001we're live thank you good evening it is 6 01 pm and i have called to order this special joint study session between the ridgefield city council and the richfield school board joining us in the boardroom this evening we have board members christine malek crystal baracki peter tensing and i am school board chair tim wallace also joining us live in the boardroom we have city council council member simon troutman and then joining us remotely oh we also have joining us remote school board member paula cole i'm just looking at the screen and straining to read we have council member ben whalen council member mary supple council member sean hayford o'leary maria reagan gonzalez city manager katie rodriguez john stark is here could you remind me your title is it development yeah i'm the community development director
002thank you thank you for that and we're we also have assistant superintendent latonya daniels joining us is anyone else online oh um miss martinez that's executive analyst uh martinez is there anyone else on the screen there's 12 participants oh boy in only nine squares well we have we have a technology problem well thank you for joining us i really appreciate everyone joining us remotely and those who were able to join us live um the first item on the agenda is the rps in the city share joint initiatives and issues impacting the community and and that will be presented by superintendent nunowski who i did not introduce joining us at the table and city manager katie rodriguez all right so that is quite all right so stevenowski superintendent welcome to our colleagues and friends from the
003city we are going to tag a little bit so i'm going to talk a little bit about joint initiatives from a school district perspective then we're going to turn things over to city manager katie rodriguez to talk about things from a city perspective you'll note some things overlap and some things are individual even though they are all of our areas of partnership so as a school district as we think about the joint initiatives and issues really we have worked together on a number of fronts including feeding the richfield community technology and internet for the richfield community we actually partner up together with the chamber of commerce and supporting our local businesses we have community communications projects like the yearly calendar uh we actually have been partnering on a safe routes to schools set of grants
004and outcomes and then also our community ed and the parks and recs department work together on lifeguard training child and babysitting safety and then also winter adventure day in addition to some other opportunities in terms of free meals we have turned into a group that is feeding the community and since the pandemic began we served over 460 000 meals to children over 36 000 to adults and totaling up as of about a week week and a half ago over 500 000 meals served to the richfield community typically as a district we charge for meals however every single one of those has been free and so while that does impact our revenue we have gotten grants to fund feeding the adults and then also we are looking at cares money from the federal government which has
005helped this partnership in terms of student student meals and feeding children within our community technology access one of the things that we've done is distribute chromebooks throughout our community over 5 000 of them have been shared out to children mostly but also to adults an additional 120 ipads a wide range of repairs and then also 180 hot spots and one of the things we are working together in the legislative platforms and things we've talked about is trying to get broadband funded by the state across the entire state of minnesota to provide equity of access and opportunity to technology and internet online to every student every child every family in the state of minnesota regardless of what they might have in their homes um from there um we want to turn things over to city manager
006katie rodriguez to talk a little bit about some of the partnership things um that we have done together from the city's perspective katie over to you thank you steve give me a minute and i will share my screen [Music] i'll just make that bigger for everyone there we go so thank you so much for uh setting up the meeting tonight we always appreciate it the last time we met was june of 2019 and it feels like a lifetime ago um and before we get started i just want to say thank you and how much appreciation i have for the district and how they have responded to the pandemic my teacher and sorry my sister is a teacher and it really is nothing short of hero's work right now so kudos to all of you i
007also want to appreciate send some appreciation to superintendent yanowsky i really um i am grateful that you are so accessible and we communicate regularly and we have commiserated a time or two over the last year and a half also the the board has always been really accessible and other staff so thank you for that we have tried to share information as well we shared our 2020 community survey with the with the school district um also we tried to regularly share our redevelopment updates and i think that our both of our communication teams have done a really good job coordinating and amplifying each other's messages we also appreciate having a chance to attend school events both the mayor and i were able to attend the middle school's career day um the the 2019-2020 kickoff for the
008stu for the teachers and then we had lots of council members and staff at the beacons program launch of course those were the good old days before kovit hit and we could be in person um but we we were also able to um attend each other's meetings with legislators this year and i felt like that was a good tradition to continue and again thank you for coming to our thank you our sorry i'm tongue twisted tonight um thank you for rps coming to our council meeting to thank our building inspection staff it was that was really really appreciated by our folks even though covet is hit our partnership has continued some of the efforts have been you know smaller and some of them have really been significant in in the outcomes we got a lovely
