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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2007-07-23 Transcription July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 1 July 23,2007 City Council Work Session 6:30 P.M. Council Present: Bailey, Champion, Correia, Elliott, O'Donnell, Vanderhoef Council Absent: Wilburn Staff: Atkins, Karr, Dilkes, Helling, Davidson, Fosse, Rackis, Briggs, Trueblood, Craig Tapes: 07-54 & 07-55, Both Sides. PLANNING AND ZONING: Bailey/ Okay, let's get started. Planning and Zoning items. Item Sa CONSIDER A MOTION SETTING A PUBLIC HEARING FOR AUGUST 21, 2007 ON A RESOLUTION TO AMEND THE NORTHEAST DISTRICT PLAN TO INTEGRATE A LARGE INSTITUTIONAL PROPERTY INTO THE PLAN FOR THE LINDEMANN HILLS NEIGHBORHOOD NORTH OF THE PUBLIC SQUARE ALONG LOWER WEST BRANCH ROAD. Item 5b CONSIDER A MOTION SETTING A PUBLIC HEARING FOR AUGUST 21, 2007 ON A RESOLUTION FOR A VOLUNTARY ANNEXATION OF 14 ACRES OF LAND OWNED BY HENRIETTA MILLER AND 1.89 ACRES OF LAND OWNED BY THE CITY OF IOWA CITY LOCATED NORTH OF LOWER WEST BRANCH ROAD, BRENTWOOD DRIVE, AND BROAD MOOR LANE. Davidson! I have no pictures tonight because everything you are doing, lovely boathouse behind me has nothing to do with Planning and Zoning matters. (laughter) Everything we're doing tonight is either involving setting a hearing, or a repeat item. So, no pictures. Items A and B actually go together with Item C, which we'll discuss tomorrow, but they are in order, setting the public hearings for the, uh, Comp Plan amendment, the annexation, and the rezoning of property related to the relocation of St. Pat's Church to east Iowa City, and I don't know. . ..excuse me (coughing) those are all setting public hearings. So, if you have any questions this evening about what's going on there, I'd be happy to answer those, but otherwise, you will just be setting a hearing for the meeting then in August. Bailey/ Does anybody have any questions? Okay. Item 5g CONSIDER AN ORDINANCE VACATING A PORTION OF COURT STREET RIGHT-OF-WAY BETWEEN CLINTON STREET AND CAPITOL STREET. (V AC07-00003) (SECOND CONSIDERATION) This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23,2007 City Council Work Session Page 2 Item 5h CONSIDER A RESOLUTION OF INTENT TO CONSIDER THE PROPOSED CONVEYANCE OF THE VACATED PORTION OF COURT STREET RIGHT-OF-WAY BETWEEN CLINTON STREET AND CAPITOL STREET, AND SETTING A PUBLIC HEARING ON SAID PROPOSED CONVEYANCE FOR AUGUST 21, 2007. Davidson! And then the other items are Item G and H. They are also related. Second consideration of the vacation of a portion of Court Street between Clinton and Capitol. This is the arrangement that we've worked out with the Clarks in conjunction with the CB-5 zoned building that they're building there. Basically swapping two small parcels and evening up the right-of-way. That's Item G, second consideration; and then Item H, at your August meeting you will have third consideration of this, adoption of it, and then what this does is set the hearing, uh, on the conveyance, the actual conveyance of the property. There's no money exchanging hands, you'll recall, because they're approximately equal properties that we're swapping. Any questions? Bailey/ No. Thanks. Davidson! Thank you. COUNCIL APPOINTMENTS: Bailey/ So, we had applicants for Housing and Community Development, Human Rights, and Police Citizen Review Board. Let's start with Housing and Community Development. There's three applicants for three positions, and two are renewals. Champion! Right. And I thought the third person was good. Bailey/ I thought the third person was good, too. Okay? (several talking) Everybody agree? Great. Human Rights Commission. (several talking) Champion! I'd like to hear...I was very impressed with both Brian and Newman. There's only one male on that Commission. I wanted to hear what other people thought about those two. I mean, we can't have two. Correia! I was tom between Joan and urn. . . Champion! I didn't consider Joan, not because she's not qualified and wouldn't be good, but there's only one male on that Commission. Bailey/ .. . gender balance, yeah, I think I would agree. Correia! I was more impressed with Newman over, I mean, I think they both have . . ImpressIve.. . This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 3 Champion! I thought they were both really good. Bailey/ Do we have four for Newman? One, two, three, four.. .okay. And the Police Citizen Review Board? (several talking) Okay, moving right along. BOATHOUSE (A1?:enda Item #6): Trueblood! I won't be up here long. I'm going to turn it over to people who know what they're talking about. So, but, this boathouse, as you know, is something we've been working on with the University for quite some time. Uh, this evening with us are Hugh Barry with the University of Iowa, Kevin Monson and Tim Schroeder with Neumann Monson Architects, and there might be one or two more coming, but essentially what they're here for tonight is to show you the conceptual plans for the building, and hopefully get your approval by consensus to proceed with this conceptual design, as it is with all projects, and then from there as far as the plans and specifications, City staff will be working with the University to get it all nailed down before it goes out to bid. Urn, and also, an agenda item for tomorrow night is a Memorandum of Understanding, and the Land Lease Agreement which you will need to vote on, approved by.. .hopefully approve by resolution tomorrow night. So ifthere's any questions about that, tonight be a good time to ask, as well. But with that, I'll turn it over to Kevin Monson and take you through the conceptual design. Bailey/ Thanks, Terry. Monson! Good evening. Last time we were here we were asking for your consideration for the use of this parcel of the Park, and with that approval and consideration, subject to lease, we have proceeded with a design to be incorporated into the Park, and so I'm going to walk you through some slides showing that. This is an aerial photograph of the larger area, with the boathouse being positioned here; Terrill Mill Park, of course, here. But we also wanted to give you the relationship of the larger part of this part of town, especially when you talk about views coming in Dubuque Street, and how this might affect views, and also whether we would be affecting the views to Hancher Auditorium, which is here. As you can see, we placed the building, tucked it as far to the west as we can - the Terrill Mill property. Actually, the Park ground stops about mid way on this little waterway there, urn, you can see very evidently the skate park, and then we also have a clump of trees here that pretty much camouflages or hides the building as you enter the city from the north, and you can also see once you get around the comer, we are out of the view corridor of the river itself, and would not impact any views of Hancher Auditorium. This is a close-up of the proposed location, and how we would anticipate developing the site, with the boathouse here. This line indicates the land lease boundaries, which is about 76,000 plus square feet and it does allow for enough ground that potentially we could add another boat storage there in the future, primarily probably for community use. We see this growing and needing more boat storage for community use. We're taking the existing driveway and the This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 4 existing parking lot you see in the light gray, and actually extending it to a loop drop-off. We also are adding parking along that driveway. Currently there's about 30 parking spaces and we anticipate doubling the number of parking spaces within this plan. We do anticipate the new parking to be pervious concrete and we also are looking at many lead. . .leadership and energy and environmental design aspects to this building. This may be the first lead certified building done for the University of Iowa. Vanderhoef/ Will this actually show us how close the parking goes to the facility? Monson! Yes. This is, uh, the curved parking lot and these are added parking spaces here on the new loop drive, and then there's also new spaces you can see here, added sporadically along the current driveway, and those are placed such that they do not interfere with existing trees. So you can see we're adding actually to both ends of the parking lot, doubling the size of the parking. We also are investigating adding a new restroom facility for the City, which is right here, which would serve the Park and I'll show you plans of that in a minute. As, just walking you through then the circulation for the facility. Entry would be off the existing drive, parking either new or existing spaces - we do have a drop-off. The front door of the facility is right here, uh, and then we also have access to the river with a winding sidewalk. This is the rear boat launching area, the area here would be a platform to be able to maneuver the boats and turn them. We also have a walkway to the dock. This would be a catwalk sort of thing, very environmentally sensitive over that area of the walk. This is the current plan for the restrooms. We've been working with Terry Trueblood very closely on adding restroom facilities to the Park. Currently there are no restrooms in the Park and we decided that it would be probably more prudent to have a separate freestanding restroom facility for the Park, than to have the folks go into the boathouse and use those facilities. So, we are proposing a separate facility, and we're still working out the details with Terry on this configuration. Close up then, you can see the restroom here, skate facility here, drop-off point entrance, building itself, future bay, uh, and the facilities for the launching of the boats. We have talked with Andy Rocco about using this facility as an opportunity for a water safety, a water rescue, and in our discussions, we actually determined the best use of our facility would be to actually use our current launch as the University launches that will be stationed here while the river is usable, and that we would do a joint kind of safety equipment for him. They do need to have boats on other parts of the river, or access to other parts. This is a fairly limited area that they can do rescue on, because of the dams on either end. So we have, I think, a very good cooperative agreement that we can use our existing launches, which are here in the river on the water and ready to go in very quick order. This is the first floor plan then of the facility, with the yellow being the boat storage areas, which are on the far west side of the site. Front door being right here. We have. an atrium space, so once you enter the front door, you can basically see through the building and see out to the river. Uh, to the east then is the rowing tank and mechanical spaces. We do have, right at the front door, the club office, This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 5 which would actually be doing most of the community kind of aspect of the rowing facilities, with Eric (can't hear) and his group actually providing for that community kind of opportunity through the rowing club. Then we have a stairway going up and an elevator going up to the upper level. The upper level is primarily on the east side, erg room.. .which, it's an erg room. It's ergometers, which are simulated rowing machines, which are used basically throughout the year. So the spaces within the building that are used throughout the year, not just seasonally, are placed on the east side of the building. Obviously the storage and locker facilities, the boat storage would only be used, of course, in season. On the west side of the upper floor we have locker rooms, training area, mechanical spaces, offices here, uh, public restrooms, and also club dressing areas, and then we have a meeting space, which has been added to the program, and that meeting space we do see available for some public events, as well as the outdoor terrace, uh, which we think will have wonderful views of the river, and that too would be open potentially for public use, scheduled use ofthe facility. So... Champion! Terrace on the second floor? Monson! Yes, it's on the, it's above the tank for the rowing room, or the tank room, so it is on the second level, and you'll see this in a minute when I show you the exterior elevation, so.. .public spaces that could be used for public are here along the river to the east. We have the stairway coming directly up to that point, so as you, uh, progress up to the second floor, that would be the first spaces that you would see, right as you either leave the elevator or the stairway, as you walk up through the building. Vanderhoef/ How big is that meeting room, and what's its occupancy? Monson! It's about 500 square feet, and depending on the type of use, we could have 20 some people for a conference or if it was a lecture or some sort of other social event, depending on whether you need tables or not, the occupancy could be as many as 40 people, I suppose. 40 or 50 people ifit was a reception sort of thing. It's really meant to be in that location to be used also with the deck, so you could actually use both meeting space and deck as kind of a combination use, and we do have a small storage room right off of that meeting space so you could store some equipment to allow it to function many different ways. Elliott! Kevin, will you be getting into, uh, some of the area, will there be a boat ramp to get into the river? You're talking about Andy Rocco. They would bring their boat if there were an emergency? Monson! No, no. They would actually use one of the launches that are already on the dock, so it'd actually speed up their ability to get in through the river. Elliott! So there would be no boat ramp? This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23,2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 6 Monson! There is no boat ramp. Elliott/ So if the public were to use that, the public.. .would there be canoes and kayaks? Monson! Well, in the community recreation program, the University would furnish the boats for that program. Elliott! Canoes and kayaks, for rental? Monson! Yeah, and they do have rental at the, urn... Bailey/ You'll have to come to the mic if you want to respond. Elliott/ And if you want to go ahead with the physical structure, go ahead and I'll save those 'tillater. Monson! Okay. Hugh, do you want to answer that while we've got it here? Barry/ As I understand it, this would be only for rowing type boats which are shells. The Touch the Earth Program has the outdoor equipment for canoes and kayaks, and that's located at our far west campus, within the Tennis and Recreation complex. Elliott! The far west campus being on the river, or on the lake? Barry/ That facility is west of Finkbine, off Melrose and Mormon Trek. Monson! Right behind the Hall of Fame. Barry/ Right behind the, yes, the Visitor's Center Hall of Fame. Vanderhoef/ So you'd have to haul the equipment and find another place to launch. Barry/ If they wanted to do canoeing and kayaking, and bring their own, they would have to use.. .no, this would not lend itself to that, as I understand it. Elliott! So, community involvement in this would be quite limited? It would be limited only to those club situations involving shells. Barry/ It would be...I don't think so. It would be, anybody.. .I'm sorry Harry's not here tonight to speak more to that, but they will have programs for people, ifthey're interested in learning how to row, that they can sign up for, and they will teach people of all ages.. Elliott! But, I mean, it would be limited to the shells? Barry/ As I understand it, yes. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 7 Elliott! When you think of community involvement, and you think of people on the river, you think of canoes, you think of kayaks, you think of things like that, as opposed to it would almost have to be an organized activity for using the shells. Barry/ I don't know that this building would add anything to anybody that wanted to canoe or kayak. Elliott! Okay. Thanks. Monson! Well, that's the upper floor plan, and if we move, this is the view of the north side of the building, and if we can, we're going to see if we can make this actually move. NO...it did not move. (several talking) Okay. We'll have a slight technical change here. The materials on the building are (unable to hear). Remember, the building is actually on a flood plain, and the (unable to hear). Bailey/ Kevin, can you use the microphone so it's.. .thanks. Monson! The building is designed so that the boat storage area will actually flood in a hundred year event, which is fairly common for boathouses because they need to be built close to the river and easily accessible. We have the great advantage though to having the dam above us so that our river levels are very controlled, unlike many boathouses that have to contain, or deal with floods, every year and actually on our tour of boating facilities out east, we witnessed a couple of boating facilities that just had been flooded and so they were trying to regroup and that's almost a yearly event for some of those. Urn, but our facility is actually designed to, uh, to take care of a flood. The east half of the building is higher and it will be one foot above the hundred year flood, so we kind of have that first level is kind of a split situation, allowing us to take care of those changes and actually the boat storage, in the last 40 years, would have only been flooded twice. So, we don't think it's a very current, it's not something that's going to happen every year. It's very sporadic. And you can probably guess which years those were. So this is the north view of the facility, and the materials, I was beginning to say, it's pre-cast concrete, simulating stone on the base. These materials need to of course be durable because they will be in flood situations. The reddish color is actually a fiber cement product in a rain-screen application, and (unable to hear) is actually, urn, glass. So as we move around the building, as we tour the building, as I mentioned, the east portions of the building are actually the occupied portions of the building so they address the street. Here we are, more of a south view. You can see the erg room and the area there, actually come out to a bow-shaped form, and it also kind of decreases the scale of the building from its view from Dubuque Street with a very much a more narrow profile looking at Dubuque Street, and you can see a fair amount of glass so that at night it will be illuminated and somewhat of a lantern within the Park. This being the rowing facility. You can see the deck above, and you can see the meeting space, which is actually cantilevered out and so it will have some pretty spectacular views up and down This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23,2007 City Council Work Session Page 8 the river. Urn, here you can see the outdoor terrace area, and again, the meeting space. So this is open to the public for scheduled events, as well as the meeting space, and you can see our apron of what we hope to be pervious concrete for the preparation of the boats to get into the river. Correia! And all of this area around is grass? Monson! This is a PhotoShop picture and that's all grass. (laughter) And those trees really aren't dead. They're... they're just white ghosts. And a close up then of the meeting space, with the lobby below, and so as you enter the building from the north, you can actually see through the building, uh, and see the river and you could actually go through the building out to this southerly patio space. Vanderhoef/ Is that all foyer then? From front to back on that lower level? Monson! Yes. Right. It.is. Foyer and then this is a view from the river side. Here's our boat storage, with locker rooms above. Lobby space, and meeting room, and you can see the terrace behind. Champion! I'm confused about placement. Can you show me a slide again, what's going to be seen from Dubuque Street? It's not this long part, it's that narrow part? Monson! It's the narrow part, right. Champion! But the other end, that end. Monson! This is more of the view from Dubuque Street. Champion! Okay, thank you. Monson! As you're coming in, this would be the kind of the north view of it, and this is kind of a south view, from Dubuque Street, south-easterly view. Does that help? Champion! Yes, thanks! (several talking) Correia! So actually, going back to Bob's question, related to the access. So let's say the Rec Center was going to have a community program, you know, introduction to canoeing or something. You could launch canoes off of this, if they brought the canoes in and there was a scheduled program, I mean, you could launch canoes off of this. Monson! The dock would be appropriate to do it, sure. Correia! The dock, right, so it has the ability to handle that type of an activity. Monson! We just don't have storage and we don't...there's no storage there. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23,2007. July 23,2007 City Council Work Session Page 9 Correia! Right, not storage there, but you could have a program that would include that type of activity. Monson! Right. Correia! Okay. Schroeder! The last meeting, Harry mentioned that that could be an option, that there could be just more than the shells here, that could serve as canoes or kayaks, if that was a demand of the community. So he did say he was open. Correia! Right, so it's not precluded by this design. So this doesn't... Elliott! The reason for my questioning, I recall Harry talking about, uh, community sharing, and that would be, I would think, at least initially the major part of the community sharing would be in those aspects. Monson! I think we're all anticipating that there's going to be a resurgence in rowing. Everybody's going to want to row in Iowa City, now that we have this wonderful facility. Champion! You might be right. Monson! This is, by the way, the largest women's program at the University, as far as members, I believe. Uh, there's about 90 women that participate in rowing facilities, and one of the reasons that we are needing this facility is because of their inadequate current facilities and it's been mentioned in their reviews by NCAA, the need for the facilities. Bailey! So is the roof really that white? Monson! Urn, because we were going for lead, it needs to be highly reflective, and so it will be highly reflective, although we won't see it unless (several talking). This is more of the view that you would see from across the river, from City Park. Vanderhoef! It would seem it has a great angle there for (can't hear). Monson! Potentially, potentially. Urn, where we're at in the process that we are on the Board of Regent's agenda, hopefully for their August meeting. Urn, this hasn't gone to their meetings yet for approval, and so we are preparing for that. It has been released to the Board of Regents so they have seen this in their packets, but otherwise we probably wouldn't be here today. Sure that we're following the correct protocol here. 1'd be happy to answer any questions you have on the building. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Wark Session Page 10 Vanderhoef/ How many months of the year do you plan to have the building open? Monson! Well, the building itself, I wO!lld guess, will be open twelve months of the year because the use of the tank and the erg facilities. Obviously we're not going to be on the river during the winter months, but urn, the two facilities that will be used year-round would be the tank rowing facility and the erg room above, and that's why, one of the reasons they're located on the east side of the site, to actually provide activity in the building throughout the year. Vanderhoef/ Is this tank adequate for the competitive swimmers also? Or the resurgers? Monson! No. It's very.. ..it's very shallow. It's just deep enough for the oars. And it's actually moving water. Vanderhoef/ Yeah, which... Monson! It's very... Vanderhoef/ ... used for swimmers at certain times, but a dual-purpose, even for some of the PT kind of studies and so forth. Monson! No, it would not be deep enough. We don't anticipate it would be available for that. O'Donnell/ This community room would also, or could be open year-round. Monson! Oh, yes, certainly. You may not want to use the terrace year-round, but (laughter) the meeting room certainly would be, yes. Vanderhoef/ When you say you're going to go for lead certification, then what kind of heating and cooling are you going to have for the building? Monson! Well, we haven't firmed that up. We are investigating ground source geothermal systems, but that final decision has not been made, and won't be made for some time. Vanderhoef/ It leads without? Monson! Oh, sure. Oh absolutely! Yeah, lead is really more than just energy conservation. It's uh, it's sustainable design, as far as interior environments, uh, how are you going to use water. We anticipate using rain gardens to absorb some of our roof water, uh, as we've mentioned, using pervious concrete to reduce our run-off. We're looking at collection of rain water to be used within the building, water efficiency as far as our water flows within the building, daily lighting - obviously you can see that all the rooms have natural lighting, which is a key component of our design, and the use of natural lighting versus artificial lighting, This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 11 urn, so thermal comfort, controllable systems, all of these things factor in to the lead rating system. But certainly it's not a pre-requisite or not necessarily all that common to use geothermal for, to gain lead. Certainly it's one of the aspects that we are anticipating looking at. Bailey/ Other questions? Correia! Do you anticipate that the parking will be additional, so it'll be City parking, or there are times when you'll block it off for rowing events? Monson! We've had a lot of discussion about the parking, both University and City. Urn, and at this point, one of the problems we currently have of that park is that we have a lot of Mayflower residents who park there and we need to stop that, obviously, regardless ifthere's a boathouse here or not. So, our plan is to up the enforcement and typically our use of the building probably, high use of the building is probably off hours with the Park, and the number of actual Park users that park there, urn, aren't huge, because we have a lot of walk-in traffic in use of the Park. So we're hoping by better enforcement of the current parking situation, uh, that we'll be okay. We have made accommodations, if we have to gate it off or gate a portion of it off, to control that we can in the future if we need to. We're hoping not to have to do that. Correia! But there's no plan for meters or anything? Monson! No, right. Terry wants to talk about that. Bailey/ You want to talk about parking, Terry? (laughter) Do you have any other comments about how Parks and Rec would use this building or facility or how you see the community partnership? Trueblood! I think: it's been pretty well summed up, but it's primarily a rowing facility. Now, Harry and I have had unofficial conversations about maybe accommodating some canoes, kayaks, that kind of thing, but I did want to point out that we currently have three parks with official access points to the river for canoes and kayaks. One of them's right across the river in City Park. We have one above the dams, up in Waterworks Park, and below the dams, down at Sturgis Ferry Park. So there is... Elliott! But it would be nice if the City had, or a private enterprise, had some canoes, etc., for rent. There. Trueblood! Some of this is, it's just going to be kind of play it by ear, so to speak, but we've talked about either jointly, or separately, offering rowing classes, for example. There is a, already a public rowing club that will house there. Skulls, shells.. .but that... This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 12 Vanderhoef/ Will that be a lease situation between the club and the University? Trueblood! I'm not sure what, I'm not sure if that falls under Recreational Services or not. Gentleman back here might be able to shed some light on that for you. Bailey/ You have to come... Keitel/ Some of you may know me. My name's Dennis Keitel. I'm a member of the Old Capitol Rowing Club, and we are the community-based organization that's, we're semi-associated with the University. Urn, we are a community-based organization. We utilize University facilities. We're very excited about this new facility, because it is going to provide additional storage space for our boats. We've just additionally purchased four new rowing shells. Urn, we do operate the "learn to row" program for the University, as part of the University Recreational Services Program, and because of that, the University lets us use, right now, they let us use the storage space in their current rowing facility. Urn, we also do, you know, we try to have an active club. We participate in racing events throughout the year. We are a year-round club. We do use facilities, you know, twelve months out of the year. So, as these gentlemen stated, yes, this facility would be used twelve months out of the year. Urn, we are limited by the flow in the river, is really what determines when we can be on the river and when we can't be, and of course the ice that's on the river. If you have any other questions, I can answer those for you, as well. But, we're very excited. We're real happy that this is coming, and as a resident of Iowa City and a community member, I'm totally in support of this project and really can hardly wait to see it happen. Bailey/ How many members in your club? Keitel! Right now we have, I think, about 30 active members and we're trying to build up our.. .we're doing a "learn to row" program right now that we're trying to build up new members. I think one of the new people who just signed up is Karin Franklin. (laughter) So.. . (several talking at once).. .so you know, we're getting some good people! Elliott! I have a question. (several talking and laughing) O'Donnelll Steve Atkins will probably be next! (laughter) Elliott! I have a question for Steve and Dale. Uh, yeah, they mentioned that the City's first responder launch is going to be permanently moored there. That's blocked by the Burlington Street dam. Does the City have two such launches? Monson! No, that's not correct. The City's launch will not be stored here. Urn, the City will use one of the University's.. .which is already in the river. They will keep their launch wherever it is now, right. So, actually, the City will use the University's boat, for rescue in this part of the river. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23,2007 City Council Work Session Page 13 Elliott! Because it seems to me that hopefully this will mean that surface activity on the river with boats, with canoes, with rowing.. .they're going to be some accidents, and we need to have the first.. . okay, good, thank you. Bailey/ I just have a question about the capacity of this, given that we have a Sports Authority with the Convention and Visitors Bureau. Will there be opportunities to have other, beside UI or University-related rowing events, are there other events that we could draw to the community because of this facility? Monson! Potentially so. The University ofIowa does all of their competitions at Lake Macbride, so they don't actually have their competitions here on the river, although they have done their regatta, which is once a year, on the river. So their competitions are actually, or anticipated still being at Lake Macbride. Correia! Will there be opportunities for there to be community events, like scheduled through the Rec Center, so that would be, would that be... Bailey/ .. . actually talking about something that would draw additional outside people to the community, not necessarily community events, but an economic impact. Correia! Right. I'm just wondering ifit would, if they would work with the Rec Center to schedule things like that, since it would be non-University. . . I'm just wondering if that's how that would work. Monson! Anything that we do out of this facility we would coordinate through Recreational Services at the University of Iowa. Correia! Okay. Monson! There's potential just for sponsoring things, but working through the facility, or co-sponsoring things. Of course there's also the possibility that Recreational Services simply sponsoring community activities, as well. Correia! So would the Sports Authority be able to coordinate events through UI Rec Services, would that be how that would work? Bailey/ Will they have somebody from the Rec Department on their Advisory Board, because I'm assuming that would be the first.. . Monson! Mike Moran is actually a part of that. So... Vanderhoef/ The.. .one of the things that the big boats, rowing boats that are getting more popular. I don't see any way to bring those in here to have the regatta. You know what I'm talking about? I can't remember the name of them. Somebody help me out! They look like the big Chinese.. . (several talking at once). This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 14 Bailey/ You mean dragon boats? Vanderhoef/ Yeah, that's it. Thank you! Monson! The largest boat that we'll have is an 8-person boat. Vanderhoef/ But is there a way that you can launch those from, from City Park side? Trueblood! Yeah, we've had those out there before. So, there is a way to do it. Vanderhoef/ Ijust haven't happened to see them. Trueblood! I haven't personally launched one. I haven't personally (laughter).. .but I know they can do it. Correia! I just had some questions about. . . Vanderhoef/ ... it would be nice to be able to have that kind of thing, which is an economic development and a special kind of thing, if you could be using the community space and the deck and.. .at least seating. Bailey/ Well, it sounds like there are lots of possibilities. I mean, it's just a matter of coordination and getting this Memorandum of Understanding in place for scheduling. I mean, am I understanding this correctly? Okay. Amy, you had some questions? Correia! Yeah, I had a couple questions from reading the MLU. One was, do we.. .the University, I imagine, will be having things scheduled or going on there almost every day. So I'm just wondering, is there a sense of how many hours we would want, or that the Rec Center would want to.. .because it doesn't set out in the memo, sort of a guaranteed number of hours. I mean, we don't necessarily want to constrain to that, but I guess I'm wanting to get a sense of will it be available for.. . Bailey/ Yeah, what would be the practical availability? Correia! Yeah, what's the practical availability? Bailey/ That's my question that I wrote down. Trueblood! Actually, you know, we haven't put a pencil to paper to try and figure out what the hours would be, might be, but as Kevin mentioned earlier, from the rowing team perspective, a lot of their hours are going to be different from a lot of the hours that we might want for community use, or for Park use, so it's not conflicting there. Recreational Services, uh, all I can tell you is, you know, for This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 15 years and years we've worked back and forth with Recreational Services on a variety of things, primarily the Hawkeye Softball Complex, and we've always been able to work it out where we get sufficient time and they get sufficient time, so I don't anticipate any difference here. Correia! Okay, great! Champion! ... unless rowing goes crazy nuts and they have to have rowing all day long, but obviously it's a University facility and University students will