Minutes Acting Mayor Veenbaas called the meeting to order at 7:30 pm. COUNCIL IN ATTENDANCE: Aldermen Mike Cannon, Len Prejna, Laura Majikes, Brad Judd; Robert Banger, Jr., John D Astice, Tim Veenbaas COUNCIL ABSENT: 0 STAFF IN ATTENDANCE: City Manager Barry Krumstok, Deputy City Clerk Ginny Cotugno, Assistant to the City Manager Lori Ciezak, Community Development Director Valerie Dehner, Finance Director Melissa Gallagher, Fire Chief Scott Franzgrote, Deputy Fire Chief Terry Valentino, Police Chief John Nowacki, Public Works Director Fred Vogt, Assistant Public Works Director Rob Horne, City Attorney Jim Macholl Acting Mayor Veenbaas: I would like to start by reminding everyone that we will go through two items tonight. Number 1, Extension 6b for JC Restoration, 3200 Squibb Drive and the second topic will be the Fire Stations Relocation Project Update. For the first one my understanding is that they are actually looking for direction from the City Council. Is that correct Mr. Krumstok? Mr. Krumstok: Yes, because we would have a resolution coming up at the next Council Meeting but we do have the partners here to hear from the council and also for the council to hear from staff. Acting Mayor Veenbaas: Okay, very good, and then the second item on the agenda is the Fire Station Relocation Project. My understanding is that this is an update by the Fire Chief and my understanding also is that there is not a need to have any direction from the City Council, is that correct? Mr. Krumstok: That is correct. It s setting the update and then at the next City Council during Closed Session there will be a continuation on the next part about land acquisition, but also it is a full update where we sit right now with the vetting process and some of the additional information. Acting Mayor Veenbaas: Okay, very good, so with those summaries in mind let s start off with Number 1 and I ll defer right back to you Mr. Krumstok for introduction of Extension 6b. 1) Extension 6b for JC Restoration, 3200 Squibb Drive Mr. Krumstok: Thank you very much. Obviously since 1990 the City has only given two extensions for 6b s. We always tell people who are asking us for a 6b, we tell them you might
Page 2 get it once, but you really don t come back to the City for a second time. We do feel very comfortable about this discussion tonight for certain reasons. Obviously we bought this to the Economic Development Committee earlier in this month and we had the discussion about it. JC Restoration has been in the City for obviously numerous years. They did receive a 6b. They did extensive work in their building. They bought in new employees and then during certain times they have been just a great community business. They have been to almost every National Night Out cooking the hot dogs if you remember them there. They ve been, actually allowed us to use their trucks. They ve allowed us to use their overall playing soccer field when we had NATO actually in here. We ve been allowed to do some training in there. Warner Cruz, who is sitting behind me, actually used to be on the Economic Development Committee for the City of Rolling Meadows and obviously when they were coming back to us with this discussion their new owners of the land, Gramercy, we had the discussion about the extension of a Squibb and unanimously for the people who were actually at the Economic Development Committee meeting it was approved for the extension for the 6b but also with the understanding that the land for Squibb Road to be extended would actually be part of this and that s where the real value to the City is, the extension of Squibb to Ring Road, which is ours, so between Apollo and Ring Road, those are both City roads and then allowing the Squibb. We do look at it as beneficial because again for JC Restoration and any of those properties in there, Squibb would be beneficial but we also look at it the City s not expending any additional money out there. It is putting the City obviously a few years out, but it is a resolution that you would see that would allow them to ask for the extension, Cook County, so with that we do have some folks here from Gramercy, from JC Restoration, if you have any questions, but again staff feels very comfortable that we would bring back a resolution that talks about an extension of