The Blog from City Hall

Yesterday, April 29th, marked my one year anniversary of working for the City of Eden Prairie.

It has been a very rewarding year for me professionally. Eden Prairie is an exciting place to work. The atmosphere here was ready and willing to welcome new leadership at the top of the organization. That’s not always the case, so I have been lucky in that respect.

I have enjoyed the new challanges that come with a new job. Getting to know new employees. Getting to know a new community. Getting to know the history and culture of a new organization. Eden Prairie is unique. I’ve not worked or lived in a community like this prior to April 29, 2003. I’ve alwasy wanted to. This was one of the driving forces for me as I courted this job in early 2002.

I am lucky to have a good City Council. They are experienced. They know their appropriate role in city government and are willing (and happy) to play it. I have a good working relationship with them. I am lucky to have an exceptional city staff. Again, they are experienced and happy to be here. Many of them are tops in their respective fields. And again, they know their appropriate role in the city government and are willing to play those roles.

The biggest change for me in adapting from my immediate past position as the City Administrator in Northfield, MN to the City Manager position in Eden Prairie has been the emphasis on personal leadership here. In Northfield there was also a formal and informal confusion between the roles of Mayor and City Administrator as to who was the leader of the organization. It was sometimes a difficult situation for people to understand, both inside and outside the organization.

In Eden Prairie, the City Manager position has a history of being the leader of the organization, both to the City Council and the community. The formal establishment of the Council-Manager form of government here contributes greatly to that. There is much less confusion here about when the Mayor is the leader and when the City Manager is the leader. I like that. I do not need to be the external leader all the time to be happy or for the organization to function correctly. Sometimes the Mayor act as the leader. Mayor Tyra-Lukens and I have a good feel for who should say what and when. We have a straight-forward relationship and can talk about this issue whenever it rears its head. I like that. I like that alot.

So at the end of year one, I can honestly say it has been a good year for me, and I think it has been a good year for the City of Eden Prairie. I’m staying on for more of the same.

Minneapolis Mayor RT Ryback gave the City’s annual State of the City address today. With the Twins, Timberwolves, and Wild all in action tonight in their home stadiums, it’s quite possible that the Mayor’s address did not capture the public’s attention.

The Minneapolis city government is facing some very steep challenges right now. The numbers they are facing do not lie. And Mayor Ryback does not lie. Minneapolis is losing a ton of financial assistance from the State this year, and next. At last estimate, I think they are going to lose upwards of $47,000,000. They are going to be faced with tought decisions. There is no way around it. They are going to have to decrease service levels and lay off employees and probably raise fees. I don’t envy those options.

Mayor Ryback is an engaging speaker who, in my opinion, tells the truth. It’s too bad that his State of the City address didn’t get better play. It’s an important statement of where the City is likely to head in the future. That’s important for not only the citizens of Minneapolis, but for the citizens of the metropolitan area as well. We have a stake in the health of Minneapolis. In many ways, downtown Minneapolis is our downtown too. Their are parks are our parks too. Eden Prairie needs a healthy Minneapolis.

I wish the Mayor good fortune as he grapples with difficult financial decisions.

The State Legislature is in the midst of considering a fundamental change to the way that local officials decide who may and who may not carry a concealed handgun. Citizens who want to carry a concealed handgun must request such a permit in order to legally carry a concealed handgun in this state. Under current law, County Sheriffs and City Police Chiefs have substantial discretion to grant what they refer to as “conceal & carry” permits. Under current law, a citizen must have a very good reason to get a permit. If a Sheriff or a Police Chief thinks that a citizen has no demonstrated need for a permit, they have the discretion to deny the request for any reason.

Under a proposal that has been adopted in the House and is scheduled for a vote in the Senate today, the tables get turned. Under the proposed legislation, the Sheriff or Police Chief must have a good reason to turn down a request for a conceal carry permit. In other words, the Sheriff or Police Chief must issue the permit unless there is a very good reason not to issue it. There are some criteria that can be used to deny a permit request, but the law is being changed to enable more concealed handgund permits to be issued, not less.

