The Blog from City Hall

Utah governor declares four-day work week for many state agencies.

Utah’s Spectrum (6/29, Van Deusen) reported that Gov. Jon M. Huntsman (R) will put “many state government agencies” on a four-day work week, beginning in August. Huntsman, who noted that “[t]his is something that has been done at a local government level,” said he would like Utah to “be the first state actually rolling this out.” The Spectrum added, “Approximately 1,000 buildings will be shut down on Fridays” to reduce energy costs by about 20 percent, and, in doing so, “the state’s carbon footprint.” To maintain services, “[e]mployees will work 10-hour days from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m.,” and government offices will “open roughly one hour earlier,” and “close one hour later,” Huntsman said. The Spectrum noted that one Utah resident said the expanded hours may help people utilize government services

We’re one of many cities, counties and states across the nation that are examining the idea of doing our work differently in order to reduce the cost burden our taxpayers pay for energy costs. We’re going to examine what work can be done from home. We’re going to look at what work must be done from the City Center offices. We’re going to ask our residents and our City Council what they might think of a new concept for office hours. Maybe, like the state of Utah, we should look at a four day week, but expanded hours of availability. I’m not sure if that’s a good idea or not, but we will take a look at it.

I attended a Tom Friedman speaking event in May where he dared the audience to think differently about work. He said that we need to think of work as a thing that we do, not a place where we go. That would be a different way to think about work. There are many ideas out there about how we could do our work differently. We’re going to start looking at them this year.

That’s me (R) and KARE-11 TV reporter Rena Sarigianpoulos. Rena does the field and feature reporting at KARE, the Twin Cities’ NBC affiliate. She does a weekly feature called Job Swap With Rena in which she trades jobs with someone in the community. In today’s edition of the feature, she traded jobs with me. You can see the video of our job swap at the KARE-11 website at this link: City Manager For A Day. You can also read more about the job swap at Rena’s blog at this link: Rena’s Blog.

I like Rena. She’s fun and a good reporter. Her next job swap is a nice step up the ladder from city manager: garbage truck worker.

Thanks for the job swap Rena. It was fun, but the hours are not so good. At 4am, I want to be sleeping, not working.

I suffered some technical difficulties on Friday. Regrettably, I was not able to provide you with the special free blog post I promised. Not to worry. It may be Monday, June 23. It may be the start of a new work week. But nonetheless, here is your Friday installment of City Manager Question Time.

Question 5.3: Mr. Neal, I was paging through the recent issue of American City & County and came across the article on local officials blogging. Our City Council members have been interested in doing this but have been told by our City Attorney and IT Director that it would be difficult to comply with open records requests. I’m assuming that Minnesota also has an Open Records Law. Can you tell me how you comply with the open records law when using your blogging website? If there was a request for something you blogged about, say 6 years ago, would you be able to comply? Thanks for any information you can provide me. Stay warm!

Scott Says: Minnesota does indeed have an Open Records law. My blog complies with the Open Records law because everything I’ve ever written on the blog is available 24/7/365. It’s important, as a blog writer, to remember that. I always keep in mind that anything I put into this blog is available 24/7/365. Thus, it’s important to be respectful, truthful and factual. It’s important to know that if you’re not respectful, truthful and factual - someone out there is going to make you eat your words someday. I know because I’ve had to do it a couple of times, and they did not taste very good.

I hope that helps.

Here’s my contribution for City Manager Question Time: Day 4. For those of you scoring at home, I had to skip Day 3 yesterday. I’ll give you a free blog tomorrow to make up for it.

Question #4: Our company is located on Wallace Rd. in Eden Prairie. We have a person living in Victoria who is really feeling the pain of gas prices. She is looking for alternative transportation options..such as car/van pooling.(the bus schedule doesn’t fit her schedule). Would appreciate your input. Thanks in advance.

Scott Says: This is a tough one. Victoria is served by SouthWest Transit, but it appears the bus system is not going to be a viable solution to this problem. You could certainly try the website for Metro Transit and look for possible car or van pools there. Sorry I couldn’t help more, but I’ll bet that staff at one of these two transit agencies will be able to be much more helpful (and knowledgeable) with this question than I am. Good luck.

