 you cannot be successful or happy. Thank you very much. Would the clerk please call the roll for today? Thanks, John. Get in there. 15, I'm sorry, 15 present. And Alderman Madicek is not excused. Next, I'd like to ask you to please stand and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Next item on the agenda is the approval of our minutes from the last meeting. Alderman Hammond. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Move to approve. Second. Thank you for that motion and support on the minutes. Is there any discussion? Seeing none, will the clerk please call the roll? Wake up, Joe. 15 ayes. I was looking at my roll. Motion passes. There were no council appointments to consider this evening, so we'll go on to the presentation of the Harbor Center master plan. This is a master plan that's been going on for the last three months or so. And today we have representatives of the Harbor Center Business Improvement District, their board president, David Gass, and their executive director, Dave Hoffman, otherwise known as their manager. And Chad Pellecek from City Planning will also be assisting in this presentation. And Chad, I think you are going to begin the process as soon as he's plugged in. We'll be ready to go. So I'll start this thing off. As the mayor said, I'm Chad Pellecek, the director of planning and development. And with me is Dave Gass from the Business Improvement District, how we plan to handle this tonight is we've got a PowerPoint to talk about the highlights of the plan. We're going to start out by doing a little bit of an introduction, talking a little bit about the economic indicators we found as part of the plan, what the current conditions of our downtown are as compared to our city as the whole. After that, we're going to go into some of the key strategic plans to move forward in some of the core strategies. Dave's going to handle that section. And then we're going to finish up with more information on the design standard side of it that we're going to work on hard to implement along A Street corridor. So with that, the Harbor Center vision as part of the plan and the mayor said, we had hired Virbecker and associates out of Madison to help us with this. They came up with, there was a number of public input sessions and surveys and steering committees that worked together to develop what we see here today. The vision of this plan is really to look at a downtown that's economically prosperous, working on focusing on retaining jobs, businesses and new investment, a vibrant downtown. We've talked a lot about residential opportunities, new residential opportunities being a focus in our downtown. You'll see more later on that. An active 24-hour community, support expanded retail and service sector, which we believe will come after we've got more people living here and it's becoming that 24-7 operation. Inviting a well-preserved and restored historic buildings, we heard a lot of people say that we need to really hone in on what we have existing, work to improve those. New buildings need to be cohesive and fit into the overall downtown scheme. So that's where the design standards pieces come in to give us as staff something to work towards when people come in and are proposing improvements to their building. Complimentary new development, active public spaces. We've heard that if we're gonna have a vibrant downtown, we need to activate our public areas and some of the, you'll see later, some of the proposed plans for potentially the Boston Store could give us some of that additional active space in our center of our downtown. And then how do we connect our area? The business improvement district is rather large, includes three distinct areas, the downtown Riverfront and South Pier. We know that we've got a river dividing them. How do we connect all those to work together with cross-marketing and connection opportunities? So this map here shows kind of the business improvement district. I'm not expecting you to be able to read it, but one of the things we have is our downtown has 23 acres of developable land that sits vacant currently. So we're in an opportunity where we have that to move forward to build new tax-based new jobs. We've got some major destinations in our downtown. We've got a world-class John Michael Kohler Art Center, Stephanie Weill Center for the Performing Arts, the Mead Public Library. So those assets are what a lot of communities are hoping to get when they start a planning process and we just need to leverage those better. Look at the arts culture and food district. We'll get into a little bit more on that. Streetscape improvements, we've done a lot over the years with our A Street. There's some additional connectivity things that have been proposed that can kind of make the user feel a little bit more connected to what's happening. One of the first phases of that is a wayfinding signage plan, which we'll talk about later, but we're implementing that with our Department of Public Works in the planning department and you'll see those signs going up as of today and over the next couple of months. So we're working on early phases. Connectivity, how do we connect these areas? There's a proposal for a water taxi, a trolley service, rent bikes, those types of things to get people in the different areas and then some minor infrastructure improvements really with around the Boston store and reintroducing some street grids. So under the economic and market analysis, the land use is primarily commercial, residential and civic, as we all know, we have ample parking and there's some opportunity there, I think, for some new development on some of those sites and there's a number of vacant and underutilized sites. The