These are our 2007 EPy Award Winners were announced yesterday at our annual spring employee recognition event. That’s them in the photo. Click on the photo to get a better view of these fine folks. They are, L-R, Cliff Cracauer, winner of this year’s James G. Clark Award for Teamwork; Chuck Schaitberger, winner of this year’s Mayor Jean L. Harris award for community service in Eden Prairie; Doug Ernst, winner of this year’s Mayor Jean L. Harris award for community service in an employee’s hometown (Waconia for Doug); Mayor Phil Young, who helped me emcee the event yesterday; Jill Judlin, one of three winners of this year’s City Manager Quality Awards; Beth Kaszynski, winner of this year’s Carl J. Jullie award for Customer Service; and Mary Keating, winner of a 2007 City Manager Quality Award. Sgt. Bill Wyfells from our Police Department also won a 2007 City Manager Quality Award, but could not join us for yesterday’s event. This was a fine crop of award winners this year. Congratulations to all of them!

In addition to the awards, we also recognized new employees and current employees who have achieved notable thresholds of years of service for the City. We recognized four employees yesterday with 30 years of service: John Conley, Police; and Stu Fox, Don Lang, and Scott Cole all of our Parks & Recreation Department. We also recognized one employee for 35 years of service: Wes Dunsmore, Parks & Recreation. That’s a photo of Wes receiving his 35 year anniversary recognition gift from the Mayor. 35 years is a long time. A very long time.

Here’s my congratulations, and hearty thank you, to Wes for dedicating his working life to Eden Prairie. Well done Wes.

The State Legislature is well, well underway with their 2007 session. With the DFL controlling both the House and the Senate, there are some new issues getting some hearing over in St. Paul this year. An issue that always gets play each year is the attempt to make our system of taxation more fair. In years when the Republicans controlled the House and/or the Senate, they also wanted to increase the level of tax fairness, but it looked differently to them. Here’s an editorial from today’s Star Tribune newspaper that describes the DFL’s view of tax fairness:

Editorial: Aim for a fairer state-local tax system

Don’t raise one regressive tax to cut another.

Published: March 19, 2007

http://www.startribune.com/561/story/1060611.html

When it comes to hyping a forecast, Minnesota House DFLers can play in the same league as TV and radio meteorologists. Last week, they announced the best-guess projections of 2008 property tax increases with a “sky is falling” tone befitting the onset of a blizzard.

In fact, the property tax outlook for the state’s homeowners is improving from stormy to partly cloudy. After several years when state aid cuts to local governments, a 2001 property tax restructuring and rising home market values made homestead tax bills climb at a double-digit clip in much of the state, their rate of increase is slowing.

That’s happening for two reasons: Home prices are flattening — or worse — in much of the state. And the reverse is true for commercial and industrial property values. The real estate market appears to be doing some rebalancing of the state’s property tax portfolio on its own, without legislative intervention.

That won’t stop a DFL-controlled Legislature that rode into office on promises of homeowner property tax relief. On Friday, Senate DFLers pushed a $375 million property tax relief package over its first committee hurdle. It offers lower property taxes next year to virtually every homeowner in the state, regardless of income or market value — though, appropriately, it’s more generous to lower-income homeowners. Those are the taxpayers who were most ill-served as the total tax burden shifted from business to homes in the wake of the 2001 tax overhaul. They deserve a break.

Relief for other homeowners is less well-justified. The best case for it is that Minnesota is relying too heavily on the regressive property tax for its total state and local government revenue. But the Senate plan undercuts that argument by proposing to pay for homeowner relief in large part with a big increase in the statewide business property tax — $222 million through June 2009.

That approach raises one tax that falls disproportionately on low- and middle-income Minnesotans in order to cut another. Business taxes are passed onto consumers and employees, in often invisible but real — and regressive — ways.

A better way to finance property tax relief was proposed by House DFLers Friday: Use the income tax. The House would raise income taxes on Minnesotans with after-deduction income of more than $226,000 per year for individuals and $400,000 per year for couples. Those earners now pay a smaller proportion of their incomes in state and local taxes than do people with incomes under $100,000. Raising their taxes to reduce the property tax load would move state tax policy in the right direction — that is, toward a fairer system.

I spent most of the day on Friday in interviews. We were interviewing five candidates for our upcoming vacancy in our Director of Parks & Recreation position. After 29 years of loyal service to the citizens of Eden Prairie, Parks & Rec Director Bob Lambert is hanging it up on Friday, March 30.

