Okay, let's get started with this committee of the whole board meeting. It is February 12th, 2024, at 6 o'clock PM.
Quick, would you please call the roll?
Laura's here.
Lambert.
Meyer, here.
Ross, here.
Schwank.
Wilson.
Here.
Very good.
Thank you very much.
Just one moment.
All right.
We'll welcome everyone.
Thanks for attending.
Everyone here live and joining us online as well.
This is the annual State of the Village of Dress.
And I have two promises tonight.
I promise, first of all, that we won't have any awkward, pregnant pauses, while I wait for you to stand up.
in thunderous applause.
Well, they other half may be just sits there in scouts.
We won't do that, but I do promise also
that we'll have great information for you.
They'll take roughly an hour, and I think at the end,
you'll learn some things about our community
that unless you're in the building here every day,
you may not know all this stuff.
So you'll hopefully learn something here tonight
with some good information, and you'll
kind of know where the village is at
from a variety of perspectives.
First, I want to stipulate, though, that great local government starts and stops with great
public safety and public works, fire and police and public works.
It's those public safety and public works, those are the blocking and tackling of municipal
government.
And tonight, I mean, think about it.
If people don't feel safe, and the tap water is brown, they're not going to move here.
All right, you got to have those things set in place and we're very fortunate in our town that those three departments are just rock solid and it enables us to have bandwidth for other things that we're going to talk about tonight that are run by pretty much the other departments most of which are all in here
administration, our building department, community development, and finance, as well.
So we're going to talk a lot about and silvery things, but keep in mind,
immunisable government, the majority of our employees
are in the fire, police, and public works. And so we appreciate that we're so
rock solid in those areas that we can talk about art. All right, and
beautifying our community and growth, things like this. With that in mind, tonight we
Okay, I'll give the address here and then I'll publish questions at the end during public commentary.
If you have commentary itself, we'd ask that you wait until the board meeting to follow right afterwards at 7 o'clock or so.
Okay, but questions would be great at the end. We certainly have a lot of brain power here that'll address anything that I might not be able to handle.
Okay, and so tonight we'll have, oh, we've got to kick this off every, you know, this is a slide we always go with, what is our brand promise is a community.
And it's that we are, we are centrally counties premier location for entrepreneurs and we're known as a welcoming community and our slogan is start here, start here.
Whenever I talk to high schoolers, whenever I have a chance,
I tell them where we're going as a village,
our goal is that when you leave high school
and go get your other education,
and then come to a place in life,
or you're looking for a place to lay roots down,
and grow a family, or just start growing your life,
we want you to consider coming back to Monday line.
We don't want you to leave,
and go, I'm never going back there.
Well, we want you to at least consider it,
because we're doing, we're making a lot of changes
over these last 10 years and we really want you to give us a good shot there. That's what I say to
all the young people and we're making huge inroads. Tonight I have the top 10 items that will cover
after which we'll go just to a survey of all the departments, but tonight the first three items
we'll discuss are the goings on with downtown here. We'll talk about a few infrastructure projects
bring up to speed there. We'll talk about the status of arts in
Monday line. We'll go over the elements of fiscal responsibility.
Talk about our new website a little bit. We'll do a survey of the various
commissions and committees. We'll talk about our road projects coming up as
well and then top it off with some events and latest news.
And then after which we'll do the survey of all the departments and everything.
OK, first off, downtown development, back in 2005, my predecessor and the board then embarked
on the, oops, I'm out, embarked on the project of deindustrializing our downtown.
And what that looked like over the following years meant that the village itself would
purchase a 10 acre box factory on which this village hall is, is it's now, we purchased
a eight-acre guitar factory site, we purchased a lumber yard, and we purchased the recycling
plant as well, with a notion that we're going to redevelop all of that and we really
gain traction now in terms of doing that.
So when you look at a map of our downtown, since 2005, you can see in the red, you have brand
new buildings, all in red, the big cluster up top is more a station, of course.
major renovations or the blue that where we've had some demolition going on is in the gold and public infrastructure improvements are in the purple.
We've been extremely active since 2005 and really gained a lot of traction here in the last few years as we'll discover.
Going onward, we have a first huge project to report and where it's at.
We have the village hall here at Village Plaza, and all this vacant land, surrounding Village Hall is spoken for by Flaherty and Collins.
And that is a $68 million project.
You can see that in, they're going to have upwards of 230 residential units here, apartments and some town homes as well.
There's a retail building up on, right on Holly Street in Chicago, and they're going to break ground.
they're due to break ground, this spring,
spring sometime late summer late or early summer,
right around there.
And so that project is moving forward.
It's going to be very, obviously very present here
in downtown, and so there's a lot of work going on,
but that's very exciting that we have all the rest
of the land being spoken for here right around the village
Plaza.
Next, right to the south of us, we have station 250.
There you have 165 market rate luxury apartments, they're going to open this year and they have an outdoor pool,
sauna, fitness, studio, golf simulator, dog cleaning station, lounges, and a barbecue patio.
It's a luxury apartment right next door here and that's going up as well.
You have more a station that we discussed.
Those are being built right up there near Park Street and Seymour.
And those are leasing out very well.
I'm over half the people that go to a showing and up leasing with them.
And so they're going gangbusters there.
We're very pleased with that project.
Those are town-home style apartments.
And we're just very happy with that.
Two other items to report.
We have the Cardinal Square buildings across the tracks here on the east side of the
tracks near the pedestrian bridge.
Those two buildings are going to open this year.
those are combined 180 units over there.
One unique thing with that, those buildings
is they have high speed internet, what's it called?
Used to be called Gigafiber, and then now it's
Fiberty Unit, all right, and very fast.
