here we are were wrong well good evening everyone thank you for joining me this evening i what i hope is going to become an annual event to talk about the city to give people more information about our community in the form then what we've accomplished in recent times to talk about our future as well most importantly and i want to thank the council members councillor for arm and council member peterson for joining us and i want to thank the members of our commissions and our city staff who are here also i want in any other guests as well and anyone watching at home on cable i'm glad that you had a chance to tune in and i put think will be rebroadcast in this as well if you didn't see it live it will probably have some opportunity to take a look at this in the future  simply put there's a lot that's going on in the city council members and city staff are involved in a multitude of different things every day every week every month and every year so many things that it's not possible to talk about everything that we're working on the c v just to kind of give some examples and point out some of the key items that that i think we as a council think are very important to the future of our community but please know this that we all of us at the city the city staff in the city council works very hard every day to make nursing paula great place in fact we might see an extraordinary city to live in most of what i'll be talking about this evening in terms of our futures tied to our new newly completed strategic plan that we put together this past year through a series of retreats working with staff and the city council and the plan is kind of our road map for the next forty years in the city it's really our future and i think it's  i render standing as council members of the issues we need to address and the opportunities that are before us in a statement of how we hope to accomplish all these items that we haven't and i encourage people who have not seen the comprehensive plan it is posted on the city's website we would have copies as well vailable upon request at city hall so i encourage people if you haven't taken a look at it please look at it because it really is and it will be updated from time to time but it really is the road map from right now as we look to the future of our community so what is the state of our city and i think i would like to report that our state of the city is great but i think from my perspective my evaluation of our community is that the condition of our city is fragile but i think it's improving and i think the foundation is being laid for a very bright future for our community as well we know our communities changing according to the two thousand and ten we know that there is a big jump in the amount of our population that's age forty five and over and we have even a higher senior population that i think over sixty five is about eighteen percent of our population and we also found out in our tw that nearly one fourth of our approximately twelve thousand relatives who are living are sitting in our nonwhites and with this changing demographics come new challenges for our city and how the services that we provide today and what we might need to provide in the future so it's important as we all engage and as citizens whether you are like me a lifelong resident or a brand new resident that we all together can help make our city even stronger let's start looking at economic development first to me nothing is more important to our future than have a stable and prosperous city than having it in our economic development nothing to do nothing to me is not an option for us because things will happen even if we do nothing and i think we want to help guide that and control it in our future as a fully developed city we have very little land and very little opportunities to grow and expand our economic base so that remains a challenge and we need to do what we the properties we have available and when they become available we need to do that wisely it also means our redevelopment efforts to attract new business and citizens need to be carefully thought out and needs to have a positive lasting impact on the community generally speaking we got one shot in our lifetime basically to work on a redevelopment in our city is poised for that at this point in time and with with that said we we are taking a new approach in attracting business which i'll talk about in a little bit here and we are also revisiting our zoning code to improve flexibility for business to do development in our community a low economic development has been slow in recent years due to the great recession that hit our country for about the last five years we're now starting to see interest in nurse st paul gain some steen recent investments in the community included the hundred fourteen unit project called polar ridge which will be open in april and that is a fourteen million dollar development that not only provides residential options for our city but it's also something development that will also provide about seventy new jobs in the city as well then recently we've  seen reflex medical complete an expansion last year on seventh street and that included near nearly doubling their size and they have about thirty employees that work there on a full time permanent basis and they're also by the way one of our largest electrical and they're currently located in the standard they're building and they have about sixty employees that work there and so there are new jobs as well they brought to our community and we've also have two new schools that opened recently in our town during this last school year one is b prep academy that's lisa's from the city the greg great portion of the community center and they bring nearly one hundred students in about twenty twenty faculty members into our downtown area  day the school specializes in both education but also hockey development and then there's the why is gate academy which opened last year on sept level of art in the old