The Rochester City Council held a work session on June 22, 2026, covering three major topics: a presentation by Urban3 on land use productivity and fiscal analysis, a review of Tax Increment Financing (TIF) policy options, and a corridor safety study for Elton Hills Drive. The meeting included extensive discussion among council members, staff, and consultants. No formal votes were taken; staff were directed to bring back refined recommendations for the July 20 council meeting.
Welcome to our colleagues here at the tables to staff staff people, to our consultants, to the community who are gathered here. I am acting council council council president in place with President Schubert. And Patrick Keene to the table. So thank you for uh being with us again this day. We have three really important topics, and we have some consultant deadlines, timelines uh to follow. So I will uh try to uh observe pretty closely the eight-minute limit for any one council member on any one topic. I will turn it over to administrator Zalmus, please. Thank you. We're going back back in time. Um, so our first item that we have here is a presentation from Urban Three that um you saw a little snippet of at the DMC City County um joint meeting about a month ago. Um, but this is much more information if you take a look at your packet. Um, and so I will turn it over to um community development director Irene Woodward, and she will do an introduction and I just did want to qualify. This is a lot of information, and I don't think it's the last time you can expect to see um smaller snippets of this, um, but we wanted to give you all of it in one fell swoop today. Thank you. I'll just briefly say um there we're kind of doing both a revenue analysis. So the last time there was a revenue analysis done by Urban 3, it was about five years ago. Um, in addition, there was also a fiscal analysis that wasn't previously done. Um I want to thank um RPU public works and finance who contributed a lot of data to make that happen. Um, and so really Heather Worthington from Urban Three is gonna go through that entire presentation and kind of that whole analysis, and then we'll be available for any questions that we go through. So without, I'll turn it over to Heather. Thank you, Irene, thank you, Alison. Um, great to be with you today. Thanks for having us here in Rochester. I am Heather Worthington with Urban Three. We are located in Asheville, North Carolina. I am based in the Twin Cities, and so I just drove down this afternoon. I'm a rust belt kid originally, and I just want to introduce myself. I grew up in Lansing. Um I was always fairly skeptical, so this is an accurate photo of me. Uh and my dad worked for the city, and so I went on to work for a city and counties, and um my favorite thing as a kid was schoolhouse rock. And I really believe in deep curiosity and this Francis Bacon uh quote, knowledge is power. You might have thought Schoolhouse Rock invented that. They didn't actually for Sir Francis Bacon said it first. Um as a little kid, I loved my world book and my yearbook and my world book and my Globe, of course. And I went on to work in various jurisdictions in the Twin Cities. So I was the city manager in Falcon Heights and the assistant Nidina, and then I worked for Ramsey County, and I ended my career in local government as long-range planning director in Minneapolis, leading the Minneapolis 2040 plan. So that's just a little bit about me. Um what we're gonna cover today is really the full meal deal that we did for Rochester, and you know, one of the things that we get asked a lot is what is a city. Well, a city is really shaped by the people who live there. Uh it starts out like this though, as just sort of green land. Um about cities and how they grow is thinking about land production, right? So if you're a farmer, and if any of you grew up on a farm or just maybe one generation from the farm, you understand that farmers apply a simple rule of land economics, and that's the yield of the land, right? So they look at land with water per acre, crops per acre, labor per acre, etc. And we think at Urban 3 that's a really good way to look at the same uh data for buildings in a city. And I'm gonna show you this example. This is in Ramsey County. So these two examples, one in Roseville on the left, the Walmart, and the Osborne 370, formerly the Eco Lab Tower in downtown St. Paul. And we really wanted to see how does land use regulation shape productivity uh of that land use. And you'll note that that Walmart sits on 19 acres.