loan. The fish pass project was very key in 2025 with some delays, as we all know, from the lawsuit and so forth. But it was still put in enough to where it is today and where it could handle that extra flow. I put $25 million plus here of federal funds. I checked into that a little bit more. It's looking to be more closer to the $30 million range coming up, possibly even $32. But there were some state funds as well. I think we had $1 million from the dam safety unit that was provided. And there might have been a couple smaller ones in there, but those are the main project funding mechanisms. In 2025, we launched a west side sewer lining project where we were trying to attack and goals to get I&I infiltration and inflow, keep it out of our collection system to not impact the treatment plan as much during large storm events. Spent about 1.2 million on that and that came from the sewer fund as well. then the UV project is ongoing at the plant. We're gonna be doing the replacement portion of that in the next year or so. So this is a picture I wanted, or a couple pictures I wanted to share. Down along the river wall, this was, One of those events that I was fearing would happen before we got it removed, I'm sorry, relocated over to the center of the alley. You can see in that left slide, that's the old abandoned 24-inch clay sewer. And it sits right on the river wall foundation that comes out about 10 feet to the right from the wall. And then a close-up picture is that hole in the center there and that was a former lead like from one of the buildings that was coming in and by that soil all, getting just you know taken away from that it couldn't support it anymore so that pipe just fell down to the bottom so if that particular sewer was still in service it would have just been spewing raw sewage all the way into the river which goes to the bay and our estimate on that is about one half million gallons per day running through that line thankfully we were able to replace that main and abandon it in place so we have a new 30 inch down the center of that 100 block And that ties back into the existing 24 just downstream like by Cass. And then the second phase of that project was going from the 200 block, so Cass Street over to Park. And that was where we reinforced the wall with the new sheet piling. and that's coming up, I'll probably have more on that in a bit. So we did receive a state and national award for the American Public Works Association for this project and that's a cool thing too. So great outcome, could have been way worse. We're excited that we were able to have that new 30-inch in place. This is that second phase I was talking about. So there wasn't room in this block, the buildings, compared to the wall is a very narrow strip, so we didn't have any room to relocate the sewer over toward the buildings. So the recommendation from a study that was completed prior was to reinforce the wall. So we had a new sheet pile wall just installed in front of the existing concrete wall. That went down very deep into the ground, likely 30, 40 feet. I remember those piles sticking way up when they started driving them. There's a picture of one of them that's almost down to the bottom. So basically that shielded the infrastructure behind it and then we filled in between the two walls, the steel wall and the concrete wall with a slurry type concrete to fill any voids that were under there. So that sewer in this block still remains on the edge of that wall on the footing side away from the river but it's very well supported. very well protected from this project, from the steel sheet pile. So what was causing the sinkhole is the water on the 100 block was getting under that foundation and then it was drawing the soil away and it just kind of created that sinkhole. So this can't really happen on the 200 block. So the lining program we did in 2025, we invested about 1.2 million, 9,000 feet of sewer lined. We based our locations on the SAW grant, which was a study done in like 2018. It was finished. And we took initially a project back in 2020 and did the worst of the worst project pieces, which were downtown on Front Street. We lined, I don't remember the footage, but we lined a significant amount along Front Street out toward Delamar out in the highway there. And then we took the remaining recommended segments which are mostly on the west side and compiled a project to have it lined in this project. One thing we did a little differently in this project is we actually lined about five feet up at each connection point. So there's a brand new liner in the main and that where each sewer line goes to a home or a building, we actually have a connection in the main and makes it watertight out about five feet and that was installed with this project. That is a key point in trying to eliminate infiltration and inflow because mainly infiltration will come up and if you just cut a hole where that was and the sewer line is still at that connection leaking water, groundwater coming in, you're not really taking care of it as much. You're taking care of the main, but you're not taking care of the connection. So this is a great opportunity to do a little bit more. And those were part of those restorations of the actual sewer laterals were part of this project. We did focus on deep, deep sewers where groundwater is more prone to try to come in to the pipes. So the results, we don't know exactly how much infiltration or inflow. It's hard to measure because storms come and they hit harder in one part of town or the other. But we feel based on what Mark saw at the plant that this investment did help take down the total flow that was reaching to the plant for treatment. So we're not done lining. We want to do more. I think it's a great technology that's more affordable than digging up an entire stretch of street and roads. We do that when it makes sense, but when we don't have to and we can just go in and rehabilitate sewers between manholes, it's a good method. So the goal here was to eliminate I&I as much as we can, reduce it, and have better success with flows, managing the flows at the plant. The fish pass project, we're all aware of that. I guess down to the nitty-gritty of this one is engineering analysis indicated that if the old dam was in place, it would have been likely overtop because the spillway capacity just wasn't there compared to what this new structure can provide and that could have failed the entire dam we could have had initially upstream flooding because the water couldn't get through but that if it would have failed it probably would have just been a wall of water going through town and the damage would have been astronomical we don't even want to think about what that would have looked like but we're really fortunate and glad that that didn't happen so we avoided some downtown flooding uh for sure there we uh We had the wastewater discharge go up, but we were able to handle that and see the weir actually passed more water. So that helped upstream at the wastewater plant. So we discharged from the plant into the river. So the higher the river is, the harder it is to get water out of there that's cleaned and treated. So by this weir handling more flow, that river didn't go up as high and we were able to discharge what we needed to during that event. Additional infrastructure impacts upstream, if we would have had a much higher elevation that went all the way up, say, to South Airport Road, that was very close to, the county was very close to losing that road with the culverts washing out. if the water would have been higher it probably would have washed out so this uh weir in place was really key for the city and our partners upstream in the townships so i'm going to turn it over to mark for three slides and he's going to explain a little bit about these effects at the wastewater plant all right good evening we're really working on projecting my voice tonight so

Yeah, so the touch on the wastewater plant, obviously we are not immune to these events, regardless if they happen right on top of us or a little bit upstream, we see increase in flows. So during this event, our max day was just over 7.8 million gallons per day. Prior to this event, we were running around 4.5, 4.7 million gallons per day. So we definitely saw an increase in flow, but certainly a manageable flow. The peak hour flow that we saw during the storm was 9.1 million gallons per day. Again, the plant design is 17, so we were just over half of that hydraulic capacity of the facility. So we were able to easily get that flow through the treatment processes. Next slide, understanding UV reporting event. So as I already mentioned earlier, one of the upgrades that we had interim solutions with the UV channel was protecting the equipment so we didn't lose UV. We couldn't increase the hydraulic capacity of that UV channel at that time. That's what this upgrade is going to help address that we're currently doing. But we were able to come to an agreement with Eagle to do an interim solution which meant we will keep the UV going as long as possible by raising the electronics up out of the channel. You see in the picture there on the right, that upper portion that's above the grating, that used to be sitting down not in the water but in the channel above the water line. And when we had those storms in 2020, the water level rose enough to affect the electrical components in those cabinets. So raising those up has solved that. So we did not, during this last event, did not lose our UV disinfection process at all. That does not address the hydraulic capacity as far as the depth of the water in that channel. So part of the ACO is when we get above that 5.17 feet in the channel, that's when it's assumed that we're not getting full disinfection treatment from the UV light. So we monitored that, those levels, and it would periodically throughout this event would surpass that 5.17 feet from April 12th to April 16th. And so during that whole timeframe, we were able to determine that about 2.3 million gallons of the overall flow through those four days was, may not have received full UV disinfection. But we, the majority of it did, and we were, We're thankful we have the membrane process because when we test our fecal coliform counts, which is what we use to kind of gauge the effluent and how the UV disinfection is working, Our UV counts upstream of that system are usually non-detect as they would be as they are downstream. So the membranes do a great job. The UV serves as almost a secondary protection of the water and is still required to have UV disinfection in wastewater facilities. So that's why this upgrade is happening. So the upgrade will address We'll adjust the hydraulic capacity. It'll also be the UV modules will be contained and in the water and so the likelihood of electrical failure or something like that, it's not possible. And then during the event, we are required through our reporting processes, we have to monitor that level, report that volume as I said earlier. We report that volume to EGLE. We also increase our sampling. So we do the, oops, I forgot to change that one. So we do E. coli sampling in the receiving stream. So we went upstream and downstream of our outfall and sampled. And sample concentrations were actually lower downstream than upstream. All of our effluent parameters that remained in compliance, so our fecal coliform that we sampled just downstream of the UV system, all remained well under our limits, as you see in the data listed below. Membrane system removed almost over 99% of the fecal coliform. And UV system, like I said earlier, it just provides a redundancy to the membrane system. Any questions on UV portion?

Good news.

Cool. All right. Thank you. Good. Thank you.

