The Blog from City Hall

I authored the following commentary piece for the Eden Prairie Sun Current and the Eden Prairie News. I thought I’d share it in this space as well for my readers that don’t have access to those newspapers. It is about the City Council’s recent decision regarding the selection of the City Prosecutor.

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Commentary

Scott H. Neal, City Manager

September 22, 2006

For more than 20 years, the City has outsourced its criminal prosecution legal needs to the private law firm of Gregerson, Rosow, Johnson & Nilan. The firm has supplied several different lawyers over the years to serve as the official City Prosecutor in the Hennepin County Courts. The current City Prosecutor is Ms. Jennifer Inz.

In January of this year, the City Council directed City staff to study the manner in which the City was fulfilling its criminal prosecution legal needs. The Council specifically directed that staff study the feasibility of discontinuing the current outsourced prosecutor and bringing that service in-house by hiring more City employees. The Council also directed staff to study the advisability of continuing to outsource for our prosecution needs, but to conduct a competitive Request For Proposals (RFP) process to test the value of the City’s current relationship with the Gregerson Rosow firm.

At the City Council meeting last week, I presented the findings of the staff’s analysis and my recommendation on how to proceed. The staff analysis on these two issues led me to these conclusions:

First, we studied three cities (

Bloomington , Minnetonka and Coon Rapids ) that provide both civil and criminal prosecution legal services in-house with City employees. We also studied one city, Elk River , that outsources its civil legal work, but uses an in-house staff attorney as its criminal prosecutor. We compared staffing levels and operating costs from these cities to what we believed our costs would be here in Eden Prairie . We found no significant financial savings to the City from this model.

Second, we compared the costs of our current outsourced criminal prosecution legal contract with Gregerson Rosow to other comparable cities (

Apple Valley , Eagan , Burnsville , Edina , Maple Grove , Plymouth and Woodbury) that also outsource criminal prosecution legal work to private law firms. We found that our current prosecution contract, which we estimate at $255,000 in 2006, is about 8 percent higher than the average contract cost of these cities. In terms of our relative rank, our contract ranked #5 of these cities. In other words, we felt our contract was right in the market.

Third, seven private law firms submitted proposals in response to our RFP. We had two interview teams interview the three firms. One interview team was made up of Police Department employees. The other was made of up City Councilmembers, myself and two members of my management staff team. The interview teams conducted the interviews without knowing the cost proposals of the firms they were interviewing. We did this because we wanted interviewers to concentrate on reaching a judgment about which firm would provide the City with the best service. In this interviewing environment, the clear preference of both interview teams was the Gregerson Rosow firm.

Finally, it was my responsibility to synthesize the interview results with the cost analysis. In doing that I also took a look at two other factors. I confirmed that the City has a proposed criminal prosecution legal budget for 2007 of $249,850. The Gregerson Rosow proposal for 2007 is $240,000, so the City has adequate funds available for this proposal. And, taxes will not need to be raised to cover the cost of this contract in 2007.

I also did some analysis of the cost savings impact of selecting the lowest cost proposal in the RFP process, which was $120,000 for 2007. Disregarding whether or not that law firm could actually perform the service level we want for that cost, I ran the numbers. If the City saved $120,000 on this contract and passed every dollar of that savings back to property taxpayers, and assuming some other taxing body did not swoop in and snap up our tax savings, the median residential taxpayer in

Eden Prairie would have saved $4 per year in taxes if the City accepted the lowest cost law firm.

In my judgment, the tax savings was just not sufficient to risk the long-standing positive relationship the City has with its current outsourced prosecutor, the Gregerson Rosow law firm. The firm’s performance over the past two decades has been outstanding. It has the strong support of our Police Officers, which was a very important factor to me. The crimes prosecuted by our City Prosecutor - DUI, domestic abuse, traffic offenses, petty thefts - are the crimes that effect

Eden Prairie citizens. Our Prosecutor and our Police take these offenses seriously. They work closely together to make public safety in Eden Prairie the number one priority of city government.

For all these reasons, I recommended the City Council appoint the Gregerson Rosow firm to serve as the City’s official criminal prosecutor. The Council agreed and confirmed that choice on a 3-2 vote. It’s never an easy choice for elected officials to choose an option that costs more than another option, but in this case, the value outweighed cost.

