all right good evening everyone welcome to our business meeting i don't know if i can play call it a regular business meeting since it's a tuesday night at five for those of you who are in chambers or watching live on television welcome live for those  again tonight meeting as we usually begin these meetings with two items first of all a prayer tonight led by our count our colleague council member wayne conference and then immediately following that the pledge of allegiance if you would kindly stand for both of these items we would appreciate we come to you with humble hearts thankful for all your glories with this community and this council and guide us to do what is good and honest and right show us a path to help the city to ok we have a bunch of items tonight's agenda and there are copies in the rear of the room are available in the city's web site city of holland dot com and they are marked with asterix next to them and these are consent items items that we deem to be routine or otherwise talked about in our intention is to handle them all with one motion one vote regardless of where they appear on the agenda you don't think that they're routine or you'd like to have us discuss it separately once we hear what's on the consent agenda you may step forward to the microphone identify the number you'd like removed and we'll take it in its ordinary course members of council of course can also remove one or more items from that consent agenda so we turn to you to give us all a listing of what is presently on the consent to approve the following minutes budget review sessions held the april ninth alive and twelfth study session held april twenty fifth closed inside the stash sessions held june thirteenth and study session held july twenty five two thousand and twelve to excuse the absence of council members birch and peters item eleven b to refer to staff or study and report to a one nine hundred applications submitted by j m s somehow and for ten ten productions court and seventy nine productions place item fourteen c one to approve the revised peg support fee at a rate of one point two five percent of gross revenues for the period of nov one two thousand and twelve through october thirty one two thousand and twenty and authorized the mayor and deputy clerk to execute the new franchise form subject to approval asked to form by the city attorney item fourteen one point one one point two and one point three to adopt resolutions schedule in a public hearing for windy october seventeenth for the downtown parking operations and maintenance assessment the downtown principal shopping district and the downtown snow melt operations assessment in that the deputy clerk be instructed to publish and mail the required notices item fourteen one point four to accept a bid submitted by coyer services inc in the amount of eighteen thousand seven hundred twenty one dollars and thirty three cents for drainage repairs to the city's seventy parking lot located on the south side of seventh street between central in college avenues and to allocate twenty five thousand dollars from the don't home parking system fund for this project item fourteen point one and item one nine place on and except for first reading the proposed ordinance amendments to article fifteen point one of chapter two for the change of the leisure and cultural services commission to park and recreation commission for a seven board member item fourteen e point two to approve a contract with the carl frost center first social search science research to conduct a telephone survey citizen survey in the amount of eighteen thousand seven hundred twenty five dollars with the funds to be taken from the general account separate p a one ninety tax abatement applications for j m s how one for ten ten productions court and eight seventy nine productions place to the wednesday october seventeenth council meeting and the deputy clerk instructed to publish and mail the required notices for both p a one nine hundred applications or i thank you that's what's presently on the consent agenda anybody the audience care to remove an item from it otherwise members of council care to remove any items council member whiteman ok thank you that then takes us down to item ten a ordinances the rezoning of municipal stadium property greg we turn to you for a brief hopefully final last time we on the rezoning this will be now the to close the actual sale of the stadium hoping that your first meeting in november to have the two road easements in and use agreement with the and its rezoning from the traditional residential neighborhood to the education district of the hoa property to the north and to the east of this site is zone educational so this will make it consistent with the adjacent it's at least for the property that's at least owned by hope and there's a twenty one day period before this actually takes effect so that will be near the end of october so that's the planning commission held a public airing the vote of the plane commission was unanimous to recommend that you approve the amendment to the zoning district from the r t r n to the education district right thank you any questions for staff all right this does require a public hearing this is the time and place for it if you're here to address this item we asked you step forward to the microphone and address that microphone is open cept for tim hemingway you cannot come up here you know you may come up just for the record you may come up seeing no one coming forward will close the public hearing and we have a recommendation from anyone in the audience who cares to address any item that's not otherwise on the agenda here is the opportunity to do so all that we require is to step forward to the microphone so that folks at home and in chambers can hear you and state name and residential address for the record city of holland as you all well know for utilities but i think a lot of people follow these meetings and there are some broader issues that have may be of interest to you as well as those who follow the meeting as well as the good folks from the board of public works who serve the good people of holland michigan well i wanted to talk about a couple of things that that may interest you or certainly interest those folks that you know peripherally through business in the community some of you representing areas that get out right at the edge of the city as well the first item i'll bring up is consumers energy is going to roll out some new meter technology in the near future you may have heard something about it smart grid or smart energy will be installing through twenty thirteen new meters that are going to be digital meters that will allow two way communication between our customers and consumers energy and one benefit of that particular technology for our customers especially who live out in the more rural areas is that we'll know when their power is out before they have to contact us right now we don't know that unless they pick up the phone and call us we don't have a big board that identifies that by house and so that's great for rural areas especially along the lake shore and so forth but also allow people then to better identify how they use their electricity and make personal decisions about how to conserve but because consumers energy doesn't serve the city of holland that won't get into that great detail on that muskegon county northern audible county through next year we'll get down around the city of holland and zealand down into the