The Blog from City Hall

Merry Christmas from all your friendly public servants working for the City of Eden Prairie.

State Auditor Pat Anderson Awada released her annual report on municipal financial conditions this week. The Star-Tribune did a nice article on the report.

You can check out the State Auditor’s numbers on Eden Prairie: Eden Prairie 2002 Financials

When you have to build a public building to the specifications that we have to build them to, it’s almost always faster, cheaper, and better to repair and remodel than it is to build something new. We have completed three small repair and remodeling projects at City facilities recently, and have several more in the hopper.

This is a picture of the new granite counter tops at the City’s Prairie Village Municipal Liquor Store. We chose granite because of its durability and because it’s easy to clean. The green color is pretty close to our official “Eden Prairie Green” logo color:

We also installed ceramic tile in front of our beer coolers to make it easier to maintain our floors, especially during the sloppy seasons. Here’s a photo of that:

Finally, we are moving our Fire Marshall and Fire Inspectors from City Center over to Station #1. We are remodeling to accomodate them. This office space, when completed, will house them and the Assistant Fire Chiefs in an office area right outside the Chief’s office:

Money magazine came out with its annual list of “hot towns” yesterday. They have analyzed cities across the United States and divided them by two simple criteria: Population and Region. There are two population catagories: over 100,000 and under 100,000. There are three regional catagories: East, Central, and West.

For a complete list of Money magazine’s hot towns, clikc on this emblem:

Eden Prairie made the list. We’re officially a Hot Town. We rated 6th in the Central Region for cities under 100,000. We fell in right after Chesterfield, Missouri and right before Fremont, Illinois. Our old friends in Woodbury were ranked #1 in our group.

I wish we were ranked number 1, but I still think it’s pretty impressive to be ranked #6, considering the number of cities there are that are under 100,000 in the central section of the United States. I think we can learn from this and use it as a tool to improve Eden Prairie’s qualilty of life even more.

For a full look at Eden Prairie’s quality of life stats, according to Money magazine,
click here:

I just got out of the Friday morning General Session. We saw a live TV uplink with General Wesley Clark. Clark is a Democratic candidate for President. He was supposed to be here live, but he could not make it. I was not as impressed with him as I thought I might be.

Clark was followed by political commentator James Carville. I don’t buy into all of Carville’s political ideology, but he is very entertaining. His southern country boy routine always makes me laugh. It’s a role.

I am going into sessions this afternoon on improving productivity through the introduction of new technology into the workplace, especially City Halls.

More Later…….

Just blogging in from cloudy & rainy Nashville, Tennessee. I’m here with 5,000 other elected and appointed city officials from allover the country at the annual conference of the National League of Cities (NLC). I was able to get to a Cyber Cafe sponsored by Comcast, a large cable and internet provider here in the south.

So far, it’s a good conference. Our keynote speaker this morning was Cokie Roberts of ABC television fame. She spoke about contemporary politics. Typical talking-head sort of stuff. I’m off now to a break-out session this afternoon to learn about “Taxing Policy in an Anti-Tax Environment”.

More later…….

Hennepin Village is the name of a major new development on the south side of Eden Prairie. The development starts just south of Grace Church. Aside from the new housing that is being developed there, the City reconstructed Spring Road. It now looks like this:

After you pass a couple of curves in the road, you will see the Hennepin Village signs that look like this:

The Ryland sign is on the east side of the road. The Hennepin Village sign is on the west side.

The City Council recently endorsed a change to Hennepin Village that will allow the developer to build fewer signle family homes that look like this:

…and more multifamily townhouses and rowhouses that look something like this:

or like this:

Sales of signle family homes in this development have been slow, but sales of multimfamily units has been brisk, according to the developer. The development will be a great new neighborhood in our City.

No pretty pictures today. Just comments…

The City is currently embroiled in a bit of a public controversy that just won’t go away. It concerns the current and past levels of public spending by the City on historic preservation projects. There is a constituency in the community that is quite unhappy about what it feels are high levels of spending on historic preservation projects. The Council has been supportive of historic preservation projects and has funded a number of them over the past few years.

The current Council would say that its spending, when averaged out over the past twenty years, has been reasonable and has completed projects that were initiated by prior Councils. Residents who do not favor the City’s current level of historical preservation spending believe that it should be much lower on the City’s priority list, especially in times of budget tightening for cities.