I was out of the office sick yesterday. I took charge of my own my own health care decision making. My treatment of choice: Robitussin-DM cough suppressant and expectorant. I think I had consumed about half the bottle before I looked on the side of the bottle (at my wife’s request, by the way) to notice the expiration date of 5/2004. I guess the bottle was a little dusty when I looked at it closer. I wish I’d noticed that sooner.

Anyway, I think it still worked. I feel better and am back at work for Thursday, September 29.

Lesson for the Day: Don’t put me in charge of your health care too.

The City of Eden Prairie has been talking about our city’s potential involvement in a new Light Rail Transit (LRT) line for a couple of years now. The discussion is being managed by the Hennepin County Regional Rail Authority. Consultants and staff to the Regional Rail Authority gave the City Council an update on the status of the LRT proposal at last week’s City Council Workshop. City staff have been working with the Regional Rail Authority on the LRT project. It is our recommendation to the Council that the City begin to assume a more favorable and active role in supporting the proposed LRT project. If we don’t, the County will have no reason to extend the rail out to Eden Prairie. We believe the LRT line would be good for Eden Prairie’s future.

There are several options for the LRT line that are still under consideration. I have inserted thumbnail photos of the maps of the two basic options. You can click on either of the maps and follow the routes from downtown Minneapolis to Eden Prairie.

There are two primary differences between these two maps. One is the section of the line in Minneapolis. This is shown in the LRT-A option and the LRT-C option. LRT-A takes the line to downtown Minneapolis through the Kenwood neighborhood. LRT-C takes the line to downtown Minneapolis through Uptown.

The other primary difference between the two maps is how the line might serve Eden Prairie. The maps show three different options once you get to the proposed Shady Oak Station on the boarder of Hopkins and Minnetonka. The LRT-1 option takes the current SWLRT Bike Trail corridor through Minnetonka and Eden Prairie. LRT-2 goes into Minnetonka and Eden Prairie along I-494. The final option, LRT-3, comes into Minnetonka’s Opus Industrial Park and then down into our Golden Triangle Industrial Area and then into our future Town Center area just west of the Eden Prairie Center mall.

City staff strongly favor a version of the LRT-3 route. We favor this route because it provides a greater level of service to the employers and the employees in the Golden Triangle; provides greater access to downtown for our Town Center Area; and connects the LRT to the bus system at SouthWest Station. We do not, at this point, have an opinion about the LRT route through Minneapolis. This decision will be made, as all decisions are made in Minneapolis, by a long and arduous political process. It’s probably best for those of us in the suburbs to keep our collective nose out of Minneapolis’s neighborhood politics for now. They’ll reach a resolution and then the project can move ahead.

There are other options being studied right now too. One if for an expansion of the bus system. Another, called LRT-4, dead-ends the LRT in Hopkins. Hopkins doesn’t like that one.

There is a group of technical experts from the Rail Authority and effected cities participating on an advisory committee called the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC). The TAC for this project met last week and agreed on the following recommendation:

TAC RECOMMENDATION:

a.) LRT 1A 2A, 3A, and 4A meet Tier 1 goals and are therefore recommended for further evaluation.

b.) Under Tier 2 goals, LRT 2A is not recommended for further evaluation because it has higher capital and operating costs than LRT 1, but does not provide the economic development benefits of LRT 3. LRT 2A also has the highest estimated CEI of the A alternatives. Because other A alternatives better achieve Tier 1 and Tier 2 goals, LRT 2 A is not recommended to carry forward.

c.) LRT 4A is already encompassed in the full-length A alternatives. A shortened version of the preferred alignment(s) may be identified as a future minimum operating segment (MOS) if required in the future. In the event an MOS is required as the initial phase of staged implementation of the full alternative selected, detailed analysis of impacts and mitigation required to serve as an interim route terminus will be undertaken.

d.) LRT 1A and 3A are recommended to carry forward.

e.) Of the C alternatives, LRT 3C is the only alternative meeting both Tier 1 and Tier 2 goals and is therefore recommended to carry forward.

OTHER RECOMMENDATIONS

The TAC also approved two other recommendations to forward to the PAC:

• That the Southwest Transitway PAC request that the Metropolitan Council move theto a Tier 1 corridor when updating the Transportation Policy Plan.

• That the Southwest Transitway PAC request that the HCRRA proceed into the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) process for the.