atrium building and that serves about thirty young children that have special young adults that have special needs and they have a staff of about ten that came here into our city last year so again we've also i think we have some things that are slowly happening and we've brought a few jobs in but i think we have a lot more work to do in the future recently we heard that in part of the atrium building that next year we may see a charter school coming into town to locate in that facility so as i mention earth st paul's gaining speed and the city regular conversations on two different major developments on a regular basis exploring ideas at the former twenty acre anchor block site on mic night road and also the seven acre area that we call commerce power which is where the old school bus garage used to be located so there is some interest in development on those but we have not seen any anything concrete happen there but we hope that things will move forward this coming year we also and i are in a position to help with the redevelopment of the downtown area of the city owns three parcels that are all open and ready for development the old city hall side obviously the old medical center site and then the area and margaret right across from our fire station here so we hope to also work hard to attract some development on those sites as well i think as we move forward on these things i think it's going to be imperative that we try which we've tried for many years and that i think staff and councils are extremely committed in and can is going to say here here is that we need obviously desperately need at least one more restaurant in our community in a grocery store we certainly would love to see that and that is something we have not lost sight in it's just very difficult so the we've seen some interest in the community i would be remiss to not recognize and thank some of the existing businesses that have been longtime located in our city or have been good members of the business community and they include such businesses and i obviously am just naming a few but tracey luther auction law garage gift shop the k g catering our vets clubs newman's bar  do black corporation the insurance center thorson breading jura noveck accounting and barrois refeed i think they have all been real anchors and helpful in our community and we think them all very much for their continued support in helping make our community a good place a large component of future development for attracting new and retaining existing business in the community has been an effort that the city council has made over the last two years and that's hiring a national firm to help help analyze businesses in there called the bu peroration their goal is to help the city assess specific businesses through there and they'll assess of about two hundred fifty different factors which could be have a good market base in our city  goal is to pinpoint these types and names of businesses that meet the nurse st paul profile and focus our efforts on them in our city staff hopes to engage in one on one contacts with about twelve of these profile businesses that meet the profile very well for our community this spring and probably another twelve contacts in the fall to try to entice them and convince them but i think what the economic development authority of the city found out in the city councils learning as well is that  you know you just can't say well we have this many people and we have this base and you need to look at a market trend and you need to go out and attract businesses with the needs of convincing them that you have the proper information to inform them that this is a good place the profile is there here's the information we need a lot more information than simply employment or ages of our residents and this company has these tools and city council i think in the e d s quite excited about the opportunities to work with them so economic development is a major it will remain a major challenge to our community but it's there but it's vitally important and you have a firm commitment i believe from our city council that substantial efforts will be placed on this topic in the years ahead what is now shift to neighborhoods neighborhoods to me are the most vital thing that give strength to our community they're the real you know backbone of the city we need to ensure that they remain safe and decent places to live the majority of our housing stock we know is older in a need of some updating working with property owners through a proactive in education approach and coding for cement and  through new programs to help possibly help property owners make improvements they desire will be important to help us preserve property values and keep our neighborhood strong and vibrant in the future we also need a diverse housing stock the newly constructed as a previously mentioned hundred fourteen a polar ridge i think is a really prime example of meeting a need that we do not have in our community particularly in the areas of assisted living and also some nursing care particularly focused on memory care so these are examples i think of where efforts to start filling the gaps that we have in housing i think it's important that we shoot for a community that if you are born here you come from the hospital and grow up here that there should be housing options and let me give you an example of what a perfect example that we didn't have in the middle line nine hundred ninety s we had a number of people who wanted to retire in raise their kids here and they wanted to the world war two vets a lot of them they wanted to to remain in the community but they didn't want to own a home they wanted association living they wanted to own and they wanted it one level of back in about one thousand nine hundred four we did a survey we had for such homes for unit little town house development up upon parkway drive well the council went to work and contacted developers and put a lot of time and effort into it in as a result