City Administrator’s Friday Memo, May 15

The Friday Memo, written by Northfield City Administrator Joel Walinski and many of the department directors, managers, and supervisors, summarizes many of the staff activities for the week.

The Friday memos are published and archived in PDF form at the bottom of Joel Walinski’s web page. See the Friday memo for this past week and then comment or ask questions about it here.

This week’s good news includes a colossal invasion of privacy (not to mention waste of time) as the City “reviews” EVERY RESIDENTIAL PROPERTY TO VERIFY USE:

The building inspection staff continues to work on getting all the residential properties that are used as rental in Northfield brought into compliance with the rental ordinance. Staff has started the process to review every residential property in the city to verify the use of the property. We will determine if the property is owner occupied or is being used as a rental. This process will take several months to complete. Monthly progress reports will be provided to the Community Development Department Manager.

WTF?

I sure hope my college-age kids don’t answer the door when the City comes calling, but if they do I’ll be sure I’ve coached them on the fourth amendment and that they ask the building inspector for his warrant. Maybe it’s just me, but does anyone else see problems with a rental ordinance that requires visits to every home to determine “compliance”? I’ll bet they’ll even be wearing brown shirts. Have I mentioned that the rental ordinance is not in conformance with certain principles adopted in the Comprehensive Plan? I won’t start by throwing around that word “unconstitutional”. Call your councillors, everybody, this is a dumb one.

Moving right along to the better and more constructive stuff in the weekly memo, there are details of funding reductions in local government aid (LGA), a good visual presentation by Kathleen McBride on where our residential and commercial property taxes go, and updates on many of the construction projects around town.

Supplementary documents for the week are available on this week’s Friday memo page on the City website.

Note: There is a City Council meeting/work session tonight. You can view all meetings here on the City calendar.