The TAC’s recommendation will now move on to an advisory committee of elected and appointed officials from local governments along the proposed LRT corridor called the Policy Advisory Committee (PAC). The PAC will review the TAC recommendation and then make its own recommendation to the Rail Authority later this year. The purpose the recommendation at this point is to thin down the number of options that will move to the next phase of the analysis. Right now, LRT-3A and LRT-3C (our favorites) have made the cut to move to the next step. City staff believe that either of these two options will provide Eden Prairie with excellent LRT access to Minneapolis in the future. Maybe the near future.

Probably the most common question these days about my blog is why I don’t have it open for “comments” like other bloggers do. There are a couple of reasons for that.

For one, blogging is just one thing I do in my job. I’ve got other things to do too. I fear that allowing open comments all the time to every post I write would require too much of my time to read them, think about them and respond to them. I’d have to respond to them because allowing comments and then ignoring them is worse, in my opinion, than not allowing them in the first place.

For another, I’ve always looked at my blog as a tool for communicating to people and not necessarily with people. There’s a difference. I read other blogs where the shortcomings of electronic communication really diminish whatever value there is to the back-n-forth of the exchanges between the communicants. It’s incredible how far some folks will go to not understand another’s point of view. It can be very frustrating, and I’ve got enough of that in my life right now, so I’ll keep doing what I’m doing.

All that being said, I do receive lots of comments on my blog. Other readers don’t see these comments, but I get them regularly. I usually follow-up directly with the person offering the comments. I’ve occasionally shared some of the comments I’ve received by copying and pasting a representative smattering of them into a single posting. It’s been awhile since I’ve done that. Well, today is your lucky day. Today is the day for that posting. Enjoy these comments/responses:

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Comment: Thanks for the information on oak wilt–unfortunately, I felt that your posting was a little confusing. Here’s a clearer explanation from the University of Minnesota Extension service:http://www.extension.umn.edu/distribution/naturalresources/DD3174.html

My Response: I went back to that posting and inserted the link.

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Comment: Hello Scott, I just found your blog about fiscal disparities program. I am a PhD student in Economics at Georgia State University and I my dissertation is about the effect, which the program produced on the industrial/commercial property values in the metro area. My hypothesis is that the program should have induced the flight of these properties out of the metro area. I wonder if you know if any research of this kind has been done before, and if the results of my work would be interesting to some policy makers. Thank you.

My Response: I referred this fellow to the information he was looking for at the Metropolitan Council.

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Comment: Hello — We were tickled to see our biweekly “County Board Actions” on your blog. You said you received this info from Commissioner Koblick — if you would like to receive CBA on a regular basis (I do them after every board meeting) to inform your folks, I can put you on our e-mail media list.

My Response: I accepted the offer and now receive a weekly email from Commissioner Koblick’s office describing the activities of the Hennepin County Board for that week.

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Comment: First off… I just want to say thanks for writing a blog. It’s not every day when the a form of government can reach out to it’s people it serves in such a way as a blog… but that brings me quickly to another point. Why can’t I comment on the posts? Closing off comments does nothing but stop a few pesky spam messages from getting on the blog… but it ends up closing the door for people who read the blog to speak their mind about the current topic. :: shrugs :: But at any rate, I like what you’re doing… keep it up!

My Response: Asked and answered. Sorry.

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Comment: I am a footballer, am seeking for a club to enter in your locality. i played midfilder, and four is my wing. i have played for srongest team in nigeria , which i host there captain for thee year. sir i my applicant can be acceptable by u , i promsed to bring glory to your club, through my football career.

My Response: Couldn’t help this guy. I love the beautiful game, but I’m not an agent or a manager.

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Comment: I am a prof at Long Beach State and would like to reference a part of your web log on the Kelo IGR case for my students here in CA. Nice blog, keep up the good work, EP is in fine hands!

My Response: I said “Sure, why not.”

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Comment: I just moved into Eden Prairie off Pioneer trail and Cedarcrest Drive and am now facing a significant issues-the airport-My realotor nor the sellers ever disclosed that the planes and small jets bank right or left and fly straight over this house I paid 1.320,000 for this property-what is the buzz I hear from the neighbors regarding EXPANDING!!!!! this airport/ Please e-mail me back on this Thank You.

My Response: I had to share an unhappy message with this new resident that the train on airport expansion had left the gate some time ago. The airport will expand. We don’t know when. I’m guessing it won’t be soon. But if the economics of air travel change quickly, it could be soon. The Metropolitan Airports Commission controls the airport. They determine when the expansion will occur.