So key takeaways here, just real quick. Investing in our infrastructure does matter, protects public health and safety and welfare of people, our residents and our visitors. reduced the environmental risk going out to the river in the bay and handled the flood quite well not too surprisingly but thankfully you know can always look things that are worse but for the most part I feel really good how we handled that large flow that came came to us we didn't ask for it it just happened so other than that Just by investing in infrastructure, this is a very broad statement, but like 25 plus million, more like 30, 32 million in our fish pass project prevented threats to downtown and human life and property damages. I put in hundreds of millions. I didn't calculate it. It's a wild guess, but comparatively, The Sanford Dam, which was downstate a few years ago that failed, they were over $175 million. That was a more smaller area, more rural than the city. You know, we have some of the largest valued properties in that whole stretch along the river there. So I can't imagine it not being hundreds of millions of dollars of damage if it would have not been in place, the fish pass project, to handle that flow in a good way. So looking ahead, we're going to be doing that UV system capacity improvement. These are things that are going to help us become more resilient. That's at the wastewater plant. The sewer rehabilitation, I've been putting in like an annual amount in the CIP where we can try to go out and do like a half a million dollars worth of sewer lining and try to catch up on this. We've been focusing in on the west side because that's where we saw in 2020 some of the largest impacts from infiltration and inflow. Stormwater master planning, we're working on city engineers working on an RFP to come out soon, looking at our whole city and our master plan for stormwater. Climate resiliency, we're going to try to integrate that in any projects we can. If it's a 10-year design on a storm sewer pipe from an old chart, we're not going to probably use that because that's old stuff. We're going to update it and become more resilient. And just take the regional approach for watershed collaboration. We have our drain commissioner here tonight who's going to be talking in a little bit too, but working together to, because stormwater really doesn't understand boundaries and political, it just goes where it needs to go downhill. So collaboration with our region is important. It's one of our OKRs as well, goals. So looking at infrastructure, life cycle replacements, you know, when it makes sense to put a brand new sewer line in such as we're doing on Madison this year, we're going to do it. But we have those other rehab type options available. And we just updated our clean water and drinking water state revolving fund project plans. You supported that real recently. I think we finished one in May and finished another in June. And those have projects laid out there for our future pending funding from the state program. So that's all I have for you. I'd like to open it up for discussion or questions if that's anybody has anything.

Questions?

Heather, go ahead.

And then Mitch, I saw your hand.

At that post-flood EGLE forum with the legislators, Senator Moose really wanted a marketing tool to get, to use for proactive funding for critical infrastructure. So I hope that you're going to send him this as well as John Roth.

Yeah, we can definitely share this with our legislators.

Yeah, he really wanted something that he could use to show this is what happens. This is what doesn't happen if you spend money ahead of time.

Yeah, that's great. Thanks for recalling that and mentioning it.

Mitch, you had your hand up.

Yeah.

Yes, and to that point, I think that this is very good. Sometimes it takes, in our case, a month and a half after the peak of the flooding to fully analyze the numbers. do an after action report and put together a nice slide show. But is there a reason that some of this stuff couldn't have been communicated as soon as it was known that, say, we didn't have a leak or a spill from the sewage treatment plant into the river? Because just from the general public, I was getting a lot of comments, complaints about the what people felt was an undoubted certainty that there was a leak or a spill, but we didn't have one.

Correct. I think it could have been maybe disseminated a little bit earlier, probably came down to workload and priorities. And the situation that I think you're referring to at the wastewater plant, there was a lot of confusion with the public groundwater system that is discharging into the river from the project where we have to dig a deep excavation was approved by Eagle and then happened to have a bad smell for a weekend from a load of wastewater that was used our back truck was used to help out at the plant and we took out a load that was in a pipe that had been abandoned for some time so it you know, looking at it from the trail, I see where people were coming from. We tried to communicate that as best we could, but I appreciate your help in that world as well. You were fighting for the city very hard and you knew that we weren't just discharging raw sewage into the river. We would never do that. We care too much about this environment and the city and our jobs, so.

Any other questions? Go ahead.

Could you speak to what that water flowing out of the ground, what that, it looks like an artesian spring, but it's not.

Yeah.

So after the water goes through the UV treatment, and it goes out to the river, is that just like a relief for hydraulic pressure? What is that?

No, it's not related to our normal operations. The effluent that treated water that goes into the river is submerged and it's just upstream from the pedestrian bridge. You might see a little swirl once in a while on the surface. This is due to the $41 million upgrade project that we're working on. So the two circular clarifiers that are going to be replacing the, longer rectangular settling tanks they're getting ready to dig down 20 feet from the ground level and that's just full you know groundwater is only a few feet down so they're pumping groundwater with well points basically that's what they're discharging that while they start building that foundation and excavating and first got to excavate gotcha it's just a side effect to the construction that's going on there right now it's because i've never noticed it and then all of a sudden it was this big issue and we thought it was sewage brand new this year but due to the construction not anything to do with the treatment process

Okay, awesome. One of my questions was I was going to ask if you would speak to that, so thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. Thanks for getting somebody's back once again, Mitch.

Laura?

Yeah, I don't have any questions, but Art and Mark, thank you for that excellent presentation. I think to Commissioner Shaw's point, what I heard loud and clear is that the real story isn't what happened during the flood, it's what didn't happen. So we didn't see a major discharge into the river. We didn't experience widespread utility disruption. And Fish Pest helped save downtown from catastrophe and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in flood related damages to our downtown and our businesses. So truly this is a moment to celebrate and I really appreciate the presentation. Thank you.

Great. And I'll say to you really quickly.

Thank you. I was just saying thank you for that.

I actually want to thank Tech Ready at West High School. He had myself and County Commissioner Ashley Walter come speak to his government classes on Thursday. And I join in saying that it's wonderful that we can have an event like that and come in and say, here's what we did right. And of course you can't, nothing comes out unscathed. We know that some of the riverbank was affected around Fish Pass, which I think led some people to think that there had been a failure or the design wasn't correct. It's just a lot of water, as you showed 92% increase over the last time we had any kind of incident. The other thing, I guess I will take a moment and this isn't on you Art, so I will not attribute any of this to you, but I'm just gonna make the point. Is part of what you did bring up, though, is us doing that saved South Airport Road to a point and other things downstream. Right now, when we do road millages, when we do a lot of things, you all have your Board of Public Works that meets, which is great. But there's a lot of other things that are all contingent on each other. We are taxpayers to the county. The county does not pay for the city, though, on anything. And so us doing that helped them out. We also saw, though, that when South Airport was out for a week, plus with the failure on Beitner, 8th Street took much of the brunt of that as did Grandview Parkway. We are not involved in the road. We do not have a voice on the road commission though, and we do not have any appointments on the road commission because that is all the county. Those were choices that were made by the road commission that directly affected us as well though. So I just wanted to raise that point as we talk about cooperation and more conversations amongst our neighbors and our colleagues. You guys are doing a great job with public works, that's a great thing that's set up. I would just say that as we look at these incidents like this and take more holistic or 20,000 foot views, we start thinking of things like that because continuing along with, and Andy's presentation, Andy Smith's presentation next will show how we're also trying to kind of meld that together more, in all the ways we possibly can. Right now, the millages keep getting passed with what's ours is ours is the city, what's theirs is theirs is the county slash townships, and that might be fine for funding, but we probably have to take some bigger looks at some of the major projects that are going on and some of the major arteries east, west, north, south through our community so that we're all working more together to actually prevent these kind of major pressure points from happening when the unexpected does happen. So I just wanted to take a moment for that. You were the entree for that, sorry. This is not your responsibility, but I just wanted to point that out as we're having this conversation because that is also part of our regional cooperation. But you all did an amazing job, so we thank you so much. Thank you very much.

Go ahead, Jackie. First, a heartfelt gratitude to you and your team that, you know, a well-deserved victory lap. And thank you for being here to share the recap. When I try to look at this as a policy question, I find myself trying to balance the cost of preventing disaster with, you know, the cost of potential damage. And I wondered, do you have any tools, any guidelines, anything that could assist us in understanding how to make those really nuanced calculations and decisions?

I can't think of anything right off the top of my head but cause and effect is a big part of what I do in my evaluating prioritizing projects and the one along the river wall there addressing that situation with the sanitary sewer was a very high priority and it took literally several years if not more to get it done in the field there's a lot of hoops and just stuff to jump through but I don't really have like tool that I can pull off the shelf or in the computer at this point to share with you to help I'm just I'm relying on previous studies or information that's provided from a consultant or you know looking at five-year plans what's what's the highest priority from from that perspective and then we try to carry it out and takes funding and money and approvals through this commission, a lot of steps but I'm sorry I don't have a great answer for your question.

You know, maybe unanswerable but I do hope that if there's new technology or new tools that you become aware of that could help with that kind of balancing act, I hope you'll be back to us with that information. I do have, if it's all right, a follow-up question about the alley in the 100 block of Front Street. Is that okay? I think where that sinkhole appeared wasn't the first sinkhole in that location was my impression. And I wondered, is there a history of ground instability there that we should be aware of? Might it be connected with, you know, the early 20th century process of widening that alleyway for more function for the front street businesses and how would we go about exploring that?

So yes, to answer the first question, there has been a lot of like incremental smaller scale settling over time. We know that between where the sidewalk used to be and the wall, I think it's about a 10 foot area of soil and grassy area that keeps sinking. And you could see it over time with the parking meter posts and the parking pay station was sinking. So you know we're aware of that and that was due to undermining of that wall footing and the soil coming falling into the river basically below that wall footing and it just kept going little by little. This event just caused it to go much, much quicker. So it sped up that process and there was a higher flow rate, it was pulling more soil more over time quickly and it created that sinkhole. The repair that was done, the emergency repair addressed I would say in the 80% range of what we had seen happening. It ended up starting just above where that sinkhole was toward the Union Street and it went all the way through to almost the Cass Road, but it's a ways up from Cass. So there is a little bit more settling that we're aware of. And there is a parcel there that's owned by a private individual or partnership. And so we didn't go all the way through that parcel. It's just one area. So we kind of stayed on the, from the upstream side of that sinkhole down to the end of the city ownership at that point along the wall. And it was addressed with a longer term solution. So there was like an impermeable liner that went down after they excavated out where that picture was where the sewer pipe was showing. And then they laid that down. across where it was trying to get under that footing for all these years and where it did rapidly during this large event. And so then that was all filled back up with some kind of a slurry mix of concrete to keep it from, you know, moving anywhere and it stabilized that area and it extended beyond where that edge of footing wall was. So that's going to keep that area more stable And if any future project needs to dig through that, it's the type of material that can be excavated back out. So it's not like hard concrete where you'd have to remove it with crushing it or some other method. Hopefully that helps answer your question.