It's just going to be building full of gamers, right?
I think that's how I think of it.
When I think, OK, who's going to move in there
is those that have a reason to have all that?
So, and then also, we have the online senior apartments
over there across for mories on prospect and holly and they're going to open this year the
going gangbusters and you may have noticed those little modules located around downtown
that were kind of stored and then eventually a crane would pick those up and move those
over and you can see here the modules arrived outfitted with carpeting cabinets and plumbing
fixtures and on-site construction includes all the plumbing electrical brickwork elevators.
There was a weird rumor going around that didn't have elevators, which is kind of weird, but it does have elevators and the sightings put on there as well.
And so that's immediately in the downtown area.
Now, the second item going on in downtown, and this has been in the news for the last month or so.
Right about a month ago, we had a committee of the whole board meet in here from Hezner Group and it concerned this sight downtown where we have two banks that are for sale.
the old PNC bank, as well as the first mid-west bank, and this is, you can kind of see the,
it's kind of a triangle, but if you include the land, the vacant land on the other side of Chicago,
that amounts to six acres. And when you, when you look at it, you have green is at the bottom of the screen,
and then you have the top left, that's PNC bank, and then kind of right in the middle towards
the right, that's the municipal building. We own that building. That was our old water building.
And currently, the Moonlight Tool Library is in there.
And then on the far right kind of behind where it says parking density, you have the old
sit-golf station that the village purchased.
So we control quite a bit of this.
And looking at this, we could just not do anything and let someone come in and maybe redo a bank
and convert it to something, maybe a restaurant who knows.
But what we decided to do, what the Board decided to do was to hire the Hezner group, come
And in a value, what would happen if we marketed this whole piece to a developer, a developer with the means to create something really grand?
If they were to buy both bank buildings and then our building and then take the gas station as well and then maybe the land there, the tracks, what could happen if a developer could start from scratch have a blank canvas so to speak?
So, Hezner came up with some great concepts, they introduced two of them, and one of them
involved the municipal building remaining, and being converted to a bar, restaurant, and
another one had it being raised, and converted to basically a courtyard.
So if you wanted to see that presentation, it took the better, we went over an hour, I think,
on that.
You can go online at monolind.org, you can see that video of that presentation as well as
the slides. It was just fantastic. They were envisioning five story buildings with restaurants
and retail and everything. So take a look at that. It's a it's a it's a it's a big deal
coming down the pike. It's just on the radar and it really sets a bar for what could happen further
in our downtown region here. Moving south in the downtown area we come to Cortland province. This is
the area of construction, you may have noticed on the corner of Portland in Seymour, just
kind of east of that on the north side of Portland. You'll see a lot of work being done.
That is a new park going in, where we envision hosting several events there, having that
be a great venue for more events. And one of the events involves community days, and I want
to roll out to you what we envision that community days could look like going on that site.
So, have an open mind, just be open to this.
What you'll see then looking north is at the top and you have where on the left it says
Carnival Area and that's where the stage and the tent used to be was previous and so we
envisioned that Portland Park down on the right half of the screen that would be where
The stage is in the main tent and the beer tent and everything there and the carnival would
encompass crack our park as well as the Santa Maria parking lot as well as the seat portion
of Seymour.
So we're working on this.
This is not, notice in the bottom right, it says design is not final, but this will be change
and change is not always easy and so this will be just something different and we can always
make adjustments and changes down the road,
but this is tentatively where we're at on community days coming up.
Okay, let's leave downtown and talk about,
well, not really, two significant infrastructure projects
I've want to bring you up to speed.
I have a coffee with the mayor every first Saturday of the months,
and these two topics come up more often than not
at each of those coffees.
People ask, hey, where are we on this?
First off is East Holly.
You're every years ago West Holly from Chicago
or the railroad tracks moving west all the way to the high school, we had a huge project
where we tore down the polystreet down to the dirt and it was extremely disruptive to
the businesses downtown. And we got that all rebuilt, curbs put in, it was amazing, infrastructure
replaced, it was an amazing project because the road was failing so badly. Well now, East
Holly Street from the railroad tracks going east all the way to the intersection with 176,
That street is in pretty bad shape, and so we are in the middle of
Desizing that and phase one design work and we're going to we're trying to figure out how to wait a partner with the county similar to the West Holly project
Partner with them on the East Holly, but the first step is that we pay for all the design work
And whenever the county wants to you know get involved, they want bike pass put in and so we did get a
and a half dollar i-tap grant that goes towards the bicycle path portion of the project.
And so, we're off to the races, we're in the design phase.
It's definitely on our radar in a big way and that's kind of the status.
So, where things I cannot report a timeline on that, we have to talk with the county about what their budget situation is for projects like this.
But the first step is always the we pay for the planning and the design on that.
So, we're going to town on that.
Second, I get asked about this all the time.
is the 683i.project from 176 down to townline road.
We had a few years back.
The governor himself came here right in this room
and had a little mini press conference about that project
that was involved with the capital bill that was going in
at that time.
And so they committed to do this to expand
683 from 176 on the north coming all the way down to townline
And that included an overpass at the Diamond Lake Railroad Crossing,
which is the music to thousands of people's ears
who commute on that road.
And so that project is being,
it's in phase two engineering now,
which includes land acquisition and a lot of preparation.
And at best they'll break ground in 2025.
That's extremely aggressive.
And I would turn it out in Boshe and say,
where we have it because it could change, but that's kind of where that was the aggressive
time frame, you know, figure something around 2026 or something, but know that that project
is a go, it's just, you know, we'll just see where we are here in a year. Okay, so that's
where we are on that one. All right, going to another topic completely, all right, just kind
Turn around three times, take a deep breath, and change your brain.