009thank you from the stem school staff our public works had donated some plants for their their entryway garden and also some pretty creative schools that they made out of tree trunks we also appreciated that the school district was able to partner with us on the census and we had great results on that we increased our our self-response rate by 1.9 percent uh to 38 or i'm sorry 78.6 percent and just a shout out to executive analyst martinez because she's the one that spearhearted your head of that effort and i just listed some other programs where we're regularly partnering with the schools we also have enjoyed working with will wislow on safe routes to school we partner in various ways we had a great bike giveaway where we gave away 200 bikes and i am personally
010grateful to will he came and met with us uh before it was bike anywhere day on in may and this was may of 2020 and suggested a route for me to bike to work and then i went on to bike to work you know three three to four times a week which i plan to do again once the weather gets nice up i'm not up for winter biking yet also we normal in a normal year we would be having 6 000 students come through wood lake for free field trips uh we had expanded our our field trip program and we had just had fourth graders out to skate which was really popular we had our water plant tours and we had a staff person come and present on our program before that unfortunately we've had
011to pause those programs but we hope to continue them again we also do some fundraising and to help support these programs and we were really grateful for the school district's support and in our fundraising for the universally inclusive playground which we planned for spring in 2021 uh we've also been working with mr brown on the high school's green team on sustainability efforts and we've got more ideas for future collaboration on that the city also had a various other programs that they've been working on and i've just again lifted listed a few here and superintendent iannowski also um listed some of these we continue to meet monthly and we hope to have future collaboration some of the things we're working on is bringing the snowshoeing out to the school districts and snowshoeing there so you don't
012have to bust to us and then working on having outdoor environmental education so we're still collaborating uh my next few slides are about the community support that we've tried to do as a city and before i get to that you know wipe out the head just like the school district we really had to pivot very quickly i want to give a shout out to my staff because they've been able to provide our services in a safe way it took a lot and just providing those basic services has been hard and so a big thank you to our staff but we try to go beyond that and provide community support for them during these trying times bloomington public health has been great and getting out very good communication and doing it very quickly um they also
013we've also coordinated with them and standing up some testing sites and both in the community and then in surrounding communities we also had a lot of our um our cares money we directed towards the community and uh about 250 thousand dollars in uh beep support for rental assistance and then small business forgivable loans for almost 250 000. early on we surveyed the community about the impact that cobit had had and the financial impact we also surveyed landlords and because of that we we felt like we were able to tailor those cares dollars to the people that needed it most um and these are just again some some things that we were doing to support them we had a holiday food drive it was very popular and we collected four thousand dollars food four thousand pounds
014of food and this is just a one of the vehicles we used we had four pallets of food that we delivered and then finally we we surveyed our staff who were trying to take care of their families during the pandemic and parent through all this and learned about their struggles and ways that we could try to support them we tried to we tried to do some fun programs wherever we could um director amy merkel who heads up our recreation services has just been really creative in in supporting the community in fun ways we did a lot of virtual programming um we had and this was as of august i don't have a recent count but we had like 500 000 engagements uh for our virtual programming on facebook we did the birthday parades they were
015super popular amy and public works were able to open a dog park and we had sidewalk poultry so trying to still have fun a little bit of trying here in terms of budget impacts uh we were down we estimate to be down about eight percent for two million dollars without our without the cares funding and without increased building permit revenue which thankfully has continued to be strong it really hit our depth reg in our recreation revenues we have been able to keep expenditures down we have a soft hiring freeze and we have some furloughs we have been able to limit that we also cut non-essential spending but the thing that really helped us was we got keras funding of about 2.7 million dollars [Music] some of the things that we use that for again i
016talked about about 500 000 that went directly to the community um we did a lot of it went to first responders personnel cost and like the school district we also had to invest in our technology we had to support folks that were working from home we had to switch to this virtual environment you know providing support for online meetings and also digitizing a lot of our processes and then like a lot of organizations we had extra cost for cleaning supplies ppe and testing kits we remain concerned the state's budget forecast has been all over the place which i'm sure you're aware of we've got two million dollars in lga budgeted and so that's always going to be a concern for us and so we're watching closely um we did predict this as as long as