It does. Thank you. You're welcome.

Just a quick comment. This has been phenomenal. Thanks, Art and Mark, for your guys' great work. One of the things that I felt it was personally very helpful, and I hope I see more of it, is that sewer lining to prevent the infiltrate. I think that's making a bigger difference, and we're giving it credit for it. It really is those old clay pipes. Water soaks right through them when it's raining. Great. Thank you.

go ahead i i had a meeting with ben you know the one-on-ones it was two weeks ago i believe he said that if it wasn't for commissioner funk noticing that the trees were falling off there by rotary square you deserve a medal yeah that's what he said one more one more piece of sheet piling and it wouldn't even happen i was just i wanted to see what it looked like after all that rain after i dropped the kids off from school and just happened to be in the

right place at the right time but we're all very grateful for that still filled up full of water i feel really bad it wasn't you i thought about calling 10 minutes before i did it was taking more than 10 minutes to react but i did remember i do remember seeing you down there right after it happened we were talking a little bit and you said i was here i watched this

It would have been a viral video. I should have filmed it. It was pretty wild.

Well, now you know too that the 10 minutes wouldn't have mattered. So, Mitch, you've got your hand up.

Yes. In terms of celebrating what went right and acknowledging what could have gone wrong but didn't because we were proactive, we can even take a scope beyond the city Our city owned utility used to have three dams upstream from the river that were removed in the last 15 years. And as somebody that 15 years ago was an intern for the dam removal project, I had seen the failure scenario maps for those projects and it would have, likely been at least one of those dams had they been still in place would have failed if not several and that could have caused vastly more devastation than we ended up seeing absolutely domino effect there's that regional cooperation other questions or comments at this time

Well, thank you so much, Art, to you and your team. You're welcome. I appreciate the update for the public to see this and for all of us to have it at once and for all the work you all are doing and that you continue to push us to do. So thank you.

Thank you. Appreciate the support.

Thank you. And not unrelated, we will now move our discussion on to our stormwater management. And, Lauren, were you going to give this a quick tee up? Sure.

So I had some questions from Mayor Pro Tem Nass about stormwater utilities. And in that conversation, sort of realized we should probably do an update on this. And just for the new commission and the public to understand how we kind of landed on the idea of working with the drain commissioner on stormwater infrastructure. So as Art mentioned, stormwater doesn't know any political boundaries. But the drain commissioners in Michigan under the drain code have the power to work across political boundaries and to basically especially assess properties that are benefited by stormwater infrastructure for the implementation of that infrastructure and its maintenance and operation. So that conversation, there are some complexities with stormwater utilities that exist legally in Michigan. It's not a slam dunk. and um the last commission uh sort of went through the thought process of how best to deal with stormwater and landed on you know why don't we deal with the drain code work with our friendly uh drain commissioner that we have um and uh work with a process that is sort of tried and true and that we know it works and it's been legally tested and we won't spend our time litigating about stormwater instead we can spend our time and money and energy actually doing stormwater infrastructure. So I think Andy's gonna do a little background on how that works and how we landed here and then talk about the project that the city designated to start with as sort of our first foray into the drain code and where that's at right now because Andy's working on that.

My name is Andy Smits. For those of you who I haven't met yet, Little background, I'm a former city resident of about 12 years, and this is my second stage career. Prior life, I was a consulting engineer for about 30 years with a business called Inland Seas Engineering. And our clients included the city of Traverse City, Grand Traverse County, a whole host of private and public entities throughout the region and throughout the state and other states as well. I'm glad to be here tonight. I wanted to let you know a couple of things real quick. You're not in a time capsule. This is not a time machine episode. The date on the first slide is wrong. The save key wasn't hit properly after I changed the date. It's 2026. But this is the photo that was from a slide presentation I offered in 2024. It captures a good part of the city. And I wanted to use it in contrast with the most recent event that Art has just informed you about with resilience. This is right after the storm. I don't know if a lot of people have probably seen it already. It was phenomenal. And I want to tell you that living and working through it was life changing. I don't ever want to do that again. But we did survive it. The project that the city has elected to embark upon is called the 8th Street Outlet Drain, Drainage District, I should say. It's not a drain yet. I'll talk to you a little bit today about the administrative process under the drain code that Lauren alluded to as a, long-standing, well-tested process. The Drain Code is one of the oldest statutes on the books in the state of Michigan. The current version of the Drain Code is 1956, as amended periodically, but the Drain Code has existed since statehood, and actually in territorial times in various forms. A lot of people don't know it, but one of the leading causes of mortality and morbidity in the state was, believe it or not, malaria and a number of other water flood-related maladies that have troubled mankind since the down of time. The 8th Street Outlet Drainage District, or outfall, has been a problem for a long time. This outfall daylights into East Bay at the end of 8th Street. Your 2017 stormwater management plan, your 2017 asset management plan for stormwater identifies the area serviced by this outfall and it includes a stretch of Munson Avenue, from right around Hamilton Avenue or by the Cambria Hotel all the way down to 8th Street and then it makes a hard left turn and makes its way to the bay. A segment of 8th Street to the west of Munson also drains into this area. So it's a fairly short discreet drainage area and it's well documented by your asset management plan and so it's a great case study because this problem is we had long-standing water quality issues even with an effort to treat the outfall before its discharge this is a facebook post by someone who's been made anonymous but this person has lived in this neighborhood most of their life and documents to me at least uh... and a few other people that this is uh... a problem her father remembers the the Stormwater infrastructure that I described along Munson Avenue is probably 1960s vintage. It's an interesting conveyance beneath Munson Avenue. It's hard to imagine unless you look carefully as you drive it going on Munson Avenue to the east towards 8th Street. But the Munson Avenue slopes downhill quite a bit in that last block or two. And so the stormwater pipe up by Cambria is generally relatively flat line, doesn't have much of a slope. And since it doesn't have much of a slope, the diameter of that pipe is larger in order to convey stormwater. As the designer of that pipe progressed to the east towards 8th Street, the slope increased so they were able to reduce the diameter of the pipe. But at the same time, the number of inlets into that pipe and the number of flows added to that pipe increases as well as it collects more and more stormwater. So if you think about it, a narrowing of a pipe with the same amount of water in it is much like a fire hose. Imagine the nozzle of a fire hose. As the pipe gets smaller, the velocity increases. And this is very likely one of the causes of why the manhole blows off periodically at 8th Street and Munson, and why MDOT had to close the road for several days to repair an actual failure of the structure beneath the intersection. So this is a great pilot project, I think, for the city, because it uses the drain code, a long-established, well-documented, administratively transparent linear process to address both the water quality problem and perhaps we may find out a structural problem. As I said, this is longstanding. It does not appear to be related to lake levels. A lot of problems that we've seen recently with the high water of the 2020 era. These are aerial photographs from Google Earth that capture at different points of time and with different qualities of resolution aerial photography of the end of 8th Street and the outfall. As you progress earlier on in the top row, there's not a whole lot to be seen, but on the middle and right on the top row, you can actually see a discoloration in the water. I don't know if you can catch that very clearly, but it's dark at the bottom. That's likely organic sediment. from flushing of the pipe and the catch basins into the bay. It's even more pronounced in later pictures where the resolution increases and I've sort of circled the areas. I've actually waded into that to see the character of the sediment in the bottom and it's something you don't want to do without waders on. of a organic ooze and who knows what's in it but you know if you want to know what's in it just take a look at this other picture stuff that we don't want within a mile of the water intake for the city of trevor city so a great project doesn't seem to be related to lake levels it might be related entirely to the 1960s infrastructure that was installed by mdot This is a linear picture of the process from left to right of the drain code. It's a little bit complicated, so I've broken it down into sections, and I'll talk about these different sections as they proceed from early on in a prospective drain project to the actual end result, which could be construction. You'll see that there are three exit ramps in the process. This is not a process that the Drain Commissioner forwards on their own initiative. The Drain Commissioner is a servant or an administrator to different municipal corporations which are called drainage districts. When a drainage district is created, it is a municipal corporation and the prime minister of that corporation is the Drain Commissioner. to serve its needs in administration, in funding, in scheduling maintenance, and in representing the public. So we'll talk about the first block in dash red on the right. That's where we're at right now in chapter three. If you look at the blue timeline, you'll see a three and a four on there discreetly. We're in chapter three of the Drain Code, which is a application for laying out a drainage district. And so that application is dated November 8th, 2024. You may recall this to those of you who have served previously. It has a name now, and the administrative process includes what you see on that administrative block, that the application has been received, I've made an initial determination that it's practical to proceed. Quite possibly that could stand on its own as a measure of practicality. But one of the other options for drain commissioners who are not engineers is to hire an engineer and that has been done. The engineer for this project is the Spicer Group. that is the same entity that is serving the city's municipal separate storm sewer system permit application process. We'll get into that very briefly in a minute. But you can see that we are probably right about right now at the engineer surveyor process, getting fairly close to the end, as you'll see in the upcoming slides. The administrative process, again, is linear. There are go and no go stops, places for public input in this transparent process. In 2025, we pivoted a little bit or hit the pause button on proceeding with this application delineating and laying out a drainage district because the municipal separate storm sewer process had requirements for the city and a number of other entities within our community, including Leelanau County, uh... linoleum county road commission elmwood township all the areas that you see shaded in pink are urbanized areas according to epa and uh... the state of michigan is implementing uh... federal permitting process for stormwater in those uh... jurisdictions so working collaboratively with the city uh... we interviewed a number of engineering firms through a request for proposal request for qualification process And the Drain Commission has identified two different consultants as qualified to provide both MS4 services to the Drain Commission and to the county, as well as provide drain code services. Those are Spicer Group and Hubbell, Roth, and Clark, both firms well established in the state of Michigan, and I think both who have provided service to the city over time. If you look at item number five under the MS4 program, post-construction stormwater runoff program has a requirement for a permittee that regulates both water quality in its discharge and that discharge designated under a specific storm event. Now, Art described a storm event probability in, well, actually he was describing a flood event in terms of one in 500 years or 0.2%. It's a little segue here, but if you think about a probability with a high consequence for an outcome, I like to think about it like Powerball. If there was a bazillion dollars in a Powerball, and there was a 2% chance of it happening, would you buy a lot of tickets? Yes, because it's probably not that improbable that it's gonna happen. Somebody is gonna win, and it's gonna be a big outcome. So I like to think of stormwater in the same way. The outcome is dire in many cases. Dire in many cases, but It's probably not terribly productive that we talk about things with a probability of once in 500 years or once in 100 years. It's a probability of happening at any time in that year of 0.2%, which is really not that infrequent. The event most frequently that people don't talk about that dawned upon us with respect to the jeopardy that South Airport Road faced was actually in October of 2020. That was the last time the road almost closed and we almost lost it. That's not once in 500 years, that's once in six years or twice in six years. So, these are seemingly low probabilities but they can happen at any time. Nonetheless, in 2025, slight pause while we gathered permit applications, recruited qualified consultants and prepared for the future. This is where we're at today. The drain commissioner has hired an engineer, determined the area to be drained and that was largely achieved through, as I said before, your 2007 stormwater management plan and your 2017 asset management plan for stormwater. All the information associated with the infrastructure that could be gathered from both the city, from MDOT, from the county, from all public sources of information have been provided to the engineer of record. The route and type of construction is to be determined in this process. We're sort of wired already because we know it's not going to leave Munson Avenue and make a tangent through residential neighborhoods on its way to the bay. We're probably set with the same alignment that we have in the future as we have today, but that does not mean that we can't improve on the infrastructure that we have there. The bullet points you see with the dollar sign in front of them are actually cost expenditure items. So hiring an engineer, they will spend money to determine, verify the area to be drained. Your asset management plan includes actual visual observation of various drainage components, but the engineer of record has to verify that. At the margins, there could be different connections. There could be some need to do some surveying, land surveying for topography of pipe elevations. There could be the need for doing dye testing during a storm event to make sure that we know that the margin that's on the asset management plan is a solid margin because the drainage district, as I said, is going to become a, if it becomes a drainage district, will become a municipal corporation. and its boundary and its beneficiaries, its investors, if you will, all will reside within that boundary. So besides determining the boundary and the type and route of construction that would be typical for a drainage project, we're actually expanding the scope a little bit beyond what's minimally required in the drain code. The scope of work currently for the engineer of record is to actually develop a model allocation. So if they determine the route and course and estimated construction cost, They can also use that district boundary to determine a model for who's paying what portion of that construction cost. So when this effort is concluded, we'll not only have an idea of what to do and where to do it, but how much it's gonna cost, typically, and what fraction is to be paid by residents, what fraction to be paid by MDOT, what fraction to be paid by the county, the city, et cetera. So we're gonna go a little bit beyond so that the information you get on your pilot project give you the best model that you can possibly get on a go, no-go basis. Moving forward, the Gantt chart that you see, At the bottom of that slide is from the proposal from the consultant they're actually a little bit ahead of schedule, because they took them a little bit of time to digest the. voluminous information that was presented to them. and Now that they have that and have had a chance after the proposal to digest it, I think they're gonna be looking at mobilizing before Cherry Festival to detail the boundaries a little bit closer. We hope to have them in our community here in the next couple of weeks. And again, with the end result being that sometime this summer, early fall, this process, chapter three is concluded and then the applicant, the City of Traverse City can make a decision as can other qualified petitioners make a decision as to whether or not they want to proceed further and actually create a drain. Takes us back to this Byzantine chart. The highlighted area after chapter three is concluded is the petition. As I said before, this is a linear process. When this stage is done, when we have some idea of route and course, types of treatment or conveyances, and cost, and an allocation model, then either the city could petition, the county health department could petition, 10 freeholders could petition, anyone can petition for a drain. That petition results in moving forward along this timeline to the next block, which you see in magenta, and that is a board of determination. I said earlier the drain commissioner doesn't advance these things on their own. A board will be empaneled to take testimony from the drain commissioner and from the public at large at a public hearing, and that board will decide whether or not a drain is necessary. after a petition, a valid petition is received. If that is the case, well, let's just say that it is not the case. As you see, that straight up and down arrow, exit 86, it's over. No petition can be received again for a year. So it can be received after a year. Some new petitioner could come about. or we could have, again, one of these low probability, high consequence storm events, and somebody could petition a year and a day later. a new board of determination would be impaneled. They would take testimony and the process would start over. The Drain Commissioner's role in that is to impanel the board to find determinators that are qualified to take testimony to public notice and to orchestrate and record the minutes of such a public hearing. This is an excerpt straight from the code. So it's either go or no go. Following an evaluation petition, and the drain commissioner is just a bystander, an orchestra leader, if you will. Board of determination has got to be three disinterested county residents and property owners. And there's going to be an alternate as well. They can't reside in the municipality affected by the drain, so they're gonna be non-city residents if the petition is forwarded by the city. And they can't be county board members. The Board of Transition Meeting is an open meeting act, regulated meeting, and the noticing requirements are so far above and beyond the Open Meeting Act certified mailings will have to be sent to everyone within the district.