interesting thing, the downtown supports 4,875 full-time and part-time workers, of which there's 245 employers and there's a mix of hospitality, restaurant, finance, insurance, so you can kinda see on that chart the breakdown of those different classes. Sheboygan County is 14th in Wisconsin for tourism spending. We've heard that from our tourism group. There's multiple destinations in the region that provide these attractions and draw a range of visitors and 50% of the outside dollars coming into our market are spent in our downtown. Demographics and housing, we know that we are lacking on housing from the point of more upper market rate type housing. We've got a number of housing developments currently that are income subsidized, so you have to make a certain income guideline in order to live in those units, although some of those are coming off of those restrictions later this year, so they're gonna open up some additional opportunity, but it still doesn't fill the hole that's there for housing. So looking at the demand for new apartments is expected to grow and like I said, the downtown housing is really split between owner occupied and there's some rental units. Global trends impacting downtown, so the consultant looked at ways, are we following the trends? Are we way outside of them? How do we rein in what we have? So we know that empty nesters are demand for, they're looking for housing, healthcare and walkable neighborhoods. Global trends are showing there's a generation X in the millennial that perform this lifestyle in diverse communities in the downtown where the activity is, where they can walk to destinations and do stuff without having to get into their car. This pressure to recruit, educate and retain skilled workers, a lot of our companies and as part of this plan we've had discussions with a number of the large employers in this community and have understood that a lot of their new hires are leaving the market because they're not finding the housing that they would like to live in. So there's people driving from downtown Milwaukee to employers from Port Washington, Grafton, Mequon, so we need to try to capture those people in our community. Increasing the demand for professional housing, focusing on the quality of the function, the convenience, all those types of things. Rising alternate transportation use, we've done some of that with the non-motorized program. I think there's more we can look at. Increase the need for locally-based solutions due to the decline in federal and state funding. So we need to bring private partners to the table to make this happen. It's not gonna be strictly a public endeavor. An explosive growth in technology and I think there's some opportunity in technology-based companies as well. So when you look at the Harbor Center Market Share to the city, the graph that's shown here, it's interesting to know that almost 63% of the market share comes, the hotels in the city are located within the business improvement district or the downtown. You can see the break down there in green is the share of the property value, in the blue is retail sales, the red is residents and the orange is 12% is employment. Over the last number of years, a set of substantial amount has been invested of 45 million into our downtown and the 10-year plan is to increase this market share to 12% of the city totals. We know that this has shown that there's a residential growth projections. 376 new units is what's felt that in the next 10 years the downtown could support. Those could be a mix of market rate, they could be subsidized, they could be senior housing, you know, it could be all of that. It's not unrealistic. We've done that in the past 10 years, believe it or not, that there's been about 275 new units that have been developed with the whole Water Street development. The retail growth projections, increased demand from household spending and residential and employment growth combined is about 6.5 million in consumer demand and could support about 36,000 new square feet of newly constructed retail space. And we have the land to do that. Office growth projections, Harbor Center Business is employed 12% of all of Sheboygan workers. It's proposed to increase by 892 workers over 10 years and you can see 134,000 to 178,000 square feet of new office space. And it may need, we may need to recruit one or more large employers to the Harbor Center for headquarters or select divisions and that's really where the focus of the Panterre property had come in and looked at as being a location for a larger corporate type entity to build and bring those jobs to this area. So with that, I'm gonna turn over the strategic recommendations to Dave Gas and then I'll finish up. Just press the arrow. Or the enter. Or the enter, okay, great. Good evening, everybody, members of the council. I'm privileged to be here in behalf of the business improvement district to give you the key elements of this plan and maybe let me step back a moment and give you a little bit of reasons why did we go this route? It may seem obvious, but sometimes it's important to state the obvious. You know, last year our bid, business improvement district, affectionately known as the bid, really had decided, kind of looked at itself and said, you know, where are we going as an organization? The purpose of the business improvement district is really to promote the growth of the south, the harbor center area, which you saw the map of it, but in essence includes three areas, south pier, riverfront, and most of downtown up to Fulton Park. And while we have pockets of success in there, we have pockets, we don't want pockets, we want an entire successful area. And we have great amenities in the