It’s Tuesday, Day 2 of City Manager Question Time Week. Here is an actual question, and an actual answer, from earlier this year:

Question #2: Dear Mr. City Manager, I am a resident of Eden Prairie. Recently, more people tend to concern consumption of healthy food (organic food and food safety, etc.), and we are considering the raise chickens in our backyard. Our neighbor city Minnetonka has a policy allowing residents to raise chickens (please see Star tribune dated on March 26, 2008). I tried to find the city policy regarding this issue for Eden Prairie residents without success. I will appreciate very much if you could provide such information.

Scott Says: City Code section 9.08 regulates the keeping of chickens (among many types of domesticated animals) in the City. Generally, you are not allowed to keep chickens in the City. There are some exceptions. You can check our City Code online at this link at the City’s website: City Code Online. This is a specific link to section 9.08 about keeping agricultural animals in the city: Chickens and The City.

The City is launching a new service on our website called “City Docs” that will allow anyone using our website to more easily search our City Code and City Council minutes. We will add other public documents to the City Docs service as time goes on. We are launching the new service this week, so check it out and let us know how it works for you.

I get questions every week through my blog from residents and non-residents alike wondering about all kinds of different things about Eden Prairie. About half of them require a response. The other half just want to tell me something about the community, or make a comment about the blog itself. For this week’s series of blogs, I have decided to pick a representative question each day and share the question & answer with you. Enjoy!

Question #1: I’m just curious to know why the city has chosen this time to undertake a re-survey of housing lots in the city for compliance with their platts. I’m also curious to know why the city pays such generous salaries for basically semi skilled workers when the market place and out sourced services companies are awash in labor. An example: Parks Maintenance Technician.

Scott says: I think I need a clarification of your first question. You are referring to something the City is doing as re-surveying to check property owners’ compliance with their plats. I don’t think the City is doing that. However, the City is reestablishing property lines between private and City property, especially adjacent to parks and other publicly-owned open spaces. The City has been working on this task a little bit each summer for the past five years. We’re doing it because we want to protect public land from the negative impacts of private encroachment and to preserve the public’s ability to access public land in the future.

Regarding your second question about our labor practices, the particular employee position you referenced (Park Maintenance Technician) is a union position, so its wage and benefit package is established by contract, which is comparable to the wage & benefit levels in other similarly situated positions in the Twin Cities. This full-time position is supplemented by a number of part-time seasonal and out-sourced employees. The City also supplements these work functions with work release prison laborers as well. We believe it is necessary to have a core group of skilled full-time employees that can be expected to be here for the long-term because we believe that provides long-term benefits for the care and maintenance of the City’s park system, which residents tell us is one of the top two reasons (the one is the school system) they moved to Eden Prairie.

I spent the first two hours of my morning today in St. Paul at an event sponsored by the Citizens League. The event was a planning meeting for the Citizens League’s Regional Policy Conference, which is scheduled for September 23 in Chaska.

The event today wasn’t billed as a focus group, but that’s sort of how it functioned. There were about twenty people there plus four or five staff members from the Citizens League. The participants included County Commissioners, City Council Members, leaders from non-profit organizations, State employees, a State representative, Chamber of Commerce representatives, leaders from professional organizations representing education & transportation, and…one city manager.

The intended outcome of the meeting was listed clearly on our meeting agenda: Identify critical issues and opportunities to address at the September 23 Regional Policy Conference. Our discussion was wrapped around three discussion questions:

1. Are we (i.e. - the Twin Cities region) stuck? (Stuck as in stalled, nothing happening, stuck in a rut.)

2. De we need a new definition of “leadership?” (We didn’t talk much about this one.)

3. Are the problems we face as a region caused by design flaws in our public systems or flaws in the way we are executing our performance within those systems. (The easy answer to this one is, of course, “a little bit of both”, but the staff would not let people crawl into that safe answer.)