We're going to talk about the status of arts in Monday line.
Because we have an amazing, monoline arts commission that is very busy.
And they divide themselves into subcommittees.
And one committee does the writing contest.
Another one does the photography contest.
Another one does murals, sculptures, and life performances.
They're extremely active and very effective.
And so, this has been a banner year for the Moonline Arts Commission.
I just want to report on some things that have happened two murals were installed this year
as well as the sculpture, which is unheard of in our town.
We have not seen that active of that kind of art blossom all in one year.
It's amazing.
So first off, we have the sculpture that went in.
It's called Earth Flight.
It's located there by the pollinator garden, which is off of Seymour in Crystal, okay.
You go down past, going south, you go past McDonald's, make a left on Crystal and it's kind
of right there on the right, and the sculpture, it's kind of a crescent sculpture that
you can sit on it and have some interaction with it, and go check it out.
In spring after we planted that pollinator garden, it really is something.
And the Moonline Arts Commission found this that was originally commissioned in 1988,
they got it for a great price and transported it here, and public works helped out with that project of getting it in,
and it's very proud to have that in town.
Two murals went in, first of all, the one next to the looks of Mondayline,
It's the largest mural in our community at this point and it's the first large-scale private contribution to public art in Mundaline.
So no public money went towards this. This is the first large-scale privately funded public art.
And here's the ribbon cutting and right in the middle you see Mike Majestic. He's the owner of Luke's of Mundaline.
And so if you build a looks to get your food and he happens to be in there, give him a shout and give him a thank you.
I mean it's great what he did there and the mural depicts a 1940s era Chicago Street scene and it's just wonderful.
And so Kudos the mic for doing that for the community. Next is a skate park mural over at the skate park.
Cross from, just right next across from Fair Haven School, next to the Heritage Museum, you have a mural set up there that's just outstanding.
And it's, you should go see it. It's basically, it's artwork that honors the life of Matt Rogan, who passed away.
And what you interesting point, I mean he was a classmate of my daughter Ami who graduated in
O7 I think it was, and so, but it's a beautiful mural and go check it out.
It's kind of where the skate ramp is.
It's on the back wall of that and when you park for the museum, you'll just see it right there.
It's pretty nice.
Finally, just want to thank the Arts Commission for hosting the lure of the local.
Well, this was a wonderful art exhibition in the summer, and it occurs at the old Walgreens
building, which is beginning to, who remembers when Walgreens was there anymore, it's been
so long.
It's the vacant spot where Starbucks is.
If you go into the new Starbucks across from Duncan, you have that back in the corner,
a very large vacant space, and that's where the lure of the local was.
It's an art exhibition featuring local artists, and I hope it turns into a great tradition
because it's on the weekends and the summer there for a month.
It's just a wonderful event with local artists
being depicting their art, showing their art,
and then music and food, local food as well.
OK, again, turning our heads around
and deep breath going in another direction here.
I just wanted to get in some of the top 10 things
that we have to talk about, and one of them
is fiscal responsibility.
And I like to touch on this because we have to evaluate
Whether we are fiscally responsible, and how does one determine if you are fiscally responsible?
And so one way I want to address is the number of employees.
There's something in the world of government, and it pretty much any organization.
It's called Parkinson's Law.
It says that the number of subordinates will rise regardless of the amount of work accomplished.
There's something about organizations that just want to grow in terms of people.
And it's seen in multiple different bureaucracies, governments, private organizations, businesses,
and it's just something to be aware of.
And we, as a board, are aware of it.
I'm aware of it, and our staff is aware of it, that we are very stingy about adding employees
because there's a cost to that, and so it's in 2008, before the recession or just when
the recession hit, a model I had 209 employees, and then after that, there was some
downsizing that had to occur because our tax revenue plummeted so much.
It was a rough time to be in municipal government, and so here today, and then slowly over
the years that we've added people very judiciously, we've been very stingy about that.
up to 198 people now. So we're way below where we were in 2008 and that's after we've even grown
in everything. So that's one way of gauging, you know, whether you're being fiscally responsible,
is are you managing Parkinson's law well or not? Dead payments. We've been very stable,
you'll see in a little bit, we've been really holding the line on the dead payments that in the
amount of debt that we get into. But I do want to also report that we have some challenges
coming up here. They're quite serious. First, there's a lot of growth going on, obviously.
Apartments going in, we've had neighborhoods going in parts of town, especially out west,
and we're going to have another big development, of course, up north. And with growth comes the need
for more services and with more services being provided, you need more employees. And so that's the
challenge coming down the pike, but at the same time, right now we have inflation that's hitting
the country and it's affected us at all levels.
Our labor supplies, our hard and soft costs, it's affecting our budget in a very significant
way.
Combined with, and this is the real part that squeezes us, we have declining tax revenue across
multiple levels at sales. Our sales tax revenue is down. Personal property tax use tax
and income tax, the portion of the state income tax that we pay to the state, the municipalities
get a portion of that. That's down as well. And so when you put all that together, suffice
to say, I say this to the trustees and the community, this will be the toughest budget season
in many, many years going into this. And so our staff is awesome. They'll figure out how we're
to do this, but we're going to have some tough discussions coming up here, even when we meet
over at regarding the budget, and so that's just something to report the state of the
village, and that's the state of our finances in that particular way.
And so we'll see what kind of budget we come up with.
All right, spinning around again, we have a new website being rolled out.
We are going with civic plus, as a provider of the technology that provides websites.
There's a community of mass communications, notification system, freedom of information,
technology, and as well as the agenda software that we use internally to generate the
agenda.
And also that it appears on the website for you to look at in terms of agendas and minutes
and everything.
