The Shakopee City Council met in regular session on April 7, 2026, at 7:00 p.m. at City Hall, 485 Gorman Street. The meeting included an annual update from the Minnesota Valley Transit Authority (MVTA), approval of a modified consent agenda, three appeals of revoked conditional use permits, approval of a final plat, an amendment to the Shakopee Public Utilities franchise agreement for large power users, and liaison and announcement reports. All councilmembers and the mayor were present.
Call the Shacopee City Council meeting for April 7th, 2026 to order. And if you could please take the roll. Councilmember Delini. Here. Councilmember waiting. Here. Councilmember Contreras? Here. Councilmember Lara? Here. Mayor Lima. Here. Item number three. If you want to join us for the Pledge of Allegiance. Item number four special presentation, Minnesota Valley Transit Authority annual update. Mr. Luther, sir. You might have to pull that microphone closer. Thank you, sir. Just let me know if you guys can hear me. Well, I can hear myself, so that's a good sign, I think. Thank you very much for their time this evening. I'll try to um make sure my comments are not necessarily brief but poignant. So again, my name is Luther Weiner. I'm the CEO for Minnesota Valley Transit Authority, been CEO now since 2016. Just want to give obviously one of our yearly um transit updates. First, let's talk about the agenda, some of the things that I have that we'll go over. We'll talk about our fixed route, our connect service, service change schedule that we have, and some changes we're going to be doing in Shakapee, our event services, then we'll do a legislative update and round it out with a little bit about our community partner, um, talking about our South Metro Coalition and local forward. It's important to note when I have these conversations by MVTI, we start off with the basis, not everyone understands obviously the breath of our services or what we do as an agency. So I just want to make sure just everyone know we have 24 routes express as well as reverse commute. We have local service on demand, which is connect, which I'll get into a little later exactly what that is. Um we also have event services as well, too. When it comes to our fixed route services, it's important to note that we do have some good services that we offer in Shacopee. We have our express services that primarily transmit downtown to Minneapolis, the 490 and 493. We also have our four fund bus, um, which is also combined now with the Route 495. Um that service goes from all of America to Barnesville. It has branches that go to Valley Fair when Valley Fair is operating. Um it goes to Marshall Road Transit Station, Amazon, as well as Mystic Lake Casino, followed by Canterbury as well. From ridership standpoint. So when we look at ridership overall for um uh for um Shakapee, it's actually was pretty it was actually really strong. Um there was over 18 percent increase in ridership from 2024 to 2025 for the city of Shakapee. Important note that overall when it came to our last slide there, I wanted to fast forward this one. Overall, ridership overall system wide for our service is about 7.8 percent. So you guys were above um the average for um for the service for uh for our yearly service, which is very beneficial. And we want to highlight a couple routes and why that was. So as you see here, obviously state fair services up at 47 percent from um from 204 uh 2025, primarily driven by the fact that this was the the last year was the first year we opened up Alton all days for the fair. We had service at South Bridge, um, followed by our Route 490. Um, as you see, dramatic increase of ridership there, continuing to add service as well as meeting the needs of customers. Our four fund bus continues to be um a great generator, obviously going to midst of the casino as well as services to Amazon as well. Um we have a route 499, also 34 percent, and our route 497 up 12.3.