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Comment: Hello Mr. Neal; I moved to E.P. about 5 months ago. I noticed our neighbour, the city of Chaska, had Wi-Fi and the city of

just approved Wi-Fi internet as well.

Is there any discussion about incorporating Wi-Fi internet access in E.P.? The price of broadband is currently too much. Best regards.

My Response: I haven’t responded to this one yet. I’ve got a couple of comments like this one. City staff engaged our City Council in a discussion about this issue last year. We decided not to pursue a municipal solution because it appears that broadband Internet access is widespread and, generally, affordable. I think that I may need to write something more publicly about this past discussion on this subject. Just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

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Comment: Just reading some blog stuff. Hope that car accident wasn’t too bad! Love you guys, Turner.

My Response: This comment is from my middle kid, Turner. He was studying in Germany at the time he wrote this. He tuned into to my post about getting rear-ended (again) on 494. I posted a post-accident photo of my car on the blog. Hey, it’s nice to hear from the kids sometimes.

A common question we received in city government is this one: “Why are my taxes in X city higher than they were in Y city?” This is a difficult question to answer because there are so many factors that go into why one city’s taxes might be higher than another’s.

Along these lines, I prepared (with the helpful assistance of City Assessor Steve Sinell) some information for the City Council that compares and contrasts the property taxes for a hypothetical home in Hennepin County that is valued at $414,000. Why $414,000? Because that is the value where the State of Minnesota’s Market Value Homestead Credit tax relief program fizzles down to zero. This makes the $414,000 valued home the easiest value to use to do as close to a apples-to-apples property tax comparison among cities.

Before you check out the data below you should understand that in any community, there will be multiple property tax rates in play. For example, while more than 90% of Eden Prairie is in the Eden Prairie School District, the Minnetonka School District and the Hopkins School District both tax a small number of Eden Prairie property taxpayers. Then there are three different Watershed Districts in Eden Prairie each with its own tax rate. It’s complicated, so in making comparisons among cities we have used the most common property tax situation in each city as the basis for this comparison.

Here are the numbers:

Final 2006 Residential Homestead Taxes for a Single Family Home with a Market Value of $414,000 in selected Hennepin County communities (click to enlarge):

Very interesting. Eden Prairie is right in there near the bottom end of the property tax burden for these comparable Hennepin County cities. We’re working on some more comparisons for other comparable cities across the Twin Cities metro area. I think we will look good in those comparisons too.

If you’re an Eden Prairie property taxpayer, I suggest that you take a look at these two maps. They are shown here as thumbnails, but if you click on either of them they will expand and be much easier to read. Chances are that you’ve never seen them before. They’re not secret or anything. They just don’t get much publicity.

These maps are produced by the Metropolitan Council. They are maps of the seven county Twin Cities metropolitan area. The map on the left, with the blue shaded with red cross-hatch red lines shows two things. The cities shaded in blue are the 15 cities in the metro area that are Net Contributors to the State’s Fiscal Disparities Program. I’ll explain more about that program later. The cities with the cross-hatched red lines are the cities with the highest share of the Commercial/Industrial tax base in the Twin Cities metro area. The red-hatched cities, collectively, account for 75% of the metropolitan area’s Commercial/Industrial tax base. Note the cities in both of those classifications. Eden Prairie is one of them.

The map on the right depicts the cities which are Top Twenty recipients of the Fiscal Disparities Program in 2006. Note the cities that are in this category. Eden Prairie is not one of them.

The Fiscal Disparities Program is a unique regional tax base sharing program. Some call it a “wealth redistribution program”. I’d say it fits both descriptions. The program works by reallocating 40% of each cities’ Commercial/Industrial tax base into a separate tax pool. Then a “need” is computed for each city. Money follows need.

For example, the Eden Prairie Center (owned by General Growth Properties) paid $2,868,204.04 in property taxes in 2005. Because the Mall is a Commercial/Industrial property, its tax base is included in the Fiscal Disparities Program. So, of that $2,868,204.04 they paid in taxes in 2005, $816,412.31 went to the Fiscal Disparities Program. The City of Eden Prairie’s cut of the Mall’s $2.8 million tax bill? $80,202.15. Now I’m not complaining about that. $80 thousand bucks is a lot of money. But the juxtaposition of how much the City gets vs. how much the Fiscal Disparities Program gets is interesting. Perhaps alarming.

