Burnsville Mayor Reflects on Six Terms in Office

If one of the job requirements for mayor is to also serve as a city’s head cheerleader, Burnsville Mayor Elizabeth Kautz is holding up her end of the bargain.

The mayor, now in her sixth term, is an unapologetic  booster of Burnsville. Kautz, who has a master’s degree in counseling and an undergraduate degree in theology, was a businesswoman before being elected mayor in 1994 – and she brings a business focus to the running of the city.

Kautz recently sat down to talk with Patch about Burnsville’s successes during her tenure and its ongoing challenges.

Burnsville Patch: Burnsville seems to be faring well–in growth, economics and business–while comparable cities are struggling. What is Burnsville doing right?

Kautz: One of the things that happened when I came into office, and which we continue to do, is to engage the community in the community-visioning process.  And out of that visioning process-- once we defined what it is we want to do and what we would like to look like–we put in place success factors. We call them ... themes. These are the things that if we do them right, we will be successful.

Burnsville Patch: What are those themes?

Kautz: One of them is to make sure the community is safe. We also will listen to our youth and engage them, because they are our future leaders and we need to make decisions that are not just for today but for the future. We also need to make sure our neighborhoods are vital, and we need neighborhoods to be engaged and continue to work to make sure that they continue to be enhanced and are improved.

And we also need to continue to work at development and redevelopment.When I came into office, we were still only about 95 percent built out. We’re at 100 percent built out now. And we had to think about redevelopment, because the city was aging and much older than a lot of cities in Dakota County.

We also need to pay attention to the environment and make sure we have a great environment for future generations. And then there is transportation:  We need to make sure we have a multi-modal system that moves our people, we need to make sure we are connected to all of the other areas.

Burnsville Patch: What else?

Kautz: As the mayor and the city council said at that time, there were two other things we need to pay attention to: our finances - to be good stewards of the people’s resources - and services. We want to make sure we deliver efficient and cost-effective service.

When I came into office, we also put in place an infrastructure trust fund that we levied and did not touch for five years. ... I come from the business community, and it’s just common sense. For example, if your house was 25 years old, you knew that your roof was going to have to be replaced in next five years, you’d have to start putting money away. It’s the same with your furnace, your air conditioning, your water softener, your heating system – that kind of thing.

So when I came into office, Burnsville was 30 years old. We knew that all of the roads were going to need to be reconstructed, and the stuff underneath the ground that nobody sees was going to need to be replaced. So we put in place an infrastructure trust fund, and we put money away for all of that.

When I came into office, the city had a debt of over $100 million, and our goal was to bring the debt down. Because of the trust fund, that debt is now down to $45 million. We did not bond for anything, and at the same time we were bringing down our debt.

Burnsville Patch: What other areas needed improvement when you took office?

Kautz: I see the city as a product that you need to continuously improve, or it becomes obsolete and you lose its value. So we started to look at areas that needed improvement. One of the things in our redevelopment strategy was that we needed an area in the city with an urban setting, so people would have a choice – a downtown setting.

We have a commercial setting on County Road 42, but that’s vehicle-focused; it’s not a gathering place, it’s a destination where you go do what you need to do, and go home. The Heart of the City is also a destination, but (in addition) it’s a gathering place where people come to know one another; it’s also a pedestrian-friendly environment, and  it’s different from 42 in that it’s mixed use. It has residents, so you have a lot of different products that create the vibrancy of a community.

Burnsville Patch: What other benefits has Burnsville derived from the Heart of the City development?

Kautz: It allowed us to look at a 54-acre site that was only producing $246,000 a year in property taxes and turn it into a site that’s making $1 million in property taxes – and more. You always have to look at your return on investment and what it is that you’re putting into it.

We work very closely with commercial brokers so that they understand that we value them, and we work with our property owners. When a space comes vacant, we know about it, we reach out to commercial brokers, we work with the property owners to market it, and we tell them why they should locate their business in Burnsville. We are always business friendly.

Burnsville Patch: What other efforts does the city make to draw business here?

Kautz: I hold a mayor’s CEO forum every quarter, and I have great participation from all the leaders in our community. I work with them to help them expand. You only have to look at Burnsville today – in the worst recession we’ve ever experienced, 53 new businesses moved into Burnsville in 2009, and in 2010, another 40. I’m always working to make sure we continue to market the viability, the great reasons to be in Burnsville. As you can tell, I’m passionate about my city.