Can I ask a quick question? Who pays for the certified mailing? Is that the city, the petitioning body or is that the, does it come out of like a county budget for you or how does, where does that money come from for the mailing?

That's a good question. Typically, these funds are all expended from, at this point, from a county fund called the Revolving Drain Fund. Okay, great. If a project comes to fruition, and let's just say a drainage district is created, a municipal corporation exists, then that municipal corporation can actually borrow. They can finance. They can take gifts. They can sue and be sued. So it's a separate entity, and it has all those powers. Quite often, there's financing required for this to proceed, depending on the scale of the project. At least at the level we're at right now with the laying out the drainage district, the costs are not that significant. Okay, great. Currently, the budget for this effort is $28,000. Great. Now, when that process is completed, we have an estimate on cost, route, types of conveyances, et cetera, we'll have a larger, a better, more refined idea of total project cost from the engineer. And again, as I said, we'll have at least a first order model of how rate payers might pay for that over time.

Great. No, thank you for that.

And then presuming, again, the last block, presuming it advances beyond the board of necessity board of determination for necessity The final process would would advance actually Project construction documents would be assembled The project let Qualified bidders would be selected with a certain reserve on their proposal for construction cost to allow the administration of the project then to catch up and go through this administration for the final allocation of costs, noticing final day of review where people can appeal the allocated costs and the assessment. And when that is completed, then the project can be left. And I'm here to tell you, the first term of the second stage of career, the prior drain commissioner had awarded a construction contract for the Cass Road drain that was a $1.8 million project, and it started my second day in office. So once all the administration's done, that was completed in October of 2020, and then in January 2021, we were actually building. So it's relatively quick. As I said, this is a 1956 code. It's pretty well oiled. And of course the drain commissioner will avail itself to appropriate counsel for legal matters, for bonding, et cetera, as needed. So apportionment is based on benefits derived. Stormwater runoff is not a, is a right for each property owner, but you don't have a right to concentrate it, redirect it, or affect its water quality when it leaves one's property. So those who benefit from having their stormwater gathered and treated and conveyed will receive a benefit. And so benefits derived is the underlying principle for allocation of cost. You can imagine that An entity like Sam's Club, which actually at one time had a county drain, received a tremendous benefit from having the stormwater from its ginormous parking lot collected and conveyed and treated prior to discharge. So apportionment's different than assessment. Apportionment is the proportion of the total project benefit that's assignable to individuals and municipalities. municipal entities can receive at-large assessments for the benefits derived from improvements in public health, safety, and welfare or convenience, and road commissions and Department of Transportation can receive at-large benefits just from improvements to the transportation network. They can also receive assessments for supplemental benefits. For instance, if in the instance of the Cass Road drain that I mentioned earlier was my starter project, the Road Commission received a brand new box culvert underneath Cass Road. And MDOT received a brand new box culvert underneath the railroad grade to the east of Cass Road, south of South Airport. Each of those entities, was not only assessed for their benefit derived from the conveyance of water, but they were levied a special supplemental benefit assessment for the value of the infrastructure that was put into their property, the box culvert. So they paid a fraction of the actual construction cost just from the value received from having new infrastructure. So apportionment's not based on SEV or taxable value or zoning or future use speculation. It's benefits derived. It's very site-specific and circumstance-specific in each district. Impervious services mean a lot. Types of land use, industrial versus residential, make a difference. But it must be defensible because, as you saw in the flow chart, There is a day of review and people can appeal, and they do. It must be defensible, objective, consistent, and impartial. And when I say consistent, not only consistent within a particular allocation, but consistent with other allocations through time within the same county. So one could not have an allocation or apportionment process for the 8th Street outfall outlet that is radically different from the Cass Road Drain Project. The at-large assessments will largely be the same for municipalities in terms of the pro rata portion. So consistency is required under the law. These entities are not assessed. publicly owned lands or lands used exclusively for burial grounds, unless an entity agrees to be assessed. And last, again, just to highlight the exit ramps, this does not proceed unless someone wants it to proceed. The Joint Commissioner doesn't force the project. It happens organically by petition, by application. The city's made the application. We're in that process now, and we'll see what happens when it's done. I'd be happy to entertain any questions that you've got.

