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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2000-09-11 Transcription September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 1 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session 6:30 PM Council: Lehman, Champion, O'Donnell, Vanderhoef, Wilbum, Pfab, Kanner Staff: Atkins, Helling, Karr, Dilkes, Franklin, Dulek, Shera, Mollenhauer, Fosse Tapes: 00- 84 BOTH SIDES; 00-85 BOTH SIDES; 00-86 SIDE ONE A. CONSIDER A MOTION SETTING A PUBLIC HEARING FOR OCTOBER 3 ON AN ORDINANCE CHANGING THE ZONING DESIGNATION FROM LOW DENSITY MULTI-FAMILY RESIDENTIAL (RM-12) AND NEIGHBORHOOD CONSERVATION RESIDENTIAL (RNC-20) TO MEDIUM DENSITY SINGLE-FAMILY RESIDENTIAL (RS-8) FOR FOUR (4) PROPERTIES ON THE 900 AND 1000 BLOCK OF IOWA AVENUE, SEVENTEEN (17) PROPERTIES ON THE 900 AND 1000 BLOCKS OF WASHINGTON STREET, TEN (10) PROPERTIES ON THE 100 AND 200 BLOCKS OF SOUTH SUMMIT STREET, FOUR (4) PROPERTIES ON THE EAST SIDE OF THE 10 AND 1000 BLOCKS OF GOVERNOR STREET, THREE (3) PROPERTIES ON THE WEST SIDE OF THE 1000 BLOCK OF MUSCATINE AVENUE, AND FIVE 95) PROPERTIES ON THE 900 AND 1000 BLOCKS OF COLLEGE STREET. Franklin/OK first two items are setting public hearings, the first for zoning request in the Longfellow neighborhood; well it's actually the College Hill neighborhood, the College Street neighborhood. Do you want any detail on that tonight or, I mean this is just setting the public hearing? Lehman/No let' s do that when we (can't hear). Franklin/OK. Wilburn/I have a quick question though, when you, are you planning on giving us for example the types of detail that you gave on the Governor Lucas thing? Franklin/Yes. Wilburn/Thank you. Franklin/With what kind of uses are there now versus yea. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 2 Wilburn/Yea, that's what I'm looking. Lehman/And I think if it's all right with you Karin we'll do that the night of the public hearing, you can explain that prior to public input. Franklin/OK. Lehman/We can plan on that. Franklin/OK. Lehman/OK. O'Donnell/So agreeable. B. CONSIDER A MOTION SETTING A PUBLIC HEARING FOR OCTOBER 3 ON AN ORDINANCE AMENDING THE NONCONFORMING USE PROVISIONS OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD CONSERVATION RESIDENTIAL, RNC-12 ZONE, TO MAKE IT CLEAR ANY EXISTING CONFORMING MULTI- FAMILY USE WOULD CONTINUE TO BE CONFORMING UNDER THE RNC- 12 ZONE. Franklin/And then there' s also setting a public hearing for October 3 on an amendment to the RNC-12 zone the conformity/non-conformity/conformity issue that is a housekeeping kind of issue. Kanner/Can you explain that again? Franklin/You didn't get that what I just said. Sorry, yes. It's a provision in the code that has to do with whether the date and the whole issue of bringing the existing uses into conformity under the RNC-12 and making sure that it's clear as to what's conforming and what' s nonconforming. Kanner/What did we vote on before? Franklin/That was a date, that was taking a date out, this is not the date it's another. (Someone talking, can't hear). Franklin/It's another provision of that same part of the code, which we should have caught then but we didn't. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 3 Lehman/This is to grandfather in those uses that were (can't hear) when we make a change. Franklin/It's not, it's not making any kind of philosophical change. Lehman/Right, right. Franklin/It's making the language clear as to what is conforming after it's rezoned RNC- 12. Kanner/Could you give us the memo again, I don't recall a memo or I couldn't find it. Franklin/Yea that. Kanner/The packet said August 17 or something. Franklin/All ofthat's going to come to you for the public hearing which would be the October 3 meeting, this is just setting the public hearing this time. Kanner/OK. Franklin/OK. C. PUBLIC HEARING ON AN ORDNANCE CONDITIONALLY AMENDING THE APPROVED SENSITIVE AREAS DEVELOPMENT PLAN FOR LOT 52 OF WALDEN HILLS, A 4.89 ACRE PROPERTY LOCATED ON THE WEST SIDE OF SHANNON DRIVE, SOUTH OF WILLOW CREEK. Franklin/The next item then is the public hearing on Lot 52 and this is a lot in Walden Hills subdivision, that is on Shannon Drive and previously it was for 32 townhouses and what is being proposed is 19 single family lots. The conditional zoning agreement that was in affect for the previous lot 52 development will also be in affect for this. Basically that conditional zoning agreement relates to the extension of Shannon Drive to the noah property line. The maintenance of evergreen' s along Interstate 218 and the neck downs or the traffic calming being incorporated into the Shannon Drive construction. The recommendation here is for approval from both the staff and the Planning and Zoning Commission. Any questions? Lehman/I thought there was a revised report that recommended deferral that we just got in our packet tonight. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 4 Franklin/Oh, that, the rezoning, you should have gotten the rezoning staff report that was passed out to you tonight because we inadvertently put the final plat report in your packets. That recommendation was to the Planning & Zoning Commission because we still had some things to work through but it has been taken care of. Lehman/All right, right, thank you. Vanderhoef/Karin, (can't hear) I'm sure you've measured it but to me when I look at it just in this little drawing I'm concerned about site distance coming out of the development and trying to turn north and that could. Franklin/The location of this drive is not remarkably different from what it was and we check site distance with every time that we go through these. Vanderhoef/It just looks pretty tight in there. Franklin/Well all I can tell you is it meets standards. Well are you concerned about seeing what's coming down Shannon from? Vanderhoef/What' s headed north on Shannon and pulling out of that driveway and going north? Franklin/I mean I can ask Jeff about it to double-check it but I'm sure it's already been done. Vanderhoef/OK. Kanner/Karin. Franklin/Yep. Kanner/Two things on this, in our page 100 in our packet Item 5C it says amending the zoning chapter, why does it say the zoning chapter? Franklin/It's just a term, it doesn't mean that we're amending the text of it. Whenever we're amending the zoning of this particular property and the zoning chapter overall is the zoning of the city and on the particular pieces of land as well as the text. But I don't know exactly what page you're referring to but there is no change in the text of the zoning chapter, there' s a change in the map. Kanner/OK. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 5 Franklin/And this is a zoning change because it was under a sensitive areas ordinance originally and so whenever we make any change to it it's that sensitive areas change as well as the planned development change. Kanner/And I had some concern about going from 32 units to 19 and losing density in that fashion, I'm wondering if you could comment on that, is there any part of the agreements that we had originally or if that figured in to the original zoning agreement? Franklin/It is a reduction in the density and I know that you have expressed before a concern about whenever we reduce density for infill within the corporate limits and I mean obviously you're going to have a public hearing next, or October 3 about a down zoning in a close in neighborhood, I guess that' s a matter of where your particular philosophy is, I understand your position. It's not a position that it appears that the Council generally or the Planning & Zoning Commission is taking at this time. One of the things that we are looking at as we look at existing neighborhoods and the potential downzoning to preserve those neighborhoods is also areas in which we can increase the zoning. But that is really something that the Council as a whole as a matter of policy you can buy your votes on any of these zoning issues, play out your position of not wanting to downzone property within the corporate limits. Kanner/Well I guess I'm thinking about since I wasn't here on the original planning. Franklin/OK. Kanner/How did that figure in staff looked at there's going to be 32 in this whole concept of this whole division and subdivision. Franklin/It was looking at the entire area basically it was this entire area that was subject to this planned development and the tradeoffs were in a slightly higher density along this street right here and along Shannon for the townhouses and then on these two lots a higher density in the elderly housing project that Mr. Bums is doing so in looking at the whole the overall density is 8 dwelling units per acre and there were tradeoffs to increase density in certain areas, this is fairly low density in these areas also because of the smaller lots and then we have in here some townhouse type of development and then the open space along Willow Creek. So when the original plan development was discussed there was density trade off throughout. When we looked at this change on lot 52 it could not go any higher than what it was before but it could go lower under our zoning because it couldn't exceed the 8 dwelling units per acre. And it was a choice I'm assuming on the part of the developer to respond to what they felt they could sell on the market right now. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 6 Kanner/I guess I have concerns about we put infrastructure in expecting a certain kind of density and putting that money out there and then we're not getting that density back. Franklin/Well we don't pay for any of the infrastructure in here, this is all paid for by the developer. Kanner/OK. Lehman/The overall density is still OSA-8 in the area. Franklin/Yes it may be, it's a little bit less than the 8 which you can always go less than under our zoning, you can not exceed. Lehman/Right. Franklin/Without doing a rezoning to a higher density, but I think that' s what Steven's concern is that as we downzone that we push more out. Kanner/And we are doing infrastructure leading up to there and leading further out, I mean that' s part of our plan is to. Franklin/In the larger picture yea however there' s other places where we can potentially maybe make up for what it lost here some of the higher density up on Melrose where the Melrose Retirement Village is, there' s a lot of property here that has not been developed yet, could potentially come in for some other kind of housing type although the underlying zoning there is RS-5. But those are decisions that you and the property owners would make at some time in the future. Pfab/What kind of a time frame are we on? OK there' s a public hearing coming up, is that a move and vote on it or is there a it's more than one hearing. Lehman/Well we wouldn't continue the public hearing unless there was a reason to. Pfab/So afterwards it would be move and adopt. Franklin/No. Lehman/Not tomorrow night, it would be a week from tomorrow night. Pfab/So there would be a week to sort this out. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 7 Franklin/Well there would be, there's the public hearing on October, no there's public hearing tomorrow night. Lehman/Right. Franklin/And then there are three readings of the ordinance. Lehman/Right. Franklin/And then there is the resolution for the final plat which would probably on the same time as your final reading on the ordinance. Pfab/I kind of concur with Steve but I just can't picture that, I'd want to go out and check the sites and see what's out there, I mean I don't say good or bad it's just question and I would like to see the site that's all. Franklin/OK. Vanderhoef/When is the bridge going in? Franklin/That is pan of the extension of Shannon Drive and one mason why we've made this pan of the conditional zoning agreement so we don't end up with a problem of having a road without the bridge across the creek. Vanderhoef/So they have to do it with this (can't hear). Franklin/So they have to do that with this project to take it up to this north property line. Vanderhoef/OK, good. Franklin/OK. Lehman/OK. Champion/I want you to know that (can't hear) going over Iowa City. Lehman/You what. Champion/That the storm was going over Iowa City. Lehman/Oh, good. Franklin/Is that a good thing? This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 8 Champion/It's a really good thing. Franklin/Oh good OK. D. PUBLIC HEARING ON AN ORDINANCE DESIGNATING THE PROPERTY LOCATED AT 13 S. LINN STREET AS AN IOWA CITY HISTORIC LANDMARK. Franklin/Next item is a public hearing on an ordinance designating the property on 13 S. Linn Street as Iowa City Historic Landmark. This is the building that was previously the Donohue Lensing Mortuary; it has been brought in by the owner of the property to be placed on the historic landmark list for Iowa City. The Historic Preservation Commission has looked at it in terms of it's eligibility as a landmark, your role and the role of the Planning & Zoning Commission is to look at it in terms of whether it's consistent with Iowa City' s comprehensive plan. The Commission has found that it is consistent with the plan, I mean basically we're now in the midst of doing a survey of downtown buildings, what should be preserved, we definitely have a number of statements in our comprehensive plan about preserving Iowa City's heritage through it's older buildings so such a designation would be consistent with the plan. And it is recommended for approval. Any questions. Kanner/What is the Georgian revival? The pillars in front, what makes it Georgian revival? Franklin/The pillars and the floor plan as you enter, a Georgian revival typically has an entryway and then rooms off to either side. Probably those balconies are not; the dentals around the top of the building are also a feature of Georgian architecture. And these, the surrounds on the windows on the keystone, that's probably about it as far as I can see. These windows have obviously been changed. Would you like to have a Historic Preservation Commissioner be at the public heating tomorrow night? O'Donnell/I don't think that's necessary. Lehman/Not for me but if someone else wants to I don't care. Wilburn/Not for me. E. CONSIDER AN ORDINANCE REZONING 20.78 ACRES FROM INTERIM DEVELOPMENT MULTI-FAMILY (ID-RM) TO PUBLIC (P) FOR This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 9 PROPERTY LOCATED WEST OF GILBERT STREET SOUTH OF NAPOLEON LANE. (REZ00-0017) (SECOND CONSIDERATION) Franklin/OK the next item then is a repeat, that's a second consideration on the public zoning for the public works sight. F. CONSIDER AN ORDINANCE REZONING 35.15 ACRES FROM PLANNED DEVELOPMENT HOUSING OVERLAY (OPDH-1 ) TO SENSITIVE AREAS OVERLAY (OSA-1 ) AND APPROVING THE PRELIMINARY SENSITIVE AREAS DEVELOPMENT PLAN FOR WALNUT RIDGE, PART 8-10, A 23- LOT RESIDENTIAL SUBDIVISION LOCATED ON KENNEDY PARKWAY. (REZ00-0013/SUB00-0010) (SECOND CONSIDERATION) Franklin/Item F is second consideration on Walnut Ridge parts 8-10. G. CONSIDER AN ORDINANCE TO CONDITIONALLY REZONE 30.32 ACRES FROM COUNTY SUBURBAN RESIDENTIAL (RS) TO LOW DENSITY SINGLE FAMILY RESIDENTIAL (RS-5) AND 39.05 ACRES FROM COUNTY SUBURBAN RESIDENTIAL (RS) TO INTERIM DEVELOPMENT RESIDENTIAL (ID-RS) FOR PROPERTY LOCATED AT THE SOUTHWEST CORNER OF LOWER WEST BRANCH ROAD AND TAFT AVENUE. (REZ00-0012) (PASS AND ADOPT) Franklin/Item G pass and adopt on the county subdivision, or no I'm sorry on the rezoning on Lower West Branch Road and Taft. This was the annexation of the further development of Windsor Ridge. H. CONSIDER A LETTER TO THE JOHNSON COUNTY BOARD OF SUPERVISORS RECOMMENDING DENIAL OF A REZONING OF 125.43 ACRES LOCATED WITHIN FRINGE AREA C EAST OF DANE ROAD AND WEST AND SOUTH OF THE LAKERIDGE MOBILE HOME PARK FROM COUNTY A1 RURAL AND RES SUBURBAN RESIDENTIAL TO COUNTY RMH MANUFACTURED HOUSING RESIDENTIAL. (CZ0027) Franklin/Item H, Lakeridge, again the owners have requested a deferral, they requested deferral to next week, I encouraged them to moving that to October 3rd since we're not going to have this all resolved by next week. I haven't heard yet at this point whether that's amenable but I think it probably will be. Lehman/So you'll let us. Franklin/If I hear something before tomorrow night I' 11 have you then defer it to October 3rd. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 10 Lehman/We're (can't hear) 10/3 so do it. Franklin/OK. I. CONSIDER A RESOLUTION AMENDING THE MAYOR TO SIGN AND THE CITY CLERK TO ATTEST AN AGREEMENT BETWEEN JOHNSON COUNTY, IOWA ND IOWA CITY, IOWA, AMENDING THE FRINGE AREA POLICY AGREEMENT BETWEEN JOHNSON COUNTY AND IOWA CITY. Franklin/The next item is resolution that mends the fringe area agreement. And I thought what I would do is run through briefly what some of the major points are in terms of this revised agreement. There was a memorandum from me in the packet that explains some of the background and it's something that the subcommittee's been working on for some time. The major change is one is a reference to the Johnson County land use plan which was not adopted when the previous agreement was drafted. Another important change is in Area A which is the area north of Interstate 80. And what this does is it recognizes Iowa City' s revised growth area and if you refer to your maps you'll I think be able to follow this a little bit better. In that Area A what we're doing is basically paralleling the language in Area A to what we have in B and C where there' s recognition of the city' s growth area and that we're going to address development of land in the growth area and development of land outside the growth area in slightly different ways because that land within the growth area is anticipated for annexation at some point in time. In Area B which is on the East Side of Iowa City and remember this is all our two-mile extra territorial jurisdiction. In Area B it provides for clustering, in the previous draft we did not provide for clustering in Area 13 and ran into a problem when we wanted to approve a subdivision in that area that had clustering, was consistent with all the principles of the agreement but did not meet the letter because of that one provision, so that has been changed. The other very important part of Area B pertains to an provision for commercial development, and I think tomorrow night you'll probably have some input from some property owners in this area who wish to extend the portion that is shown for commercial development. And let me just get my overhead, there it is. Lehman/That's better. Franklin/What this map shows is the area of some conversation but first of all let me just point out that what we're talking about in terms of the opportunities for commercial development. This was a compromise if you all remember that the City council of Iowa City recommended that there be no commercial zoning at the 1-80 Herbert Hoover highway interchange, the county in it's wisdom rezoned it to commercial anyway and they did this twice and so this was one of the things that This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 11 instigated a review of the fringe agreement to try to reach some agreement between the city and the county of exactly where was the appropriate places for commercial development. This recognizes that a certain amount of commercial development has already taken place at this interchange and it also recognizes that there probably will be pressure for more because of the interchange. And that there is some commercial zoning in the county already so what was delineated focusing on the interchange and commercial around Interstate 80 was a series of quarter sections that would allow some additional commercial opportunities at this interchange. Now just to speak for a moment in terms of just the interest of Iowa City and not necessarily the interest of the property owners there or Johnson County. We have an economic development strategy in which we are trying to build our tax base through commercial and industrial development. It only makes sense for us to take a position that commercial development should occur within the city where we can appreciate the tax revenue on it as can the county. When it develops in the county we get nothing from it in terms of tax revenue. Aside from that I think that there is a position that is logical for a city to take in that urban density type of development, commercial, should happen within a municipality whatever one it is because the municipality is the one that has the ability to provide the services the commercial development will need particularly the sewer and the water. So that there is not significant advantage to Iowa City and Iowa City' s own interest to have this occur but this is a compromise. The question that you are going to be asked to address is to add to this the ability for this property right here and it's just this piece as I understand it that the Donovan's would like to have zoned sometime for commercial. Right now the fringe agreement shows it for agriculture or possibly residential at one dwelling unit per 10 acres. This line right here is Iowa City's growth boundary, at some point in time this property could be within Iowa City's corporate limits that is dependent upon annexation to the west until it's contiguous and it is likely that this could be sewered to the east of here according to the Donovan's engineer. What that would allow is some opportunities for this property that would not be would be there if it stayed in the county and those opportunities could be different kinds of development such as a multi-family type of development which could be quite compatible with the lower density commercial that is there. This is all of the, Gateway is Eyman the Eyman property just to orient you. So anyway you'll have some input on that tomorrow night, I just wanted to give you the background on it so that you, I think you've received a letter from the Donovan's and that you've all been attempted to or personally contacted by them. Lehman/Aside from land use usage, aren't there two things in this? Well obviously reference to the Johnson County (can't hear) land use plan. The requirement in this plan that if there's a disagreement between the County and the City doesn't this plan require that we have a subcommittee that will discuss differences of opinion. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 12 Franklin/Yes. Lehman/Before either party breaks the agreement and the other being that this agreement does not expire, it can be reviewed but it does not expire as (can't hear). Franklin/Yea there were three other points that are included in the agreement beyond this commercial bit. Lehman/Right. Franklin/And that is what you're referring to the consultation ifthere's a conflict, 5 year expiration and automatic renewal if neither party disagrees and then the other part is a provision which in our growth area, and this is just in our growth area that any subdivision or development project would be subject to city standards and that' s become an important distinction and I mean Lakeridge is an example. Lakeridge is not a subdivision per say because of the nature of a manufactured housing park and the argument has been put out there that they need not comply with city standards because they are not a subdivision. I would argue that the intent of the fringe agreement was that any development within the fringe should comply with city standards and Lakeridge should also. We haven't got to that point, hopefully we won't need to and we'll come to some kind of an argument but that' s what that other language is in there what that's about and it basically says subdivisions and development project must comply with city standards and it gives us the fight to look at any development project that is I think it's over 3 acres. Wilburn/Karin, what was the as you recall the county' s rationale for that configuration? Was it because of existing commercial there, the Gateway, Donovan, why that? Franklin/This? Wilburn/Yea. Franklin/That is a consequence of a property that Mr. Eyman bought. He first bought property here and then bought this other property I'm presuming from the Donovan's. Wilburn/OK. Franklin/This has good Interstate 80 exposure and I'm assuming that this configuration is a consequence of what he could/wanted to buy and the Interstate exposure. I don't know exactly. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 13 Wilburn/OK, you're just taking a guess OK. Franklin/Yea, yea, but they, the county basically just responded to what he brought into them. Wilburn/OK that' s what I wanted to know. Vanderhoef/And this was done before the present fringe area agreement was written so it has a previous history of. Franklin/This one yea. Vanderhoef/The other thing I was going to ask you is was about the high wire. Franklin/You know I went out there and looked at it and the statement that is made in Mr. Donovan's letter is that the high wire makes farming difficult. Well the high wire goes from somewhere very far noah because I couldn't see the end of it and somewhere very south because I couldn't see the end of it through farm land so I don't know it's a funny argument. Vanderhoef/And certainly they had to sell an easement or something to allow that to go through there. Franklin/Right, right. I think there are a number of farms with high wires through them and city's too. Pfab/Was high lined there was, that a detriment to farming or a detriment to residential development? Franklin/Well I don't know that it's a detriment to either but Mr. Donovan's letter. Pfab/But I mean what stated. Franklin/In his letter. Pfab/I didn't remember seeing that but that doesn't mean. Franklin/He states that a large overhead transmission line is located on the west side of this 40 acre tract thus making it difficult to farm. Pfab/OK. I remember, I was thinking it was something different, that's fine. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 14 Franklin/I mean basically with that argument you would zone commercial everything that was anywhere near that high wire all the way from here to Timbuktu. Pfab/OK now does it curvy line, are you saying that is sewerable, is that have, that pertains just to the sewer available? Franklin/Right, our growth boundary is predicated on what we can serve by gravity sewer and so that's one reason why it's wiggly because it's following the topography. Now depending upon how deep that pipe is we may be able to get it over to serve this ground here so this is not a precise line, it's an estimated line but it is based on our being able to gravity sewer it, given the plant expansions that we have in our plans and the extension of truck lines out to that area. Champion/Karin how far are we sewering that, how far east? Franklin/We are to, well we're to Scott Boulevard, south of Rochester, on the West Side of Scott and we are to the end of Hickory Trail in the First and Rochester subdivisions. And I would expect that once Captain Irish/Scott Boulevard is extended that we'll see that estate, the Smith brothers estate sold and the sewer line extended east northeast through there that will open up that area. Champion/So we're really not very far from this area really. Franklin/Well we're about. Champion/2 miles. Franklin/We're about a mile, it's a little bit more than a mile but once the northeast corner of Iowa City opens up it will be a mile. So it's, it potentially could be some time and there's farmers there that are still heavily into farming. Lehman/This present configuration with Gateway even though it did not agree with our fringe area agreement that has taken place under the existing fringe area agreement? Franklin/Yes and in contradiction to the fringe area agreement. Lehman/Right, didn't agree with it but that' s what has occurred with the present agreement, this is a new agreement. OK. Franklin/Right, right. Pfab/So basically Gateway is grandfathered in. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 15 Champion/No. Pfab/To the fringe, to the new fringe. Franklin/Gateway was done in contradiction to the fringe agreement, the city did not take the position of suing the county or taking the county to court on it, we instead decided to sit down and see if we couldn't iron things out. And that' s what this compromise is indicating that this whole area could be commercial. Lehman/And I believe if I'm not mistaken that this configuration as we see it on the map and your showing it there has been approved by our Planning & Zoning Commission, our staff and the County Planning & Zoning Commission and all that remains is for it to be approved or changed by the Council and the Board of Supervisors. Franklin/That' s right and the Board will be discussing this Thursday night. Lehman/And the joint committee that looked at it. Franklin/Right, right. Lehman/From the Council and the Board of Supervisors. Franklin/Steven. Kanner/A couple questions. On page 5 of the agreement, it's 128 in our packet, section 2, protecting agricultural operations, could you explain what it means "right to farm" as contained in the Code of Iowa, the fringe area agreement will not interfere with the "right to farm." Franklin/There is certain law in the state of Iowa which protects farming operations from nuisance suits, such that when people move out into the county and are bothered by the smell, the noise, the hours of operation of the farm they can not bring suit against the farmers under a nuisance suit because the farmers are protected under this state right to farm law. And what this is saying is there' s nothing in this agreement that is intended to diminish those rights to farm as provided in state law. Kauner/And there probably will be some of those disagreements in that word trying to encourage cluster, clustering which would allow 50 percent of a development period to still be agricultural land so it's likely that some of that will happen. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 16 Franklin/It's quite possible that some of that will happen, well I think it's inevitable that there will be some disagreements but. Lehman/That's no more likely than it is now. Franklin/No not at all. Lehman/(Can't hear) this doesn't change anything in that regard. Franklin/No, no. Kanner/Well I like the idea of keeping that in there, how do. Lehman/I don't think we have a choice on that it's a state law. Kanner/The clustering. Lehman/No, no, the "right to farm." Kanner/No, I'm talking about the clustering, the clustering provision that allows 50 percent for open space or agricultural or (can't hear). Franklin/Actually requires it, either 50 or 80 depending upon which area you're in. Kanner/OK requires it. Is there a way that we can put in there or was it talked about let's say to encourage state farming even after it is possibly annexed into the city? Champion/Well it would be (can't hear). Franklin/Well I guess that's. Kanner/That 50 percent. Franklin/That' s a pretty significant philosophical point because it's a question of whether you want to have farming within an urban boundary. And if what that means and what you're trying to do is preserve farmland it probably ought not to be incorporated into the city. Lehman/(can't hear). Kanner/Well was that talked about in terms of County doing development with clustering that had agriculture that this is something that might be good to stay out of the city or want to encourage farm land? This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 17 Franklin/Well in those areas that are outside the city' s growth area what is encouraged is to continue to use those areas for agriculture. There is the possibility, and that is consistent with the Johnson County land use plan. Now what the agreement provides is that there is the possibility of some rezoning to a fairly low density but in order to do that you have to cluster it so you're not consuming all of the land that you might ordinarily consume. And that what you have left in those cases 80 percent must be an open space or an agriculture. But the approach is outside the city' s growth area, first choice is it stays agriculture, but it leave open this window of opportunity for some residential but if that occurs it occurs at a very low density and it has to be clustered in the preservation of large amounts of open space. Kanner/Does our comprehensive plan address these potential clusters and the open space that would be there in any way? Franklin/Well the reason. Kanner/Let's say we decide we don't want agriculture but we still want open space do we address that or is that something that's so far off in the distance that we don't talk about that? Franklin/Well in the city' s growth area where we anticipate annexation at some point in time then the clustering, the reservation is for open space and it is anticipated that at some point there would be some future development. Now the thinking there is whatever you bring into the corporate limits at some point it's going to be at an urban density because that's why you bring it into corporate limits is to provide that space for development not the outer spaces. Then we have of course our neighborhood open space requirement as part of our subdivision regulations that looks at the provision of open space for the future. But it does not anticipate that those large areas kept in open space while it's developing in the county but in our growth area will stay in open space forever. OK. Pfab/I'm looking here and I'm trying to say why or why shouldn't we. And as I understand it really, when I went out and examined the property it has some advantages of why it should be a commercial. It' s, you have the highway noise and you have the fact that it's an easy and quick access to the Interstate. You know if it's a commercial your highways, your transportation is quick to the Interstate. So you look, that' s why, when you look against it there is a small and relatively questionable amount of land there that is suitable to agriculture. Now where those buildings are that's questionable that could be and what is sewerable. So you know, and the other thing is if it's commercial, the city will lose it as a tax base. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 18 Franklin/For now yea. Pfab/For now. Franklin/Unless it were an exit sometime but I don't know. Remember we do annexation voluntarily too so it's up to the property owners. Pfab/OK so what would happen if a person looked at that and divided that up and say what is sewerable and what isn't sewerable and that that somewhere make a decision there that some of that could be commercial and leave the rest as it is. But that doesn't hardly work either because this is where I see the high line coming in as making it somewhat undesirable for residential if you're going to go that way. I don't see the argument that the lines have anything to do with farming (can't hear). Franklin/But we have high lines through Iowa City too. Pfab/Right but theses are pretty substantial power lines. Franklin/Oh I know. Lehman/So is West Benton Street. Vanderhoef/Yea. Franklin/I mean every community has those, I don't know, I don't see the high lines, as an argument that goes (can't hear) like some of your other ones (can't hear). Pfab/Basically I don't either, I don't see just that they're them. Franklin/In terms of farming, I mean this. Pfab/The lower part. Franklin/This is the property that is owned by the Donovan's, this is the part that the homestead, which is what they want (can't hear). Pfab/The homestead it looks to me like the most or the least desirable place to farm and it's a homestead with I don't know is it functioning as a farmstead now? Franklin/Yea, I mean they live there or somebody lives there, I'm not, I think it is (can't hear). This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 19 Pfab/It's, yea, highway noise and the fact that it's, there is commercial there right now certainly. Franklin/During, during, if I might interrupt you. Pfab/Sure. Franklin/During the committee discussions of this, I mean there was talk about what to do with this here because of exactly what you're saying because of the commercial exists. But the question was did we want, did Iowa City want to have a commercial corridor on Herbert Hoover Highway because what's happened with Gateway is first we had this rezoning, that' s done. Well that's done so then he comes in with this rezoning, well this is rezoned to commercial so why not do this one. And now we're getting another argument well why not do this because we've done this and so then (can't hear). Pfab/Right, I agree, but why did the second one come through? That' s the difficult one, if that would have been stopped at that point. Franklin/The rationale at the time on the part of the county was we've already zoned one we might as well zone this one commercial which. Kanner/Talk to your county supervisors. Lehman/And wasn't part of that in the growth area and part of it out? I mean this was kind of a mixed up thing. Franklin/No all of this was in the two-mile extra territorial jurisdiction but none of it in the growth area. Lehman/But it is now, the growth goes right through the middle of it. Franklin/Yea I'm sorry, that wasn't, that' s wasn't the theory. Lehman/Yea I thought that was. O'Donnell/It was actually pretty much right on the boundary of it though wasn't it? Lehman/Most of this discussion from this point I think we probably should have tomorrow night when we have the Donovan's here and their attorney. Franklin/Yea they're going to make their. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 20 Lehman/Because I think they're going to make some points that we want to hear and there's probably some points that we want to come back to them with. Kanner/I have a question on another issue. Looking at Fringe Area A which is residential for the most part I talked to you earlier about perhaps having some sort of commercial there, commercial area so people wouldn't have to come all the way into town to get a gallon of milk or something like that. And you had mentioned that if there was any commercial in the county they don't have neighborhood commercial like we do. Franklin/Right. Kanner/They only have the one type of commercial there and anything could go and we don't necessarily want that. Was there any talk about the county trying to get some sort of neighborhood commercial that would be in a line of neighborhood commercial? Franklin/I think that the county has at different times talked about neighborhood commercial, nothing has ever come of it and you know partly that gets back to also with the neighborhood commercial or with any commercial you have to have a ceaain amount of population or what in the trade' s they call roof tops around the commercial to make it succeed. The neighborhood commercial that's really developing for that north corridor on Dodge Street which is what go, Highway 1 which goes into Fringe Area A is in the city. There' s a building under construction right now by NCS which is going to be a convenience store and gas station and car wash and then there' s the Express Stop by the Radisson, both of which serve the purpose of commercial for people coming off the Interstate as well as people traveling between Iowa City and Solon or points noah. And so that kind of is on your way home sort of commercial stop until you get to the city of Solon where you've got commercial in the city of Solon. So I guess as we talked this afternoon Steven that the commercial still I think is appropriate within the municipal boundaries and that when you get higher intensity uses like that they ought to be within municipalities not within the unincorporated parts of the county. Kanner/Would the? Franklin/Because you're not talking about a population here that is going to change driving habits because they have a neighborhood commercial somewhere along Highway 1, I mean those folks are still so dispursely populated and living in a rural environment and working in the city that they are going to be driving regardless. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 21 Kanner/What about the area along Prairie Du Chien and we just, the council voted to agree to the rezoning that area up there? Is that, under our neighborhood commercial would it be considered sustainable that that density that they have now? Franklin/No. Kanner/That' s way below what we would consider for a neighborhood. Franklin/Yea, and so I think those folks use the HyVee on Dodge Street and that is neighborhood commercial. Champion/Is there a little piece of commercial property on Prairie Du Chien though in corporate limits? Franklin/Within the corporate limits? Champion/Yea. Franklin/Just there at the intersection of Dodge and Prairie Du Chien where you've got the Hilltop and the Dairy and the HyVee, that's it. Champion/Right, right. Kanner/There' s nothing further north. Franklin/And that' s I mean that part of Dodge is zoned commercial there between Prairie Du Chien and Dubuque Road. Champion/There used to be a little grocery store up there. Franklin/No there's a big one HyVee. Champion/There is a big one, there used to be a little one. Franklin/Actually it's a small one compared to some of the new ones. Kanner/What Prairie Du Chien you're saying. Champion/Yea, I used to walk up them with my kids to get milk and bread. (All talking) This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 22 O'Donnell/I remember a little (can't hear). (All talking among themselves) Pfab/Is, you're saying ifthere's going to be a commercial, neighborhood commercial which the county does not have. Franklin/Right. Pfab/The only way you can make a commercial are what is it, what did I say the? Franklin/What did you say I don't know? Pfab/OK it's (can't hear) commercial, does it always have to have within, to make that work does it have to be within walking distance? Well you say roofiop, is that function ever work where people drive past back and forth and as a watering hole so to speak? Franklin/The roofiops relate to the commercial viability. Pfab/Right. Franklin/For certain commercial uses to be viable they have to be within a certain distance of a certain number of roofiops that' s just how the trade determines where their going to locate. Our neighborhood commercial concept is that the neighborhood commercial, and this is in an urban environment, not rural. Pfab/I understand, yea, but can it. Franklin/It's within so that you can walk it's a half-mile. Pfab/But a commercial, but out in the rural area people are driving all the time so does the, is the density that important if enough traffic goes by the cornrnercial? Franklin/Not for the commercial to operate, if they've got a high traffic count then a commercial could potentially succeed and then their going to determine it by the number of cars that go by that point. Pfab/Right so is that a concept that will work that you can take a neighborhood commercial that has a lot of traffic past it versus vehicle traffic versus potential walking traffic in an urban commercial center? This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 23 Franklin/You could but I think that it's, commercially it would work but in terms of planning and not encouraging urban sprawl or encouraging sprawl I think that is antithetical to the concept of not encouraging sprawl. That if you put those commercial centers out in the unincorporated areas then you are going to encourage more sprawl. (END OF 00-84 SIDE ONE) Pfab/And invite for commercial development? Franklin/Yes. Pfab/And isn't this really? Franklin/Which is why this area is designated around the interchange. Pfab/And is that as far, is, does this get too far and how far is too far? Franklin/Too far from what? Pfab/From the interchange say to go commercial. Franklin/Oh for the Donovan' s. Pfab/Yes. Franklin/That' s a judgment, I mean what's, yea, the question is what' s too far? Pfab/That' s the question that I have. Franklin/But then, the other principle is whether we want to have a commercial corridor coming in on Herbert, I knew it was going to happen, Herbert Hoover Highway. Lehman/I think it's important to remember too that the fringe area map designates what we expect the intended use to be does not change any zoning. Franklin/No. Lehman/That entire Herbert Hoover Highway could be zoned commercial piece by piece by piece as long as we agree to do it; this doesn't change any zoning. Pfab/No, I know, I don't know, I'm just saying what is, what is the, what is in the most people's best interest, that's the question. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 24 Franklin/Well if the majority of the population is in Iowa City, which it is then it's in most people's best interest to have the commercial development in the city. Pfab/Because of the tax base. Franklin/Yea. Pfab/And the supports that the city. Franklin/And how far you have to drive then too, I mean ifthere's businesses here that you're driving from the city to go out there, it doesn't make any sense. Pfab/But I was thinking that mainly, I was looking at the idea that most of it would be Interstate generated. Franklin/I mean if you go out now and you look at some of the businesses that are in there, I mean there' s one that' s a meat market or a meat something, meat locker. Pfab/And I went out and I looked through it and it's kind of a strange set of circumstances. Franklin/Are we ready to move on? Lehman/I think we are. J. CONSIDER A LETTER TO THE JOHNSON COUNTY BOARD OF SUPERVISORS RECOMMENDING APPROVAL OF A CONDITIONAL USE PERMIT FOR A SAND MINING AND EXTRACTION OPERATION FOR PROPERTY LOCATED IN UNINCORPORATED JOHNSON COUNTY SOUTH OF IZAAC WALTON LEAGUE ROAD, WEST OF THE IOWA RIVER. Franklin/OK the last zoning item is the sand and gravel, sand and mining, sand mining and extraction operation. And this is on Izaac Walton League Road. Can you see that better up there than I can see it down here? Lehman/Not much. Franklin/This is an expansion of the existing sand and gravel operation that is south of Izaac Walton League Road and so the expansion is this area right in here. And what is delineated by this dotted line is the 1,000-foot separation between any residential use and the extraction. I mean basically this whole thing meets all of the requirements of the state, the county, and the city for whatever we have for This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 25 extraction, this is the reclamation design which the details of it are in your packet that I think you can read a little bit more clearly. What we have recommended and the Planning & Zoning Commission has recommended that this be approved but subject to the county requiring implementation of this restoration plan. And S & G is amenable to that, this is what they intend to do, they had this done by Lon Drake. Lehman/I was going to say Lon Drake I think it's really a. This came to us what a couple years ago? Franklin/Yes and it was quite controversial at that time but they have been very good neighbors. Kanner/Yea and I found the history of it fascinating of the whole packet that we got. Franklin/Oh that Lon put together, yea, wasn't it. Lehman/Yea he does a tremendous job. Franklin/OK I'm done. Lehman/OK thank you Karin. AGENDA ITEMS Lehman/OK agenda items. ITEM NO. 6. THE AMENDED FY01 ANNUAL ACTION PLAN, THAT IS A SUBPART OF IOWA CITY'S 2001-2006 CONSOLIDATED PLAN (CITY STEPS), AUTHORIZING THE CITY MANAGER TO SUBMIT SAID PLAN AND ALL NECESSARY CERTIFICATIONS TO THE U. S. DEPARTMENT OF HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT, AND DESIGNATING THE CITY MANAGER AS THE AUTHORIZED CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER FOR THE CONSOLIDATED PLAN. Vanderhoef/The Annual Action Plan, I was a little confused on the lines on this budget. Am I reading this correctly that there's a $193,000 basically $500.00 less in the contingency? Franklin/In contingency. Vanderhoef/What things didn't happen? This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 26 Franklin/Well what that is program income, is when loans are paid back like from rehab. When loans, we're doing much more in terms of loans now instead of grants on all of our use of CDBG money and so what that is is the money coming back in from those loan payments and what will happen with that is that will get rolled over into the allocation that will take place in January, or start in January. Vanderhoef/OK, it just seemed a lot larger than contingency (can't hear). Franklin/And you'll see that because of where we are in the year and because we are getting more program income now but we feel it's a better way to use the money to keep rolling it over. Vanderhoef/I agree. Franklin/I thought you might. Kanner/I don't know, I don't think this concerns you Karin. Franklin/OK. e(6). CONSIDER A RESOLUTION APPROVING THE OFFICIAL FINANCIAL REPORT FOR CITY STREETS AND PARKING PROGRAM PROJECT STATUS REPORT FOR THE FISCAL YEAR ENDING JUNE 30, 2000. Kanner/I had a few things in the consent calendar. The first one was in the resolution, number e6 approving official finance show report for city streets and parking. I was wondering if Joe or Steve or somebody could summarize it real briefly. Atkins/Let me see if I've got a copy, why don't you go on to the rest of them while I pull it out. Kanner/OK. g(4). IOWA CITY AREA COMMUNITY PROVIDERS - youth, alcohol, and downtown Iowa City Kanned And then we had a letter from some mental health and substance abuse area service providers in the correspondence and concerned with teens under 18 drinking and other abuse and involvement and they gave an offer of helping us get input from the community on the minors, people under 18. And I was wondering if the rest of the council was interested in following through on this to see where it might lead. I think it would be a good source of input, people know what I'm talking about there? This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 27 Vanderhoef/I read that also and I'm not sure that this is the point in time when we start having some hearings I suspect that there might be some requests for something like that but right at this point I'm not sure what you had in mind that might happen. Kanner/Well I was thinking that when we had the hearings that this is another component that I think they made a good case that this is an issue that is not just about bars per say but the whole public health issue of minors drinking and substance abuse and it seems like a good bunch of people, some real heavy weights in the community that could help us hear that perspective in a better fashion. And so I'm talking about the time flame of when hearings happen but maybe we might want to think about this aspect, some formal aspect of taking them up on their offer, I'm not sure. Vanderhoef/So specifically what are you asking them to do? I guess that's what I don't understand. Kanner/Well they're offering to give us input from the perspective of minors and that might be input from minors themselves or from these people who work in the community. And I think it's a key component of the issue of excessive drinking and illegal drinking and I think they gave an offer saying we could help you discuss this is a positive fashion and I think in some way we ought to take them up on that offer. Champion/Steven we're talking about 18 and under? Kanner/Right. Champion/Which I think is, I think you're right but I think first we need to deal with the issue of the 21 business and under. I think it's a valid concern but I'm not sure at that point it would help us right now but I think it's a big problem, but I'm not sure I'm ready to address that problem. Vanderhoef/And the other place that I think I would like to acknowledge these folks for their offer and invite them to be part of our public hearings because I think it would be very well time spent, time spent very well coming to that hearing and putting their 5 minutes about their program that goes out onto the TV so that everyone has the opportunity to hear it, and council will obviously hear it. Pfab/Are we talking about individuals five minutes or a total of five minutes from the group? This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 28 Lehman/Well that' s kind of their call. Vanderhoef/Each group, I mean there were like 17 listed there and any one of them might want to come and talk specifically about a program that they are doing. Pfab/I agree that it should be part of the hearing, not separate and I would encourage it but at the same time if they come they should have enough time to make their point whatever it is. They should have the same courtesy that the anybody else has. Lehman/Which they would have. Vanderhoef/That' s what I meant. Pfab/Then that' s fine, then I have no problem then is that what you're looking at? Is that what you're thinking about? Kanner/No that's not necessarily the issue, I'm sure they'll come to the hearing, they'll, I'm sure they're active people in the community and they showed that by writing this letter. In my mind we might want to have certain collaboratives that would involve these folks and others but if they're making the offer I think we should see how we can do something special with them because this is a big part of the puzzle of the whole drinking problem and trying to define the drinking problem. That it's more than just people 18 to 21 drinking, but the whole, and they showed some figures of binge drinking, a number of people that binge drink, a large percentage of those people starting when their younger so the problem in many ways starts at a younger age and that's something that I think as a city we have an obligation to try to deal with. Pfab/Is that not something that we can deal with at the public hearing? Kanner/Well certainly I'm saying that maybe this is something beyond that that we might want to consider. Pfab/For instance what do you have in mind? Kanner/Well just like we heard from the bar owners, we might have a discussion, a round table discussion with these people. I'm not sure of the exact form it would take Irvin, I saw that they made an offer and I think it's worth pursuing to see if there is some way that we can get more in depth input in this issue of people under the age of 18. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 29 Pfab/But you're saying it's, it should be something different than the regular public hearing. Kanner/I'm saying let' s look into it, yea beyond just coming to speak at this hearing. Vanderhoef/How about inviting them to come to a joint meeting because obviously if we're working with people under the 18 group also it seems to me that if we are working with the school people and the county people and any other cities that a presentation might be appropriate at a joint. Champion/That's a really great idea. Lehman/Or I think if they were with the schools, I, from my perspective if I were that group, my first contact would be with the schools. Not that the city is a legitimate contact as well, the schools obviously address that age in particular where we have to address everybody. Vanderhoef/And if we all get educated at the same time, we're all hearing the same kind of thing here and the questions that are being asked and we might get a better coalition going. It may be too fast for them to come to this next one joint meeting but certainly I would suggest bringing it up at this one for a future topic. Pfab/I would be opposed if it means dragging this out farther. If it's something we can work in and get something come to a resolution I think the time to come to some resolution is long overdue but we can't go back but we can go forward. Vanderhoef/But we can have a whole joint just on that. Champion/No, I think that's an excellent idea, that wouldn't prolong what we're doing with the downtown issues. Vanderhoef/No it wouldn't. Champion/But I think that's an excellent idea because to me I don't see what we as a city council can do about a high school drinking beer at their parties except when the police go there. But they may have something that I have never even thought about so I think the idea of a joint meeting and having them present at it is an excellent idea. Pfab/And I would be in favor as much interaction with them and get as much exchange of information as long it doesn't delay the downtown, whatever we're going to do. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 30 Kanner/I think that's a good idea and I guess I would also ask that just someone here from staff respond to their offer and say thank you and this is one proposal we have and how does that sit with you so we just keep the dialogue going. Vanderhoef/That's fine. Pfab/Yea I think it's a, if they came forward I would jump at the chance. Lehman/Steve will, you'll see to do it to respond to those folks. Atkins/All right. Lehman/And the response that I would suggest if first that they be encouraged to attend the public hearings that we may have regarding alcohol issues in the overall spectrum thing but they be encouraged to contact and work with the school district and that if possible we could work into a joint work session with the cities and the school board. Is that? Atkins/That's fine. Champion/That might actually make one of those meetings very productive. Lehman/OK. Any other agenda items? e(6). CONSIDER A RESOLUTION APPROVING THE OFFICIAL FINANCIAL REPORT FOR CITY STREETS AND PARKING PROGRAM PROJECT STATUS REPORT FOR THE FISCAL YEAR ENDING JUNE 30, 2000. Atkins/Yea Emie. Lehman/Yes. Atkins/I'm going to answer Steven's question for him unless there are other matters. Annually the Department of Transportation requires that we prepare a statement on the use of public moneys as it relates to city streets and parking. Specifically they require this because of the substantial amount of funding we receive from road use tax. This document is pages and pages of numbers but somewhat the bottom line is that we have identified the amount of money we received from road use tax and other sources. We identify where we spent the money, road maintenance, snow and ice removal, storm sewers, traffic engineering. And then we report this information to them on this form; I'll be candid with you Steve I don't know what they do with it because all of this audited anyway at the end of each fiscal year. You're welcome to see it and. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 31 Kanner/So it's a yearly report to the Iowa DOT. Atkins/That' s correct, on our behalf and it's called for city streets and parking, it's pages of numbers and we have to do it. Lehman/It wasn't subject to the reduction of (can't hear). Atkins/I don't mean to make a curt answer but it is rather long winded. Lehman/OK other agenda items? g(7). PATRICIA EPHGRAVE - traffic in Manville Heights Kanner/One other issue, in the correspondence we had from a person about Lexington appraised traffic concerns and River Street. This is correspondence #7, traffic concerns about the request to repaint the strip on River Street in the middle to give more room to cyclists and I was wondering if folks had any thoughts on that. This person seem to make some good points that. Atkins/Can I respond to that? Kanner/Yea. Atkins/Yea I asked Jeff to take a look at that and we've had, we've only received the one complaint from the Ephgrave's. Apparently the circumstances are similar to what's on Church and Court and that is the center line of the street is offset because there' s on street parking. In the case of River Street the parking is allowed until after 5:00 PM so during the course of the day it looks a little unusual. I don't know how you resolve it, it's the only complaint we've had about it. If you do put the stripe down the middle then I would suggest you want to consider changing to off street parking then. We can progress into more detail if you're interested. Lehman/What you're saying is that if we're going to allow the parking we have to offset the middle (can't hear). Atkins/If we're going to allow parking you have to (can't hear). Lehman/(can't hear) parking away. Atkins/That's correct. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 32 Lehman/And if we're going to center the line we're going to have to remove the parking. Atkins/Bingo. Lehman/It's pretty simple. OK, all right. And you've talked to Jeff about that and (can't hear). Atkins/Yes I did because I was reading the Ephrgrave letter. Lehman/OK. Appointments Lehman/Appointments. Solid Waste, do we have an application. Vanderhoef/Janelle Retting. O'Donnell/We only have the one on Janelle Retting. Vanderhoef/I move we appoint her. O'Donnell/I second it. Lehman/Retting. Retting. OK. Champion/One down 7 to go. Lehman/OK we have consensus on Janelie Retting. Housing and Community Development Commission we received one tonight from Rick House, we have three appointments to fill. Champion/I think Rick House would be terrific. O'Donnell/This is by appointment isn't it? Lehman/Rick is a reappointment. Pfab/How long has he been on that? Vanderhoef/One term. Champion/One term. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 33 O'Donnell/I'll nominate him. Pfab/Find that' s great. I agree with you he's a good person. Lehman/We have Rick. OK now one of the other people, we had what two others? Champion/Yes. Lehman/One of those indicates. Kanner/One other. Vanderhoef/Just one other. Lehman/And that person indicates a conflict or a possible conflict because of his involvement in an agency that' s served by them. But we also need to readvertise anyway I guess I would suggest that we readvertise, appoint Rick and see if we get more applications that don't have any conflict. If we keep his application obviously he could still be considered. Kanner/Could we ask Eleanor what, did you read that? He works for Hillcrest which last year received some funding. Dilkes/Yea there' s been a lot of conflict issues raised in connection with this commission and the opinion that my office has given the Council and the Commission is that if a member of the Commission is affiliated with an applicant for funding that Commission member cannot vote on that application or any other applications so I believe it's been the Council's informal policy not to appoint such persons because this, the main task of this commission is to allocate funds. And so if you've got a commission member who is affiliated let's say with Hillcrest who's applying for money and therefore can't vote in the allocation process it sort of takes them out of commission. Lehman/Well the other thing it does to even if you can't vote on Hillcrest being a member of that board you're voting on any other allocation could be construed as having a conflict with what your. Vanderhoef/Organization. Dilkes/What my opinion has been is they could not vote on other allocations. Lehman/On any of them. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 34 Champion/So that would make it (can't hear). Lehman/So we will readvertise. PCRB. Champion/I like, I think John Stratton should continue. Vanderhoef/Oh absolutely he should be reappointed. Lehman/Do we have consensus with John? OK. O'Donnell/Patricia Farrant (can't hear). Champion/Loren Horton. Vanderhoef/Loren Horton from that, retired from the State Historical Society, Loren's been on. Champion/He's been active on a lot of committee's. Kanner/Yea he seems pretty smart. Lehman/Horton is that in agreement? O'Donnell/Is Pat Farrant not going to be (can't hear). Lehman/Pat apparently is not. Pfab/Who are you, what are you referring to right now Emie? Lehman/PCRB. Pfab/Yea but what name, what person? Lehman/Horton. Champion/Horton. Kanner/Loren Horton. Pfab/That's fine. Lehman/OK we all agree with that. Civil Service Commission I think there are no applications. Historic Preservation Commission again there are none. OK This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 35 Champion/You know when I look at those Historic Preservation Commission requirements I think we should ask them to look at those a little bit, some of those little area are so tiny. I mean like Summit Street and then. Vanderhoef/The Moffitt House went (can't hear). Champion/The Moffitt House (can't hear) the districts (can't hear) they're so tiny that it's very difficult to unless somebody makes to make a career out of it. Dilkes/I think some of those requirements for the make up of the commission are dictated up by state law, Karin do you know? Franklin/The district. Dilkes/The representatives of the district. Franklin/The state requires that you have a representative from each district but what I think what Connie's talking about is the size of the districts and getting to that where there are certain things that define a district and you have to have a certain consistency within the district and if you lose that it doesn't qualify for a district. So I think that may result in some of these smaller ones but it's a good point the commission can maybe take a look at and see if in fact that' s the reason their so small or just because they've been working small. Champion/Because they are small, and they've been, those two in particular have been in historic districts for a long time so the neighborhoods are changing slowly there might be some new blood but sometimes there aren't enough people in those districts that keep filling this commission, (can't hear). Atkins/Karin, Karin, before you sit down. Haven't we just created some new districts or did we add on to this? Franklin/We created the College Hill district. Atkins/Yea. Franklin/Which actually we've got College Green which is around the park and goes all the way to Governor but then it stops for a block and then between Governor and Summit it's not a historic district. And then from Summit to Muscatine is, and the reason there is because there' s so much in that block that is intrusions that it wouldn't qualify for being in a district. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 36 Atkins/I'm just thinking about the requirement to have a member of each district I mean that could be pretty cumbersome. Franklin/That's the state law. Champion/You're sure it isn't a commission? Lehman/Could we (can't hear) the districts? Franklin/No that's a state law, pardon me. Lehman/(can't hear) have them combine this. Franklin/You know that' s something that we might petition the state about because it does create some difficulties and could end up in a huge commission. Champion/Oh right I think it could be (can't hear). Lehman/You can't combine districts. Champion/Well maybe they can just take a look into it. Vanderhoef/Let's look. Lehman/They should look at that. Vanderhoef/And sometimes we're adding on to a district that's already there but because we give it a different name. Franklin/Those we could combine if they'll, connect physically we could. Atkins/OK. Champion/I would think (can't hear). Vanderhoef/I think we should start looking at that whether we change the name of all of them or what we do so we recognize all of them but cut it down that way. Lehman/OK we're going to take a time out. Break Iowa Avenue Phase II This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 37 Lehman/Iowa Avenue Phase II construction (can't hear). Vanderhoef/OK I will leave because of conflict of interest. Lehman/Rick your going to address this. Rick Fosse/At the time Karin and I put this on the agenda last week it appeared likely there was going to be some overlap between the Tower Place project and the Iowa Avenue Phase II, since that time the Tower Place contractor assured us that their going to be done well in advance of when we need to begin this one but schedules can change and a lot can happen in the next 8 months so we thought since this is on the agenda let's go ahead and have the discussion anyway. Lehman/Rick, I have one question and I think I heard this from someone but you hear a lot of things. I understood that before you heard what you just heard that even if Tower Place is not totally completed that some of that parking space may very well be available. Fosse/Yes. Lehman/Earlier than normal so I personally you know we have said as a council that we would not displace the parking off of Iowa Avenue until there's a place for it to go, obviously if that can be accommodated by part of the ramp I would have no problem with starting it in a more timely fashion. Pfab/Are you just saying displaced on a one to one basis? Lehman/Close. I don't, see the problem with continuing that project is it could be delayed for an entire year if it went too long or it could work well into the fall when it could be a real problem downtown. I would have no problem with allowing them to start earlier as long as, and even if there's ove~ap and it sounds like the overlap could not would not be a week or two one way or the other. Fosse/We hope not. Pfab/But you bring in an interesting mix there that I wasn't aware of and that you're saying that even while their working on it part of it would be open for parking. Lehman/That' s what I understand. Fosse/Yes, they'll finish up the interior. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 38 Pfab/Then I would say don't just charge off. Lehman/Do we have agreement that we can go ahead? You've got it guys, thank you. Fosse/Thank you. Kanner/Say that again, agreement for what. Lehman/Agreement to allow them to proceed with the Iowa Avenue Streetscape improvements even though the Iowa Avenue the Tower Place may not be totally complete. Pfab/I'd like to see a two for one replacement but. (Can't hear). Fosse/What we'll be doing is we'll be bidding it this winter and we'll probably specify start date as soon as school is out. Champion/OK. Lehman/All right you want to tell Mrs. Vanderhoef that we're ready for her. Fosse/Yes I will thank you. Champion/That was easy, your right. O'Donnell/That was five minutes. Lehman/It was not five minutes, it wasn't either. 2000-2001 Deer Management Plan (Item #7. PUBLIC DISCUSSION ON A RESOLUTION APPROVING THE 2000-2001 DEER MANAGEMENT PLAN. Lehman/2000 and 2001 Deer Management Plan who is going to speak to us on that? Arkins/Lisa and others. Lehman/Lisa, Lisa and others. Lisa Mollenhauer/Should I wait for Dee? This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 39 Champion/She's here. Lehman/She's here, hello dear. Mollenhauer/You folks were handed given this background or pamphlet and I need to tell you we're going to make some amendments to the cover page. This is not a plan, this is the report of the committee, the plan is actually just page 7, that one page. Lehman/Right. Mollenhauer/So we'll go ahead and correct that, you're not approving this whole thing, this is kind of our background report. You are going to be approving or voting on page 7. Vanderhoef/Is it 37 Mollenhauer/No that' s the long term plan. Lehman/7 is right. Mollenhauer/Seven is the 2000-2001. Tonight our chair Pat Farrant will be presenting committee work and plan to you and she's going to keep it brief just kind of give you an overview and then Tony De Nicola is here from White Buffalo in case you have any questions about sharpshooting. We also have a couple other committee members in the audience. Lehman/Will these folks be available tomorrow night for public discussion as well? Mollenhauer/Yes Pat has agreed if you would like her to make a short presentation prior to the public discussion and then Tony is also available. Lehman/Yes I would. Mollenhauer/So why don't we have Pat come up and she can explain the plan. Pat Farrant/There are a couple of committee members here I should point them out Doug Jones and Harold Goff and Judy Rhodes and Tim Thompson from the DNR and Lisa. Did I miss anybody? I don't think so. I want to make the most of the time and not burden you with the things you may have already done. So what would work best? Do you want to walk through this whole plan or do we want to start with questions? And I'm not. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 40 Lehman/Could I suggest that you compare the recommendations that your making for this fall to the ones that you made last fall and why they are similar, the same or different. Farrant/OK. They differ in more a degree than in specifics. And committee members chime in if I'm not presenting the tenor of our discussion. What we did was work with both the responsibility statement that's on page 1 of what the committee is charged to do every year. And we did all of that we reviewed data, we reviewed current and future educational possibilities and we considered lethal and non lethal management methods. And then we went to the long term plan to determine whether we affirmed that plan and that's on page 3 and that's a distinction that you need to keep in mind. This whole activity started with a consensus about a long term plan and the long term plan was constructed to guide the work of the year individual years. Even though we've been involved in deer management discussions since 97 this is really only the second full year, or will be the second full year of actually implementing the plan for a variety of reasons that are discussed in the section on history if you want to get into that. So what we did was go back to the long term plan and essentially affirm our agreement with it and then we looked at various kinds of information that we had agreed would be the basis for decision making in individual years and that information if you go to the 2000-2001 plan we affirmed that we want the city to continue to develop useable resources for people to learn how to live with a certain level of deer in the city. We affirm that we don't want to exterminate all deer in the city limits and for that to work people are going to have to learn how to live with a certain level of deer populations. So there' s a quite a bit that' s happened but one of the issues that we addressed early this year in our discussions was that we talked a lot in our previous years about implementing more non-lethal activity and concluded that we hadn't done enough and so our focus this year for the first two or three of our meetings was what more could we do to make it clear that this was not simply a committee on a collision course with exterminating deer. And I think everybody pretty much agreed that that was an approach that made sense. And we did some things pretty quickly, we approved some more educational activities, education resources, we held a couple of listening sessions to make sure that we were getting a sense of, a true sense of what the feelings of the community are about deer, whether they had changed. And I think we got, even though we've only had two so far, we had them quick and we got a lot of feedback, all kinds of feedback. Not necessarily different in content from what we expected but certainly in some cases with respect to the passion with which some people presented their feelings but that' s what we wanted and we got it. And I think we'll probably do more of that I think the committee felt that was a good thing to do and we ought to be out in the community so the subsequent committees really stay in touch with an issue that is as complex as emotion ladent as this one is. The second thing that we affirmed needed to be done was that there continues to need to be attention paid to the This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 41 specific area of human deer interaction having to do with traffic, driving patterns, speed limits, ways to help the community understand that there are times of the year and times of the day when if their going to have an accident with the deer their more likely to have it when the deer are on the move in the fall and to some extent in the spring. And so we're looking at more specific things to be done and the city has already done some very valuable things with the reflector systems and we're looking at different kinds of signage possibilities. We did meet with some of the traffic staff in town and discussed the desirability of changing or not changing speed limits in some areas. We are continuing to have a relationship with the DNR and the DNR rep. has been at virtually all of our meetings this year and it's mainly been Tim Thompson who's been an extremely helpful resource for us so that we stay in touch with the state's interest in the deer situation in Iowa City and also that's the best resource that we could find for specific information just about deer in general, deer behavior. We hadn't given up on the idea of trying to find a way to have a contraceptive, or sterilization pilot project in Iowa City, it sounds easy but it's not. There are lots of parameters that have to be addressed in order to make something like this work. But we're finding that there are more communities doing it now than did it when we were started to talk about this in 1997 so that remains an open issue for us as well. Vanderhoef/Pat excuse me, on that particular point do we have any idea of the costs of being a participant in some of those? Farrant/The costs are not small and we can get specifics for you, they're hard to derive because they're based on the individual situation, I think Tony might be able to speak to that some too when he talks but it's not, it's not cheap. Vanderhoef/I would like that brought up somewhere in the public hearing tomorrow. I constantly hear people say well we need to be part of this and I recognize there' s cost and I don't have any idea how to respond to them as to that cost because they seem to think usually when they mention it to me that when your part of a study that the study pays for all of this not the city. Farrant/That hasn't been our experience no, we haven't found any where they're going to pay us to play but we really, my take on it is that it's a developing field and their are some studies that have been funded by agencies but I think you still pay to participate because there are some logistical costs that have to be born by the local agencies. But we're not. Vanderhoef/Would you bring that up though? Farrant/Sure but we don't want to give up on it because it's something that seems at least more, has more press than it had in 1997 when we started talking about this. It This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 42 doesn't seem like such a wild eyed idea as it seemed to some people three years ago. So we did keep that in the plan for this year. For many people number 5 was the nub of what it was we came together to do and that was to determine whether we affirmed that part of the long range plan that agreed that we need to make progress toward the goal that was set when we began our deliberations in 97 of reducing the deer population to more or less an average of 35 deer per square mile in the city limits. And to do that we relied on information from the DNR, we relied on information from the aerial count that was done immediately subsequent to the shoot at the end of 99 and the turn into 2000 to develop a projection for the number of deer that we would need to kill to continue the progress being made toward the goal that was set in the long range plan. And so if you look at number 5 you'll see that we're recommending to kill no more than 500 deer and if you want to see how that figure was derived you need to go to pages 9 and subsequent. And I tried to write that in a way that made it easy to understand how we determined that number. Champion/When you say the number of deer per mile are you talking about an average or are you talking about districts within the community? Farrant/Average. Champion/An average OK. Lehman/You say average but if there is an area that is significantly more than that would that not then be an area you would want to harvest deer in? Farrand Yes. Lehman/For example my part of town although I saw one go across Benton Street in front of Roosevelt the other night, I almost hit it, I've never seen one there before but in my neighborhood there's almost no deer but certainly that wouldn't, I wouldn't think that would be averaged in with people in Manville Heights that would have a population that's very high. Farrant/No this was a challenging thing to do because we divided the city into areas but they really have fluid boundaries and it's, we pretty much came to accept and help me if I'm not saying this exactly right that you really can't say there are this many deer in this pocket of Iowa City that we have determined to call Area B because it's a moving target, I hate to use that term but it's a moving, it's a moving number. And there are areas for which deer pass so we're working with very soft figures here but we took the count, the helicopter count as a starting point. The reality, the count before and after the sharp shoot and that' s given to you on page 9, again I won't go through it, it's a pretty, the table is pretty easy to understand. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 43 Essentially 382 deer were killed last year, and in some areas we're just keeping up with where we were the year before so. So that' s where that came from. If you go to page 11 it's a little more clearly put, one thing to bear in mind is that going on the information from the DNR the target number of deer to be killed is essentially doe's and to assure killing 380 doe's generally you have to kill about a third more, a third more to kill that 380 so we're setting the number of 500 as no more than, again it's a very, it's a figure to work with, it's not a fixed (can't hear). To come to this recommendation to kill we did go through a lengthened list of options we considered, if you go to page 13, we considered no action, no lethal action and determined that the rate of increase even with the reduction, the sharp shoot, the killing that happened last year clearly suggests that we would be in, we'd be no better off than we were in the beginning if we didn't continue to consider some kind of lethal action. And as I said we considered the control, reproductive control, even sterilization, there's apparently some interest in a few places in actually the same kind of sterilization that you do with cats and dogs, again it's a very new concept but it's something we wanted to look into as well. We looked again at trap and relocate and for our purposes that was either trap the animals in a humane trap or dart them so they could be relocated. That has lots of problems, not the least of which is there are very few places to take them. It's about as expensive as sharp shooting but it has the added complication that there are very few places to take these animals so we rejected that. Bow hunting always causes a lot of discussion, we know that some communities in Iowa have used it, but once again we agreed that we didn't to recommend bow hunting as an option for controlling the deer herd and as I said the discussion about that topic always bring out a lot of emotions but we're not recommending it this year. Largely because most members, some members of the committee are very committed to the idea that it doesn't hue to the standard we set that if we're going to kill deer we want to kill them humanely. And for our purposes we defined a death that is instant and painless as humane and so, not everyone on the committee agrees with that but we did come to the conclusion that we don't want to recommend that this year but we do recognize that it's a legal option and some people have suggested that they want to talk about it in future years. Steve. Kanner/Yea I've got a question for you. As far as the humaneness. What percentage of the sharp shooting deaths were instantaneous and how many required a second shot? Farrant/My understanding is that none or one, Tony might want to speak to that. Lehman/Sure come on up Tony. Farrant/Steve was asking about the number that required a second shot. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 44 Kanner/And how many of the that required only one shot were instantaneous? Tony De Nicola/When you, the type of approach we take is your trying to shoot a deer through the center of the brain so either the deer is dead instantaneously or you missed cleanly if the deer were to move it's head to go to feed or to move in a random movement so we don't have second shots, it's either dead instantaneously or it's a clean miss. And we're usually, we're about 98 percent on our hitting our targets, so 1 out of 50 we'll miss, and that's typically because you have an animal that actually has the ability to move versus shooting at a target. Kanner/And so every deer that you killed was hit in the head? De Nicola/Correct, we don't. Kanner/With one shot. De Nicola/Correct, we only shoot for that one target, you're not shooting at a moving animal, you're not shooting at the body, you're only shooting for the center of the brain which is very select location and either you hit that location or you miss. And the energy which you're delivering the projectile is adequate to kill that deer instantaneously. Farrant/Does that answer your question Steve? Kanner/Yea. Farrant/We also looked at trap and kill but that's, I believe it's DNR approved, authorized in urban areas it just wasn't something that we thought, it's not practical, probably that's the largest objection to it so we moved to sharp shooting and for the first time we had a years worth of experience and I think we all concluded that whatever our personal feelings were about it it was done about the way we wanted it to. I got a call from a newspaper in New Jersey yesterday or Friday asking how we felt about the sharp shoot, apparently Princeton is considering a similar kind of program and the reporter felt that Iowa City would be comparable in some ways to Princeton and he said how did you feel about it and I thought mmm, that's a tough question. And I thought about it a bit and I said well we had to have a bad thing done and we wanted it done right and I think our conclusion was that it was done right and so we walked through the. (END OF 00-84 SIDE 2) Farrant/All of the other options that were realistic for us to choose from we opted again for sharp shooting and we also recommended that White Buffalo be engaged again This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September I 1, 2000 Special Work Session Page 45 to do the job. We looked at one other agency and it didn't seem to have the scope of experience that White Buffalo has. One of the other things we were asked to take a look at is traffic safety more as a way of getting another piece of information on which to determine whether we do have a problem and so we've compiled in the chart number 3 the deer vehicle accidents statistics. And the repoaing has been improved and so we have better information and you can see that there is an incremental increase in the number of accidents and the total cost. And we looked at reflectors and acknowledged that probably we don't have a clear picture of how effective the reflectors are because there' s been a lot of construction in some areas where the reflectors have been and they only work if they're clean and if they've got dirt on them, you don't get the affect that's intended so my understanding is the city has committed some funds to have them maintained. We were looking at adopt a reflector program but it seems like the city's going to take care of that so we may see more affect from the reflectors than we have in the past. Kanner/In number 2 on page 3 it talks about the annual report on the effectiveness of deer reflectors. Pfab/What page are you referring to? Kanner/Page 3, Item #2. Is the long term repoa, or the annual report incorporate into this or I'd like to get a copy of the effectiveness. Farrant/Yea we have a separate. Kanner/There's suppose to be the city will prepare annual reports on effectiveness of deer reflectors. Farrant/We do have that don't we? It's not in, is it is here? I don't think it's in here, we may not have included it here but we did have a more detailed report on reflector activity. No. Yes. Mollenhauer/(can't hear) We can certainly give you something that would indicate where those areas, we have not done a separate report on, frankly Steven with the construction on Noah Dodge Street they were not up most of the time. You have to have effective accurately maintained system in order to get any kind of data from them or it's useless. And frankly they were not up consistently with the Noah Dodge Street construction with the Captain Irish Parkway intersection for us to measure whether or not they have been affective. Misha is working with the streets department and the police department to start working, each one of them is numbered when their miscue or their diay and their going to be cleaned and we will indicate where traffic accidents happen in the vicinity of each particular This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 46 reflector so we will start gathering appropriate data but frankly we just haven't because we have not had good systems. So I'm not sure it would be very worthwhile anyway, we could put something together for you but it's not going to be very meaningfi.d from past years. Kanner/Well you summed up that them is no knowledge of the effectiveness of this in Iowa City. Mollenhauer/Not yet. Kmmer/Do we have any reports, summaries of reports of effectiveness in other cities on reflectors and also people also mentioned deer whistles and things like that and other times? Mollenhauer/You want to talk about reflectors in other areas (can't hear). Tony De Nicola/In essence at this point the jury is still out in regard to the accuracy of reflectors, there have been several studies, somewhat scientifically based often done by traffic departments, not to be critical to them but without any scientific research experience or design experience. There's an ongoing study going on right now in Maryland and there's so much variability in deer density, deer movements from year to year, they're finding in control sites with no reflectors sometimes the collisions go down and then the reflector sections collisions go up and there's so much fluctuation there hasn't been any real concrete evidence regarding (can't hear). There's some (can't hear) information showing that in more rural areas where that type of reflective light may be more adversative to a deer trying to cross the road whereas in a suburban urban context they're used to seeing brake lights, roadside, road signs that reflect, street lights so to them it's just one more light in their regular travel so they acclimate to that just like repellents and scare devices so there' s a lot of (can't hear) agreement amongst the scientific community that application in suburban areas will not have much utility. Deer whistles, deer can hear in frequency range of ultrasound but they do not respond to it, it doesn't have an infinitive or a evolutionary threat to them so if you hear a whistle from a deer' s perspective it's not affiliated with predation or any particular threat so they've actually done studies that deer do not even behaviorally respond to a car passing with a deer whistle on it, so deer whistles really are more of a gimmick than anything else. I think reflectors you know need some further review but like many repellent or adversion type systems deer will acclimate to them. That' s why deer reside in these very urbanized areas because they're able to tolerate all of the changes to the environment that we create so I think many of these things are more of a feel good circumstance and I don't think your going to see the real impact on vehicle collisions in particularly in a high traveled area. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 47 Pfab/I have a question for you. It appears that probably, or I guess I'll ask you as a question. Is there any better way to protect a deer crossing a road other than a speed limit? Fiercely enforced speed limit. De Nicola/Driver education is helpful I think over time people that live in high deer density areas leam that driving at dusk and early in the morning and often at night you are more at risk, you need to drive more carefully, that should be reemphasized. They do fence some more so in the west, we actually have migratory routes which your deer don't migrate you have daily movements, they will fence areas on either side of the road where there are problem, specific problems. Whether or not those deer will circumvent that fence into what degree they will and then reconcentrate crossing is a question but you have to look at the cost affiliated of an 8 foot high physical barrier that won't be damaged by snow plows, cars going off the road and so forth. Pfab/I have encountered many a deer and hit my share probably 4 or 5 in my life time and the deer always won because, it was always the car 0 and the deer 1 because the deer I never found a deer but it appeared the only time a deer was in trouble was I was moving and I was moving very fast a lot of times. O'Donnell/It would make it easier to hit a deer if you were moving. Pfab/Well the deer has hit cars before. Champion/Still the deer hits you. O'Donnell/Tony could you comment briefly on the sterilization process, I understand it's still relatively new and they're not quite sure what it actually does to the meat. Is there anything (can't hear)? De Nicola/You can chemically sterilize a deer which they're working on. You can make a, render a deer infertile chemically, you can then also surgically sterilize deer so there' s different approaches to prevent reproduction. Right now FDA still requires that any research program which is the only time you can administer a concept of agent to a flee ranging wild animal has to have a specific protocol which has to be approved by FDA. Every animal that is included in that study has to be clearly identifiable and marked not for consumption. There are no registered agents for a free ranging animal for use for fertility control. So any animal in your study would have to be captured prior to be incorporated in your study, clearly marked so if someone were to hunt that deer, pick up a road kill that they can identify that as a study animal and have it not be consumed. Whether there are any legitimate risks affiliated with these agents probably not likely but again there This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 48 would have to a full pharmaceutical review as you would with any agent for consumable animal before that would be acceptable with the FDA. The bigger problem at this point still becomes can you treat an adequate number of females to have a management level affect, we do not have the delivery technology in this type of environment where deer fairly ambiguous in the environment. You don't have just one park in Iowa City where deer are a problem, they are virtually everywhere. They may vary in density but she's not had definitive boundaries in which you can isolate a study population and try to manipulate it's reproduction. Therefore you can spend as much money as you want if that's the issue of cost but you're, from a feasibility perspective you're never going to accomplish a population level affect because of the nature of your community and the lack of technology in administering these agents. We can prevent reproduction in individual doe, the problem still for from the research community is administering that to a sufficient number of females in a population where your mortality is greater than your reproduction where you can actually affect that population size. And that's been our biggest obstacle, and I continually see media coverage and it says contraception works in deer, and a little subtitle and if you read farther in the article however very impractical to deliver and so that aspect has been tremendously ove~ooked. So when you try to take that even in a research context and look at it with management implications we are unable to do so and any flee range in population particularly in this type of circumstance. O'Donnell/I had one more question and, earlier you said that approximately one out of 50 shots is a miss if you don't hit and I can see something coming out of that so I think if you could elaborate a little bit on, I understand you're shooting down at the deer and if you do have a clean miss the bullet does indeed go into the ground. De NicolaJ Right you design, deer only shot at select bait sites so we pick, we had only 30 bait sites last year in the community and those are preselected, they were looked up by law enforcement, and you always assume you're going to miss so every time you shoot you have a backdrop that will accept the projectile in that environment and so our objective is when you do hit a deer we design our system such that that projectile goes no further than your target. But even if it were, if that deer, if you were to miss because that deer moved then you have an adequate back stop which is created either through topography by having some type of sloped back drop or by being in an elevated position so your shooting down into the ground. O'Donnell/OK. Farrant/Why don't we finish walking through the plan then I thought perhaps Tony could come up and just explain in some what more detail what the sharp shooting entails and deal with some more of those issues. Continuing on the issue of traffic This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 49 speeds, we had three specific recommendations on page 20 and they had to deal with, had to do with reflectors and we recognize as has been said that the reflectors probably haven't had a fair chance and we don't really know for sure how well they work but we are going to be in a position to have a little more reliable information about that soon. Another thing we talked about was signage, making sure that we've fully explored signage either changing signs in times of high deer activity or having signs that you can flip, have signs that you can flip up when deer are likely to be active. This is something that needs more information because there's, needs more investigation because there's really not a whole lot of consensus about what's the best thing to do in this regard. But the other thing that we did determine was that there are the possibility in some areas where road construction goes through areas of no deer movement that there are ways to build under passes and there are some federal programs that could be looked at for funds or matching funds to create underpasses for deer and other wildlife and so that's something else that we'd like the city to look at. And one of the things in terms of education that we're going to be working on this year is the defensive driving video that would be available at the library and run on channel, the public channels on cable. The balance of the report page 21 talks about a number of projects that are underway and I don't know if we want to go through all of those, one of the things that came out of our discussions in the beginning of our committee year this year was a much longer laundry list of possible responses to the deer situation in Iowa City that don't necessarily entail lethal control techniques and some of them are off the wall and some of them require or invite more discussion but this is really laundry list time and things will be thrown out when they don't work but it was one of those say what you want and we'll put it on the list. The balance of the report is essentially resource, there's a brief history of the activity of the committee since 1997 and one of the things we did this year was change the deer voice recorded line to a subset of the web site. And we were surprised there was a lot of interest in the beginning and then it tailed off. I think there' s been a little more lately but not lots. People could type in their unedited as long as they were principle comments and those are included in the report. And then Attachment A is the information from the DNR that was provided at our request to help us understand the level of kill that would be necessary if we accept the idea of continuing progress toward the long term goal. Attachment B will tell you some of the things that you probably want to know about what happened with White Buffalo last year, it's a summary report of the activities of December and January. Kanner/Pat. Farrant/Yes. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 50 Kanner/Once anticipate getting to the 35 count what's the number of deer that you would anticipate having to be killed each year to maintain that? Farrant/Don't know, I imagine we could do a projection of that, it's a good question, I don't know the answer to it, I don't think we know yet. Kanner/And you would anticipate getting there basically this year after the kill of 500? Farrant/We would be close to it in some areas if the predictions of fertility are accurate. Tim might have more to say about that. We're looking at the back page of Willy's (Suchy) report. Pfab/What page? Farrant/It would be page 30. Tim Thompson/I think one thing that like they were mentioning looking at the deer districts in town you also got to realize there' s deer just past that city limits too and those populations are going to have some impact because those deer don't say I'm a city deer I'm not going over hem, I'm a county deer and them is some movement obviously, the deer way out there aren't going to come way in here because their home ranges don't go that far. And so in looking at the 35 deer per square mile that' s the, the reason that figures sort of thrown out that' s where we know if the deer above that population are going to start seeing damage to a natural environment. You're going to start losing certain (can't hear) communities and under (can't hear) of that woodland. And we also know that in certain areas such as the airport one deer per square is too many, if you're sitting on that plane ready to take off so there's different tolerance limits on different areas. But the 35 deer per square mile is basically that we figure we're protecting the environment, what you may have to go lower in some areas to protect maybe the desires of certain urban people in some areas they may not want nearly that many deer in their neighborhoods. The thing of getting back to the idea of getting down there in one year, the idea on any of these programs that you're doing all the deer experts pretty much agree that you can't just go out and do something one year and evaluate it and say it's a good program. You're going to be into it at least probably three years to look at this, analyze it last year White Buffalo had real good success in coming in here, they were able to dispatch a lot of deer very quickly. We had real good snow conditions fight after the first of the year, the weather, that' s one big variable. There' s other things that come into play too, that all of a sudden it starts raining and it rains the rest of the fall, these farmers still have crops out in December and January these deer aren't going to come to bait sights if they've got standing corn fields. And I'm not talking about in the county, we've got lots of corn fields right in the city limits so there's still a lot of ag. land This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 51 fight here in town. And so there are lot of variables and you can't just say that we are going to get down there, and if White Buffalo and shoot 500 deer it would see a dramatic drop in that population but probably there's going to be some areas where they weren't able to shoot and you're still going to have some high deer numbers. That' s just like last year they concentrated in a few different areas and some areas they didn't have access to, those people were probably going hey I thought they were sharp shooting, I'm still seeing just as many deer as I did before but that' s because they didn't have access in those neighborhoods. But overall I think and I think Tony would probably agree shooting 500 would be a real sizable task to accomplish and the idea is that that is sort of a range that we're looking at in between there and you've got to ask the DNR when you submit this to the Natural Resource Commission how many permits you're looking, or tags you're looking to have for these animals and they're going to approve that higher number realizing that if you only get 200 you only get 200, if you get 450 you know that' s great you're going to be closer to your goal but don't plan on and I think Tony pointed this out last year that it was sort of good analogy you don't mow your yard in May and figure your done for the year. And the same thing for the deer management when we're providing that habitat here in town and we like that habitat, we like our yards nice, we like the Iowa River, we like the Ralston Creeks and the other nice green belts we have, we're going to be providing deer habitat and we're going to continue to have deer. And we're going to continue to be faced with managing those deer each year. Maybe not in that degree and we hope that if we get the numbers down, if something would happen and they couldn't shoot this year, or nothing is done, those numbers, you could expect them to go up about 30 - 35 percent, add that many more on top of it. So that gives you an idea that there's that many more you're going to have to control the next year so the more you can get earlier in the program the less you have to take in the long run if you can keep them down. Kanner/So let' s say we are at the 35 figure per square mile and we continue to use lethal methods the same way we're using them proposed this year or last year, how many deer approximately have to be killed each year to maintain that 35? I know you can't (can't hear) exact signs but give us a ballpark figure of what we're looking at in the future. Thompson/I haven't really even tried to pencil it out to look at it, let's see. I guess looking, well let's see. Kanner/I think it's important that we have an idea of what we're in for for the long term if possibilities. Farrant/Tim. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 52 Thompson/Like I said I hadn't tried to pencil that out, I'm just trying to look at these quickly so. De Nicola/In the generic sense in terms which is the terminology we're using is take 30 to 35 percent of your 35 deer per square mile so you're going to have somewhere between 10 or 12 deer per square mile theoretically if that were your distribution of deer. So basically you have to anticipate a 30 to maybe max. 40 percent increase in your population annually therefore you'd have to call that percentage to sustain your desired density. But you're going to see quite a bit of variability throughout the community. Some areas have 5 deer per square mile technically you kill one or two deer if that and in areas, you may have areas that are 40 to 50 deer per square mile because of access issues and you may have to kill maybe 15 to 20 deer a year. It all depends on how big your management zone is with the densities are there and just anticipate once those goals are achieved to harvest roughly 30 to 40 percent of that population annually. Kanner/But we're talking 35 deer per square mile as an average over the whole city right? Thompson/No we're just looking at, when we did our survey's, let's see we don't have a map over there, obviously we don't fly over this building right here because the deer aren't going to be concentrated here if there was a deer here we probably wouldn't see it anyway because it would be tucked in behind some hedge. We're flying in some areas where we would expect there to be reasonable deer habitat and with those areas that we're surveying the ones that are listed on the table we've got about 9 V2 square miles there so if your seeing a, let's just round that to 10, 10 square miles so we're looking at 120 to 150 deer on 10 square miles if your having that much of an increase each year. Kanner/So 10 square miles times 35? Thompson/Well I'm looking at population of 35 deer per square mile with an increase of 30 to 40 percent. 