Here are two more examples from 2006. MTS is scheduled to pay $447,520.26 in property taxes in 2006. Of that amount, $115,486.15 will go into the Fiscal Disparities Program, while $51,148.33 will go to the City. The new Costco retail store will be fully on the tax rolls in 2006. Costco is scheduled to pay $539,137.71 in property taxes in 2006. Of Costco’s total, $62,762,15 will go to the City and $141,711.75 will go into the Fiscal Disparities Program.

There are, of course, other taxing bodies that receive a cut of the tax payments from these three Eden Prairie taxpayers. The biggest recipient of their tax dollars is: The State of Minnesota. The State does not tax residential property, but it receives the biggest chunk of the Commercial/Industrial taxpayer’s payments every year.

Eden Prairie has the distinction of being the 2nd highest Net Contributing city to the Fiscal Disparities Program. Eden Prairie’s net contribution into the Fiscal Disparities Program is $7,358,965 in 2006. We are 2nd only to Bloomington’s $13,240,303. Minnetonka, Plymouth and Edina are third, fourth and fifth. The largest recipient of financial aid from the Fiscal Disparities Program - and it’s not even close - is the City of St. Paul. So the next time you hear a Mayor of St. Paul boast about how they can go year after year without raising their taxes, believe me, it’s not because they’re geniuses over there. It’s because they get a little (maybe a lot) help west metro taxpayers year after year after year.

Almost every year there is a bill proposed in the State Legislature by a legislator from a Net Contributing legislative district to study the Fiscal Disparities Program. And almost every year the bill stalls out in some committee. Legislators from Net Receiving legislative districts are just fine with the way things are going right now with Fiscal Disparities. It was revolutionary when it was implemented in the 1970’s, but we don’t know what its impacts of been on the ground. We don’t know if it has made the Net Receivers any better off in the long run. We know it has made the Net Contributors a little worse off in the short run. There are just so many impacts of this program that should be studied to understand their effects.

It’s time to study the Fiscal Disparities Program.

The City Council took up the issue of selecting a City Prosecutor at last night’s Council meeting. This has been an divisive issue for the Council in that there are a variety of strong feelings on the matter. The City has outsourced its criminal prosecution legal services to the Gregerson Rosow law firm for many years. At least twenty. Maybe more. Beginning in 2004, individual Councilmembers began to question whether or not the City was getting the best deal it could get for the services it was buying. Staff studying the issue and issued a report in 2004 that said the City was paying about what other comparable cities were paying for outsourced prosecution services. Following the issuance of the 2004 report, the issue was dropped. But it was revived again in 2005 and staff produced an update of the 2004 report with about the same conclusion. This time, however, because the issue was being discussed during the budget preparation process for the City’s 2006-2007 City Budgets, the matter was not dropped. It was discussed all the way up until the final approval of the 2006-2007 budget in mid-December when the Council agreed to a significant cut in the criminal prosecution budget based on the hope that the City could get a better deal for these services. At the first meeting in January 2006, I went back to the Council and asked them to reappoint the Gregerson Rosow law firm as the City Prosecutor and to direct staff to do two things: assess the feasibility of establishing an in-house City staff prosecutor’s office and to conduct a competitive RFP for outsourced criminal prosecution services. We did both. We presented the final report to the Council at last night’s meeting.

In a Plan B Council-Manager form of city government - which is what we have in Eden Prairie - the City Attorney is selected by being nominated by the City Manager and confirmed by the City Council. After reviewing the estimated costs of establishing an in-house city staff prosecutor and reviewing the seven responses to our Request For Proposal (RFP) from private law firms interested in outsourcing our prosecution and interviewing three finalist law firms and reviewing their cost proposals in comparison to that of the incumbent firm and the estimated in-house prosecutor, I recommended staying the course by appointing Gregerson Rosow as the City’s outsourced City Prosecutor.

I then asked the Council to confirm that recommendation. It was not an easy decision for them. The Gregerson Rosow firm’s projected contract cost for 2007 is approximately $240,000. We had a proposal from a law firm for $120,000. We had another one for $195,500. The estimated cost of setting up an in-house staff-based prosecutor’s office was $220,625. From a cost standpoint, selecting Gregerson Rosow was not going to be an easy decision.