017the pandemic news we're going to have lower revenues and higher costs and then ongoing concerns a debt service that's going to put pressure on our operating costs and we have significant right-of-way and recreation infrastructure needs we also have a limited tax base and so that is one reason why i'm really looking forward to community development director john stark's presentation because it's it's him and his team that are are building out our tax base so i would say in terms of our financial impacts were okay right now but we do have concerns going into the future and i will stop sharing but i can take questions if you want to go to questions now all right thank you um i guess i'll throw it out to the board that's in the room here if anyone has
018questions for ms rodriguez um relative to the sustainability uh work um so a lot of what we've done has been relative to our buildings and obviously we're not you know with students not being here as much we're not necessarily doing as much with our waste and whatnot but that's been i think the big focus um is sort of sustainable building operations trying to be more sustainable with energy use and recycling and waste management wondering if if you could give a high level of what the city is really working on from a sustainability perspective and especially if you are looking at all at some of those non-point source pollution measures things like phosphates or road salt etc and if there were ways that we as a large property owner could be partnering with you in that
019actually we just passed an ordinance amendment that added chlorides to our our definition of pollutants for our stormwater system and gave us the ability to enforce our well enforce but also promote um better better procedures to keep the chloride out of our stormwater system so we did do that but in terms of coordinating with the students and the sustainability committee we've got some ideas about how to coordinate with the organized calling project that we're doing we're pretty all in on that right now and i don't want to give details because we haven't even given mr brown a heads up yet but we're hoping students can help us with that and making sure that the organics goes well and people are informed and that there is a contamination with the organics program paula do you have
020any questions i do not uh i just really had a good time looking at the bikes uh event attacked because i went there and it was so cool and the kids were so cute and they were almost so happy and excited and i'm really grateful i i lived here i think i'm going on here 11 maybe and richard i can just see it's this turnaround for uh such an inclusive place uh where we really think uh about things that i don't see other students thinking about and really finding ways to connect especially during the pandemic so i just want to extend my my congratulations and my gratitude uh to the work that you all have been doing there and also of course the city council and in our mayor and the impact that your work
021has had in really approving and going you know and suggesting and approving or going along whichever way uh happens so thank you all i just have one question about the the resources available um was it for rent assistance and the food drive has our staff been included in broadcasting that in terms of making sure our families are aware of these resources by the city yes we actually have a partnership between the communications department at the city and our communications department and so we frequently share messages that the other group sends out and so we have sent out messages from the city to support our students and families and the city has sent out multiple messages of ours to do the same thing super thank you these appear to blend together because it's hard to talk
022about where we are and what's going on in the world without drifting into the budgetary impact so yes and so as a district we have i'd say in the short term financially as a district we've done relatively well we do have significant concerns over the long haul and the sustainability of the long haul so since the start of the pandemic there have been what's called cares dollars and then also crf dollars and we have used those to support increased technology increased food increased staffing needs and a wide range of other other needs financially and then there are we are anticipating it's called essr dollars which we've been told to expect not just for use in the spring but then also for use over the summer and then to even extend it to possibly staffing for
023next year and so schools our biggest component is separating out one-time dollars from ongoing dollars because well one-time dollars are wonderful and they can help you fill holes they also do not help in the long run in terms of overall staffing needs and so a couple of areas that we are specifically concerned about and there are bills currently at the legislature um that we have testified in support of already um one is in regard to how we count the number of students and how we count the poverty in a district and so what we do as districts is we collect free and reduced lunch forms uh to determine the poverty level and then there are multiple uh pots of money that are aligned to students in poverty one specifically that supports richfield is called compensatory
024education and compensatory revenue supports helping close gaps and needs it pays for things like social workers reading teachers math teachers and really helps for students in poverty um and as we know poverty has increased during the pandemic not decreased at the same time we've been serving free meals and so richfield public schools much like many districts across the state have had challenges um collecting free and reduced lunch forms and we're finding a pretty big gap in the reality of the data we're finding and the reality of the human toll that we're seeing of the pandemic in 1920 we received 5.3 million dollars in compensatory education to serve student needs for students in poverty for 2021 and we are anticipating next year's budget would include 4.4 million dollars of compensatory education so that is suggesting that