harbor center and we felt that we needed to find a way to get our coordinator efforts, the efforts of all the people involved. And so we decided that we really need to sit down and put together a plan. And if we're gonna do that, the thing that we're gonna do that on our own was not realistic because first of all, we didn't have the capabilities to do all the elements of the plan. Number two, every one of us has our own opinion and who's to say who's opinion is better than the other persons. Outside expertise can help you get the right opinions to bubble to the surface. And plus to have capability and credibility to the plan. So as Chad indicated, then there was a lot of data gathering and analysis that went on that he went over that led to where we are right now, okay? So the plan, and this plan is like 50 pages, but this is the essence of the plan. And I think it's really good in a sense, it's simple. It's three legged. I kind of like three, I think three is a great number. It's tangible, it's digestible. So we have three core elements to this plan. Number one is creation of an arts culture and food district. And we'll go through each one of these in a little bit more detail. Our promotion of housing and urban development, excuse me, and working on better connection and cross marketing of the segments of the bid. One of the things that we determined we had to do with this plan is we have to demonstrate visual progress and get the maximum number of people involved. We got to have some short-term success. We can't be sitting there lingering and lingering and lingering and nothing happening. And we have to have ultimately long-term goals that we have to the short-term success links us to and obviously demonstrate success. So let's just talk about these elements in short. The arts culture and food district, we need to look at leveraging and enhancing in our existing strengths. And what are those strengths? Again, it seems obvious, but really when we looked at this, maybe the obvious was being ignored because it was so obvious. We have a world-class arts center in the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. Unbelievable. You talk to people in other cities and they're like, Marvel, how did you guys get that over there? And it's sitting there and it's sitting there. They do their thing and they do their thing. We have the Wiles, Steffi Wiles Center. Excellent, great facility, they do their thing. We have the above and beyond museum. Great museum, they do their thing. We have performing arts groups that are downtown now. We have the Heritage Museum and we have the spaceport. We have all of these great cultural events which would be the envy of cities three times our size and we have them in Sheboygan. And we need to work together and how can we leverage those to get more people coming downtown? Because people hear a lot of things. People coming downtown, visit places, they spend money and they shop. So we needed to capture those additional dollars and so we looked at that and our consultant said, you have great amenities that you just need to do this. That's like your number one strength that you gotta build on. Housing and urban development. Now this may not seem really obvious, but downtown Sheboygan, the harbor center, the area is really an area that people would like to live next to or in. It's near a great lake. We have great amenities there already. We have great restaurants. We have great cultural events. It's right next to a trail that's been built in the city or close to the trail. So we've got all these key ingredients. So it's a great area for putting housing and once you get housing, you get more people who wanna go to the arts and culture and wanna shop and do all those neat things. So you really need to focus on getting more housing and urban development. And that entails also improving the A Street aesthetics, increasing activity as well. And then the last thing that we're gonna focus on is again, connecting the three segments that I talked about, the South Pier, the riverfront and the downtown. Right now, they don't connect as smoothly as we'd like them to. We all know that South Pier is a bit on a peninsula and so it's not like you go straight there. You kinda circle around and we need to work on that because any kind of obstacle can cause people not to visit some place. And so the goal is to remove as many obstacles as we can and then create a lot of amenities for cross marketing and connecting. Some transformative opportunities real quickly. Again, this is somewhat redundant but you have the A Street gateway which we need to work on, the arts culture and food district and then the library plaza which is next to the Boston store which we now know that we're gonna have greater ability to influence than we maybe thought we would three months ago, four months ago. Real quickly, an example of what could be done on the A Street is you could where the former Alliant building is now the Heritage Museum. If you took that walkway and you opened it up and put more landscape in a greenery, just what a difference it makes. You see across the street an example. I'm gonna give a cautionary note here. People will come up and say, so you're tearing down the Boston store building or you're gonna tear down this person's buildings. Nothing has been decided. These are just ideas and examples of things that could be done and if you don't start with ideas and examples, you can't really get there. You can't create the visual pattern that'll get you excited about doing something. So for the public, for the media who's watching this, there are all ideas out there. Nothing has been decided about a lot of these elements so people do not get overly excited