The purpose of case is to recommend to City Council, that additional analysis be performed on the significant investigation and reports resulting from the Resilient Communities Project with the University of Minnesota on the potential of a Community Center in Ramsey.

There apprears to be resident interest in a 'community center' in the City of Ramsey, as expressed through community meetings, surveys, and other public input. Although the idea has been generally discussed by the City Council over the years, no in-depth planning, budgeting, nor significant community engagement has been performed (until this RCP work). The attached collection of reports brings together student work completed in conjunction with the 2017-2018 Resilient Communities Project (RCP) partnership with the City of Ramsey.  Included in this collection are the final student deliverables from three classes offered at the University of Minnesota in which students worked exclusively on exploring options, tradeoffs, community needs and preferences, and potential design elements for a Community Center in the city  Additionaly, there is an Abstract that preceeds each group of reports, to aid in navigating and reviewing the 136 page document.

In addition to the question of 'will there be a Community Center in Ramsey', and how might it be funded—another prominent question that remains unclear, is whether a traditional (centralized) Community Center may be the best model for Ramsey, or is a decentralized approach (different amenities is multiple locations) a more realistic alternative.

Upon Council concurrence that this project should be undertaken, Staff is recommending a strategic approach to addressing these questions, that may be summarized by the steps below:

1) Write/prepare an Executive Summary that highlights the pros and cons (with citations to 136 page aggregated report), and comparisons of the centralized, versus a decentralized Community Center.

2) Prepare a realistic business model(s) with anticipated construction costs (whether or not this would be a public/private partnership), and expected annualized operating costs—based upon some of the precedent studies in the attached report(s).

3) Bring to each of the city's Boards and Commissions for review and input—with the goal being to understand if there is consensus on the direction for any and all aspects of a Community Center in Ramsey.

4) Present the findings to City Council for planning purposes, and as a report to the community.

No funding is required at this time.

Staff recommends a review of the RCP reports, and requests ideas on the plan and process (outlined above), on how best to bring to resolution the questions and direction relating to a proposed Community Center in Ramsey.

Based upon discussion.