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Veterans Park volunteers urge North St. Paul to streamline event permits and insurance records
Summary
Charter members of the Veterans Park Council told the council volunteers raised roughly $250,000 to build the park but face repeated permit, insurance and administrative hurdles after staff turnover; they asked the city to keep a single maintained file or staff contact to simplify future events.
Charter volunteers who built and maintain Veterans Park urged the North St. Paul City Council to create a streamlined, documented process so routine special-event permits and insurance proofs do not get lost amid staff turnover.
Dan Fischer, a charter member of the Veterans Park Council, told the council the volunteer group — five veterans and three non-veterans who worked without city payment — raised about $250,000 and met engineering requirements to construct the park. "We hammered out an agreement with the city. I have a copy of it here," Fischer said, and asked the city to maintain a single "Veterans Park" file that staff can consult when volunteers submit routine event paperwork.
Fischer and a second resident who spoke during public comment described a pattern in which insurance certificates and event plats that volunteers believed had been sent to the city were not consistently retained, requiring volunteers to re-submit documents each time a new staff person starts in the office. The second commenter said the group received a bill from the city's online permit payment vendor for a permit the group believed should be free as a nonprofit and asked the city to assign a consistent staff contact or use a stable, generic email address for permit-related emails.
Volunteers said they do not have problems coordinating with parks, police or fire but that the administrative handoff at the front desk is the recurring friction point. "It's just a lot of extra little work," one volunteer said, asking the council to make it easier to work with VFW posts and other community groups when planning events such as the park's upcoming 10th anniversary.
Council members thanked the volunteers for their work and said staff would follow up. The public-comment portion closed and the council moved on to city business.