that things have been decided in that regard. The arts culture and food district. We have the, this shows the Boston store property and again it's an example of what could be done a decision has not been made to tear it down but it's an example of what could be done there based upon potential development. And again this tends to try to create an open area for traffic which would be a, that's kind of a middle ground between John Michael Kohler Art Center and the library and the Steffie Wiles Center and all these things that's sort of right in the middle there so it could be a gathering point whether for retail space, for arts and crafts or potential educational learning there or a park area. The library plaza, here's an example I'm sure there's gonna be some people out there who are fans of the helper in water display there who might get a little excited about something but this is just an example of what we could do there. And the other thing that we as a bid board recognizes that there are some people who are gonna be, will identify all of the weaknesses and all the obstacles to getting something done. We don't care, we know that's gonna happen. Our attitude is we gotta work together and we gotta move forward and try to be positive and there'll be obstacles but we'll get over them and that's how we're gonna approach this. In the first one to three years what we hope to be able to do is we hope to be able to against create this district and start to have some things happening. We hope to create some awareness of redevelopment sites. And I might add, obviously with the arts, culture and food district we already got a head start in that we've got the Boston store building in within our control. And with these redevelopment sites and creating knowledge we've got some seminars and things like that that are being planned. Improving pedestrian experience and way finding, improving the design standards and some of the signage and as Chad indicated some of that is already in place. City development, city staff have been working on that so you're already gonna see some of this taking place. Over a 10 year period this is just an example of sort of what we'd like to see 10 years from now from the various work that we do on this plan focusing on these three areas. And hopefully we could do better than this but if we could accomplish these things after 10 years things would be humming. It would be an incredible dynamic area down in the Harbor Center. So I think that's then I'll turn it over to Chad for design standards. So I know this is a little off kilter up there because we see it nice here. But anyway I'll try to talk you through it. What we decided was like I said earlier is we have standards for riverfront development. We have standards for the South Pier area guidelines that when people come in and wanna propose to build something they have to follow these guidelines we never had anything for the downtown. So we always struggled as staff over what should be downtown and what do the people wanna see. A lot of times it was up to the architecture review board and the planning commission to approve these developments and whether they worked or they didn't work it was just really the discussion that happened. So these design standards that you see here really are looking at making these blocks look uniform and inviting and help us kind of preserve this pedestrian friendliness and protecting our historic structures. In the survey that was one out of the 650 people that took the surveys part of this process that was one of the top things that people said is we need to restore our buildings and bring some uniformity to our downtown. So you can see the two different pictures here. One is a block on between center and Penn on A Street on the top photo that I will say though that block is a part of the Benjamin Moore painting project that'll be painted later this year. So there'll be some enhancements there but you can see the kind of uncommon color scheme and everything doesn't match and then if you look at the buildings on the south and that's really where the jeweler is and some of those you can see more cohesiveness and connectivity. So that's kind of the vision we're trying to accomplish here. The design standards are really developed. There's a section for existing buildings and for new buildings and it looks at things such as building height, the scale, the massing, ground floor treatments, what you see when you walk down the street, facade colors it lays out a color scheme for different sections of the downtown lighting, signage, building materials that kind of stuff that and it gets into very a lot of detail and gives us some direction in what people have to try to achieve in their development. So the design, the area was developed into three, four design districts. We have the downtown north which is really from Ontario up to Michigan and that's a little bit outside of the bid boundaries. We felt that as staff that we needed to have this along A Street, the intent is to start working after this with our businesses on Indiana and on Michigan because we have kind of a U shaped commercial corridor and try to bring those into this at a later date. So we kind of have some standards for our entire commercial district. But you can see from the downtown north it lays out some color tones underneath the picture of what is proposed to kind of keep it into those tan colors with some accents and those types of things. Then the arts culture and food district is really to kind of dive into this regional destination area with natural and muted tones and these secondary colors. And this area is also part of the Benjamin Moore painting project. So some of the colors that have