online services welcome karen thank you mr anthony i'm very happy to be here good ok what is the city code well technically the city code is the laws that governs the city of maplewood good way of putting it actually i have referred to it as such but the city code is what governs the city it's our laws and so it when the city council passes an ordinance which they passed the first one those are modifications of previous ordinances and it's quite a task to keep them uploaded in keep them accurate as a city laws change and so we've just recently done a republic date and that included modification of ninety eight ordinances in the boy book and now we have also gone to municipal code online which i would like to show on the computer ok karen well look you roll the ok what i'm going to show you first is this is actually the city website which is located at w w w c e i dot maplewood got him in dot u s it's easy to remember if you remember the first two letters for city cia the city of make would and in the state and then united states cia dot maplewood dot in dot us for those that are not familiar with our website on the right hand page if you go down you see a link that says city code simply click on that and it will bring you to the actual city code page then you click on view the maplewood city club code and this takes you to number nine thirteen inactive july eleventh two thousand and eleven was the last code that is included in what is online now just let me clarify that we had when we did the republic ation we we behind ninety eight codes being updated so this is accurate through twenty eleven july eleventh of two thousand and eleven however there are only been four codes that have been inactive since then and those will be included in the next republication that will be online probably the end of march are we going to republish or do the recount if occasion on a quarterly basis or every six months or something like that i'm glad you asked that question because it's a good one we will be doing the update of the city code on a quarterly basis or as needed for example if we have an ordinance that's passed that you say it's a hot button issue or something that the public is incredibly interested in we could have a turnaround of two or three days but our contract is that we would do it on a quarterly basis so there would be a little bit extra cost for them there's to put that on and stuff like yes if it was needed immediately within twenty four to forty eight hours i mean that is such a rare occasion that that would happen but we're very excited to let the citizens know that this will be updated at least on a quarterly basis if there's a period of time a quarter that we don't have any changes in our ordinances of course we wouldn't be doing it but that's what the schedule will be so i kind of want to go over some of the very very interesting parts of the city code and there are a lot of citizens that love to do research we also have students that would do papers on different cities as you well know we have people come to to the city council meeting and they're doing researching or whatever and  so this is going to be a great tool for all of us to to be using in the future if say you wanted to do a search on let's say something that's real that we get a lot of phone calls on is recreational fires so that a controversial issue about three years ago yes it was so you could do a search of recreational fires you just key that in and then you hit go and  then all of the issues pertaining to recreational fires those laws that govern our city you'll find these come up under that search so this is going to be extremely beneficial for those for city staff that gets a lot of phone calls we can refer individuals to the to the website and as people become more and more custom to using it they will be doing the research on their own of course we're more than happy to help if someone wants to call in and get further information another issue would be say a liquor license we have a lot of phone calls on liquor licenses and then all of the you can see all of the laws that govern liquor licenses that come up and so individuals can do their own searching now that would be strictly the maplewood ordinances it wouldn't be going into the state statutes right now it will not go into state statutes however a lot of our ordinances let's see if this particular one once you click on the issue the item that you haven't it comes up on the page then you just click on i'll go back so people can see that explain a little bit say this comes up and it says this is one hundred percent of this issue here has to do with what we entered in this liquor license so you click on that and then that brings you back to the actual language in the ordinance then you can go down and read about that one of the things that you'll see here mr antonin that you just question was your state law references so a lot of our ordinances mere if you will the state law we also adopt by reference a lot of the state statutes don't we in our order yes or we do very good point occasionally what we will do if the state state law supersedes local law you can be a local law can be stricter but they can't be less restrictive  state law so a lot of references that you'll see within the city code will say the city has adopted the state statute in conjunction with our own laws so as you can see  we also have references here when this ordinance was last changed so was in two thousand and six and then you just go through and many places throughout the  code you will see where your search words are referenced so in order to do a search extremely easy in a comprehensive as well  well it almost looks like on the left side there that the ordinances are index two they are so will go back here if you're just doing a general you don't know exactly what it is that you want to key in say for example you know everything there is to know about let's go down to zoning oh boy that is our largest chapter is the zoning chapters the forty fourth chapter and it's  person's computer going to be completely swamped when you click on that zoning to basically slow it down or how do the how do the address at issue of