All of that is a system that we're switching over to civic plus coming up and we'll have
new website next month. And so we're looking forward to that internally. We're very excited about that actually.
Closing in on the end of the top 10 commissions and committees, but first just a word about volunteerism.
I think that vibrant communities are communities that have a strong sense of volunteerism in town.
And if you, if you like people, or can at least tolerate people,
You have a little extra time on your hands and you want to enhance your life in a great, great way.
I would highly recommend that you consider volunteering your time someplace.
For me, it was youth sports. A lot of people find youth sports is a great place to volunteer.
The schools that your kids go to, it's your church, maybe it's scouting.
But volunteer your time because there's many organizations in town that really rely on volunteers.
and so I would encourage you and then here at the village we have opportunities for you to
volunteer as well. And let me just go over those a little bit here. We have a variety of
commissions and committees that do some important work. Plan and zoning commission. They review proposed
developments and land uses and ensure compliance with our comprehensive plan and our zoning
map, and they have statutory powers and they're completely staffed with those commissioners
or completely volunteers.
Community, community days commission, they plan the four-day festival, and that's what
they do.
They meet occasionally right afterwards here in the fall, and then they really ramp it up
and going into July.
I mean, it's very, they're very, very busy, and they work tirelessly to bring us a wonderful
four-day experience.
Mindline Arts Commission, they're awesome, I talked about them earlier, we have a beautification
committee that develops plans and programs to beautify Monday line.
We have an economic development commission, the EDC, they attract and retain businesses
that's their task.
The Mindline Historical Commission, a wonderful group of people, they're tasked with preserving
our history and they administer the Mindline Heritage Museum out there across from Fairhaven
School.
old number one fire truck preservation committee. Our fire truck, the first fire truck was
purchased in 1990. It was given to us by Cardinal Monaline in 1925, which means next year,
Bob is the 100th anniversary and 100th birthday, what do you want to call it? And we're already
talking about plans for rolling out some celebration there. We'll have a 100 year old fire truck
town that's just awesome. Three other commissions. We have the police and fire commission.
Three folks that are in charge of hiring all our police officers and firefighters.
We have a police pension board and a fire pension board that administers those respective
pensions to our retirees. So a variety of ways to volunteer and all that information is on our
website when we have openings and such.
Closing in roads, roads, we live in a tough place in our country for asphalt.
The thine cycles are numerous every year and every time the snow comes off the streets and
the spring starts entering every crack that's developed.
You wonder where these cracks come from, they just emerge and it looks terrible and then
our public works department does a great job of addressing those.
But every year we do a lot of road work and I want to talk about that a little bit we have
110 miles of roadway in town and our budget for addressing the roads in terms of work allows us to
address roughly two and a half miles of roads each year. Now we address those in two ways.
One is that we will take a road that has no curves and gutters and we will just remove the whole thing
down to the dirt and put in all new curbs, storm sewers and everything, utilities, and build
it from the ground up, and that's very expensive.
The other way to address roads is when you have a development that's maybe 20, 25, 30 years
old, and it was, you know, the streets have curbs and storm sewers and everything, and it just
needs to be resurfaced, that's the scrape and overlay, as they say, and that's much less
expensive and you can accomplish a lot more miles, you know, per dollar doing it that way.
So we do both projects this last year, we spent a million on cert resurfacing and 3.65
on reconstruction.
And so this year, we have those two projects coming out and right now, and so I'm going
to show you the list of streets and those of you that want to print out the page and see,
you know, and you're going to magnifying glass out and see what it is, you know, we're
going to show you a map of all this.
But basically the top in the orange is the...
Surfacing streets. The road reconstruction is in the blue, and when you put this on a map, it looks like this and on the left, we have the resurfacing, and this is the neighborhood called long meadow estates off of 83, and you can see, and that we're taking care of most of that development. The very northern part will be addressed, Chadwick, that'll come later, but the huge portion of long meadow estates will be addressed in terms of scraping and overlaying.
and bring in those streets, you know, addressing the age of those streets.
Now, in terms of the reconstruction, that's on the right side, and that's the neighborhood kind of continuing where we started last year around Hawthorne, you know, west Hawthorne, and this is North Shore and Lakeview region down there.
We're going to do a complete rebuild for those streets in that neighborhood there, and so a lot of work coming down this summer for those two neighborhoods.
And so, we have a list of neighborhoods we need to get to.
We still have miles of road that have no curbs and gutters.
Those will have to be reconstructed, but the good news is that the miles of those roads,
the ones that need reconstruction, it's slowly being whittled away, and once we address the roads
that need reconstruction, once we get those done now, the whole budget can go towards resurfacing.
And then you can really start making headway on terms of the miles you address every year because you're resurfacing and not reconstructing and so
but every year we have to pick away and get those streets rebuilt that don't have curds and gutters, okay?
So that's where the roads project is.
Finally, events and latest news.
We have a whole host of events that the village works with my online community connection and other organizations in town.
everywhere from park on park, farmers market, we have Santa's Cottage, Bingo, the bike race,
all of these are in town that you really need to understand where they are and where they are.
It would be best if you were to, if you don't already get our email newsletter,
just simply email info at monline.org and you'll get a weekly Friday afternoon newsletter that will
price you upcoming events, you can also go online to our social media, we're on Facebook,
Instagram, Twitter, slash x, and LinkedIn now as well. And we have the Arts Commission,
the Farmers Market, and the Park District, are on social media where you can get dates and
all these events. And so that's how to keep a prize of all the numerous events that we have
going on throughout the year. So, especially, get the newsletter if you're not already signed up for that.
Okay. We're done with the top 10. Let's go around the departments and address a few things.