been selected as part of that are kind of tied into this. So we've got a project in the works. The downtown south is really this corridor from the A Street bridge up to the swing streets and what some of those, up to Penn actually, what some of those areas should look like. And then, I'm sorry, that's the area from Penn up to the library is the downtown south. And then the waterfront transitional pieces, that piece I'm saying from A Street up to the swing streets where there's some proposed development opportunities that could happen in that area and it kind of ties in kind of the color scheme. So that's pretty much about it. I know Dave wants to address one more thing but one thing I do want to say is if anybody in the public or the council is interested in the Harbor Center Master Plan, it is not 50 pages, it's about 130 pages. It's on the city's website, which is www.ci.cheboygan.wi.us. If you go there, there's a banner running in the homepage and you click on it, it'll take you to a area where there's three or four different sections because it's a very large document and you can look at the specifics on the plan and I would encourage everybody to do so. Thank you. I think I was thinking of the executive summary. So anyway, a couple of these closing comments I wanted to make was about this project so far and it will continue is I think this master plan has been an example and a good example of a partnership between the bid and the city. We've had Chad in his office and the council and the mayor's office, we've all worked closely on putting pieces of this together. Obviously, the Boston Star Element involved a lot of cooperation and I think that's really a success in and of itself. So that's a great, a good start for us and we look forward to continuing to work together in partnership with the city because as Chad indicated, this plan is going to require both. It's not just the city who's going to implement this. It's going to require the city and private people to work together to make this happen. As far as process, the bid, the bid board approved this plan last, was it last week, Dave? Yeah, at its last board meeting. So we've approved it, we're ready to go. Our next step, once assuming the common council approves it, our next step would be to then talk about the implementation which is identifying how do we go about tackling some of the action steps and in the master plan, there's a section, it's six, seven, eight, maybe 10 pages of a number of suggested steps, not concrete steps but suggested steps and so what we need now is to identify groups of people who are going to try to tackle some of those steps and I think we'll start probably small, we'll probably start with the number three again and look at trying to maybe develop three groups of people, three task force, whatever we call that and look at what can we tackle first to get the biggest success quickly and then move on from there. So that's what our thinking is as far as a bid. Were there any questions from the Alderman? Go ahead Alderman Lewandowski. One of the most common questions I'm asked about the downtown is will there ever be a grocery store downtown and I'm wondering what the odds are of that? I can respond to that, I think we've looked at that in 2009 the city hired a consultant to do a downtown market study to see if our downtown can support a grocery store and at that time there wasn't enough, the demographics weren't there to justify the expense unless it was substantially city subsidized. Now once it's kind of that build it and they will come and I think once we can work on getting more urban housing downtown and getting that base down here I think we have some credibility to try to recruit a downtown grocery store but I think right now as it stands it's difficult although there's a lot of people that say they would shop downtown but when you draw the radiuses around our current stores there's not a lot of open area in the downtown and they're covered pretty well when people travel up to a quarter of a mile to get there and that's what retailers look at and the other issue is until we build that mass they're not drawing anybody from the east obviously from the lake so they've got a three sided radius around it so back in 2010 we had communications with our local Pigley Wiggly and tried to see if they would be interested in opening up a metro market or something and they said the way the numbers are they just couldn't justify that expense at this stage so I think it's something we can work towards in the future I wouldn't say that it's not ain't gonna ever happen but I think right now I don't believe we have enough mass in the downtown to support that. Any other questions? Okay nothing. One thing I will say is this the document that's on the agenda tonight is being referred to the planning commission and the architecture review board we'll come back to this body for final approval and adoption on the April 14th meeting so if there's anybody in the public or the council that's got questions in between there feel free to get in touch with city staff and we'll be happy to address those. Thank you very much for your presentation tonight and thank you very much to the bid all their merchant members who participated on the committee as well as all the city staff job well done. Next we'll move on to the public forum. Yes we have two this evening first on the list is Delcey Johnson. Delcey if you could come up please. And Delcey can I get your home address please? 