Council Meeting April 3rd

There are several items of note from the April 3rd City Council meeting. City wide grid system adopted for addressing, BMX Community Night, City Purchasing Policy and Council by-laws.

The City wide grid addressing system was adopted to bring greater order and sense to Isanti’s street naming and numbering system. The current previous process had allowed developers name city streets without any rhyme or reason and the city’s zero line was not in the right location. City staff was directed to create a new city grid that will take names of roads from the west of 65 and rename the roads to the east of 65 if they line-up. Roads that do not line up will be renamed according to the new grid system. All names have to be approved by the City Council. The zero line is the point in city where numbers starts from. If you live at 100 x street you are in the first block from the zero line…..if you are 100 y street then you are one block over….unfortunately the zero line was moved by city staff a few years ago from Main street to highway 5 east of 65…..this should not have been done. This has caused all the numbers to the east to be off by several hundred numbers……the zero line was moved back to the imaginary extension of Main Street to the east of 65.

The purpose of these changes is safety. We need to make sure emergency personnel are able to get to an address. A logical addressing system is needed as the city grows. There a few businesses and about 20 homes east of 65 that are affected. This is painful for these addresses but the action had to happen before we have hundreds of homes and dozens of businesses in place. This is was not an easy decision for the Council but we all felt it was necessary to solve the problem now before the situation reaches a critical point.

The BMX Association is hosting four community night rides on their track. The nights are May 30th, June 27th, July 25th and August 29th. There will be a fee of $4 per rider per night but the association has extra safety equipment for riders. These nights are to give the residents of our community the opportunity to use the track without having to become members of the BMX association.

The next two items are part of the year of reforms.

The City Council adopted its first ever formal purchasing policy and Council by-laws. These may not seem like the most exciting actions but they will have some of the longest lasting effects on the city. I had the pleasure to work on both items on the Personnel Committee for the by-laws and on the Finance Committee for the Purchasing Policy. These two items are added to the newly created Travel and Reimbursement policy and start to form the backbone structure of city government.

The purchasing policy details spending limits at each level of city government and addresses budgeted and non-budget items. It also for the first time directs when competitive quotes are needed. The goal of this policy is to layout the Council’s expectations for staff and to bring greater discipline to city purchasing.

The Council By-laws are also a first for Isanti. The by-laws detail Council organization, meeting procedures, Council Members interaction with each other, with the public and the public’s interaction with the Council. I hope this will help demystify council procedures and meetings. I signed this ordinance today and it will go into effect April 12th. I encourage you to read Ordinance 393 at

http://www.ci.isanti.mn.us/vertical/Sites/%7BDDAE1093-5A2F-4061-B896-4E2183E27B6E%7D/uploads/%7B44B0B16E-54AE-4596-991A-94A418A4A7BE%7D.PDF

There will be more reform measures coming before the Council over the next year. We have had great success passing the current reforms and I believe we will continue to move along this path. Both reform items passed with unanimous votes.