Voting

With all the campaign ads and lawn signs around we know it is election season. The general election is November 2nd from 7:00 am to 8:00 pm. For Breezy Point residents voting takes place at city hall. This is located at 8319 Co. Rd. 11, across from the airport and south of the Public Safety Building.

If you have recently moved or become eligible to vote you will need to register. Advance registration can be done at the county offices. There are forms available at city hall as well. You’ll need to provide some identification information such as a social security number or driver’s license number. The form can be mailed in. The last day to pre-register is October 12.

You can also register on Election Day at the polls. You will need to provide information such as a current MN Drivers license or MN Photo ID card showing your current address in the precinct. A tribal ID or prior registration with a change of address or name in the same precinct can also work.

If your ID does not show your current address someone who is registered in your precinct can vouch for you. You can also use a current utility bill and photo ID to prove residency.

If you can’t make it to the polls on Election Day you can vote in advance with an absentee ballot. Absentee ballots can be received at the county courthouse. If you are registered, an absentee ballot can also be sent to you if there is sufficient time to receive the ballot and mail it back. In any event you’ll need to contact the County Auditor’s office to arrange for an absentee ballot. The Auditor’s office is also open on Saturday October 30th from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. for absentee voting. The last day an absentee ballot can be accomplished is Monday November 1st.

Election Day is November 2nd, please exercise your right to vote.

Housing Starts

We all have experienced the result of the declining economy but recently we have seen a small uptick in new housing starts. Building permits have creped along this year much like last year and we’re now seeing a few single family homes come in. We have 4 single family home starts so far but we also have 2 more in the wings with another 3 rumored to come in. Two 2 quad homes are in the works for construction adding to the building of housing in Breezy Point. A number of these single family homes are tear downs of seasonal structures with a rebuilding of a new year-round home. This sometimes means a change in population while it is an increase in taxable valuation.

Throughout the summer we saw a fair amount of decks, porches, garages, and additions. Remodeling of existing structures was also prevalent as property owners work to better their housing conditions. Construction typically picks up this time of year as builders need to get some things in the ground before winter freeze up. All this brings new hope for change and things to come.

This is truly good news as we haven’t anticipated the housing starts we have seen. The evidence of properties changing hands is apparent in assessment searches and septic tank certifications gives further pause to consider that perhaps things are stating to turn around. We’re a far cry from the housing boom of the past but seeing housing starts again is certainly welcome. We can only hope the change continues through next year.

Off Season Recreational Vehicles

Is it time to store your boat for the winter? If you’re like many fishermen that doesn’t happen until you have hard lakewater. There are however a great number of boaters who retire their boats after Labor Day or when the weather starts to turn. That brings up the question of storage. Where do I store the boat until spring?

Many of you take them to storage facilities. Some people have garages that are available and others store them outside. The outside storage issue was one that the Planning Commission and the City Council had worked on for almost a year but finally been adopted. This ordinance attempts to keep Breezy Point free of the clutter of boats and trailers but recognizes the need for common sense, use and storage of these. As a recreationally orientated community it can be hard to keep things in balance.

One stumbling block was that of storage. What is storage? Moving trailers in and out on a regular basis such as that of a contractor is not storage. Regular use of your boat parked in the driveway is not storage but when the use ceases for the season, parking becomes storage. Then we get into time periods and sizes of recreational vehicles. If it is over 30 feet in length outside storage is limited to 21 cumulative days per year. If it is under 30 feet in length, parking is limited to 21 consecutive days however storage of these types of recreational vehicles does have specific caveats and exemptions.

Storage over 21 days can occur if parked on the side or rear yard of a property but must be at least behind the front wall of the principal structure and must be less than 30 feet in length. The recreational vehicle must have a current license and/or watercraft registration.

Exceptions include units that are maintained for year round usages. Water craft under 9 feet do not have to meet regulations and if your property is in excess of 1 acre or there is no visibility from other properties, such as screening, these rules don’t apply.

This may seem confusing but if you have questions feel free to stop by. Copies of the change in ordinance are available. Questions are also welcome.

Men in Tights

I generally have reserved this blog for city matters but have been getting a number of requests to post pictures of me at my daughters Katelynn's wedding. She had a grand idea that weddings should be fun and wanted something different. In keeping with that spirit she chose a theme wedding. A Renaissance wedding was her choice along with a picnic dinner of a hog roast, grilled corn on the cob, and cole slaw. The wedding was short, the dinner was great and a good time was had by all.
Lady Ginger and I are the proud parents.

Its been a Summer!

This summer season has been a bit different than many past summers. We have seen a good deal of rain which has helped address the drought conditions of many years and brought up lake levels. It has also created different sets of problems for city crews and their activities over the summer season.