Some City Councils in Minnnesota have taken official positions on this legislation. Some have not. The Eden Prairie City Council has discussed the issue, discussed taking a position on the issue, but has not taken a position on the issue. Several citizens have encouraged the Council to take a position opposing the legislation. I encouraged the Council to refrain from taking an official position on the issue, at least as a corporate body. Councilmembers are alwayws welcome to take individual political positions on political issues of the day. They are elected officials and taking political positions on the issues of the day is what politicians ought to do.

I encouraged the Council to refrain from taking a position because I did not see the Council taking a position on this issue as being particularly influential to the state legislators who are charged under state law with making this decision. This is an issue of individual freedom and I think that state legislators are going to be more responsive to individuals on this issue. Also, this issue is a more appropriately discussed at the state government level. It is not an issue of local governance. A corporate position on this issue would feel intrusive to me, just as the state government taking a position on a local zoning issue would feel intrusive to me.

This is an issue that raises strong feelings. The resolution of this issue will make many people will be unhappy, regarless of how this issue is ultimately resolved. Our state legislators will have to be accountable for their votes on this issue. That’s how our system works.

City Councilmember Sherry Butcher and I attended a meeting today of the
Minnesota State Senate Tax Committee. The committee was giving a hearing to two amendments being proposed by

Sen. Bill Belanger of Bloomington to the Governor’s tax bill proposal, Senate File 748. Sen. Belanger is the author of the Governor’s proposed tax bill.

The first amendment was full of technical correction and definition changes and had been blessed by the Governor’s office. The second amendment, however, was a bit more daring and has not yet been endorsed by the Governor’s office.

The second amendment proposed to SF 748 today by Sen. Belanger strikes into new territory for state-local relations in Minnesota. In very clear terms, this amendment would free cities from many state-imposed fiscal policy controls (levy limits, salaray freezes, debt service restrictions, etc.) if the City or county would agree to give up its state financial assistance (i.e. - Local Government Aid, LGA).

I think it is a brilliant bill. Trade your money for your freedom. The state can grant more fiscal freedom to cities without costing it a dime. Under Sen. Belanger’s amendment, the state makes money by granting its cities fiscal freedom. Cities might lose state financial assistance, but they win the ability to raise funds at the local level in a manner and at a level that they need to fund local services. Citizens win too. They will see greater accountability under this concept. If a city has to generate all its revenue locally, citizens who will know exactly who is accountable for local fiscal conditions. Cities won’t be able to blame their financial constraints on the state anymore, if they accept this challenge.

The hearing was interesting, uncomfortable, and entertaining - all at the same time. Sen. Larry Pogemiller is chair of the Tax Committee. He challenged the credibility of State Revenue Commissioner Dan Salamone a number of times. He does not beleive that Mr. Salamone, or the Governor who appointed him, are being straight with the committee concerning the impact of the proposed tax bill being advanced by the Governor’s office. As a staff person, that was uncomfortable watching that.

Sen. Pogemiller also related his “research” on the tax bill, which amounted to discussing graphical representations of it with people he met in a bar while watching the Timberwolves game last night. He added later that the reference to the people in the bar was meant to be a metaphorical reference for the “common man”. He is pretty sure that the common man is going to buy the Governor’s assertion that the LGA cuts in his budget are distributed fairly around the state. That was, sort of, the enteratining part. The entire committee was not present. Some were busy with other bills, but the whole thing was very interesting.

If I had to make the call for Eden Prairie (and I don’t. This is a Council policy decision), I would trade our state financial assistance for fiscal autonomy any day. It would be good for us in the long run, both fiscally and socially. In a year or two, we’d be a stronger community for taking this challenge.

Senator Norm Coleman was the keynote speaker at the City’s 2003 Board and Commission Recognition Banquet. He gave a wonderful message about the importance of civic engagement and volunteerism. His words were exactly what our board and commission members needed to here. The real mystery of managing local government is that we couldn’t do it with out the thousands of volunteer hours that are dedicated to municipal government every year. No kidding. Couldn’t do it without them.

We had a nice recognition program. Gave away some nice plaques. Had a nice dinner. Wrapped in up around 7:30 p.m.

