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CC 2003 11 24CHANHASSEN CITY COUNCIL REGULAR MEETING NOVEMBER 24, 2003 Mayor Furlong called the meeting to order at 7:05 p.m. The meeting was opened with the Pledge to the Flag. COUNCIL MEMBERS PRESENT: Mayor Furlong, Councilman Labatt, Councilman Peterson, Councilman Ayotte and Councilman Lundquist STAFF PRESENT: Todd Gerhardt, Roger Knutson, Justin Miller, Todd Hoffman, Bob Generous, Kate Aanenson, Matt Saam and Bruce DeJong PUBLIC PRESENT FOR ALL ITEMS: Jerry & Janet Paulsen Debbie Lloyd Melissa Gilman Chad Lubbers Mark Littfin 7305 Laredo Drive 7302 Laredo Drive Chan Villager Chanhassen Library Chanhassen Fire Department PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENTS: Mayor Furlong: Good evening and welcome to those here this evening and those watching at home. Just like to make a quick public announcement relating to the tree lighting ceremony that's going to be held this December 6th, which is a week from this coming Saturday at 5:00 p.m. in our new City Center Park. This is going to be a fun activity. Very family friendly for the kids. It's sponsored by the City of Chanhassen Park and Rec Department, as well as the Chanhassen Chamber of Commerce so would encourage everybody to come down on December 6th at 5:00 p.m. to the new park, which has sod on it. Even though it's covered with snow right now, and it should be a fun event. First event to be held there. With that I'd like to move forward with our agenda and ask if there are any changes or amendments to the agenda items this evening. One that the staff requested, item l(b)(2) on the consent agenda should be tabled. To clarify some issues and so without objection we'll table that item. And then also there was a substitute distributed this evening with regard to item 1 (d) with some clarifying language there on the process as well so we'll be voting on the substituted l(d). As a consent agenda. CONSENT AGENDA: Mayor Furlong: At this time I would ask if there's anybody that wishes to pull anything from the consent agenda to discuss it. Debbie Lloyd: Good evening. Deb Lloyd, 7302 Laredo Drive. ! would like to pull item 1 (b)(4), Chapter 7. ! would like to understand what the community development City Council Meeting - November 24, 2003 inspections division is. Will this mean that there's new staff?. What kind of changes will this mean? Mayor Furlong: Why don't we just pull it and we can address your questions at that time. Debbie Lloyd: Oh, okay. Thank you. Mayor Furlong: Okay. Because we can provide some clarification. That's fine. Any other items? Councilman Peterson moved, Councilman Lundquist seconded to approve the following consent agenda items pursuant to the City Manager's recommendations: Approval of Minutes: -City Council Work Session Minutes dated November 10, 2003 -City Council Summary and Verbatim Minutes dated November 10, 2003 Receive Commission Minutes: -Park and Recreation Commission Summary and Verbatim Minutes dated October 28, 2003 Approval of Amendments to City Code, Including Summary Ordinance for Public Purposes: 1) Chapter 1 3) Chapter 5 5) Chapter 7.5 6) Chapter 8 7) Chapter 15 c. Approval of Speed Trailer Purchase. Resolution #2003-103: Approval of Resolution Authorizing Call of Outstanding 1995B, 1995C, and 1996B General Obligation Bonds, as amended. All voted in favor and the motion carried unanimously with a vote of 5 to 0. l(b)(4). CHAPTER 7, AMENDMENT TO CITY CODE. Mayor Furlong: Why don't we go ahead and take item l(b)(4), Chapter 7 right now. Ms. Lloyd if you'd like to, I'm sorry for cutting you off earlier. Why don't you just, just if you have a specific question maybe staff can address it. Debbie Lloyd: Alright. I'd just like to know if this is just moving from one department's responsibility to another? How it will or will not change staffing issues? And if a building code officer is someone that is already an employee of the city or you'll be you know looking to hire someone. And also there's a landscaping provision in this code, but 2 City Council Meeting - November 24, 2003 I didn't see a driveway provision and I'm wondering if there's something similar in another section of code, because it seems like if landscaping needs to be completed or money held in escrow, why would not there be a similar provision for driveways? And those are my questions, thank you. Mayor Furlong: Thank you. Staff like to comment or address them. Todd Gerhardt: Kate you want to address those? Kate Aanenson: Yes, I'd be happy to address. The inspection division, there's two divisions within the community development department, planning, and inspections. There was recodification doesn't anticipate any changes. It's just clarifying that inspections is within the community development department, as is building officials. Again there's no contemplation of adding additional inspectors. Those positions are already in place. So that's answering the first question. Grading and erosion, you can get a grading permit separate from other actions within the city. And those are handled through this section of the code. There is a more definitive landscaping section which would be in Chapter 20 and that has not come before you yet in a formalized. That will be held with the public hearing before the Planning Commission, so anybody that's interested in that portion of a more detailed landscaping requirements, that's where that would be. Bob Generous: And as to driveway security, ! don't believe that we require