City of Eden Prairie Blogs

A cold day to test our new Fire/Rescue boat last Friday, but that was the date selected a few weeks ago when it appeared the weather would never cool off. Well Friday came and it wasn’t all that nice, but as they say in Hollywood, the show must go on. Assistant Chiefs Koering and Taylor made the trip to Red Wing, Mn to open water and gave the boat a workout. Everything went well with a few minor exceptions, another trial will take place this week or early next week.
We will have the boat ready for action on our local lakes and waterways by the time the ice leaves us. Click the thumbnail to enlarge.

I’ve installed the blogging platform WordPress here for Dan’s weblog and imported all his previous entries from the past. Let me know if you discover any glitches.

Note that he has a new RSS feed, too:

City Manager Scott Neal has completed the transition to his new weblog.

As of this morning, he’s got five new entries on his new weblog that are not on his old one.

If you subscribed to his old RSS feed, remove that and use this new one:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ScottNealsBlogFromCityHall

Thanks!

All three weblogs have been converted over to the new platform.

The Blogroll links on the right sidebar include the new and the old for now. The headshot photos link to the new.

It’ll be a few days before I’ll have a chance to train the bloggers on the new platform.

Since the early 1900’s in Minnesota there has been a fire insurance tax imposed on every property casualty policy written in Minnesota. The purpose of the tax was to fund a strong and active State Fire Marshal’s Office. Over the course of time some of the revenues generated by this tax have been rerouted to the State’s General Fund for use on other projects and simply to help balance the State’s budget. The continual reduction of the actual funds going to their original purpose has resulted in a grossly under funded State Fire Marshal’s Office.

Last year the fire service as a whole got together and proposed an new strategy that would get funds going to where there were supposed to go. For many reasons last years initiative didn’t get too far at the legislature. The fire service redoubled their efforts this Spring, Summer and Fall and have now introduced a new initiative to fix the problem long-term. The initiative is called the Fire Safety Account and will direct funds to a variety of worthwhile life safety programs. The new initiative abolishes the old tax strategy and replaces it with a more politically palatable fee structure. The fire Safety Account will be directed by the Commissioner of Public Safety with strong input from a fire service advisory committee. Funds will generally be directed to a series of important programs such as: The Fire Marshal’s Office, State Hazardous Materials Response Teams, Firefighter Training, Structural collapse Teams and funding to beef up the BCA’s ability to assist the fire service with investigations to name a few. These are all very important programs in the times we live in today.

I hope you will be able to join me in supporting this legislative effort. Contact your local legislators, and urge them to support this bill. You can review the bill for yourself by clicking here.

We’re converting the three EP weblogs over to the Word Press weblog platform.

Stay tuned!

In the meantime, you can still get to the old weblogs:

• Police Chief Dan Carlson
• Fire Chief George Esbensen
• City Manager Scott Neal

I’ve installed the blogging platform WordPress here for George’s weblog and imported all his previous entries from the past. Let me know if you discover any glitches.

Today I had the opportunity to swear in two new officers to our department. Officer Matt Struck comes to us with prior experience at the Hopkins Police Department and eight years of military experience. This will be Officer David Boosalis’s first job as a sworn officer but he has served our community and Edina for several years as a police explorer, a reserve officer and most recently an animal control officer. We are excited about the diverse work experience these two officers bring to our department.

This was a “functional” swearing in to certify them as sworn officers with the authority to carry out there duties. We hold a Police Department Awards Ceremony each spring where we do a ceremonial swearing in that includes family and friends.

Welcome to the EPPD Officer Struck and Officer Boosalis!

One of the mixed blessings about Eden Prairie is the abundance of “green space”. The parks, the Minnesota River bottoms, the Bluffs, Purgatory Creek, Anderson Lakes, these areas and the dozens like them are a major draw for people to live and work and recreate in Eden Prairie. But they are also a draw for wildlife as habitat.

Balance is always a factor when dealing with public safety issues. When dealing with urban / suburban wildlife issues finding that balance is not always simple nor clear. I believe the City has found appropriate balance in how we manage deer and geese in town. That balance is based on the public safety issues of these two wildlife populations that is quite tangible. For instance statistics on vehicle / deer crashes are an accurate way to measure personal injury and property damage issues in correlation to deer populations.

There has been lively discussion about the presence of cougars in the area, brought to light again recently with the capture of an escaped domestic cougar in Willmar.

But the critter topic of the day is coyotes. A local news station aired an erroneous report that there has been a “coyote warning” issued in the city…..NOT TRUE. We have had inquiries about coyotes in town. Questions of if they are dangerous, that their howling can be disruptive to sleep, are they in Eden Prairie?

We do have coyotes in EP, we always have. They do make noise that can start dogs barking and that can be annoying. We have had many reports of sightings, had them hit by cars, but to the best of my knowledge there have been no reports of attacks on people or pets in the 24 years I’ve been here. But we do gets calls from people who say they are fearful when they see them and concerned for their safety.

So here’s the balance we try and strike. We have no information that the coyote population in EP is of public safety concern (as we do with deer and geese) that justifies us developing a management plan for the entire population. However, as always, should there be a specific incident, a specific coyote that is causing concerns and problems (ie: sick or injured or trapped, etc) we definitely will get involved to try and resolve the issue.

Education is a key to understanding and co-existing with our wildlife population. We have an excellent Animal Control Unitthat is always more than happy to address any wildlife issues (as well as domestic animal issues) or questions you may have.