025poverty has significantly decreased of the students and families in richfield and that's almost nine hundred thousand dollars less or a nine hundred thousand dollar reduction to serve students in poverty uh based on the way that the state traditionally counts forms uh what makes this even more troubling is the way we collect these forms is by using social worker time outreach worker time uh administrator time and nutrition service members time so they are not outreaching to families to provide family support they are not providing student or family counseling during this time administrators aren't doing their role and nutrition folk aren't serving meals they're trying to collect forms um that can be extremely challenging and so we are looking with our government to see what to do about that uh but this is a particularly challenging area
026because those will be ongoing reductions in dollars that we might anticipate now and into the future at the same time districts around the state have seen a reduction in students as families are homeschooling or going online or there are different schools with different rules about how many days a week you're allowed to come into school or whether or not you're allowed to come into school at all and so it's not the same equal footing where everybody is in the same amount there are very different products based on very different rules and so we have seen a reduction in student enrollment of 91 students from last year and so that also will base our budget assumptions for next year and so we'll not only be seeing a reduction in the amount of dollars designed to serve
027students in poverty but a reduction of the dollars overall to serve all of our students and so these are particularly concerning and this is the same type of concerns that you hear echoed across the entire state and then there are a number of different areas where we have a reduction in revenue one of the great examples that we're using right now is food service so because of our students aren't in and we are really distributing meals over half a million but we are serving fewer meals and so there's also no dollars brought in for a la carte or additional items sold to our students so in 2020 revenue was down 53 000 from the previous year and then that has continued into the fall and continuing on through this year so again we're trying to
028cover those gaps through the use of federal dollars but we are certainly concerned about the sustainability and the long-term dollars for our school district with that i suppose i will pause prior to a city development update for mr stark and see if there are any questions from our city council folk or our city staff prior to transitioning into a city development update and larger conversation for all of us someone have questions for superintendent uranowski on the the budget impacts and that's just a a short list of the the impacts i'm sure it's much lovely the true impact is longer than that but the compensatory revenue being down is is is a weird function i don't think any of us believe that that poverty is down collectively given the economic disruption of the last year yet
029that's what our paperwork says and so in part it's because we are just giving away meals to everyone not just those who are who are on site on in the days of school so we have no sort of carrot to dangle in front of people to collect the forms it's very odd it's always going to happen that way when you're using a surrogate measure correct yep correct yeah right right the surrogate measure is losing it's it's it's um it's touched with reality if there are no questions for superintendent nanowski um we will i guess mr whaley mr whalen yes sorry had to find my unmute button um i'm curious i know it's still very early in the legislative process but i um as i understood the governor's proposed budget it was would increa include increased
030spending for education i'm curious if uh i haven't not dug into the details yet um do you can you comment on that is that is it too early to be worth commenting on obviously it still has to make it through the legislature so overall we appreciate that in a time of fiscal challenges that the governor has sort of sent out a first message about increasing funds to schools rather than decreasing them so we are definitely pleased with that it has already been counted out there are 12 unfunded mandates one of the things that often happens to schools within that bill and so if due north passed as is we do have some small concerns about that the second thing i'd say as a district is we are working on our equity policy and we are
031very clearly focused on serving any and all students um i think it's important that we recognize that there were some transformative words shared by governor walls that are not typically shared by people in power talking about anti-racism diversity and equity in ways that are not often heard by uh hurt amongst the higher powers in government office and so we definitely also want to acknowledge and appreciate that um that said i would want to tell you that even the budget increase doesn't touch the compensatory education nor the reduction in students and so there's a bill right now house file 4 that i testified for last week that would allow schools and districts to take their account from two years ago uh prior to the pandemic to use that for poverty um and to use that for
032the number of students thereby not penalizing districts across the state of minnesota for any changes that happened during the coven pandemic and so that's the type of bill that would actually above and beyond the governor's budget proposal which we very much appreciate um that would actually really help public schools across the state of minnesota yep i think the other the other piece there i mean you asked ben about the legislative process and i think you're absolutely correct to be uh recognizing that there are two house two bodies in the legislature and they do need to come together and at this point um the indications we have as dr yanowski mentioned there's a bill in the house that would go a long ways towards keeping us whole we haven't heard yet from the senate um preliminary