We included most of the Parks & Recreation Department employees in the day’s interviews. We used a multi-panel format. One panel was the Department Directors. One was the management employees in the Parks & Rec Department. Another was a community panel that included representatives from the Parks Commission, the Eden Prairie School District, and the City Council. Our final panel included all of the field employees in the department.

The purpose of including so many eyes and ears in the process was to increase the among of feedback available to me to help make the final choice. I get to make the final choice. It’s going to be a tough one. We had five excellent candidates.

I hope to identify The Choice later this week.

We finished up our National League of Cities (NLC) trip in Washington DC yesterday with a morning conference session with Senators Norm Coleman, Hillary Clinton, Christopher Dodd and Joe Biden as the speakers. Senator Coleman spoke to the conference as a former Mayor. He gave an excellent speaker and got a standing ovation from the 3,000+ city officials in the audience. The three Democratic senators that followed Senator Coleman spoke on the themes they each planned to advance in their respective Presidential campaigns. The NLC invited all declared Presidential candidates. These were the three candidates that accepted the invitation.

Following this session, we trudged up to Capitol Hill again to meet with 3rd District Congressman Jim Ramstad and his senior legislative assistant Adam Peterman. This was our longest meeting of the two days. Congressman Ramstad is an engaging and intelligent man. He has great recall of local events. When we sit down with him we get right to the issues. We talked about airports, trains, highway, access to the Minnesota River Valley, public safety radio spectrum, homeland security spending, community development block grants, and WAFTA. Congressman Ramstad will assist Congressman Kline with our WAFTA policy needs. He also committed to helping set up a meeting for the City with officials at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to discuss the City’s hopes to provide greater access to the MN River Valley with bike trails.

Following our meeting with Congressman Ramstad, we headed over to the Russell Senate Office Building to meet with Mr. Thomas Sullivan, a legislative assistant to Senator Amy Klobuchar. We covered the same range of issues with Mr. Sullivan. This was our first meeting with Senator Klobuchar’s Office. It went well. In fact, it looks like Senator Klobuchar could be particularly helpful to us with WAFTA.

While we were visiting Senator Klobuchar’s Office, we had the opportunity to meet briefly with Miss Minnesota Nicole Swanson. We had our photo take with Ms. Swanson by Senator Klobuchar’s staff. They told us they like to take photos of all of their visitors. The staff person emailed this photo to me yesterday. She told us that this year’s Miss Minnesota context will be held at Eden Prairie High School later this spring.

It was a busy couple of days in Washington DC. We shared our City’s interests with our federal legislators. They were polite and helpful. They will keep us informed as our issues are debated, discussed and decided.

It was a beautiful sunny busy day for us on Capitol Hill today. We started the morning at the conference headquarters to hear an address from National League of Cities President Bart Peterson, who is also the Mayor of Indianapolis, Indiana. We also had a chance to hear about half of the morning’s keynote address from political pundit and columnist David Gergen.

He had to take off during the Gergen speech because we needed to catch a cab over to Capitol Hill for our first meeting of the day with Minnesota 7th District Congressman Jim Oberstar’s office. We met with one of Congressman Oberstar’s staffmembers, Mr. Bill Richard. We spent our time with Mr. Richard talking about transportation issues. Planes, trains, and automobiles. We talked about our new relationship with Flying Cloud Airport; the City support of the proposed extension of LRT from Minneapolis to Eden Prairie; and asking for continued federal support for highway projects at the intersection of 494 & 169.

Next, we were off to the Longworth Building to meet with Minnesota 2nd District Congressman John Kline’s staff. We met with Legislative Assistant Casey Buboltz to talk about one issue: WAFTA. WAFTA is the Western Area Fire Training Association. WAFTA was formed in the early 1970’s after the U.S. Defense Department transferred ownership of a former NIKE missile base in Carver County to a group of eleven small cities who joined together to acquire the site for use as a location to train fire fighters. Well, the site was used for a couple decades then generally abandoned for its original use. The site, however, is contaminated and needs to be cleaned-up. Eight of the eleven WAFTA cities are in Congressman Kline’s district, as is the WAFTA site itself. Three of the WAFTA cities are in Congressman Ramstad’s District. We’re here looking for federal assistance to clean-up the pollution at the WAFTA site. We’ll talk to Congressman Ramstad about it tomorrow.