“A good time was had by all”, as they say in every small town newspaper I’ve ever read.

Today was our City Employee Health and Benefit Fair. It is the day when we provide preventative health screenings (weight, cholesterol, etc.) to employees in exchange for providing them a free light lunch. We also host a number of our employee fringe benefit vendors. The vendors are there to provide first-person answers to employee questions about benefits. It is a productive use of our time because employees get good first-hand answers to their questions.

Why should you care if the City’s employees are healthy and fit?

Aside from all the humanitarian reasons, employee health and fitness has a huge effect on our City budget’s bottom line. If our employees are healthier and fitter, our employees (if theory holds) will consume less healthcare and present less healthcare costs for the City to pay in employee benefits costs. If the City can cause this sequence of events to roll, it will positively effect our financial bottom line. And whatever effects our bottom line positvely, will effect our taxpayers’ collective bottom line positively. After all, almost every dollar we spend comes to us directly from you - the EP property taxpayer.

I like the employee health and benefit fair concept for both reasons. I am a fiscally conservative humanitarian at heart.

I repesent the City of Eden Prairie to an organization known as the Municipal Legislative Commission (MLC). The MLC tracks legislation and influences legislators (I hope) in the interest of a group of eleven suburban communities including Plymouth, Minntonka, Edina, Eden Prairie, Bloomington, Woodbury, etc.

We are especially engaged with MLC right now because the State Legislature is engaged in the business of writing a tax bill that we’ll have to live with for the next twelve months or so. There are several different versions of tax bills floating around out there. One posed by the Governor. Another by House Republicans. Another by Senate Democrats. There are a couple of others that are in serious contention.

Tax bills make enemies and friends. Will the central cities team up with outstate cities to pass a bill that is hard on the suburbs? Will the suburbs court the interests of the sentral cities against the interests of outstate cities? Or, will every city-based interest group fight each other to a draw.

An interesting article from the Southwest Journal describes a new way to look at Minneapolis and its relationship with the state economy. Conventional wisdom is that central cities are necessary, but they are net receivers of state financial assistance. That may be true in St. Paul, but this article argues that Minneapolis is different. This article almost goes as far as saying that Minneapolis has more in common with its suburbs than it does with St. Paul or with outstate cities.

I don’t know if I’d go quite that far, but it does set the table for an interesting discussion between Minneapolis and the suburbs of, at least, Hennepin County. Maybe we should ally ourselves and advocate for a common-interest tax bill. It might be possibe this year.

Maybe…..

Leadership Eden Prairie is a program of the Eden Prairie Chamber of Commerce.

The program is a leadership development program that strives to acquaint people who live in or work in Eden Prairie with the community’s institutions and leadership structure. The program includes days devoted to learning about the local school system, about the city government,and about the court system, among others. The participants must make a substantial time commitment to participate in the program, but it’s worth it. When you come out of it, you have networked yourself pretty well in the community.

I spent time with the group on their final day. I gave them a presentation involving a community issue that they had to analyze and solve for me. I told them about the City’s consideration of building a new outdoor water park. We discussed the issues from many different points of view and they offered me their solutions. There were two groups. One group suggested the City proceed with the project in a conventional manner: design it, ask the public to approve it in a referendum, and then build it and operate it. They said the City should pursue corporate sponsorships and advertising to help support the operations of the pool.

The other group recommended the City partner with a full service hotel to build a water park. The hotel would operate it, but the City would help subsidize its construction. The City needs a full service hotel and some hotels are getting into the water park business around the country. They suggested the hotel/water park be built in the Major Center Area- around the Eden Prairie Center. That’s an interesting idea that I haven’t heard until today. I’ll give it some thought.

I like to work with groups like Leadership EP because I always like the opportunity to give a civics lesson. More to the point, I like to put regular citizens in the shoes of what it’s like to be on the City Council. It’s not easy to empathize with elected officials until you’ve tried to do what they do.

It’s a great program and I hope the Chamber continues it in the future.

I am looking forward to the City’s 2003 Board and Commission Recognition Banquet this year. Our keynote speaker this year is U.S. Senator Norm Coleman (R-Minnesota).

