Grey Cloud Island Township met for its annual meeting on Tuesday, March 10 at 7 p.m. in the town hall. Included in the night’s agenda were a county update, flood update, road update, annual budget discussion, and plans for Annual Roadside Cleanup Day for County Road 75 in St. Paul Park.
Township Clerk Pam Dupre nominated Keshia Jones as moderator, Jones accepting the nomination before moving to the first order of business.
“All right,” she said. “First order of business is to approve the annual minutes from last year, March 11, for the 2025, annual meeting.”
With motion by Phil Dupre seconded by Patty Bestler, the motion passed.
Giving a general update was Washington County Board Chair Karla Bigham.
“Thank you,” she said. “Chair Jones, I appreciate the opportunity to be here tonight. Thank you Grey Cloud Island township for allowing me to speak for just briefly at your annual township meeting. I really appreciate coming every year and giving a quick update about three or four things. First, if you haven't seen in the news, our Park Grove library is closed until probably next spring for construction. It's going undergoing about a $15 million upgrade, so we will have a lot of modernization, but study groups and large gathering groups will have better space for the computers for the kid area, teen area. So just really upgrading it. It was built in 1984 which I don't think is that old, but it was showing its wear and tear, and needed some upgrades. And the parking lot was horrible, and so that's getting fixed, and we're going to have some outside area to patio area, so it's good to have that updated. And then we also are continuing to work on the 19A and 100 arterial road that will help with congestion on the Jamaica Avenue exit as the population grows in the industrial park and in the residential area to alleviate some pressure there we are going through on the environmental side now, doing some of that. Planning will start in 2027.”
That wasn’t all.
“We are very pleased to provide the crack seal programming for the township this year,” Bigham said. Saying it sounded like things were going to start May 4, Bigham said the county was pleased to partner with Grey Cloud on crack seal.
It sounds like that's going to be starting May 4,” she said. “And so I think we're really pleased to be able to partner with you guys and take care of that service.”
Bigham said the 19A and 100th arterial road project was still in need of partial funding, with Washington County Design Engineer Ryan Hoefs sharing more.
“We've got some more funding requests, as Commissioner Bigham pointed out, through both the build grant, which is a federal program to the FHWA, as well as working with some representatives for some congressionally community project funding, I believe they're calling it these days” he said. “So if all goes well and we get some funding, you know, we should have, hopefully, projects ready to rock in late ’27 you know, shovels in the ground in ’28.”
Also speaking at the annual town board meeting was Washington County Emergency Manager Doug Berglund with a flood update.
“My only report would be just a brief flood update,” he said. “So I think you're probably all aware, no big surprises. We're in good shape right now. We are. We are below normal for the potential for a flood…so barring any changes, any substantial changes, we'll just continue monitoring situational awareness. If there are changes, I'll certainly let you know.
“But right now, all indicators are below normal. I always give that type of flood update with a disclaimer, with the precipitation potential for March, April and May. We can always see profound changes in that outlook based on based on what we get, but right now it looks good. So we'll take what we're getting from the National Weather Service, and I will let you know if there's any changes.”
Cleanup had taken place at the bridge with the Army Corps of Engineers after it had gotten packed with debris.
Jones read the Plan Commission report.
“We don't have any representatives from the planning commission to read the report tonight,” she said. “Pam will post it on the township website if anyone wants to take a gander at it. But really, overall, the highlights of that, it was a pretty quiet year in 2025 overall, just a few residential permit applications, nothing out of the ordinary. And then just a note about the start of the 2050 comprehensive plan. So that's an exercise every municipality has to go through.” The comprehensive plan was updated every 10 years.
Following Plan Commission, Patty Bestler gave the cemetery report.
“So in 2025 there were two burials,” Bestler said. “Jack Knutson, he was 100 years old. He passed away in February. He was a longtime resident of Grey Cloud. And then John Reeves also passed away in April. So they were both interred at the cemetery, and they were both full burials, which we don't see happen as often anymore. Typically, they're urn burials. American Legion held the annual Memorial Day ceremony on May 26 in recognition of our great color Island veterans. Currently there are 29 veterans buried in the cemetery. So every time you know somebody passes away, I keep track of whether or not they're a veteran and add them to that loose and that's provided on an annual basis to the Legion when they read off the names.”
Also I view was a new cemetery ordinance.