the 6b for a good business partner, but also for the City to receive what we need to extend Squibb Road from obviously Apollo to Ring Road and obviously make that a connector road for what we do in there. So that s my really brief intro. Obviously as I said before there are members here if you would like to ask them any questions, but they really are a good business in the City. They ve been very beneficial. They participate with us and it s another reason why we feel comfortable allowing the 6b because there is a quid pro quo. Acting Mayor Veenbaas: Very good Mr. Krumstok. On that note too in the readings that were sent out there was a lot of information that was shared with the Council so there shouldn t be too many questions, but there are a couple members of the council here that are also on the Economic Development Committee. Are there any other clarification questions we have for Barry or anybody else on this issue anyone would like to ask? Mr. D Astice Alderman D Astice: I have no clarification issues. I sit on the Economic Development Council and they explained it, Mr. Cruz explained it in really detail. Enough detail that the Economic Development Committee unanimously approved moving it forward so I won t speak for Laura, but everyone pretty much said it was a go. Acting Mayor Veenbaas: Thank you for those comments. Any other comments from anyone about this? Mr. Cannon
Page 3 Alderman Cannon: Just a real brief thing. My interaction with this company has been nothing but outstanding. I guess if we had more corporate citizens like them we d be a better place than we are already. They ve been nothing but generous to our City with the things that they ve done in support of both Public Works operations and also National Night Out. They ve been incredible. From that standpoint they re wonderful. I just wanted to make that comment. Thanks. Acting Mayor Veenbaas: Any other comments? Mr. Judd Alderman Judd: Just for clarification. So we offered the 6b in 2008 which means it goes to 2018 correct? And then there s two more years if it s a reduced rate so is this extension pursuant to 2018 or does it start in 2016 and its ten years from now? Mr. Krumstok: Well I actually want to introduce Patrick and I ll have him introduce himself for the minutes, but Patrick can go over that. That s one thing that we did through the EDC talking about the extension and then what we do after that. Patrick Kilmer: Hi, my name is Patrick Kilmer. I m here for J C Restoration. So the 6b started in 2009 and 6b s last ten years and then there s two years of wind down. So in 2018 that would be the 10 th year of the 6b then in 2019 if nothing happens it would be a 15% (inaudible) and then 2020 would be at a 20% (inaudible). So what we re doing is to get a resolution now, hold on to it, and then in 2018 when its eligible for a renewal file it so that in 2019 it would be the first year of the new 6b. Mr. Krumstok: So you d have 10 by 10 by 2 instead of 10 2, 10 2. Alderman Judd: I guess that leaves me just to try and understand why would we do it now? Why wouldn t we wait until 18 and let whoever is on the council at that point make that decision. What s the purpose of doing it at this point in time? Mr. Krumstok: We felt that it was appropriate to bring it at this point in time because of Squibb Drive that we re trying to get done now and we decided that if we got the discussion on the table we also got the road built its beneficial for the City, its beneficial for us, and then this way they know what they have in the resolution. We have the street done and we feel comfortable moving ahead with this at this point in time. Alderman Judd: Okay, then what s the approximate, do we have any idea of the value of that parcel that they are going to, are they giving it to us or just conveying it to the City or just an easement, or what exactly is the term that they re giving it to us? What use do we have of it per se? Mr. Krumstok: It s actually a dedication. That s what I, there s a Mylar that talks about the easement and everything so it would really turn into City of Rolling Meadows property. And I know your next question is going to be what s the rough value of what we re getting in that green space for Squibb. It s estimated, and again it s just an estimate, over 300,000 dollars.