we ended up with a pen place or kill town homes and condos minium development which added ninety three housing units and since then we've been successful adding some smaller units we have the area called develop by sure we're development that's behind the crestwood townhomes that created twelve new one level units across from st peter's that created seven units the cardinal gardens and seventeenth avenue that included seven units and now the new development there cardinal builders will be putting up this year at the site of the old nurse st paul nursing home which is about the name of it but it's also a cardinal development and we w mean what was it yeah the little fall of nursing home but i'm trying to think of the news what cardinals call in the new development anyway as a result we'll have ten new units going in there that are in these are all one level so as a result in about twenty years we've been able to go from four one level ownership housing units to one hundred thirty three one level ownership housing units but it shows you how long sometimes things can take especially when you have very little land to develop i think that's really really important is to use as an example and over the past six years another great success story has been of course our student housing program working with intermediate school district nine sixteen we've so far constructed five new homes this program is not only brought in about one hundred which is me one point three million dollars in real estate value into the city in the price of these new homes as they became sold but it's also helped to increase property values in the community in the neighborhoods where these homes have gone and you see a lot of home improvements being made by my neighbors in those areas but it's also given as well high school students a chance to test out the market and their skills in construction trade it's been a great partnership and we're really happy that that we've been able to to work with the school district on that our sixth home is being built this year now being built it's around ovation project the first renovation and it's a home on sixth street across from webster school and it was a small side by side duplex that is now being renovated and converted into a single family home and the city also is going to be hopefully of approved by the planning commission the council dividing the lot up there to have a seventh home site on that same site which will be the construction project for next year and begin to encourage people to drive by and take a look at straight off of seventh street seventh avenue at six treat in just across from webster school  there in addition to the student housing program last year the city council acting as a housing redevelopment authority began discussions of other additional programs to help maintain a stable housing stock the council will be looking this year at possible programs to provide low interest loans for x sure improvements of homes to a revolving loan fund through our h r a and also looking to provide some incentives for him to help seniors stay in their homes was we call it aging in place and through making and providing some assistance for making home safety improvements for them to stay in their homes to help keep neighborhoods well maintained the city council approved two part time positions in the budget for this year in the  development department to work on in the warmer months on reasonable coded foresman of basic code violations the goal of these new positions is to help us take on a more proactive and educational roles of approaching residence to have some such issues rather than the traditional methods of going out issue citations etc we want to encourage and engage the property owners in helping to keep our neighborhoods attractive and great places to raise their families  part of preserving obviously the value of our neighborhoods is also ensuring public safety probably the most primary important thing the city council does each year and this can be accomplished to improve relationships of our residents business owners to our police department which is this is an initiative the council is supportive of called community policing whereby we the police recognizes the citizens help and engages the citizens help in helping to prevent crime by being the eyes and ears because we know the police officers can't be everywhere and this obviously requires some training and motivation and other things which i'll touch on a little bit here in the past year as part of the shuffling of our law enforcement personnel largely we lost five officers all at once to ramsey county as ramsey county went through a wave of retirements of their officers and a lot a lot of our officers took that the choice to go to a larger police department where there's more variety in the work they do so in their place this past year the council it went through through our police department hiring process and we hired six really new enthusiastic community center dr sears and they seem to be a great fit in the department they seem to be even a motivation for more senior officers and we think that's a great complement how the officers are working together right now to assist in some of this efforts  dealing with neighborhood community policing the council did approve last year a part time half time position in the police department for a second community services officer and that person will largely  coordinate the neighborhood watch programs or the council were very interested in expanding those we have just a couple neighborhoods that now have a crime watch program and where they exist they seem to be very helpful but it needs some help at the residents can't be expected to do this on their own and to gather the information and to conduct a lot of the things that that is required to put a watch group together so we've we've also engaged in additional own personnel to work with that in the neighborhoods because we think that's provides a good a