033uh indications from senate leadership has been that they are looking at a at a much more conservative approach in terms of the revenue the revenue line that they really are inclined to keep that revenue line steady and so we're just going to have to see how that plays absolutely and just by point of comparison uh governor dayton's budget first request two years ago um was actually lower in a surplus than the first of of governor wells it might not it was two or four years ago when governor dayton asked for a half percent increase this actually during a deficit governor wallace has asked for more money from the government than the previous governor had um just to talk about uh we just want to be very respectful and appreciative of governor walls for for this
034beginning point any other questions or comments i'll do a better job of scanning for the hands nope okay wonderful i guess we'll ask is it mr stark who's up for the city development update yeah thank you i hope everybody's doing well give me two seconds to get my presentation [Music] up well sorry this was all set up before let me try again [Music] there we go i'm going to go through this a little quickly we've got a lot going on and can everybody see this yes yep yes okay all right so um the stars are just where in the community we have some projects going on i'm generally going to go from west to east there are kind of our inventory here some of these are recently completed i'm not going to go through this
035list right now because i'm going to show you pictures of everything as we go so lund's apartments uh is in the northern part of the lund's parking lot uh they're proposing 127 units there with six stories of housing it's 100 market rate housing uh which means that nobody there is no government entity or any other prohibition on what they would charge for rent so we wouldn't consider any of the units there to be affordable uh it it received no city assistance and those are tied together uh in order to receive city assistance a project must include affordable units uh this is being developed by lunds they have their own housing arm and by doran architecture and development bonovo apartments which is right behind cvs or right to the west of cvs 192 units there is
036a mixture of three and five stories again it's a hundred percent market rate because there was no city assistance this is scheduled to be complete this summer 6501 penn avenue south this was an old bumper to bumper building that the richfield housing and redevelopment authority was able to acquire we are working with the development team called nhh and boy claire they have a preliminary development agreement and they're talking about up to 69 units there funded by something called tax credit funding the low income housing tax credit is the term this one we are actually hoping to get some more deeply affordable units typically uh the affordable that we've been able to do is affordable to the households earning 50 or 60 percent of the area median income we'd like to see some of the housing
037here affordable housing household much lower than that at uh perhaps as low as 30 percent of the area meeting income and 10 of the units there would be supportive housing and we're not sure exactly what that means right now it depends on the clientele the idea is that 10 of the units would have a clientele that needs some services on site so it could be veterans needing some veteran services it could be people with either physical or developmental challenges that some services then anderson lane the hra actually purchased this property uh quite a long time ago 17 years ago now and if you can see the white house in the picture that's what was there it was a single house on a lot we acquired that is a very oddly shaped property and when we
038bought it the housing market was in the doldrums and so it sat we were finally able last year to work with a developer on developing five new single-family homes last year all sold quickly and are occupied the lindale garden center redevelopment site for those of you that have been around richfield a long time uh you'll remember the lindell garden property this is just north of lake winds co-op you'll see that kind of shown on the south half of this site i'm going to go through the residential pieces of this in a minute but there is a retail piece there you'll see highlighted in red the hope had been we would get a a brew pub or a tap room or something like that the the pandemic has changed the real estate market unfortunately after the
039pandemic the the real estate professionals think that there are going to be a you know glut of restaurant spaces available and really push down uh the lease of restaurant spaces and that would make this site too too expensive to develop in that way but we will have to see how that pans out for housing on the site it consists of 30 luxury condominiums that opened the summer of 2020. uh these are beautiful if you haven't had a chance to go out there they look over um ridgefield lake and i would say that uh these are probably the the highest end units that ridgefield has ever developed uh in city bella there is a there's a penthouse unit up there that's quite um quite extravagant uh maybe second to that these are the nicest condominiums or
040housing that's been built here for a long time i i believe the highest and one went uh sold for 850 000 also in this area is the henley apartments which is 66 apartments and eight rental townhomes we were really excited about the rental townhomes because that's a product that we don't have enough of we we really don't have enough family rental housing this was developed by a company called north bay and opened this january and then across the street from that is what in the past was called henley ii uh they've now named the project rowan um how they name development projects is beyond me i i don't always understand the names i think that they it starts with looking on the internet for domain names uh and you have to be able to have
041a domain name and so you know they run through their list of possibilities and whatever domain name is not taken that's what they land on this is 82 new units of housing and that's shown that's the white kind of at the bottom this is actually going to have some very nice accessible physically accessible housing that's going to exceed our standards greatly and then the top you'll see the existing apartment building there that's 22 units those are all going to be rehab that's going to remain uh we think that that's a great way to develop to bring in a new building and rehab some older units and so the existing apartment building will have the tenants will have access to all of the uh community space in the new building uh the hope is that it
