Laserfiche WebLink
Go to the county and get information on the tax base - how much is commercial, how much is residential. Be sure to consider this background when making strategic planning decisions. Why <br />is the Fiscal Disparity tax on businesses so high? This is money that leaves the City. Take steps to ensure that another loss of commercial land by Lake Elmo, like Oakdale's annexation of <br />Section 32, does not occur. Estimates that that area is has $600 million in commercial real estate value - and Lake Elmo does not get a penny of the tax revenue even though the businesses <br />are heavily patronized by Lake Elmo residents. <br />What is the plan for business development in LE? We suggested that there may be a section of larger business/industrial near I-94 and I 694, a smaller-business downtown, and residential <br />development in the rest of the City. We would like to have local businesses to meet the needs of local customers, to keep the spending in LE. Changing demographics - bringing in more <br />young workers and families with kids. <br />She thought that community business awareness could be improved. We mentioned the creation of Connect Lake Elmo as an organization to help with this need. <br />Strategically, said that it would be good if more retail business with "charm" could be attracted to the downtown area to generate more foot traffic. Many of the downtown businesses are <br />destinations (like the architects, real estate, insurance, etc) and do not depend on random visits by people walking by, but the by-gone coffee shop and once-proposed ice cream shop would <br />make the downtown a lot more attractive. Even amenities like Bayport's hanging flower baskets and Mabel's ice cream would help downtown Lake Elmo attract more customers. <br />The strategy should be more inclusive to small businesses, and make it easier to deal with the City for business modifications. Their plan had been to expand on the original Old Village site but <br />the complications of dealing with a third-party engineering firm made the process very inefficient and time-consuming, finally they gave up and moved to the roundabout business park. <br />They like Lake Elmo, “Main Street” is amazing and has opportunities for improvement, it is "not Woodbury". There should be good opportunities with the new demographics (more active <br />young families) to provide growth for a service business, if people can be persuaded to keep the business local. It would be helpful if there were attractive businesses or activities to keep <br />people “in town” after they come for a haircut or a restaurant meal. <br />It would be good if the City could relax the requirements for signage on businesses. It would be good if the City could provide notification on the highways about businesses that exist in Lake <br />Elmo, something like the ones on the freeway that mention "food" "fuel" "lodging". Then some customers might drive in instead of driving by. <br />Build business incubators <br />No suggestions - we did talk about signage to let people know that Lake Elmo has auto repair available, and about the possibility of creating more traffic by bringing in more retail business to <br />downtown Lake Elmo, but he did feel that these would make much difference to them <br />bring in more traffic - such as via "businesses in Lake Elmo" signs at intersection of Highways 14 & 15 <br />currently there are some obsolete signs still standing in Lake Elmo, causing confusion. <br />what about having a page on the City website that links to a local business directory?