ok the state of the city is in excellent shape excellent shape we're probably one of the best shapes of any city in the state of minnesota and that's in a lot of large part is that when the boom came we didn't we didn't expand staff we kept everything down to a minimal and if we had a good extra help we outsource that because we knew sooner or later they have you know it doesn't always keep going that way and we just don't want to lay off a bunch of people you know once we hired them so so we kept the pretty minimal you know we get things done and that's main playing next ok we're going to talk about where served by six ninety four ninety four thirty six and one twenty then everybody knows the housing boom was in the mid eighty's and early ninety's and it was a boom here in oakdale too  it was named one of the fastest growing communities in the metro area in one thousand nine hundred four and we continue to see a great outstanding industrial and commercial growth in the city and these are some of the awards we've gotten over the years and i really want to recognize twenty years in a role receiving the financial report excellence thanks to suzanne warren who's been here since day one since i've been here and she is excellent and that's one of the reasons that that our budget is so low and she watches everything ok in general current population is almost thirty thousand now moody's credit rating is double way too you have a million dollar operating budget that we've been going on last year one of the lowest per capita in the metro area twenty four seven fire ambulance police service provided by fire department in the police department you have to fire halls we have a strong volunt basis on the fire department and before i get to the community overview i just want to give you a little insight of how we got no where we've gotten and why we went in the directions that we did when i got on the console and one nine hundred ninety and ted was there and we had all this commercial industrial land and we really didn't know how to develop it what to do how to market it everything like that so like your business in my business you want to put the best people you can around round yours self so that these things can get done because every one of us there was instrumental in a lot of development in role as well you know the rosedale mall etc and craig knew how to put deals together knew how to market had connections so what we did under his leadership we formed the economic development commission because we knew knew we needed some more input from other people and from there we we you know  so we had all that land to go with were suddenly are we have a great location great land what do do we so that's first thing we did and well what we did is we also we knew we had to change the attitude of the commissions so that everybody in the city was working in the same direction that we were going to develop this land this commercial land we need of the tax base we had as we were a housing communally we had very little commercial industrial back then and you can't sustain that way so we ended up developing that land you'll you'll be able to see here another year another item that happen we lease a back to wendell and instead of going through his books every year we we worked out a deal with him we take a cut out of every round of golf there is played in our way we don't have to worry about him  book son so on shirts or whatever that's that's his business but that's just some of the things we've built those two fire departments we made it one bill fire department we used to be east county line we did the nature center we did a lot of good things ted you remember walton park when he had the idea to bring in the national guard on the weekends if anybody knows he came up with these plans that sometimes work sometimes then than so he brought in the national guard for their weekend duties to redo ball fields well eventually they started sinking in and it just wasn't done right so we really did walton park to the tune of over a million dollars of what you see now there was two houses to the west that we bought which was a good acquisition because then we could build the football field make all the ball fields regulation we knew back in the ninety there that we were parks i mean we really didn't have much many ball fields we didn't have we had the i am but we didn't utilize it so we had a deuce do our layout with staff unary thing in and you'll be able to see that we've changed staff as time goes on because things change all the time and you need people that know what they're doing around you and if you don't then you aren't going to get these things done so right now you can see that we have over thirty restaurants ted what do we have just the burger king back then are not very many yeah him even now that so you can see that a lso city hall just as it was half full it was in the croissants and hot men built the city hall and then it was only half of what it is today and we had to cancel chambers up stairs so when i first got on the cot so my first meeting when you know it was a controversy about aspen apartment buildings right down near wall park there and so i walk into the first meeting i should have known better but i didn't so i walk in there and people are wall to wall lined up down the steps and this is all if anybody's been upstairs the city hall or craig's offices and stuff so that's where the consul chambers were and i'm sorry like oh man what i get myself into here had to be one hundred degrees up there so hats rolled off my head and i'm sitting there i went home and  flat i don't know about this deal but anyway made it through and the rest is history you know it's just a bad or a have been good people on the console everybody working in the same direction and having gr staff and once you do that then things start falling into place like like you'll see with thirty restaurants you can see in two thousand and seven commercial industrial value was four hundred sixteen million today it's four seventy one you can see a little dip from the recession there but it's it's still improved quite a bit in the total value in the city of oakdale it was eight hundred sixty six million now it's over two billion so you can see