The City of Crookston held a Workshop on Roles and Responsibilities on Monday, January 27, 2025, at 5:30 p.m. in the Council Chambers of City Hall.
Before the workshop started, Tanner Holten, the attorney for the City of Crookston, gave a brief summary of the closed meeting on Monday, January 21, which had to do with City Administrator Jeff Shoobridge’s evaluation. “Not everything is publically available, but under the statutes, we are required to give a closed meeting summary at the next council meeting, and that’s what I did,” said Holten. “Essentially, what happened at that meeting was we talked about the City Administrator, what he’s been through, the tough spot with the audit, the difficulty with keeping long-serving City Administrators in Crookston and keeping staff at high levels in our departments. We talked about the things the City Administrator is doing well, some things that the council would like him to do differently, one of which being that department heads attend City Council meetings going forward.”
Besides what the City Administrator was doing well or needed to work on, the Council talked about setting some expectations going forward and giving him some benchmarks to hit, as well as giving the Administrator a raise. “Also, we were talking about potentially giving the City Administrator a raise,” says Holten. “He provided some data from comparable cities in other areas.” Holten says that the Closed Council meeting on the topic of the City Administrators evaluation will continue next Monday, February 3. At that time, the Council will continue to discuss the performance of the City Administrator and consider the data that he provided to the city.
The Workshop, which was put on by the League of Minnesota Cities, reviewed some areas of the Crookston Charter and policies pertaining to agendas, meetings, and new member orientations. Aimee Gourlay, Lexi Wentworth, and Josie Rosene from the League of Minnesota Cities led the workshop. The later session was supposed to cover “Working as a team” (within your roles) and some of the next steps in developing policies.
Unfortunately, on Monday evening, due to illness, injury, and other unforeseen matters, there were only four of the eight council members on hand for the workshop. Morgan Hibma, Clayton Briggs, Don Cavalier, and Derek Brekken attended the workshop. “It went as well as could be expected; we did have some emergencies that happened with some of our council,” says City Administrator Jeff Shoobridge. “Our thoughts and prayers all go out to them. We will continue further down the road; the council will dictate the timing on that, and we will schedule some more things to finish up and clean up some of the loose strings.”
The next City Council meeting is Monday, February 3, at 5:30 p.m.
