02-13-2023 Council Packet - Laserfiche WebLink

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MINUTES OF THE ORONO CITY COUNCIL MEETING JANUARY 23, 2023 6:00 o’clock p.m. _____________________________________________________________________________________ Page 11 of 12 knows, but there's legislators in session up at the state capitol. They're having about 30 to 40 meetings every single day and all the different departments or all the committees and one of the housing bills that I think everybody needs to pay attention to that is coming up that he alerted me to is they're looking at and right now in part of these some of these committees, they're passing these rules that they want to pass to make statewide, they're doing it without any amendments or any discussion. They're just saying, we control it. We're voting on it, we're moving it on. So they're doing a lot of stuff very fast. They're doing one in the housing bill that would eliminate single family zoning in the entire state of Minnesota, it would make every house automatically considered to be a two-family residence. That means in every neighborhood, you could have duplexes, essentially in your house, and there's nothing the City of Orono could do about it, it would take the zoning out of our control. So I'm telling you to maybe wake up on this item, call Andrew Meyers, who was our house representative on the Republican side and call our state senator Kelly Morrison and say you oppose this bill, that you want to make sure the zoning stays in the control of the local jurisdictions. If you want to see how it's turning out, go to Minneapolis. They've already eliminated single family zoning in Minneapolis. You can do quads in every neighborhood. But even if you just give away single family and you make everything essentially duplexes, you could have a whole lot more people living in your neighborhood and it will change the character of everything that you know of today. And if there's extra money in it. As my realtor professional over here will tell you, if there's extra money for developers as they're buying up houses and converting them to two families instead of one family it will be done. This big money will come in and they'll just start buying up swaths of houses and start renting out. So Kelly Morrison on the Senate side and Andrew Myers on the House side, call and make some noise and tell them you do not want this to pass. We only get one chance at this because once it gets passed you'll never put that rabbit back in the hat. Johnson said Andrew Myers is not in support of it. He was unsure about Kelly Morrison’s position. Walsh said he doesn't know her stance in general but I know the Democrats are all passing this stuff out of committees without any discussion and any amendments -- they're just passing it. And it's like a 45- page bill if I remember. And it's like that little paragraph in the middle of this housing thing that they're passing. So it's a small piece. But thank God, we got people who are looking for those things. And I think Soren had pointed out the cities that he represents too, like St. Louis Park and other cities, aren’t happy with that either because it takes all the zoning out of our control, and we can't do anything about it, which is not good. In my last Orono article, Orono Times or whatever we call it that we send out to everybody I talked about a number of different things. But I think one of the last things I talked about was social media, and that if you want to find out what's the truth about matters, it's probably best to call the City directly or call one of us and we can tell you or point you in the right direction. But another one was a very confusing post about the terms of the council and the mayor in particular, making it seem like we did something in the middle of the night that changed the term from two years to four years. Well, I posted on Next Door the facts about that. Back in 2018, after the election, in December, staff did come to us and say that they thought it'd be more consistent to change the mayor's term from two years to four years because the council is all four years, just put more consistency. And so we took their recommendation. And we did change that from a two-year to four-year term in December of 2018. But it wouldn't take effect until the next election in 2020. So that gave everybody two year’s notice -- nothing in the dark, the papers printed it, everything that was going on. But there was a very confusing post thinking that we're doing something in the dark that nobody knew about but everybody knew about and I just want to make sure