Questions from our commissioners? Go ahead, Mitch.

Yes, I presume that this will be determined through all the engineering work that will have to be done, but do you anticipate a change in the overall slope to be more consistently down the length of 8th Street rather than the current configuration of flat and then much steeper towards the end with the corresponding disparity in pipe size?

Well, I'm lucky that I had some experience with this before. Most drain commissioners, there's only about five drain commissioners in the state that are actually engineers. Most of them are administrators. But I respect my peers and I'm not gonna, I'll review their work, I won't prejudge it. My estimation of one of the problems with the slope on the pipe is inferential. It's not the result of independent engineering evaluation that it did, it just common sense dictates that reducing the pipe diameter and increasing the slope is gonna increase the velocity. What they come up with, I'm going to leave it up to them, and I'll review their work carefully, ask a lot of questions. I can't see that the slope is going to change that much, but what might change is the pipe diameter and types of conveyances that actually reduce the velocity. If it is a momentum problem at the end of Munson Avenue where it makes a hard left turn and goes towards the bay, if that is really the the result of a momentum change of 90 degrees of a lot of water moving really fast, then we'll have to do something about that. In water main infrastructure, and Art can support me on this, quite often when we have momentum changes in water main under pressure, we install things called thrust blocks at the momentum change. Typically a big mass of concrete at the elbow so that it resists the force of a pipe hammering water that changes direction suddenly. Maybe the analogy that most people might get accustomed to is driving your car down the road and turning the wheel suddenly. The car keeps moving, you move differently. That's the net effect of the change in the velocity factor. So the water makes an abrupt left-hand turn on its way to the bay. And perhaps that high velocity water is flushing out the treatment unit at the end. We don't know. It's suspected at present, but we're going to verify that. And if we need to address both water quality or a greater residence time in the treatment unit or reduction in velocity through increasing pipe sizes or some potential interim storage. We're going to have to figure that out. There's not a lot of room beneath the public highway to do a lot of storage.

Yeah, that was my next follow-up was if this was like the Miller Creek area, then you can have, essentially flood areas that are built as ditches for excess capacity. But there's very little space above ground. And below ground, yes, we can install tanks. But where those get put can be a tough question from an engineering standpoint, and how much capacity that increases relative to how much you need.

I'm hopeful we find some area west or north of Munson along 8th Street. for some storage or some treatment capacity or velocity change. As you've driven that, it's an old neighborhood. It's not a great deal of right of way in there. And I haven't looked to see what other complexities we have with other infrastructure within the roadway. But that's part of the engineering process. We're going to look for anywhere and everywhere that we can to make improvements.

Great. Thank you. Glad we have you as an engineer in one of the five, so thank you for that.

Other questions? Go ahead, Laura. I have two questions. One is how, this was a pilot project, how will we know if the project was successful?

I'll know when the people along The avenue stopped calling me. Okay. When we don't have dead birds floating around. So that's one of the metrics. We'll see it in water quality. Okay. We'll see it probably in this process. One of the objectives that I've asked the engineer to consider in their evaluation is to either televise or actually enter the manhole structure at 8th and Munson so we can actually see what happened. MDOT's records of their repair of that structure are poor. We don't know exactly how it failed or what they did to put a bandaid on it. We just know that the road was closed for several days and they made a fix and then put the lid back on. But I remember it being closed and it's not the first time I saw it closed.

Okay. And then what should guide how we evaluate future projects that the city embarks on similar to this?

That's a good question. And I think that's something that everybody sitting here will want to talk about. You know, one of the ways, I think just from your citizen input, from your community input, you're gonna see at these public meetings levels of support or dissent from the process. You're gonna see through this cost model whether or not the cost for the infrastructure that you see on this slide, the stormwater infrastructure is a rate payer basis that's similar to water, sewer, cable, or, you know, for those who still have a landline, copper wire. So I think that's one of the measures. And the other advantage is this is a municipal corporation. There's a process for it to be dissolved. It's not a simple process, but it's going to be, If it's established, it's going to be here forever, and it's going to be a living entity. And there will be assessments for maintenance of the infrastructure over time that are not general fund allocations from the city. So that's another measure. You're not going to see this fraction on your general fund cost on your balance sheet. This will be something that's subscriber-based.

Great. Thank you. I think it's Heather and then Ken. And then Jackie.

Jackie. Well, that leads into my question which is cost. You mentioned residents may pay, county may pay, the city may pay. When you say residents, do you mean all the residents of Traverse City? No. Not just that neighborhood or just that neighborhood?

That's a great question. So, I didn't put a slide in here because it was already kind of a thick deck. And I wasn't sure what kind of appetite you'd have on a nice summer night. But the assessment process includes a two-tiered levy. It starts off with the at-large assessments. So at-large municipalities are assessed, the city, the county, the road commission. they will have a fraction of the total cost which is taken off the pie chart and allocated to them as an at-large assessment. The remaining beneficiaries of the drain service are then individual property owners and they'll have their own formula their own allocation of cost imagine a residence and there's several I think that I can recall right along East Bay Boulevard that have beautiful rain gardens you know that are managing stormwater on their own property they don't receive much benefit because they're already taking care of their stormwater but along Munson Avenue. I think if you look at some of the development that has happened there historically, you don't have a lot of treatment or storage along Munson Avenue. You've got hotels and businesses that run off either collection in their parking lot and discharge to the trunk line. And so they're receiving a greater benefit. So the formula will consider all those things for the non-at-large assessments or the per property assessment.

But since the outfall is so close to where we actually collect our drinking water, doesn't the entire city benefit from having better infrastructure there, better water quality?

So does Elmwood Township and so does Garfield Township.

And is that statute as well, how it gets assessed? As in, the question seems to be why is it not going to everyone and it's? By statute, it gets assessed on the people within the district, correct?

Even though we're all benefiting from this. And that's what the at-large allocation is for. So there's two tiers of the allocation. Some will be based on the actual property owners that are benefiting from the drainage. So they're not. So they're not getting flooded anymore per se. And some will go to those municipalities that also benefit from the infrastructure as well.

So to close the circle on your question, yes and yes. The city will receive an at-large assessment and individuals within the city will also. So one will come on a tax bill to an individual's address, a taxpayer address. The other will be assessed to the city, and I'm not sure what fund they would make that payment with, but it's two-tier.

Thank you. Ken? it jackie was first no please go ahead you please well you you mentioned this particular um drain district has been a good case study and i'm assuming that part of that is because the district boundaries themselves might be much more compact than say the cass street drain and you also in your presentation mentioned that um Publicly owned lands, you know, are exempt from assessment. Would that include something like the airport facility which is, of course, full of impervious surface and located relatively close to this particular drain site?

Well, that wouldn't fall in this district, but that's a good question. And I would be remiss if I just shot an answer off without researching it. I believe the airport would qualify as one of those public entities that would be exempt from an assessment. Okay.

Thank you.

But I have to check to see if an airport authority is a different matter for at large.

Mm-hmm.

Good point.

Okay. what is the benefit of entering into this drainage district versus just appropriately managing our city stormwater on our own because everybody benefits so it seems natural that if everyone benefits everyone could pay but why create the district which is this legal entity that seems to be a can of worms in itself and just the people that are in that district pay and everybody else benefits from it Why enter into the district? Is there some significant other funding available through the state, through federal funds that we can access or grants? I guess it's, why make a few pay for something that so many would potentially benefit from?

I think Warren's also ready to answer that legally.

Well, I can take a stab at a couple of the reasons. So first of all, while some public entities might not be, are exempt, exempt tax exempt properties are not exempt so that's one reason one way we can get at a cost that is actually a burden on the entire city and the taxpayers um because if this were to be financed by just taxes things like churches or the hospital or the the college or other entities that are tax exempt don't pay that so they they will pay uh benefit to the drain commissioner for this infrastructure, whereas we could not recuperate that through taxes to the city if the city is going to take charge, build this infrastructure on its own, and then the taxpayers would be subsidizing that. um the other thing that's really important i think i mentioned this before is that drainage districts really go along watersheds and not along political boundaries so this particular proposed drainage district is all within the city of traverse city that was my next question but other ones the drain commissioner can capture a drainage district that goes across Garfield Township into the city or things like that. So right now the city is the basin where all of the water drains in to get out to the bay. So really the city has been subsidizing the region by taking care of all of the storm water that ends up in the city and it all does. instead of those other surrounding areas helping to pay for that infrastructure. So if we get into a drain that, you know, a good example is kind of what comes down from Hickory Hill area in Garfield Township and ends up, we saw that with the reconstruction that we did on, what street is it madison madison jefferson that whole thing um a lot of that water comes not from the city but the city paid for all of that infrastructure so we that's another way of you know regionally dealing with these issues that the city can't capture that there's no mechanism for the city to have other outside entities help pay for that but the drain commissioner can do we have any districts that already exist in the city anywhere not not right now have we ever entertained the idea of entering into a drainage district this is the first this is the first sort of foray and this was the result of that whole conversation that happened with the last commission of how do we do this in a way that is equitable and that really deals with the issue of stormwater because stormwater, like I said, flows in and out of boundaries. So really trying to deal with it as a region and use the tool that we have that we know is legally solid to do that.

