I get questions every week through my blog from residents and non-residents alike wondering about all kinds of different things about Eden Prairie. About half of them require a response. The other half just want to tell me something about the community, or make a comment about the blog itself. For this week’s series of blogs, I have decided to pick a representative question each day and share the question & answer with you. Enjoy!
Question #1: I’m just curious to know why the city has chosen this time to undertake a re-survey of housing lots in the city for compliance with their platts. I’m also curious to know why the city pays such generous salaries for basically semi skilled workers when the market place and out sourced services companies are awash in labor. An example: Parks Maintenance Technician.
Scott says: I think I need a clarification of your first question. You are referring to something the City is doing as re-surveying to check property owners’ compliance with their plats. I don’t think the City is doing that. However, the City is reestablishing property lines between private and City property, especially adjacent to parks and other publicly-owned open spaces. The City has been working on this task a little bit each summer for the past five years. We’re doing it because we want to protect public land from the negative impacts of private encroachment and to preserve the public’s ability to access public land in the future.
Regarding your second question about our labor practices, the particular employee position you referenced (Park Maintenance Technician) is a union position, so its wage and benefit package is established by contract, which is comparable to the wage & benefit levels in other similarly situated positions in the Twin Cities. This full-time position is supplemented by a number of part-time seasonal and out-sourced employees. The City also supplements these work functions with work release prison laborers as well. We believe it is necessary to have a core group of skilled full-time employees that can be expected to be here for the long-term because we believe that provides long-term benefits for the care and maintenance of the City’s park system, which residents tell us is one of the top two reasons (the one is the school system) they moved to Eden Prairie.