these large amounts of information that's available i don't think that it will i think basically if you if say if you take a chapter and you do a cut and paste and then paste it back onto your own computer that would take up space but i don't think that that's really go us by viewing people can just go through this and without worrying about taking up space on their computer in this type thing except if they're going to actually download the thing on there and you know and use manipulation or whatever that is i went back to a liquor license here you can look up the whole chapter and i can guarantee you that you'll be reading for a long time because it is rather large hands and last year so say if you want to go to signing regulations i think that there's actually signs is in a couple chapters you can get that and then you're going to see all of these different places and it is in chapter forty  four and it will give you all of the information for conforming and non conforming signs what's exempt from having to be permitted except euro so as you can just see i'm so excited about it because  one of the reasons that i really pushed to get this online through municipal code is for this searching tool that we have here one of the things that i see it is a tremendous benefit to the citizens well so i think it should help us to where people are put in data requests and and sometimes i know we get some real interesting data requests sometimes some other ones are more nuisances than anything else and so a person that is waiting in line so to speak to have their data practices request responded to basically avoid the whole thing now by by going to the the ordinance code one of the when they're concerned about something with the city laws or when it was adopted where it's ad what it says etc etc that is also a good point as well one of the things that she's well known is that our one of our goals has been is to continue to improve on our openness in government and i think we've done are tremendous great deal with that i'm going to go back to  back to our city web page on our web page we have just have an incredible amount of information and we're continually putting stuff out there one of the things that happens with when you met you mentioned data request is my office as a responsible thirty for the city we received those data requests through my office and last week i was able to not through the code yet but through the website an individual was requesting information on the local all of the information pertaining to the trash hauling that was just recently passed and i sat on the phone with him and we walked through and i showed him where all of this information was now once the new ordinance pertaining to the trash hollings passed that will be on here as well that might be one that we want to have put on yeah i think i think cool will probably put that on there so that hopefully you can answer a lot of questions that people have but people arrange things but once you kind of read their mind it's fairly fairly simple to find what you need ok here we are at the city website so just were segue in a little bit from the code but it's also a part of the question regarding the data practices when you come to the city website but say someone will call me and they'll want to know some information on perhaps about what do you have to do to to get a building permit and so i would say ok let's go over here and click on the partment and then you can see building inspections go to contractors applications or say someone wants to know ok i'm going to open up a restaurant in the city of maplewood what what do i need for how where do i find a a license application and i would direct him to departments city citizen services which is one of my departments that i oversee and then i would go to business licenses and then here you see all of our all of the licenses that we have in the city and i would go down here's your you would need a food establishment license and you would need a liquor know if you're going to serve liquor but most of our restaurants do and i would say also you'd probably want to have a business alarm and so you can see that our web site is just so wonderful for people to find information and then community center all the information about that environmental natural resources here's all the information on our trash planet since that's such a hot topic right now let's just click on that much bring that up and then we'll go back to the code but this is a maplewood trash plan and you can see all of the documents that you can can look at here's all of the agendas all of the  videos the presentations that were given the actual proposals that we received online for people to to review scroll back down just a little bit because i wanted to down the right under the trash dollars working group there you go the all that was videoed right everything was as it was on stream video streaming and it's in the archives so if you wanted to see what interaction took can see all of the all of the documents that were used during this whole process are on here and also the contact for the issue well her phone number and her e mail but say when when we when we do the  codification and we put trash hauling ordinance in the court ordinances and a lot of this material say the agendas and the presentations for the working group will not be  ordinances and so it's still important for people to use the search function on the city web site in addition to going to the code of ordinances just to make sure that people have the reports that they need that there isn't anything left out so to speak i mean the code is pretty clear in what the ordinance says what is published and how we put it there but the background material may still be in the archives somewhere when by using your search engine or search function i guess you can bring that up correct very well put the the thing to is that when you the city web page also has a search function let's put in i haven't done this but let's try this out if you put trash plan in our search function on there i'm assuming and then hit go see you're going to get all of those documents there so even if you didn't know exactly