northern parts of allegheny county then getting over into kent county and so forth and this is going to be a multi year program seven year program whereby we roll out these meters across the states while one point eight million of our customers and bill district library would like to be top of the list well i work with you on that ok any other questions about smart energy or smart meters ok mr mayor let me just continue that with an item that's on the ballot the michigan state ballot proposal three calls for the state of michigan to amend  constitution so that twenty five percent of the electricity that would be sold to customers of utilities in the state would have to come from renewable sources such as solar and wind consumers energy is as committed to a renewa energy program as you may know the two thousand and eight energy law requires that utilities such as consumers have to provide at least ten percent of the electricity we generate for our customers to come from renewable sources like wind and so we think that renewable certainly have their role to play but were afraid that this particular proposal really does overstate the value of that technology for our customers some of the folks will be following this  meeting and this would affect the people who live within the city of holland as well perhaps mr koster will be asked questions about that later as well but at any rate wind energy would be the direction that we go in right now we're meeting that ten percent portfolio standard that we have to meet by twenty fifteen that ten percent renewables we're on track to do that we've just completed construction of a very large wind farm up by ludington that will help us to do that so we're on track to meet that standard we have not yet met that standard which we won't be able to do until twenty fifteen and so the idea of generating a new constitutional amendment prior to our compliance even on the first step of that program seems to be difficult for us renewables are often thought of as less expensive than the the more traditional forms of electricity and actually we find that they're more expensive for various reasons i do see that in the future the the cost of that alternative energy renewable energy will come down but right now it's a higher cost almost twice the cost of our traditional methods of generating electricity the idea of amending the constitution is also a sensitive issue those folks in the legal profession have been most vocal about it as a matter of fact three attorneys general have commented on  this mr shooty mr cox and also mr calley have all commented to the negative toward this proposal so that proposal three should be turned down because altering the state's constitution f policy issue just is not the right way to to manage energy policy on a state level let me just complete my my statements by just saying that there is a coalition of  businesses and people in the area who have organized to oppose a proposal three and encourage people to vote against that it's the clean and affordable renewable energy coalition that care coalition there's a website and i have some information here that i can either share with you leave with you you can give a copy to the clerk and so on the jury gets into the record if others out any what i usually suggest is if there's a web site you can say it from the from the podium so folks following along at home can thank you so much buildings and contractors farm bureau and other organizations that are state wide organizations opposed to some pleading state chamber so i'll leave some information as you've suggested i appreciate your time  d as matter of fact if you'd like i'll answer any questions if you feel that would be a good use of your time for me to do that question for mr mcgee and us it's always a treat to see you you know we don't as you mentioned of course the city is served by the board of public works seeing no no we will then close the item twelve and move on then to report fourteen c one which is the comcast franchise mr city attorney will turn to you  we have before council tonight a recommendation relating to the comcast cable franchise if i could summarize for the council what our recommendation is and the background of this  municipalities and local units of government there is very limited ability to modify the state franchise but the two areas that you can modify are to establish what is called the franchise fee and the peg fee which is the public educational and governmental channel contribution when this matter came before the city in november of two thousand and ten the city  imposed a ten our five percent franchise fee that franchise fee generates approximately two hundred and thirty eight thousand dollars each  year the peg fee was inserted at the rate of one point eight four percent of gross revenue this would have generated approximately seventy to seventy two thousand a year that peg fee must be devoted solely for the purpose of public education on governmental channels comcast oppose the peg fee they wanted a seventeen cents per for scriber which would have generated seven thousand dollars for paid contributions there was a proceeding filed with the michigan public service commission and through that process we three four percent and as a result of negotiations with comcast they have accepted a peg fee of one point two five percent  contributions for the remaining eight years of the franchise there is no impact on the five percent franchise fee that i previously mentioned so the recommendation tonight is that the council approved the amendment to the franchise that will be submitted for final approval by the city attorney's office of which would establish a peg fee for th one point two five percent based upon calculations that have been done by the office this is going to be about fifty nine thousand dollars a year versus the seventy or seven thousand dollars that can pass was proposing to hale's so our recommendation tonight would be that the council accept the amendment to the franchise establishing the of one point two five percent of gross revenues for the remaining eight years of the franchise any questions for the city attorney then a motion would be appropriate at this point supported by rather that the reason i asked to take this off consent was basically to give the opportunity for a lumination to the situation and we've had some discussions about the situation and  what we have here does represent a specific change and what we've experienced in the past i think it's important to realize the difference between what we've settled on as far as our percentage of return and  originally had been proposed by comcast basically between seven thousand roughly fifty nine so i still think it's a good record recommendation i just matt deserves great credit for for getting to this i know it took a long time a lot of meetings it is unfortunately a substantial differ the one point four that we had originally settled on but the state's got our hands tied to a certain extent so i think it's a great compromise that we can go out the rest of this balance a lot better than what then what was it to support it originally so let me just  contributions a studio into a dollar number and that was where the michigan public service commission i think was instrumental in getting the calculation to one point three four percent so i mean if you look at that over the maximum amount that we would've been able to probably per sale before that p s a we're talking about nine