We are excited to have Senator Coleman as our keynote speaker. He is going to have dinner with us and address the group on the importance of civic participation and volunteerism. As a former Mayor, he understands the crucial role that volunteers play in bringing city government to citizens. He can speak to that first hand.

I am glad the City has developed the custom of having this banquet. Our board and commission members put in many, many hours of time for no pay, and sometimes a little grief to go with it. Most of them will tell you, however, that they do it because they love their community and they just want to give something back. That’s what makes this experiment in self-governance in America work.

For more information about how to volunteer for the City, please check us out on the web at: Citizen Involvement for the City of Eden Prairie.

The Metropolitan Council

is a somewhat unique being among governments. It is a metro-wide regional government with power and authority to use it. That’s not common across the United States. When I’ve shared with my colleagues in other parts of the country what the Met Council can do, they are surprised at the scope of its mandate. Many of them who work in metropolitan areas actually wish they had such a big brother to help their neighbors and guide their neighbors from time to time. After all, it’s always the neighbors that really need the help and guidance.

There are 16 members on the Met Council. They are appointed by the Governor. The 16 members of the Met Council represent 16 geographic districts throughout the seven county metro area. The districts are supposed to group local governments by “community of interest”. The districts, because they must take population variances into account, might be considerd a bit oddly conceived. It’s hard to draw practical districts when population variance must be your primary driving factor, but nonetheless, some of the current districts could be improved.

Currently, Eden Prairie is in District #4 (map). It is one of the largest districts, geographically, on the Council. It includes Eden Prairie, Chanhassen, Chaska, all of Scott County, all of Carver County, and most of Lakeville. The Met Council representative from this district is Mr. Jules Smith of the Chaska area.

A new redistricting plan that has been endorsed by the Local Government and Metropolitan Affairs Committee of the Minnesota House of Representatives proposes a significant change for Eden Prairie’s Met Council district. Instead of linking Eden Prairie with rural points west and south, the new district - District #7 - puts Eden Prairie in a district with Minnetonka, the south Lake Minnetonka cities, Victoria, Chanhassen, and about half of Chaska. This seems to me to be a good match for Eden Prairie. I think these cities have a bona fide “community of interest”. The Eden Prairie City Council hasn’t taken a formal position on this issue yet, but I think that I will recommend that they endorse this plan. I think it fits us now and will fit us just as well ten years from now.

I didn’t go into the office today, and it’s probably a good thing, too, because my mind wasn’t focused on work today.

On April 6, 2003, my 15 year old son Turner, celebrated three years of life following a heart transplant. Each April he goes in for an annual examination where he is poked and prodded to see how things are going. We (Turner, his mother, and me) just completed the two day annual exam today. I am very happy to say that the good folks at Abbott Northwestern Hospital found Turner to be in tip-top working order. His heart is in great shape and his overall health is good.

I think we ramp up the family tension and worry level the week of the annual exam, so it’s nice to put it behind us each year. It’s even nicer to say that everything went well.

Tomorrow: Back to the business of government in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.

We’ve moved this weblog to a new server in the past week.

There’s now a home page for the City’s weblogs with a link to Scott Neal’s weblog.

Flying Cloud Airport is our airport. That sounds funny to say, but it’s our airport.

We’re lucky to have it and we’re stuck with it, all at the same time.

Flying Cloud Airport is owned and operated by the Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC). The MAC operates Flying Cloud as a reliever aiport. The reliever deisgnation means that Flying Cloud has a relationship with Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (MSP).

The general idea behind the reliever airport concept, when it was originally conceived, was that small aircraft of all types could and should be located away from the MSP fields, thereby giving the MSP runways and airspace to the large airlines and large airplanes. The little guys could be at the little airports and the the big guys could be at the big airport. Sounds reasonable, right?

Northwest Airlines thinks differently now. Maybe they thought differently all along, but they are just getting around to making their point about it now. Northwest recently sued the MAC because Northwest believes that MAC uses fees and revenue generated at MSP to subsidize the operations at the reliever airports around the metro area. The Star Tribune reported on the current status of the suit earlier this week.