where to go you can see right here just by doing using that search function on the city web pages well it brings you back to that page so what we're trying to do with making sure that we have the city code updated as as much as possible the website updated as much as possible with as much information as we can put out there we're trying to make our openness  government work hand in hand with the code and with our city website and i think that we're doing a splendid i splendid job here and it's going to be very beneficial for the citizens well particularly since this thing must weigh twenty pounds pretty heavy this was last codified in what two thousand and three two thousand and three so i mean it's almost ten years nine years and so that's that really is too long yes and so by going to putting the code on the on the website and the to find it online and stuff  basically we can avoid having to print this must took a half a dozen trees anyway just to to print this devil and it is more timely correct and probably up to date going the technology is changing things are going to electronic and the thing with doing the books at one point i think we had twenty five of those books and then any time that we did do a modification we had to recall all those books then put the new pages in so now we're only going to have three actual hard copies and then everything else will be online the one thing that i wanted to point out to make sure that we get time to address is that how important this  having this online is also to the staff and say for example as you well know mr arrington and all of our public safety our police and fire have access to computers in their rate and so say for example you know we work mostly from eight to five but say our one of our police officers is out and he has an issue with the way a sign is on a building he's responding to a  complaint he or she can actually look the code up now in their vehicles and know that they're looking at an accurate document so if i'm not in the office at five o'clock they can feel free just to look at up and answer the question of the of the business owner from the code obviously because of the nature of right of snow and when people have to plow the lots of stuff but i think i think it won't be too long before say that the person complained the author looked it up on the computer and my guess is the next step is to have a little printers in the cars as as as we go along where they can actually print out a copy of the ordinance and and show it to the people so you know they may not like the noise from snow removal but that issue has been discussed has been decided by by their elected representatives god knows when probably twenty thirty years ago but that's exempt from our of ordinances and therefore there really isn't any action the city can take that's correct and it's going to be a wonderful tool for public safety and so we're very excited about that as well one of the other things i want to show you too on if you go to if you don't want to go through this city website which most people will but you can actually access our code through municipal code and that that addresses a muni code the first four letters of municipal ammu and i code dot com and then when you come to that page you can pick the state of minnesota the say you hit click on minnesota there and then these are all of the cities in the state of minnesota that use municipal code is there caught fire and so for myself when i'm reviewing a code or something the city council has directed staff to to look at maybe modifications to our liquor license or modifications to wall tonight what we have on the on the agenda is our tobacco license or tobacco regulat and so tonight will be presenting a new version of our tobacco license and so in the process of writing that with chief tamala i did visit several other cities that have to back o and tobacco related products codes and so this became a tool for me to use that was very beneficial and helped me with my time so you can go to any other city  looks looks just like our yes but i suppose because all their all the ordinances are in conformity and stuff like that and we do try fairly fairly seems we do try to be that when people can search  minnesota if you don't remember it you can google it and if you do google it will be that i think where the first hit there that comes up but didn't when you want your on our website you go over to the right hand side click on city code and then that will bring us to our city code of ordinance page on their maplewood site then you hit view the maplewood city code and it takes you to our contractor who is municipal code and as i stated again we'll be updating this  on a quarterly basis or as needed and if anyone has any questions on how to use the site if they they can certainly feel free the phone number is up here two four nine two thousand is our main line or they can feel free to contact me directly and that's two four nine two thousand two that's my direct line and i can certainly help walk through it if anyone wants to learn more on how to use it what we will be doing  now the second reading of this is tonight for the final and then we'll be going live and after that i'll be sitting down with each one each of the departments so that we know how to use it very fission lee and it's going to be a great tool for us i'm sure that it will what's the cost of care and i know we went through this last couple years trying to come up with enough money to to pay for it to have a good product and and three i think it was not to exceed sixteen grand and we did stay underneath that now that the code is up to date we'll be doing a republic a sion quarterly and that will that price per year will not exceed five thousand dollars now that 's i think even our harshest critics will agree that this probably is really well spent money as far as transparency open government getting the information out to people that need it in and hopefully will save our time their time and everybody's time and speaking of time we are just about out i really appreciate all the work you've done on this care and i think people know how hard you work and how many different