After our meeting with Congressman Kline’s staff, we headed over to the Hart Senate Office Building to visit with Senator Coleman’s staff. The photo above is of Chief Esbensen and Council Member Butcher outside the Dirksen-Hart office building. The other photo is of Chief Esbensen and me talking with Senator Coleman’s legislative assistant Jordan Talge. We did not have much time with Jordan. The Senator needed him today. But with the short time we did have, we covered WAFTA (again), asked for greater levels of homeland security funding, asked for the Senator to hold Nextel to the concessions they agreed to fund to public safety agencies (I’ll talk more about this later), and shared information with Jordan about our local Partnership for Emergency Readiness.

Tonight, Chief Esbensen and I are having dinner with Eden Prairie Police Department Lt. Jim DeMann. Lt. DeMann has been out here at the FBI Academy in Quantico, VA. He’s in the 10th week of a 10 week program. He graduates on Friday. We’re meeting up with him for some Irish food at a pub around the corner. It’ll be nice to see him and hear how things are going.

More tomorrow……..

In my post yesterday I said it wasn’t Washington DC unless you could see someone protesting something somewhere in town. Today, I need to substitute the word “protest” with “parade”. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon. I caught a little bit of the DC area St. Patrick’s Day parade.

It was a great parade. I snapped the photo (click on the photo to see it in a larger size) on the far left from the observation deck of the Washington Monument. It was striking view. Not a cloud in the sky. And it wouldn’t be a St. Patrick’s Day parade with pipes & drums, Irish step dancers, and a subtle political statement that there are indeed 32 counties on the island of Ireland and that all 32 of them ought to be in one country. Not offense to my British friends, but I feel the same way.

Tomorrow we start our series of legislative meetings. We meet with Congressman Oberstar, Senator Coleman and Congressman Kline’s office tomorrow. The meetings are interspersed throughout the day. Chief Esbensen, Council Member Butcher and I will meet at 8am at the conference hotel to brief for the day, then go see the opening keynote speaker. We have to sneak out early to head over to the capitol to meet with Congressman Oberstar. Our issue(s) for him: Light Rail Transit. We want his support for the Southwest Transitway LRT project. The City Council favors it. So does the Eden Prairie Chamber of Commerce. We see some momentum for LRT right now, so getting Congressman Oberstar’s support - while he is chair of the House Transportation Committee - is very important.

After that, we meet with Congressman Kline’s office. Our issue for this meeting is WAFTA. The Western Area Fire Training Association site is actually in Congressman Kline’s district. Most of the cities involved in WAFTA, however, are in Congressman Ramstad’s district, so it’s important that we talk with both offices about the environmental issues at WAFTA. We need help from both of them.

We end our day on Capitol Hill with a meeting in Senator Coleman’s office. We’re net expecting the Senator. It’s a Monday and he is very busy. We will meet with his staff and talk about LRT, WAFTA, public safety radio rebanding (too complicated to talk about here), Homeland Security Funding for city governments and and Community Development Block Grants.

It will be a long day, and I’m looking forward to it.

You know, it’s just not Washington DC unless somebody somewhere is protesting something. Today’s protest: Free Tibet. I snapped this photo of a Free Tibet protest in DuPont Circle.

Today is a Day of Infamy for Tibetans. China invaded Tibet in 1950 and quickly subdued it and incorporated it into The People’s Republic of China. On March 10, 1959, after nine years of Chinese rule, there was a massive uprising in the Tibetan capital city of Lhasa. The Chinese government in Beijing responded by shelling Lhasa and killing over 87,000 Tibetans, according to Tibetan sources. Tibetans around the world commemorate March 10 each year to honor the souls of the Tibetans that died that day in 1959.

After this protest got rolling the park, they marched up Connecticut Avenue to the Chinese Embassy and let’em have it. I counted about 200 protesters. I can’t wait to read the papers tomorrow and see if the media reports it as 200 or 2,000 protesters. In my experience, sometimes the media exaggerate the size of these events. It could go either way.

I did not get to follow the crowd to the Chinese Embassy. I had to check in at the National League of Cities conference HQ and get ready for my pre-conference training session. The training session was from 1-5pm today. The session topic was mentoring. The discussion focused on how to incorporate the best properties of a good mentor into your everyday management style. I found it interesting and informative. A lot of common sense stuff, but we took the time to learn why the techniques were common sense.