Burnsville Patch: In a recent city survey, a majority of residents ranked the quality of life here as good or excellent. What contributed to that result?

Kautz: We always want to understand what our citizens are saying. We haven’t changed our direction in terms of strategic factors because they’re the right ones. You can look at our crime rate; since I’ve been in office, the crime rate has continued to go down, down, down. You look at our neighborhoods, and we’re continuing to work with our residents to make sure the neighborhoods continue to be vital.

Even during the foreclosure crisis, we’ve been working with banks. We’ve said that if you don’t take care of [foreclosed] properties, we’ll take care of them put them onto the tax rolls so when the banks sell them, they have to pay us for all the services, plus back taxes. The important thing is that this helps the value of all the properties to stay at par.

Burnsville Patch: How have the challenges facing Burnsville changed during your tenure?

Kautz: One thing we do is we right-size our government. We have not received any state aid since 2000. We have no local government aid (LGA). We live on our property taxes. That’s all. That’s our revenue stream, along with fees for applications, water, that kind of thing.

The state took LGA away from us. So we get none of it, but we adjusted, we’re moving on, leave us alone, we’re running a very good organization, thank you very much. I’d like local control, but when the state can’t pay their bills, they push it on down to us in the market value homestead credit. That meant that last year and the year before, there was $1.5 million coming out of our property taxes to pay a bill that belongs to the state.

Another ongoing challenge is the perception of what people think what we’re doing and whether there should be taxes or not. Taxes are a revenue stream. Here’s the way I explain it to people: You pay X amount of dollars in property taxes, and what do you get out of it? It’s just like a check register: You keep track of what you’re paying for and what’s coming in, and when you add it up you can see where your money goes.

The thing is, it’s not that we want to raise taxes just to raise taxes; there are costs that continue to go up. I always have to look at my revenue and the expense side, and we’re always managing that expense. It’s always hard to look at the revenue side because people don’t want to pay taxes -- but they do want the services.

My first year in office, we made lots of cuts. The next year we put them back in because the people didn’t like it. They didn’t like that the parks were not mowed every week; we mowed them every other week or once a month, but no, no, no – the people wanted them mowed more often. We didn’t sweep the streets until May, and they didn’t like that, either. People say they don’t want to pay any more taxes, but they do want to make sure that if there’s a burglary and they call the police, they want the police there in seven minutes or less.

Here’s the thing that people don’t understand. They say businesses have reduced their costs, so why can’t the city? But there’s a difference. I’ve run a business, and in a business, if your customer base starts to go away, you do not have the products to move out because your customer base is going away. You have to lay off people.

People ask why the city doesn’t lay off people, but the demand for our services doesn’t go away – it continues to increase. There’s still a need for ambulance service, there’s still a need for fire service, there’s still need for police to be patrolling the streets. The need doesn’t go away, it still ratchets up.

That’s the fallacy. At the same time, I hear what people are saying, and we need to ask, what is the appropriate level of service? When I came into office, there were only about 55,000 people in Burnsville. There are over 60,000 now. But we have the same number of employees today as when I came into office. We’re 100 percent built out in this city, even though we have more than 5,000 more people.

Burnsville Patch: What information is jumping out at you from the recently released Census data?

Kautz: We’ve always been a country that is very international.  In Burnsville, instead of saying, “Oh, my God, look at the greater diversity,” we’re saying that we embrace the international culture that we are becoming. We live in a global society. We market all over the world. And what I’d like to see is that our children learn to speak English fluently, but also retain their language so that they are bilingual, multilingual and can be successful in getting a job when they graduate. So instead of saying that the greater diversity is a problem, I would like for us to look at it as an opportunity.

That’s something the school district has to look at, too, and figure out what they need to do. Maybe they need to look at doing education differently and not continue to educate our children in 1918 methods. We need to look at what’s happening in the future – again, looking to the future – and then making good decisions today to get to that point.

Burnsville Patch: Do you have other political plans beyond the city level?

Kautz: That kind of politics is a party system and it’s too political. That gridlock and all that stuff – it’s not me. I’m results oriented and I’m business focused. I enjoy what I do, and I do a good job. I know that I can make a difference here.