March Citizens Forum

On Saturday March 7th I was honored to host my first Citizen's Forum. The Council had recently made some changes to the Citizen's Forum by rotating the host amongst all the Council members and moving the meeting location around the city to hopefully get a wider group of citizens involved in the meeting. The Council had also asked that each meeting have a theme or topic to start the meeting, so for now we are featuring a different city department at each meeting.

This meeting was held at Fire Station #4 which is in south Maplewood on Londin Lane. We had about twenty people in attendance and about nine were from the south leg. For at least four of those people this was their first Citizen's Forum.

Mychal Fowlds, the head of Maplewood's IT Department, was the featured speaker. He did a great job of explaining his department and explaining the many features and applications that are available on the Maplewood website. There were several suggestions from the participants on ways to improve the website or changes which we might what to consider. Some were: should we charge people who wish to access your advanced mapping system, we need a easier way to access individual employees contact information, rework a confusing arrangement of options that access the city council minutes, and include the meeting topic for the Citizen Forum in the published information.

The meeting then moved to open discussion of whatever topics the participants wished to discuss. One of the questions that was asked was whether we are planning on closing fire stations in the city. The short answer is no we are not. The person that asked this question is the same person who asserted at the last Council meeting that we were planning on closing fire stations. Chief Lukin addressed that issue at the meeting. You can watch the video by clicking here. On the streaming video page click visitor presentations or simply slide the button under the video to almost the end of the meeting. The Chief's responds immediately after Visitor Presentations is completed. There was a continuing discussion at the Forum about some of the various options and items that are being looked at by the Fire Department. There was then discussion about the recent police sting operation with a split on opinions about whether it was a bad thing to do or not. I would say the majority were not in favor of that type of sting. City Manager Antonin said that at least one good thing came of the sting and that was all the free press. In his opinion there are most likely more people buckling up now than there were before. The group indicated that if that was the case that we should do a better job of reporting all the stings to achieve that same effect. Some discussion took place as to whether the city is improperly storing snow off our streets in wetland areas in the south leg. Mr. Antonin and I indicated that there had been some discussion of this late last year and that it was being addressed. The meeting finished up with a discussion of administrative fines and whether they were a possibility for Maplewood.