This might end up become a fight between accountants and economists to sort out the flow of money from Northwest to the MAC and then from MAC to Flying Cloud Airport. Does it work like that? I don’t know, but even if it did, would that be wrong? Remember one of the basic ideas behind the entire concept of reliever airports was to get small planes out the hair of the big guys at MSP. Maybe it’s appropriate for them to help support a place for the little guys to fly.

One of the things that really bugs Northwest (I know because I’ve heard their executives say it privately) is that a lot of business travelers are now flying in charter aircraft or small privately owned corporate jets instead of flying coach or first class on Northwest’s big planes. And guess where those charters and small privately owned corporate jets are based………. yes, the reliever airports. Northwest is feeling a bit of a pinch now because customers they used to serve are now using alternatives to them. And Northwest feels like it is subsidizing the operational costs of the small airplanes that are flying the customers that used to fly with them.

The City is on the periphery of this squabble, and that’s where we are staying. We’ve made peace with the MAC this past year. We’ll wait and see who prevails.

One of the bills that has popped up at the State Legislature this week is a bill that would force cities that have their own transit systems to levy local property taxes to support their transit operations. Up until two years ago, cities did levy property for their transit operations. Then the state decided to step in and take over that responsibility.

Eden Prairie, Chanhassen, and Chaska participate jointly in Southwest Metro Transit. It is widely recognized in this state as being perhaps the best transit system in the state. We have great new buses, a great new parking ramp, and an exciting new hub and commercial development that will be the best transit development in the metro area. Slinking back into locally-levied property taxes would not kill SW Metro’s operations, but it wouldn’t be the best thing to happen either.

The bill was introduced this week in the House by Rep. Dorman and in the Senate by Sen. Langseth. They are elected representatives from Greater Minnesota. Most small towns in Greater Minnesota do not have transit operations so they don’t have any transit taxes to reimpose. They see the state takeover of the transit tax as a subsidy to the suburbs. Many people feel this bill is aimed squarely at the suburbs. It looks like the first shot across the bow of a suburban-rural show-down in the legislature for this year. Not a good thing.

It’s been too long since I’ve been a bona fide civilian. At least in the since that I can’t step far enough away from local government to see it as an average citizens would. Do citizens think that city, county, school district, state, and federal officials all work closely together to coordinate taxes and services so that one doesn’t step on or trip over the efforts of the others? I hope they don’t think that happens, because it doesn’t.

Maybe state and federal officials work closely together. I sometimes think I can see evidence of that. Other times not. It is not unusual for cities and counties to work together on projects, especially road projects. It’s not unusual at all for cities to work closely with school districts on both projects and services.

In Eden Prairie, I am really pleased with the way the School District works with the City.

The new Superintendent and I have started a practice of having our respective management staffs meet in a joint staff meeting once each quarter. The School Board and the City Council meet in joint session twice each year. It keeps relationships in tact and faces familiar. If that’s all it did, it would be worth it, but we discuss policy issues and plans for the future too. It’s a good relationship for us to have, especially from a citizen/taxpayer perspective.

The city-state government relationship is an odd one in Minnesota. Most cities feel like they are autonomous corporate entities. The state, for the most part, would emphasize that cities are mere sub-units of state government. Most cities, if they took a good, hard look at their finances would not be able to support their current array of city services without the financial assistance the state provides to the cities through a program known as Local Government Aid (LGA). Eden Prairie is different in that respect, as are many of our adjoining suburban neighbors. We don’t receive much LGA and if the state government removed it all, we wouldn’t change our service levels much.

So I’m off to St. Paul today to discuss municipal finance legislation with our local elected state representatives. It’s sort of like lobbying your cousins. While I’m not optimistic about how the state legislature is working its way through its budget balancing challenges, I’m hoping they won’t negatively impact the financial positions of cities in the process. I would gladly return every dollar of appropriated state financial assistance to Eden Prairie IF the state legislature would free the City from any newly adopted political/financial limitations (i.e. - “strings”) they are considering imposing on cities that accept state financial assistance.

For Eden Prairie, it would be a good bargain to trade money for freedom. Anyday.