03-13-2023 City Council Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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MINUTES OF THE ORONO CITY COUNCIL MEETING March 13,2023 6:00 o'clock p.m. from our perspective. The other thing I've had,I don't know if it's a good fortune or not,but the firefighters have taken upon themselves, some of them,to give me the NFPA guidelines. It's a nice, lengthy book of all the things fire-related,that I've had the great opportunity to read. I am not finished by any means.And I'm not going to be an expert.But I will say what I have learned is we have a lot of opportunity. So I know that Ron and Adam and James are putting together an analysis,I think we need to make sure to really level set ourselves.When I looked at those guidelines,there's a lot of pieces, I'm just going to speak to equipment,there's a lot of pieces of equipment that we're using for fire that don't fit the guidelines.When I say they don't fit the guidelines.I mean,we're 10/15 years off of when we should have pulled these out of service. So I mentioned this just saying,I'm not an expert,but I know these guys are gonna bring us a really thoughtful analysis. I think regardless of where we land there's going to have to be this pretty well-thought-out plan,year over year,to start replacing pieces of equipment,because when you start to really look into those guidelines,they pretty much say after 15 years,you're not using them as a first line. Well,we've got some that are well over 15. Some that are over 20. When you're thinking about, public interest and servicing your residents and bringing safety to their houses,you need a piece of equipment that's gonna get there. I haven't seen the full analysis because the guys are still working on it. But I did want to kind of level set the conversation that just looking at the current fleet,no matter where we land,we're gonna have to start purchasing some stuff in the near future. The other challenge is new equipment is 24 to 36 months out, so even if you said we're going to buy all this,it's going to take time, so there's definitely going to have to be some thoughtful conversation around how do we solve for that. So again,I'm not laying out the purchase plan but I think starting to read those guidelines was pretty eye- opening to me on what the work ahead of us is,regardless of what solution we end on.I don't know Matt, if you have anything to add on that. I did want to say congrats to the boys hockey team for making it into the State tournament. Warroad and Hermantown are tough.Again, loved seeing some of the guys that I've seen when they're little grow up. Super fun.Big kudos to all of them.And bummer that they didn't make it to the end but they should be super-proud either way.They played some hard-fought games. Johnson said he was also in attendance at the LMCD meeting. Our representative,Richie Anderson was sworn in, so really thank him for his participation on the LMCD. Special thanks to staff and Soren.That issue at the LMCD was a big one. It was a floating dock in front of City of Orono property that someone was gonna make a marina out of It took some cooperation from the LMCD to get it put to bed too.I think we handled that well. On the consent agenda,Adam's evaluation was done. We're really proud to have him.He had an exceptional review.And we're glad to have you. Thanks,Adam. The other issue that keeps coming up is Average Lakeshore setback.That's probably another one to put on a work session. Just in talking to staff in particular,I think one of our goals needs to be for the benefit of the residents,is that we empower staff wherever we can to expedite processes. We made a good step on the emergency restoration issue.Maybe we can make it a little bit better now that we've done it. The Average Lakeshore setback is another piece of that,that staff keeps bringing up. I talked to Soren about it too. There's a lot of history with that Average Lakeshore setback and you know, we had at one time additional setbacks to the watershed requirements for wetlands. Orono just arbitrarily threw a number out and we got rid of that because they're the authority that has jurisdiction. So maybe that's something else that we visit along the way. Congratulations to the hockey team. I understand the swim team had some qualifiers for State,too, so congratulations to them too. Page 19 of 21