that. Kate Aanenson: We haven't in the past. Matt Saam: No, ! guess comparing to the landscaping security Mr. Mayor, to the driveway security which the resident's proposing, ! fail to see. Usually we don't have a problem with people putting the driveways in, similar to putting in their house. They need access to it, but the landscaping is meant to be somewhat of a guarantee that people or residents are going to put in the trees that they say they're going, or that we're requiring, so. Mayor Furlong: Okay. So part of the question is, those issues will be addressed in a different chapter of the code. Kate Aanenson: Correct. Mayor Furlong: As opposed to this one, and ! guess the other question with regard to will the driveways be considered, ! guess we can talk about that but has it not been a problem? Matt Saam: Yeah, exactly. We haven't seen a problem in the past that ! can remember. Mayor Furlong: Okay. City Council Meeting - November 24, 2003 Todd Gerhardt: Mayor, if I may address this issue. Driveways are private individual's driveways. The city does not guarantee that you build your driveway or your contractor will build your driveway perfectly. It's an issue between you and your contractor to build that driveway, and like a private road, we do not put conditions on private roads. They're inspected by the owner to make sure it meets their specifications, but same thing with driveways. And as to the landscaping, we want anything behind the curb landscaped and we also in our ordinance we require one or two trees be placed in the front yard as boulevard trees or just to get landscaping established, so that's when we take an escrow for that. Mayor Furlong: Okay, thank you. Any other questions or discussion then? I think that will be helpful and we'll look for the information in Chapter 20, which the council began some discussions with this evening at our work session. If there's no other discussion is there a motion to approve item 1 (b)(4)? Councilman Peterson: So moved. Mayor Furlong: Is there a second? Councilman Labatt: Second. Mayor Furlong: Any further discussion on that motion? Councilman Peterson moved, Councilman Labatt seconded to approve the amendment to Chapter 7 of the City Code as presented. All voted in favor and the motion carried unanimously with a vote of 5 to 0. VISITOR PRESENTATIONS. Mayor Furlong: We have invited Chad Lubbers, who's the branch manager from the Chanhassen Library to come here this evening. Good evening. Chad Lubbers: Hello councilmen, Mayor, and it's actually Chad Lubbers. Mayor Furlong: I apologize. Chad Lubbers: It's all right. Happens all the time. For those of you that I haven't met yet, my name is Chad Lubbers. I'm the new Building Manager of the Chanhassen Library. I moved up here from Ohio and Indiana about 5 years ago and my internal calendar still says that it's February. You guys have got the months all backwards up here. Still getting used to the area but I am enjoying it. I moved over here to the Chanhassen from Anoka County where I supervised a library for 3 years and I can tell you right now the amount of support that I've seen in this area is absolutely tremendous. You can take it as a compliment that your residents are very, very supportive of the library that has been built over here and we've been able to do a lot of good so far. The mayor invited me to speak today a little bit about what we provide at the library. We do 4 City Council Meeting - November 24, 2003 have a variety of print and electronic resources that were provided to the county. A lot of this has been used recently for business information. I'm not sure exactly how active the business community is in this area, but there has been a lot of business start up information that we've been handing out at the library. Most recently we had somebody stop in looking for biomedical remediation information. Anybody heard of biomedical remediation? It's an interesting job. It's the person that goes around after a crime has been committed and cleans up the crime scene. And the person who came was looking for information, he's actually a school teacher so ! don't know what it is in the school district that drives a person to want to clean up crime scenes but that's what people are looking into right now from the Chanhassen community. Library is operating right now largely because of the support of the community. In the past 2 months we've logged over 300 hours of volunteer time at the library. This has been from organizations like the Chaska High School, members of the Chanhassen Wood Carvers Association. The people that put together that historical wood quilt in the back of the library. Had members from the Minnetonka High School. We've had students come in from other communities in the area, from some of the local parochial schools. We've had folks come in from Carver County Correctional, Hennepin County Correctional and Dakota County Correctional. We've got folks coming in on an individual basis. People that have seen advertisements in the newspaper that we need help, and we've got kids that are coming over as service projects for Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts. We've got lots of people helping out at the library and like ! said, the only reason we're keeping our head above water right now in these lean economic times is because of the volunteer help we're getting from the community. Just want to let you know, that is usually a good indication of the kind of support that a community has, is how much time