Monthly Archives: March 2008

Pothole Season Is Here

Yes, it’s that time of year again. It’s pothole season. With the freeze and thaw and freeze and thaw cycle in full gear right now, we will begin to start seeing our old driving nemesis more often - the pothole.
We have a new feature for our residents to assist us this year in fighting potholes. [...]

Home Values in Eden Prairie

Home values in Eden Prairie, like most places in the United States, are heading down this year. Values are not collapsing, but they are taking a short run dip. Leah Shaffer did an informative article about local home values in last week’s Eden Prairie News. She did an extensive interview with City Assessor Steve Sinell [...]

Council Moves 20-40-15 Forward

The City Council took a big step last night toward advancing the City’s 20-40-15 initiative by approving a plan prepared by the City’s energy management consultant, McKinstry & Associates, that will increase the energy efficiency of the City’s public buildings.
The plan, which we call Phase 1.1, improvements to the lighting and electrical controls at the [...]

Wine Club

Are you a wine connoisseur, or would you like to be? If your answer is “yes”, you might enjoy a membership in our new Wine Club. We rolled out the Wine Club at our spring wine tasting event earlier this month. You can buy a Wine Club membership at any of our three municipal liquor [...]

Water, Water

I composed (with the very able editing of Communication Manager Joyce Lorenz and Public Works Director Gene Dietz) a commentary piece about water production and consumption for Eden Prairie’s two local newspapers last week. It got into the Eden Prairie News last week and will hopefully make the Eden Prairie Sun Current this week. Here’s [...]

Follow-up to DC Trip

Council Member Brad Aho, Fire Chief George Esbensen and I walked walked and walked the sidewalks around the office buildings surrounding Capitol Hill as we went from legislative office to legislative office to talk about Eden Prairie’s federal legislative agenda. It was a lot of walking. My feet were dead after two days of it. [...]

Computer Problems on the Road

Computer problems on the road are frustrating for anyone. For me they are frustrating as car problems on the road. Unfortunately for me, I can’t fix either one of them. I had intended to give a daily update about our National League of Cities trip to Washington DC this week. But alas, not cooperation from [...]

Heading off to DC

City Council Member Brad Aho, Fire Chief George Esbensen and I are heading off to Washington DC this weekend for the 2008 National League of Cities Congressional Cities Conference. The conference is important, but we have also scheduled meetings with a number of Minnesota’s federal elected officials to discuss policy issues that are of particular [...]

Big Council Meeting for Presbyterian Homes Project

At our March 4 City Council meeting this week, the City Council granted the final approvals for the proposed Presbyterian Homes project. The project will replace the Castle Ridge/Broadmoor development. It will consist of over 700 units of housing, 70,000 square feet of retail space and a stand alone CVS pharmacy. The estimated value of [...]

Community Center Opens Phase II

The second phase of the new Eden Prairie Community Center opened on Saturday, March 1. The major component to open on Saturday was the new front door. The new front door opened at 5:30 am, and shortly after that the building was full for most of the day with residents, visitors and youth hockey players [...]