State of the City Address

Parks and Recreation

Our Parks and Recreation Department continues to brighten our community. First off, thanks to a donation from the Friends of the OVAL Foundation, we relit the MN OVAL with seasonal lights for the first time since 2019. Crews placed 500 strands of LED lights in the evergreen trees surrounding North America's largest sheet of refrigerated ice. 

The City completed construction of Sunset Park in Southwest Roseville last fall. The city’s newest park features a playground, a nature loop trail, a basketball shooting area, and a picnic space. It also moves us closer to our goal of providing a park within walking distance of all residents. Sunset Park is the city’s 33rd park. 

We take playtime seriously here in Roseville because we know our award-winning parks system supports kids’ physical, social, and emotional development. This spring, we unveiled the new, more inclusive playground at Lexington Park. We thank the nonprofit Friends of Roseville Parks organization, whose $75,000 donation helped to make this project possible. The playground features a new three-story tower accessible to all ages and abilities, a variety of climbing structures, slides, swings, a safer poured-in-place play surface, and additional shade structures for park users.  

Our parks are more than just a place for us to play - they also include valuable natural areas and habitat. The City of Roseville is moving forward with a new long-range plan to ensure that our parks remain healthy, beautiful, and biologically diverse spaces for all residents to enjoy. The City Council approved the Natural Resources Management Plan in November, which provides for the preservation and restoration of forested areas, wetlands, and prairie, including oak savanna, in Roseville’s nearly 680 acres of parks and open space. 

I am proud to say Roseville is ahead of the curve on natural resource management. Staff, volunteers, and consultants have already completed hundreds of preservation and restoration projects that were guided by the city’s earlier 2013 Natural Resources Management Plan, and many of those same people were integral to the development of the newly adopted plan.

In addition to habitat restoration, the city has planted more than 400 trees in the past year along boulevards and in our parks, with an eye towards species diversity to ensure a healthy urban canopy for future generations.

With the help of a generous donation, we added an outdoor art installation at the Harriet Alexander Nature Center. The towers feature beautiful mosaic images of animals found in our region. Thank you to longtime volunteers and donors John and Kris Robertson-Smith and the Friends of Roseville Parks, which facilitated the donation. 

All this wonderful and meaningful work in our parks has been nationally recognized. We are one of only four agencies in the state to be accredited by the National Recreation and Park Association. 

Public Safety

Both Roseville Fire and Police continue to see record call volumes, and both departments have conducted staffing studies to ensure the city's public safety needs are met.

Fire Department

Roseville firefighters responded to 7,544 calls in 2024, an annual increase of more than 9 percent. That includes calls for fires, rescues, and emergency medical service. 

We’ve added equipment and staff to bolster our response capabilities. We anticipate the delivery of our first electric fire engine later this year. This engine will reduce emissions and improve working conditions for our firefighters. The electric fire engine also has a longer lifespan than its diesel alternatives. 

On the staffing front, the Fire Department has used its successful cadet program to train and recruit new firefighters. A full-time fire inspector position was added. This position plays an integral role in the city of Roseville’s rental licensing program as well as our new hotel licensing program. 

Even with all this critical, lifesaving work, our fire department continues to prioritize community outreach. Fridays with Firefighters summer events attract more than 1,000 visitors to the fire station. 

Police Department 

The Roseville Police Department responded to nearly 45,000 calls and incidents in 2024. 

Roseville Police and city leaders remain committed to creative problem-solving with additional investments in the Community Action Team, or CAT for short. CAT was created in 2021 to respond to pressing community needs, including homelessness, behavioral health issues, problem properties, human trafficking, and other complex social issues. The 9-member team includes a sergeant, five police officers with specialized training, two social workers, and a homeless outreach coordinator.

Roseville is a regional shopping, restaurant, and entertainment destination that attracts millions of guests each year. 

In 2024, Roseville Police, in partnership with Rosedale Center, created the Retail Crime Unit. This team is made up of two police officers who work out of a police substation at Rosedale Center. These officers build relationships with business owners and store managers; monitor intelligence and surveillance; communicate with other law enforcement agencies; and use other specialized techniques and tools to thwart and investigate organized retail crime. The higher visibility of officers also means more positive interactions between police and shoppers and enhances the overall sense of safety in our community's retail districts. Rosedale Center has agreed to cover the cost of the two officers and provide office space.

Building relationships with the community remains a top priority for the police department. They're a crowd favorite at nearly every community celebration. We have school resource officers working in our schools. This past year, hundreds of residents learned ways to protect themselves against scammers, thieves, and fraudsters. RPD's financial crimes experts led two 90-minute community presentations on identity theft and fraud.