Other questions?

If I could?

Jackie?

Oh, Andy probably has something more to say.

Riff, one more little thing off that. There is one other advantage, too, in that when it comes to financing, again, this is construction that happens before any assessment is made, or basically the capital is secured to make construction happen before the first bill is paid. The drain commissioner can ask the County Board of Commissioners to pledge full faith and credit of the entire county to lower the debt obligation or the debt service obligation if they agree. And they did so on the Cass Road drain, resulting in a lower interest rate for that project.

Jackie, go ahead. This is a background question. I took a very brief look at some of the highlights of the 2017 stormwater asset management plan. At that time, I understood there was An expectation that there might have been some modifications in state legislation around stormwater management and stormwater management utilities and I wondered did anything ever happen, nine years ago, what are we still where we were then.

Lots of lawsuits. Sort of. So there's a case called the Bolt case out of Lansing that sort of originated this. And the really quick and dirty of that is that stormwater utilities have been found pretty consistently to be a disguised tax. So it gets at this question of when municipalities are trying to raise funding for this sort of orphaned utility that has no funding associated with it, is that a fee? Is that like a water fee or some other type of fee or is it really a tax? And because of the Headlee Amendment, if it's a tax, it has to be voted on or else it's not legal. And so that's where we kind of hit a wall of, you know, how do we get at a utility without wasting all of our time on a lawsuit about whether it's a fee or a tax. And maybe at the end of the day, you know, finding out, well, it was a tax and we couldn't do it and now we're right where we started. And so there have been bills introduced between then and now to sort of correct what that case did in the statutes and in the legislation to allow a statutory authority for municipalities to actually do stormwater utilities. And those bills kind of have come and gone. There's currently some bills that are sitting And they've been there for a while. So I don't have a great optimistic hope that the legislature is going to save us on this. And that's also part of the reason why when we talked most recently, we thought, well, we're going to try and partner with our regional partner and go with what we know we can do. We know for sure.

And the issue of a stormwater utility tax has never been brought before the voters of Traverse City?

It has not.

Okay, thank you.

But we could never put it out to the county to have them share in that burden though, right? Right, so that's- Again, we're isolated, we're an island.

Yeah, that would authorize for the city proper. Yeah, that's correct.

Other questions? All right. Thank you, Andy. That was a good roadmap. I appreciated the literal exit signs for us and going back to it. That's always helpful.

Thank you for having me tonight. And as we proceed throughout the summer, I'll work with Ann and give her regular updates and perhaps public comment, update you all.

Great. Thank you so much. All right, moving on to our next agenda item, which is the city attorney search. Since this has my name on it, I'll kick it off. Have the memo in here that was a broad summary, as I mentioned last week. These can be conducted probably unless somebody has a creative new idea, kind of how we've done the city manager in the past. I see it was suggested 45 to 60 minutes. I would suggest we give ourselves a full 60. What was not exactly itemized in here, but I wanted to clarify how we've done in the past is, for example, Thursday morning we will just be interviewing one firm and the rest on Friday just because of scheduling. We will interview a firm and then the staff department heads will interview alternating because the legal counsel advises both the city commission and staff traditionally and city manager leads both city commission and staff. We have traditionally invited them, department heads for input. We would get notes from them. Ultimately, it's our decision. Ultimately, it's what we want. But the city attorney advises everyone in the city, not just the city commission. And so just like the city manager leads everyone in the city, not just answers to the city, or only answers the city commission, but leads the city, we have always done that input in there. So that was left out of the memo. So those, and then what would happen is, Thursday should be pretty straightforward because we just have the one firm. But Friday where we would have two firms, we'd want to get notes. After we've kind of talked this through the process, the clerk's office and others will come together and put an agenda together for us. We have an idea of what the day will look like as well. We'd want to give time to collect notes. Give ourselves time to look them over as well and give ourselves a liberation time. So I would say Friday is going to be a full day potentially. So just plan for that. Um, the other thing I would say is, uh, that as we're going through this process, uh, your notes are foilable, FOIA-able, sorry. So they will be collected, they are going to be available, so just that's something to keep in mind that that is part of our deliberation are our notes during those interviews. So I just wanted to say that at the head too. So with that, I just will open up for everybody's thoughts right now. Go ahead, Heather.

How about the input from department heads and staff? Are we going to be able to see that? Yes. And even on Friday? Yes.

Because we're going to be all- The goal is that after the city commission has interviewed the candidates and the staff has also done that, there'll be a brief pause while we gather everything. And then the notes from the department heads and staff will be given to you to also review. So you will have that information for your discussion and deliberation.

And then you're going to collect our notes as well, and those go into some files somewhere.

They're just there in case somebody foils us, yeah. And we can keep our own notes until after deliberation. We don't have to hand them over early or anything like that. So we have them to reference from, you know, Friday afternoon to Thursday. Nobody takes them, you know, there's nothing in between. I think one question I would have is we do want to give ourselves some time to breathe there after the interview. So are we thinking we'll have like a, some light refreshments or something that the interviewees and us can partake in, and then we'd come back to deliberate to give us that time to breathe. So maybe some sandwiches or something, because we will be here all day. We give anybody who wants to that's been interviewed, because one will be finishing with us, one will be finishing with staff, the chance to mingle with us. Even in the past when we've done that, media's in, public's in. It's not closed session or anything, but it's another opportunity to interact with the interviewees as well. That will probably be built into that process during the day, correct, Sarah? Correct. Yeah, so go ahead, Jackie.

I wondered which department heads will be providing input.

All department heads, correct?

All department heads are invited.

Yep, whoever is available. Yep. Great, cool. And wants to participate.

And then looking forward, I'm presuming there's going to be an opportunity for us to have a discussion of process and how we're going to manage the the requesting of legal services from an outside firm. Absolutely.

And so I think what we'll decide on, the way I kind of see this playing out is Friday morning we'll have our interviews, we'll have our time to digest what everybody has. As well as making our decision, our deliberation and decision on that, we will be talking about kind of high level probably some of the things we'd like to see in the contract. We can't get into nickel and diming at this point. We don't have time for negotiation, but In my mind, for example, Lauren has in her contract, just like Benjamin does, we have quarterly sit downs and reviews, right? So we'd probably want that for our new firm to make sure that we're all on point and touching base. But in addition to that, we will need to decide our own policies of what that looks like requesting services. We don't have an open door attorney anymore. And that will also have to come, we will also want Benjamin's input on that because we will need to know what the policy will be for staff and that demand because ultimately it's our hire and our budget, obviously, but that's part of our budget. So what ultimately might happen is we, and what I want to hold off before we have too much is to hear what they have to say too, right, about what their thoughts are on how they'd approach us, what they think would be a good relationship. We might even be picking that up at the July 6th meeting or something because we ultimately want to go into a contract and have them so that Lauren can start with the handoff, but that we might be, how we interact and things might be just something that we hash out in the very, very near future, but we don't inherently have to have because at the end of the day, it's who we think is the firm that's going to represent us the best through our questions. And then how we interact with them is our policy decision, not theirs. So we don't actually have to do that before we have the contract with them in my thoughts. And we can all disagree, or we can all have bigger conversations about that. But I also don't want us to try and be itemizing a contract, have a defined policy, and hiring a firm all on Friday afternoon. in a very short course of order so that we have that all hammered out before people are sitting there, you know, on July 15th saying, oh, I have this really big question about the packet and I don't know who I, if I'm allowed to ask our attorney or not. So, we definitely don't want to get into that space at all, so.

Got it. Thanks.

Yeah, Laura.

I have one question and then some comments. Will we be receiving a packet prior to Thursday or will we be arriving and picking up packets?

Okay. Well, we do post the time though, right, and the agenda.

Yeah, so there will be an agenda that lists which firm you're interviewing. Okay. But the packet will be available, the questions.

So kind of like an interview binder or something? Yeah, yeah. Okay, correct. Great. And then a comment. So to Commissioner Anderson's point that as we are moving from in-house counsel to an outside counsel model, managing the relationship with the firm is going to be just as important as selecting the firm. And so the most expensive legal bills aren't necessarily going to come from our negotiated hourly rate, but they're going to come from the absence of clear expectations, oversight, and discipline in how we use this new model. So again, to Jackie's point, we're going to need to focus on expectations and practices for both staff and commissioners to control our costs. and to ensure that our legal resources are focused on the city's highest priorities. And so I look at this as two things that are going to be absolutely essential. One is the city manager will need to develop some very specific policies and procedures around staff access to legal services. Some type of gatekeeper model I think is going to be key. And then second, the commission is going to have to establish our own protocol on how we are going to be accessing legal counsel. This is going to be a completely different model from what we're used to. And I think that the topic on how the commission establishes that protocol it fits well with our next agenda topic in terms of commission rules. And it also fits into our ongoing discussions and shared agreements on our own expectations. And then third, I hope that there's some opportunity to discuss and maybe as Mayor Shamro alluded, maybe in July, how we can establish some oversight mechanisms of reviewing those invoices at least in the first six months to a year. I think it's going to be really important that from a transparency standpoint and from kind of looking at trends and overall uses before we have a runaway train of legal expenses that we have some oversight. So I appreciated your comment and that's something that I've been thinking a lot about how we can put these structures into place.