1306 North Third Street, Sheboygan. Mayor Van der Steen, Cindy Clerk Richards, Alderman and Citizens. A few years ago I remember former mayor Susha spoke about the council having supposedly found a money tree to finance some big project. It would seem that this council has found a money tree to buy the Boston store property and a new fire truck. I don't know the criteria for buying a new fire truck but if it has anything to do with usage I would point out that the fire department responded to only 48 structure fires in 2012 and only 30 structure fires in 2013. That's less than one call per station per month. The purchase is the least to buy deal of $75,497 for seven years at 2.99% interest which will cost the taxpayers a grand total of $528,480. The price of the Boston store property is $500,000. I was at a meeting with Alderman Carlson a couple weeks ago and I asked him what the taxes were on the building. He said he did not know and I sensed did not feel that it was important because acquiring the site was important to the redevelopment of the downtown. In figuring the total cost however you must also add the loss of property taxes. The taxes on the Boston store building and the South parking lot are $102,833. The taxes on the North parking lot are $4,274 for a total of $107,107 making the investment $607,107. We have just heard the bids master plan. Are there other plans? I hope that the city and the council did due diligence before deciding to purchase this property. Granted one would not want the building to sit vacant for a long time but one would hope that the city and the council had good information to substantiate their constituents' investment. How many years will it be before the site will again generate tax revenue? Each year it remains a city-owned property, the city loses tax revenue which over several years will add up to a substantial sum. I believe in a strong downtown. When I was in the council in the 1980s I opposed the mini malls that investors wanted to build beyond the downtown. My position always was build downtown. I served on the redevelopment authority between 2005 and 2010 and again I objected to more mini malls. Of course the authority was happy when Mr. Shaper developed his properties at Athon Penn. This was originally to be a two or three story building with apartments on the upper floors. Mr. Shaper ever built a one story building because as I remember he could not finance and find tenants for a two or three story building. Indeed much of that building has sat empty for four or five years. When Mr. Shaper asked the authority for financial help with one of his north and Calumet area projects I suggested he build on the vacant lot which he owns across from the Wiles Center. His answer was that businesses don't want to be downtown. I am skeptical if the interest in the downtown has suddenly done a 180 but you will not find anyone who would be more pleased than me if A Street could be successfully redeveloped. I would love to see more shops downtown and more offices and housing would bring more people to the area but as you know there are currently plenty of opportunities available. When I was on the redevelopment authority someone proposed a new office retail housing building next to above and beyond but that did not materialize. The relatively new Nemshoff office building has been advertising for tenants for several years. The building that house Johnson Bank has been vacant for several years and the building on the corner of Athon Center has been vacant for over a year. The Sheboygan Press building is for sale and would be suitable for offices or possibly housing. The former Walgreen building on A Street has been for sale for several years and Mr. Shaper is still looking for tenants at Athon Penn. I was interested to learn from the press story that more downtown housing appears to be the more pressing need and that existing vacant office and retail space will first need to be filled before building more. How many years will that take? What will it cost the taxpayers if the Boston store property is not developed for several years? Will the taxpayers end up with another struggling south peer development? The cost of the Boston store property in the new fire truck is almost equal to the projected budget deficit for 2015 of 1.3 million. It's obvious that the garbage fee will have to be extended and though the plan is again for no budget increases for 2015, somehow that never works out for all departments. A half million here, a half million there and as they say, pretty soon you're talking about real money. The city is fortunate to have a money tree. Thank you Delcy. And finally on the list would be Mike Brunette. Mike, could I have your home address please? 1925, South 26th Street. And, excuse me, you will have five minutes or? All right, and to start off, it was brought to my attention that I wasted city money by getting a CD made and not coming and pick it up. So here's a bunch of CD's to cover that. And in the future, I might add, it's like Chad said, I was very happy to see that city plan is online and you can do it. And it's one of my pet peeves when things go on, not that it's CDs or whatever, when anything isn't available and you have to hunt for anything, nobody likes it. It's a step in the right direction. But what I really came here to talk about was one of my lost causes, the quarry. And it's one of those, it's not gonna cost $100,000, not a nickel, not a penny, never cost anybody anything really. And it's like the city still maintains it. I mean, I talked to people who claim they do such a thing, but it's one of those things that last time I spoke, it ended up being a unanimous thing. It's getting voted on again tonight. You're giving it to somebody who basically is running an LLC out of their house outside of Madison and they're getting it for that crazy amount of probably a buck, I don't recall exactly, but it's basically gonna be another