February 11 council meeting

Lengthy public hearings on street improvements pushed some of the controversial agenda items forward to the next regular council meeting on the 25th. Citizens will have to wait until then to learn more about Mr. Ahl's organizational proposals, Mr. Rossbach's proposed changes to visitor presentation rules, and Ms. Guilfoile's information concerning voter data access by campaigners.

The council did clarify that Mr. Copeland is on paid administrative leave, and that the as yet non-existent Community Center sign to be supplied by Clear Channel will be subject to the dynamic sign moratorium that passed its second reading.

Mr. Nephew had Mr. Kantrud confirm that authorizing the check for back pay issued to Mr. Copeland, included in the standard 'approval of claims' portion of the consent agenda, in no way legitimized the purported employment contract with Mr. Copeland. Mr. Kantrud explained that since the document included the November 2006 Hjelle resolution which included the pay increase, the back pay liability was created by the resolution not the purported contract. There was no update on the status of the contract investigation referral authorized by the council.

Who owns the streets?

The 'Myrtle-Idaho Area Street Improvements' public hearing turned out to illustrate the central public policy question of the meeting.

The city has, for the last decade or so, been involved in a street improvement program with the aim of bringing all city streets up to a uniform minimum standard. Streets of sufficient quality can be maintained in a way that provides thirty-plus years of useful life. Every property unit (e.g. a single family house) in the city will sooner or later pay an assessment as its street is upgraded. The amount of the assessment is set each year, with the goal of having the assessments pay about 50% of the street improvement cost. A significant part of the street work is to also bring storm water management infrastructure up to a standard (ed note: I believe this is a state mandated standard which must be implemented if significant work is done on a street. This needs to be confirmed.)

The Idaho Street portion of this project proposal is a short dead end which has never been properly constructed as a street. The runoff from the street winds up in the wetland located on the Priory Preserve.

When street projects are planned the city engineers try to include a manageable set of work on different street segments in order to save the cost of assembling the equipment, hauling, and so on. Thus the Myrtle and Idaho segments were included in a single project, even though the streets don't intersect and the utilities and stormwater work isn't interdependent.

Because the residents on Idaho Street presented united opposition to the reconstruction of their street and stormwater system, the Idaho portion of the project was separated and will not be done in this project cycle.

Thus the public policy issue: can the City make and enforce a policy decision even if those residents most immediately affected resist it? Should the City do so?