042will be you know very you know integrated as the development uh 20 of the units at this development are going to be affordable the households earning 50 percent of the area income and this was approved just a couple of months ago and we think that you'll start seeing some construction activity there um once the snow is gone the link 65 project i don't have a good site plan for this i'm sorry but um it it encompasses the retail strip that the lynn 65 restaurant is located in so i think they're trying to make this confusing i've been heming too it is proposed by enclave development out of north dakota 157 units and 8 000 square feet of commercial they again our policy is that if a development receives assistance they must provide affordable housing or
043they must contribute to our housing fund in this case this developer did both they are contributing to our housing fund to help us do affordable housing projects and programs throughout the community but they are also including 10 two-bedroom units at 60 of the area median income and again we do need a lot of affordable family units uh richfield has a you know large percentage of affordable studios and single and one-room apartments so we're really happy to see the two bedrooms here this was approved the funding was approved in november of last year and all the zoning and those kinds of approvals are are coming through this month we are working there are about a dozen retail tenants here we are working with them our economic development authority which was created in 2018 created a funding
044source to help businesses that are displaced by relocation i'm sorry by redevelopment and so we are hoping to relocate all those businesses within the community and provide them with some funds to do that and just as an aside i should have mentioned there was an earlier question on sustainability since i mentioned our economic development authority i will tell you that they also um this year or sorry 2020 inaugurated a program called the energy efficient business grants and that was providing grants to businesses for things like energy efficient lighting energy efficient refrigeration and those kinds of things and the richfield schools were recipients of some of that money uh one thousand eight hundred fifty dollars and grant money went to the schools for uh energy efficient upgrades that were made there the emmy is located at
04566th street between stevens and second avenue this one i can actually tell you why it's named the emmy uh that's the name of the developer's daughter me this was originally approved in 2018 with 31 units and 6000 square feet of commercial uh as they progressed they learned that there wasn't as much demand for the commercial space and there was more demand for the housing and so they increased the housing by 11 units and decreased the commercial space this will include 20 percent of the units affordable at 60 percent of the area immediate income it received their final approvals in january there are a few houses there in an old church building those will be demolished in the spring case bank at the roundabout at lindale and 66th street um if folks have seen that going
046up that's just a a bank branch nothing too exciting uh maury's jaguar land rover opened last year on 77th street by trunk highway 77 and then along ridgefield parkway across the street from target home depot is the cedar point housing development and that's made up of 64 forestall town homes and 230 apartment units the apartments are called the raya apartments it's being developed by shaffer richardson it's 237 units these are market rate units it's fully approved and construction is set to begin in march or april and then the rs 64 townhomes oh there's some blanks there i'm sorry um it's 64 town homes i everything that's constructed is occupied so i believe that there are 16 units occupied the units are selling for around 330 000 which is affordable to households earning 115 of the
047area median income and for uh home ownership that's considered affordable and we expect to have this one complete uh really it depends on how quickly these units uh at the pace they're selling them it should be complete this year but if sales slowed down it would be complete uh early 2022 the vets park area is now subject to laboratory you may have read about that the newspaper the american legion is selling their four acre parcel uh the comprehensive brand guides this high density residential which the associated learning that would allow 400 units of housing we think that's higher than the community would really tolerate on that site and so we uh we put a moratorium on the the development of that area which really just puts a pause on development proposals uh it's a seven
048month moratorium uh that was enacted in november so i believe it it ends in april or may um it's going to give the community and neighbors a chance to give a little more input on how they would like to see the site developed the american legion themselves would like to retain a presence there uh some meeting room for their members perhaps a place for their members to now have a beer and a burger the city would love to see some event space there we're not sure if that's feasible but we're working with the legion to see if it is and again they are they're listing the property now with uh with a real estate broker and we expect to see some proposals coming in from developers in the next uh couple of months and then
049finally the hub this is a 16-acre site that everybody in ridgefield would like to see redevelop it's really outdated the layout if you're looking at the aerial photo for example you'll see all that parking to the north of that that parking is never utilized uh even on the busiest of days uh there are a lot of spaces in there that are either not utilized or underutilized the the issue is it's owned by a publicly traded corporation uh called brixmore and just their nature of being publicly traded um really makes it a lot more slow for them to make decisions um in their world they own i believe 80 79 or 80 shopping centers from coast to coast and in their world the vacancy rate here is actually low this is um they consider this a
