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HomeMy WebLinkAboutCCWkspAgenda 8-4-10Falcon Heights City Council Workshop City Hall 2077 W Larpenteur Ave. 6:30 p.m. AGENDA August 4, 2010 : 1) Strong Towns Pilot Project Proposal 2) Draft 2011 General Fund Budget If you have a disability and need accommodation in order to attend this meeting, please notify City Hall 48 hours in advance between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. at 651-792-7600. We will be happy to help. pdf\PersistentHandler REQUEST FOR COUNCIL ACTION Families, Fields and Fair __________________________ Meeting Date August 4, 2010 Agenda Item Workshop 1 Attachment Pilot Project Proposal Submitted By Justin Miller, City Administrator The City That Soars! Item Strong Towns Pilot Project Proposal Description Several weeks ago Mayor Lindstrom was approached by Jon Commers, the cofounder and executive director of an organization called Strong Towns. The organization is described as: “Strong Towns is a new nonpartisan, nonprofit organization focused on partnering with communities to redesign themselves for long-term financial, environmental and social viability. The organization is virtual and highly entrepreneurial in ways consistent with its mission.” Mr. Commers is interested in finding cities to serve as a pilot to test out some ideas. Initial discussions led him to believe that Falcon Heights would be a good case study. Attached is a draft proposal that he has developed, and he has been invited to the August 4th workshop to further discuss his ideas with the council. Budget Impact N/A Attachment(s) Pilot Project Proposal Action(s) Requested No action is required. Citizen Professionals: Core Asset in Falcon Heights, MN Proposal for Pilot Project Partners [City of Falcon Heights logo] Citizen Professionals Pilot Project Description City of Falcon Heights and Strong Towns July 29, 2010, page 2 of 6 Background and Rationale The people of the Minneapolis Saint Paul region consistently rank among the twenty most productive workforces in the country. So why have we stumbled from one episode of apparent scarcity to the next? How do we explain the development of an ongoing, structural deficit that leaders are now saying threatens the state with fiscal “meltdown”? We have grown to view the payment of taxes as our primary way of contributing to key shared assets: Education, health, transportation, housing, all core public functions. Still, taxes are not the only way we provide shared assets. And for good or ill, our system of paying taxes is an at-arms-length transaction. For many of us, our property tax payments – the main way that cities, school districts and counties raise revenue – are embedded in our mortgage payments or rent. As Harry Boyte of the Augsburg Center for Democracy and Citizenship has long argued, we remain disconnected from the reality of what happens once we make those contributions to the commonwealth. We become consumers of public goods in an exchange for our taxes. We’ve become primarily consumers, not producers, of public goods – but it doesn’t have to be this way. Beyond paying taxes, citizens have nearly endless capacity to identify and address challenges they face every day: Minnesotans do so as volunteers at a rate that’s unmatched nationally. Yet, we have a body of skills and assets that aren’t fully utilized in our roles as volunteers. Our schools need energy improvements, and there are those among us who can install insulation, more efficient boilers, solar panels and geothermal heating systems. We can redesign, renovate and maintain parks in need of repair, and build stormwater management infrastructure like rain gardens. If this seems arbitrary or onerous, remember that many of us already manage public spaces on boulevards and in alleys. We produce public goods such as well-managed polling stations, community gardens, and guardians ad litem, to name a very few examples. What’s missing is a recognition that these examples are just glimpses of the potential to involve citizens in the design and execution of public work. When citizens are involved at this level, it follows that results will be improved through the matching of those who have the most experience with a given place to those with the responsibility and authority to manage it. It builds civic muscle, taking underused capacity in the form of citizen expertise and labor and investing it locally. Of course, we’re busy. Those with work are working more hours than before, and over 14% of us are unemployed or underemployed in the wake of a brutal recession and so far largely jobless recovery. But even a modest commitment of time and expertise present an astounding resource. The region’s population over age 18 numbers roughly 2.4 million people. If just 10% of us gave an additional one hour per month to a shared purpose, this would represent the equivalent of 1,500 people working full time to