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To: Honorable Mayor and City Council September 4, 1998 From: Chuck Whiting, City Administrator Re: September 8, 1998 City Council Work Session A quick reminder that our work session is on Tuesday next week since Monday is a holiday. Here's what we have on the agenda: Item 1: Street Reconstruction Standards and Assessment Policy Review: Mike and Bruce have prepared some information for the Council's packet, and Council members may want to bring their past information and data printouts from last spring's work on Spring Lake Road. Part of this packet are the sections from the Charter regarding the assessment processes and recourse and the 1995 resolution setting construction preferences. What the Council may want to discuss in helping determine a course of action is whether it believes a set of criteria should be determined that applies to the city's street reconstruction plan, or whether the city should first determine the likely street reconstruction candidates,meet with residents to determine a construction preference, and than set the construction standard for that particular street. The difference between these two approaches may, in reflection,be a definition of the real problem the city faced in the Spring Lake Road project. The city has established clear and preferred criteria for its street construction projects, set up a financing mechanism to pay for those costs and laid out a plan for determining which streets should be done when. When put into practice, general concerns about a street are reviewed(with residents)and the city orders an engineering feasibility study to be completed. That is the first real step of the assessment process. The criteria used in the engineering have been set by Council prior to even the street project selection. These criteria are applied to the conditions of the street,reviewed with residents as the how the project will be completed, modified where modifications continue to fit with established and preferred construction criteria, and the project and process moves ahead. It was clear on Spring Lake Road that the residents did not like the preferences in place that the city was using for considering the reconstruction of the street. This would suggest three options for the city to take, one, stop and reevaluate the city's preferences,two, accommodate concerns within the established preferences but not alter the project beyond those criteria,or three,place the construction criteria secondary to street residents' concerns. The Council struggled with parts of all three of these options on the Spring Lake Road project. While we have all sorts of information about street construction and financing, the real issue may be how we determine what it is that will be constructed. A suggestion for this discussion on Tuesday then may be to talk about whether the city should set up construction (and even assessment preferences) in the form of a plan to be applied to the city, or whether a street should be designed around the preferences of the effected residents prior to the ordering of a feasibility study and the ensuing march of the assessment process. The former is the traditional approach, and the latter perhaps more representative of citizen involvement. Both have their problems and both impact residents beyond those living on a particular street,but it would appear that in order to move on with some semblance of a street maintenance plan, we need to commit to one or the other. Item 2 -Hay Comparable Worth Study: You have in your packet information on the work that has been done to date regarding the Hay evaluation and position pointing for city personnel. There are several aspects to this and I will attempt to review and answer questions. Essentially what has