Minutes - 2026/04/23 - Laserfiche WebLink

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2. Silverview Park, 3. Hillview Park. Meet at 5:30pm on May 28th at Lakeside Lions. B. GOAL Parks discussion with City Council. see packet. Specifically, the GOAL PARKs Committee recommended funding options including: 1) ballot for a voter approved bond referendum, 2) having the charter commission consider a .5% to 1% levy adopted into the charter for future park improvements. 3) explore sales tax, 4) encourage staff to search and apply for grants, 5) city discussions with ISD 621 for partnership, 6) community built projects, 7) cannabis revenue, and 8) corporate sponsorships City has met with ISD 621- the school district is looking for help specifically with gymnastics space and robotics space. They are also looking for indoor turf. WSB has given a list of key users of the community center to talk about needs. The Charter commission has started to talk about a levy option but that discussion was tabled pending this meeting. Per Commissioner Smith: the Sanneh Foundation is a group that helps provide funding to help parks in Ramsey County. Question on can we go back to sales tax: Answer is there has to be a regional project to qualify. There’s two parts to the funding question: 1) Doing a bond. There will be a survey to see if there is support for a bond. 2) Levy. The levy would be for future projects. Levy: The streets are levied every year. We don’t know what streets we are going to do exactly every year, but we know it’s going to be needed. The levy portion of the parks would be similar- we know we’re going to need funding to continue to update the parks, but we don’t know what the exact need will be every year. What needs to happen next: We have the master park plan. The master plan had to happen first because the city can’t get grants without a master plan. We had the GOAL PARKs committee talk about the funding options and where to start for maintenance. The GOAL PARKs has suggested the community center and Silverview as the big first projects and Woodcrest as a small project. There is not currently enough in the funds for continued maintenance on the parks, so something needs to happen. The general public does not have a general knowledge that the funding is currently not available. The previous failed vote on the community center expansion seemed to be caused by the community not understanding the why of the investment. Also the previous study on sales tax did not factor in internet sales, so residents were worried that they would be too adversely impacted. Question- what will happen if a levy doesn’t go through and we don’t have a plan for ongoing park maintenance? Eventually parks will close. Woodcrest currently needed the playground removed once it was inspected and determined that it was no longer safe- so Woodcrest currently does not have a playground and there are no current plans to add one, because there is no fund.