It does not surprise or disappoint me that there is a public controversary in Eden Prairie. I think it’s quite normal, and healthy actually, for residents to feel free to express their dissent publicly. What does surprise me though is the magnitude and duration of the discussion on this particular topic. By any measure, historic preservation is a relatively small part of what the Eden Prairie city government has accomplished over the past five or so years. In addition, the City’s projected capital spending on historic preservation is planned to decrease to zero within three years, as evidenced by our approved 2004-2008 Capital Improvement Plan.

I have to chime in from time to time to correct facts and figures, but elected officials have to explain why historic preservation is important. How much longer will this discussion last? Who’s to say, but it looks like it will continue for a while longer.

The start of winter often signals the start of a spat of household fires as residents make more use of their fireplaces or light more candles. Firefighters will tell you that careless smoking and candles cause a surprisingly large percentage of household fires.

The photos below are of a recent household apartment fire in Eden Prairie. This fire was caused by a candle. In photo #1, you can see where the fire started. The candle was on top of the Candyland game box, on the second shelf. The candle burned up into the bottom of the top shelf.

In photo #2 you can see the burn pattern from the candle. Fires typically leave a ‘V’ shaped burn pattern where the tip of the ‘V’ is at the initial source of the fire. It’s not a perfectly shaped ‘V’, of ocurse, but I think you can make out the ‘V’ shape on the wall and follow it back to the second shelf of the plastic shelving unit where the fire started.

Neither the residents, nor any firefighters were injured by the fire at this apartment. There was property damage, however, and the lives of the residents are now significantly disrupted. Fire is a dangerous and powerful tool. We often don’t treat fire with the appropriate amount of deference, and this is what happens when we don’t.

Little by little, it’s possible to see the economy coming back. I can hear it when I listen to commercial real estate agents talk. I can see it when we receive fewer than expected applicantions for key City jobs that are analogous to jobs in the private sector. But I can see it best though by reading the Business Section of the Star-Tribune newspaper.

Eden Prairie companies had an exceptional day today (December 3, 2003) in the Star-Tribune business section. Here’s what’s happening in the Eden Prairie business community:

ADC Posts Profit

ADC Telecommunications posted its first profitable quarter in the 4th qauter of FY2003 since 2001. ADC reported a net profit of $9.3 million dollars in that quarter. While they are still down in profitability and economic size since their highpoint in 1999-2000, they are slowly working their way back

Stellant Receives Award

Stellent Inc. is a nationally known and well regarded computer software company based in Eden Prairie. It recently recevied the BASEX Excellence Award for its universal content management software product.

MTS Announces New Orders

MTS Systems Corporation, a longtime fixture in the Eden Prairie business community, announced that it has new orders totaling over $45 million dollars over the next few years.

Highjump Software and Quality Bicycle Products

Highjump Software announced that Quality Bicycle Products Inc. will implement Highjump’s supply chain software products at Quality Bicycle’s headquarters over in Bloomington.

All in all, a pretty good day in the newspaper for Eden Prairie businesses.

The City held its annual Truth In Taxation public hearing last night. The hearing consisted of a 15 minute presentation from our CFO, Ms. Sue Kotchevar, on the status of the City’s 2004-2005 budget and proposed tax rates. The City plans to increase its total spending next year by 2%. We plan to increase our property tax levy in 2004 by 1.9%. Our tax rate, because of an array of complicated factors, will increase by 4.9%.

There were five Councilmembers, 10 City staff members, and 3 citizens in attendance at the public hearing. No citizen voiced any objections or questions during the public hearing. The Mayor closed the public hearing and adjourned the meeting 18 minutes after calling it to order.

Short and sweet.

This is a photo of Birch Island Woods. Birch Island Woods is a City-owned conservation area on the north side of Eden Prairie. It is a largely undeveloped natural area.

This is Birch Island Road. It runs along the south edge of Birch Island Woods. Some portions of the road have a standard look with standard curb and gutter. But other portions of the road are more primitive, like the part shown in this photo.

This is what is happening on the south side of Birch Island Road, directly across the road from Birch Island Woods. It is a small residential subdivision development. It will be a through street connecting on to Birch Island Woods. The orange snow fence is to protect the trees during land grading.

This development is making some Eden Prairie citizens nervous because it may signal the start of more development in the vicinity of Birch Island Woods. The City owns some of the land around Birch Island Woods, but not all of it. Some of it, including the Picha Farm, is in private hands. There are citizens advocating for the preservation of the private land around Birch Island Woods. There are citizens advocating for the free-market development of the privately-owned land.

It’s a difficult situation for the City, but we will need to step into this fray, I fear, within the next twelve months. Until then, we wait.