Page 4 Mr. Judd: Okay, nothing else right now. Thank you. Acting Mayor Veenbaas: Any other discussion? And thank you again. So if there s, is there any other discussion on this topic at all at this point? No. Would it be worthwhile at this point to.. Mr. Krumstok: Just the straw vote just so we know. Our plan is to bring it back for the January 10 th City Council meeting for the resolution. Acting Mayor Veenbaas: Okay, why don t we then do a straw vote and we ll do that by show of hands then? Mr. Krumstok: Yes please. Acting Mayor Veenbaas: And for those of us that are for the extension 6b for J C Restoration let s raise your hand. That s six votes yes, one vote no. Alderman Judd: Not committed at this point. Acting Mayor Veenbaas: Not committed? Okay. Mr. Krumstok: That would be number one. Acting Mayor Veenbaas: Okay, thank you very much. 2) Fire Stations Relocation Project Update Acting Mayor Veenbaas: Moving on to the second item, the Fire Station Relocation Project Update. Chief Scott, we ll hand the floor and the microphone over to you. Fire Chief Franzgrote: Seasons Greetings to everybody. We have with us tonight Terry Bohr from RC Wegman Construction Company and David Patton from Healy, Bender & Associates, Inc. They are the consulting group that we ve been working with. As you may recall, the purpose tonight as we stated is to give a summary of what we ve been doing over the last few months and just a preview of what our next steps are in this project. As you recall we signed, the City signed a contract with RC Wegman in September and from that point forward we ve been working with them. Based on their recommendation we established an internal City of Rolling Meadows Steering Committee made up of selected staff members from the Fire Department and other Departments in the City and we ve been meeting with RC Wegman, and Healy, Bender group on a regular basis in no particular order working on a few things. We started with evaluating our current space needs and some of our future needs for fire stations. We looked at our square footage issues and some of the things that we definitely need in a fire station that we have now in our fire stations and some desires and wants we might have in the future also. We evaluated those current and future needs, again, with their consultation on some of the best
Page 5 practices and some of their help in helping us vetting that process and some of those, that criteria on a fire station. We applied those needs then to some very, very preliminary conceptual designs for fire stations and at that point we then toured a half a dozen or so, four or five fire station projects in the area that Healy, Bender, and RC Wegman Group had put together over the years to kind of really get a feel for what our options are and how the things on paper looked in real life. We also did a preliminary evaluation of around 10 or 12 sites within the City of Rolling Meadows. We narrowed that list down that I think you are aware of and then we established again with our Steering Committee, the internal staff members, with their assistance, we established preliminary criteria selection process, some preliminary criteria for selecting a fire station location all with the design to just vet this process that we ve been talking about for some time now and to make sure, again from a third person standpoint, that we re on the right track and we seem to be doing this the right way. At that point then, toward the end of November, we invited select community stakeholders to help us further vet this project. We met for about an hour on December 5 th, asked them to look at the criteria that we put together internally with the help of our consultants. They confirmed that criteria. We asked them if they had other thoughts and with I think it was 24 criteria we wound up utilizing. We had them rate that criteria basically to give those a weighted level of importance and I d like to invite for about 10 minutes David Patton from Healy, Bender, the architect group that s working with us to kind of just give you a brief summary of that criteria selection process and then we ll talk about what our next steps are in this process. Mr. Patton: We put together a short Power Point that I think each of you have a copy of this evening. Basically, just to kind of reiterate the goals that we re looking at on the site selection process, we want to make sure that it was an objective process. That is was open and transparent and it involved key stakeholders within the community to get a broad agreement on the approach moving forward. We wanted to make sure that we prioritized the site selection criteria appropriately and with the ultimate goal of selecting the best sites for the new fire stations. So the first step that we did was basically involved the stakeholders and asked the question which site selection criteria should the City of Rolling Meadows consider when selecting sites for new fire station facilities and we also wanted to know the weighted importance of each of those site selection criteria. What we did is we developed a process where we, as Chief mentioned, we presented 24 different criteria that would be considered for a site selection process and then we asked the stakeholder committee which was the steering committee plus additional community members to join us. We asked them to go through a voting process. Each member of the, each stakeholder got six dots and they were numbered one to six and they, we laid out the 24 criteria sheets throughout the room and we asked them to go through and vote with number 6 being their highest importance criteria item and five being the next, all the way down to one. And obviously there were several criteria that they couldn t vote on because they only had six votes, but as a group then we collected the results of all that and basically the total that each one of these criteria received became the weighted value. And here is essentially the results with 77 votes, total votes, the location to minimize response time was the highest vote getter, followed closely by proximity to high call areas. Basically there were four kind of top tier vote getters that the stakeholder committee determined that evening on December 5 th. There was kind of a second tier where you ll see kind of 20 through, got 20 votes through 12 votes and there was kind of a lower tier where there was I think 7 or 8 items that got, there was one item that got 1 vote, but
