Slayton City Council met on Monday, April 4th. All council members were in attendance. The agenda, minutes from the March 21st meeting and claims for the month were approved.
Josh Malchow, City Administrator, gave the Council an update on where they were in the Food Truck resolution process. He was waiting to hear back from Pipestone as they are also going through this process. The Broadband Grant is moving forward. All policies have been approved at the City and County levels at this point. They won’t be able to move forward until the Environmental study is completed by Bolten & Menk.
The Council moved on to unfinished business which was the Rupp Variance Appeal. There had been two questions from the last meeting. First, was that any variance that is approved runs with the property and not the owner. And secondly, does the law allow the Council to impose other requirements of the applicant? The League of MN Cities Attorney, Jed Burkett, Land Use Attorney, responded to this with MN State statute 462.357 Sub 6 No 2. Which states: “The board or governing body, as the case may be, may impose conditions in the granting of variances. A condition must be directly related to and must bear a rough proportionality to the impact created by the variance.” Chuck Platt who is on the Zoning Board was present and he wanted to express his thoughts. He stated, “he would like to see Rupp put up a building on his property there but has concerns about the setbacks on the property.” Malchow asked Platt’s opinion “if the Zoning Board had had all the info that they had today from the beginning would they have had a different decision for the Council?” The Council discussed many factors including the setbacks, garage door placement, land use, residential vs. business and the sewer location. They agreed they needed to look into the sewer movement options and have Doug Rupp in attendance to discuss this topic further and tabled it again until a later meeting.
The Council moved on to new business and started with the acceptance of Deputy Clerk Kari Carlson’s resignation effective April 8, 2022. Mayor Carney thanked Carlson for her many years of service to the city. They also reviewed the Deputy Clerk job description, which they made slight changes to the sections regarding safety officer and zoning duties. The Council approved the updated job description and approved to start advertising for the position internally for 10 days and then move forward to advertising to the public.
The next item of business was to discuss a vendor or independent contractor agreement for the city in the future. Malchow had spoken with Carlson about helping with some items in the future. These might include items like the pool opening and summer rec and the knowledge base from years of experience, etc. Malchow was asking for the Council’s thoughts on having an option like this for the future as they transition. If they decide to do this, he will get the proper paperwork together and bring it back to the Council. They also agreed to have the accountants be the “second set of eyes” for audit purposes in the interim and approved this motion.
The airport project design has been approved and they now need to approve going out for bids with the open date of April 28th for those bids. From a cost perspective, they also approved to have a concrete alternate option for which Malchow will check with the State on this.
They next held the public hearing regarding TIF 1-2 which is the geographical area of Lindenwood and Prairieland. They are modifying the land use to allow for the loan for MN Signature Care and their project at the old Golden Living Center property. This was approved by the Council.
Moving on, they reviewed Officer Meinders 6 month probationary status and with the recommendation of Police Chief Jeremy Steinle removed Meinders from probation placing him as a permanent employee.
With no other business the meeting was adjourned.
