The following items occurred during the July 15 City Council meeting:

Looking into
airport issue

During the July 15 City Council meeting, Mayor Phil Young brought up the issue of nighttime flights at Flying Cloud Airport. He proposed having the Flying Cloud Airport Advisory Commission look into the issue directly with the FAA.

“Anything that we can do that lessons the nighttime noise impact on our citizens and still stays within the boundaries of reasonableness, I think we should be doing,” said Council Member Kathy Nelson.

 Smith-Douglas-
More house update

The Eden Prairie City Council will likely be reviewing the lease situation related to the Smith-Douglas-More house at an upcoming meeting.

The city currently is leasing the property to a Dunn Bros. coffee franchise owner under a one-year agreement. During the July 15 meeting, Mayor Phil Young proposed that they should talk about what the council wants to do with that lease at the August meeting. He said they shouldn’t wait until the end of the year and possibly leave the tenant in a tight spot.

The city owns the historic house and has been leasing it out to Dunn Bros. since 2002. The home was recently appraised and valued at $565,000. Mayor Young has been of the opinion that the city should look into selling the property.

Under the 12-month lease, the franchise owner pays $33,250 in annual rent, down from previous rent of $67,000.

 Irrigation at
the city

The issue of irrigation of city property came up during the July 15 council meeting.

 “It’s important that the city also set an example for this,” said Council Member Brad Aho.

Apparently a citizen had questioned the city’s watering practices and brought the issue to council members.

City Manager Scott Neal said they’d been taking a look at this issue.

“We have turned down the frequency of how much we water.”

He also noted they have always complied with their own watering ordinance, which does allow some exceptions to outdoor watering, primarily for new sod.

One other issue is that the different watering zones they have in place are “very very large.”

“Much larger than we would want people to use today.”

He said the city is going to take a look at those systems and how much it would costs to put in new ones that include smaller zones.

They also plan to look at “the cost of converting some of our turf to another surface that’s maybe more natural and requires less irrigation to sustain.”

 He said staff will continue to take a look at this issue and they’ve already dialed back the watering.

 “We don’t want to kill the grass, but it will be a little crunchier than normal.”