design, build and repair public assets we all use. If "work" and "volunteerism" were not segregated in our minds and on our calendars, would we view today's environment as scarce? Citizen Professionals Pilot Project Description City of Falcon Heights and Strong Towns July 29, 2010, page 3 of 6 These aren’t radical ideas. They’re traditional. Tom Fisher, Dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota, has called for restoring the role of citizens as a way to strengthen public systems. He’s written an article (and is currently working on a book) on the subject, called “Fracture Critical.” In his writing and in an interview last month, Fisher called on the metaphor of the polders of Holland. Polders are land areas organized centuries ago, to manage dike systems to keep the Dutch lowlands from catastrophic flooding. Building and maintaining one of 3,000 Dutch polders is a local enterprise. Historically, the high stakes of failure served to involve monasteries, merchants and Dutch farmers alike in the design, construction and ongoing management of the dikes and pumps. Polders, becoming the seat of decentralized government decision making, also served as training grounds for people to learn the craft of handling waters, protecting the land, and forming democratic decisions. In so doing, skills and local knowhow are also distributed through local communities, and across age groups. One of the reasons that scarcity has become the backdrop of public debate nationally, is that we’ve been leaving the assets of citizens underused. Our deficit is structural because we bring in less revenue than we expend each year, and also because we do not channel the resource of citizen skills, labor, and ingenuity into Minnesota’s vitality. Fertile Environment for Experimentation The City of Falcon Heights is a community of roughly 5,500 residents, adjacent to Saint Paul to the south and featuring two prominent regional assets: The University of Minnesota’s Saint Paul campus, and the grounds of the Minnesota State Fair. In recent years, elected leadership and senior staff of the City have pursued initiatives to harness citizen resources more effectively. Falcon Heights boasts an engaged population: population: 100 neighborhood liaisons or block captains network households with City decision making. More than 500 residents are members of a digital forum sponsored by the City. Programs such as the Community Emergency Response Team and Adopt a Crop have been popular and sustained, representing an expression of public will to invest citizen time and skills in shared assets. Citizen commitment and City infrastructure illustrate that Falcon Heights residents are highly involved. Falcon Heights is also a markedly educated city, due in large part to its proximity and historical connection to the University and its faculty. According to the 2000 Census, over 70% of Falcon Heights residents between ages 35 and 44 held a Bachelor’s degree or higher, doubling the region’s average and nearly tripling the national average. According to federal data, higher educational attainment and membership in the age 35-44 cohort are each highly correlated with participation in activities labeled as volunteering. Citizen Professionals Pilot Project Description City of Falcon Heights and Strong Towns July 29, 2010, page 4 of 6 Finally, the City’s small size and relative simplicity in staffing structure provide an environment well suited to a progressive City role in promoting initiatives to expand public work within its boundaries. Initiative The premise of this proposal is that citizens have skills that remain unharnessed for the design, improvement and maintenance of public space and systems. As envisioned, an initiative is intended to achieve multiple outcomes: • Increase the fiscal stability of the City of Falcon Heights through use of citizen skills. A state-level, structural budget deficit looms in Minnesota, and exploring broader ways of engaging citizens in community work is an important way to reduce political and fiscal risk. • Develop the base of citizen skills applicable to public work (examples may include horticulture, stormwater management, athletic programs, or other). An initiative in the City can provide opportunities for development of citizen skills (and transfer of skills among citizens) that have long term value both to the commonwealth and to the individual. Citizen development is workforce development, as well. The initiative contemplates pursuing these goals via two concrete strategies undertaken with the support of the City of Falcon Heights and Strong Towns: • Form and facilitate a budget team of citizens tasked with identifying opportunities for bold change to building and maintaining public space and systems via public work • Drawing on existing networks including the City’s list serve, social networking tools, and institutions including the University and Roseville Public