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Item E (Planner Job Offer)
For those of you contacting the city with questions on zoning, property rules, etc. we have a new employee to replace Alec's position. He has a lot of experience and we're all excited to have him join the team at city hall. His name is Ed Courton.
Item F (Moratorium)
When we get a preliminary plat, we have 120 days to take action on it. If the request is in order, we can't easily deny it.
A few months back we lost our assistant planner to the county. A few weeks ago we lost our Planner to Rogers. While we do contract with Landform for some of our planning needs, I'd rather not test their capacity.
We know we have some transportation and land use plan changes coming up which can greatly impact any new developments.
Given all of this, I proposed we put a moratorium in place until we get caught up on some of these. We will have this on our agenda for the next meeting.
Item G (Water and Sewer Updates)
Our last engineering study on water and sewer was done back in 2007. Given the amount of development and some of the changes we're proposing regarding roads and land use plans, staff proposed that we update those comprehensive plans which the majority of the council agreed with (including me). It will cost about $150k to do those updates, but that will come out of the water and sewer funds (not taxes) since it applies to them.
Item H (Pavement Management)
Roads are one of the larger expenses municipalities can have. And often they're not easy to plan for since maintenance can depend on a lot of factors (usage, base soils, etc.). Up until recently, the only way to have any idea of the current state of a road was to have someone with experience go out and look at it, which means the answer is likely to have a high degree of random to it. Recently a better way to "measure" road quality using automation has been created and we decided to go that route. It'll require using a piece of gear that is driven over the roadways and uses a number of inputs to score the roadway. If successful it'll provide us with a better way of predicting costs out 1-5 years.
Item I (Well #5 Contract)
This well will be located within the River Walk development and will provide water (with #4) to the treatment facility off of the river road which will feed the entire north central system. We're looking at next fall as the completion time frame. The city received only 2 bids for this work and one was significantly higher than the other. We've used both companies before so we chose Traut Companies for the project.
Item J (Planning Commission Opening)
A few months back we had a Planning Commission member resign. While we lost a significant amount of experience there, we still have quite a bit of experience in the remaining four members. We originally had no applicants for the position so we reposted and received 3 applicants. None had any previous planning experience, but I'm also someone that believes it doesn't hurt to have outside perspectives. Two of the applicants had a very short amount of experience in our city and the third (Ryan Maltzen) has had a significant amount of interaction with the residents, which is an asset as far as I'm concerned. Ryan was the only applicant motioned and he was appointed 3-1 (I was in the majority).
Feel free to contact me with your opinions / questions!