really good working relationship with the police department to help decrease teacher crime in the neighborhoods and i also want to give my compliments to our police reserve i mean they don't get sometimes a lot of recognition but we have a police reserve that has just recently added five new members and they have six applications and processed by a largely advertising that century college and in using our city's website in press releases and we by this summer will have a police reserve very large as it's ever been of about fifteen or sixteen members and they seem to be a really good group we had a chance to meet on the other day many of them and they do such things that the police just don't have the opportunities to do last year that  estimated amount of hours they contributed in volunteer work to the city was about three thousand they'll do things like extra patrolling checks on check home checks when people are out of town they work at community events to help control crowds and traffic and they just do a variety of things that we just wouldn't be able to simply do without our police reserves so the council's very appreciative of them as well as one addition to our police department we also they think have a very proud in and well trained fire department volunteer i liked to say i'm proud of and our fire department continues to provide i think dedicated and professional service but finding volunteers for that he parliament is a growing problem we were facing a dip last year and fire department personnel until late in the year approximately nine new applicants came forward unfortunately three of them even had some past experience in firefighting so it helped jump our numbers a little bit again but i think it's important for the residents in the city in this in and the department to hear this that we as a as a city council i think they're very supportive of the volunteer fire department we don't we feel that's the best way to go in our city it's a tradition we have so we want to keep  and we are willing as a city council to work with the fire department any way we can to help recruit and retain the new members and we keep the members that we have in the department because it's a tough job and we don't know if it's possible but we're willing to work with the department on them and i also want to point out when it comes to our firefighters that the council worked with the fire department and the fire guys did all the work they put in hours of a committee looking at the purchase of a new fire truck and the fire truck is due any day and tomorrow i'm hearing possibly even and if we're really excited about that it replaces a twenty eight year old fire truck that has reached its time where it needs to be retired and that's the later than retire after twenty years but the guys kept it going and now it's going to be replaced and then also i want to just mention very briefly that our public safety personnel conducted a program last september on the fifth anniversary of the death of officer richard created in and we at that time conducted a ceremony that rename the nurse st paul portion of highway thirty six in in officer critics honor so it's now officially known as the officer so also tie the community is the need for us a strong and good parks system because it's what helps attract young families to our city and high quality parks is also an opportunity for us to socialize and interact with each other but it's also i think encourages a healthy lifestyle for our residents that we would like to encourage as well to get out and use the parks for those purposes i personally believe we have some of the best parks in the area and the city council in the park commission is continue looking for ways to improve them and to expand to provide new experiences to offer to our citizens and our visitors twenty fourteen was a tremendous year for our parks i'm believably last june a miracle happened in our city it's five thousand violin tears assembled and donated over five thousand hours of volunteer labor to build a very special playground a k c they park known as janie's playground in st paul resident who suddenly passed away at the age of eighteen months they built a very unique whimsical looking playground that could not have been done without the help of volunteers because it would not be financially possible to do it it was an army of volunteers that took over a city that weakened the city's grateful to the as the radko family in the city's park commission for making this project a reality it's a real asset for city another amazing project is the funding that has now been completely secured construct which will happen as soon as spring comes the new veterans memorial park that will be located at the site of the old can and park just north of the  bridge this project is a is a consolidated effort working with the city the park and rec commission the veterans organizations and the community in the junior aero t c air force r o t c and north high and it's just been tremendous the veterans memorial committee has gone out on their own by selling fire over five hundred twenty five paver small pavers and over thirty large pavers and doing countless other fundraisers have raised one hundred fifteen thousand dollars for this project and then the committee along with the systems of the city lobbied the legislature for another hundred thousand dollars in funds from the in the state bonding bill which was granted this year and beyond that we also were the recipient the city of a one of a ten thousand dollars grant from the minnesota heritage fund from its arts and cultural account due to the original design of the project and that so the money has all been completely secured to build this approximately two hundred twenty five thousand dollars project that is going to be i think something that is going to be a real pride of our community and it's going to be something that people i think are going to enjoy visiting call aspect to it a walk of history regarding military