Finance. Finance department, Linda Miller's finance directors, does a great job.
And we have to address property taxes because we're talking about the state of the village.
Where are we in terms of property taxes? And we just got to report what it is.
So, when you get your property tax bill in the mail, the village takes up roughly 13% of that total bill.
Schools, 63, 65% and then the other agencies take up the rest.
All right, now, of that 13% it's divided into two parts, the village of Mundaline line item, and then the village of Mundaline pension line item.
Okay, and so you have the numbers there, you can print it out and look at them if you want,
But I'm going to show you the graphical version of this item one, village of Montelina.
We're breaking that out into three parts, just to show you kind of where we're at.
And the line item number one, it's all summarized right here.
And ideally, in the board always favors when it comes time to look at our property tax
levian november, the board always is looking at a way, what would it mean if we didn't
our property tax levy at all? What would that mean to us as a village government if we just kept it flat the same?
And for years we were able to do that. We actually kept kept it the same, but recently especially we just haven't been able to
most recently to to inflation these last few years. And so inflation hits us and trust to provide the service level
that our community is accustomed to.
We've had to raise the tax levy to accommodate inflation.
And it's not an insignificant number.
It's pretty serious.
And so that's where it's at.
And when you break out the number of village of
Monday line, we have three parts to it, as I said.
The corporate, this is where all the raise went into,
is our corporate tax levy as the operations.
Okay, so all of that increased went towards operations.
where that inflation level is really hitting.
The other two, road and bridge, it's gone up over the years, but we flatline it when we can.
And if the board were ever to decide to address roads by raising property taxes, this would be the fund where you, this would be the line item where you go to do it.
It is the road and bridge fund, but we've held it the same for the last several years.
And finally, our debt payments, we've kept it roughly at an a million dollars a year for
several years, even when we rolled bonds over, and rebonded out.
We kept that payment the same, and it hasn't been raised.
It's actually down from where it was certainly 10 years ago.
So that's kind of where we are on that one line item.
The other line item is pensions, and this is certainly not unique to us, is that pension
costs have risen dramatically for various reasons, and it's mostly due to what the state
requires in terms of when they win our auditors as well is that when the model, when you run
the big math problem is to how much money you should sock away for our retirees. If you change
a few variables, it has huge ramifications down the road. So over the years, there's been
and adjustment for the longer life expectancy is one.
So when they assume that people are going to live longer,
well, that means you're going to have to suck away more money
for years down the road.
And so that's what some of that is where they raise the life expectancy.
The other one is the assumed return from the stock market.
So when you suck the money away,
you're assuming that the stock market
is going to give you a certain return over the years on average.
And when you reduce that number as the state did, and are actually where he did to our
routers, well then, you know, that number goes up again.
And so that's some of what you're seeing here in terms of higher pension.
And the desire also to be fully funded by a certain date in the future, all contributes to
that raising that higher number over the years.
And so that's our property.
Now, ironically, the property tax rate is gone down, and I'm not going to dwell on this
too much, but basically, you know, when a community is growing and you need to assess
more property tax, we assess dollars, how do you gauge whether or not you're being responsible
or not?
One way, just a rule of thumb is to take the percentage of your home value that you're
being assessed with property tax.
And so when your property value goes up,
but the levy stays the same,
well, the property rate goes down, okay?
Now if your property value goes down
and the property tax, the dollars levy stays high,
well, then your percentage goes higher, of course.
And so, but you wanna just have it as a rule of thumb,
it's not something you can hang your hat on
and say, like in this case, yay, we dropped it one penny,
You know, no, we had to raise it because of inflation and pensions, but yet the rate went
down because our property values went up so much and we've added more real estate into
town as well, raising the total aggregate value of the real estate in town, okay?
So I just wanted to report that not going to dwell on it too much.
Moving over to our community development department, talked about a lot of the things that all
The growthing town, Amanda Orenshuk, and her department handle a lot of this.
All the plan is only commission stuff goes through them.
But one of the things they do is help businesses find locations in town and help with
the ribbon cuttings.
And we've just had so many business start businesses start up here in Monday line.
I've gone to several ribbon cuttings for some of these businesses.
And it's just a joy to watch businesses start out, family run, start ups, and just all
over the place in Monday line.
and we are indeed a town of entrepreneurs,
and it's something we can be very proud of.
Another way we help businesses
is we have something called the Business Incendent Grant Program.
And what we do is the board is assigned money
toward for used by businesses the one who
they want to improve their property,
either through a better sign, landscape being,
maybe there's interior work that needs to be done
attach to the real estate, sprinklers, et cetera. And so over the years since 2015 that we've
had this 74 businesses have taken advantage of our grant program and we've spent 928,000, we've invested
that into that program over the years. But then usually when a business doesn't improve it to their
property, they just don't do the matching. You know, if we give them 5,000, they're not going to
$3,000 and oh, by the way, can you give me a grant for some improvements you're doing?
And so we're just helping the business kind of priming the pump.
And so it results in far more money being invested in total.
So we've invested $9,28,9 or $28,000 combined with the businesses that have inputted their own,
or have used their own money for improvements, $7.5 million has been put into those 74 businesses.
So, that's pretty, that's pretty impressive.
Recently, this last year, we invested 94,000 through this program and then the total investment
from the businesses was 266,000 and these are the five businesses that got some of the big
funds, the business extent of grant funds.
In terms of occupancy, and this is always a topic because you can go online and hear people
talking about, ah, you know, there's shopping places where it looks like a ghost town and
I'll admit Oak Street Plaza looked like a ghost town before it got demolished.
But now, and I can think that there's one empty building there on Holly Street.
