Lakeville City Council Makes Budget Reductions, Gives Consent for Malt-O-Meal to Expand

The Lakeville City Council voted unanimously Monday evening to approve more than $132,000 in budget reductions for 2011. The current council had been since January.

During a Feb. 28 marathon work session, the council and city staff went through nearly 100 pages of recommended and potential line item budget possibilities in an effort to tighten the city’s financial belt. Following that meeting, city staff drafted the resolution based on council recommendations and presented the council with resulting savings that netted the $132,322 total.

Council member Colleen Ratzlaff-Labeau moved to amend the budget adjustment so as “not to set a precedent for using the liquor fund to pay for new employee wages."

“I don’t want to set an example that we can take out of the liquor fund for employees at this time,” she said.

The amendment essentially transfers an expense of $23,650 from the liquor fund to the general fund to help pay for a new police records tech position. The position will help officers spend more time on the streets by absorbing the bulk of their routine data entry reporting. The move did not affect final numbers.

The council also left the door open for further reductions and further review of the 2011 budget as needed.

Council members also provided Malt-O-Meal with written consent to build on a 155-foot conservation easement located on their property south of Jutland Place. Preliminary by residents along Jutland Place and vacating the easement was seen as a potentially controversial precedent.

Conservation easements typically are used as permanent land-use restriction tools and a vacation of the easement would have been the first such action to occur in Minnesota.

The conservation easement in question was adopted by the city council in 1995 to help provide a buffer between then manufacturing activities at New Morning Windows and residential properties. Malt-O-Meal's preliminary expansion plans addressed their potential needs for additional space to house professional offices within administration, research and development and engineering departments in support of their manufacturing operations located elsewhere.

Malt-O-Meal’s Vice President of Business Development Paul Holzheuter said the company has no timetable for development of the property, but highlighted their rapid growth since moving to Lakeville and the need to plan for long-term.

The company relocated from Northfield and has already expanded their employee capacity to 300. The company currently employs approximately 225 employees with an annual payroll of roughly $20 million.

“We’d like this to be a long-term location,” said Holzheuter. “We didn’t expect this kind of growth within one year of coming to Lakeville and we need to be prepared for future growth. There’s a lot of efficiency to having people at one site. The same thing happened in Northfield. We didn’t have space to expand so we came to Lakeville. We’d like to continue growing with the city of Lakeville.”

City Attorney Roger Knutson drafted the original easement and stated that the key provision “without written consent of the city” inserted at the time allowed the city to keep the easement in place but still allow for development to occur on the land without violating the conditions of the easement.

“That’s the key phrase,” said Knutson. “We’re not vacating it (the easement). We’re just following the terms as written.”

Stipulations of the approval include extensive landscaping with 20-foot white pine trees to help provide screening and limiting any future development on the property to two-stories.

Both residents and Malt-O-Meal officials said finding a resolution to the issues had been amicable. The company solicited and heeded many of the residents’ concerns and altered plans accordingly.

“I appreciate the residents coming out with suggestions and ideas for Malt-O-Meal and I appreciate Malt-O-Meal’s willingness to make some rather large concessions,” said Council member Kerrin Swecker.  “This is a very reasonable agreement in my opinion.”

Other Business:

Lakeville has been named a Heart Safe Community. The designation is awarded to cities that have undertaken extensive efforts to help train citizens on CPR to help increase survival rates for cardiac arrest victims.

Kathy Lewis, a Lakeville school district board member, spearheaded the effort and said the program has trained more than 5,000 residents to date through the schools, police department, churches and civic organizations. According to Lewis, statistics show that survival rates are increased by as much as 300 percent if a cardiac arrest victim receives bystander CPR in advance of medical personnel arriving on the scene.

Lakeville had 39 cardiac arrest calls last year.

Lakeville police officers for their work in DUI enforcement. The two were among only 50 officers nominated statewide to receive an award from Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The officers, who combined to make 185 DUI arrests last year, were honored by M.A.D.D. on March 9 at an awards banquet at Target Field.