08/18/2008 Council Packet - Laserfiche WebLink

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August 17, 2008 Dear Mayor and City Council members, In light of some recent events, some members of the Citizens Task Force felt we should clarify our position relating to our recommendation regarding amending the Charter. In preparing our recommendation, we gave considerable attention to the option of eliminating Chapter 8 of the Charter as it related to special assessments and road reconstruction and instead replacing it with State Statute, in this case 429. We ended up choosing what, we thought, would be an adequate compromise in the hope that the Charter Commission would be more likely to support our proposal. A Citizens Initiated Petition has been proposed that would eliminate Chapter 8 and replace it with State Statute 429. I have notified the Citizen's Task Force of this petition and had hoped to get responses from those that were involved in our process last year. We had 9 members assigned to the original committee of which only 7 were regularly present and involved in meetings. Of the 7 members 4 of them have emailed support of the citizen's petition and support this new citizen's amendment over what we put forth in our task force. Those members are Jamie Stern, Cheryl Sanchez, Peter Brown, and Laura Carlson. Of the 3 members who did not weigh in on my email one of them is Kathi Gallup who will be present ( I believe) in your work session and be able to comment on her opinions regarding the citizen's initiated petition. I believe it is accurate to say that a majority of the Citizen's Task Force is in favor of this petition going forward. If Kathi Gallup, Jon Latcham or Judi Brunner have a favorable opinion of this petition we would have an even greater majority of support. Assuming these statements are correct, and that the Citizens Petition is found to be valid, the majority fo the Citizen's Task Force listed above would now like to put their support behind the Citizens Petition to, "repeal Chapter VIII, Sections 8.01 through 8.07" and replace with "The City may undertake public improvements financed in whole or in part with special assessments in accordance with state law." The passage of this amendment would put Lino Lakes on a even playing field with other municipalities in the State and would give us a tested, workable, and fair way, to deal with issues of special assessments and road reconstruction. Thank you for your service, Citizens Task Force members in favor of of supporting the amendment called for in the Citizen's Initiated Petition presented to the City of Lino Lakes on 8/12/08: Jamie Stern Cheryl Sanchez Peter Brown Laura Carlson