Other than that, you have whole shopping centers that are completely full.
And if you were to go around and look at what the total occupancy rate is in Monday line,
It turns out that it's roughly 88% combined industrial and commercial throughout our village 88% occupancy, 12% vacancy, which is a good number.
That means when a business comes to town and they want to look for a place, there's a chance that they might find some place to use for their business that they're going to either start up or move into town.
If your occupancy is at like 99, it's likely they're not going to find anything, so they won't even try.
Because there's just nothing. But here we're at a good place here. We have places in town that can accommodate many, many new businesses.
If you look at just the commercial occupancy, not industrial, we're at 91, 91%
And if you look at just downtown, just downtown in this region, it's at 81.
It used to be a higher occupancy, but we had a big, big tenant in the Archibusiness Center building,
leave Sigma left, and that number dropped to 81%.
So, we're pretty happy with that.
If you look at industrial, it's at 91% occupied, and it used to be much higher.
as high as 97 at one point. Recently we had that large building going behind garden fresh 300,000 square feet.
They have yet to rent that out and that vacant building then lower the number to 91.
We're in a good place though.
Moving over to public works and engineering.
I think I don't know when it was last time that we competed in the snowplow championship at the state level.
We have some of the best snowplow drivers in the state.
And they competed in the past down state, in a competition.
They're just an awesome group of people.
And all that said, there's a few things that they've been working on that I'll report on.
but the core of what they do,
we just can't appreciate those guys enough.
Sidewalk replacement,
one thing they do is go around and replace sidewalks
in this last year.
Instead of just replacing the sidewalks that were depressed,
if they found a panel that was depressed on a sidewalk,
they would do something called mudjacking,
where they would put material under the panel
that would raise it up rather than chiseling it out,
leveling it all new, they save a lot of money
by doing this mudjacking approach and a pretty cool technology and it saved some significant money this last year for us by using this mudjacking approach.
LED street lights. This has been on our radar for a long time and we're closing in where 90% now of our lights have been converted to LED.
So we're very happy with that and congrats to the public works department for all the good work that they do for us really.
Going to our building department, they are very, very busy.
Look at all the development going on in town.
Each one of those apartment buildings, town homes needs an inspection, needs several inspections
actually.
And so when you break down all these numbers and combine, remember, we're also helping out
long-growth and hot-roen woods.
They're paying us money for our inspection services down there.
But just within Mungoline since 2022.
The inspections rose to 8374 inspections done. That's a 164% increase. And so those guys are really out hustling, hustling around doing these inspections. And so also, I want to mention, Pete Schukegel is retiring. He's been with us. There's Pete Grazier-Hampy, there he is. He's been with us for 30 years, 30 years. And I think 12 as a, is the department head?
Something like 12 years is our department had these retireing this year
and really big shoes to fill and so we're working on that right now
But congrats to Pete on retiring and he will be definitely missed around here. Very busy department though.
Admin our administration and information technology are IT department.
One thing we, the administration does is they linemen row over our system village administrator.
She works with the beautification committee, and this last year, they hosted folks from this
organization called America in Bloom, who came out and looked at our community, and then
Lynn went to the convention where Monday line one three different awards from American Bloom for
beautification efforts in a variety of ways, and those are listed here, but
beautification is definitely on our radar. The committee does a great job. They hosted the folks there.
Chris Woodard over here was a huge help with that. Thank you very much.
And so we're very proud of the work, and that's one of just one of the things we've done inside
in our admin department. Another thing though is the administration of chickens.
The administration of chickens, so chicken keeping is now allowed and staff work very hard
to come up with the process by which applicants would be awarded the permit to raise chickens.
We have 12 chicken keeping permits have been submitted and approved at this point.
So if you're interested in keeping chickens, just come on in and get the paperwork for a
permit and that'll get processed through.
Winding down, we have our police departments, an amazing group of people, and as I said,
we have to feel safe around here, it's a very important, and they do such a great job.
And if you go to the Neighborhood Scout website, we have been in the nation's top 100
for roughly 11 straight years, in terms of cities over 30,000 people, in terms of the
statistics and the safety levels. And that's that's just kudos to our police department for
for doing such a great job. And I can't thank them enough. Jason Seely is our new police chief.
Chief Seely, raise your hand. There he is. And congratulations on being our new chief this year.
That happened just this last year. Finally, our fire department. Very busy. Very busy. Kind of like
building department when you have growth and you have you know people need services but then when you
add things like a kind of a nursing care facility down in the south area you have more
neighborhoods in town the number of calls has gone up when you look at this it's gone up 8.9% increase
in coal volumes since 2021 and so they're more busy and over the years coming up especially
with more development going on out west and to the north there will be a need for more
firefighters eventually another fire station out there is development occurs out in that
area and that's so that's something on the horizon there's no timeline but that's coming
up and I just want to end with just kind of just meditating on the notion that we live in an
credible time where you could, I mean, to be able to call 911 and have a high-tech medical
team fully outfitted with the best technology at your door in seven minutes or less, usually
a lot less.
I mean, that is amazing.
I mean, most, I'm not going to say most, but a lot of parts of the world, they don't have
that.
You can imagine living in a part of the world where you don't, you know, if you've made
call and you're looking at hours in some places to get any help or to have an armed officer
arrive within minutes if you need assistance of any kind.
I mean that is this whole 911 thing is just a marvel of the modern world.
I mean most of the history hasn't had that and so just to contemplate life without that life
would be completely different and so we so appreciate our public safety and I'll start
started in L.N. with the public safety and public works. You guys really, it's the blocking
and tackling the municipal government. We're just so thankful that we have those bases
covered so well. All right. That's it. What time is it? How are we doing?