take precedence over. . . Correia! No, I know, just wanting to make sure. And then the other thing in the MLU is that, it said that we might do mowing and snow removal? Just wondering... Trueblood! The wording is such in there that the University is responsible for that on their leased property, and we're responsible for it on Park, outside ofthat. Correia! Right. Trueblood! What we ended up with in the wording was just that it might be possible that we the City would do some mowing for them, so to speak, and some snow removal for them, so to speak, if it's determined by me or my successor, whoever that might be, that it's reasonable to do so. And the reason that we put that in there was actually, you know, at my suggestion wording such that because if we're out there mowing and we can easily mow another 50 feet without any obstructions in the way, then why not do it. Or if we're out there for snow removal and there's another 20 feet of sidewalk to remove snow on or whatever it might be, then why not just go ahead and do it. So those are things that. . . the wording is such that it would allow us to do so, but doesn't require us to do so. Correia! Okay. Vanderhoef/ Okay, along those same lines then, uh, I know we've had City police trying to keep those cars moved out of the parking lot so that they aren't being used for storage and so forth, but we've got a new building in there, so the security for the building and the routine checking of it I would presume belongs to the University, so can we work some sort of a situation that takes care of the parking, and the security of (unable to hear). Trueblood! That's something that we have to work out yet, but you're right on track. It's.. . Kevin had mentioned earlier, we had a rather extensive one day talking about the parking and the parking issues, and can we put this kind of gate in or that kind of gate with electronic swipes and all kinds of things, where we finally just decided, you know, let's.. .we can add a gate later if we need to. For right now, let's just step up our enforcement efforts and see if we can't correct it that way, so we won't need a gate and.. .that kind of thing so that we're going to give This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 16 that a try, but we still have to talk to the law enforcement officials, both the City and the University, to get them involved and what they can do. Down the road if we have to, we can always add a gate. Vanderhoef/ That 1...I understand, but it's just the routine patrol kinds of things that I was curious about, because we can end up having duplication of services, so if we decide to do the mowing and the plowing and they decide to do the security. Trueblood! Well, if the. . .when City police go out there, you know, their primary objective is going to be checking the parking in the park. I'm assuming that the University police will be making routine checks, like they do I guess on other buildings, of checking the building, but of course there will be some sort of cooperation (coughing). . . that the City police officer went out there and saw somebody breaking into the building, they might give the University a call. You know, and vice versa. Vanderhoef/ It's just sort of one of those things to look at in cooperation both ways. Bailey/ Any additional questions? Okay. Vanderhoef/ I had one question, and Terry, I suppose, it's in the Land Lease and there's a section that talks about taxes? Eleanor? Uh, it's number 9, uh, in the Land Lease. Dilkes/ Yeah, we put that provision in there because, urn, when the University leases property from the City, urn, they can't rely on the City's exemption, and they can't rely on their own. In order to be tax exempt, a University has to own the property, and in order for it to be tax exempt, urn, under the City's exemption, it has to be put to a public use that is a public city use, and that's case law that's, urn, from the Supreme Court. So, urn, initially anyway, the University will be responsible for the real estate taxes on that parcel. There's no exemption that applies. We have talked about looking in a couple years and seeing whether the amount of City use is significant enough to qualify for the tax exemption, the City's tax exemption, and we'll just have to monitor that, but initially there's going to be taxes, urn, owed and that'll be University responsibility. Atkins/ Eleanor, that's tax on the land only? Dilkes/ No, no, that's tax on the entire.. . (several talking). Vanderhoef/ Well, having it as a taxing, uh, property within the city, then for me that makes a difference whether that will be or won't be, versus the $1.00 lease for 99 years. If we have some return on our land, uh, the value of. . . Dilkes/ There's no guarantee of this in the lease. If down the road the University believes that they can qualify for a tax exemption, and the only way at this point would be there would have to be substantial non-incidental City use, urn, there's nothing in This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Wark Session Page 17 this lease that would prevent them from seeking an exemption. So if you want some kind of guarantee ofretum, this lease does not do that. Vanderhoef/ That's what I'm presuming. Bailey/ We don't have any return on the land right now, right? Champion! No, we don't have any return on the land. (several talking) Bailey/ So there's no... Dilkes/ I'm not suggesting that there should be, I'm just saying that's what the lease says, so if you want something (several talking) different.. . Vanderhoef/ That's just question, and figure out what it is. Trueblood! We are going to get a $1.00 off this. Vanderhoef/ Yeah, that.. .that is a little (several talking at once). Dilkes/ You know, I don't even think we're doing a dollar here. I think we're just...I thought it was just in consideration of mutual (unable to hear, several talking). Vanderhoef/ Another thing about the contract, urn, ownership and improvements and at the end of the lease period and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah on extensions and what have you, if it were ever returned to the City, uh, they say we have, the City will receive anything that is there on the land. Urn, I think out there 99 years from now, we may want them to take it down before they give it back to us. So, is there any way that at the discretion of the City that the buildings will or will not be removed, but I would say at the discretion of the City. Dilkes/ You could do that. There wouldn't be anything preventing you from doing that. The really.. .really that .statement is kind of meaningless, because it just reflects what, what happens with any lease hold improvement at the end of the lease term, it becomes the property ofthe owner of the real estate. Elliott/ It appears we have a century to worry about that. Vanderhoef/ .. . (several talking).. .that got renewed, that... O'Donnell/ Dee, you're probably the only one who will still be on the Council to worry about it. (laughter) Vanderhoef/ You know I plan to live that long! (laughter) This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 18 O'Donnell/ This is a great opportunity for the City and the University. There's many good things happening here. Going to have a restroom in the park. A great facility. Community involvement. A community room. We're going to have, uh, I think it will be worked out where we can launch kayaks and canoes. I never plan to go on one of those things (laughter). It's endorsed by our Iowa City Rowing Club. Ijust think there's too many pluses to let this thing slip by. This is a great opportunity. Correia! Actually I have a question too. When we're looking at, urn, the substantial community involvement or use ofthe facility, that.. .will you take into consideration the rowing club, which is.. .which has an affiliation right now with the University, but it's a community based organization, and whatever we do with the Iowa City Rec Center? Dilkes/ Perhaps, I mean, that's just a fact-based inquiry that's going to have to be made down the road. Urn, it's a tough standard though. I mean, it's, it has to be very substantial City use, so at this point, just what I've seen envisioned, I don't see that happening, but it's a possibility. Bailey/ Any other questions that will affect how we move forward tomorrow night? (several talking) Thank you so much for being here. Trueblood! Ijust want a reminder is that, if you're prepared to do so, we would like to have your approval by consensus for the conceptual designs tonight. Champion! You got it! Elliott! You bet! Vanderhoef/ Fine! O'Donnell/ Did I hear something about Karin Franklin and a dragon boat? (laughter) Bailey/ I don't think that was part of the conceptual design! (laughter) Eleanor, you had a question? Dilkes/ That was what I was going to say. Thanks. Bailey/ Okay. Thank you. (several talking) You want a break? 7:26. Elliott/ How 'bout 27? (several talking) (BREAK) PUBLIC WORKS UPDATE: Bailey/ Yeah, let's launch slowly. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 19 Fosse/ What I want to do is what I've done the last couple years, is just give you an update of the Public Works type things that are.. .some of those things that are out of sight and out of mind, and can we go ahead and kill the lights, Marian? Correia! This Iowa City sign has all of the letters on it! (several talking) Fosse/ Let me talk about that while we're... Correia! Would ya? Fosse/ What we're doing is, the one without any letters, they're manufacturing new ones in a thicker-gauge metal. The anchors are going to be set in epoxy rather than in silicone, and they're going to be of a larger diameter and then they're going to have a tamper-proof set screw. Correia! Okay. Fosse/ No guarantees, but it's going to be harder. Correia! Okay. Could there be an alarm attached to it? (laughter) Bai1ey/ Is that really how we want people spending.. . (several talking). O'Donne11l I thought we should it carved into that, with lights on it. F osse/ Yeah. Correia! That would be nice. Fosse/ If this doesn't work, we'll go back and rethink the whole concept, and one of the things that we'll be talking about in here is a joint way finding project with the University of Iowa - got a slide in there on that, and that won't affect this sign, but other things in general. So let's go ahead and get started, and I'll begin talking about what I'm not going to talk about, and that is our construction projects. You can drive around town and see those for yourself. So, going to cover some of the other Public Works types of things. So let's go back to the beginning of the year. You remember the ice storm that we had? Earlier in the year? Turned out to be a real dozy for us, and we had a lot of limbs down around town. It was at a temperature though which the salt and sand worked very effectively, so it wasn't too bad to deal with. Interesting thing was is this was declared a federal disaster, whereas this was not. Figure there's some concepts at work here that we don't fully understand, but (laughter) the good thing is we're going to get reimbursed for a lot of our effort in fighting that storm, so that'll be a good thing. That money's on the way. Question I often get is, what do our guys do in the winter time, when they're not dealing with snow storms, and Ijust wanted to share a couple things with you on that. They do a lot of concrete work This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 20 during the summer, so it just makes sense that they can do indoor concrete work in the winter time and save us some money. This is a spill containment system inside one of our buildings for storage and chemicals and paints and that sort of thing. It's part of our spill prevention program. Another thing that we did was pour a floor in one of the buildings that we got with that Sand Lake property, and we'll come back to that later and talk more about that. We always look for ways to cheat the weather, how to get more out of our winter season, and one of the pieces of equipment that we picked up this year is a hot box and what this does is it keeps the asphalt heated so that we can go out when there's snow on the ground and be effective at getting pot holes patched. So that's a good thing for us. It's a very nice piece of equipment. As the spring rolls around, they spend time clearing the bridges, preparing for the spring rains, and uh, getting things cleared out so we don't need to worry about debris piling up at the bridges. When they're not clearing bridges, they're fixing bridges. (laughter) Every once in a while, somebody will clobber one of our bridges. I like to watch your step here. But you'll notice, this is a.. ..(several talking and laughing). Not sure what they're working on here, but one of the reasons I included this slide is in FYlO, there's some money appropriated for this bridge for some improvements, and one of the things that we intend to do is put a barrier rail, just separate the sidewalk from the street, because that's not the first time this has happened on this bridge, and those barrier rails, it's just about impossible to get on the other side of those, but not impossible, because later that same weekend, over on the Benton Street bridge, there was a car that we think started across the bridge on the sidewalk and hit the railing, and then the momentum of the car carried its back end up around and up onto the railing there. So... this is within two days of each other. Elliott/ Would you put that on the Burlington Street bridge too, because there's a whale of a lot of students walk across there and they're within inches of cars going by. Fosse/ Yeah, that particular bridge belongs to the State. There's two of them there. They gave us the old one, and they've got the new one, so we could talk to the State about doing that. That's a good thing there. Urn, when they're not fixing bridges, they're doing concrete repair in the summer time, and in this case, we're putting some curb and gutter along Dubuque Street there, along the entranceway. Both Parks and Public Works have been working to dress up that entryway into.. .so that's turned out nice. Now, also do painting of our poles. That's something that we work on every year. It's just a continual process. Onto our equipment division, we've been working on the emissions thing lately, and last fall, last summer we made the conversion to ultra low sulfur diesel, and then our trucks that we're getting this year have a different exhaust system in it, and this has a catalytic converter and other components to reduce particulate matter and also nitrous oxide, so our emissions for our new diesels (coughing) excuse me, is going to be lower than what it has been in the past. Urn, we also will be looking at the State bid for hybrids this year too. The State takes bids on vehicles every year, and we're hoping the prices get down to the point where as we begin to This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 21 replace some of our pool vehicles out here we can bring some hybrids into our fleet. Elliott! You've checked with Cedar Rapids on that? Fosse! This is not the big busses, no, no. (laughter) That's where the cutting edge of technology can be dangerous. Elliott! Uh-huh. Fosse! It's risky, anyway. Another thing we're working on, the equipment division, is that.. .taxi inspections that was enacted this year, and so far we've inspected 73 taxis and 34 of them have failed. So, it was good of you all to put that program (laughter). It's working out pretty well. This one didn't make it through the inspection station. O'Donnell! Was that one running? Fosse! Not when I saw it. (laughter and several talking) Uh, out at the Water Plant, got a couple things going on. We're swapping out the, some of the carbon filter system in that. That's the last step in the treatment process. It's like a 3-foot thick Brita filter, and that carbon wears out over time, so we're beginning to replace that. Another thing that's happening, with both water and waste water, is the rate study that we had talked about. In fact, you approved a contract for that earlier in the year for the consulting, and right now we've made it down to this step on that. We've looked at our revenue requirements and cost to service, and what we've found is that the finance department, working with our utilities, has done a very good job of matching our rates to what our expenses are. If you recall we've gone through a series of decreases in our water rates. One increase in our waste water rate, and we're right on the money now, but we're right at the bone. So what we can anticipate in the coming years is, is the inflation adjustments that are coming up. And one of the things that we'll be back to you for in more detail is this last step in the rate design. Currently all of our customers are one class. Residential, commercial, industrial - all that, and the question is, do we want to split up those classes, because we can assign different costs to different classes, and prepare different scenarios for you to look at on that. We'll get into that in more detail later. It's just a preview. All the news is not good news. One of the things that we goofed up at out at the Water Plant was a reporting requirement for the State. We.. .there are a number of parameters that need to be tested regularly, and it has to be forwarded on to the State, and in May, they missed report, or missed forwarding on the results of a test, and the State's very sensitive about that. So, this week in the paper you'll see a notice that's posted, that we're required to admit in next month's water bill, this will be going out. So, just to brief you on that, the thing to really key in on is this sentence right here, and it's during the month of May, nitrate samples were taken every day and recorded at the treatment plant. All samples tested safe; however, the specific State sample was not