Four things I want to finish in a second term. Each one matters more on this side of Highway 10, and each one is somewhere in the process right now rather than somewhere on a wish list.
The 2028 reconstruction from Rossman to Washington is the biggest north-side project in over twenty years. Streets, water, sewer, some of it seventy to a hundred years old and actively deteriorating.
My job on this is threefold: make sure it actually happens, keep the cost down, and pull in as much state and federal aid as I can so less of it lands on the people who live there. I've already started asking about grants. I'm also working with our Public Works Director and City Engineer on Rossman, Central and Oak Grove, which are in rough shape and need both a short-term answer and a long-term one.
Ours is more than a decade old, and it's been longer than that since a complete review. A comprehensive plan is just the city's promise about the future, written down. It tells a homeowner what can be built near them. It tells a developer what we actually want. And it drives the capital improvement plan, which streets, water and sewer get replaced and when.
As Chair of the Planning Commission, this is the piece I most want to take on next.
City code gets complicated one amendment at a time until nobody can follow it, and the cost of that lands on whoever is trying to build.
I pushed the Planning Commission and city staff to stop amending around the edges and actually fix it. We rewrote the permitted and conditional uses across the B-1, B-2 and B-3 business districts so they're consistent and build on each other. A developer can now read them and know where they stand. And after watching parking variance requests pile up, I pushed for a working group with staff to rewrite the parking standards instead of granting exceptions one at a time.
Let's keep reducing the regulation. There's more here.
Local Government Aid, Public Safety Aid, state bond funds: Detroit Lakes' share of these has dropped over the past decade, and that shows up directly in your property tax bill. Every dollar we don't get from St. Paul is a dollar we raise here.
I've driven to the Capitol three times in the last four years, on my own vacation time, to make the case for this city to our legislators. This year, leveraging public safety aid is a large part of how we funded an additional police officer and a deputy chief position without a bigger levy increase. I intend to keep going.