10 minutes. Hey. All right. We have some time for some questions. This is awesome. Any questions?
We got all the brain power here. They could handle anything. So, anyone have any questions at
Yes.
Yeah. And so if you didn't hear the question for those online, we're talking
about the building across from the post office, used to be the old village hall. It's
quite a large building and it's still vacant. So earlier this year, we had a potential tenant
come in and give a presentation. It was a golf simulator company. They wanted to take over
whole top floor and have, I think, eight stations in there, eight golf simulation stations
of the highest tech and the board approved them to have a liquor license because they
wanted to in the off-season for them would have been the summer they wanted to have a bar
and then a rooftop bar up there as well. And so that's the last of we've heard of any interest
And I think if that group doesn't pan out, Mr. Gunther, there's another group also looking
at the same concept, and they wanted the bottom floor, I think, correct?
And so that's currently what's in the works, was there a golf simulation company of some sort?
Anyone else?
Yes.
Any update on the work property?
No, it's the home.
Works property?
I thought, you know, maybe I could have invested a slide on them, because that, however,
We haven't had anything of substance to report since the last time I talked about it a year ago.
We are entering into a time of planning and then working towards a development agreement
that we anticipate voting on the board voting on in a year or so yet.
So there's a lot of planning going on and then there's going to be a lot of negotiating regarding impact fees.
And everything that goes into a development agreement is going to occur in the next 10 months or so.
so that we can ink a deal, hopefully with them next January, February.
Anyone else?
Questions?
Yes, ma'am?
Yeah.
I'm
kind of adult, ma'am.
And what I think, maybe when we're not there, I'd hope to see what's in the one
state of the community.
And that's basically how nervous it is that it's the target, and then the
organization facility in particular, it didn't look like there was enough access to
place in Pyramid when you're always in emergency and there was no link, because it was a very small space for them to get in to provide emergency care.
Okay, we have a question regarding the Morris Station development and regarding parking and also the width of the lanes for emergency vehicles to get into and out of.
Can I turn to my brain trust here to address who wants to take that one in terms of emergency vehicles?
I know that when when a development ever is planned
It goes to all the departments for commentary. Okay, so if we could have a comment about emergency vehicles getting into more a station
If those lanes are wide enough, and then we'll need someone to comment on the parking and the plant parking for more station as well
Sure, the access to more station, not a problem at all.
There are studies done when they do the planning, turning radiuses of fire trucks,
the matter trucks, the ambulances, we have no issue at all getting in there.
And from a parking standpoint, so the downtown area has different parking standards than the rest
of the village, because of the urban environment that we are trying to create.
There are requirements that every unit has to have at least one space per unit.
Most of our multi-family units in downtown have more than one space per unit, but there is a minimal parking dedicated to those types of projects.
So you are observing that correctly that there's not as many parking spaces for the units downtown as there are in other areas of the village.
And will the barrier be currently at one point on the west side and more stations will be on the other side of the back of the proximity from the residents to the tracks was so tight and we'll see the barrier, but I hope we can go to both sides of the tracks.
Yeah, the question is, is it more a station?
There's a barrier on one side of the track.
The question is, is there going to be a barrier on the other side of the track as well?
Do we know that?
We're
working with the Canadian National Appeal to deal with that.
To do both sides.
That's in the works working with Canadian National, yep.
All right, yes sir.
683, especially from the Morsian and adding towards online growth.
Is there any particular destruction maybe creating two ways?
Each way or is there just going to stay that way?
Yeah, that sixty eighty three expansion from one seventy six for the north all the way to townline
They're going to four lanes isn't that right Adam correct four lanes
Yes, with the overpass so that their trains don't
You know, you know, in fact it's like they do anyone else yes sir
Any
population estimates I mean
Well, I mean
Yeah, I would, one number that was planned and under construction that I saw, the most recent
total was like of 1,200 units, 1,200 units.
So you figure how many people per unit, you know, 1 to 4, something like that, isn't that right?
I think I saw the 1,200 numbers.
Yeah, and I would say for projects like I have no village projects, there are going to
You know a demographic analysis of that projection that will go along with the project like that.
That's going to be determined in one of these.
Yeah.
Yeah. Well, the words project is completely separate in terms of.
But we're talking to 1200 units in downtown including, you know,
down there the DR Horton development where Oak Creek Plaza was.
That's including them as well. But yeah, you're right.
I mean, as you grow as a population, you need more services.
Absolutely.
Yes.
Yeah, well, the question is, is with all these developments, is there enough room and
bundling high school and other schools for all these kids?
And one thing about these kinds of developments is you don't have a lot of kids living
in these apartments.
When you do the demographics, I mean, these buildings do not produce a lot of children
going to schools.
I mean, do we have numbers on the Cardinal Square?
I mean, it's very small.
Yeah, so for, like, the apartment buildings, yeah, with the higher rents, you see, like, for the buildings at Cardinal Square, there's been anywhere from one to five kids coming out of that on the annual basis.
In terms of, yeah, I think, some of the other residences. There certainly are additional kids.
I know that there are, when you look at some of the school enrollment slightly, there's actually been declines in school enrollment for some of the schools in our area.
I know 76 and 79 have seen lower enrollments in recent years because the population is, it's an aging population with less kids, so that's something to do.
I remember when Oak Creek Plaza was going to get demolished in those 222 townhomes going in,
District 76 was very happy that we were going to have those townhomes to bring more children
into their school because of the declining enrollment.
Anyone else?
Yes.
You mentioned the budget, what is the time frame of when the budget starts and ends and annual January?
Yeah, May 1st to May 1st.
Yep, that's our fiscal year.
Story of carbon building in work.
That's supposed to be a business district.