This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23,2007 City Council Work Session Page 22 received by the Department of Natural Resources. So we have to send all this out. So that's what that's all about, in case you get asked. Correia! So the issue is that the samples weren't sent, but they were taken? Fosse/ Yeah. The water was safe. It was not recorded properly. Correia! Okay. Fosse/ An embarrassing process, and we're putting techniques, or checks and balances in place to try and keep this from happening again. It happened once back around 2000, as well. But the other thing that we were struggling with out at the Water Plant, and I sent you a memo about this back in April, and that is the difficulty with the beams in the ceiling out there. The same pre-caster that made the panels that we had the trouble with, also made the beams and we're having trouble with those, as well, and we're in the midst of working that out, and you can see that the primary problem is with the sheer crack. This is the worst beam out there, and there's other ones just showing hairline cracks, some do not show any problems at all, but we're taking it very seriously because this is our Water Plant. The last one we had, we occupied from 1888 to 2003, so we're in it for the long haul. Urn, what we did is designed and manufactured a system to hold that beam in place, so we're not worried about that bad one anymore, and (can't hear) time to figure out what's going on and figure out a remedy for that. We had one of the techniques that was being used, we've hired a forensic engineering firm out of Chicago -- ----,-' they're an excellent firm, and this is a ground penetrating radar unit that looks inside the beams and finds out exactly where the reinforcing steel is, and this is what it saw is that near the end of the beam, there was reinforcing out in the far part of the beam there's reinforcing, but there was an area in a lot of these beams that's missing the reinforcing that's supposed to be there, and that's where those sheer cracks are occurring. So, we're working with Knutson and their engineers and the whole works to figure out what the right solution is on this, whether we pull the entire roof off and replace it, which is risky to our operations, or if we do some sort of fiber-reinforced polymer solution to reinforce that. It has. . . something similar has happened before in our history. If you go over in the Rec Center and look at the pre-cast concrete beams up there you'll see those have cables retrofitted in there. That addressed another type of reinforcing steel deficiency that.. .whenever that was built, 60's I think:. So, this is something we're working through. Elliott/ Have the legalities of the cost been determined at this point? Fosse/ Oh, we think: they have. (laughter) Elliott/ But, both parties.. .there's something yet to be determined on this end? Fosse/ Yes, yeah, we've... This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Wark Session Page 23 Vanderhoef/ This does not meet our specifications in our contract - is that correct? Fosse/ That's correct. And the problem is systemic, in that it appears to be in most of the beams throughout the building, so there's a lot of beams that need to be addressed out there. Difficult thing to deal with. This is a design feature of the plant that has worked out very well for us, and that was a difficult decision to place the wastewater, or the water plant upstream from Interstate 80. That was done specifically done for this. This was just earlier this year where a tanker truck overturned and was full of herbicides, and we wanted to keep our plant upstream from the Interstate to reduce the vulnerability to this type of thing, and this is not the first time it's happened since our plant went into service. So that was a good design decision Ijust wanted to share with you. Let's talk about water quality. We.. .you've been following, we've been doing a lot of emphasis on storm water quality and one of the ways in doing that is incorporating, or enlisting the help of volunteers in cleaning up our waterways, and we have five cleanups in the spring and five in the fall. They take advantage of the University employees, high school, or not employees - University students, high school students, junior high. We have a lot of response for that. It's a very popular program. This is over on the west side of town along Willow Creek. This is by the east side Recycling Center that's being developed. We have things to do for all ages out there, and in addition to cleaning out the stuff, one of the things that we want to do is control erosion as well, and to do that, we need to establish deep rooted plants and those can be hard to get established, and a neat technique for doing that is with these seed balls, where you take clay and you mix with them seeds of deep rooted grasses and you transport them out to the site and then you let kids throw them into the bank, and they splat and they stay put and then the grasses grow. And the kids have a good time and they learn some things along the way and we get a nice product out of it, so a lot of compliments that Carol Sweeting and also our solid waste division that's out there on all those Saturdays and Sundays with them because they picked up all the debris as it comes out and gets rid of it. Urn, over on our east side Recycling Center, we're at the point now where we're negotiating a contract with our designer for that final stage of design, and we're kind of hung up on that negotiation phase right now on the fee issue, and we need to come to some resolution there or begin to shop around a little bit. Hopefully that'll come to a head and move forward for us soon, but we don't want to pay too much for this. We did get a grant for $7,500 from the State ofIowa for this, for the bio-soil that'll be incorporated into this, and Ross was out and accepted a check from the State, a big check - one of those display ones - that they gave us at a press event earlier (coughing). Excuse me. Urn, I just wanted to show you this out at the landfill and show you how the economic growth in China actually affects our landfill operations, and it's an interesting way in that this scraper here, we needed new tires for it. We could not get new tires for it. We looked for over six months, and finally located four tires down in Texas for $32,600, and it is just about impossible to buy construction tires in the industry right now. So we bought four tires. We brought them up here. Two of them are on the scraper. We're eeking This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23,2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 24 the last life out of the remaining tires that are out there before we put the other ones on, but that's a difficult thing facing the industry right now. Correia! Why is that? Fosse/ All the tires that are manufactured are going to China, and about the only way to get new tires is get them on new vehicles. Finding tires to switch out on your old ones is difficult. Champion! Might need to go to China - might be cheaper. Fosse/ Yeah! Buy them over there and ship them back! Urn, our solid waste division is slowly making the transition to tipper carts, and we just distributed 1,300 tipper carts this year. So we've got 6,000 of them out on the street. We've got a little over 14,000 customers out there, and we get a lot of positive feedback on these things. Not only does the customer like them, but it's really reduced our injury rate because the way those empty, rather than throwing them up in the air. Either the truck picks them up with some fingers and dumps it, but the guys still have to wheel it out there, or we've got one with an automated arm that grabs it and dumps it, and we hope to pick up one more fully automated truck this year for that. Urn, I mention that way finding thing. The University of Iowa has engaged a consultant to begin to look at the way finding issue for the campus, and they've invited us to participate in that, and we've started some discussions, and we'll be back later to get more details from you all on it, but it seems to be a very good thing. John Yapp and I are working with the University on this. This is just a, just a grab at an idea here on how destination points for both entities can be on the same sign. John Yapp drove around town and he identified at least five different way finding type signs around town, and that's confusing for people that come here. When I talk to people from my hometown, a small town, and they come to Iowa City, they're just completely bewildered by it all. They come from a town where you navigate by dead reckoning. You see it and go to it. So, these things are very important for a community that serves small town folks from all around Iowa. This is McCollister bridge, this is a sketch of how that's going to look. We're getting into the final stages of design on that. It's going to have somewhat of a prairie theme in it, and we'll.. .because it's going down along the south edge of town where we already have that theme going on some of the art things. One of the steps in this was the environmental assessment, and that included going into the Iowa River and finding the mussels that are there, the clams, and seeing what existed and sorting them out, and what we found, there's one called the (can't hear), which is on their list of ones that they want to preserve, so there's.. .when we build the project, there's a swath through there, and we're going to have to go in, and we're not going to sort. We're going to find all the clams in there, and those will be transported upstream and then released up by our Water Treatment Plant. So, that'll be a part of the environmental component ofthat project. Relocation. And that bridge will go in right here. This is Sand Lake down here, and thought 1'd give you an update on that. Parks and Public Warks have been This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Wark Session Page 25 working together on that. Parks is continuing to work towards the CAT grant and if you recall, there were a couple of buildings that existed up here. One of them is the temporary home of the Furniture Project. It's in town now so it's more handy than it was out at the landfill and it's waiting to go into the east side Recycling Center. The other building is generating some income for us right now. Uh, we had been using it to store streets' vehicles, but during the summer months we can keep those outside for a little while and the new bus company needed a new place to get their new busses up and running before the school year and before their building is going. So we're getting $800.00 per stall per month with that. Down at the south end, down in this area, Parks and Public Works staff worked together to put in a parking lot so that people can go down there and begin to use the park. We have a lot of people that like to fish down there. Haven't seen any boaters down there yet, but canoes and kayaks might be a popular thing for horsing around out here, especially if you don't want to deal with the current. And the roadway that goes by is a very good example of a complete streets' type design, but that's back before we had a complete streets' policy, but we're still incorporating those ideas and we've got plenty of room for bicycles to ride two abreast and still have vehicles go by, so that. . . that opens up a nice corridor for getting people down there. We started with weather so we'll end with weather. We've had a few wild weeks here with rain and storms and that sort of thing, and that one Friday that we got pummeled, it was Thursday night into Friday. We got somewhere between, around 6 inches, plus or minus depending on what rain gauge you look at. This is Van Buren Street right over here looking at Burlington. So this is Burlington Street going past here, and that's the bridge by the Rec Center, and if you'll recall a few years ago, I shared with you that bridge is designed to be over top like this. We know the water's going to go over the road there, so we have the railing with an open design to let it get through as unimpeded as possible, and I think at the last Council meeting you heard from a person about the Sandusky drainage out there, and there's a memo in your packet about that, and the history there, and unfortunately what shaped up last time is a dynamic that we see in a number ofprojects where we have property owners that are impacted by construction, but they're not necessarily a beneficiary of the project, and that can interfere with support for the project and it ended up killing it last time. So, it'll be presented in the Capital Program this year and if you all chose to fund it, then we'll begin some neighborhood meetings with the folks out there and try and come up with a design that's more palatable to the neighborhood that's go that right balance of impact and functionality. Correia! So that means we're not going to consider that until January? Fosse/ Yes, yep. Correia! Is there any way to speed that up if we're interested in.. .ifthere's a... Fosse/ Oh, if you all want us to get started on design now, and start meeting with them, then let us know. We'll need to check and make sure that we've got the money This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 26 available for that, but that's certainly a possibility, but even if we do that construction prior to, uh, 2009, it would be difficult. Correia! Ijust mean in terms of that community meetings and just wondering...it seems, you know, six months isn't that long to me, but I don't live there and urn, I'm worried about (unable to hear). Fosse/ Certainly with a project like that, it's best to strike while the iron's hot because when things are fresh in people's minds, hence more momentum. Correia! Right. Fosse/ And I think that's when things had hurt us last time, is once design commenced, we had a couple dry years and.. . forgot about it. So let us know if you want to do that, please. Urn, this is down at the south waster water treatment that same morning, south waste water treatment plant, and we have these overflow basins when the water's coming into the plant faster than we can treat it, we divert it over here temporarily, until things slow down, and then it comes back into the plant and we can treat it at a reasonable pace. So this gives you an idea of how much water was coming in down there. Now, the really interesting thing was we didn't get a single call from anybody in the sewer backups from that storm, and compare that to 21 years ago when Steve started, we probably would have received 150 or 200 calls from people with sewage in their basements, and certainly that's one of the legacies that Steve can (laughter and several talking). Atkins/ He unplugged the sewer! (laughter) Fosse/ No, there was a substantial investment in up sizing sewers to eliminate that problem, and we've got a good handle on most of them in town here. Those are tough projects to implement because again, you do projects in neighborhoods in which the people don't receive direct benefit. Often times people up there that are getting surcharge in their basement, people down here experience a larger sewer. Elliott! Also as I recall, the reservoir off of Scott had a lot to do with that, because the people along the creek on Muscatine really used to get a lot of sewer backup, because the creek would back up, and now that reservoir off of Scott Park is really beneficial. Fosse/ Yes, and that's the, they were getting a double whammy, both from storm sewer and sanitary, and we approached both of those separately. Vanderhoef/ How are we doing on, uh, storm water versus sanitary sewer separations? Fosse/ The separations are good, but the...we still have quite a bit of inflow and infiltration. I was going to cover that next. Good segway! Most of our problems that we deal with the sanitary sewers now are cave ins at places where there's This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23,2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Wark Session Page 27 storm water getting into the sanitary sewer and so we're working to remedy those. Usually with trench-less technology, where we'll go in and we'll line a pipe from the inside and control that inflow and infiltration because we do get a lot of storm water flow in our sanitary sewer, and we need to treat that thing, and although they didn't come out directly stated in the article, we think it's projects like this that, that contribute to outside magazines saying Iowa City is one of the 30 best towns. So, that's what these folks have been up to. Do you have any questions? O'Donnell/ No, that was great. Bailey/ Questions? Champion! I hate to bring it up, but did you consider making the bridge bat friendly or am I the only one interested in that? Bailey/ I like bats. Correia! Which bridge? Bailey/ The McCollister. Correia! What's a bat-friendly bridge? Champion! It's built so bats can live underneath it. Fosse/ And what we're looking at there is, is suspending things between the beams that bats can inhabit, so ifthere's a change of heart on that, those can be taken out and the bridge is just like a normal bridge. We've not forgotten about that. (laughter) Champion! They eat a lot of mosquitoes! Fosse/ Well, thank you. Bailey/ Thank you, Rick, for being here. It was great. Elliott! Are you related to Count Dracula? (laughter) Bailey/ I think she mentioned that she was. LIBRARY UPDATE: Craig! Rick has pictures and I have words. Well, built it and they will come, as they say. I'm pleased to come and tell you about some of the great things that have happened this year at the Library. One of the most ambitious things we did was to expand hours this year, and in May of 2006 we changed our Friday hours. We formerly closed at 6:00 and we expanded that to 8:00, and then in September of This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 28 2006, this