 The city of Bemidji is making some changes in 2019 when it comes to its public spaces. The city council held the first reading of its new special events ordinance this week, which coincides with the rollout of a new online park reservation form. The online program is designed to expedite the reservation process with less paperwork. It's also designed to provide everyone with the same guidelines when holding an event in a public space. We want to ensure we're protecting our resources. So when you're talking about where we have Lake Bemidji, we have people resources, we have you know our parks, what do we do with food vendors and ensuring that you know any sort of grease, where is that going as such and be going into our lake? So is there a process for that? How do you remove the garbage and making sure events have plans for those? So these things are also taken care of and we're being good stewards of our environment. The new online reservation forms are now live on the city of Bemidji's website. The city will hold its second reading of the special events ordinance at its next council meeting. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.