dead year for the quarry, like last year, because it's too expensive, it's crap. I mean, it's bouncy toys, it's not a beach. It's like giving somebody Elkhart Lake and saying, how could you possibly screw this up? And that's the answer, go look at it. I mean, you saw what it was last year and it's like, you know what it used to be. I mean, I'm researching something the other day at the Historical Society and I come across an article from 1971 of them putting up the fence. Does anybody here know why they put up the fence? They put it up to limit people because they wanted to keep it to under 2,000 people at a time, that's how busy the quarry was. And it's like safety thing, it was too busy. And it's like, they kind of handled that problem and looking through everything, I don't see all these danger problems. All the people that died two years ago when it was open are sitting in my trunk right now. And it's like, yeah, it's not an issue because there aren't any. And it's like, because that can be open to no liability, you'd have to close Lake Michigan. I'm being redundant, it's the same thing over and over again. But why we would possibly, I mean, you're working hard. I like hearing what Chad's saying about the downtown and that. And it's like, I mean, you need to have plans. I mean, open things up, change, try to get things going. But when you just do things that are blatantly obviously make life for people that live here worse, just plain worse. And it doesn't matter what you do for anything else, you have to do simple things that make it a better place to live. And in my opinion, closing the quarry makes it so. If you wanna go swimming, especially this summer again, it's like you're gonna truck out to Elkhart Lake every time you wanna jump into an inland lake. I mean, that's about as close as you can get. It just doesn't make a lot of sense. And it's something that we basically just have sitting here, but yet we don't. It might as well be a million miles away if that's even possible on the planet. I don't know how big it is. And that's all I have. Excuse me. Thank you, Mike. Thank you. Next we'll go on to Mayor's announcements. There's a hazardous waste collection coming up on April 5th on Saturday from eight to 11 at Maywood. There's a charge of $10 per vehicle. And there's also another one staged rather on May 9th at the South Side Shed, the Highway Department Building. And that will be on Friday from one to five on May 9th. Our Department of City Planning has scheduled a landlord training session. They've put together quite a good program and a book of materials for the people that participate. That'll be coming up Tuesday, April 22nd at the JC Quarry View Center. And that's from 5.30 to 9.30. And I'd also like to make you aware of the fact that the Mayor's International Committee is having a fundraiser at the Weill Center on Monday, April 15th at seven o'clock. They're bringing the UW Band in so that people can continue that celebration after they win the final four this coming weekend. Yes, Alderman Hammond? I think it's the 14th. Yes, that's the 14th. Thank you. Go, Badgers. Okay, next we'll go on to the Consent Agenda. That includes items 2.1 through 2.20. Alderman Hammond? Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I move to accept and file all ROs, accept and adopt all RCs and put all resolutions and ordinances upon their passage. Second. Thank you for that motion on the Consent Agenda. Is there any discussion? Alderman Carlson? Thank you, Mayor. I just want to point out document 2.15 which is the Chief of Police Annual Report. I just wanted to mention a few things. I first wanted to thank him for putting the report together. If you haven't had a chance to look at it, it's great. There's a lot of information. But most importantly, I want to thank him and his officers for the work that they are doing in this city. One of the biggest significance acts of 2013 was an 18% reduction in part one crime and that includes thefts, break-ins, rape, homicide, essentially serious crimes. We've had an 18% reduction and that's due to the work of his officers being out on the streets every day, knocking on doors and getting to know the neighbors in the neighborhood, so thank you. Thanks for highlighting the good work of the police department. Any other discussion? Seeing none, will the clerk please call the roll? 15 ayes. Motion passes. Next, we'll go on to reports of officers including items 3.1 through 3.14. Those will all be referred to various committees. And then under resolutions, item 4.1 is a resolution by Alderman Heidemann, Boren, Bellinger, and Panticoa approving the agreement for tree removal. Alderman Heidemann. Thank you, Mayor. First, need a motion to suspend the rolls? Second. We have a motion to suspend. Is there any discussion? Seeing none, will the clerk call the roll? 15 ayes. Under suspension. Thank you. The resolution regards a contract with a local company to continue to remove trees in the city. Over the last couple of weeks, our Department of Public Works have done a fine job of clearing a bunch of like 100 some trees that they've already cleared up. This is to continue to work and get those men that were doing the trees on the city streets, so. Thank you very much. Is there any other discussion on the motion? Seeing none, will the clerk call the roll? 15 ayes. Items 4.2 through 4.9 will also be referred to various committees. Under section five, reports of committees. Item 5.1 is a reported committee by the Sustainable Task Force recommending opposing the construction of a nuclear waste repository in the Great Lakes Basin. Alderman Carlson. Thank you, Mayor. I move to accept and adopt and pass the resolution. Second. Thank