time of year I never know what year it is! Fiscal or whatever! In September 2006, we added an hour to our Sunday and we're now open from 12:00 to 5:00 on Sunday. It was originally 1 :00 to 6:00, and we thought 12:00 to 5 :00 would suit people better and it seems to. Urn, and it has done what we thought it would do, urn, we have both our circulation and number of people are record setting this year. We circulated almost, I said to the staff, next year I want to say 1.4 million, so we need an extra 22,000 next year to get to 1.4 million. The number of people in the building is now at 680,000, and I always think that's a low number because we only count people who come through that main gate into the main part of the Library. So if people come to meetings and they are using the facility, and just use the meeting and the restroom and go back out through the lobby, we haven't even counted those people. So, it is the busiest public library building in the State ofIowa. I am almost certain, I haven't seen the numbers yet for the new public library building in Des Moines, but I think that this year will be.. ..we also set a record for the number of people registering for our three summer reading programs and if any of you registered, you got this nifty little nylon backpack and it's so much fun to see these around town. I saw a couple at the Geoffrey at Hancher and it was just fun to see, kids mostly, wearing them around with their books in them. Urn, we registered almost 2,800 children, 300 teens, and over 600 adults. We're the.. .the adult, the teen and the adult summer reading programs are pretty new for us, and we're finding a lot of interest from adults, sort of unexpectedly to us, you know. Ten, fifteen years ago, we couldn't beg adults to join a summer reading program, but I think Karin and Steve are signing up for next year, right? (laughter and several talking) We had a strategic plan goal this year to reach out to underserved kids and to try and get them to the Library, particularly in the summer time, to keep them reading throughout the summer. We worked with the school district, and we worked with two City departments on a couple ofprojects that have been very successful, urn, one is the Library Bus Project that runs three days a week; each day has a different route, and it runs mid-day, off-peak hours for Transit from 10:00 to 3:00. We're averaging a little over 50 riders a day for each of those, which isn't an astounding number, but I think for the first year it's good, and we will work on that and hopefully, you know, inch those up, those numbers up for next year. The routes are designed to go to places where we know there are kids that don't have transportation to the Library, Title I schools, neighborhood centers, trailer parks, places like that. Vanderhoef/ How many circles are they making, uh, in that 10:00 to 3:00? Craig! I believe five. I'm not absolutely positive - it might only be four, but it's four or five. And then we worked with Parks and Rec...a reading teacher from Lucas came to us and said, our students need some reading material in the summer and the bus is great, but if they don't get on the bus, urn, they need some materials closer by. What can you do for us? The Broadway neighborhood center is too far away, and but that they did activities with the recreation department, urn, out at the Aquatic Center and the Scanlon Gym, so we put a deposit collection of This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 29 materials out there, just a cart of books in the lobby. You take one, you read it, and you bring it back, and urn, it was a little slow to get started because I think people thought you had to check it out with a Library card, and we got the staffto sort of pass the word and we put a bigger sign, 'No, you don't have to do anything; just take the books and read 'em and bring' em back.' And so that has seen a lot more use since we encouraged people to do that. We had a lot of partnerships this year. We worked with Englert Theatre, Prairie Lights, Hancher Auditorium on pretty big programs that brought.. . each of those programs brought in hundreds of people. Attendance at children's programs this years was just over 30,000, which is pretty astonishing number. Weare partnering with the public libraries of Coralville and North Liberty to offer a service called "live homework help," and we pay this service that is an on-line tutorial type of situation. You go on-line and if you don't have a computer at home, you can do it at the Library. There are certain hours of the day that we've purchased the service and you get an on-line tutor. So you pick what grade you're in, the class work that you need help with so if you were a senior in high school doing AP Physics, you would have a different tutor than if you were a 5th grader trying to solve a problem about fractions, and you chat on-line with a teacher. These are almost all teachers, the tutors are, and it's a very educational environment, because they're not just answering your questions. They're saying what do you think about, you know it's really a teaching mode. We purchased the service in the spring, but we've been waiting to spend any money on advertising it until the fall because we didn't think kids would use it in the summer. So we're getting together next week with the other libraries to talk about how we're going to do that. We're going to have some book jackets made to give to kids in junior high and high school, urn, so I'm really excited to see how that works. I know of a couple towns in Iowa that have it, and they say kids love it and parents love it, so urn, I hope that that's a real success. Certainly our internet service this year is a success. It's just a growing, routine way that people do business, and we had 135,000 log-ins through our log- in system where people have to have a Library card or else they get a visitor's card, and with your Library card, you get two 45-minute sessions a day at a public access internet computer, and we also had 46,000 uses of our wireless network, and that network is in our building and extends out onto the Ped Mall with some antennas that are on the roof. So that is growing, as well. It just is more and more a way that people interact with government, with agencies, with companies. I mean, how many times do you see an advertisement, 'Go to our web site at blah, blah, blah,' and we are the place for people who can't afford it, don't really know how to use it, don't.. .maybe don't want it in their home because they don't understand the technology, but they have a particular need to look up a piece of information, to file an application, or to do something like that. This summer we offered, again, to try and attract youth to the Library. We offered teen tech hours in the computer lab and we opened the lab for three hours on a couple afternoons a week and they didn't have to use their other time out in the public space, so they got three hours to sit in there. They could talk to each other and communicate, which really bothers people when they do it out with the old folks in the internet access area, and that has been very, very popular, and we're talking about doing it This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23,2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 30 on Thursday afternoons during the school year, when it's early release day. We can't do it all the time because we're using the computer lab more and more for the purposes it was intended. We're teaching more and more classes in there. We have a regular volunteer who teaches classes on different Microsoft Office types of programs. We teach classes on how to use the internet. We teach classes on our databases. We've taught some of these classes in Spanish. We hooked up with the University to offer community writing center, where students from the Rhetoric Department come and are sort of tutors there, helping people with any writing.. . any person of any age with any writing need. So they help people write cover letters, and resumes, but they also help people write poetry. So, they were there. Again, it was one of those things that took a little while for the word to get around, and they didn't serve tons of people, you know, five or six people a night when they were in there, but it grew as time went on, and we're talking about which day we're going to do it in the fall. So I think that it was very successful for the people who used it, and the University appreciated the chance to be teachers then. The Vita volunteers, which we also get from the Accounting people at the University, they help low-income and people who meet certain guidelines file their income tax, and for the first time this year, they filed their income tax on-line through the computers in the computer lab. So.. . social networking is certainly a phenomena that we're trying to cope with, which is all the chat and the on-line stuff and YouTube and all those kinds of things. We updated our catalog and we offer some interactive types of things, like you can now review a book or any item that's on the catalog. You can write your own review for that. We've been able to leave comments at the web site since we had a web site. We offer information you can sign up to get RSS feeds. We really tried to advertise our web site this year, hence the little logo on this bag and a variety of places, trying to advertise on-line ICPL, and there's a copy of our web site page attached to the memo. We pay for a lot of information databases that we really want to encourage people to use, and one of the messages that we worked hard to get out this year and we want to continue to work on is that Google is not the end-all and be-all of information. Sometimes, sometimes you get what you pay for, and ifit's free, it doesn't mean it's the best. Urn, so we have subscription databases in the fields of, you know, on-line text, full text of magazine articles, urn, you can get the full text of magazines, like the Cedar Rapid's Gazette, which if you go to the on-line version of the Gazette, you're getting a different version of the story. If you go through the Library's web site with your Library card, urn, you're getting the full text of the Cedar Rapid's Gazette. You can get full text of Consumer Reports. We just bought a new database that is car repair information. So, you can go on-line and find out the electrical wiring diagram of the 2003 whatever. You know? It really (laughter) somebody needs it! It really isn't an area of Library materials that people are very interested in. So, we're seeing that use grow and we want to continue to see it grow, and educate people about these on-line databases. The building is really in good shape. It was well built and it's holding up well. Urn, we've had almost two million people through the doors since it opened, so it is very heavily used. We're starting to see some wear and tear on some of the furnishings, but the building itself is doing well, and I'm glad This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 31 that we used some durable surfaces, like the granite in the lobby and on the stairs, and stainless steel that is holding up really well. Some of the table tops are getting a little worn, but it's really in very good shape, considering two million people have been through the doors. We did a software upgrade this year on our HV AC controls to get some better use out of that, and this summer we made probably the biggest change since the building opened and we moved the Library Foundation's used book store from Linn Street to the second floor in a nook that was up there, and if you haven't seen it, please stop by and look. It looks like it was meant to be the whole time. So, that's my update. Bailey/ Any questions? Vanderhoef/ And you got it rented! Craig! And we got the basement rented! Bailey/ I have a question about the, the bus program. That's funded with a grant, right? Craig! We have, we got two gifts from the Iowa West Foundation from West Bank, and from Proctor and Gamble. That money has helped us pay for the salaries, which s the only expense that Transit is charging us then. Bailey/ So I anticipate, or I assume that you're looking towards next year and seeing what funding is available? Craig! Yes, and we also hope to explore some private funding for the homework help service because we just think that with all the libraries in the Iowa City Community School District participating, that somebody should want to help pay for that. Bailey/ Oh, sure, that's a good idea. Thanks, Susan. Any other questions? Okay. AGENDA ITEMS: ITEM 13. CONSIDER A RESOLUTION TO ADOPT THE IOWA CITY HOUSING AUTHORITY'S AMENDED PUBLIC HOUSING ADMISSIONS AND CONTINUED OCCUPANCY POLICY (ACOP). Bailey/ I'd like to start with Item 13 because we have staff here to speak to that, so why don't we just do it that way. So this is the Housing Authority item. Rackis/ Good evening. Bailey/ Hi, Steve, thanks for being here. Rackis/ No problem. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 32 Bailey/ Do you just want to overview what this is, and.. .briefly, and then we'll probably have a lot of questions? Rackis/ Okay. Well, actually it is something that Deb and I thought was already contained within our admissions and continued occupancy plan, and we discovered it was not. So we decided to come forward and try to add that, since we could not implement such a program unless it was spelled out in our admissions and continued occupancy. We think it's a valuable tool to help our public housing tenants when they have exercised all relief that they have some control over, in terms of enjoying the peaceful enjoyment of their neighborhood, where they have called the police or police have stepped up patrols, or even the Housing Authority has stepped up its own patrols of our public housing units. So, we just looked at it as a valuable tool. Thought we should add it, in case we needed to implement it. Bailey/ Questions? I know, Amy, you have quite a few. Correia! Yeah, I guess I was, I had...1 guess I'm wondering, so ifthere has been requests from tenants, ifthere's been public meetings, urn. I had been to two HUD conferences in the late 90's that were resident involvement in crime prevention in public housing, neighborhoods, and most of those were efforts that were brought to the Housing Authority by residents, and they were generally in large neighborhoods that were all public housing, maybe 300 units in large urban centers, urn, and paired with having data on the police reports and things like that, and I guess I was just. . .having it just be on our, you know, having just seen it from Thursday, wanting to have more data about are there particular neighborhoods of public housing that we're concerned about, since we are primarily a scattered site public, have scattered site public housing units. Just wanting to be more focused on the data, and then also wondering HUD has this discretionary policy for about, I'm not sure how long, but maybe right five or six years. I'm just wondering ifthere have been any evaluation studies done of these programs, urn, if they've had the impact that they wanted to have, as well as what are the other comprehensive crime prevention strategies. I think, you know, when I was attending those conferences, urn, when residents were wanting to look at crime prevention, this was having the police live in a unit was one strategy, where there's comprehensive partners in looking at, so I was just wanting to make sure if we're putting this in place that we're looking at a comprehensive look and not wanting to just have a silver bullet, so to speak. Rackis/ Well, I think, you know, without.. .well, quite frankly from a personal perspective, I think that the southeast side of Iowa City has been unfairly treated in the press in terms of I think some self-fulfilling prophecies where I know for a fact and anecdotally that there are families that will not allow their kids in Grant Wood and Mark Twain, because of some of the negative press, and certainly in some of the conferences that have been held at the Public Library regarding This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 33 affordable housing, and you hear time and time again, people that are coming to the community and having their employers tell them when they're looking at housing, urn, not to live on the southeast side, that's not where you want to live. Now having.. .we've been quite sensitive about sort of drawing attention to some of our concerns, but increasingly Deb Briggs, our Public Housing Coordinator, and I have had expressed, or had concerns by our tenants and homeowners in the Whispering Prairie, Whispering Meadow neighborhood, and what we're seeing is large congregations of primarily younger kids, young adults that are not public housing tenants, that are not even necessarily tenants of the neighborhood, that are sort of leaking into the neighborhood from other areas, as far away as Melrose. So we've seen a lot of people reporting and thinking that; you know, a way to be proactive would be to use this device to create a presence of a police officer to assist that neighborhood in sort of controlling by calling the police and calling the Housing Authority. Correia! So, but I guess if. . .I mean, I guess I'd want to see data on has there been an increase of crime, or is it that, I mean, I've driven through the neighborhood and there are, there are a lot of kids and there are people hanging out in their front yards and talking, or whatever, but obviously I don't live there so I don't know, but I guess I'd want to hear from the Police Chief, urn, what's the crime that's occurring, especially you know when you think about the, urn, the purpose behind this is to respond to crime happening in public housing, not in neighborhoods where there are non, you know, non-public housing tenants. I mean, I don't know what the presence of a police officer living there is only going to be there in his off hours, urn, and certainly wouldn't be required to be there every off hour he's there, would have any difference than increasing patrols or community policing in neighborhoods where the residents are requesting community police. Rackisl I think what we see is a lot of times, even in more middle income and upper income neighborhoods, there's a considerable amount of fear in calling the police. I think a lot of people just tolerate it until, and we had an incident on some other neighborhoods in town where it really struck me that when frustration overcame fear, then people started calling the City, calling the police, calling on a situation that had been ongoing for some time and not just the current tenants, but sort of a long, a long for a couple of years bad tenants in a particular unit. So, I think you know the presence, I think, can help people overcome that fear, maybe not to where they get the frustration and report some things. Now, what we're looking at is, you know, certainly I think on, you know, Muscatine where we have two four-plexes. I don't think we ever entertained looking at a police officer. I mean, public housing, uh, yes we are scattered and ifit's our tenants that are creating the problems, we can act through the Iowa Tenant-Landlord Law and through programmatic requirements and take care of that. So we're looking at where we would have five or more public housing units and where those tenants have, you know, expressed a concern and they felt that they've done everything within their power, and we have looked at some incidents and just sort of briefly, and this was from January 1,2007, through July 20,2007, Indigo Court had 31 calls. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23,2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 34 Correia! What were the calls about, and what did they result in arrests? Rackis! Uh, fight in progress, juvenile complaints, animal bite, weapons offense, improper illegal parking, civil dispute, juvenile complaints, road hazard, again, just sort of slipping through there. Coneflower had 14, fraud, bad checks, assault, public assist, juvenile complaints, um, Whispering Meadow had 47, extra patrol requests, juvenile complaints, property damage, um, missing person juvenile, assault, property damage, fight in progress, narcotics, uh, juvenile complaints, welfare check. Uh, Whispering Prairie, 26 calls, same thing - sort of fight in progress, criminal mischief, uh, then I think part of our concern, and again these aren't our public housing tenants, but where we're getting a report from people sort of spilling into the neighborhood. Lakeside Drive, and we didn't do the condos, but Lakeside Drive had 226 calls by comparison, and I think the footprint, yes, there's larger number of units there, but when you look at the overall footprint ofthe neighborhood, it's really the same sort of geographical footprint and 226 calls versus 31 calls, and it's still the same criminal mischief, juvenile complaint, public intox, threats, distortion, criminal mischief, fight in progress, burglary, domestic fight, uh, criminal mischief. . .I mean criminal mischief comes up a lot. Correia! I guess, I mean, I don't know what the juvenile complaints are, I don't know... Bailey! Deb, you're going to have to be at the mic. Briggs! I can kind of speak to that. We have gotten a number of calls from tenants, anything from slats on fences being ripped offby the teens to a grandmother telling me I'm not, I don't let my grandkids go out and play at all because I'm fearful in this neighborhood. Um, they're basically calling me almost on a daily basis. I have encouraged them to do a neighborhood watch, you know, tried to hook them up with the Grant Wood Neighborhood Association, but for our tenants to use their time that way, they're already stretched to the max and they really don't have the time to try and organize something else in their life, so they even call and say, 'Well, you're not out here, you're never out here,' and I said wait a minute. I drive through at night in my private vehicle to check on things on a regular basis, but if I'm out there every hour on the hour, and something happens on the half hour, I can't do anything about it, and I told them they need to take back their neighborhood - bottom line, but for instance, last Tuesday night, police call out there, 18 to 20 youths blocking the street so that people can't even drive through. They weren't our tenants. They weren't associated with one of our units. So what are we supposed to do. What do you want me to tell this grandmother when she knows we have the capability, you know? Correia! Right, but I guess, I think that if we're seeing comprehensive neighborhood issues, then we...I don't think having a police officer live in a public housing unit This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 35 is going to address some of the issues in the neighborhood for community building. Briggs/ Well, the police have upped their patrols. We've upped our patrols. Correia! I guess I'm not talking about it from a, I'm talking about it from a community development perspective. I mean, if we need, and not from a public housing perspective, and I'm not saying that I don't think it's not a good idea, ifit's paired with getting the neighborhood together. Briggs/ Well, and we have another project on line. You.. .maybe you've heard about the new community group called "Reclaiming Roots." Stan down in HIS is a part of that, and we've already talked to him about getting his group to go out to help just, you know, maybe adopt a house out there. A lot of our tenants are moving from apartments into homes, maybe don't know the expectation for weeds, trimming, that type of thing. So we are trying to do a comprehensive thing, but the first thing is you're not going to get anybody outside as long as they aren't comfortable walking in their own neighborhood. So that comes next. We need to be proactive on this, is my opinion. I've done property management for over 20 years. I don't want anybody to get hurt. We did have gang activity back in that area. It was on a public housing property and we did evict the tenant. That doesn't mean that those people that were involved are necessarily gone because they weren't all public housing tenants that were involved. So that's, you know, our concern right now is, if we have something that we hope would work, and the idea is to do a month-by-month lease and monitor it and, you know, determine if it is working. Ifwe've got a mechanism that we can use and we aren't using it, how effective are we being as property owners? Correia! And that's what I'm wanting to know, ifHUD has had any evaluation of these programs, because I really wonder if one police officer living in a neighborhood is going to have the kind of comprehensive impact that we're hoping that. . . Briggs/ .. .without the police officer. A comprehensive approach is exactly what's needed. That's kind of a starting point. Correia! Right, but if the evidence has shown, and I don't know what the evidence 'cause I don't know ifthere has been any evaluation. I would hope...I know HUD does evaluations of many of its programs to say is this a evidenced-based approach, and if it is, then I'm willing to commit federal resources. I know there are people on the public housing waiting list, and ifit's not...if evidence doesn't support it, what does the evidence show. Rackis/ I think, you know, from our HUD rep's perspective, urn, the word "create a presence" is what came up over and over again. That the reg was designed to create a presence. I didn't get a sense from her that, urn, there was a great deal of evaluation of the use. I do know, larger public housing authorities or larger This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 36 housing authorities that have more public housing units, uh, like for example, Tulsa, Oklahoma or Lincoln, Nebraska, they actually have partnerships with the police department. They have their own, essentially their own police force, and the, I think the original intent of the reg was you have a multi-family apartment complex that's public housing and you know you stick a police officer on the first floor, you know, something like that. I think that was the intent, that was.. .but, even though that was the intent, we believe with, you know, the number of public housing units in that neighborhood, we have 26 units that, you know, putting an officer, you know, somewhere down there where, you know, again, just creating a presence where people know there's an officer, might help some of the congregation, might help you know with other people feeling a little bit more comfortable that if! see something, you know, I'm not going to wait for one of my neighbors to do something - I will call the police because I feel just a little bit more comfortable. Again, HUD kept emphasizing "creating a presence," not, you know, hiring our own police force to do patrols or anything, and I think the only way we could evaluate it in a scattered site situation like we have is to try it. I don't know that looking at large multi-family public housing is... Correia! Right, and that's why I think that the intent in a large public housing is because that there are, there are consequences if you are, you know, participating in criminal activity and you live in a public housing unit and it can quickly be identified by a police officer and get that to the Housing Authority. That's going to be an effective strategy, but when you're in a neighborhood where it is mixed and there is, you know, criminal activity that people are participating in, they're not living in a public housing unit, there's no... Rackis/ And again, I've had staff go to the training; Tulsa, Oklahoma puts on training for fraud detection, and a lot of their deployment of officers is for the purpose of investigating, of identifying, who's breaking the rules and then reporting back to the Housing Authority. We're not looking for somebody to sort of ride herd on our tenants, but somebody that can assist our tenants in taking back their neighborhood. Briggs/ The other thing, I think (unable to hear) as a resource for the community, a resource for the community, not to put his thumb on anybody, but in addition to the 26 public housing units, you need to remember you've got Bums units back there, you've got Habitat unit back there, and you have Housing Fellowship units back there. So we.. . and, as well as many owner-occupied. One of the business owners that lives on the comer of, I don't even want to say, but a business owner that lives back there has called me and talked about what she sees of the comings and goings out of the Lakeside area, back into our neighborhoods and then back out, and she's starting to monitor license plates, and she wants us to be a part of the solution. You know? And what I tell our tenants, if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem, and so we need to all get together, but I think you would not only have our tenants benefiting, but you would have the Habitat and everyone else back there benefiting, as well. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 37 Bailey/ And so just to clarify, this is a living arrangement for a police officer, and not.. . and it has nothing to do with... Briggs/ It's no service.. .no, nothing at all. Bailey/ Right, okay... Briggs/ ... they simply act as a resource, and get as involved in that neighborhood as he would in any neighborhood he lives in, or she lives in. We don't... O'Donnell! I really don't understand the resistance to this. Having a police officer live in the neighborhood is not a bad thing - it's a good thing. We have numerous examples. You know, somebody who, ifhe does pinpoint a problem, or she does, is able and not afraid to call the proper people. I mean, I've never heard of anybody moving out of a neighborhood because a police officer moved in. Briggs/ And we do find that that neighborhood is one of our harder ones to rent, because, you know, as Steve said, there's already a picture being painted about the southeast side, so even families coming in to town, it's a hard sell for me to get them occupied, and ifthere's more of a comfort zone for our own residents and they can talk the talk of being comfortable in that neighborhood. I don't understand the resistance either, and we are not locking ourselves into a five-year lease or even a one-year lease. We're looking month by month to see what, see what will stabilize that neighborhood, and I personally have like driven through and not been able to get through a street, and have had to stop and talk to the teens to tell them to get out of the neighborhood. I feel confident. . . Correia! Out of the street - not out of the neighborhood? Briggs/ Yeah, get out of the street, let the cars pass. I've been called names at 7:30 at night, you know, and had to stop and say, 'Wait a minute.' I don't have a problem doing that, but I don't live there. I can't... Bailey/ Deb, in addition to your work in the neighborhood, what has Neighborhood Services been doing? Briggs/ Well, I couldn't tell you what Marcia.. . are you talking about Marcia Klingaman? Bailey/ Yeah. Briggs/ I have put residents who have had concerns in touch with her to try and organize something. Bailey! Is that something thatwe can also encourage... This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 38 Briggs/ ... want it to all work as one big package deal, but I think that the first step is to get rid of some of the fear that our own residents have about going outside. I mean, one lady called me, okay, they took my slats again. Should I put them in the garage and wait for you guys to come over and install them, and I said, 'Yeah, just hold off for a minute,' you know. Vanderhoef/ Tell me about, uh, I am presuming that the eligible police officer that we're looking at putting into this has to be a, potentially in the first few years of, or is their salary a. . . Rackis/ No, actually the HUD reg calls for... that's why you have to have in your plan, there's two types of where you can house people that are over income. One, most police officers are going to be over income. So HUD makes a provision for housing authorities to house, and some, you know, a starting police officer who's single probably wouldn't be over income, would be eligible. You can house other people who are over income. You just have to spell out the reasons and rational in the plan. So the presumption is that most police officers that you would move in to public housing are over income. Briggs/ And we would leave it up to the Chief to determine which of his staff would be eligible. Obviously, he's not going to take somebody that's in their probation period, and let them go in there. You know, so it would be up to the Chief to like identify who might qualify and be a good fit. Correia! And would they pay rent? Briggs/ It's up to us. HUD says we can do what we want to. Correia! So if we don't pay rent, would that be counted as a taxable resource? Briggs/ No. Correia! With the IRS? Rackis/ No. Correia! I have a problem having a police officer making a very good salary not paying any rent, and using up a federal resource. Briggs/ The...I mean, the house was paid for with federal funds in 1980-whatever. I don't get your... Correia! I mean, we have to maintain that property. Briggs/ We get capital improvement. . . This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23,2007. July 23,2007 City Council Work Session Page 39 Rackis/ Well, the... Correia! I have a problem with a police officer. . . Rackis/ You know, at any given time... Correia! .. .without any expectation necessarily of them being involved in the neighborhood, other. . .in any other way than they would be involved in any neighborhood that they lived in, urn, I have a. . . Bailey/ Connie, you had a question? Champion! Well, 1. . .I have a comment more than a question. Bailey/ Okay. Champion! I mean, you know, Amy, despite what you say, this is a high-crime neighborhood, and I'm telling you right now that a police presence is a detriment to crime. I mean, I swear, if they put plastic police cars on the highway we'd all quit speeding. You know? I'm saying that the sight of the uniform, uh, and once you recognize the man without a uniform, or the woman, you do know that this is a policeman, an authority, and it might be a scary authority, but it is an authority, and it might also build a relationship with some of the people in the neighborhood and they wouldn't be so afraid of them. I disagree with you. I think it's a very valid thing to do to help stabilize this neighborhood, and bring them back together, and provide some impetus for the neighborhood to say let's get control of our neighborhood. (several talking) Correia! I mean, I think I really do believe that it needs to be not encouraging working together, ifthere are a lot of kids in this neighborhood, we need to be supporting or (several talking). Bailey/ Wait. Do you have other specific questions for staff, because we can have this discussion, you know, without taking up their time. I mean, I think let's be respectful of that, and we can continue this discussion amongst ourselves, if we wanted to. Elliott/ I just want to say I'm very much in favor of the program. I think it would be very good, but I've talked to some people this week and I said that I would be very happy to defer this and collect more information, but I'm very much in favor of the program. The last, oh within the last two weeks, I've had about three different expressions of concerns. One was from an elderly housing apartment building in the downtown area that is for elderly and younger people with disabilities, and as a matter of fact, they referenced another similar apartment building, also in the downtown area. I know another hot spot is