of the, or how much personal time people are willing to dedicate to an organization and the library's getting a lot of help right now from the individuals in the community. Does anybody have any questions for me at this time? ! was told to keep it brief, and believe me ! could talk for a half hour on library services if ! wanted to but ! don't want to put you guys to sleep. Any questions at all? Councilman Lundquist: As the County goes through it's budget process, any indications or feel for what we're looking at in terms of hours of service next year versus hours of operation this year? Chad Lubbers: It's a good question. We have, kind of have this informal priorities list that people have been bringing in to me where they say well why doesn't the library do this? Why doesn't the library have that? That's probably number 3 or 4 on the list. The top item on the list everybody wants to know about are where are the books? Because we don't have as many books in this library as ! think we should have, and apparently the public thinks we should have. Number two is where is the parking? Well that kind of took care of itself when we cleared out the parking lot over here. Number 3 and number 4 are hours of operation for next year. Are you going to close hours? Are you going to open additional hours? At this point we're not going to have to close hours. ! can tell you that much right now. We got the first round of budget cut information from the County and we are not going to have to reduce service hours at this point. If it gets any worst, that is a possibility. What we're hoping to do right now is find someway that we City Council Meeting - November 24, 2003 can increase hours because that has been a big question in the community. Everybody wants to find out how we can get the library opened longer. Particularly hours on Sundays, which especially high school and grade school kids want us to be open on Sundays so they can come in and do homework on that last day of vacation before they have to go back to school. But at this point I'm not sure exactly where that funding would come from, but staff wants it, the public wants it and if we can find a way to make it happen, we will. Councilman Ayotte: How about different hours? Chad Lubbers: Well we could toggle the hours around a little bit I suppose. Were there particular dates that you had in mind? Councilman Ayotte: I was wondering whether or not any survey work could be done to see when people would be most available to take advantage of the library versus when the library is open. To offset people who are working or people who are in school, to your very point about the weekends, so has that been looked at to flex it? Chad Lubbers: There has been a usability study that was done in the community, ! believe this was a year or two ago and ! haven't actually sat down with the text of the study to read what the results were but ! do know there was a usability study that was done and ! think part of that was in preparation for a new library being built. There may be that in there, and ! can always make that available for you once ! track it down to find out what people have asked for as far as open hours. ! can tell you that there are already peak usage hours that we've identified at the library. Thursdays right now are the lowest used day of the week, and right now we're open for 10 hours on Thursdays. Personally ! think that we could probably reduce hours on Thursday if necessary in order to accommodate additional hours on different days of the week, but again keep in mind ! am middle management in the library and that decision is made above my head. But if you'd like sir, ! could make available the usability study for you. If you'd like to check that out. Councilman Ayotte: I just think it's something we ought to look at, if for affordability reason we can't open up longer, we should open it when people can use it. Chad Lubbers: Absolutely. Absolutely. Councilman Lundquist: Is that a library board decision? Who makes the call on when each library is open? Chad Lubbers: The library board determines hours, at least as I understand it. The library board for Carver County determines hours, but the hours are largely dependent on the funding which is approved by the County Commissioners. Councilman Lundquist: Sure, so there's a bucket of X dollars or whatever and then the library board decides that's going to be 4 hours on Monday, 12 hours on Sunday, or whatever that is, but that's. City Council Meeting - November 24, 2003 Chad Lubbers: Right. Councilman Lundquist: And then ! imagine they take recommendations from you and your staff as to that, but they are the ones that make the final decision. Chad Lubbers: Right. And do understand too that the hours that we are open now are the hours that have been identified by most libraries in the metro area as the most effective hours of operation. But personally, like ! said, Thursdays is kind of a dog right now and if there was wiggle room that we had in place to shift hours around, Thursdays would be the day that ! would prefer to do it. Mayor Furlong: Okay. One thing, just as a comment for information. What I'd like to do probably sometime in the first or second quarter of this year is schedule a work session for the council and invite the staff and representatives from the library board, possibly the Friends of the Chanhassen Library, to come in and talk with us as a council about how the new library, how things are going. It opened up in August. That will