There was a lot going on at this meeting…where to begin? First, it is comforting to know that the council has explicitly acknowledged the importance of the following issues:
Ordinance enforcement (specifically parking)
Road maintenance
Driving around St. Paul, it’s easy to see, erm feel, that significant road maintenance needs to be done and it appears that many council members are in favor of moving forward to make progress in this area.
So if most of the council is on the same page as the citizens, why has nothing happened? In short, it is an execution problem. For many complaints, either there has been a long delay or nothing has happened. For example:
Vital road repair on Lavon Parkway that actually damaged vehicles was delayed
Erosion issues on a Lakeway Drive culvert have continued to worsen and the ditch hasn’t been maintained in years
Parking issues on Lakeway have yet to be resolved
General road maintenance throughout the town for years
Fence ordinance enforcement throughout the town over a period of years
There are however, a plethora of excuses for the lack of execution on each of these issues. In a Type A municipality like St. Paul, the city secretary (a paid position) is responsible for executing the will of the council. According to Section 22.042, the mayor’s major responsibility is to help assure that the will of the council is being executed, in this case by the secretary. Now, we get into a management 101 type problem. If milestones are not being met, then the problems need to be explicitly broken down until the manager (in this case mayor) can understand the scope of the task. If that fails to solve productivity issues, employees should be held accountable and staffing changes need to be considered by the mayor and the council.
Also, and related to this point it was mentioned that an ordinance committee was disbanded by the mayor because of lack of being able to meet, even though only a council vote has the authority to make such a change. After a junk mail hiccup, several committee members reached out with their availability in order to move things forward and a meeting date was never finalized by the mayor. To insinuate that ordinance committee members were unavailable, unwilling or not interested in meeting is not an accurate representation of the situation.
The ordinance committee was initially formed by the town council to do research aimed at helping modernize our ordinances while cross referencing new state standards with existing ordinances. This was not enacted to replace engineering contributions or legal counsel, but to help expedite and perhaps minimize some of the time and costs involved with laborious leg work research.
If you are unhappy with the execution of the government, watch the meeting, take note of the seat you would like to run for and register yourself as a candidate starting next Wednesday. From the video the seats are identified as (1, 2, Attorney, Secretary, Mayor, 3, 4, 5) from left to right from the perspective of the camera. The Mayoral, 3rd and 5th positions are up for election in the next cycle.
A public Hearing of the planning and zoning committee to determine whether or not the office suites located at 3990 Lakeway can continue to be used as a house of worship (ICW) by obtaining a special use permit to do so, will take place on Tuesday, January 30th at 7:00 PM, at the town hall. Please plan to attend if you have any concerns about the parking/traffic/safety items involved in this approval and make your voice heard.