involvement and we're all excited to see it begin and to see it completed we hope to have a completed mid to late summer and believe me we're going to have a wonderful dedication ceremony and i hope everyone in town will be able to attend there because it will be a wonderful day for city and this also the city park and recreation commission we'll continue discussions on a new park shelter a k c lake the city council will be discussing the size cost and ways to pay for the new shelter or the next several months we have also approved a replacement slide at silver lake and reconstructed over the last couple years for a new park shelters that housing tower so overlay can at near the wind which is is an area that will soon probably will be renamed the rotary park because the rotary club in the area has helped provide some funding to help do some development down there and be a great stopover for people using the gateway trail and so we're also looking to place a plaque to provide the history and physical information by our world famous snowman that people from all over the country stop to visit so we'd like to provide them with some information on that and also in the works is  potential the summer of a community another community build project the park commission is great at that which will be the addition of a new fishing pier at k c lake park with the materials donated by the d n r so that's a would be another nice collaborative effort in finally i can't just say enough about the volunteers who work so hard to improve and protect the city's only nach nature preserve that we have southward countless hours of volunteer work every year continues to be put in there and this year the last year the i think a lot of the concentration was on this endless battle to remove bark farm and japanese knotweed and also on the removing of the invasive chinese elm trees that existed on there and then they've also with the help of of the city and the volunteers planted nearly one hundred new trees in the park this years we've been told that a lot of the wooded area in that park is deemed to be a dying forest area so we want to start replacing the trees there and just my little commercial of my speech the park funds always accepting contributions to help make our park system the best it can be good parks are key to attracting young families and you can contact the city or going to a website for information on how to t contribute and help the park for and grow tied to parks is also the need to have a good environmental environmental program in our community last year the city initiated discussions with ramsey county  to me to move to begin to require recycling in our apartment complexes which is something that's not required at this time and we think that's an important endeavor that will take some planning and  amount of public education to make this success when we hope to have that project and underway this year as well from an environmental perspective last fall several members of the environmental commission and i think the planning commission design a circuit review that a chance in a park commission also had a chance to do a tour of a program that the city has adopted a number of years ago called the living streets program and i think we came up with on the tour with some really good ideas for traffic calming practices and residential neighborhoods to create more green space along our roadways and to improve safety practices for protest reasons and bicycle lists and i think there's a lot of ideas that the council will be discussing this year and maybe some of them can even be put into place another environmental thing i think that's six trying importance to the council is simply the to work with the silver lake improvement association to preserve and improve silverlake obviously it's probably our number one natural resource a source of great history in the community a source of great pride and we want to make sure that that there's things we can do and there's there's a number of things with water runoff into the lake that we hope to engage in discussions with this year come up with a long range plan for improving the water quality of the lake and we're also working towards implementing a plan to fight the emeril ash bore that has all around us in will hit our city we have done a tree survey of all the cities on public property in the city and we know we have an over abundance of ashen affected the survey showed that north of highway thirty six approximately seventy percent of all the trees on public land are ash trees and so what we're doing is trying to anticipate the disease hitting our town in the next few years we' trying to be very proactive in replacing damaged trees throughout the city last year we did a number of those and we'll continue to do that this year and in our street construction project last year when the trees are replaced the ash trees were that were taken down were replaced with new varieties of trees in the city council i think remains strongly committed to a neutral to a tree replacement program with diversification of our tree varieties throughout the town so let me touch now the next on communications you know we have a great history of volunteers i'm in our city and i think that people want to give things back to the community they're involved in it and many of you here this evening are part of that but i think also to encourage more involvement and even those who are involved they want to know what's going on i mean i think that's always something the council hears what's going on you cities are not communicating and despite every effort that we make there's always a need to do more communication so the city and again in our strategic planning discuss the aspects of communication and i think the idea is to create a more informed citizenry in our community the city council is committed to expanding their city newsletter fact the very next issue of your city newsletter will be doubled from two pages to four pages that