the vast improvement job increases this is a big one two thousand we had seventy eight ninety eight today we have ninety two ninety two and growing and some of the newer businesses five guys came here which is a wholesaler for tomatoes and vegetables so she had a bank we have the oaks business park which is over near the freeway near guardian angels over there well we just found out yesterday that they finally lease the wrestler buildings off so that's totally fall over there so hopefully they'll start building more buildings or that was the original plan and so i think they they may look at that now we have crossroads they have johnson yeah and he's doing well down there are you fully leased out pretty much for us too and that's were i'm a shim is as were sokal want to build the vikings twins stadium he came to a meeting at toby's and i was the funniest thing you ever saw in your life he wanted people to pay there you know great businesses up there so that's worked out great for us pins bowling alley now that's also really gets a lot of use if you have kids or grandkids i mean it's a there now a fitness very popular now we have in all the economic development allows us to get a better quality of life in the city and you can see we have a ph business and all the businesses for helping us out a lot of these are through volunteers and without volunteers a lot of this isn't possible in the donations winter wonderland mark you know about that it's just fabulous huge crowd in nor market we have right up here now that we have this building ball feels because we didn't have enough land for the ball field so we want in with school district for one thing we went in when they built that school we went in with them on a family locker room expanded the basketball courts and and the poor area put in a pool so the community could use that pool and basketball and things like that and then we did the ball fields and we sprinkled the ball fields put in sprinkler system something lot of money and of there it's turned out great to have a partnership of and also we put into hockey rinks and that's behind tartan high school nats with the school district so the three cities went to cities and school district went together and that nets turned out great too so a lot of those things that have been done without any referendum which i don't like referendums for city anyway we figure out if we can't figure out how to do it we're not going to do it and basically that's been our mode of all along is that stay within our budget make sure that we don't overspend and make sure we don't have a lot of bonding and referendums out there that the people are eventually going to have to pay we have the that's free also oakdale summerfest so everybody knows about that and we also have the farmer's market june through october which is really well attended now we have the community that's become huge we have that in walton park and there's usually about ten thousand people that come and we have concessions now refreshments  so it's huge we have over twenty five parks known clued in this one here the oak hill and the preserve which is two hundred twenty acres of city own land that is for natural setting and it's just so you don't find that many places you can see the discovery center the things that you see here today they don't happen overnight either i mean it's many hours and many meetings and to go through all this stuff there's our storage area right here just put that up we're going to future here's where we're going we're we're going to we're really committed than redevelopment there is where we are now we were ok all that errol is and what happens in a lot of communities they go up and then they if they don't do anything they're going to go at all and we don't want that to happen here so so we've been really working hard on this redevelopment we're really committed to it right here is one to one instance where we had the northstar ideal storage or was out of doors that was near the target there and  we worked with them so that they can move behind target and build them indoor facility you don't even know it's there hardly but it suits fall we have the red all preserved which is on fiftieth street right over here now to replace the just a lap aetate up more home park it was dangerous there the sewer and water were gone so we we eliminate at that park and you'll be able to see in a minute here craig can click click  we go through to to do this we have a mix use up there we have town homes single family homes habitat for humanity round though we have a senior place up there and it's the coolest thing because it all meshes together it's a lot sometimes when you do these projects they don't come out the way the way that you think they're going to at the beginning this one came out exactly how we thought it was going to and all all of homes are are sold now bill and so so the whole development is basically done and and it's a real mixture of people you know what i mean and we've had very thirty three single family or island homes and can see the public safety calls have decrease yorkdale mall site that that we're going to  redevelop and we're going to do that and we're putting in the infrastructure which is starting next week i think where they're put in the roadway system there'll be a stop and go light right there between  you can see what the local mall looked like i mean it was it was a mess it was a mess you can even hardly breathe in there when you walked in there because of the mold them and pipes broke you know was it was terrible the deal with the owner of the mall was like dealing with the worst person i ever dealt with i can say that now that we got the site but he was in california to say probably won't hear this i don't care but anyway you can see that it's going to be a mixed use plan on a senior place in the back and then you know maybe some medical and  retail you can see that we have a rock out there now so it's official that we're going to do something here and we did you know we are getting a lot of interest in that site we're getting a lot of interest in that sites and the one thing that we have done we position ourselves unlike a lot of other cities that just you know went in a cocoon we positioned ourselves in