Community Development

Roseville is largely a built-out city, but our Community Development department continues to attract and guide new infill projects, redevelopment, using flexible regulations that improve the quality of life in our city. 

The City of Roseville successfully lobbied at the state Legislature for local authority to license hotels. In 2024, the City of Roseville began licensing hotels to ensure health and safety and to dissuade criminal activity. Fire and Community Development staff completed comprehensive inspections of a dozen hotels, which have more than 1,300 rooms.  The effectiveness of this new licensing program was demonstrated by the fact that one hotel was required to cease operations, and was unable to obtain a license, due to ongoing maintenance and life safety deficiencies.  That hotel is working to address the deficiencies in hopes of being able to become licensed and operational.

Two major commercial projects were completed, including the opening of a Dick's Sporting Goods flagship store at Rosedale Center and Ramsey County’s Environmental Service Center, which is a one-stop-shop for safe disposal of everything from old paint to electronics.

We are seeing more electric vehicles on our roads. In response, the city has begun implementation of its new electric vehicle charging requirements for new or expanded parking lots, which have resulted in new electric vehicle charging stations at Rosedale Center. 

The City of Roseville issued a building permit for Parallel Apartments at the corner of County Road B & Pascal. This is only the second market-rate apartment built in Roseville in the last 25 years. Housing market studies have continued to show a real need for these units. 

The City also continues our efforts to build and maintain housing at all price points. In the last five years, Roseville has added nearly 1,000 new homes and apartments. That includes market-rate and affordable apartments, affordable senior apartments, single-family homes, and townhomes. 

In addition to building new homes, the City of Roseville is also helping residents stay in their homes, and we’re helping a new generation achieve the dream of homeownership. Over the last decade, we have provided 82 loans that have totaled over $5.5 million in home improvements and down payment assistance. We’ve partnered with Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity and have helped 12 families become homeowners. And more home sales are in the pipeline.  

Public Works

Our Public Works Department is the backbone of our city, maintaining roads, pathways, water and sewer systems, and other public infrastructure. 

In the past year, the city updated its streetlight policy and, in partnership with Xcel Energy, committed to adding 160 new streetlights at intersections across the city to enhance traffic and pedestrian safety.

The City of Roseville completed its Lead Free Roseville campaign. Federal safe drinking water regulations required an inventory of all water service lines to reduce any potential lead exposure. Thank you to the more than 90 percent of residents who responded. We are pleased to report that only 28 Roseville homes, or less than one percent, were found to have lead water service lines. These residents have been made aware of the presence of lead and can explore replacement options and timelines. 

The City Council passed the Green to Go ordinance in the fall of 2024. We were the fifth city in Minnesota requiring food takeout containers to be recyclable, compostable, or reusable. Restaurants were given a year to ramp up, with enforcement starting in January 2026. Given our number of restaurants and the surge restaurants have seen in their takeout business, we believe this will help reduce our community’s collective waste stream. 

The City of Roseville created its first-ever bike plan, which identifies and prioritizes bicycle routes for improvement or construction based on safety, community health, and equity goals. 

After a competitive bidding process, the City of Roseville contracted with Waste Management to take over as the city’s recycling hauler. Residents received new recycling bins in June. 

The city is starting work on a climate equity action plan, a blueprint for how our community will address and prepare for climate change. This plan will document ongoing climate work, including transitioning to clean energy, reducing pollutants, cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and leaning into resilient practices. We’ll have more to share on this in the coming months. 

Perhaps the biggest change on the horizon for our Public Works Department is the new Maintenance Operations Center to be built next to our City Hall campus. In November, voters passed a half-cent local sales tax to fund the facility. Thank you, voters for carefully weighing community needs and moving forward with this project. 

We are now hard at work planning the design and construction of this facility, which will serve as a more efficient, centralized hub for essential city services, including roadwork, snow removal, water distribution and sanitary sewer systems, maintenance of the city’s 33 parks, and much more. We are currently working with architects and our city staff to finalize plans, and will have more to share soon. 

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Volunteers, Commissioners, and Closing

Finally, we could not have accomplished all of this without the assistance of our volunteers and commissioners. Our volunteers are critical to the success of many of our programs and community events. From Rosefest and Clean-up Day to serving on one of our commissions, our volunteers make a positive impact to our community. In 2024, over 2,000 volunteers donated 5,400 hours of their time through our robust volunteer program. That is the equivalent of 2.6 full-time employees.  

Thanks for joining us for the 2025 State of the City. I encourage you to get involved in our Roseville community - share your voice at a City Council meeting, join a city commission, sign up to volunteer at an event, or follow us on social media! 

We hope to see you soon.