Page 6 they were still considered as part of the criteria that we should look at. There were several criteria that received no votes and those items when we go through a grading process for each of the sites, we wouldn t go through the effort of grading those criteria because a weighted score times zero is still zero. So the next step that we did was actually today we met with the steering committee again and we actually scored each of the sites that are currently under consideration using the criteria that the steering committee, or the stakeholder committee had developed with that criteria and what we will be doing is generating the results of that process and coming back to the council in January with results of that process to indicate kind of where the different sites turned out on a scoring level. Thank you. Acting Mayor Veenbaas: Thank you very much. Chief Franzgrote: And so then just to summarize and add one important factor, the one factor we didn t ask the community stakeholders to look at was cost because we know that s a big factor and we obviously know that s your factor. That s the decision that we re going to have to make so the next then moving forward would be we have to go into a Closed Session on January 10 th to talk about Land Acquisition and take this criteria and have you guys look at it and give us your authorization to move forward from there. Acting Mayor Veenbaas: Very good. I know there s been a lot of time and effort gone into this and you ve done a very objective process to define what exactly we want to use for site selection and of course it s going to get down to cost one way or another. You ve already mentioned that so are there any questions or discussion concerning this. Mr. Prejna Alderman Prejna: I have a couple of comments. First off when you first came in and we did the background, you re an outstanding company for the things that you have done with surrounding cities and I supported having you come in so we could get an objective look at this, but I know I ve been in the minority from the beginning in that I would rather keep 15 down there and I think the cost for this is too high so the one thing that I have learned being on this council is to signal early that I won t be supporting going forward with this at this time. Thank you. Acting Mayor Veenbaas: Okay, any discussion, any other questions? Mr. Cannon Alderman Cannon: Scott, I was wondering if you could give me an insight into when we will be going to the bond market. The bonds are getting more expensive and I was told in open session that it will take us somewhere between 4 and 6 months to get the bonds done and then we have 18 months to use them so I guess if we re not going to go to market as quickly as possible I guess I would like to know some reasons why we wouldn t be if we re not going there. Thanks. Mr. Krumstok: I can actually deal with that. Obviously we re not ready to go to bond at this point in time because we don t know, we don t have plans, we don t have designs, we don t know which location we are potentially going to be moving two stations to, but those discussions we would be having in 2017 and the other part of that is obviously through certain aldermen we ve had already some of those discussions. If we do go out to a bond we would potentially be looking at a full bond for some other construction items, some other infrastructure items to make
Page 7 it not just one item only because we still have some infrastructure from the Baxter Woodman Study that will be actually reviewed by the Capital Improvement, which we ve actually talked about sewer and water and then we have actually talked about some street items too, but again once you have that money you really have to use the majority of it within that year, but at the same point in time we do have another discussion once we have that ballpark because we do know if you re really looking at the Baxter Woodman Study, they do have a number in there for how much we would have, but those projects are not ready so if we get ready to do that we d have to really look at what s being geared up. And we have to make sure that if we are going to the bond, what kind of bond are we going to go to that has numerous calls, it s an open return, are we actually having it only at definitive times that we can pay off certain points so there s more discussions that we really need. So your answer is in 2017 we will have the discussion but we need to have more of the pieces ready before we actually just say we re going out to bond because bond counsel will ask us specifically where certain projects are. Where are your designs? Where are your pieces and we do not know any of those pieces? Alderman Cannon: So, you just gave yourself kind of a broad brush there saying sometime in 2017. To me if we don t get this done in the next couple of months that is unacceptable from my standpoint. I can see no reason at this point that we spent, the Fire Department staff has spent years putting this thing together. They seem to be on board with what needs to be done. I assume the gentlemen we ve hired as contractors know what they re doing because they ve had many projects. I just don t understand why we wouldn t want to go get bond money as quickly as possible to save the citizens money going forward. We know this is going to be an expensive project and if we decide we want to do other stuff I can accept that to a certain extent, but I can t see any reason why we shouldn t have bonds out to market by March at the latest. Mr. Krumstok: And part of that is even when we get ready to go out, even the bond counsel or anybody else picking that up is going to look for certain things and commitments and we don t have those commitments ready because we would not have a plan to show them, here s where we re moving stuff, here s why we re doing, here s the plans that we actually have for two new stations. Is it a two bay? Is it a three bay? Some of those pieces yes they might be ready when we re getting ready, but at the same point in time S&P might be asking us okay you just finished your audit of 2016. We would like to see a clean audit which means that would not be ready until June, but some of those pieces again they allow us to trickle some of those in March or April, but again we look at all those different definitive pieces and we also look at our bond counsel to help us with some of those pieces, but again once you have that money that clock starts very quickly that quicker than if you don t have projects you just can t be putting that in and that s also one of those things when we had the money last time that you have to broad brush those infrastructure, because if you just say it s for one thing and you can t finish that thing then you re in arbitrage and then we have a bigger problem for the City of Rolling Meadows and that s something that no municipality really wants to put us into. Alderman Cannon: While I can appreciate your comments one could read into your comments that you think that we might not be done with this project by the end of 2018 and if that s a possibility that s crazy because it shouldn t stretch out that long.
