Important strategies that will impact your quality of life as a Minnetrista resident and your pocketbook as a taxpayer will be discussed at the city council’s strategy planning meeting on February 19 at 4pm in the Minnetrista public safety building (next to city hall).
This is, as all council meetings are, a public meeting although it isn’t listed on the city’s website calendar as of this date. The public may observe the session but there will not be an opportunity for public comment.
At our last council meeting the city administrator informed council members a number of new city ordinances will be discussed at this meeting. This past year there have been suggestions to consider new ordinances in reaction to resident complaints on a variety of issues. Before jumping in to adopt new city-wide ordinances the following steps are critical in my opinion:
- Conduct a needs analysis which examines what the problem is, how many people it affects, what other solutions might be available to solve the problem, and what unintended consequences may arise from any of the solutions.
- Determine the cost of developing, drafting, revising and adopting the ordinance. Attorney’s fees, staff time and council’s time can run into hundreds of hours from the time of proposal to adoption.
- Determine the cost of enforcing the ordinance. Adopting ordinances without enforcing them undermines the public’s trust in the city.
- Do a cost-benefit analysis to examine the ordinance’s benefit to the community-at-large compared to the total cost of developing and enforcing it.
The steps above will lead to a good decision. I hope we can all agree on this.
Minnetrista Governance Blog 