Agreed and so I would say that and this kind of rolls into one other point that I was going to make is I think those are certain things that you know if people haven't submitted questions already or think of a couple more we promise we'll have them by like tomorrow. But as those thoughts are in your head too, if there's any questions you want to ask of the council while they're in front of us, I don't want to throw too many out, but I don't think anybody would think of this as a curveball, is, you know, what municipal experience do you have and how have you worked with bodies before, right? And so they might say, I recommend X amount of hours per month. They might have something totally different. So I think that can be stuff that we can glean a little from their perspectives, but ultimately it's our policies to make and it's our decisions. And so with that, though, one of the other items I wanted to point out that has happened in a couple different ways, but What we found worked well was we've submitted all the questions to Christine. Christine has some too that just are good HR-based questions. In the past, we've been given kind of a packet with all the questions in it, and everybody just picked one to ask that they wanted. Most of the time, at least one of their own. We're probably going to, in an hour, have a chance to ask maybe two questions a person, maybe less. And so that's how we've done in the past. They're then vetted by Christine, at least for legality and things like that. Or if people wanted to and say, you know, I really like my questions. I want to make sure nobody else asks them. We could have everybody kind of state claim their own questions too. So does anybody have a preference? Are we good with a one sheet or what? How do we feel about that? Go ahead, Jackie.

I actually included in my question submissions one regarding best practices for cost-effective use. So, you know, I would like to, you know, focus on the questions that I had identified. Okay.

I think that maybe if you would, if everybody has, like, pick your top two or so because, again, time. I'm hoping lawyers aren't giving us enough. Yeah, I was gonna say, I'm hoping lawyers aren't giving us short enough answers that we get through several rounds with seven of us in an hour. That then maybe stake that claim to Christine in your email of which ones you'd really like to kind of own. Let's say three of them, just in case somebody else also owns a similar one and the order just puts them first. And then we will have the kind of unclaimed or general questions. Christine, why don't you put those kind of in a handout for us so that we all have them available on hand if we need them. So does that sound good to everybody then? And if you don't have a question in mind or you put one or two that were already asked, there will be that list of other questions that have been vetted or that others didn't claim because they maybe sent six in or something like that. So does that work for everybody?

I haven't submitted my questions yet because I was waiting to have this discussion. Sure, absolutely. So we can submit those ASAP? Yep.

Okay. Perfect. Other, wait, okay, other questions to Heather and then Laura?

Do we know the order of the interviews, like who's first on Thursday and?

I don't want to tell them. No, I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding. Keep them on their toes.

Well, I'd like to know to be prepared on Thursday.

And the- We will be asking the same questions to all of them, though, too. So whoever we have on Thursday, whoever we have on Friday, first and second.

I had specialized questions for each.

We typically have done that for legal reasons of making sure we're being fair to each person. I think there's an opportunity in the past, we've asked for clarification and follow up on a general question to the specific person, but we don't want it to be too specialized, because then it could look like we've got fingers on scales, is how we've done it in the past, correct? Yeah. Is that, if you want to elaborate, if not, if it's just yes, that's fine.

Yes. Take your pick.

So what we've done in the past is we look at all of the questions that you guys have submitted. We create questions that are similar and kind of condense that. And then if you have something specific, I will write that down as a follow-up question if that's not answered through the questions that were provided.

Yeah, it's tough. I mean, you've got one firm that's got how many, 100? Mm-hm. And you've got another one with eight. So those create different kinds of questions about how. Mm-hm.

Well, that's where, to use Jackie's example of a question, and Laura said she had a similar one of, you know, economics, economies of scale and keeping things, you know, good budget. that would be an opportunity for a large-scale answer how that applies to them and a smaller one to answer how that applies to them. And we can always ask follow-up questions on it. Go ahead, Jackie.

Will there be one individual representing each firm?

They're supposed to be, right? Yes. That is correct. And Laura, you had your hand up.

I have a question on timing and either Mayor Schamro or Lauren if you could respond. So following the interviews and the deliberation on Friday, when do you expect we'll return to the commission with a final retainer agreement for approval who will be working out the details of that agreement because there, I know the hourly rates were included in the RFP but the structure of those rates and there's a lot of details to this that I think do still need to be worked out and how are we going to be approaching that?

Well, typically what happens is if this commission is ready to make a decision on Friday and select the firm, then you could make a motion on the Friday afternoon and say something like the commission would authorize some sort of a team to negotiate and bring back uh the agreement for consideration um that team could be you know it's the commission's call the mayor myself the city manager how you want to handle that ms bosley if if you want that's up to the commission and we can try and turn that around as quickly as possible um could be Already by Monday, we could put a placeholder on.

That would be my question is, could you be ready by Monday?

It just depends on how prepared the firm is to do that. Lift over the weekend, I'm prepared to do it. You know, if not, the commission could have another special meeting just to approve the contract. So we'll try our best to turn that around as quickly as possible.

Because we, you know, in the municipal attorney world, we have had in-house counsel for the standards for when people have had, you know, what we're looking at this model, is it usually a fine detailed contract to start with or is it more of a retainer with a couple of caveats that then get hammered out as we kind of figure out our policies and our usage and see the trends and other things that have been mentioned already that we'd be looking at in the near future and distant future?

in general it'll be a retainer agreement you know with the general a lot of general terms but you there are going to be some points that you probably want to drill down deeper travel costs expenses things like that attendance at meetings might be one of them whether you prefer that person in person or maybe once that relationship is established if you have that person by, you know, video conference or something. So there are a number of things that can still be negotiated other than, you know, basically the hourly rate was part of the RFP.

And even though, I mean, this is a kind, even though technically we don't, we always love to negotiate contracts in public, would it be prudent of us to have a list of suggested things like that from you on Friday that we could also talk about after making our selection so you have that up front and everybody knows at that point the deliberation will be done? We can include that as part of our discussions on Friday so that it's not one committee and blind. Okay, that'd be great.

I can put together some bullet points and then during the discussion if others come up, we can add them to the list. Okay. Great. Other questions or comments right now?

Go ahead, Ken.

How do we anticipate that the actual selection process is going to go? Like are we going to rank them and score them points and then add up the points to find a, a winner are we going to just everyone's going to go across and say who they like the most and if somebody gets four and the other one gets three we're going with one that gets four what lends what lends the most to fairness to best interest i have a first choice i have a second choice i have a third choice do i score them all separately that's kind of what i'm wondering is how we're going to go about the selection of the actual firm

And it would be deliberation, one way or another, even if we have a rubric, it would be deliberation amongst us all. So it could be like we did when we, I mean, I'll be honest, when we go back to how we picked who we're interviewing even, we had six choices and three- We scored them. We scored them based on everybody's feedback.

But the whole point of that meeting was to just discuss who do we want to interview? Right. And we didn't really put a lot of discussion into that ahead of time. We could have interviewed all five of them, but for the appropriateness of time, we narrowed it down to three when we could have gone with two.

But if, I would argue too, though, if four had pretty solid followings between them, we would have done four. It turned out to be three because three firms rose to the top. We could have had two firms. I doubt we would have gone on just one firm at that point with all the work and efforts that were put into the RFPs. Oh, yeah. But, you know, so I think some of this is us deliberating. There is no magic formula to say this is 100% how we arrive because it's going to be all of our, we are all going to bring our own biases and our own opinions and our own priorities into how, why we like certain firms over others. Heather and then Jackie.

Because this selection involves money, do we need a super majority?

Do we need five people? Jackie. Jackie.

I think it would be very helpful to at least have a short list of criteria against which we're going to be thinking more deeply about each of the firms. a list of five attributes that we felt were important to how we were going to work together and then had the ability to do, I hate the sticky dots, but they work. And so we could do some sort of numeric or other feedback on those specific criteria I think would help to add a little structure to the conversation and then take it further. Lance?

So without adding structure, I like where you're going, but it's also very predictable and people can speak to it, right? It is. One way, a couple boards I've sat on where we've hired either an executive director or a firm, we've put up, we're gonna be in the staff training room, right? Yeah, so we've put up sheets of paper and objectively just gone through each firm pros and then each firm cons and somebody, maybe Sarah scribes that and so it's in front of everybody and then we're all visually looking at it. And then from there, we just have a more robust discussion, because you're gonna have that same, you're gonna have different pros and cons for each one, and everybody's gonna have different pros and cons, so just an idea.

And I think that's, yeah, the deliberation process.

Yeah, part of the deliberation process, and you're kind of then staring at everything in front of you, right?

And I think that'll be the good thing. I understand the structure, but I think that will be the good thing about the deliberation process, because as people speak, and then as we get answers in interviews, having gone through this with city manager and TCLP and DDA heads, that sometimes, for me, sometimes it's what comes out in the interviews, right? We know we're looking for people with deeper benches. We're looking for people who can handle the bigger array of things, the majority of the array of things that we go through, like zoning and contract labor and things like that it's so that sometimes is where the difference is it's that everybody has the different experience is that always quantifiable in a in a way like i think sometimes the impressions come out we've seen people that on paper are great this happens in any job interview and then they get in front of you and they don't interview as well or you don't they don't communicate in a way that jives with you that might be something that I personally think about somebody, and then Jackie may be like, I was hearing them perfectly, and that's why I really liked them more. That's part of the deliberation process, too. So we can try to make it as objective as possible, but at the end of the day, we're all bringing in our own perspectives, too, and that's part of why we deliberate publicly is so the public hears that. So that gets into Lance's pros and cons list versus a rubric of strict criteria or something like that. Go ahead, Mitch.