12 to 15 deer in each square mile additional each year. So 12 to 15 times 10 square miles, 120 to 150 deer. Kanner/120 to 150 (can't hear) each year. Thompson/Annually, and that's contingent that nothing else happens like I said a mild winter that you can't track them in or very harsh winter that you can't have access because you just can't get out there. De Nicola/As the mayor pointed out you can't oversimplify deer distribution in an environment such as this, you can't just, 35 deer per square mile is a generic This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 53 number for both biological and cultural conflicts. So you're going to find areas of town where people will be very intolerant to deer and may want lower densities or may be in very high traffic areas where your maybe your reflectors aren't adequate enough and you need to concentrate your effoas in and around approximate to some of those more heavily traveled roads and then there may be some areas where people don't mind 40 to 45 deer per square mile and they're quite content with that and yet you have to sustain those densities accordingly so you have to micro manage. And appreciate that 10 square mile area, we only work in 4 square miles last year, much of the western poaion of town towards Coralville was not even assessed. So fight now if any activity were to take place this year really it's going to be in the northern part of town and that' s 4 square mile area where you'll be trying, where you have to adjust that 500 will be looking at all those zones where as realistically if your working in a 4 square mile noah side of town to achieve a 500 deer reduction will be close to impossible based if you were just working in that select area. Thompson/Yea actually on part of that just mention that part of that east just mention that part of that east Clear Creek, a lot of that is in Iowa City but that was left out because a lot of that is also University owned land and there is quite a large deer population there but that' s not reflected in these numbers that you're dealing with in the plan. Pfab/When you go out to kill a deer what is your ratio doe' s to bucks or how, is there, do you care? De Nicola/You always prioritize shooting female at the bait sight, males, contrast to the hunting popular opinion that their much more intelligent, their actually much more easily removed so often times you remove all the females there's still a male there, and you remove that animal, it's still an animal that's chasing doe's and when it's crosses roads it's still consuming vegetation. But what we've worked on a manuscript right now in which we're summarizing all the demographics of suburban unhunted deer populations and it's extremely consistent. You basically have 40 percent mature doe' s and you have 40 percent fawns and you have 20 percent males yearling and above. And so that's your population you're contending with and typically the harvest reflects that and very much mirrors what's out there. Thompson/Actually what White Buffalo shot last year their numbers right here, 60 percent females, 40 percent males. Pfab/My question is that by design or that' s just the way it comes up? This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 54 De Nicola/A bit of both. When you harvest deer at a site you harvest in an opportunistically but you prioritize the females, but with the techniques we use in essence you end of removing all the deer that are at that site and that is often reflective of the population as a whole. And you can avoid removing males but males if their not dumb but if they repeatedly see the program in process they' 11 start to get leery to the operation and they quickly start sharing their flight response with other deer which may be your target females in the population. So you can't completely ignore the males. In your 60/40 we really look at as antler less to antler and you end up with 80 percent of your population antler less because you can't differentiate a male and female fawn unless you have it in hand. So that affects what your actual sex ratio is. Farrant/I'm going to finish, I promise. Just a couple more things. There is, if you really get into there is a color keyed map that will help you understand this a little bit better. Go back to the short term plan for this year, there are a couple more items on that list, we took a detour into sharp shooting and now we're coming back to the plan. The issue of what to do when we reach whatever the target population turns out to be is a tough one, I mean we didn't, I think one of the things that would be follied to think is that we signed on for something that was going to be over in 2 or 3 years I think everybody has kind of taken that in now after three years of talking and I don't know what the outcome will be. If you listened to, if you observed any of the conversations at a couple of the listening sessions you will see what both Tim and Tony were saying about people being very variable and their willingness to tolerate deer. Two of my neighbors came to one of the deer listening sessions and we all have exactly the same situation with deer and two of them had terrible problems and one didn't, go figure, we all have exactly the same number of deer in the same neighborhood so you have that and then you have people who truly have a bigger problem and then you have people who have a bigger stronger reaction to the situation they have. And so it's not going to be an easy one even if we get down to some population that everybody seems to feel is the target. One thing that did come up as a result of the discussions at the listening sessions finds it's outcome in number 6. Some members of the committee suggested that we investigate the possibility of some kind of regulated hunting and in our deliberations we made a very clear distinction between sharp shooting and hunting so this would be a DNR typical DNR hunting allowance in some areas in the city limits. What the outcome of that will be we don't know but there was enough interest in it that we thought we should include it in the plan as something to be looked at. And then 7 and 8 are just kind of boiler plate that we'll keep compiling data so that subsequent committees will have something to work with. So this is essentially what it took a little less time but no less emotion this year to hammer out. We learned a lot this year, you can't assume that there' s carrying over from leaming from year to year because we do introduce new people and new concems and so I think those of you who continue on the council will This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 55 probably hear every year some combination of what you've already heard before and some stuff that your kind of surprised to hear. I think we're OK with this plan, we did have a unanimous approval of it which was different than last year, there was one abstention last year, there were no abstentions this year. So I'll throw the floor open to discussion, we can bring any of the visitors back up to talk about very specific things or we can talk generalities it's, we're at your pleasure. O'Donnell/I don't really, you know I listened at both of these deer listening sessions and some of the comments I heard it was, this one lady has 7 ½ acres, she's got 15 grandchildren under 10, and she can't let them out in her yard to play baseball or football because of deer droppings. And I listened to an organic farmer who planted 42 pepper plants in one night and they were gone in the morning and who could not stay at the meeting because he had to go home and protect his plantings. I listened to an elderly couple that said they had trees damaged in during the (can't hear) and all the bark was pulled offof them and those trees meant a great deal to them. But I guess the one that affected me most was I listened to this elderly lady say that she did her yard 50 or 60 years ago and she did it with her heart and shovels and she' s watching this yard just be taken apart on a daily basis and had seen 30 to 40 deer in her yard so I'm ready to support the deer committee. I think they've done an outstanding job and looked at all the aspects of this and I just think you did a tremendous job. Farrant/Let me say one thing, thank you, on behalf of everybody, let me say one more thing. One of the suggestions was made and I thought it was a very good one was that perhaps when we get to the point where this a level of deer in the city that in general people will tolerate that we create some kind of deer ombudsperson office to deal with the very specific kinds of situations and several of them were the ones that you just named where people have a very specific problem that needs to be addressed and there was interest in that for a lot of reasons, one was just to help citizens solve their problems but another was maybe we don't need to continuously have a huge response to a problem that maybe at some point will become localized and be rather pockets within the city. We're not there yet though. Pfab/I would really support the deer ombudsperson, ornbudsrnan I guess is the word and because we as a group like the deer, and if there are particular hardships for individual people I think that there should be a way that if that to work with some way so that they can feel somewhat comfortable that they're not being, they're, the benefit of the deer is for the total population is not, they're not that is shouldering all of the burdens. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 56 Lehman/Now my understanding is tomorrow night there will be discussion on this, an opportunity for the public to comment. Pat we're going to ask you to give a brief overview of the work of the committee and we will have the public discussion and then my understanding is probably at the following meeting we will vote on the plan which will be a week from tomorrow night. And obviously I suppose there may be questions tomorrow night from the public and/or council folks which you or White Buffalo should be prepared to answer or the DNR if your here. Is there other questions from council tonight? A lot of this needs to be during public discussion tomorrow night. Kanner/Could we have tomorrow a rough estimate of the costs, do you anticipate it being about the same? Farrant/Can we do that? Yes we can. Anything else? Lehman/Pat thank you. I think, I speak for the entire council, please thank your committee, each one of them, I mean really this is a job that is a thankless job, it's a difficult job and we're so fortunate to have folks who are willing to do this and I mean really express our sincere appreciation. Everybody says thank you whatever, we really mean thank you. Champion/If nobody likes your decision. Farrant/We said that in the beginning, our little preamble says you know it's a, what made it possible at least for me the last sentence, the plan is to compromise, it's a product of our attempt to listen, understand and respect many different voices. But I would say the means test for being on the committee in the future you have to have a high tolerance for abuse. Champion/Yea, you guys have done a great job. Lehman/I think that would encourage you to be on the council, thank you Pat. Economic Development Committee Undate Lehman/OK Economic Development update, the only thing that I think that we were, we did meet a couple weeks ago. One of the things that the committee viewed as a priority and we kind of wanted to run it just past the council is this area to the south of Iowa City, particularly the area along the Dane property and the extension of Mormon Trek. The Wolfe trailer park property as this area develops this envision that that property picked along the south edge of the airport and over against Highway 1 to be prime property for future investor development because of it's proximity to Highway 1. Now that road is not in the CIP in a specific year This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 57 but I think what we would like from the council is just some concurrence that we can proceed to visit with the property owners there regarding annexation, regarding the perhaps the location. All of this will come back to the council but this is just your permission to proceed because we feel this is an important thing that we should be moving along with rather than putting it somewhere in the out years, we could come up with some definite proposal for that area including the alignment of the road and what would be done hopefully getting some annexation. Pfab/You say and discuss with the property, who do you mean? Lehman/Well there at least three property owners. Pfab/OK I thought you said property owner, OK. Lehman/No, there are at least three owners and then of course the Wolfe project would be in the same area whatever, but the whole area appears to us to be kind of a prime area particularly with the north side of the airport being, we're going to put the infrastructure in that I think even this fall. The south side of the airport can be accessed as soon as that road is put through. There' s some real issues involved with that manufactured housing area and that entire area right off of the intersection of Highway 1 and 218 is should be really primed particularly when the Avenue of the Saints is completed which is coming pretty pretty quick so it would be nice for us to at least be ready. O'Donnell/I think that's a good idea, very good. Pfab/I concur with that. Lehman/I mean the committee obviously would do absolutely nothing except we do a little bit of ground work and maybe get some recommendations from time to time as (can't hear). Pfab/While you have that, while you're talking about that area there and that particular area the mobile home park, I notice it keeps, it' s kind of slipping down the slope and we never can catch up to it as to approve it, it keeps moving out. Lehman/Oh but I think there are issues that are being dealt with as we speak. Pfab/OK so there. Lehman/Oh that is another issue, this would tie into that, that's another issue that's being dealt with as we speak. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 58 Pfab/So there is progress being made even though it doesn't come for our approval or vote? Lehman/Well according to what Karin said that she hoped there might be something ready by October 3 so obviously we are talking and we have hopes that there are some progress being made. Pfab/I think there's a lot of tug and pull there from both, different, there are different (can't hear) by different people, different principles. Lehman/All right then we will proceed along that line, I don't know when we'll have our next meeting. Atkins/Let's have it (can't hear). Lehman/I don't know when we have our Economic Development meeting. Atkins/That' s one of the things to do to talk to you about, we have to schedule that shortly. Lehman/OK but then we, we did, and that last meeting from David Schoon from Economic Development, Karin Franklin, this is staff folks as well as the committee but we think it's something to address sooner rather than later. O'Donnell/We do too. Lehman/Well thank you. O'Donnell/You're welcome. Champion/Sooner or later either one or the other. Council LaDton Comouter Policy Lehman/The next item on the agenda is the Council Laptop Computer Policy and I will state the policy as I understand the council to have set it and if the council wishes to change it please say so. And if Marian I think you did, we all got copies of a memorandum that was given us early part of this year. Council a couple years ago and it might have been at my request being we were getting so many volumes of paper decided to try laptops to eliminate the 12 or 15 thousand pages of paper that we all got and made our trips down to the recycling place a couple times a year. And the idea was we would have a program which I understand Laserfiche is This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 59 specifically designed to provide the kinds of information that the council needs, puts it all on one disk, does not have the mountains ofpaperwork that are associated with hard copy. And in order to use the computer we required the Laserfiche program, we get the information on a disk and then if we are (can't hear) to use the disk and instead of a hard copy we would then have the laptops on which you use the disk. And I think that is the policy that' s been pretty much set out that the use of the laptops are for the disks which provides the information. If we don't use the disk I think the policy specifically says that there are probably less fancy, less expensive laptops that could be used for other purposes. How does the rest of the council understand the laptop policy? Vanderhoef/The way you stated it is the way I understand it. Pfab/I guess I have, I have just a question, I mean I have no problem with the policy. How many users here are quite satisfied with the laptop arrangement? Champion/Very. Lehman/Oh I like it. O'Donnell/I think this is the best thing since sliced bread for getting rid of carrying those 300 and 400 page packets. I, you know we assembled those, I've got one four- drawer file cabinet, and it was full in six months and it's just. Pfab/OK so then I want to ask another question, I'm trying to get a feel of what everybody has. I had to give up using the e-mail in the computer just because it was so unreliable and slow, now I understand that the combination of Laserfiche and the laptop is a lot different than Laserfiche on the city computers, it's a, the program is a fair amount different and slower and more difficult to use. O'Donnell/Connie would you explain to me what he said. Lehman/I don't have any idea Irvin. Champion/I don't have (can't hear). Pfab/But everyone else seems to feel that it's working. Wilburn/What is it that you'd like to? Lehman/The information from the packet I love, I love it because it's no space, I don't have papers all over the place, I pick up the computer everything is right there. I do not use e-mail that much and when I do use it or periodically I'm the same as This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 60 many times that I read the e-mail. I think e-mail is probably slow but I don't really care about the e-mail as much as I do the information which is what we got the laptops for was getting the packets. O'Donnell/And you can reference it back it just (can't hear). Wilburn/What is it that you would like to happen that' s not happening by this policy? Was it that you wanted? Pfab/Well what I really wanted, what I was really expecting was the connection, the phone connection with the city would be a lot quicker, a lot more certain that you could depend on it, I've found that that doesn't work. Champion/I've never had a problem. Vanderhoef/What do you mean? Wilburn/So give that what are you asking for? Pfab/No I'm not asking for anything, I was just asking for information in a sense that I've tried different approaches, I'm using this right now and that's fine, I'm probably will go back and make another shot at the computer and the disk and one of the problems that I had is with bifocals it's difficult, I mean you try to follow the sucker and to get it on a page you had to have it so small that you couldn't read it. Now I. O'Donnell/You can enlarge it. Pfab/Then you get a little piece of the page so you can't. O'Donnell/Then you up and down it. Pfab/Yea, then you're up and down so I'm getting different glasses which I haven't gotten yet but I had my eyes tested so I'll probably give it another shot and so. Lehman/You can also print, there are portions of the packet and I hate to admit that there are significant. (END OF 00-85 SIDE 1) Lehman/And Commissions that represent no controversial discussion I do not peruse, I peruse them I don't read them as carefully as I should but there are probably other sections that if I'm interested I go ahead and print them out. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 61 Pfab/I also had difficulty when I went to print it out the printer didn't want to work so on this computer so I had to use it on my other and get it off e-mail and the web and what not so. No that' s fine, I have no problem with that, I was just wondering if everyone else, if it was working fine for everyone else that' s fine. Champion/I don't think you really gave it a fair chance. Pfab/Well that's not impossible. Champion/You know I think you should try it again it really is very simple, listen believe me if I can do it you can do it. Pfab/Well the question. Champion/You can always get it working again for the next packet. Pfab/OK. So anyway. Lehman/Well for retrieving, or for the information that we need for council I really like it just because I don't have to carry that huge amount of paper. Steven. Kanner/I don't think it's perfect, I think there's room for improvement and hopefully over the coming years the program will be improved in some ways. But the issue of not being able to keep your computer if you request the paper one, the paper packet it seems to me that to take someone' s computer really doesn't benefit the city, it's there and it's not really going to go to someone else. And the council member has the opportunity to print off all the pages themselves if they want to do that. But it seems that that' s a more expensive way than to just allow if a council member is having difficult reading it on the screen to do just an extra printout along with the ones that go to the press and the other people and to keep the computer for possible use for research, you also need a program to look at past records and past council packets. So from that point of view I don't really have a problem spending the extra dollar or two to do another packet for a council member that' s having trouble reading it. To me that was one of the issues I saw here and still being able to keep the computer. Pfab/I guess not to, just another topic, I have a computer that has exactly the same chip, it has exactly the same, what is it ram, the high 28 megs. a ram and on that computer I can do 5 times the work as I can with this and it was just, it wasn't efficient but of course today I ran into the problem it doesn't have Laserfiche and the city has a problem they don't want to put in them and I'm not arguing that. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 62 Lehman/That may be a license problem Irvin I don't know that. Pfab/Well I don't think it's a license problem because you could put it in this one and because I'm the only one who can use it one at a time. Lehman/But I think it has to be in city owned equipment. Pfab/Right I mean that's yea. Lehman/Yea a license agreement. Pfab/So that was, I don't think it's part of the license equipment it's just that the city has a policy and I really don't want it in mine after I sorted it out, I like mine a lot. I don't want somebody to screw it up. Lehman/And slow it down. Pfab/Yea but anyway so no the other problem is if I don't have the computer and even if I do get this there's spaces that I don't have because there was spaces I didn't get so it's on the disk but I don't have the hard copy so anyway, it's no, it's not a big deal one way or the other, I can live either way with any of them and that' s fine. Lehman/I really think it would be if you should leam to use it (can't hear) if you can read it because I think it has so many advantages (can't hear). Pfab/Well that's why, I never sat down and asked everybody what did you like and does it work and I watch, I observe what you do and I see running through it and I look at it and I say oh shucks what was that? So I can read this. Champion/Well it does have it disadvantages too, I mean you can't sit on the couch and throw up and watch a movie while your flipping through like the notes (can't hear) so it does have certain problems. Kanner/What movies? Lehman/Channel 98. Champion/While watching Discover channel. O'Donnell/I do too. Lehman/Well I think the point has been from the beginning that if the computers were there to make life a little easier for the council people and I think what you said This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 63 Steven is not necessarily the truth because I do believe that there are uses for laptops within the building that if a council person has a computer has a computer and doesn't use it that we could probably use it (can't hear) I mean it's not something that just sits in an office it the council person isn't using it. Wilburn/Well the policy also says if your not going to use Laser~sche, a less expensive laptop could be provided for you to e-mail and letters and things like that so. Kanner/But you probably want to keep it for doing research. Lehman/But if you can't do it then there' s no. Vanderhoef/But if you don't know how to do Laserfiche you're not going to know how to do the research anyway. Kanner/Well that's an assumption that people will learn to do that or have trouble seeing. Wilburn/Or if you have trouble seeing it for the packet you're going to have trouble seeing it for the research for a search or something like that. O'Donnell/I think we ought to see ifthere's (can't hear) Kanner/But the point is that that' s not an every week occurrence perhaps and that' s not 200 to 300 pages. Pfab/Well I guess I guess I wouldn't want to pull my ADA rank here. With my disability I' ve really been following that but so I mean, so no that' s fine, if I just, the problem is when I used to depend on it and I couldn't, I couldn't, there are times when I couldn't, I didn't know what was in it, it just wouldn't work and so I just, so that was when I said I need some safety hatch and that' s why I went that way and if I have to have one or the other I want one that I can depend on. Lehman/Well I tell you if you want and I would be more than happy and I'm sure that almost any council person here when we get our packets if you want to (can't hear) on a Thursday afiemoon when we pick it up, we'll bring our computers down and we can sit down and go through the process a couple three times (can't hear). Pfab/Oh no, oh I know how, I run it and I follow it a number of times but there are times you put it in and it didn't work. Lehman/Oh, no, if you put it in right it works every time. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 64 Pfab/Well that's up. Lehman/No Irvin that' s why I say. Pfab/See I have all these wonderful endorsements OK. O'Donnell/I know how to use those two buttons. Pfab/OK. No as far as the policy I can live with that (can't hear). Champion/Well the other thing now, I just want to bring up something else. If he loads his computer with Laserfiche for retrieval mechanisms then I think you can he can probably see well enough to go back and retrieve something and print it out. So I want to make sure we're not be too petty here, I mean is it really so terrible to print out another packet for somebody? Pfab/Well I kept trying to find that out and I always ran into a brick wall because I couldn't get past it. I don't know what the cost is, is it $100.00 then it's too expensive. If it's $4.00 or $5.00 then I think it's tolerable or $10.00 1 don't know so that was just. Lehman/It's council's call. Karmer/What do we charge the press for their packets per year? Lehman/We don't charge for that do we? Atkins/Yea we do. Karr/We do. Kanner/Yes we do. Wilburn/I'm not looking at it, I'm not looking at it as a cost per printout one packet. Kanner/Well I have another question Ross it's whether I can get an answer to that. Atkins/I don't know the answer Steven, we'll find out. It's a subscription rate of some kind isn't it? Karr/Yea, it's a yearly subscription based on per the price per last year, I don't know what it is. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 65 Kanner/Like $30.00 or something. Karr/Oh no. Atkins/Oh no. Karr/Oh no. Kanner/Hundred' s, two hundred. Karr/It's several hundred. Atkins/We'll find out for you tomorrow. Pfab/So it's $700.000 dollars? Karr/Several, several. Lehman/Several. Atkins/Several. Pfab/Oh OK. Wilburn/I'm not looking at the cost of handing someone an extra packet if you've got this. The issue is do I, do I know how to take advantage of the technology with this model of computer. If I'm not using, if I'm a computer but not the level of technology here the expense of having this I might as well give this to somebody who (can't hear). If all I'm doing on this is word processing there's no point in me having this computer, that' s what I'm looking at this at. Is that clear? Lehman/Right. Wilburn/OK. Champion/Or e-mail. Wilburn/Even though it's not here, if I'm playing solitaire on here it doesn't make sense for me to have this model. Lehman/I have solitaire on mine. Wilburn/Well that' s a different issue. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 66 Lehman/Well are we satisfied with the present policy? Do we change anything? Pfab/That's fine with me. Lehman/All right. City Manager Report - Distribution of Draft Documents Lehman/City Manager's report. Atkins/I have an item for you this evening, hopefully this won't take too long. I have a concern that I want to share with you, not only from my office but some of the other folks in the building. It's the distribution of draft documents to you, those documents to you that are not in final form, the timing of the distribution of those documents. Recently a staff person asked me upon the request of a council member to distribute a developer's agreement and I said yes, that developer's agreement was not finished at the time it was distributed. Now in itself that may not seem to be a big deal but let me just take this take you with us for a couple more minutes. The moment I have that document given to a council member and this case it was selective, all of you didn't get it, the document became public in effect at that time because the document was made available for public review. Now principle I don't mind the public review but it should be the final document and I want to explain to you some of the reasons why. If it becomes public and only one or two of you are aware that this document is out you know quite frankly it affects my relationship with the rest of you and I did get some calls. And I was called by the press to ask about, to comment on the document and the council member didn't have it. The press is only doing their job, we received calls in the office about this document, we tried to explain to a couple folks that it was a draft, that we were still negotiating with the developer, and that it's likely to change. Well it didn't stop the people from pressing us for questions, and in fact I ended up talking about the thing twice, nobody ends up particularly happy about that. Pfab/Can I interrupt here because I'm the person who did that? Atkins/Sure. Pfab/Before I released that. Kauner/No you're not Irvin. Atkins/There are two of you. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 67 Pfab/Just a second, but anyway before I released that to anyone, I asked David Schoon. Atkins/OK. Pfab/Is it, can I put this out to the press? Atkins/Now that' s the problem. Karr/No you (can't hear). Atkins/Now that' s the problem, you asked David Schoon, not me, not Marian, not Eleanor. Pfab/Well I was under the impression. Atkins/OK well let me finish up here folks because that' s part of the difficulty too is that if we're going to talk to different staff people, and by the way I'm not angry about this it's just that it reflects on our staff work. My concern is the public review process is initiated and not all of you know about it, and a couple of you let me know and rightfully so. I didn't know what's going on, what' s the comment, what' s this. Here' s the problem, it's a complete document, not all of you are informed collectively, simultaneously, it will lead to confusion at any public hearing because somebody's going to read the draft and come to the heating with one expectation, you're going to have the final and it's another expectation. The media is not informed, the media found this out, they're doing their job, but it somewhat unofficial and unfair to all the media. It reflects badly on our staff work, you have a right to expect good staff work. But we have a right in my judgment to give you good staff work and if it goes out as a draft, that is not a complete work product. And finally it can really stifle creativity, folks aren't going to write things down, and circulate drafts, and run ideas informally passed people. If they think it' s going to get out before it' s ready to get out. I would ask you please don't be angry with us, please respect the fact that if a product, a work product is not finished I may so no to you it's not ready, it will go out to everybody all at the same time. Please remember we move the agenda up a day in order to allow for more public review and comment. Pfab/What do you mean by that? Atkins/You used to get them on Friday, you now get your packets on Thursday, we added a day. Pfab/Oh OK. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 68 Atkins/But the difficulty, I'm not naive, I know full well that you want to represent your various constituent interest groups with respect to various projects, that's OK and you have seven differences of opinion, that' s OK, and you want to share it with you constituent interest groups but I'd like to make sure that all of you share the same document at the same time with whoever you want to comment on and that didn't happen. Lehman/So what you're saying is that you're going to have a policy of not releasing draft documents. Atkins/You know it, we make it sound so formal but anyway yea, I mean, an informal request for information is one thing but the moment I place it in the hands of one council member and if the council member chooses to make it public I've got six potential council members not happy with me and I don't want that. And checking with David, Irvin that's OK, David called me and I told David to release the document, I shouldn't have done that, I should have said no. Karr/Steve, Steve that's a different document, Irvin that's not the same thing, it's a different document. Atkins/All I know is that we can't go to three or four staff people to get the answer you want on a document and particularly when it's a draft. Now you may as individuals not be as concerned about this but I really am truly concerned about particularly the public review and hearing process. Somebody comes tomorrow night comes to the microphone to be critical of a process of a document they read, it's not the fight document, it may have been changed, it may have, who knows. But we've got to kind of bring that under control. Pfab/Every page had draft on it. Atkins/ That' s, absolutely and it should not have gone out. Pfab/And that's why that didn't bother me and when I spoke to them, he criticized, I'll check with you, I wouldn't know where to go. Atkins/Call me. Pfab/OK well then I did something wrong. Karr/Steve, Steve. Atkins/No you did not. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 69 Karr/Irvin it is a, what Steve is talking about is not the same one I sent you, I got it from David, that' s a different issue, what Steve is talking about is not the same specific thing. Atkins/I'm talking about a draft document. Karr/That' s different. Pfab/OK it's different. Atkins/Nobody did anything wrong, you're exercising what you want to do as council members and I'm OK with that but you've got to understand that I want, I just want us to be fair to us but let us do our jobs and give you good staff work, you have a right to expect it. And then when I get a call from a person who' s saying that I just read a document and it says this and it says that, I say wait a minute, I hadn't even read it, I went back and read it and said I'm sure that's going to get corrected. Well then why are you putting it out? I'm not putting it out, well then how did it get out and why does the press have it? I spent 10 minutes arguing with this one particular person over why the documents out, which finally he said I've got one person to blame, me, should of said no and I didn't. Lehman/So what your saying is you're not going to release draft documents and you're going to release all documents to all council people at the same time. Atkins/I would like to make that an understanding from all of you. Lehman/You just did. Didn't he? Vanderhoef/Yes. Kanner/Steve I hear what your saying and it makes sense what your saying, I think in my mind the issue is having enough time to present this to the community and so it's a political sense for the council in one regard. Atkins/Yep. Kanner/But it also you're part of that and you help set the agenda. Atkins/Yep. Kanner/And also you have a perspective that you're trying to push just like we are in many ways and so I think (can't hear). This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 70 Atkins/Woo wooo wait a minute perspective I'm trying to push. Kanner/Yea. Atkins/No. Champion/No. Atkins/No you made a decision as a city council that you wished us to enter into a developer' s agreement with MGD, we prepared that document, I didn't push anything, I did what you told me to do. I don't want to get into debates with your various constituent interest groups over what I like or don't, that's not an issue here. O'Donnell/I agree. Atkins/What's at issue is your policy, vote it up or vote it down, that's your call. Champion/Steve I have problems with. Kanner/Let me Connie before you go on let me just respond to that. And I'm not going to, I'll formulate a response specific to what your saying, but in general the idea is that people that set the agenda up have a certain amount of control and I think it' s incumbent on those people that set the agenda to realize that more time is needed than four days, one and a half business days or whatever to present this to the public in a detailed fashion and to be able to gather political support for perhaps minority position. So I think that' s we should talk about it as a council and certainly as a council/staff. Atkins/That I'm OK with Steve but that political decisions rest with you all now I'll hear, I'll advise you, I can tell you the pitfalls, the ups the downs but if you wish to press a political position that's amongst you all. O'Donnell/And if you're going to present anything to the public it should be at a finished product. Lehman/That's what he's saying. Atkins/That's what I'm saying. That's my biggest concern. Vanderhoef/That' s the whole point, that was my big concern too, I happened to hear about it so at least when I got my phone call from the press I said that was just a draft not even a completed draft that's coming to council, we don't even know but This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 71 I had found this out because Steve had called and said this document is out on the Intemet and I said what and he told me. OK but when somebody calls me from the press and wants me to respond to it I haven't even seen it now how can I respond to it when I don't even have the copy so. Champion/Yea that' s right. Vanderhoef/If I receive a piece of information until I know everybody else has it on the council I wouldn't consider putting it out to anyone else. That part was made we really angry that it went out on the Internet because one person received it and put it out on the Internet and the rest of us did not have a copy of it. Champion/Can I just say something? Lehman/Please do. Champion/I'm trying but you know I just have to say that if you get a draft document and you're presenting that to the public you're presenting probably, it could be false information. Vanderhoef/Absolutely. Champion/And I think the only reason to present a draft document to the public is to grandstand Steven and I guess I have real problems with that. You asked for a particular piece of paper for your own use and then you put it on the Internet when it's not even a complete copy I really (can't hear) that. Kanner/Well first of all, you're stating facts that aren't true. I never asked for just my use, I made it clear that this would be used to show other people. Second of all I never put it on the Intemet so Connie before you start accusing. Champion/(Can't hear) I thought you said you did. Kanner/No I said that I was the one who requested the copy first of the draft specifically so that I can get, we had, the issue in my mind was that there weren't people speaking against this or for in favor of it except the developers and I felt it was incumbent that we have other people aware of this and so my position was to try to get the word out before 4 or 5 days, now I agree with our city manager that perhaps in the future that's a bad policy but I think it's then incumbent on us to make sure that we have enough time that we get our packet with this information on last Thursday and we don't vote on it and we don't have a public hearing until a week and a half so that we're able to circulate it throughout the community because that' s what we want to do. If we want to have a public hearing and we This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 72 want to have ample opportunity for people to hear it. We're about democracy and letting people in on it. And that' s why we need more time so that' s why I would urge council to do. Lehman/Well now in this particular case. Kanner/Wait Mike I didn't hear what you said. O'Donnell/I said Steve we are about democracy, this is about presenting a finished product to the public, this is about not giving out inaccurate information. You know there' s nothing for you to be offended about, this is something that you shouldn't have gotten in the first place and that' s the point, we don't get it until it's a finished product. You can then do whatever you want with it. Kanner/You don't agree then that we as a council then we would perhaps delay some of these issues. O'Donnell/No I wouldn't, no I wouldn't. Kanner/Some of these issues that are big issues that we'd have more opportunity for the public to have access to these things. O'Donnell/That's not what I said Steven, did you hear me say that? Kanner/I'm asking would you agree to that. O'Donnell/And I just told you no. Kanner/You wouldn't agree to allowing the public to have more access. O'Donnell/We give the public three opportunities to comment Steven, we have a public heating, this is Iowa City, we want everybody's opinion and we get it. I mean to say that the public is not made aware of anything that we've got on the agenda is ludicrous. Vanderhoef/When they publish the packet is when all of the press gets it and when all of the staff. Lehman/All right but I think is Steven is saying and I hear what he's saying and I agree with you in some situations particularly when I'd (can't hear ) not do it because, you're talking about concept here with Sycamore Mall project. Not a particular contract but a concept, you disagreed with it the first time, it's basically the same thing, it's coming back up again so I don't consider that new, I don't consider that This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 73 something that someone had to have the information sooner rather than later. Now at the public hearing tomorrow night, we won't vote for another week, we vote two more times after that so there's, there is adequate time for public input. But I think this whole discussion is kind of past tense because if we, our policy is not to release draft documents to release all documents at the same time, what' s happened has happened and the future we know what we're going to do. Pfab/OK, all right here is the difficulty where somewhat handy struck here and that was we had the public heating and we had to vote on it immediately and one person showed up and so obviously the information was not getting out to the public. Lehman/No don't say that, it was well publicized in all the papers. Pfab/OK, all right the public wasn't picking up on it. Champion/Why because you didn't like it? Pfab/No, no, no, no, no, the public, you go out and talked to the public and nobody knew anything about it. I don't care, I don't have a dog in this fight, I really don't. But I do have, I'm interested in people becoming informed. Now Steve made a good point and I think maybe I can offer something to him on that and that is when it's issued, when the press and the council people pick up their packet that should be put on the Internet at the same time at 3:00 that should go right out on the Internet so anybody can pick it up. Ifthat's done (can't hear) then that's fine, but see otherwise it's a commodity that' s controlled, the press has it. And how much of that document did you see in any of the press? Atkins/Well it wasn't available. Pfab/Yea as far as anything. Atkins/It isn't finished. Pfab/Well it isn't finished, now that it is finished how much have you seen? But see if a person that wants to pick it up if they can go to the Internet that' s fine, I have no, I think that' s a wonderful and I think you bring up a good point, that at 3:00 that if the document' s ready put it on the Internet. Atkins/You want the whole agenda on Internet? Pfab/No, no, no. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 74 Lehman/But Irvin as far as having seen this that document is nothing more than filling in the blanks on that particular project, the urban renewal, the formula is there, it doesn't belong on the Internet. Pfab/Sure to you (can't hear). Lehman/Fill in the blanks. Pfab/To you it is because you've been doing this for six years. Lehman/No, no, no, because they're all that way, all urban renewal projects, the procedures and whatever are set by law. If you pass the concept which we did, it requires an agreement, the terms of that agreement are pretty much set by law. Isn't that correct? Atkins/Yea. Lehman/There' s not a whole lots of discussion between us and whoever it is we have to contract with. Those are pretty well set by law. Pfab/OK but even if, the (can't hear) and urban renewal area immediately after you have the public heating I thought that was, that caused panic. Champion/(can't hear). Pfab/Why couldn't it, the vote have been like every other public hearing like tomorrow we're going to have a public hearing on this document so it's going to wait, that's fine, no problem but see what I, but I also had a misunderstanding. I did not realize and I don't know how I missed it that that was the first of three readings, I thought it was a move and adopt. See so and I just realized it today because somebody brought it up to me and (can't hear) even says so I went back to it and so that's what I realized. Lehman/Well but we said that the same time we voted it was the first of three. Pfab/Well that wasn't, it, I asked before I voted, I said what does this mean and I, regardless. Kanner/Again I accept what Steve said on the conditions that he said make sense in fairness. I would ask that at a future work session we discuss about the timeliness of public hearings and when we consider things in regards to when information comes out. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 75 Lehman/I don't disagree with you, however when we set public hearings I think we're required by law to set those public hearings, how many days before the hearing? Karr/Most of the time it's no less than 4 and no more than 20. Lehman/No less than 4. Karr/Published, published 4 and 20, we set them, two weeks. Lehman/We're setting public hearing tomorrow night. Karr/Two weeks, two weeks usually. Lehman/We set the public hearings two weeks notice before the public hearing ever occurs, we've told the public we're going to have it. Kanner/But I'm talking in relationship to when information comes out, the specifics, and using Sycamore Mall deal as an example, just as an example. There were some specific information that we didn't get if we waited until Thursday. So I'm saying it might be appropriate at times to have a lag time and that's something I hope we can discuss at a work session. I don't know if it would be a majority that would agree with me, probably not but I think it's worth having that discussion a little more in depth and see. Lehman/I don't disagree with you except that I think when you have a public hearing even if you vote the first time the same night you still have to have two more votes which is a period of a minimum of 4 weeks and probably 6 weeks, that's a long time for public input. Vanderhoef/There's also. Champion/The other thing too is we are the democracy, we are elected by the public, we are represented even by districts to make sure there' s equal, not equal distribution or some distribution about geographically where people live who are elected to this position. We are the democracy and you know it's our job to vote now and public hearings are wonderful and I love to have people call me on the phone or e- mail or come to a public hearing. But sometimes I don't vote the way the public hearing wants me to vote because you know, it could be a special interest group, it could be something else, I vote on the decision that I think will be best on the long run of the commtmity and that' s how I'm going to continue to vote and I don't care if I have 500 public hearings. And that will be, you know if I'm not elected again I don't care, but I'm going to vote how I think I should vote so I'm not This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 76 saying we shouldn't have public hearings but I think what you're saying, I think you're definition of democracy and mine are different. Kanner/Well Connie someone here and a couple people I remember not to long ago saying if you really, if you want this to have a chance of getting on a work session, get the people to call and to write. And that's all I'm saying is this if, a better chance of getting the word out there in certain ways and let' s consider sometimes holding off on when we set the issue in motion because once you get that first thing going there's a certain (can't hear) even though there are three readings and the public is adversed to get involved. And I agree with you that we make the final decision. Champion/Right. Kanner/We make the vote, we can ignore, we can take into count or whatever for the public opinion. But if I want to have a chance of trying to convince people part of it is I have to try to convince the public in some ways to perhaps look at this a different way and consider whether they want to get involved in a bigger fashion. Vanderhoef/You know I think we have an example that happened just recently that people got involved because they were, they heard it and they wanted to be involved and that was on the down zoning south of Burlington. Now that was exactly the same kind of a pattern that we're going to have on this issue, it was published from the moment we set the public hearing we had a time constraint of when we did it and we certainly had adequate public input. And people found out about it and those that cared came down and talked to us, they sent us e-mail's, they called us on the phone, they offered to take us down and walk us around. It was the same identical time pattern so what your saying about this particular project I don't see any difference. We're going to continue to have, set the public hearing. Wilburn/That's an excellent point, yea. Pfab/I think that's, Dee I respectively disagree with you, the reason that that was one compressed because there was a building permit that had to be accepted or denied. Vanderhoef/No. Champion/It wasn't compressed. Vanderhoef/It was state law. Lehman/It was a moratorium that was going to be over (can't hear). This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 77 Pfab/Right, so that was a time flame, this did not have this time flame so. Vanderhoef/(can't hear) six weeks. Pfab/No just a minute, when we put a public hearing, when we have, I have just one request, if we're going to have a public hearing let' s not have a vote at the same time unless it's very pressing and then the public should be well informed. That was all, my only intention was to inform the public, I don't care how they vote, I don't have a dog in this fight. I don't have an agenda. Lehman/Generally speaking I think that we have almost always (can't hear). Pfab/But that was. Lehman/However it is always the call of the council if they wish to vote after a public hearing they certainly may. Pfab/We tried our best not to vote. Lehman/Well two of you did. It's also possible for the council to say we want to continue this public hearing, we're not satisfied (can't hear). Vanderhoef/We've done that one too. Lehman/But that's your call anytime we have a public hearing. Pfab/But see it was so out of ordinary and then we were going to vote right away and I was for some reason I was, and then at that point I missed the point, I did not realize this was one of three votes. So I said well if it's that much, it's almost like a railroad job, if you have the public hearing, one person shows up and we vote and that' s it. See so that was my panic that I developed, wrong but that' s why I took the stand I did and I didn't realize it was one of three hearings for sure, I finally figured it our today or yesterday maybe. O'Donnell/There are always three readings. Lehman/All right. Kanner/I just want to answer Dee, I think it was different because this was a group of people that initiated the petition, it also went through Planning & Zoning for a number of meetings too. The issue of Sycamore Mall did not come from a grass roots neighborhood group it came, one of the questions I have, what is the This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 78 timeline? Where did it come from? Did it come from the Economic Development committee? Did it come from the city manager? Did it come from Sycamore Mall who made the initial proposal? But in any case it is different because there was already a built in vocal advocate for the issue in a grass roots sense. There were people in the neighborhood that made this and they also had the Planning & Zoning to go through than Sycamore Mall case. (All talking) Lehman/OK, no, no, no, hold it. Now Steve we've addressed the issue and your policy is going to be not to release drafts and (can't hear). Atkins/I'd like to have your policy but you want ask so I'm going to have to tell you no. Lehman/Now despite what everybody thinks we haven't had council time. Kanner/Well let's let' s settle it first Emie, are there people that agree with this policy? Champion/Right. Lehman/Well I don't think anybody has a problem with that policy. Pfab/I only think the only problem, where the problem started was the vote immediately after the public heating, if there would, there would have been no problem at all if that vote at the next meeting I wouldn't have said a word. Word one I wouldn't have said it. Lehman/I hear you Irvin and that's a problem for you it was not a problem for some of the other council people and I understand where you're coming from and you're right it's a very (can't hear) from what we normally do. Pfab/And it's so unordinary and you're all like, there was no, it just kind of sprung out of, sure it was published but there was no constituency, there was no information, the press hadn't. Lehman/There was all kinds of, we're not going to argue the same topic. Stuff was all over the paper, people chose not to come because they agreed, disagreed or didn't care. Folks OK council time who would like to be first? Dilkes/I have one comment, I just want to clarify that this discussion is not related to the issue of whether something is an open record or not. Pfab/Is what? This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 79 Champion/Oh of course. Dilkes/I just want to make sure that' s clear that' s clear to the press and to you. Pfab/I didn't hear you. Dilkes/This discussion is unrelated to the issue of whether something is or is not a public record. Atkins/I understand that. Lehman/OK. Dilkes/Understood. Pfab/I'm fine with it. Lehman/OK council time. Council Time Lehman/Dee. Vanderhoef/I'll pass for a minute, I don't think I have anything. Lehman/Steven. Kanner/A few things. One Steve there' s a sidewalk on Dodge on the east side south of Bowery that is torn up for a while. Atkins/South of Bowery, on Dodge. Kanner/East side it's gavel, it goes for towards the bridge from Bowery to the bridge over the train tracks. Atkins/OK, I'll let you know tomorrow. Kanner/And I'd like to know what's happening to that. Atkins/I don't know but I'll find out and let you know tomorrow. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 80 Kanner/And to believe it or not I had a point to bring up about the public hearings that I didn't know we were going to get this discussion but there' s a little confusion on my point when we vote after a public hearing that. I was informed that the general council policy is to not vote the same day a public hearing unless it's requested usually by staff. And what I would ask is that we instruct staff in the agenda that comes to the public and in our packets to put one sentence why we're voting that time right after a public hearing because that is the exception. Arkins/Sure. Kanner/And I'm still, I don't know sometimes when we're going to vote and so I'm playing it by ear sometimes. So again I'm asking that staff on the agenda put when we're going to be voting immediately and they might put a disclaimer at the front that most instances we vote the following meeting after a public hearing, something to that affect, something simple. Lehman/I'm not positive. Vanderhoef/Do you want that with like when we okay letting a bids? Atkins/That's not an ordinance. Lehman/That's not an ordinance. Vanderhoef/Yea but we vote on it at the same time. Lehman/But I think that (can't hear). Atkins/Usually what you do in a plans and spec. Lehman/Suppose to be done in a certain time in November going through the process, I'm not positive about this maybe you know Steve but the Sycamore Mall public hearing and the reason we voted the first night I think that does fit a time table that we had to vote. Kanner/Well no that' s fine Emie and I understand, put a sentence saying staff recommends that we're we vote the same time just because such and such just like you said and everybody understands a little better. Atkins/Can I interrupt you a second Steve? Dee you were saying plans and spec. hearing that' s where you'll often close the hearing and adopt the resolution which the resolution is saying go out to bid, that' s all there is to it, they can still have another crack at it. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 81 Kanner/I think anything though that we have public hearing. Vanderhoef/That' s what I thought you were saying and I think there are some things that that shouldn't apply to. Atkins/Well then you need to talk about that. Vanderhoef/Yea. Kanner/Well just to put a sentence saying we're going to be voting. Vanderhoef/Well the sentence is fine. Kanner/Just say we're going to be voting. Dilkes/I don't think the. Vanderhoef/But the typical that we do that. Lehman/Eleanor. Dilkes/At last in the time that I've been here we've always held the public hearings at the same time we do the resolution and adopting the plans and specs. and so I think that's. Vanderhoef/That' s standard. Dilkes/That' s been the standard with respect to that issue. Lehman/Right. Kanner/Well even so though for the public I think it is a bit confusing and it wouldn't hurt to have that on there that information saying we're going to be voting right after the public hearing. Pfab/Not a problem. Lehman/Except that it says it right in the agenda, it's got public hearing, vote, resolution, it's right in the agenda. Vanderhoef/Yea they're right there. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 82 Lehman/It tells you right there, it did last. Vanderhoef/It's one agenda item, it gives you the business then it says public hearing and then the second is resolution. Lehman/Resolution, yea. Kanner/OK if it's clear and maybe I can see that but if we could be as clear as possible that's my point and anything would be a little bit of a (can't hear) for me. Lehman/OK. Kanner/I know this seems like beating a dead horse but it's the issue of traffic calming on College. The information I received is that the first count, the first survey was taken when school was in session in 1999 on College and Washington. The second count was taken when school was not in session. School was out of session May 4 and we're told the count was taken a couple weeks after that. And so we were told there was no significant decrease in speed and that there was a significant decrease in traffic but I'm wondering if that traffic is accounted for by the absence of students that are normally there who were there when the first count was taken. There might be reasons we want to keep the traffic calming devices there those particular ones but we might want to examine if their really doing the job and we might need other ones and I think it behooves us to get a count when school is in session and keep this issue open in a certain sense of what does the job. If it's not doing the job we have to think about other things, it's not bad or good it's just maybe it's not doing the job. O'Donnell/Have we not surveyed the property owners on College Street? Kanner/Well I'm talking survey of the traffic. O'Donnell/Oh but I'm talking, the procedure is that we survey the property owners and. Champion/And we check it out the next year though to see if it's working. O'Donnell/But I mean still Connie if you have 60 percent of the property owners that want to do it then we take it into consideration. Champion/Yea but I think the (can't hear) point when the count decreased, one count was taken, I mean the idea of traffic calming was to slow down the traffic which the city planner said didn't and a decrease traffic and if they took a reading when students were here and then when students were gone of course you'd have a decrease of traffic. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 83 Lehman/We don't really know when the cotrots were taken do we? Champion/No we don't. Kanner/No but we do actually and in the memo we know that school was out for the second one and at least the spring session one, we know that, I called and found out when school was out and they said May 4, even if that was the week before finals it was still two weeks later. And then the first count was taken March which Jeff in the middle said school was in session, I didn't check that but he said school was in session at that time. So we do know I think we ought to continue to look into this and see if we can do better. Champion/Is that an issue now or are is it just an issue it with us? Lehman/We have I think we told Jeff to make the traffic calming permanent and so did the survey in the neighborhood. Champion/Right. Lehman/And we may have some flawed information but if the. Champion/But we're not going to. Lehman/Influence our decision, what's your pleasure? Champion/Well if we've already decided to make it permanent then I'm not interested in going any further. O'Donnell/I'm not either. Champion/But I think it's a valid point, traffic counts ought to be done at the same time approximately. Vanderhoef/To approximate same populations. Kanner/We could leave it temporary for another year and take it. Vanderhoef/I would go along with that. Kanner/I'm not saying (can't hear) but let's leave it in there and. Wilburn/You just want another traffic count of the at a significant time. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 84 Kanner/Yea perhaps in March of 2001. O'Donnell/Have we not already advised everybody in that area that we are going to make it permanent? Lehman/We have said we're going to make it permanent but he brings it up and if there, it's up to the council. O'Donnell/Yea but we've already told the neighborhood and I want to stand by that. Lehman/Are there four people who would like to change this from making it permanent to leaving it temporary for another year? Vanderhoef/I suggest we do. Pfab/It doesn't make any difference one way or the other to me. Vanderhoef/The temporary will hold up for another year. Champion/Didn't we get the neighbors all riled, it's (can't hear). O'Donnell/We already told them. Lehman/Well, next time. Kanner/Is there? Lehman/There aren't four. Wilburn/I agree that since we already made our decision. Lehman/All right. Champion/Otherwise I totally would to do it. Wilburn/And I'm going by antectdodal too on that just observing, it seems to work and so I'm happy with it. Kanner/On the information for the building permits there was a handwritten note said there was zero dollars tax exempt but Mercy Hospital in Iowa City were listed there that you were going to start breaking out. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 85 Atkins/Yea and I think that Mercy was part of their medical offices and those are taxable, yea that's taxable. Kanner/There was something from the city I thought (can't hear). Atkins/Yea then that wouldn't have been taxed, yea. Kanner/What? Atkins/Yea the city would not have been taxed, I didn't see a city one, I checked that, I'll check again, yea, I'm sorry. Kanner/And the last thing is we got a color picture in of our packets last time or two times ago and it was very nice to see that, the black and white ones are hard to see. Karr/The black and white ones, just as a reminder the black and white ones you get because of time, we don't have time to color scan them before you get them. What we do is in your final one week later you will always get the colored one scanned. Kanner/Oh really. Karr/All of your black and whites are color scanned, it's simply a matter of timing. We just often don't have enough time to get it out to you so we'll put out the black and white' s, when we finalize that, complete the resolution numbers, put in the roll call votes we'll color scan. It should be in there. Kanner/OK I know it might be an added expense and it might not be worth it but it is before we vote it is nice to be able to see some of these things. You can't really make out some of the things like you know. Karr/Well there are a number of different proposals or ways we can handle that, the bottom line is timing and sometimes we get those color copies, the colored originals to us at 9:00 and just the color scanner just takes a very long time to produce the copy for you and either we'd either have to delay the packet for color copies on those days, reproduce hard color copy for you or distribute the colored ones set us up. (END OF 00-85 SIDE TWO) Karr/Time, I'm sure we can color scan them it's just a matter of time. Lehman/Connie. This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 86 Champion/I don't have anything. Lehman/Mike. O'Donnell/About a week ago in the paper downtown there was a guy walking with his girlfriend and had jumped and hit with a skateboard and 16 stitches in his head and I'm it just seems outrageous that happened in the streets of Iowa City and it didn't really seem to be much cause related to it and I'm real disappointed that happened downtown. Also there' s been letters in the paper about the First Avenue extension, whether your pro or con it I think you should be accurate and when I hear a figure about 20,000 cars, 21,000 cars a day are going to use this road and I don't know where this figure is coming from and you know everything that I've heard it's 9-10,000 I'm just wondering where the 20,000 figure comes from. So if you could expand on that a little bit. Kanner/It wasn't a letter, it was about that piece. O'Donnell/Over 20,000 cars I'm wondering where their figure came from. Kanner/Yea it came from JCCOG. O'Donnell/It didn't come from Jeff Davidson. Kanner/There' s a report that has that from JCCOG. O'Donnell/Well I would. Kanner/I will bring it tomorrow. O'Donnell/I would like to see it because I've spoken with Jeff yesterday and Jeff is you know, that's at least twice what we're expecting on First Avenue. Kanner/Yea that's part of the contention of it and I welcome an (can't hear) piece from you with your position on it Mike, it would be interesting to see what you have to write. O'Donnell/Well it, well Steve if I write it I would do is check with the traffic engineers they're the ones that have done the studies and know what their talking about so if they're telling me 9-10,000, I'm losing my voice, that's what I'm going to believe and that's what I'm going to write. Lehman/Is that traffic on First Avenue without Scott Boulevard? This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100 September 11, 2000 Special Work Session Page 87 Kanner/I'll bring in the information. Lehman/I'd be interested in seeing that too because I find that to be a very large number. Anything else? O'Donnell/No. Lehman/Irvin. Pfab/No. Lehman/Hey guys tomorrow night. Vanderhoef/We're out of here, yes. Adjourned 9:50 PM Kanner/ This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City council meeting of September 11, 2000. WS091100