But we compared Gregerson Rosow’s costs to what the cities of Apple Valley, Burnsville, Eagan, Edina, Maple Grove, Plymouth, and Woodbury pay for their outsourced prosecution services. Gregerson Rosow was right in the market with what those cities were paying. We also compared Gregerson Rosow’s outsourced costs to what the cities of Bloomington, Minnetonka, Coon Rapids, and Elk River pay their in-house staff city prosecutors and found that Gregerson Rosow’s costs were in right in the market when looked at from this perspective too.

The tough question was not “Could we do it cheaper?”. I knew the answer to that question. Of course we could do it cheaper. The tough question was “Could we do it better?” In my judgment the answer to that was not clear at all. In absence of a clear and convincing answer to that question, I decided to recommend the safest course of action which is to stay with a longtime partner who has provided exceptional service to the City - the Gregerson Rosow law firm.

The City Council debated the merits of my recommendation at last night’s meeting. They discussed the City’s relationship with Gregerson Rosow, the minimal tax impact of the potential savings the City might enjoy from selecting a lower cost service provider, the high level of support for the firm expressed by our Police Department and the nature of the criminal prosecutor’s work load. In the end, the Council voted 3-2 to approve my recommendation.

City Council’s must occasionally wrestle with difficult issues such as this one. The Council had a good debate on the prosecutor issue last night and reached a decision. Now it’s up to staff to make that decision work in the most cost effective way possible. We’ll start working on that immediately.

That’s Rick King standing in the background with his arm pointed at a power point presentation. At the time of this photo Rick was delivering the summation talk of a week of business conferences. Rick is the Chief Technology Officer at Thomson Legal & Regulatory in Eagan. He’s also an Eden Prairie resident. He’s also the chair of the City’s Flying Cloud Airport Advisory Commission.

Rick invited me to Thomson’s office campus in Eagan today to sit in on a private lecture plus Q&A session with Minnesota native and very hot author right now James McGregor, author of One Billion Customers: Lessons from the Front Lines of Doing Business in China. Thomson was retained McGregor as a consultant to assist the company in developing its own “China strategy”. Rick invited me today because he has been watching the Habitat For Technology, School District, Chamber of Commerce, and City in Eden Prairie all work together on a China initiative of our own with Loudi, China. He thought I would enjoy the lecture, and maybe learn a thing or two. He was right, on both counts.

McGregor’s was a very engaging speaker as well. It was a relatively small group setting for his speech. I’d say there was 60-70 people in the room. The attendees were all part of the technology support wing of Thomson. Many had come from across the country at other Thomson offices to be part of a week business planning and team building. McGregor was the keynote speaker of the final day.

McGregor said some things today that surprised me about China. He said some things I had not expected to hear. For example, he said that the China is not a nation of “collectivists”, but really a nation of conformists. He said the drive among the Chinese to be successful in business is as strong as it is here in the US. McGregor also said that China is taking a serious look at changing its “stuffed duck” education system in which teachers try to stuff as many facts as possible into a students head and students are rewarded for excelling a rote memorization. While we may be looking at Chinese students and admiring their math and science skills, they are looking back at us an admiring our creativity and problem-solving skills. They are changing some aspects of their schools to be more like American schools.

McGregor had many stories he shared with the group. Many of them are in his book, which is an amazingly quick read and good practical guide for doing business in China. Thanks for the wonderful gift of the experience Rick. I appreciate it very much.

These are just three photos from an event I attended the other day at the Orchard Street Bridge over I-494. The event was a dedication of the newly expanded 494. The theme of the event was “From Rubble to Reality” reflecting the long demolition process necessary to remove the old sections of 494, crushing the debris into rubble, trucking the rubble away, and then finally replacing the rubble with a new concrete freeway. The photo on the left shows a small gift bag of the actual rubble that was given out to everyone that attended the event to remind us of the time and energy it takes to build a road project like 494.

The event was attended by elected officials from State and City government. The middle picture is Eden Prairie Mayor Nancy Tyra-Lukens addressing the group about the positive impacts the new 494 will have in Eden Prairie and the west metro. To the right of the Mayor is Governor Pawlenty. The Governor spoke about how state government had moved this project up on MnDOT’s priority list to get it completed sooner than expected.