Yes, I'd say it's premature before we have not just had our deliberations but even heard the interviews themselves and seen how the different candidates distinguished themselves or not. Plus we have the already submitted materials from packets last week. But procedurally would it be possible as we're going through deliberations to either have a rank choice vote or a straw poll for which the results would be viewable only to say the city clerk to gauge how close we are to consensus before we actually have a vote?

My understanding from previous is we cannot do that because all of our deliberation has to be public. And so doing something that only the clerk can see is not public. So that is where the deliberation. Now, we could at the time, and I guess I would say be prepared to maybe have something that gives us a ranked choice or something like that if it gets to some tight deliberation. But I think we did it at one time with the buttons and that got, people got wrong answers on, yeah, I see Sarah remembers this. So sometimes it's better for us to just do the old-fashioned talking it through, here are my top three, or I'm torn between these two, or this is my number one specific, and seeing where that lands us in the immediacy, and then from there finessing We have an HR professional that's here to help us. We have our clerk that's here to help us to help us drill down a little bit more on that. And I know that's a little bit loose, but it is part of the public deliberation process. Why we can't do what a lot of firms and other things do where it's more, we're gonna put these in an app or we're gonna rank them and anonymously hand them in and rank from names in a hat. We can't do that. We have to be very, very public about what we do in our deliberations.

Yeah, I just don't want to end up in a situation where we have, say, three people go with one person and then two with another and then two with another or even four with one person and then the other three are split. And then feeling like there's then pressure to get five votes for the person that three or four people had as their first pick when there could be more agreement for somebody.

I understand that, I think, though, too, through deliberation that comes out, right? Yeah, we'll see. And so we'll see how that works. But I think that that's how the sausage is made, too. And that's why we do it publicly. Yeah.

I mean, we did choose to advance three candidates. But last week, we could have said, hey, we're going to have a vote. And who is everybody's first pick? And we might have hit five votes right there.

Yeah. It could have, but we also could have had that whenever we shared if all number one was the same for everybody. So go ahead.

I think it was Heather that asked the question on will we be interviewing one attorney from each of the firms. And I know it's a nuance, but I think it's important to remember that Even though we're hiring a firm, we are still hiring a lead attorney who is going, that's a requirement in our charter, who is going to be our city attorney. And so I personally, for these interviews, I would be very focused on the experiences in municipal law of that lead attorney, as well as their style and their fit with the city commission. I think that is going to be paramount in the decision. Selection of a city attorney is one of our most important responsibilities as a city commission. And I think we really have to stay focused on those criteria in terms of not just costs, but also their experience, their style, and their fit with the city commission. Mm-hm.

Go ahead, Heather. When was the last time a city commission chose both a city manager and a city attorney?

Oh, that's a good point.

It's probably.

It's a record. Probably never.

Maybe never. Maybe a very long time. Trivia question. Who's good at that? Who's good at that deep research? Lance. That's a good point. It's a great point, Hunter. Yeah, Mitch. He'll have an answer for us next week. All right. Are there any other things? Go ahead.

So this is going to be 45 minutes. 60, I think. I'm sorry, 45 to 60 minutes per attorney. It's just Q&A. There's not going to be any presentation, no chance to listen to them, kind of tell them about themselves. Because I mean, that could be a question. That could be a question.

Yeah, that's a question for sure.

It's a weak question.

But as you're pointing out, it's valuable information. Not always. So there's no weak questions when it helps us make a decision, right? And so I would say, yeah, please feel free to submit some more questions still until when tomorrow, Christine? When's the other drop-dead date to have it ready by Thursday?

How about end of business day tomorrow?

Perfect. All right. And then also with that, if you already submitted questions and there are two or three that you want to stake your claim on, let Christine know as well. We can keep those off the list, but know that they are pre-approved by her. And if she suggests a wording choice, please take it, because that means that she is protecting us legally in how we're asking our questions. So anything else from the commission for clarification before Thursday? All right, everybody. As Heather said, we're tasked with yet another big decision. And we'll start it on Thursday morning at 9. We'll plan on 60 minutes. That will give us some time. We'll be fair. That's the other thing. We will be fair on the time that we're giving everybody as well. So it might be that one commissioner asks two questions and another commissioner only gets to ask one per candidate, and we all get to ask two for another. It'll just depend on the answers and the time we're allotted. Okay, with that, we will now move on to our last agenda item of the day, which is the city commission rules, and we will hand that over to you, Sarah, thank you.

Wow, I get to speak.

You do, you are, you're the main show.

All right, so city commission rules, these are your rules, not my rules, they're your rules. I'm gonna go briefly through these, and then we can have some discussion. If you have questions, I hopefully can answer them. If not, Lauren's here. So rules one through three, so regular meeting schedule, first and third Monday, 7 PM. This is in the city ordinances, that's how that's set. Oops, sorry. Rule number two is the order of business and the agenda for the regular meetings. So this is what gives me my guidelines on where I'm putting stuff on the agenda and when I have to have it prepared and published. So for regular meetings, it has to be published the Thursday preceding the regular meeting, no later than 1159 PM. Mind you, I am not working that late. I'm usually asleep at that point, so it is getting published by 5 p.m. The deadline for study sessions is 5 p.m. the Thursday before, so I kind of try and keep it consistent any time between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. is my target window because I like to sleep. I'm not waiting until almost midnight. Three is the consent calendar. Typically, as you're aware, these are items that we feel are non-controversial, fairly routine business, things you see frequently. You're approving the consent calendar with one motion. That one motion is basically making all the recommend motions the motion. Just kind of like swoop all the business together. Four through nine, so orders of business at special meetings. So these are only matters that are specified in the meeting notice. So like Thursday and Friday, we're interviewing the city attorneys. This is a special meeting for that. Special meetings allow action to be taken at the meeting. Study sessions, no action. Presiding officer, that's the mayor. If the mayor is unavailable, it's the mayor pro tem. If both of them are unavailable, it's me. I hope that never happens. But it's me up until somebody from the body is selected as the presiding officer. I'm only gonna do it for a short period of time. Rules of order were governed by Robert's Rules. Or the abridged version, I have both. Great study material. Motions, every motion or resolution require a second. This is before putting it to vote and before debating. So if you want to have discussion, I need a motion and a second please. No motion to reconsider shall be entertained unless it's by a member of the voting in the majority. and I'm giving you guys, remember the quick sheet? I'm still working on updating it, it's almost ready. Agenda modifications, so you can modify the order of the agenda at a regular or special meeting. Sometimes we'll put something under new business or old business and maybe there's a lot of interest in it and we'll need to reorder it and hear it before everything else. That can happen at the meeting. The presiding officer makes that call and decision. So considerations of matters referred at the regular meetings. The commission shall not consider any matter referred or submitted to it by any city official or officials acting unless it appears on the written agenda.

And to clarify that, because there was a question. So if an item is on the agenda to be discussed and take action on, it might not be the motion in the packet. So we've had that before where we've added public art to the approval of a process or something like that. It's still allowed because it was on there with the idea of action being taken. What we can't do, though, is say maybe there was an update, like tonight, let's say the arts update on infrastructure had been on a regular agenda. There's no motion in it, but suddenly we decide we want to add $1 million to the budget to pay for infrastructure. We cannot do that. That is where the clarification is, correct?

If the topic is on the agenda, the motions that we put in the packet for you, they're proposed motions. You're not required to use that motion. You can go off script if you want, as long as it's within that topic.

Right. Or, and I, and just another example, we can, the motions can be, I can't talk, sorry, motions can be altered or whatever by the body in agreement and then obviously it's voted on. We cannot though also say in a meeting where it was not on the agenda at all, say I'd like to propose a

for X thing that is not anywhere on the agenda. So that is also a kibosh.

Okay, so I just wanted to clarify that because I know that's been raised before that if the item is on there, it is allowed to have action taken on it, even if it's not an exact action that was on the motion. Go ahead, Heather.

So can you explain again, Lauren, how that, this came from Doug Kimble, resident of, how an item that is not on the agenda is added at a meeting? Without a vote of the commission.

That item though, the question was about the changing of what we were voting on for the master plan. But the master plan itself was up for a vote on the agenda. So that's why when the action taken wasn't what the motion was, It was still deciding what was going to happen with the master plan. That's why that was allowed to go through by Lauren, correct?

That's correct, but there is another way that things can be added. If the subject is not on the agenda at all, it can be through a super majority of the city commission can suspend the rules. You can suspend your own rules and add something to the agenda. a topic that doesn't apply to that specific instance because that topic was on the agenda at that meeting. But adding something to the agenda and suspending the rules, I think that's only happened a couple of times since I've been here. That's pretty rarely used. Like if we get a grant that has to be acted on by that meeting or else, and we didn't have notice of it or else we'll lose it. So you can suspend the rules and add it to the agenda so you can take action on it, but it takes a super majority of the commission to do that.

Right, but I just want to go back and clarify that because we did look to you at that meeting. The question for that meeting was, was the city commission going to approve the master plan or not? And the motion from the commissioner at the time was, actually, I think it should be by statute that only the planning commission needs to approve it. That was then voted on by the city commission, but it was still the action of what are we going to do with the master plan. Correct. So it wasn't that the master plan wasn't on the agenda, and it wasn't that what was going to happen with it. Whether there was a full agreement or not, we asked Lauren at the time for the legal status of that for that reason. So that is not plucking something. The master plan was not on the agenda at all, and then it was just thrown on. So that's where that difference is.

Right, the topic was on the agenda. Yeah, Mitch?

Yeah. So along those lines, say if we have to take something that has come up and been controversial in the past, our annual salt order, we have a motion in our packet. We can choose to modify that up or down or to change to a different type of salt that we're using.