the city of oakdale to once this economy starts breaking and i will some day if not already we're position the goal we're positioned to build out on this commercial industrial stuff and also our system is so much better now a lot of other cities we have design standards so that when they come in they can staff can show me exactly how we want these buildings to look and they don't have to go through months and months and months and years of red government tape we try to run it like a business like any of you you know i mean you you try to get it through but you want to do it right and that's why we set the standards up front so that the developer know norm is right away when they walk in the door and see the caribou just pass that's where the old quick shop gas station up on thirty six and one twenty park tool kit we just passed the purchase agreement tuesday night this is huge for us this park tool is going to go over that bubble the lap table right across from the north fire station was and we picked up that way i'm not a tax forfeit so we own the land we sign a purchase agreement with park tool for nine hundred thousand up front for the city of oakdale and them taxes are like twenty cysts twenty seven thousand a year now i don't know how many jobs craig fifty five jobs are right now so that's common no they are in there and they're national they're nationally known they're the biggest bicycle tool company in the nation if not the world so of a sudden there are logo i'm assuming is going to read part two all headquartered oakdale minnesota and you can't buy that advertisement so that's a that's a big deal tanners like we're still working on that we keep getting people were gay actually we're getting people more interested in it then we then we have we had a plan for the higher end apartment building with a real nice separate restaurant on the waterfront not connected to the building but so we'll see all that goes we're going to end up does is see we have a townhome association or a condo association and you know how sometimes they let him get run down because they just don't have the money or whatever to to keep the repairs going on so we start of this is this and well what the city can do is run a low interest loan through it don't ask me how we do it but we do it the loan is paid back over ten or fifteen years by these condo associations and the members come come to us they have to have so many so many other members such a percentage agree that they want to do this and craig you can show the improvements  ok the ones we passed were fifteenth street town home association that's a forty eight unit townhouse and they and what they're going to do is repeat that prepare wrists men were wetland cleanup door repair driveway ceiling roughly a two hundred fifty thousand dollars investment back into the into their area which in the long run helps everybody this is part of that keep up with the redevelopment otherwise it's goes down and the other one is lakeview condo that's down near tanner's lake that big apartment building there are a condo they need a lot of work there seven hundred thousand worth of work appreciate everything your b p a all their members do it's really appreciated and we want to keep a strong quality of life because that's what draws people in that mark mentioned the signature street that was one of the things that  we decided we wanted to do because when you drive into a city it's your first impression that's going to count so we want to look good but and also you want to do all this on a budget that we've always maintained we never got over budget and when we do the budget we start in like july and i go and then we finalize it told were november somewhere in there and it's a it's a long process we staff sort of gets our direction that ok what we try to aim for is that we want the regular homeowner to be at zero you know with the tax formulas are so complicated that you know as a bottom line person just show me what i got to pay so we want to we want to keep it at zero so that you know if your home is worth one hundred thousand or whatever let's use that and you paid a thousand dollars in taxes last year we want to keep that at a thousand now that it doesn't always work that way because of values the home go up and now some go down and they get a little less tax and some go up to because they remodeled or whatever and the commercial properties are even harder for us because the state of minnesota gets involved in that formula i don't i don't know i think you'd have to be a real mathematician a figure any of that out but anyway we that's our goal is to keep that budget so that the average homeowner and business does not get overtaxed now wabby may rise a little if we you know say we have more development because if you were working out as a is a budget that is probably three years old now and still wages are everything you know i mean we've extended roads because of new developments at souter and so you still have to maintain all that stuff so it's still costly in today's money both but we're real conservative as a consul and like i said the great thing about oakdale is that you had a city council and we've always had this sense i've been on that work in the same direction we may disagree on a few things but after the vote were done i'm movin on and you have to have a great staff like everybody knows boy it's a people around you and make you look good and questions told you would be done by one m you well like you said it may look boring but we get a lot to get off a lot and it's a consul's that argue and fight in our political that's one thing we've been lucky we don't have anybody that's political you know inertia they want to go a bill a governor or whatever it's the everybody on the consul's always been pay what's best thing for the city like i said we may disagree on that but we in the end we all agree to move forward so and when you don't i when you have a consul that's chaotic nothing gets done period you lose staff you have such staff turnover not only that every two years or so many of the consul members are up for reelection every two years they get on elected and somebody else comes in so you never have this consistency and that can kill a city for ten twelve years