In the picture to the right, Lt. Governor Carol Molnau addressed the group both as Lt. Governor and as Commissioner of MnDOT. She holds both titles. She talked about the effectiveness of the “design-build” process in bringing MnDOT construction projects to faster completion. That may be true, but there is another side to the “design-build” process that I’ll get into on another day. Suffice it to say that on this project, it worked pretty well. Also in the photo with Lt. Governor Molnau are the Mayors of Edina, Minnetonka, Eden Prairie and Plymouth, all of whom contributed a few thoughts to the program.

It was a hot day for September, but it was worth it. It was a good event for a project worthy of such recognition. There were lots of honks from the cars and truckers on 494 going under the bridge during the program. We interpreted those honks as a sign of appreciation for the project. That’s what I think they meant anyway.

Like most Americans, I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing exactly five years ago today. I was working in Northfield. Right about now, I was driving into my office at City Hall when I turned on my car radio to here the new about a airplane hitting on the towers of the World Trade Center. There was a television in the main hall of City Hall. I turned it on hoping to catch an update and see some video of what had just happened on CNN.

At that point in the day, it was still the conventional thought that a small plane had crashed into the tower. It seemed like a terrible random accident. But then, as I stood there watching, I saw the second plane crash into the south tower on live television. It then began to become clear that I was not watching an accident. I was watching an attack on our country. I think the military calls this epiphany “situational awareness”.

As the day wore on and our situational awareness matured, I heard about the attack on the Pentagon, and then about United 93 plunging into a farm field in Pennsylvania. I remember getting my Department Heads together to talk about what we needed to do to inform our Councilmembers about what was happening and what we might have to do if a second wave of attacks hit Chicago, or maybe even the Twin Cities. What had seemed impossible when I ate breakfast that morning seemed possible now.

Later in the morning I called my wife at her childcare center. It was about lunch time. She had not heard anything about the attacks. She did not have a radio or a television, so I told her as much as I knew. I called my kids on their cell phones at school. They were all huddled around televisions watching the day’s events unfold live on CNN just as I was at Northfield City Hall.

It was a very difficult day, even for those of us thousands of miles away from Ground Zero. It united us as a country, but it slashed our national confidence that the kinds of terrorist attacks that we had seen happen overseas could not happen on our own soil. We know better now.

As we mark the fifth anniversary today of the events of September 11, 2001, it is both right and proper that we take a few moments today and contemplate the loss of life that occurred five years ago today. Consider what has changed in our country since September 11, 2001. Where have we been as a nation and where are we going? Pray of those who were lost on that fateful day and for those they left behind. We should never forget what happened on September 11, 2001.

What is the CMBAC? Actually, I hope we don’t get into the habitat of calling it that. I use it here only to catch your eye. The CMBAC is an acronym for the City Manager’s Business Advisory Committee. The creation of the Business Advisory Committee was included in a proposal that I advanced to the City Council at their meeting this week. The Council approved my proposal. You can read descriptions of the Council’s discussion and vote on the issue in stories in both the Eden Prairie News and the Eden Prairie Sun-Current.

I proposed the creation of the Business Advisory Committee to try and be responsive to the City Council’s past discussion about how to improve the operations of the City. I’m interested in making our operations more efficient and effective. If there are operating practices that we can learn from the business community that will make us more efficient and effective, then I’d like to hear about them and consider them.

I have attached (below) the memorandum I prepared for the City Council that explains how the committee would be structured and how it would function. Take a look. It’s an experiment, but I’m committed to this experiment. Eden Prairie may indeed be a Money magazine Top Ten city, but we can always do better.
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Date: September 1, 2006

To: Mayor and City Council

From: Scott H. Neal, City Manager

RE: City Manager’s Business Advisory Committee

At my 2006 performance review on June 6, I presented the Council my idea for the creation of a new standing committee within

Eden Prairie city government for the purpose of taking advantage of the business operations expertise of our citizenry to assist me with improving the quality and cost-effectiveness of municipal services and operations. After the performance review, I met with the Mayor and was advised that the Council received the idea positively and encouraged me to develop it more fully. That is the purpose of this memorandum.

I propose the name of the committee to be the City Manager’s Business Advisory Committee. The committee members would be recruited and selected by the City Manager. The committee would be responsible to the City Manager. I propose the use the word “committee” to distinguish this group from groups appointed by the City Council which we organize as either “commissions” or “task forces”.