Page 8 Mr. Krumstok: I would hope not because again how the vetting has worked out at this point in time, then when we have the discussion in January 10 th at the, regarding property hopefully that will vet out a little bit more that we need to do, but 2017 will be a lot of discussions and I know that RC Wegman has their own schedule. I know that Scott and some of us who have been talking fire stations for 10 years we ve had numerous plans, numerous ideas on different things so again we would want to do this and I know that originally when we were talking about building fire stations you know that s a nine month to a year construction depending on what we actually build. Alderman Cannon: And again I appreciate all those comments. I can t see any reason at this point why we shouldn t be able to have a shovel in the ground by the end of summer. Alderman D Astice: I think we just heard why we may not. Alderman Cannon: Okay Alderman D Astice: We ve got a lot of discussions to take place. I agree with you. We want to move it forward so it s based on what this council wants to do so the first action is January 10 th at the Closed Session. As soon as we can decide some of that. I agree with you Mike. We need to move the project forward, but I don t want to be the one to threaten saying I can t see why we don t have a shovel in the ground by the end of summer. Alderman Cannon: I m not threatening anybody John. It s just a matter of.. Alderman D Astice: I think we have to, it s up to the council to move it along as quickly as we want to. Acting Mayor Veenbaas: Okay, let me kind of step in here just to calm or slow it down, or calm it down or whatever words you d like to use. Let s kind of bring it back to the subject that we re here to talk about. The subject here to talk about is the process that Scott and his team and adhoc group went through and are there any other discussions concerning that and I don t think there is. Mr. Judd Alderman Judd: Not that specific per se issue, but just one of the things that I know has frustrated me through the whole process of working with government in general is the speed and nothing ever gets done in any kind of private sector reasonable speed time. So I think that is kind of what Mr. Cannon is alluding to. I understand what Mr. D Astice is saying as well and what Barry, but can we, is there a way to get some kind of drop dead date so we can start, so we know if we re going to make a decision January 10 th.. Acting Mayor Veenbaas: I think for the comment tonight we re here to talk about just the relocation portion of it and we can talk about that at another time. Alderman Judd: But that s what I mean.
Page 9 Acting Mayor Veenbaas: We ll talk about that at another time. We can talk about that at another time. Alderman Judd: Then help me with what we re actually discussing tonight. Acting Mayor Veenbaas: We re here to talk about the process that Scott just gave us with respect to summarizing what work he has done over the past couple of months. Alderman Judd: And nothing about what s going to happen in the future. Acting Mayor Veenbaas: No, the intention was not to vote on anything. Not to do any straw votes, but just for information gathering from Scott. That was the intention. Okay, with that in mind any other discussion concerning this relocation? No? Alderman Prejna: Can I make a motion to adjourn. Are we not there yet? Acting Mayor Veenbaas: We re at that point and if there is no objection then the meeting can be adjourned right now. Thank you all and Merry Christmas. There being no further business, by unanimous consent the meeting was adjourned at 7:58pm. Respectfully submitted by Ginny Cotugno, Deputy City Clerk Committee-of-the-Whole Minutes were approved at the January 10, 2017 Council Meeting. Ginny Cotugno, Deputy City Clerk