and but as a result of that and the cost of putting it together at least for the first year as we try this and market it it'll be by monthly newsletter so we need to do that just to kind of get our feet wet and work into that but we think it we know it'll provide a lot more information we're going to feature of each issue a feature on one of our businesses in town we're going to feature police updates and a variety of other announcements and notices that that we think will be more informed  and this takes a different philosophy as we do this because it's so much of it you need to plan ahead and that's what we want to do we want people to know about things before they happen more than reporting things after they happen and i think that's really important for us to engage the people and we're also one of the things that we're going to be doing with with our communication is we're in the process of updating our city web site to make it more user friendly so residents will be able to fill out more applications and forms et c if they don't want to stop at city hall they'll be able to do most of that on line hopefully and the city is also developing an app and i'm not very technological oriented but it's an app that people can put on their smartphones and the absolute also allow them to engage with the city and through their use of their telephone to be able to interact that way and so it's our plan that we continue to work on these things and another thing that we have kicked around is a system using just the e mail system to inform people more again people say there's a rash of home break ins we didn't know that how can we be informed so we will be reaching out to residents if they so choose to provide us with an e mail address that is protected but it will be used to provide crimewatch updates cancellations like of softball games of inclement weather we can use it for simply providing notices of emergency announcements in a whole variety  snowplow information a whole variety of things and so very useful tool that we're going to be also working on this year and finally from a communications in one of the things the council worked on last year that got became public about three weeks ago right here at this very po the new city logo and the reason the city logo was redone is it's an updated more accurate resemblance of our current city snowman it's actually an outline of the city's snowman as it exists from standing along the highway and it also is very important i think is our city tries that we can expand our outreach and marketing and trying to attract economic development in the city it's a freshness that we felt i think was needed to be the replacement of a fifty one year old logo that still kept the snowman but it's just a fresh look to it and i personally also hope that new ogle will also be a sense of community pride that we can use this as a spinoff to build community pride and  we have at city hall will have some we've we've created with graphic traffic a local design company on nick night road series of logo where the clothes hats and shirts and sweaters etc that people can look at and possibly order and purchase to promote the pride of our community and they can be viewed at city hall we have order forms available you can go on the graphic traffic website or also stop in the at their place of business and take a look and try some of the clothing on and we were very proud of it we think it is been a good addition to our community to come up with a slightly different fresh logo in finally the outreach efforts the city council wants to continue the city exposure at our car shows  examine the dition of other community events and we just discussed as i got here this evening with a member of the lions club an idea for a possible winter event and i'm not going to reveal it but i think it's a great idea that maybe we can explore but other ways we can engage the communities not necessarily major events but things where people can come and get to know each other better and i think that's a very important in our town and you really see that when you get involved with the crime watch program how important it is to know your neighbors so we hope to work on some of those types of things and one of my personal things that i promoted for a long time and i didn't say it's my personal idea but i think you know i'd like to try to mesh our ethnic diversity into a positive that we have in our town  we have the older residents so we have newer residents but they all come from different places and have different cultures and i like to work with the community to try to promote and like an ethnic heritage week and that would include possibly food and dance and music from not only the german and scandinavian populations that originally populated nurse st paul but also to learn more in have food and culture in music from both armani and hispanic populations which are also increasing significantly in the community so that we both can understand their different cultures and where we came from so that's just a personal aside for me lastly the recent finally lastly but certainly not least is the talk just a little bit about our city's budget and city finances the city is right now i think strong financially the great recession was a time when the city's had to pull back and be very neutral and nursing paul was no different from many other cities fortunately like some cities of fortun that a lot but we obviously didn't go bankrupt which a few cities did around the country but we think that the time was a great challenge for us at that time but we're now making our way forward we're engaging in conversation about our next budget  and we also put together a budget system that will not only when we do our budgets look at like the twenty sixteen budget when we work on that this year it'll also look at twenty seventeen and beyond so we can have a better idea of the future so we're not just always looking at just a year and trying to survive that year but we're trying