you for that motion and the support. The motion is before us for any discussion. Seeing none, will the clerk please call the roll? 15 ayes. Motion passes. Item 5.2 is a reported committee by Public Protection and Safety recommending entering into a purchase agreement and an associated seven-year capital lease for the purchase of one rescue pumper apparatus for the fire department. Alderman Carlson. Thank you once again, Mayor. I move to accept and adopt and pass the resolution. Second. Thank you and thank you for the support. Any discussion on the motion? Seeing none, will the clerk call the roll? I'm sorry, Alderman Boren. Thank you, Mayor. I'm gonna support this tonight, but I do have a question for Mr. Amorio. Back a few months ago, we were purchasing a few garbage trucks and we decided to purchase those garbage trucks outright without considering a lease and I'm wondering what the thought was behind going with a lease on the pumper where we didn't with the garbage trucks. That's quite a bit of interest, 38,970 dollars and 80 cents. So I'm just wondering the thought that went into not leasing garbage trucks, but leasing the pumper. City Administrator Motio, would you like to come to the front and take that question? Yes, sir. Thank you, Mayor. At the time when we looked at the garbage trucks, the interest rate was excessive. We're leasing the fire truck from Pierce directly and we got a favorable rate of 2.99%. That was a difference. If that answers your question. Go ahead, Alderman. I don't know how you knew the interest rate was excessive because you didn't put it out for bid. It was a hurry up thing about two days before the meeting where you decided not to lease the garbage trucks and we never got any bids. So how can we say it was excessive if we didn't get bids? Well, we called a few leasing companies and the rates were in the 4% range. And with a few days to go, we had to make a decision. And I believe that it was too costly at a 4% rate that really wasn't market to lease those garbage trucks. So this is a percent difference then basically? Yes. For four trucks, the purchase was 1.1 million. So, thank you for that question. Is there any other discussion? Seeing none, will the clerk please call the roll? 15 ayes. Motion passes. Next, we'll go on to ordinances. Ordinance 6.1 and 6.2 will lie over. And under matters laid over, we have 7.1 which is general ordinance number 56 of 1314 by Alderman Boren Vanderweel. Dassler amending the municipal code to delete and add various positions to the fire department table of organization. Alderman Boren? This is 7.1. Yes, it is. I'll make a motion to put the general ordinance upon its passage. Second. It's been moved and seconded to put the ordinance on its passage under discussion. Seeing none, will the clerk please call the roll and passage? 15 ayes. Motion passes. Next, we'll go on to other matters. City Clerk? 8.1 is an aro by the city clerk submitting a communication from James Reinal putting in a request to cut the flip flop parking at the same time as daylight savings time ends which is before April 1st for year to year, not just one time. I'll go to public protection and safety. 8.2 is an aro by the city clerk submitting various license applications. That would be referred to law and licensing. 8.3 is an aro by the city clerk submitting a claim from Nicole Reynolds for alleged damages to a vehicle on a city front end loader was removing snow and scratch the front driver's side panel to the passenger door. That will be referred to finance. 8.4 is a resolution by Alderman Hammond authorizing the city of Sheboygan to enter into a contract for dock repairs at the Harbor Center Marina. That will be referred to public works. 8.5 is a resolution by Alderman Heidemann authorizing the appropriate city officials to enter into contract with traffic and parking control for the purposes of purchasing traffic signal equipment. That'll be referred to public works. 8.6 is a general ordinance by Alderman Hammond annexing territory owned by the city to the city of Sheboygan. That'll be referred to the city planning commission. 8.7 is a resolution by Alderman Heidemann authorizing the purchasing agent to enter into contract for the replacement of sanitary sewer for North 20th Street from Cleveland Avenue to Dewey Avenue and North 6th from Euclid to approximately 160 feet to the south. That'll be referred to the public works committee. 8.8 is a resolution by Alderman Hammond authorizing the city clerk to move various city of Sheboygan wards to new polling places for all future elections. That document will lie over. 8.9 is a resolution by Alderman Hammond authorizing the city of Sheboygan to enter into a contract for buildings and property insurance coverage. That'll be referred to the finance committee. 8.10 is a resolution by Alderman Hammond Carlson, Bellinger, Dassler and Heidemann to authorize a transfer of appropriations in the 2014 budget. Be referred to the finance committee. And 8.11 is a resolution by Alderpersons Hammond, Vanderweal, Heidemann and Carlson amending Rez 125-1314 relating to the 2014 one-year annual action plan for the community development block grant program submission. That will lie over. Next we have a closed session scheduled. Alderman Hammond. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I move to convene in the closed session under the exemption contained in 1985 one E Wisconsin statutes for the purpose of deliberating a proposed development project where competitive or bargaining reasons require a closed session. It's been moved and seconded to go into closed session. Will the clerk please call the roll. David. 15 ayes. Motion passes. We'll take a five minute recess and reconvene.