be about a 6 month time period and hopefully long enough to get through some of the kinks and have some information, such as this, that we can talk about and give some direct feedback as a council to representatives, not only the library board but the staff and other residents that are very interested in the utilization. It's a wonderful asset that we have and ! think it's one that we have to, as a council keep our hand as well just from a stewardship. Chan Lubbers: Mr. Mayor...we are up to 1,000 visits a day from area residents and that is over 140 percent increase over the numbers we were putting out last year. Mayor Furlong: Okay, that's great. So that's to come. Thank you. Appreciate your time. We're still at visitor presentations, if anybody else would like to come forward at this time. If not we'll move on. LAW ENFORCEMENT/FIRE DEPARTMENT UPDATE. Mayor Furlong: We do have an update from the Fire Department this evening, and ! see Assistant Chief Mark Littfin is here this evening so. Mark Littfin: Good evening. John's I think out of town, and Greg's teaching so I was the last in line here. Let's see, our current staffing level is 39 fire fighters. We do have 3 on leave. One's currently in Afghanistan. We're kind of following him on a daily e-mail when he can get it, and when we can get it to him so we are in the process of doing some hiring. We just finished up the last group of the candidates tonight for the agility test so we're starting our interviewing process in the next week or so and we're hoping to get the strength up to at least 45 so we're excited about that. Our calls year to date, we're at about 748, which is 129 higher than last year at this time so we're anticipating easily 800, depending on how the weather is and with December and everything. It was amazing with the snow we had over the weekend we, the fire department did not have any weather City Council Meeting - November 24, 2003 related calls. Traffic accidents, we did have one sledding accident and somebody broke her leg so. Other than that, no vehicle related incidents. Nothing in the last couple weeks as far as any major calls. We did assist the sheriff' s office last Thursday with some lighting after the shooting down on Pioneer Trail so we helped illuminate the scene with our light truck for the BCA investigation. December training, we're going to get into ice rescue training with our equipment to re-familiarize ourselves with that with our water rescue suits and cold water because it's the season for thin ice and people venturing out on that, as well as animals and that type of thing. We're aggressively doing inspections. We've got daycare, licensed daycare centers finished. Schools. We're doing some hotel/motel inspections. We're starting some industrial and moving into the bar/ restaurant inspections of existing buildings. New construction inspections, Presbyterian Homes is going to be getting busy as well as Powers Ridge Apartments, Eckankar Spiritual Center, and there's some miscellaneous industrial buildings that are going up out at 5 and 41 area. And the last thing is my term for Assistant Chief will be up at the end of December and I'll be just mainly concentrating on Fire Marshal and fire prevention activities so. With that ! can stay at the stations on Monday for a while. Any questions or comments? Councilman Lundquist: Is that unusual for the first snow storm of the year to not have any traffic related calls? Mark Littfin: ! thought we'd get some unless everybody was just driving so slow that if they did have accidents they were just property damage only where there weren't any injury accidents. Plus it wasn't a busy work travel day which may have helped also, but ! don't know what the sheriff' s office had for just cars in the ditch, this type of thing but we did not have any injury related accidents, which was great. Especially when I've got two teenage drivers out there that they made it home so. Mayor Furlong: Very good, anything else? Very good, thank you and thank you for your services assistant chief. This is a light agenda. We'll move forward to council presentations. COUNCIL PRESENTATIONS. None. ADMINISTRATIVE PRESENTATIONS. Todd Gerhardt: We did lay sod in the park and we hit 70 degrees, or 50 degrees Roger. Roger Knutson: You said it'd be 60. Todd Gerhardt: Was it 60. And things are going good out there. It looks nice. ! think the crew was out there Friday night sweeping the area, before the snow started to fall so. They'll have to get rid of their brooms and pull out their snowblowers but that's all ! have. Mayor Furlong: Thank you. Any questions of the City Manager? City Council Meeting - November 24, 2003 CORRESPONDENCE DISCUSSION. Mayor Furlong: If not, any discussion on the correspondence packet? Councilman Labatt: Did we all note the Seiler's? Mayor Furlong: Please do. Councilman Labatt: Donated back their winning raffle to the fire department. Residents like that are few and far between and when they do show up like that it's very much appreciated I'm sure. The fire department likes that too. Mayor Furlong: Thank you. I'm glad you mentioned that. Any other comments in the discussion package? If not, if there's nothing else to come before the council this evening, is there a motion to adjourn? Councilman Lundquist moved, Councilman Ayotte seconded to adjourn the meeting. All voted in favor and the motion carried. The City Council meeting was adjourned at 7:25 p.m. Submitted by Todd Gerhardt City Manager Prepared by Nann Opheim