the apartment complex off of Muscatine, and I think that I've talked to the police on and off for years. We all This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23,2007 City Council Work Session Page 40 know where the hot spots are, and in the apartment complex where my wife and I and daughter lived when we first came to town, was at one time very nice. Now is not. The presence of a police person there would be very beneficial, but I'm happy to wait for another month or so to collect information. Bailey/ Okay, ifthere is interest in deferring, are there specific bits of information or pieces of information that people need to make this decision? There's no point in deferring just to defer. I mean, Amy, you had expressed interest in deferring. What kind of information do you want? Correia! I'm interested in any evidence from HUD on the impact that these programs have had on neighborhoods. I mean, I'd like to see a community meeting. We're talking about wanting to have an impact, a positive impact on the rest ofthe neighborhood, I mean, I want to hear what the neighborhood feels like...it would like, beyond whether this is a piece of it; what are the other pieces of a comprehensive strategy to work on the issues that are being brought up by you all about this neighborhood. I want to have an opportunity to hear directly from more than one or two people, and then you know, what are the additional positive - is it positive youth development? Is it neighborhood center type support in the neighborhood that we would commit, if we're committed to, urn, this neighborhood. I just don't think, I mean, I think that having a police officer can be one aspect, but I don't think that it's going to be, you know, the end all, be all, especially in a neighborhood that's very scattered in geography. Vanderhoef/ What I think I'm hearing, uh, the... there are few statistics available from HUD. I also hear consistent complaints that people are comfortable in calling Deb and telling her about what's happening, but...in a community meeting or calling the police themselves, we're not going to get that same kind of information, so I think I heard the best information for that particular neighborhood right here tonight. Uh, as far as community centers, Amy, we've been committed to the Broadway Community Center. We've been committed to Grant Wood School in providing gymnasium for working with their pre-school activities. I think we are just slowly putting together many things that you're asking about, and it will hopefully bring this neighborhood together, to take it back for themselves. Bailey/ But what I heard is Deb has a broader plan, and I think it would be a nice opportunity to see what those components.. .the components are of the plan that this is a piece of. Briggs/ And that would be great, but time is of the essence though. I mean, I don't think.. . Bailey/ How so? This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23,2007 City Council Work Session Page 41 Briggs/ Because of the crime statistics. I don't think we can continue to let this escalate and feel comfortable with not taking any action. So if as you talk about deferring.. . Bailey/ For a month. Briggs/ ...I guess for a month. That's a long period of time when you've already got a serious situation. Correia! I also want to know, urn, arrests. Not just calls. I mean, obviously I'd be interested in hearing from the Police Chief on the calls. Bailey/ I'd like to get a sense from all of you ifthere are four to defer. Champion! I don't want to defer. O'Donnell/ I don't want to defer. Vanderhoefl I think we should move on with this, and not drop it and not exclude these other things that we're talking about. Keep.. . (several talking at once). O'Donnell/ Let me ask a question. How many calls, and I know this is a difficult question, but how many calls do you get in a month? Briggs/ Well, in the last about 30 to 45 days, I would say, you know, multiple per day. Multiple per day for this neighborhood, and in fact, I had one of the business owners call me and she said are you going to Council yet, and I said yeah, and she said can I go and speak up, and I said not Monday night. Might have to call you Tuesday morning though. You know? So there are people that will come, urn, whether they'll be our residents, again, you know... Vanderhoef/ They don't want the spotlight. Briggs/ Right! O'Donnell/ So these people are calling you asking you for help. Briggs/ And, you know, we partner with the Board of Realtors on our Home Buyer Education, and I was at a Fair Housing Ambassador's meeting last Friday, and kind of spoke to them about it, and they're like well can we get involved because we have houses for sale back there that aren't selling because nobody wants to buy back there, and I said absolutely. So as we talked about the reclaim roots organization, they were talking about we need to get a tool shed going so people can check out tools for trimming and pruning and so on and so forth. So, you know, there's yet another partnership, but I don't think we can have all the pieces together, which I think, you know, would be. . .it would be the best thing. I don't This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 42 think that's possible. I think we're going to have to first show our intent to reclaim that neighborhood and get it straightened up, and then the rest of it will all follow, I think, quite easily. Bailey/ What do you think that time line would look like, ideally? I mean, if you say our message and then how long would it take? Briggs/ Well, basically, as far as how long would an officer live there, or... Bailey/ No, no, I mean, you know, if we're talking about these other things. I mean, the reclaim the roots. What timeframe is that on? What timeframe of getting Marcia involved? Briggs/ We have a project already scheduled through August, so they were looking to start in September. Bailey/ Okay. Briggs/ We were looking to try to get an officer in there yet this month, so he could get a sense of the neighborhood for about a month before we went on to the yard work type, block party.. .you know, we haven't really got the details figured out. They're willing to take it on, and we've just been focusing on this, as opposed to trying to organize that because it all needs to fit together. Bailey/ So, it doesn't look like this will be deferred, but I think that there is interest in hearing what will come next. So if we could have that, you know, as this progresses, I think that would be very helpful. Briggs/ And do you want a letter from the Board of Realtors? Do you want a letter from Reclaiming Roots? Bailey/ Want you to come back and tell us what's happening in the neighborhood (several talking at once). Rackis/ You're looking for what additional activities, what impact, those activities that.. . Bailey/ The community building activities that Amy's talking about, the more comprehensive activities that you mentioned that are necessary, and that will take some time. Okay. I mean, I think that we just need to figure out how much and when you need to come back. Rackis/ I think one thing to take a look at, and I think Terry's staff participated. When I first started in 2003, there was a review, and I think Marcia Klingaman had organized that review of the big study that was done in the Broadway neighborhood group, and I think there's a lot of validity in that study, as what that neighborhood needed at that time, and what was not implemented out of that This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23,2007 City Council Work Session Page 43 study. I think the Grand Wood recreation and some things that I believe the City had some control over happened. I don't know that, you know, all of the great ideas in that study, you know. It might not be a bad thing to just sort of dust that thing off, see what it said, because I think it's applicable to multiple neighborhoods. Champion! And one thing that this neighborhood wanted was, were more police in their neighborhoods. They even wanted a sub-police station. I mean.. .police are really part of the answer. Rackis/ Well, I think there was also from the Park and Rec that, and I remember to this day the two gentlemen that were there. I can't remember who was at this meeting, and they said, and I'm sure it's true now, when we're in there, when we have activities for these young kids to participate in, there are no problems. When we're not in there, when you know we can't provide the activities or you know the weather doesn't provide, that's where the problems arise. Briggs/ .. .ofthe officers that we've talked to said, you know, basically these kids have nothing to do, you know, and if even on an informal basis...I mean, there's vacant lots. Put together a softball game at night, you know, just to keep the kids occupied. That was kind of the intent ofthe officer that I talked to. Correia! Well, and I guess, I mean, what ifthere's a public housing unit was reserved for a community center? Where there could be police substation, where there could be positive youth activities happening, where there could be Parks and Rec? Briggs/ I don't know ifit's provided for in the reg. Bailey/ So, I mean, we can brainstorm all night. Briggs/ Right. Rackis/ Yeah. Bailey/ And I think we'll want to hear from you again, but it seems like, I mean, and I think there are still some lingering questions that would be good to get answers for, but I think we should probably just move on. O'Donnell/ That's a good idea. Thank you. Bailey/ Thanks for being here. Briggs/ Thank you. Rackis/ Thank you. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 44 Champion! This was a good idea. ITEM 9. CONSIDER AN ORDINANCE AMENDING TITLE 10 OF THE CITY CODE, ENTITLED "USE OF PUBLIC WAYS AND PROPERTY," CHAPTER 3, ENTITLED, "COMMERCIAL USE OF SIDEWALKS, " SECTION 3, ENTITLED "USE FOR SIDEWALK CAFES," TO ALLOW SIDEWALK CAFES TO ENCOMPASS RAISED PLANTERS IN CITY PLAZA UNDER LIMITED CIRCUMSTANCES. (SECOND CONSIDERATION) ITEM 11. CONSIDER A RESOLUTION AUTHORIZING THE MAYOR TO SIGN AND THE CITY CLERK TO ATTEST A LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR TEMPORARY USE OF PUBLIC RIGHT-OF- WAY AMONG THE CITY OF IOWA CITY, LANDOWNER MAUREEN MONDANARO, AND TENANT SALOON OF IOWA CITY, L.c. D!B!A THE SALOON FOR A SIDEWALK CAFE. Elliott! Can we do 9, 10 and II? Brian's been sitting here... Bailey! We're going to do 9 next. We're doing 9 next. Elliott! .. .patiently. Bailey! Okay, so Item 9 is the second consideration of this ordinance for sidewalk cafes that would permit them in the planters, and I know that there's been a lot of concern and we have correspondence, urn. I just want to get a sense... Vanderhoef! Can we take a five-minute break and read that correspondence? Bailey! Ifit's five minutes. Vanderhoef/ I can do that! Bai1ey/ Okay. Fair enough! Vanderhoef! I'm sorry, Brian, but I saw the stack and 1... (BREAK) Bailey! Let's move on to Item 9. We've had some correspondence. There have been some concerns expressed by Council Members. Where are we with this issue? Champion! Well, I'll speak first. Urn, I'd like to leave the ordinance the way it is. Urn, I think Mondonaro is willing to chop off the part...I know he's willing, to chop off the part.. . yeah, new design. I'm willing to support the new design. I know there are people out there who don't think we should bother with the planters, but I personally think they look like crap. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23,2007. July 23,2007 City Council Work Session Page 45 Bailey/ I agree. (laughter) Champion! I don't mean that word. I mean they look junky, 99% of the time. (laughter) And I think this is going to be a great improvement to them, and of course everybody knows I love sidewalk cafes, and uh, so I'm going to support the ordinance. I'm going to support the amended design to the Saloon. O'Donnell/ Which does not allow seating under another business. Bailey/ In front of. . . Champion! What other business? Correia! Well, although, I guess this seating, the way it's proposed is in front of the business next to Saloon. Champion! Mondonaro owns. . . Correia! He owns the building, but he doesn't operate the business, does he? Champion! They don't have food, so they wouldn't be doing this anyway. Correia! Oh. Champion! It's really a bar. Elliott! It would go, it would still go in front of the building he owns, but it would not go in front of the one, in front of Donnelly's, which is owned by another person. Now that was the only reason I voted against it last time. Since this time, I think...I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to check with the Downtown Association and see what they think about putting a beer garden in the middle. (several talking) Bailey/ It's not a beer garden. It's a sidewalk cafe. Elliott! No, but that's what it's going to be. Champion! Oh, I don't think so. Elliott! You know, after.. . after 9:00 that's what it will be. Bailey/ So, any other concerns about the ordinance itself? Champion! Because we have to review every project anyway. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23,2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Wark Session Page 46 Bailey/ And this, I mean, and we only sign on for a year through January. So, if this doesn't work, ifit becomes a beer garden that's unacceptable to Council, we don't renew a permit next year. Elliott! I would just like to... we just got done with the taxi thing, not checking with anybody downtown. I'd like to check with the folks downtown. See what they think about it. Not to let them make the decision, but what do they think about putting this space where during the early evening will be eating. During the late night it will be drinking, and see what they think about, because the concept now is that area is reserved for just visual, supposedly attractive things, whether you agree. Bailey/ So if we would do that, are you, you're suggesting a deferral and that would take a month and...I mean, what are you suggesting about checking? Elliott/ Ijust think when we, when we do things downtown, let's check with the people who have businesses downtown. I'm kind of tired of the Council making unilateral decisions that affect a lot of people. Bailey/ But what do you suggesting specifically for tomorrow night, I guess I'm asking. Elliott/ I defer. Vanderhoef/ Indefinitely, until we have feedback and have them have an opportunity to get together and talk about it? Elliott! Now, if we. . .if the majority of you want to go ahead, I would certainly feel much better about going ahead with Jim's amended design, which does not go in front of Donnelly's, and I could live with that. Bailey/ I do see that there's a time consideration. I mean, about going ahead. I mean, we can try it for this season and see.. . Amy, you had a comment? Correia! I'm just thinking about.. .so there's, a sidewalk cafe, I mean, I don't know what time the kitchen closes, so there must be a period oftime where the kitchen's closed and they're still open, and I'm just wondering about the. . . Dilkes/ I think under the ordinance the kitchen has to be open. Correia! Okay, then that was my question. So then, so you wouldn't have a situation where between 11 :00 and 2:00 they're still serving drinks out there because the kitchen's closed? Karr/ Our ordinance, our ordinance requires that when it is open that the kitchen be operating. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 47 Correia! Okay. Like their full menu or. . . Karr/ That the menu be offered. Elliott! So they have to block it off? When the kitchen closes? Karr/ The outdoor cafe closes when the kitchen closes. Elliott! What happens if people sit there? Are they asked to leave? Dilkes/ You know, I'm trying to think of a sidewalk cafe...I mean, there's a...in our ordinance it has to be a restaurant, and there's a definition of restaurant. It can't be, you know, what we think of as (several talking) just a bar. Elliott! Yeah, they can't serve them. Dilkes/ I'm trying to think of a sidewalk cafe that we have that is...a bar situation. Champion! Oh, I think that was. . . Bailey/ Atlas was open, urn, to midnight, but it looked like people were eating. Dilkes/ No, no, I know they're serving drinks, but what sidewalk cafe that we have do you think of as being a "beer garden?" (several talking) Elliott/ So in other words, this would, they would not be serving drinks out there, after the kitchen closes? Karr/ They would be in violation of their agreement. Elliott/ Okay. Bailey/ Okay. Does that. . . Elliott! Yeah, that helps. Bailey/ Any other concerns or questions about moving ahead on second consideration; or perhaps expediting? So, you're not concerned about the ordinance as is, but you will offer up, which one is it? Champion! Well, I like the amended. . . Bailey/II. . . you will offer up that we will do the amended design in 11 ? O'Donnell/ My concern was, was the area being used in front of another business. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 48 Bailey/ And that is addressed with Connie's... O'Donnell/ That's addressed in the new one. So I'm... Vanderhoef/ For this particular one. Do we have any other potentials out there? Champion! Well, we have to approve it anyway. Dilkes/ We may, but... but I have specifically drafted this as a case-by-case look by the Council. There is no way that we can identify each potential planter, sidewalk cafe issue and deal with it in the ordinance. So.. .so you really have considerable discretion when it comes to this. Elliott! Weare not opening floodgates. Dilkes/ No, I don't.. . Champion! The other thing that I was concerned about was drainage, because this needs to be made handicap accessible, and I did ask the architect about that today, and actually, the ramps are going to be slats so that the water will drain through just like it does now. Dilkes/ City staff has dealt with the drainage issues and has looked at that, and I think... Bailey/ Well, and I know that the taxis were not our.. . our taxi stands, were not our prime moment, but (laughter). I wasn't on Council, I'm sorry I missed that one! Urn, but part of understanding is also seeing how it works, and since this is for a limited time, I'm comfortable moving ahead and having the discussion as we see it in action, rather than having the theoretical discussion of what it mayor may not be. Elliott! Yeah, what Eleanor has said I think has made it much more palatable for me. Bailey/ Are there any other concerns or questions about these three items? I just wanted to get a sense where people were, because I know that we've had correspondence, and we will have public comment about it tomorrow night, urn. I'll certainly allow people to speak to the ordinance and speak to the other issues. Okay? Champion! (unable to hear) Bailey/ Are we ready to move on? Terry's been waiting for Item 17. Do you want to explain exactly why you've been so interested in this? Vanderhoef/ Oh, he wanted to hear all of our other discussion. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23,2007. July 23,2007 City Council Work Session Page 49 ITEM 17. CONSIDER A RESOLUTION AWARDING CONTRACT AND AUTHORIZING THE MAYOR TO SIGN AND THE CITY CLERK TO ATTEST A CONTRACT FOR CONSTRUCTION OF THE MERCER PARK AQUATIC CENTER ROOF REPLACEMENT PROJECT. Trueblood! That's it! Uh, Item 17, the reason that I wanted to be here tonight was to explain to you, there's something a little bit unusual with the acceptance of this bid in that if you look at it, the recommendation is to award the bid to Geisler Brothers out of Dubuque, which if you add the base bid and alternate bid, they are the low bid, but if you look down at the bottom there, Academy Roofing and Sheet out of Des Moines, their base bid is lower, but they didn't submit a bid on Alternate A, and we do definitely want Alternate A, and Alternate A has to with the adhesive that's being used on the roof. Evidently.. . evidently this wasn't caught until the pre-bid meeting, when a discussion initiated by our staff and Engineering staff about odors building, and it was determined that solvent-based adhesive emits very strong odors, and that we have like a huge air intake unit on the ceiling of the Aquatic, or the roof of the Aquatic Center that would pull all those odors into the building, meaning that we would have to close it. . .if we use solvent-based adhesives, we would have to close the entire building, or a substantial parts of it for up to three weeks, and so the water based adhesive doesn't do the odors and that's what Alternate A is, is the water based adhesive, and the reason that Geisler Brothers has an alternate of$239.00 is they work with water based adhesive all the time. They said that's mostly what they work with. These other firms don't, so their alternate bids are all over the place. Matter of fact, Academy Roofing said they didn't feel comfortable in submitting the alternate to use water based adhesive because they've never worked with it before. Correia! And it's so less expensive? Trueblood! Pardon me? Correia! I mean, their Alternate A was $239.00? Trueblood! Uh-huh. Vanderhoef/ Because they buy it in big quantities, probably. Trueblood! I have to assume that most of that was already included in their base bid, since that's what they work with. Bailey/ Do we have any questions for Terry, who stuck around? O'Donnell/ Thanks for sticking around. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23,2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 50 Vanderhoef/ Is there any difference in the quality, particularly when we are working over a swimming pool? Trueblood! Not supposed to be. Vanderhoef/ Okay. Trueblood/ Ask me in ten years. (laughter) Or don't ask me! Bailey/ Okay, so we're good? Thanks for sticking around, Terry. Other agenda items. We've covered I think the biggies. ITEM 7. CONSIDER AN ORDINANCE AMENDING TITLE 4, ENTITLED "ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES" TO PROHIBIT POSSESSION OF OPEN ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES ON PUBLIC PROPERTY. (SECOND CONSIDERATION) Dilkes/ Oh, number 7, could we collapse that? That's the open container ordinance that we're just fixing. Bailey/ Could somebody make a note to expedite? Dilkes/ Get rid of that. Vanderhoef/ I have a couple that I had put a question mark about collapsing. Bailey/ Yeah, I wondered about.. . but it'll all work out anyway (unable to hear). Vanderhoef/ That was one of them. The other one. . . Bailey/ But that'll work out because it'll all come together at the next meeting. ITEM 8. CONSIDER AN ORDINANCE AMENDING TITLE 8, ENTITLED "POLICE REGULATIONS," CHAPTER 5, ENTITLED "MISCELLANEOUS. OFFENSES," BY ADDING A NEW SECTION 9, ENTITLED" AMATEUR FIGHTING AND BOXING" TO PROHIBIT AMATEUR FIGHTING AND BOXING AT EST ABLISHMENTS THAT ARE LICENSED TO SERVE ALCOHOL. (PASS AND ADOPT) Correia! We had a lot of correspondence on the USA Boxing, and... Bailey/ Would you remind me what item that is? Correia/8oo .Item 8. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23,2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 51 Bailey/ Uh-huh. Correia! And I just going back and thinking about the conversations that we had in drafting this ordinance, what we were concerned about was unregulated activity, and we've been given ample evidence that USA Boxing is heavily regulated, and you know, the letter that Mr. Pollack submitted to us. I mean, I think we continue to talk about this, you know, amateur boxing, regulate amateur boxing in a bar and you know, he said the Union would not be a situation, it doesn't hold a regulated ring, you know, he continues to sort of talk about an opportunity to have an event at the Sheraton, or a ballroom where there's a liquor license, and I think that these are events that could bring in visitors, urn, and if we have this ordinance in place even though there's the opportunity to come back and get it fixed, not knowing what's going to happen, that these types of events will go to Coralville and the Marriott or somewhere else and we'll miss out on (TAPE ENDS) Bailey/ Connie can't offer the amendment again tomorrow night, is what she's saying, because it was defeated. Vanderhoef/ It has to be somebody that (several talking). Dilkes/ No, I wouldn't worry about the reconsideration. I don't consider this... Karr/ ...if it was already adopted. Bailey/ So if you wanted to offer up an amendment to, again tomorrow night and give it another shot in hopes that one of us would change, you can do that. Dilkes/ Now if you want to do it twice tomorrow, then we might. (laughter) Bailey/ Okay, so are we all clear on that? O'Donnell/ I'm not ready to change this. There's been two boxing matches. They've both been at the Rec Center, and you know, that's where it should be. I just. .. Correia! I think that's making a determination on private enterprise that... Bailey/ You can offer up the amendment and make your pitch tomorrow. Elliott! And I want beer allowed at softball games. (several talking at once) Bailey/ Other agenda items? ITEM 16. CONSIDER A RESOLUTION APPROVING, AUTHORIZING AND DIRECTING THE MAYOR TO EXECUTE AND THE CITY CLERK TO ATTEST AN AGREEMENT BY AND BETWEEN THE CITY OF IOWA CITY AND NEUMANN MONSON PC TO PROVIDE This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Wark Session Page 52 ENGINEERING CONSUL T ANT SERVICES FOR THE SENIOR CENTER ADA RESTROOM RENOVATION PROJECT. Elliott! Yes. The one where we're having consultants. Champion! You love consultants! Elliott! To put in.. .to put in bathrooms for crying out loud. Why do we need a consultant to put in a bathroom? Atkins/ Need an architect, an engineer who has a license. Elliott/ But we've got plumbers that do that. Atkins/ It doesn't work that way! (laughter) Elliott/ I mean, they do that all the time. Hire a plumber, put it in. What number is that? Bailey/ 16. (several talking) Champion! We had some problems in that bathroom though, and it wasn't, it's not just redoing the bathroom. There was some problem. I can't remember what it was. Elliott/ Mold. Vanderhoef/ Mold. Champion! I think I'd want a consultant on how to deal with that. Elliott! Well, with mold yeah, but for the other bathrooms, we don't need consultants to put in a bathroom. My God, we get consultants to design parks. We.. . every time we turn around we hire a consultant. But I've ranted. That's enough. (several talking at once) Bailey/ Item.. .what item.. . (several talking). Don't make me think too hard ifit is, okay? (laughter) Correia! When we get around to doing these restrooms, if we. . . I had correspondence from a user of Senior Center related to not having restrooms on that main floor. If we could do those restrooms first, so that those become operational. Bailey/ The main floor, when you say.. .which is the main? Correia! The floor.. .no, I don't know if I said main but the one where they're gone. Is that the.. . (several talking). This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 53 Elliott! Well, I think the main floor. . . Correia! Yeah, ground floor, where there's no restrooms. People have to go to other floors to use the restroom. Bailey! Right, because the restrooms are.. .have this problem. Correia! Yeah, they're non-functional. So if we could just do those first. O'Donnell! That's a good idea. Correia! (several talking).. . operational. Bailey! Okay. Other agenda items? ITEM 15. CONSIDER A RESOLUTION AUTHORIZING THE ACQUISITION OF PROPERTY INTERESTS NECESSARY FOR CONSTRUCTION OF THE COURT HILL TRAIL PROJECT. Elliott! I wish we'd put cost down. Item 15, urn, consider authorizing acquisition of.. .we don't have cost. Atkins! And we won't know. You have to authorize us to acquire it so we can go out and find out what the cost is. Elliott! Yeah, but are we talking about a million dollars or $50,000? Dilkes! That's included in the, that should be included in your Capital Improvement Budget, I assume. An estimate anyway. (several talking) Elliott! That's just a request. I just, you know, when I look at something, if you don't say the cost, then I have no idea. O'Donnell! Did the Cardinals lose or what? Elliott! Yeah! (laughter) Bailey! We assume that they'll get the best possible break. Other items? Dilkes! It's not big on this one, Bob. Item 3f(1l) Consent Calendar - Katie DeVries: Quicker Access to Assault Alerts Correia! There was correspondence in the packet, number 11, quicker access to (unable to hear). Do we have that... This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 54 Champion! I'm sorry, what... Correia! Quicker access to assault alerts. This is related to (unable to hear), and I'm just wondering.. . Bailey/ I would like to hear from the Police Department regarding this. I think it's very concerning, and I don't know what else (several talking), but... Correia! .. . about lighting issues. I know it said in the paper today that they've stepped up alerts, urn, that this woman had some good ideas in terms of. . . Atkins/ There are several things in the mill. Right now. I talked with (several talking). I would prefer not. As far as getting a report to you, I'd say by the next Council meeting that's not a problem. Elliott/ Those reports, I get them on my computer the following morning. Atkins/ No, I mean. . .how we're dealing with it. Correia! No, not the police reports, I mean, just reports on what we're doing to try and... Atkins/ I understand that. Correia! And I don't know if some things are related to lighting, ifit's related to you know late night bus service, you know, what are... Atkins/ Sure. Bailey/ It's not so much the reports, it's actually some ideas for (unable to hear), so we need to be concerned about as we think about the budget, I think is what you're saymg. Correia! Yeah, exactly, and how, you know, maybe working with a rape victim advocacy program and getting... Elliott! The University at one time had a program whereby people could, if they were going to be alone on the street late at night. I tell you what, I wouldn't be walking down the street alone at 3:00 in the morning. Now if they just got off a work shift or something, then I'd like to see some. . . Atkins/ If! understood the last one, the young woman was actually walking with someone and he volunteered to walk her home. She said no, no, it's only a couple of blocks. There's some suspi~ions... Elliott/ That's not wise at all! (several talking at once) No, no, I'm not blaming, I'm just saying...if it isn't required, it's stupid. If I walk, in Chicago, if I walked down This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 55 Madison Street in the middle of the night, that was stupid. The person who mugged me was still against the law, but it was stupid for me to be there. Bailey/ I think I would really like to get this predator.. . okay, other agenda items? All right. ITEM 14. CONSIDER A RESOLUTION APPROVING FUNDING FOR LA REYNA, INC. FROM IOWA CITY'S COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT BLOCK GRANT - ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT FUND AND AUTHORIZING THE CITY MANAGER TO ACT AS CHIEF ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICER AND SUBMIT ALL NECESSARY DOCUMENTATION TO THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT. Vanderhoef/ Somebody tell me where the, uh, the actual location of Item 14 business is. Bailey/ Are we talking about La Reyna? Vanderhoef/ Uh-huh. Bailey/ Go down Keokuk Street, it is, urn, there's an old Pizza Hut, there's a new Pizza Hut and you go just a little bit farther south and it's right there on the west side of the street. Very nice grocery store, very good food. Atkins/ It's on the west side of the street? Vanderhoef/ West side... Bailey/ It's close to the comer. Comer of.. . something. (several talking at once) Vanderhoef/ Oh, okay. (several talking) Bailey/ Okay, any other agenda items? COUNCIL TIME: Bailey/ Anybody need Council time today? Champion! I'm just going to take one minute for Council time. It's something I've talked about before, because I have two kids moving back to town, they've been looking at houses. One house that was perfect for one of my kids they did not buy because no parking on the street during the daytime, and the reason there's no parking is because that's City High. So I'm just bringing up the idea of neighborhood parking stickers again. Just something to think about. A lot of cities have neighborhood parking stickers. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23,2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 56 O'Donnelll I don't think that's a bad idea. I really don't. Bailey/ Northside has talked about it, they've just never pulled the trigger on it. Champion! We need to talk about it again. Vanderhoef/ Every time we start, then they pull back on it and say I don't think so. Bailey/ Well, maybe we should ask Marcia to poll the neighborhoods and see if, if somebody's willing to be sort of the guinea pig neighborhood. Champion! Yeah. Cities do it all the time. And the only reason the street has no parking if because people don't want the students parking their cars there all day, and during.. .that's why. Bailey/ Other Council time? Correia! I have two quick ones. The memo from the Chief in last week's info packet, urn, I had wanted more information, like detail, on where the PAULA charges, the usual charges.. . yeah, we haven't been getting that (several talking). Bailey/ No, we haven't been getting the usual charts. Correia! And then the other thing was the... Atkins/ We'll take care of that. Correia! Okay. The thing I was looking for related to the like underage selling was really...I know in some communities they go out and check right around prom. So, I mean, so I started thinking about the underage, high school underage, urn, and what. . . Atkins/ You want us to more like kind of characterize when we do it. . . Correia! Yeah, like and if we go to like the Kum n' Go or the Hy-Vee, you know, Wine and Spirits around prom time just to be sure... Atkins/ Sounds okay. Item 3e(1) CONSIDER A RESOLUTION SETTING PUBLIC HEARING FOR AUGUST 21, 2007, ON A PROPOSAL TO CONVEY A SINGLE FAMILY HOME LOCATED AT 960 LONGFELLOW PLACE. Item 3e(2) CONSIDER A RESOLUTION SETTING PUBLIC HEARING FOR AUGUST 21, 2007, ON A PROPOSAL TO CONVEY A SINGLE FAMILY HOME LOCATED AT 962 LONGFELLOW COURT. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007. July 23, 2007 City Council Work Session Page 57 Item 3e(3) CONSIDER A RESOLUTION SETTING PUBLIC HEARING FOR AUGUST 21, 2007, ON A PROPOSAL TO CONVEY A SINGLE FAMILY HOME LOCATED AT 983 LONGFELLOW PLACE. Item 3e(4) CONSIDER A RESOLUTION SETTING PUBLIC HEARING FOR AUGUST 21, 2007, ON A PROPOSAL TO CONVEY A SINGLE FAMILY HOME LOCATED AT 985 LONGFELLOW COURT. Vanderhoef/ And one other number that I'd like is, uh, we've got four new ad-hoc housing units to be sold on the Consent Calendar, and how many have we done now, total, with these four? Atkins/ Affordable Dream Home, those programs? Sure, we'll look that up. V anderhoef/ Yeah (several talking) around 12 or 13, or more. Atkins/ At least 20. Vanderhoef/ Are we that high? I think that's a good number... 7/12 Information Packet - IP6 - Neighborhood Street Lighting Correia! I also have one other, in the info packet on July 1ih, there was a memo from Jeff Davidson about the lighting project, and there was something.. . (several talking) he said something about not wanting to look at period lighting, which I thought that's what the, the Goosetown Neighborhood was interested in period lighting? Bailey/ I think that's really smart though. Well, they have to bring it to us anyway. Atkins/ That's true. Bailey/ Just a reminder that we have.. .our meeting starts at 6:30 tomorrow night, special formal. Okay. See you at 6:30. Thank you. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council meeting of July 23, 2007.