We had a very interesting and enlightening discussion, because we did not have to solve anything today. We just had to identify issues and opportunities. We didn’t even have to justify why we identified some and not others. The staff will take everything they heard today, integrate it with the same sort of stuff they heard from a previous group and with the same sort of stuff (probably) they’ll hear from a subsequent group, and then produce a proposed agenda for their September 23 conference.

Then, they’ll shoot that agenda out to the participants in the planning groups and we’ll all get a chance to give some more feedback. I suppose, and I hope for the sake of the staff, that that’ll be about it for the planning process. By the time they get to that final stage they’re pretty much going to be at the “fish or cut bait” point. Go with what you got and plan, plan, plan away.

I have not participated in a Citizens League event before today. It was fun. I hope I get to do it again someday.

This is a photograph of a stream in Eden Prairie. It was taken two weeks ago. It is a real photograph. It is untouched by Photoshop or any other kind of Internet fakery.

It’s blue. More accurately, it’s Smurf-Blue. The reason it’s blue is that the foolish employees of a painting contractor working on a project near the intersection of Hwy 62 and Baker Road decided to flush extra paint and washed out painting equipment down what they thought was a sanitary sewer. It turned out to be a storm sewer, which led to this creek, which drains north into the Glen Lake area of Minnetonka.

There were some poor decisions made in this matter. First off, the painting contractor’s employees should not have tried to dump their waste into our sewer system. It did not matter if they thought it was going into a sanitary sewer. That’s not allowed either. The second bad decision was to dump it and leave it.

We found it because some office workers in the area saw it and called our offices in City Hall. Our environmental protection employees followed-up on the calls. They contacted the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and the Eden Prairie Police. The MPCA made sure that the mess got cleaned up and the Police made sure that the mess was properly documented, because somebody is going to get in some real trouble for this one.

This is an Automatic External Defibrillator (AED). It is attached to the wall near the main reception desk of the building where I work, Eden Prairie City Center. I’ve been trained by the Eden Prairie Fire Department how to use the AED safely and effectively in case one of my coworkers or a guest to our building goes down with a sudden cardiac arrest - which is still the number one cause of death in the United States.

The City has been doing its part to encourage the owners of all public and private buildings in Eden Prairie to purchase AEDs. We’d like to eventually see the AED as commonly as we see fire extinguishers. That’s what the City’s Heart Safe Eden Prairie program is all about.

We started phase 1 of the Heart Safe Eden Prairie program in 2006 by raising over $60,000 from the community to purchase and install AEDs in the public buildings around the city. We are launching phase 2 of the program this week, which also happens to be National CPR and AED Awareness Week, in order to spread the reach of the program into private buildings where we all eat, shop and work.

The AED is easy to use. The Red Cross has comes out with a new campaign about AEDs called “Saving a Life is as Easy as A-E-D“. Check that link. There is a lot of helpful information on their website.

We believe the Heart Safe Eden Prairie program can have a positive impact on the health of the residents of our community. By placing more AED’s in the community, we are decreasing the proximity of an AED to people who may suffer a sudden cardiac arrest. We know that decreasing the time between an arrest and the implementation of the first shock from an AED is critical to survival. If the first shock is delivered within the first minute following an arrest, there is a 90% chance of survival. That survival percentage decreases 10% for every minute of delay of the first shock following the arrest.

So having as many AEDs around us in Eden Prairie is important. We saw another first hand example of that just a couple of weeks ago in a local retail store when an employee suffered a cardiac arrest in the store. His coworkers called 911. Our Police Officers rushed to the scene. One of our Assistant Fire Chiefs was close behind. Our Police and Fire vehicles all carry mobile AEDs. Our Police Officers shocked the person and restored his life. By the time the ambulance showed up, he was conscious and talking. That retailer placed an order to have AEDs installed in the store the next day.

At last night’s City Council meeting, the Council issued a proclamation declaring June to be Heart Safe Eden Prairie month. I hope you will never need one, but if you do we want their to be an AED near you in Eden Prairie.

For more information about the Heart Safe Eden Prairie program or how you can help, please contact the City offices at our main reception number at 952-949-8300.