050good center and so they're a little hesitant to completely redevelop it another issue is that the rainbow store while it is vacant jerry who bought rainbow and uh and some other grocery stores is still leasing that site uh they found it was cheaper for them to at least uh to continue paying the lease payments than to buy their way out of their lease and then it also keeps groceries for competitors from coming to the site we are not privy to how long that lease is the city works on a concept plan in 2017 and 2018 as part of our comprehensive plan and we came up with a few different potential uh development layouts you'll see one here there are a couple of others in our comprehensive plan and that was just the show the development
051community that the city is interested in or redevelop their redevelopment there and i do believe that brixmore is ultimately i think what we'll see happen though is it will be phased uh where they will take down [Music] part of the development at a time and you know if they have some good tenants maybe consolidate them into one half of the development while they redevelop the other half so with that that's the end of my proposal but i could take any questions you might have [Music] maybe next year one of the things we can talk about you know i could do it tonight but if we did a little more time aside would be tax increment financing and how that goes or does not impact the schools thank you yeah i think that would be perhaps
052worthy of an entirely different conversation and give it it would take the whole hour if not more relating to that i guess is i mean tiff is is one of the incentives that developers are offered to make make the projects work and the the other side of that is that when they accept it we have we're able to impose some responsibility for affordable housing units and whatever and what have you the projects you discussed had a pretty wide range of percent of ami and so is is that the sliding scale you mentioned where where they they can if they receive some sort of incentive they can donate to your other fund and in or they could comply by providing units a certain percentage of units that are designated as affordable but within that i mean
053a unit at 150 115 percent of ami is not the same as a unit at 30 ami is that is that accurate so that the incentive is scaled and and takes all that into account really there there are three factors um one is our policy which is called our inclusionary housing policy and that says that if a developer gets assistance from us at a minimum they must include 20 of the housing affordable at 60 percent of the ami uh so again that's a minimum we try to work with developers on going beyond that we work with our financial analysts at ellers associates i believe the school also works with ellers and sometimes it's not feasible for a developer to go deeper than that that the return on investment that would result would just make the
054project infeasible but we are able to dig into their numbers to determine if that's the case so again one of the factors is our inclusionary housing policy the other factor is the funding source even with tax increment financing there are different kinds of tif districts there's a housing tip district that requires affordability at 50 well it's a range but typically developers in a housing district go at the 50 percent uh ami for 20 units if it's a redevelopment if district the that's a different requirement they're actually not required to have any affordable housing at all i mentioned low-income housing tax credits if a developer were to get their funding through that they would have to have deeper affordability and so again it just depends so much on the funding source and then the type of
055unit again for a home ownership 115 percent sounds like a lot uh 115 of the area median income but for homeownership with the studies that have been done um they feel um and when i say they the people that set the legislation and set these uh limits and numbers feel like at home ownership 115 of ami is kind of the equivalent um of 60 of the ami for rental housing uh based on the incomes of um people that are in the home ownership market uh again and this is something that's evolving uh the way we look at affordable housing i think is changing all the time and so we are working with the legislature on changing some of these numbers uh making more deeply affordable housing work better with the rules that we have uh
056so i would say it's an imperfect system right now um but we are collectively working on that well thank you i appreciate that do others have um so this is a question i think both the city and the school district one of the things we've been hearing that we need more space the public needs and get together and i know the school district is going to keep renovations when those are finished um do you think there'd be interest in cooperation with the city and the school district to make this available for the community to use so i i would i would volunteer that i would be willing to entertain it the one constraint on it is is as a taxing entity anytime we wish to raise funds we have to go to the voters and
057ask them specifically to do it and i don't think you are as constrained so are we interested in space probably but the the ability for us to raise funds for it are harder to get you know we have to get broad public support in advance by way of a referendum that will the school district space be available for the community existing the space what the existing infrastructure is doing now right yep oh and i would i would suspect that our our i mean we lease space to many renters already is that yes we anticipate returning back to that whenever the end of the pandemic comes and we feel it is safe to do so i mean i think i think the only and i'm pretty sure we'd i have to go back and take a