I’m glad I went. More tomorrow……

I am composing this post from our nation’s capital. I’m in Washington DC today attending the National League of Cities’ annual spring legislative affairs conference. I’m in a pre-conference session all afternoon today. The conference itself kicks off tonight followed by more conference sessions tomorrow, Sunday. Then on Monday and Tuesday, we hit The Hill and go meet our legislators. Council Member Sherry Butcher, Fire Chief Esbensen and I are here representing the City. We’ve got meetings lined up with Senator Coleman’s Office, Senator Klobuchar’s Office, Congressman Kline’s Office, Congressman Oberstar’s Office, and with 3rd District Congressman Jim Ramstad. Not his office. He himself. I’m especially looking forward to that one.

But all of that doesn’t have anything to do with this great photo. On Thursday night, the City dedicated it’s newest public building: Fire Station #4. Instead of cutting a ribbon to dedicate the new station, we drove truck #41 through this giant banner. It worked like a charm. The banner broke exactly where it was supposed to break and our Communications Supervisor Pat Brink snapped this great action photo. Thanks Pat.

Fire Station #4 is located at the intersection of Dell Road and TH 312. It is very prominent there. It is our fourth, and most likely our last, fire station. It is a beautiful building. And, so far, the building has come in under budget and ahead of schedule. I say “so far” because it’s not quite done. Close enough for a dedication ceremony, but there’s still a punch list for the contractor to finish up.

Like every building dedication I’ve ever attended there were many expressions of gratitude and appreciation shared. The Mayor was particularly eloquent in his appreciation of the dedication of our fire fighters. But I want to say just one more time how much I’ve appreciated the work of Assistant Fire Chief Steve Koering on this project. Chief Esbensen and I brought Steve into this project to be the City’s Project Manager. Steve is a very sharp guy, but had not really managed a public construction project before. He’s done a fantastic job. He has worked cooperatively with the contractor when that was important to do, but he has also been hard-nosed with everyone at the site when that was in the City’s best interest. In the end, we’re getting a beautiful new building thanks in no small part to Steve Koering.

We’re getting ready to change our nameplates in the Council Chambers. I’ve seen the new ones. They look great. It will be a big upgrade from the plain ones we use now that people can’t read because they’re too small, but that’s enough about that…..

So as staff began the process of ordering the nameplates the topic came up about how we ought to refer to the people who are Members of the City Council. Currently, and for as long as anyone can remember, we’ve been calling them “Councilmember” in Eden Prairie. One word. Councilmember.

Other cities use terms like “Councilperson” or “Councilor”. But the most common title is “Council Member”. Two words. Council Member.

Staff debated this via email until I said that we would see what other comparable Twin Cities suburbs did on the matter and then ask our Councilmembers for their opinion. We did a quick survey of the websites of the eleven other cities of the Municipal Legislative Commission. Here are the results:

Councilmember cities: Eagan, Apple Valley, Maple Grove, Bloomington, Shoreview and Eden Prairie.

Council Member cities: Maplewood, Lakeville, Burnsville, Plymouth, Minnetonka, Edina, and Woodbury.

I then raised the question at the Council meeting Tuesday night. There was what seemed to me to be a long pause, then Councilmember Sherry Butcher said that she thought the title ought to be Council Member. The other Council Members agreed. The issues was resolved in about two minutes. We now have Council Members in Eden Prairie instead of Councilmembers.

Not a huge deal or anything, but I thought you’d all like to know.

It’s standard process for employees here at the City of Eden Prairie to set up annual goals in consultation with their supervisors. I’m not different. I propose my goals to the City Council during my annual performance review, which is typically completed in the April/May time period. During my 2006 performance review, I proposed a goal for this year to develop a new set of protocol for the relationship between the City Council and its citizen advisory commissions. I proposed this goal because I believed that we had room for improvement in the way that we are capitalizing the intellectual capital of the

Eden Prairie citizens who are sharing their time and energy with their community as volunteers on the City’s advisory commissions.

I presented the new protocol to the City Council at their meeting last night. They approved it. Staff will now begin the process of sharing it with commissioners and putting the new procedures into place. The fundamental improvement in the new protocol is in the area of communication. Sounds simple, right? Here’s what we’re going to do:

1. The City Council has a standing agenda item on each meeting agenda for reports from commissions. We will establish a rotating schedule which provides an opportunity for one of the commissions to make a 5-10 minute status report to the Council during this agenda item at each Council meeting. During a normal year the Council has 21 regular meetings. This would provide three reporting opportunities each year for the seven standing commissions.

2. Based on my periodic attendance at commission meetings, my discussions with Commission chairs and my discussion with commission staff liaisons, the Commissions would like to receive more direct input from the Council concerning the things the Commissions are working on. OK. The Council be more deliberate in providing input, feedback and suggestions to the commissions. The Council agreed to establish a regular practice of considering the City’s needs and formally assigning defined policy development tasks to commissions.