tenths of a percent difference from their calculation than ourselves and our relationship with comcast is change the amount of one thousand dollars from c n i sales with their desire that the department use the funds for general purchases and the recreation department received donations collected from the two thousand and twelve boardwalk and pancake breakfasts help september third ownership fund in the amount of one thousand four hundred forty eight dollars and twenty cents and also an additional donation from paul and gina vander mulan in the amount of five hundred dollars in kind donations were also reported for this about from gordon foods taylor runtime h j heinz of holland it is recommended that the said donations be accepted with appreciation and an expression of gratitude be forwarded to the donors posed the same that passes thank you fourteen easy five point two perhaps a very brief introduction since i suspect we'll be talking about this in greater thank you mr mayor this follows up on the fourth highest priority of the city council during your goal setting retreat in february and that is very citizen survey further conversation visually with council members have signified that you would tend to prefer a statistically valid system survey there's numerous ways of getting citizen input but a statistically valid survey takes some scientific effort and some special methodology which will cost money so with that understood we talked to the karl frost research center as well as the international city county management association who does this in conjunction with another partner nationally the questions we asked ourselves is how many do we want to sample to get that valid response and whether that should be mail or telephone that are though those are the two methods recommended to us the mail will not be as valid the telephone will be especially since it can be handled  someone speaks spanish in that manner and it also can use telephone numbers off of that include cell phone numbers so which is more and more you know more prevalent than just the house phone so with that being said and to make this brief we settled on the five hundred telephone interviews from the current frost as the cheapest and best outcome there is a alternative there of in your revised agenda if there's some conversation that you'd like to have and all the additional alternatives and this we need to get this done ideally before the next budget and i think we have plenty of time to look at other alternatives  questions foreign city manager you took this off would you care to yeah ryan kind of touched on it there near the end of his his introduction and that really is just for us to to consider some of those alternative methodology is there's a number of advancements in survey methodology i think our last one was done primarily with the telephone interviews and i think i remember correctly it was roughly four hundred eighty plus or minus respondents to that and it was basically valid however that's roughly forty year old technology in the survey world and with the advancement so not only in the survey methodology but also in the you know whether it be this thing here and i or interactive voice response things like that that our residents with not only do i think we keep our validity in the statistical side of things but i think we might actually get some higher response rate as well if we come together as a group and consider some of those methodology as well so that that was really my reasoning for pulling it off and maybe making the suggestion that we might consider that a study session at least funding and we went through the civic center the other day and there's some needs there and some thoughts from there so i hate to see that money being drawn from them to their county certainly i would support a some kind of a survey i think we need input from citizens to find out what their thinking is and where we can use tax dollars well or not use tax dollars and save money that way but i think i'd like to see this kind of kick around also what kinds of questions and how many and maybe rhinos how many are really talking about here but what kinds of questions would we be asking and  what do we do with that information is it for information only are we going to set policy is that you know exactly what i'm going to do and what types of questions i think i would rather have us get some first before we go out and make a contract with a company or an organization another idea might be is to do something internally i know we had brian respond who may not be an expert here but he spent time doing that we might be able senator in the past and they've proven to be very adept and good at what they do so but i have to say that i am becoming less and lost technologically savvy as time progresse so i think it would be a wise thing to create a little space just discuss methodology and i realize when there are some questions that we could toss around and still accomplish this in the time frame that we need to so i'm willing to give it a little more discussion and the other thoughts or comments otherwise todd ryan wanted to i just want to thank a staff member who's who's helped me on this in ways there are new and different in the noise he might have done in the past and that sank and she's here today so i thank you santa for helping to get to this point and we were going to bring it to the study session for development of the question so the fact they were just going to look at the methodology as well as the questions is is perfectly a good approach i think table this item to our next business session and instruct the city manager to put it on our study session thanks to motion to table with those parameters is there support for it supported by all those in favor of tabling as stated please say i i pose the same all right that is tabled as indicated and some at home are thinking it's not just tuesdays he's stupid so anyway all right ok moving right along then we nearly we have paper copies here so i can move off it and now i don't so that takes us down to i believe communications from the city manager of one i came from the d d a board and they have announce that we do not have a groove walk on october twentieth we have a boob walk costumes are welcome thank you mr mayor great interest is the city manager this year for the commissions from the mayor this evening not a whole lot to report to keep in mind that leaf pick up begins in the sixth i believe so soon you can start putting your leaves out even though it's already even though they're already falling but obviously as always you can get ahold of a city of holland dot com lots of contact information and other information about the city located on that website so we invite you to visit that and communicate with us communications from members of council tonight motions and resolutions slightly blew past my apologies let's see we have a reappointment of robert van de camp to fill a term relief for cultural services commission expiring september want to twenty fifteen and a resignation of marc tucker to leader of cultural services and i would suspect we to if we accept that we do so with regret is there motion and support for those actions a move by the mayor pro tem supported by council member whiteman all in favor would we have the standard as an example communication under the open meetings and do we expect to take any action following that close i do not expect there will be action or enough for the request of the