With each rain, particularly large ones we see drainage issues. We have some areas with adequate paved roads and drainage but much of the city is served by gravel roads with little or no drainage facilities. Each rain brings erosion on these roadways that carry materials of sand or gravel to low lying areas. Public works spend a large amount of time dealing with these in some fashion all over the city. Roads are graded, shaped, and crowned. Ditches are installed and after a few years they fill up with sand or gravel and we start all over again. Gravel roads are less costly to install but far more costly to maintain. It does keep staff busy in many ways.

Another issue we’ve had this year with the rains has been mowing. Roadside mowing is a large task that occurs all season long but this year has been difficult to keep up with. We try to stay ahead of it but in the spring there are calls to limit mowing to save the wild flowers and then very quickly it gets out of hand. In most years we manage to keep pace but this year the rains just kept coming. Calls come in asking for mowing as we continued to mow with as much equipment and manpower we have. As I understand it in most years the rain relents in August and we finally catch up, but that didn’t happen this year.

Summer is the time we clean out, fix up, and expand facilities. The clean out and fix up happened but very little expansion occurred. A good part of this was budget constraints, but we also saw the reconstruction of Co. Rd. 4 occur which displaced some of our activity. This certainly falls into the fixed up category but was very disruptive for many people who rely on this roadway. As we always say “short term pain for long term gain”. This project as I understand it will have its first lift of asphalt installed by the middle of October. That will bring some relief to many.

With Labor Day weekend upon us, many of us focus on family, the end of summer, and the start of school. The city starts to focus on the coming season. Irrigation lines need to be blown out. Plows and equipment is readied for the “S” word. Final pumping of the wastewater at the plant occurs so that adequate storage exists for winter use. Those items needing repair and winter work are readied. We shift our focus and resources to a new season.

Have a great Labor Day Weekend and enjoy the last hurrah of summer as the seasons are a changing.

Funding the Sewer System

Funding of sewer systems is far more complicated than most people assume. I think the common belief is that we charge a user fee and that covers all the costs. The user fee approach generally only covers operations. Operations include running the system with man power, electricity, and repair and maintenance. There are two other generally accepted charges that are used by cities to pay for sewer systems but first we’ll talk about how the system operates.

As you know there are pipes that run in the ground for the collection system. These pipes are sloped to allow gravity to run wastewater to lift stations. They pump the wastewater to a higher level in the collection system to again run by gravity to the next lift or to the wastewater treatment facility. Lift stations have force mains associated with them as well.

These collection systems are funded, in part, by assessments for the pipe that runs along properties and a portion of the lift stations needed to serve an area. The other portion of the lift stations not assessed is paid by trunk fees. Trunk fees also pay for force mains, over sizing of sewer lines and for future improvements to the wastewater treatment plant.

The collections of trunk fees occur with every new or expanded building that uses the sewer system. The theory here is you are using the collection and treatment system and you should pay your associated costs in that system. Much like expanding a home with additional bedrooms you are required to have additional capacity in your septic system and drain field. The city installed and prepaid for this equipment and wants the users of the system to pay their fair share of the costs.

The method of determining the impact is through an “Equivalent Residential Unit” or ERU. There are established standards in use to determine what constitutes a residential unit for other types of uses. So uses such as gas stations, restaurants or any other non-residential use requires the calculation of equivalents to determine the number of ERU’s and trunk charge. Trunk charges are generally paid at the time a building permit is issued or when a use is connected to the sewer. Almost all cities use a form of this to address costs for sewer. In Breezy Point the present trunk charge per unit is $4,838.20.

Occasionally cities will use a tax levy to pay for wastewater given the high costs of treatment facilities. This is not the preferred method of payment as users of the system should pay the costs of the system. In Breezy Point there are no tax dollars supporting the sewer system. Only sewer users pay for sewer through the charges of line assessments, trunk charges and user fees.

Paying off the TIF

The use of Tax Increment Financing (TIF) is something that is done throughout Minnesota and other states to spur economic development. TIF stands for Tax Increment Financing. TIF is a means of capturing taxes to offset costs associated with development. There are a number of types of TIF’s.

How this works is a developer generally starts out with a property that is undeveloped. The property is then developed and the city captures the difference in taxes between the vacant undeveloped property and the developed property. That’s the increment. This increment is then used to write down costs of the development.

To accomplish this, the city is obligated to write a plan which includes both a development district (physical area) and a development plan. The plan includes what is going to happen in terms of development and what were the expected revenues (taxes) that will be created as a result. A public hearing is held prior to the adoption and notice is given to the school district and county. The plan captures their taxes in addition to the city’s. Setting this all up generally involves the use of a public finance consultant and sometimes a bond attorney. Establishing these documents and going through the process generates some expenses.

