Welcome everybody to our October 12th, 2026 City Council study session.

We have a bare bones uh council here.

We have four council members, council member Palmer is somewhere in the hallway, so we know he's here, and we have the mayor, and we have three topics on our agenda.

First off, we have a report from the Rochester Olmstead Youth Council members trip to Germany.

I'm looking forward to that.

And then we have uh discussion on parks and recreation uh marketing and awareness efforts, and then we'll wrap things up with uh another discussion on council rules and policy items.

So to begin things I'm gonna turn it over to the mayor and she's gonna introduce our guests from the from the ROYC.

Yes, we have two of our members um from who you talk to.

Um Alex, Yakchev, and Isha Kumar, and they can you can we typically sit over here if that's all

right.

And

they're going to uh share a little bit about their experience um going on the sister city exchange in

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you just need to press the button.

Yeah.

All right, good afternoon, everyone.

My name is Alex Yavchev.

And

I'm Isha Jake Maher.

We're members of the Rochester Omstead Youth Council, and today we're gonna be sharing our experience as part of Rochester's delegation trip to Germany this past summer.

Uh

before we start, we'd like to uh thank Miss Sean Rogers.

Uh which yeah, she's upstairs, but we'd like to thank her, uh Mayor Kim Norton, uh Council City Council President Randy Schuebring, and uh the entire council as a whole, uh, for having us today.

And uh yeah, let's make it a great presentation.

Uh so we'll first of all start off with an agenda um for what we'll talk about.

So just six relatively briefish items.

Uh we'll go over what Roik is for those members who don't know yet.

Um and then the three cities that we primarily engaged in um diplomatic exchanges over in Germany.

Uh and then we'll finish with our youth takeaways and community impact.

So what is Roik for anybody who doesn't know?

Uh the Romstead Youth Council is a partnership between both the uh City of Rochester and Olmstead County open to students aged 14 to 20 from across the county.

So we have students right now from John Marshall, Mayo, Century, and also Stewartville High School, I believe, who serve on the council.

Uh and we serve uh as an advisory role to city leadership on uh mainly municipal initiatives, but also like county initiatives and any anything that government uh leaders want youth input on.

Um and then we also attend city council and county meetings like this one and then report back on what we learned during the thing because we're also um yeah, just mandated to do so and to learn more about our government since not that many people know how local government really works.

Uh so going into the actual interesting parts of the trip, Mooseburg.

Um, it's a Bavarian town uh near Munich uh with a population of around 20,000 now.

Uh Rochester's relationship with Munich dates back to around 1982 with formalized relationships.

Um so we stayed there for two days.

During the first part of the day, we exchanged uh gifts uh and pleasantries with uh uh the deputy mayor, Reinhard Lautzerbach, and also the director of the historical society over there.

So, as you can see, those two pictures over there.

Uh that's our delegation and also the deputy mayor and the director uh above Mayor Norton's right.

Um, and it was overall a very uh great experience the first day.

And then the second day we um discussed more about uh or we we went to their youth center.

They have a very good youth center for a town of their size um and discuss um met with members of their own UGN parliament, so their own youth parliament, um, which is very similar to what the Rotch Romstead Youth Council does, just that uh the UN parliament is uh they're elected to their positions, but they largely serve the same role of um advising officials and all the stuff that comes with it.

Um it was a very interesting thing to hear their perspectives on um us Americans and our perspectives on them.

Uh and it was it was a very meaningful exchange that we had um between the two our us two youth.

Um and then we also visited um Stalag 7A, which was I think the largest prisoner of war content uh camp uh built during Nazi Germany during the war.

Um and we were also toured there by um a lot of the local volunteers there who may uh aim to uphold the history um of the camp and uh it really like shows what uh and and they they have parts of the camp that are still open just to serve as a reminder of what happens when hate supersedes peace in the world.

Uh

moving on to Munster.

Munster is a way larger city than uh yeah, Munster is a way larger city than Mooseburg, located uh north of Cologne, uh Dusseldorf, if anybody's familiar with those industrial the Rohrer region.

Um and it has about three times the population of Rochester, so 300,000 residents.

Uh, but it is known as the bike capital of Germany.

And why is it known as the bike capital of Germany?

Because over a hundred thousand people every single day use bicycles around the city.

In fact, uh the bicycle uh terrain there is so extensive um that there's just no point in using cars when you have such an extensive infrastructure of bicycle paths.

Um, and so the picture on the far bottom left, uh, as you can see, that was that's part of a 4.7 kilometer um interchange around the the city uh center where it's just open to bicyclists and pedestrians.

Um and it it's uh it's a very great experience, lots of greenery, lots of green space.

So there's a lot of stuff that uh Rochester could implement in terms of that.

It's uh it's a very nice space overall.