3. City staff have a standard practice of developing departmental and divisional Work Plans each year. The Work Plans are reviewed and approved by me and my senior management staff. The Council will establish a similar expectation for the commissions. A good example of what I envision is exactly what the Council received at the February 20 meeting from the Airport Commission and what the Council approved at last night’s meeting from the Conservation Commission. I envision a document that describes a commission’s plans and goals for the year that is developed from commission, staff and Council input that is formally approved by the Council on an annual basis.

4. In order to develop and sustain a good working relationship, I believe it is important for commissions, staff and the Mayor (as a representative of the Council) to meet and talk on a more regular basis than occurs today. The Mayor and I will host a meeting twice each year with the Commission chairs and staff liaisons to discuss policies, procedures, progress, ideas, etc. Former Mayor Tyra-Lukens and I facilitated two such meetings during the final two years of her term. She and I found the meetings useful as a means to connect the City’s elected leadership to the City’s appointed commission leadership. The Commission chairs found the meetings to be valuable. They began a dialog among themselves about their respective commission scopes, polices, practices, etc. It was a good learning experience for all involved. Mayor Young has already initiated one-on-one meetings with commission chairs to get to know them better. This practice is a good idea and will further a sense of connection between the commission chairs and the city’s elected leaders. On my end, I am going to initiate a post-commission meeting meeting with commission staff liaisons to get a timelier and in depth briefing of commission meetings and activities. I also plan to continue my past practice of sitting in on at least one regular meeting of each commission each year.

The four points of the new protocol have one common dominator: greater levels of formal and informal communication among Council, staff and commissions. I believe this new protocol will improve the effectiveness of our commissions; provide greater policy value to the City; and increase the sense of connectedness between the City’s elected and appointed leaders.

Is there such a thing as the Y2K7 Bug? Are all of our electronic devices going to hiccup to a halt because of the change in the start date for Daylight Savings Time? i actually hadn’t given this much thought until we discussed it in a staff meeting this morning. Here is an email note we sent out to our employees today about this issue:

“The IT Division is currently working on updating our systems to prepare for the new Daylight Saving Time Dates. This year Daylight Saving Time will begin 3 weeks earlier and end one week later than normal. This change is causing problems with the way computers handle times during those additional weeks. If you currently look at your appointment schedule in your Outlook Calendar you may notice that the times are shifted during these weeks (March 11 - April 1) (Oct 28 - Nov 4). The IT Division is currently patching Servers and Workstations to solve this problem. However, we do need your help.

-Please do not shut your PCs down at night when you leave. Please RESTART instead, this leaves the computer running and allows us to complete the updates on your PC.

-Please manually adjust your appointments during these weeks, and also verify you appointments. If you will be scheduling meetings with others during these times it would be a good idea to include the times in the subject of the messages rather that simply relying on the times that are included with the message. If you need help adjusting you calendar items please contact IT.

We will keep you informed of our progress on this issue and let you know what to expect and what else you may need to do to ensure a smooth DST Change.”

That’s what we’re telling City employees. I think we can handle it. Below is more information about the DST change from CNN.

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	Commentary:
	Top Tips by Gerri Willis	Column archive

Keeping in sync with Daylight Savings Time

This year we’re springing forward three weeks early. Gerri Willis takes a look at how to prepare for the time change.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — We’re springing forward three weeks early this year and that could cause some computer and gadget headaches. We’ll give you the preparation tools you need to navigate through this year’s time change.

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The City of Eden Prairie has established an inclement weather policy that governs what services the City will provide during time of inclement weather. This policy then dictates which employees must come to work and which ones may stay home. The employees that must come to work are those providing “essential” services. Essential services include such services as police protection, fire suppression, water plant operators and 911 dispatchers.

“Non-essential” employees may stay home on days when we activate our policy, if they clear the absence with their supervisor, and if they take personal leave time to cover the time away from work.

Today and tomorrow, essential services also includes all of our snow removal team employees. They are scheduled to come in to work tomorrow morning (Friday) at 3am and plow the snow from our streets throughout the day.

I just watched the Channel 9 news. Looks like Eden Prairie is looking at another 6-9 inches of snow tonight, so we will activate our inclement weather policy again for Friday, March 2. Essential employees, come to work. Non-essential employees, contact your supervisor and play it safe.