When you consider financing options, two approaches exist. One involves the bonding for the improvements the city will participate in and doing the construction. Construction can occur through the developer or through city efforts. So in this approach, the city bonds for costs to be incurred and then collects the increment and uses it to pay off the bonds.

The second approach is a pay as you go. What this means is the developer pays all costs associated with the development, which he’ll get reimbursed from the TIF. The city pays the developer the increments received as we collect them on an annual basis.

In either approach a development agreement is needed which specifies what conditions each party will observe. In many communities a developer is required to pay for all out of pocket expenses the city experiences. Some communities rely on the increment to reimburse itself for prepaid expenses. This was the situation with the TIF district the city recently decertified. The district was then decertified as the developer did not live up to his obligations. The city was then left with prepaid expenses that were not reimbursed.

We wanted to satisfy our books by removing the fund that supports this district. We did this with a transfer from the general fund to the TIF Fund. The fund will no longer show a negative balance so it can be removed from our accounting. The unfortunate part of this is the city chose to reimburse itself with an increment rather than demand upfront payments of costs associated with the development. This was a decision that didn’t pan out as expected but we’ll know better if there is a next time.

A Different Arena

I know most of you have heard of Annexation. This is where a city brings property from a township into a city and expands the boundaries. If you’re from Breezy Point you have probably heard about Detachment. This is somewhat the opposite. A property owner petitions the state to remove their property from a city.

The statute that addresses this is a very brief one. This statute is a poorly written and accomplishes its goals but fails to address numerous concerns. I think the issue that generates the most concern is that of the lack of local control in the process. Here a property owner petitions the state and only the city and property owner are involved. There is no notice to the receiving township or the county. They have no formal say in the matter. After the “required” 3 meetings with property owners an administrative law judge makes a decision. This person only looks at the detachment law, doesn’t take into consideration the character of the community nor do they consider any other statute that may conflict with this action. This judge is only accountable to the governor.

This judge, in the absence of an agreement, allocates costs for the proceedings if a hearing is held. The last hearings held in Breezy Point resulted in the city paying 75% of the costs. The city didn’t petition to have land removed, the petitioner did. Does the judge think because we’re a city or have deep pockets we should have the majority responsibility for loosing tax base and part of the city? It just doesn’t make sense.

The law provides that only abutting property owners are eligible for detachment. The state office allows non-abutting property owners to petition for detachment. They do this by considering that combinations of property create the abutting situation. This abutting property clause seems to address limited situations where one jurisdiction may be better able to be served by a neighboring unit of government. The legislative intent was not to allow wholesale detachment of vast acreages in a municipality without good cause. A very different interpretation is being used.

There criteria for determining whether or not the property could detach is both vague and broad. Rural in character, doesn’t affect the symmetry, not commercial or industrial or have utilities. This could be said of many communities in Minnesota that have a rural flair.

Given legal expenses, hearing expenses, the actions of the past hearings and the lack of common sense with the state’s administrative law judge the city council considered our options at the last meeting. They reluctantly voted to end the proceedings and the expense by allowing for the detachment. They also acknowledged indirectly that the resolve for this matter isn’t found at this juncture but rather lies in the need for change in law. We will be diligently working in this arena.

It's That Time of the Year

It’s now budget time. Each year the city starts its budget around June or July and works towards a budget to address next years needs. The process starts with staff looking at their department needs and expenses and making decisions about where we need to go with it. These are then brought together to see what the bottom line looks like. Along the way we address questions like what are our equipment needs, what capital projects might we consider for this next year, and where are our costs going with payroll and other related expenses.

Once the staff has assembled a draft council gets involved with a review of the numbers and they too make decisions concerning the thresholds established in departments and line accounts. They also look towards capital projects or initiatives that they would like to see accomplished in the upcoming year.

Another important factor in developing the budget is understanding the impact. In other words what is the rate of taxation we anticipate based on last years amount. Given our cycles of valuations for properties we don’t see what our final tax capacity is until late in the year, typically December. So understanding impact is difficult in that we use last year’s data as a base. Typically cites see construction throughout the year and anticipate some growth in values. This year we have changes in values due to market conditions and also a loss of value due to detachment.

The process of the budget continues with a preliminary levy certified to the county no later than September 15th. This amount is the amount that goes on Truth in Taxation notices and it is also the maximum amount the city can tax for the upcoming year. The city continues to work the budget to hopefully additionally decrease the amount of the levy. The Truth in Taxation meeting and final levy occur in December.

The Rains Have Been Coming

The city of Breezy Point has lots of activities and things going on, on a daily basis. One of the more routine and continual matters this year seems to be road maintenance particularly when it comes to drainage. As you all know we live with granular soils here. You know, sand and gravel. We have some areas with limited clay and also areas of peat soils but the sand and gravel create the most problems with erosion.