058look at the policy but i'm fairly certain that we've revised our policies to make them more favorable towards you know community members and have a sliding scale on sort of that you know to try and encourage that local usage i think so may reagan gonzalez good evening everyone i know we have a few minutes left so i just want to say a few brief comments first i just greatly appreciate how the school district and the city has continued to grow our relationship over the years it benefits our families first and foremost and i just look forward to continuing to grow that partnership but i'm extremely thankful for the great work that we've done together um and congratulations to the new chair of the school board cautious and thank you um to crystal brackey for being
059such a great former chair last year and then there's just three areas that i think we could continue to have conversations on um because they're affecting both the city and the school and that is you know the mismatch between what the narrative is and the statistics and what they're saying about who we are as a city and a community and what the reality is and the fact is that that mismatch disenfranchises our families and our students and our in our community and so how do we look at things the census will roll out later right and that's in the future but how do we look at the information we have at the city and then the information you have at the schools to find to create and strengthen our narrative so that um you know
060they are not shortchanging our communities and our families because there's not correct information out there and so what are those stories that we're telling to policy makers what are the stories we're telling for our families and how could we create that together um especially because everybody's talking about investing in racial equity in byproduct communities well invest in richfield and we need that investment now um and so let's really push that narrative and move forward together the second thing is how do we think about um moving forward and really being resilient out on moving out of covid and knowing that there's a lot of systems that need to change so um what are those things that we're really not serving our families in our community and how do we work together to say you know these
061are a few key areas that moving forward out of coven we need to drastically change them and just pushing ourselves to partner in new and different creative ways um because we've said this in meetings in the past but the projections of what the future was going to look like have completely you know they're they'd they're not relevant anymore and so what is what is the new future look like and how do we how can we be creative to address the needs that we have um and are there a few key areas that we could really focus on just taking kind of a tagline from the school district to reimagine richfield but one of those few key areas to really do that moving forward i know that takes continued conversation um but those are the big
062buckets that i think we can keep talking about and moving forward thank you thank you those those are some great ideas i think there's there's a lot and i agree with the first one wholeheartedly um but then the other just a as as terrible as what we're enduring is is it does present us with opportunities on how to how to figure out what we want to be on the other side of it and ways we can change how we deliver what we deliver no i think i think there are opportunities here for sure noticing we are at close to time i i want to give other opportunities for comments from anyone um simon welcome thank you chair police i'll be really brief but i just wanted to say it's just so good to see everybody
063um and it's uh it's just a privilege just to be here and i just wanted to reflect really briefly um just we're just so grateful for all the increased um collaboration and communication and we share even a color red now which is great and um this space is beautiful i think this used to be the lunch receiving area but i'm reoriented and just uh you know many trains were carried as a high schooler through here and so it looks gorgeous and beautiful and and so i'm really grateful to be here but i just wanted to thank you for just incredible spirit of collaboration and even as we have really big challenges just really see you guys as friends and colleagues and we're really honored to be uh meeting these challenges together with you guys so
064it's really good and gayles good to see you thank you thank you and i i would would also you know i appreciate your presence and and you're you're taking the opportunity to visit with us and talk to us i think the collaboration the opportunities um you know started i guess somewhat modestly but but at the same time we have so many opportunities to collaborate and grow together and and and work you know there are so many areas in which we are completely aligned in terms of what we want for the community and the students in the community and the families in the community and the businesses in the community as well so and and i'd just be remiss if i didn't join with uh um your colleague and ours mary supple and talking about just
065shared space and wanting to invest in making sure it's utilized and being a good community member and then looking to the future we're we've always have a great tradition of supporting and standing beside you guys and even lowering our levy to make sure you guys get the funding you need and i just want to say with a full voice you can always count on on me and us to just support you guys and making sure that our school gets the funding that it needs our school system gets the funding that it needs thank you i won't talk over that last one thank you well i i think that does it we are at seven o'clock and so what we we do need to take a brief recess before we move on to our official meeting
066so thank you again i really appreciate the our our our guests for joining us our special guests and thank you um it is seven o'clock i will gavel down this study session and take a brief recess before we return for our meeting thank you all so good to see all of you good to see you thank you leadership and during covet everyone you guys have been amazing thank you five minutes perfect that's right other humans you guys haven't been meeting