“The township enacted a new cemetery ordinance at the end of 2025 that was in, I guess, December 10.,” Bestler said. “This new ordinance provides a really clear description with respect to the eligibility for burial versus the old ordinance and the rules in place. It is a good ordinance. I think it also provides very clear guidelines for the cemetery with regard to the placement of those decorative items that people put at grave sites and the amount of time that they can be at the grave site. I want to thank Pam for her assistance in cleaning up some of that old, weathered items which are left at grave sites, and they're just left there for an undue amount of time, and then the wind starts blowing them and ripping them apart and they get faded.”
Bestler said one of her goals for 2026 was to digitize existing interments.
“I want to digitize the existing internments right now,” she said. “Whoever started this job long ago put them on a big piece of tag board, foam board that's covered in paper and that has all these little rectangles marked down on it with penciled in names. And it's just not very user friendly. Because when you're going down there to, you know, somebody's these people have already reserved pots. But when you're going down there to actually dig for their urn, you know, you have to mark it out. And you have to be so many, you know, feet from each other grave, it'd be much more easy to have it on a digitized format that you could just print it then, instead of taking this big thing down there, and then you can have a copy of it too, so that both the chair and Pam can have a copy of it.”
Bestler said the Town Clerk will be involved with cemetery matters moving forward, including plot reservation.
“She'll be involved with taking reservations,”Bestler said of cemetery matters and the town clerk. Plots reserved prior to the new ordinance will be honored.
Next up was the treasurer’s report, given by Jones.
“Next item on the agenda is the treasurer's 2025, financial report,” she said. “So I'll have Pam pull that up on the screen here, and while she does that give me a lot of numbers? So I'll just give you kind of the punch line here. You're gonna look at kind of the bluish columns which show our budget for 2025 where we actually what we actually spent in 2025 and then the variance, so the difference between what we plan to spend what we actually spent.”
Included in highlights were a surplus of $103,852 for last year, the money set aside for road improvements. The board had planned to put away $80,000 after facing a funding shortfall under previous boards.
“So really good news there towards our goal to continue investing in our roads and putting money away for that,” Jones said. “The only other large variances last year, we had quite a bit of savings in snow removal in the 2025 season. I think that's going to come in a little bit higher here in the 2026 season, but that was kind of the main, the main driver for saving more money for road improvements. I know there's a lot of numbers on the page, but let me know if you have any questions about any of our items for 2025 and then further down on the agenda, we'll bring this file back up to look at 2027 budgeting.”
With no questions, next on the annual meeting agenda was the road report, given by Phil Dupre.
“First of all, I'd like to thank you all for showing up tonight,” he said. “It's nice to see so many of our citizens show up for our annual meeting.
“Anyway, road reports. We had road work last year we we did pioneer road 99th that was the year before this year we had to add a little area on 99th where we had how many loads of black dirt we had hauled in there to widen it all a little bit on his shoulders so it wouldn't break away.”
The job was overseen by Supervisor Richard Polta.
Also in Dupre’s report at the annual meeting was a joint powers agreement with Cottage Grove and St. Paul Park on Grey Cloud Trail and coming road construction.
“We entered into a joint powers agreement with Cottage Grove and St Paul Park to protect our interests in the road due to the developments that are going on the golf course there with all the heavy trucks driving out, so we joined powers agreement with St Paul Park and Cottage Grove,” he said, then continuing. “I'll bring up this didn't happen last year, but just to bring up that, we're going to start the process of redoing 105th Street and Island Drive. We're just in the stages of that. I just met with the engineer, and they're gonna drop some plans, and hopefully it'd be later this year, probably more towards the fall, that we'd be starting to work on that project.”
A new four ton weight limit had been put on Island Drive and Pioneer road, in order to protect the roads.
From there Dupre moved to the chairman’s report.
“Last year we we contracted out with the new planner WSB, and a new engineering firm is also with WSB,” he said. “The planner is going to help us with our comp plan, our 2050, comp plan. They also help this year with our annual mining permit.”
Also included in Dupre’s report was the ambulance service, with service was being provided as negotiations are ongoing between Grey Cloud Island Township and Cottage Grove. Negotiations followed a rough patch earlier last year in which Cottage Grove sought what was deemed an unsustainable agreement from the position of Grey Cloud Township, threatening to pull service if none was made.
“The agreement that they had was just not sustainable for the township,” Dupre said of the reason for ongoing negotiations on ambulance service. Service is being provided, but no contract has been signed.
Jones spoke up to clarify.