Schools, implement modern barn-raisings to demonstrate potential application of the ideas of public work. [Concluding comments about initiative] Partners City of Falcon Heights, Minnesota [Info about City of Falcon Heights, Peter and Justin here] Strong Towns Strong Towns is a new nonpartisan, nonprofit organization focused on partnering with communities to redesign themselves for long-term financial, environmental and social viability. The organization is virtual and highly entrepreneurial in ways consistent with its mission. Jon Commers is co-founder and executive director of Strong Towns. Jon brings fifteen years of experience analyzing, developing and implementing policy and public finance strategies to his work at Strong Towns. As a consultant to cities and private parties involved in redevelopment – primarily in core urban areas – Jon’s work has been Citizen Professionals Pilot Project Description City of Falcon Heights and Strong Towns July 29, 2010, page 5 of 6 devoted to understanding what distinguishes successful places. Managing the policy and practice of municipal finance is a critical element of Strong Towns, and Jon’s expertise supports the organization’s work in this area. Jon also writes the Cents of Place blog, a forum for discussion of the financial issues around placemaking, and is a regular contributor to the Star Tribune’s online forum, Your Voices. In addition to his work with Strong Towns, Jon is a member of the Planning Commission for the City of St. Paul, Minnesota. He has served as a Fellow at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute Policy Forum, and as an Adjunct Professor of Economics at the College of Saint Catherine. He has served on many community boards, including current service as a director for the Neighborhood Energy Connection. Jon holds an MBA (University of Saint Thomas, St. Paul, MN) and a BA in History and Political Economy (Carleton College, Northfield, MN). He lives in St. Paul with his family. Advisors Harry Boyte, Co-Director, Center for Democracy and Citizenship, Augsburg College Harry Boyte is co-director of the Center for Democracy Citizenship, which he founded at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs nearly two decades ago. He is also a senior fellow and graduate faculty member at the Humphrey Institute. Boyte is an architect of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship's public work approach to civic engagement and democracy, a conceptual framework of citizenship that has gained world-wide recognition for its theoretical innovations and its practical effectiveness in translating lessons from community organizing into institutional and professional change. From 1993 to 1995, Boyte served as national coordinator of the New Citizenship, a broad nonpartisan effort to bridge the citizen-government gap. He presented New Citizenship findings to President Clinton, Vice President Gore and other administration leaders at a 1995 Camp David Seminar on the future of democracy, a presentation which helped to shape Clinton's “New Covenant” State of the Union address that year. Boyte has also served as a senior advisor to the National Commission on Civic Renewal, and as national associate of the Kettering Foundation. He has worked with a variety of foundations, nonprofit, educational, neighborhood and citizen organizations concerned with community development, citizenship education, and civic renewal. In the 1960s, Boyte worked for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as a field secretary with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the southern civil rights movement. Boyte is author of nine books on citizenship, democracy, and community organizing, and his writings have appeared in more than 100 publications, including The New York Times, Perspectives on Politics, Kettering Review, and the Wall Street Journal. He earned a doctorate degree in political and social thought from the Union Institute. Thomas Fisher, Dean, College of Design, University of Minnesota Citizen Professionals Pilot Project Description City of Falcon Heights and Strong Towns July 29, 2010, page 6 of 6 Thomas Fisher is a professor and dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota. Educated at Cornell University in architecture and Case Western Reserve University in intellectual history, he previously served as the regional preservation officer at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, the historical architect of the Connecticut State Historical Commission in Hartford, and the editorial director of Progressive Architecture magazine in Stamford, Connecticut. He has lectured or juried at over 40 different schools of architecture and 60 professional societies, and has published 35 book chapters and over 250 articles in various magazines and journals. He has published five books over the last eight years: two with the University of Minnesota Press entitled, In the