Why are we going residential in a business district?
I don't understand.
The question is, why are we contemplating having a five or six-story building residential in a business district?
And what's there now are two vacant bank buildings?
And that's kind of...
Well, the way to attract businesses is to have more walkable traffic, excuse me, walkable pedestrian traffic, I mean.
And so this model of increasing density in a downtown of people that are living in more dense buildings, that creates people that are walking around with money to spend.
And when you have that, you're going to have a demand for space for businesses to move into.
And that model has been used all over the country.
The biggest one around here, you look at Arlington Heights.
I mean, 30 years ago, there wasn't a single apartment building where they're downtown is now with all those apartments.
And now it's just full of apartments with eatery, with restaurants.
And the summer they have outdoor eating everywhere, it's a dynamic place.
And that's kind of the vision, it's called a transit-oriented development where you build density near a train station.
And then with that density comes businesses that want to move in and serve all those people that are living in those buildings and walking around with money to spend.
And so the bank triangle is an important step in getting us there because it's within walking distance to the train station,
But it also, and the concept that they came up with,
the Hesner came up with included some retail in there as well.
It's not all residential.
There was a retail aspect to it as well, certainly,
for businesses that want to serve all those people.
But that's the proven formula.
It's to bring more people in and we're moving away
from the suburb and commuter model where everyone's done
$10,000 a lot, how much of the $10,000 a lot and driving everywhere.
This is definitely the way to revitalize a downtown.
It's been duplicated all over the country.
So can I add on to that, Mr. Mayor?
Two things to add on.
It's a concept.
The Hasner Group was very clear when they brought that to us a few weeks ago.
This is not a plan.
It's not set in stone.
We're not seeking a current company.
Trustee Lamberd and I joked on our podcast that if you have a half a billion dollars laying around and you'd like to invest it in debt
I'm underlying we do have a great plan, but it is really just a concept so
If the land was on the market and somebody came and bought it it's owned for
the it's not see five c it's the it's the downtown zoning and you could build for right for whatever's
allowable not to what we designed or has their corporation designed the second is
a concept called value per acre, and in a value per acre model you would look at increasing
density, whether that is commercial, but generally residential, to try to get the most
amount of money in one acre of land, parking lots are the absolute worst, high-rise residential
is the absolute best. So, in a value per acre, like the mayor is talking about the 10,000 square
of it lots, the tax revenue that those generate don't cover the villages expenses for that
lot. So the roadways, the sidewalks, the water lines, the sewer, the ongoing maintenance that
has to occur to keep those maintained at 10,000 square foot property, and that does even
include place and fire, right? So those costs just aren't, they keep growing every year in
tax rate doesn't grow to cover those.
So when you increase density, you increase the tax revenue,
per that one acre lock, which helps cover the cost
throughout the entire village.
I just want to, not the pile on, but, you know,
we go to these conventions, right?
And so some of them are geared towards brokers and developers.
And in years past, you would go to the conventions
for the International shopping centers convention.
and you would see all of these retailers, all of these potential end users.
Now, the only people you see there are either municipalities or you see brokers, you don't
see the retailers anymore when you go there.
The changes that have occurred in the commercial markets have been substantial since, you know,
2015, really they've been declining.
People are now doing a lot more online retail.
They're really trying to write size,
what retail and commercial that we have,
which is why you've seen the demolition of places like Oak Creek Plaza,
because you tend to start getting what they call like value ad,
which is not, you know, they're adding like storage units and other things
to those places to try to make up for the commercial runs
that they're not getting as commercial brokers and developers.
So after the approval of the towns at Oak Creek,
We actually saw an increase in terms of the tonalite square shopping center across the street.
So there was the kids empire that went in there that lay fitness knew that the project was coming in.
So they went in there. There's been a couple of other tenants that I've located there.
And then same thing with Sheldon Woods and when our North West Edmonton Line crossings,
there's now additional tenants that are backfilling with the news that these additional
residences are coming and for the downtown we are actually seeing a lot more
activity and inquiries for space and some of it is just space that we don't
have like they're looking for a certain type of space like maybe it's 5,000
square feet that has a kitchen ready in it and we just we don't have some of those
available already for tenants that are looking so that's that's some of why you're
not seeing some of these new commercial businesses is we don't have some of the
basis or they're not getting calls back from some of our property owners that they're reaching
out to to try to locate or they're not coming to deal terms with those property owners.
So there is commercial and we are working on that but it all kind of goes together.
Okay.
Anyone else?
Okay.
We'll close the floor to the public commentary portion and do you guys need a five-minute break
at all?
Are you good to go?
There's got one on the piece of business when you get back here.
Oh, I do.
OK, very good.
One moment.
OK.
All right, before we adjourn, we need to do a minute's approval.
From the last, I need a motion, please,
to approve the committee of the whole meeting minutes
from January 22nd, 2024.
So load.
Motion by Trustee Warris.
Second.
Second by Trustee Ross.
Any discussion?
Clerk, please call the roll.
Well, it is.
Yes.
Ross?
Yes.
Lambert?
Yes.
Swank?
Yes.
Mayer. Yes. Wilson. Yes. Okay. Very good. Thank you very much for attending. Those of you
online and those of you live as well. Thank you very much for watching the committee of
the whole board for the state of the village. I'll ask for a motion please to adjourn this committee
of the whole board. Some of the motion by Trustee Swank. Second, second by Trustee Waris. Any discussion?
Clerk, please call the room.
Shwing?
Yes.
More as?
Yes.
Mayer?
Yes.
Wilson?
Yes.
Ross?
Yes.
Lamber?
Okay.
We good to go or you want to break it all.
Good to go.
Okay.