After almost every rain event of any significance we get calls to fix the road to deal with an accumulation of materials from erosion or a wash out of a section of roadway. The majority of or road system was built without adequate drainage systems. In some instances drainage was provided for when the roads were originally built but over time erosion of materials has filled these drainage ways. In addressing these public works is constantly on the lookout for problems and responding to calls. We attempt to get grading of these roads done when needed and practicable. We have had some successes is solving problems over time. We have had setbacks where every rain event causes problems.

We continue to accomplish these efforts but as we move forward a couple of things need to be looked at. The first involves the construction of paved roadways. The city in the distant past has just paved over existing roadways. This provided a durable surface but really didn’t deal adequately with drainage. We’ve been looking at these issues with any project to make sure drainage is a part of the project so we can reduce the ongoing problems for residents as well as public works.

The other thing, that is more of a long range project, is that of a storm sewer utility or improvement districts. Here we’ll take a big picture look at storm water runoff and find solutions that can be maintained and provide better utility into the future. This effort hasn’t taken a priority yet but will be something the city intends to look at in the future.

Thank you for your patience with these issues. Our public works crew does a great job but with 65 miles of roadways to maintain they are at times stretched thin. We don’t inspect every roadway daily so your calls are welcome but also keep in mind the solutions don’t always come easy.

I Think We Solved It

Sometimes what happens surprises you. It is sort of a Murphy’s law thing in reverse. Murphy’s Law deals with the pessimistic perspective. If it can go wrong it usually does. However here I’m looking at the positive side of the issue I wrote about last week.

I really didn’t think we’d be able to get the cable audio fixed so that the playback could be heard in time for the July council meeting. We had tried everything we could think of and called the service technician and left a message. He was out of town for the July 4th holiday so our hope of seeing him on the 6th of July was not looking good. But he showed up, considered our problem and found a solution.

The fix was a bit technical in nature as we had to change some wires around and also needed to be careful the audio volume for the recording isn’t recorded too high. I think the problem is solved. I do know at the meeting thatthere was some audio issues in the beginning which were taken care of so volumes may have been too high to start with. I’m hoping this settled down as we moved forward with adjustments. We didn't want too strong of an output. In any event the recording volume was increased and hopefully we can hear the audio in the broadcast of the council meeting.

If you have feedback concerning the volume level we’d like to hear it. It is a bit of a work in progress as we need to address the recording volume here to deal with the broadcast equipment used for playback. We need to find the correct volume here to balance it there as it seems no two pieces of equipment playback the same. Please bear with us as we try to get it right.

I know some of you were concerned and called with complaints. Others had patience with us. I thank both groups for your concerns. With any luck we’ll zero in on the right levels soon. The good news is it didn’t require an expense for new equipment upgrades, only the technician’s time. Our thanks go out to Romane at UCT Technology of St. Michael for getting us on track.

Council Meeting Broadasts

For some time now the city has struggled with the audio portion of the DVD recording of the council meeting. The audio portion of the meeting was and is of poor quality requiring volumes to be turned up to the maximum to hear. Even with that there is background noise or a hum.

The audio in the council chambers is great so we know most of the system is functioning fine. We also really didn’t understand this as the playback of the disk had reasonable sound on other devices. So we felt the playback in the rebroadcasting was the problem. Either their equipment was at fault or the playback volume level was set too low. Over the last few months we came to realize that this maybe a contributing factor but it seemed that the audio volume had further declined and needed to be addressed.

As we tried to solve the problem we tried a couple of different things that could be the cause such as a faulty plug-in or wire. This didn’t seem to do anything. We swapped out the DVD recorder to a different machine. Here we thought at first it was better with a louder audio but it really was not. We found a setting on the back of the machine which looked like it may work but it didn’t increase volume but rather dealt with another issue with the audio playback.

After calling our audio technician he suggested a few things which either didn’t work or wasn’t available on the equipment we have. He then suggested an audio amplifier to plug into the DVD recorder. We thought this would surely solve the problem.

The package finally arrived, after 3 weeks of waiting. The technician labeled everything so we knew exactly how to install it. We noted that the unit came with an adjustable gain and we hoped that the sound volume could even be increased to a level that could be too loud for playback.

After making the installation and testing the unit by recording at a number of different gain settings, the volume level seemed to be better at the highest setting. The playback however, using a different machine, was a very big disappointment. The playback volume doesn’t need to be set to the maximum level now, only slightly lower than that.

Our technician has been contacted and we had hopes he’d solve the problem for the July meeting but it appears that won’t happen. We’re uncertain where the problem lies and hope it can be remedied quickly, easily, and at a low cost. Our determination to fix the problem is there, my hope is we can solve the problem soon.