Scheme of Things, Alternative Thinking on the Practice of Architecture andSalmela Architect, one by Rockport Press Lake/Flato Buildings and Landscapes,and one by the Architectural Press Architectural Design and Ethics, Tools for Survival. He also coedited a book with Wolfgang Preiser and Jack Nasar on the design of architecture school buildings, published by Fairchild Books, entitled Designing for Designers, and has recently completed a manuscript of case studies, Ethics for Architects, to be published by the Princeton Architectural Press in 2010. REQUEST FOR COUNCIL ACTION Families, Fields and Fair __________________________ Meeting Date August 4, 2010 Agenda Item Workshop 2 Attachment Draft 2011 General Fund Budget Submitted By Justin Miller, City Administrator The City That Soars! Item Draft 2011 General Fund Budget Description For the past several weeks, staff has been busy preparing their proposed budgets for 2011. A preliminary levy must be set by September 15th, so the city council will formally act on the preliminary budget at the September 8th city council meeting. The purpose of this workshop will be to present the draft budget to the city council and allow staff time to incorporate changes before presenting it for preliminary levy approval in September. Key points of interest for this draft budget include: 1) As with our most recent budgets, 2011 will be an extremely difficult budget year. Part of this difficulty lies in the unpredictability of our Local Government Aid distribution from the State of Minnesota. Currently, official projections indicate that the city is due to receive $438,300. After legislative cuts and unallottments by the Governor, our total 2010 LGA is $315,931. With the state facing an estimated $6 billion deficit for the next biennium, it would be wishful thinking to believe that we will receive $122,369 more in 2011 when there is an even larger budget shortfall for the state. The attached draft budget includes 2011 LGA in the same amount as we have received in 2010 in an effort to budget conservatively. 2) Some important parts of the budget are still unknown, such as our official levy limit (which will be provided by the state on or before September 1st). Our best estimate is that the levy limit will be $805,581. The reduction is due to the projected increase in our LGA allocation, which is taken out of our overall levy calculation. 3) Staff’s goal was to keep expenditures as close to a zero increase as possible, with the notable exception of the police contract ($16,669 increase due to contract language and increased dispatching costs). In total, proposed expenditures are practically flat (reduced from $1,665,817 to $1,665,055). 4) Included in the budget is a 1% cost-of-living (COLA) increase for all city employees. There was no increase in 2010, and wages were adjusted by mid-year in 2009. 5) Earlier this year the council approved the sale of equipment certificates to pay for equipment replacements over the next three years. The first payment on these bonds will be due in 2011, and a special levy in the amount of $72,300 is included in this budget. 6) While the overall levy limit increase for 2010 (as set in state statute) is 1.6784%, additional special levy authority was approved to allow cities to collect property taxes for unallotted Local Government Aid and Market Value Homestead Credit (MVHC) in 2010. The total 2010 reductions by the state was $158,001. 7) With this proposed budget, there is a need to transfer $66,740 from other funds to balance the budget. Staff is recommending that any transfer come from the sanitary sewer fund. 8) Many parts of this draft budget are based on assumptions that could change when the State of Minnesota officially informs us on items such as LGA, levy limits, etc. Hopefully detailed information will be made available by September. The council may wish to see this again before setting the preliminary levy. Impacts to the overall property tax levy 2010 Overall Property Tax Levy: Regular property tax levy $894,562 Special Levy for Debt $124,584 Unallotment Levy $3,798 Total 2010 Levy $1,022,944 2010 Draft Budget: Levy maximum amount (estimate) $805,581 Levy for equipment certificates $72,300 2010 unallotment levy $158,001 Total Levy $1,035,882 (1.26% increase) Staff will be prepared to answer any questions and take suggestions regarding any changes to the proposed 2011 budget. If major changes are necessary, a revised budget will be presented to the city council at either the August city council meetings or at the September workshop. If there is consensus among the council, the budget will be presented on September 9th for preliminary levy approval. Budget Impact Dependent on eventual adoption of 2011 budget Attachment(s) Draft 2011 General Fund Budget Action(s) Requested No action required, but guidance on how to proceed will be beneficial as staff continues to refine the 2011 budget proposal.