City Council Meeting Date: January 6, 2026
To: Mayor and City Council
City Administrator
From: Mikayla Schmidt, City Planner
Title
Contract Approval to Hire Houseal Lavigne to Update & Redesign the City's Zoning Code.
Body
Action Requested:
The Northfield City Council is being asked to approve the contract with Houseal Lavigne to update and redesign the City's zoning code.
Summary Report:
The city updated its comprehensive plan in March of 2025. The next step is to update the zoning code to reflect the updated comprehensive plan and make any changes identified.
Staff went through a rigorous selection and interview process. A Letter of Interest (LOI) request was submitted and posted to the American Planning Association and the MN American Planning Association's websites to solicit responses. Staff also directly reached out to 12 consultants to submit. Those consultants were a combination of staff connections and planning commissioner connections / recommendations. We received six LOI's and interviewed all six consultants. The interview panel consisted of Mikayla Schmidt, Jake Reilly, Mathias Hughey, Nate Carlson, Melissa Hanson, Emery John, Risi Karim, Bill Kuhlmann, Will Schroeer, Steve Schmidt, Kara Trygestad and Kari Bonde. A grading rubric was used to score responses to our questions and after the first interviews we held two sessions to debrief and share our top three picks. The shared consensus that Houseal Lavigne, Codametrics and WSB were the top three candidates. After further staff discussion and a second interview with Houseal Lavigne and Codametrics, staff decided on Houseal Lavigne.
Houseal Lavigne was notified they were the top choice and that the city would like to pursue a formal proposal and contract with them. City staff, including myself and Mathias, and the zoning update steering committee, made up of Bill, Will and Steve, participated in the review of the formal proposal. We arrived at an agreed upon scope and budget, which came...
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