The Rochester City Council convened for a study session on October 27, 2025, attended by the Mayor, Council President Schubring, Councilmembers Palmer, Keene, Doring, and Wall, the City Administrator, and key department heads. The meeting focused on reviewing the legislative priorities for the upcoming session and providing an update on the Communications, Engagement, and 311 Division's first year of operations. Council members provided significant feedback on the clarity and messaging of bonding requests, the accuracy of language regarding home construction, and the need for stronger public relations strategies to improve community trust.
Well, I was just gonna say I said my shorts on things that Palmer's short is. I thought about it. Thank you. I felt no I felt no pressure riding the button today. Did you write a button? No. I'm doing I left too late. I didn't look at Hirdwood Video as much faster. I got past most of you now. She's on the show. 15 seconds. One thing. Everything we said. So it gets captured. That's why we're welcome everybody to our October 27th Rochester City Council study session. We are five council members and SANs, a mayor, two council members, and a city administrator. And we have two uh topics on our agenda tonight or this afternoon. Uh we have our uh legislative uh priorities, and then we're going to hear about uh community engagement and 311. So uh we'll start with Heather Cochran and our uh legislative agenda. Thank you, Council President Schubring, Council members, Heather Corcoran, your legislative affairs and policy director for the city, and maybe we'll if I go to the next one. There we go. Thank you. All right, well, uh today we're continuing our annual process to review and put forward to you all for feedback the proposed legislative priorities that would be carried forward during the next legislative session. Looking for your um adjustments, any amendments at its additions, deletions as you review the proposed priority before they'd be considered for final adoption sometime in November or December. This is an annual process you all are familiar with during the summer. A big thanks to many of you who served on the league's policy committees and helped provide input into our state association that represents uh most of the cities around the state and is an important partner and stakeholder at the Capitol, along with other groups that teammates serve on through their professional capacity. Councilmember Wall, Councilmember Miller, Keene, Doring, and the mayor all served on uh policy committees or task forces for the league, and then we had a handful of teammates who also provided input. Huge thanks to them uh for helping uh put forward some important issues uh on Rochester's priority list onto the the league's priority list, and vice versa. You'll hear some issues that emerged during the league's conversations that we may want to consider, um, including more directly in our own. Uh we then convene uh uh two opportunities for teammates uh from all departments to provide feedback about legislative uh issues that might be impacting their ability to best serve residents in the community, and we gathered that up, and that's uh also included in some of the proposed priorities. You'll see we have a legislative working group that also helped provide preliminary feedback on some uh emerging issues um during the interim of session here, and then you all are reviewing these uh and it's almost November. You'll then consider them for final adoption either during uh your November council meeting or December council meetings. We'll continue outreach with our legislative delegation. The legislative session begins in February this year, which is a little bit of a later start, and then we'll um hopefully wrap up by May and continue uh participating in our state and national uh associations. Before we dived into next year, I wanted to sort of just recap real quick the previous year to remind us what we came out of. So a historic in many ways, there was a tie in the House after special elections were resolved after the first month or so of the legislative session. A power sharing agreement was established, which resulted in co sh co-chairs for all the committees, nearly all of them, and uh things had to have bipartisan support to move forward out of committees and onto the floor. The Senate also was as close as it could possibly be without uh with uh DFL um majority by one vote. It was a budget year, and thankfully the budget was passed before the July 1st uh trigger, which would have resulted in a state government shutdown. And I wouldn't have usually put bonding year on here the same time as a budget year, but turns out there was a bonding bill past this session, uh focused primarily on state assets such as uh Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, state agency buildings like DNR buildings at state parks. There were very little to none local government projects in that bonding bill this past session, despite a lot of great effort and support from our local delegation for our priorities. So looking forward as we're thinking about next session, again, starting February 17th, wrapping up third week in May. Likely a House uh tie will repeat itself again. There are, of course, some special elections that could result after a Senate special election gets resolved on election day if a current House member wins the Senate seat. Um that uh also during the interim, of course, we had the uh tragic assassination of the Speaker Merita Hortman and attempted assassination of um Senator John Hoffman and his family, which resulted in a uh a special election for that seat and a new elected leader of the DFL House party who um has met with the uh speaker, the Republican leader, and they've decided to continue the share power sharing model. So again, there will be a repeat of the co-chair model, presumably going into next session. Again, needing bipartisan support for anything to pass out of the House committee. There could be a bonding bill. I think we should uh be optimistic and hopeful. Hope Springs Eternal.