to lay out five year budgets really as we develop our budget and one of the things i think that shows our cities and good shape financially is this year for the first time this city received a higher bond rating which is a double a plus that's probably for a city our size with our tax base as high as we can go and the reason that's so positive is when we sell bonds a higher bond rating provides lower interest rates which means it's citizens of our city we're all paying a little bit less and the amount of interest that the bonds are incurring as we pay off the debt and i think that's a very nice endeavored to me it's a it's a real plus to our staff  but the spider positive progress financially we must continually plan and prepare and remain diligent because there are things that happen from the outside all the time that we can't deal with and prevent in a perfect example of that is a smaller city we get about twenty five percent our operating budget from the state from a program called local government aid and it's an equalizer to help property taxes remain relatively stable and the cities that have big tax bases in the city that have small tax bases but because it's dependent on the state and their two year budget cycle six years ago when the recession started we ended up with having a three hundred fifty thousand dollar cut of our local government a very suddenly and dramatically and we had to scramble very hard so these things are out there and it is a result trying to prepare for that after that occurred the city said for operating we want to reduce some of our dependence on local government aid so with a series of cuts over three years we reduced our dependence on local government aid by about five hundred thousand dollars some of that money has gone out to an account to use as a fallback in case we ever do lose local government aid in the future and some of it's now being used for non operating programs such as this year we've committed one hundred thousand dollars of the local government aid money for capital improvements in the city parks and we've also included one hundred seventy seven thousand for street maintenance program and you know we that's one of the things that has struggled financially i mean we hear from residents all the time about you know we are now tiring and seal coding and doing those projects that we used to do on a regular basis and we want to get back to that and that's another commitment that the city council has also from a financial am one of the things that that we  have done and last year two years ago i think it was we adopted a forty year capital improvement plan and that's to replace the infrastructure in the city again as one hundred twenty five year old city we have a lot soul pipe still on the ground coating the and main street that i believe was put in one thousand nine hundred twenty six and as a result we have more probably water main breaks than we should in other things so with the the forty year plan what we're trying to do is every two years we're trying to do a street project in the street project also includes replacing storm sewers sanitary sewers in the water mains and it creates that freshness an ability to to make sure the infrastructure stays stable and i think that sixty gi extremely important as we continue to move ahead because we need to realize that we have approximately forty three miles of city on streets in our town that including the county and roads in the highway and we also have approximately sixty one miles of water mains and about the same for sanitary sewer systems so again we need to phase this we need to continually work on those systems and that's one of the disadvantages is an old community because as we do these projects we have to do the whole the whole kit catches our city i think in a different more than are used to time moves fast and many of us are engaged in our city have the tendency to become i think in a stodgy can remember the way our town used to be which we all loved we think of things like the rialto theater weber's bowling alley back stein at miller's shoe store the silver skate roller rink and kindles grocery store just to name a few in the most recent generations  we have to realize the malls and the other types of shopping conveniences that have now been developed changed has changed our downtown area dramatically but we hope to continue to work hard there is now a new group being formed to work with the businesses in the community to work on trying to revitalize the downtown and to work with the city council in our commissions on trying to come up with some ideas of how we can move forward but i also want to tell people who have those wonderful memories which i do too that is growing up in the city but we have to remember that there's no way those times can come back and we need to work as a community for our future sitting back and waiting and doing nothing is likely to produce some bad results or things we don't want to happen so let's work together as a community to make sure the changes coming wall be good changes for our city all of us working together for our future will be challenging and exciting the bottom line is we can't think we can excuse me the bottom line is we can keep your same paul a great city where we feel safe where we know our neighbors and have a strong sense of community pride let's be open to good changes and work together to make them for our city's future i want to say a big thank you as i conclude to our wonderful city staff that works so hard every day to for the benefit of our residents to make our city of the greatest they do a great job and i also want to say that we have great citizens living in our st paul and let us work together to build a healthy and prosperous fused future for our city our future can be very bright thank you for caring about our community thank you for watching or coming this evening and god bless in our st paul thank you forgot to say let's visit and socialize and there's cookies and r