“We're very willing to make sure that it's a fair and equitable agreement, so we're not opposed to an agreement, but need to make sure it's the right agreement,” she said.
Chairman Dupre noted the work of Clerk Pam Dupre as clerk.
“I also wanted to bring up the amount of work that Pam has done over the years, being the clerk,” he said. “She has been scanning all our paperwork and all our ordinance she exactly went through all our ordinances, and we had to update a lot of our ordinances. They were out of compliance with a lot of state regulations and stuff like that. So she spent an enormous amount of time going through that and then rewriting it with the board. And so we did quite a bit of that. She's been doing that for the last, well, ever since she started on it to scan the documents and get them in so they're more accessible.”
Shifting to address criticism the board had received on ordinance enforcement, Chairman Dupre said it was better to talk with people about enforcement complaints first.
“As chairman this year I took it on myself to go and talk to the people,” he said. “You never know what’s going on in people’s lives.”
Talking and helping was better than suing, in Dupre’s view.
“I’d rather do that than send a code officer after them,” he said. “The process is lengthy and it’s costly. I’d rather see neighbors helping neighbors than neighbors suing neighbors.”
Also covered was the situation on property taxes and road funding, addressed by Polta.
“We'll get in the details under the 2027 budget discussion, but it's going to be much less,” he said. “So, yeah, the last two years, we took pretty substantial hikes, around 20 plus percent. It was an average of $300 a home, depending on your value and things. This year, we're only looking at taking up 3% because it was to kind of catch up some of those town funds, or the road funds, excuse me, and now we feel like we're in a much healthier place to kind of make up some of that over the prior years that prior town boards maybe didn't keep up with. So really just taking kind of an inflation 3% next year for the township portion.”
The board was trying to save for future road expenses, after no capital outlay from 2022 to 2024 had resulted in needing money for Grey Cloud Trail, to the tune of $170,000. The township had switched from St. Paul Park to the sheriff for law enforcement as a way to make the shortfall, then working to save money so the situation didn’t repeat. The first increases were double digit, while the present year was looking to be 3.3 percent.
“So right now we have, we figured the other day about $350,000 right now we could spend on roads,” Polta said. “We have another $100,000 coming this year. So we got about $450,000 for capital for roads.” Bathymetric studies showed that Grey Cloud Channel was getting shallower and needed dredging, a process which involved the DNR and Army Corps of Engineers.
Also touched upon, Chairman Dupre said the township was being sued by Amrize.
“Last spring, when am rise came with their building or their mining permit application, they wanted to go further north than what our ordinance said,” he said. “They figured they had a covenant agreement with the previous owners. The town board denied a request that didn't follow our ordinances with that they they had taken us to court over an eminent domain.”
The lawsuit was ongoing, with the township able to get some free counsel from insurance it pays each year to the Minnesota Association of Townships.
Also speaking meanwhile was Jean Broderson, looking for advice on hunters near her home.
“Last time I was here, I made a comment about hunting less than 100 feet from our house,” she said. “And I'm wondering exactly what I should do now when I look out the window during hunting season and this is happening.
“Excuse me, no, but they were floating on jet skis, and they had their rifles pointing right over our house like it was like, Okay, I have never 50 years and I've never seen this. I thought I was terrified. I thought, is this legal? But apparently it is.”
So long as one was hunting in a boat they could be close to shore, rather than hundreds of feet out. Broderson asked for guidance, with one option to call the DNR.
Also touched on at the annual board meeting was upcoming tree trimming by Xcel, followed by the annual budget discussion.
“We'll move on to item 10, which is a 2027, annual budget discussion,” Jones said. “We talked a little bit about this a couple moments ago, but we'll be looking at the far right 2027, proposed column.
Previous years had seen an 18.6 percent and 24.7 percent increase respectively, with 2027 proposed at 3.3 percent.
“So the levy is kind of, I'll say, five rows up from that,” Jones said.
The impact over 110 homes was projected to be $70 a home on average.
“Just again, reminder for just the township portion, when you get your property tax statement, there's many other municipalities, and I'll say levying taxes and things on that as well,” she said. “So the township portion will be minimal as it is proposed right now.”
The budget also included an $8,000 placeholder for ambulance service with ongoing negotiations, the township looking to put away $100,000 towards future road expense.
The budget was later tabled for consideration Sept. 9 at 6:30 p.m., not due for submission until later that month.
Closing out the annual town meeting update, an Annual Roadside Cleanup Day for County Road 75 will take place April, 11 at 9 a.m.