The purpose of the committee is to examine selected operations and services of the City in order to provide the City Manager with advice and counsel about how to improve them and make them more cost-effective

The committee will be composed of persons who live or work in

. The committee will be 5-7 members with overlapping two year terms for the members. I will seek the advice of the City Council, City staff and the Eden Prairie Chamber of Commerce in both the recruitment and selection of the committee members. Committee members will meet as necessary to complete their appointed tasks. Committee members will be unpaid.

The City Manager will determine the committee’s scope of work. The City Manager will determine this scope of work in consultation with the City Council and City staff. The committee’s work product will be written reports which contain both conclusions and recommendations of the study subject. The reports will be public data and will be shared with the City Council and the City staff.

The City Manager will be the chief staff liaison to the committee and will make available such other staff support and resources as necessary for the committee to carry out its appointed duties.

There are two primary challenges in managing a committee like the one described in this memorandum. The first challenge is that it must be able to look into the City’s operations and give honest feedback and input without creating negative tension among City staff. I believe that our City staff is mature and professional enough to overcome this challenge. Our staff has a strong results orientation. We will welcome recommendations from the committee can help us produce a better product or service at a lower cost.

The other primary challenge in managing a committee like the one I am proposing is deciding where to position it within the organization. The committee should have access to those inside the organization that have the information they need in order to analyze the questions they have been directed to study. However, the committee should not be positioned so that it becomes a

City Council when it becomes necessary to deliberate the delicate questions of public policy.

I believe that my proposal balances both of these challenges and places this committee in the optimal organizational location to allow it access to information, but not so powerful that it supplants my recommendation authority or the Council’s approval authority for the most important budgetary and operating decisions for the City.

The Council has had considerable public and private debate about the feasibility and advisability of establishing a citizen committee to review the City’s operations and budgeting practices. I believe this proposal establishes a committee which can take advantage of the business expertise of our citizens to improve the City’s operations and services, while not modifying the fundamental government structure of the City. I recommend its approval by the City Council.

Today is one of my favorite days of the entire year. Today is the First Day of School (FDOS). I’ve been looking forward to today since LDOS (Last Day of School) this past June.

It might be a bit of a stretch to call something a tradition when it has only been going for four years, but for the past four years that I’ve been writing this blog I have highlighted my annual FDOS photo of my own happy children. For those of you that keep track of such things, you may remember that my annual FDOS photo used to have three happy Neal boy faces in it when I first started writing this blog in 2003, but by last year it had shrunk to only one - my youngest son Ethan. He’s 16. That’s him on the left in the striped shirt. He’s starting the 11th grade this fall.

In this year’s FDOS photo, I’ve got a couple of extra guys: my exchange students Marcel, a 17 year old senior from Koln, Germany, and Jay-Jay, a 17 year old senior from Grijpskerk, Holland. They are both here under the Youth For Understanding (YFU) exchange program. They will live with my family and attend high school until late June 2007. They are both settling in and learning English quickly. It’s one thing to learn our language from a text book. It’s quite another to learn it from the 16 & 17 year olds of middle America. It’s a great experience for both the exchange students and for my family.

One of the reasons I like to highlight my annual FDOS photo is that it gives me a good lead-in to talk about the relationship between city government and the School District. In Eden Prairie, the relationship is strong and active. We work closely with the Schools on issues such as public safety in the schools, parking permits at the Community Center, ice arena rental at the Community Center for the District’s boys and girls hockey programs, coordination of a large park improvement project adjacent to Forest Hills Elementary School, Fire Safety Week activities with our Fire Department, repainting work crosswalks for kids that walk to school, and many, many more.

The Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Melissa Krull, and I work closely to keep our respective elected officials in good working relationships too. Since 2003 we have organized two joint School Board-City Council meetings each year to talk about our current joint projects and to discuss future areas where our joint efforts could produce compounded results for Eden Prairie residents. Our next joint meeting is October 3. At this meeting we are going to hear from a guest speaker who is going to talk about how cities and schools should work together on land use decisions to insure that we don’t inadvertently create elementary schools where the racial or ethnic or socio-economic status (SES) balance of the student population is out of balance with the racial/ethnic/SES balance of the community. It’s an important issue for Eden Prairie and one that will require future cooperation between city and school government in order to get it right.

Well, that’s it for me for FDOS. It’s a great day! We’re looking forward to an interesting year of cultural exchange at my house and an interesting year of learning together at the City-School level.