City Council · 2019-02-12

Any— Brent Sumner is vacationing in St. George at the moment, so he'll be calling in later. And why don't we go ahead and get started then with the discussion on NIA, and Kenna and Steve Downs are going to lead the discussion.

Yep, we appreciate this opportunity. This, this really stems from our, our retreat not last month but, but last year, and it was to set out in the upcoming budget year, so it started last July with this emphasis on what are we going to do with the Neighborhoods in Action program.

It's been—

it was—

we'll go through this. It was created in '98, but really for the last handful of years it hasn't been, you know, functioning the way maybe it was ever envisioned to function. And so with that in mind, we made a decision through the budget process to hire a community services manager that can help. That's why Kenna is here with us. And Kenna is kind of overseeing what will become of this neighborhood, the The whole neighborhood in action. We were calling it NIA 2.0. The basics— the basic, you know, kind of premise of where we're coming from is what was the intention that NIA was— you know, what was it supposed to do? And was what it was supposed to do, is that better served through a different model in 2019 than in 1998? And so that's kind of what we'll look at. The purpose— and this is taken from the minutes when that was created in 1998— the purpose of creating the NIA program was to eliminate the perception that the city did not listen And that the city is— it was openly accessible, that it's easily accessible. That was the purpose. That was what we were trying to accomplish in 1998.

'98 is when it was put in place?

Yep, 1998. The mission of it was to share ideas about the— for residents to share ideas about their neighborhood, identify ways to meet local needs, more active citizen participation, and create communication channels Between citizens and government representatives and an education process for citizens on the governmental process. So that was the vision that they had when they— and the mission when they started it. So a little bit of history. It was originally proposed in 1980, and they chose not to go forward with the creation of a neighborhood program in 1980. It came back to the city council in 1998, and that's when it was put in place. One of the reasons that they didn't— for the minutes in 1980, one of the things that they were concerned about in 1980 was, if we were to create a neighborhood program with a handful of people serving as chairs, does that really give us the pulse of the entire community, or does that give us the pulse of a couple people in specific neighborhoods? And so they didn't want those individuals to feel empowered to speak on behalf of an entire neighborhood. on a specific issue. And so that was one of the reasons they didn't. But in 1998, I think there was— they identified that, well, we haven't made any progress though. And so if the fear was that, we don't have any better solution on how to reach out to neighborhoods. Let's move forward with the creation of that program. That's what happened in 1998. The original structure was 15 communities with a— each community having a community coordinator, an assistant coordinator, and a secretary, and they were elected for a 2-year cycle. Within each community, it was divided up into 3 to 5 neighborhoods, with each neighborhood having a chair, assistant chair, and a secretary elected for a 2-year cycle. So in total, you're looking at 225 to 250 positions that would have existed in this NIA program throughout the city. Currently, as you can imagine, trying to fill and maintain and 225 to 250 positions probably wasn't sustainable. So current structure, 22 neighborhoods, an appointed chair, and the neighborhood structure now mirrors— mirrored stake boundaries for the LDS faith.

Are there 22 stakes now or 23?

Yeah, so I believe there's more. It doesn't— what we have now does not mirror exactly how those work. And that's just how it is now. There's conversations about doing some other things with Those boundaries. So part of the challenge as we looked at the NIA program was if we were to try to continue the 1998 model into the future, what challenges does that present? And so one of the biggest things was sustainability. It was— we were having— we are and continue to and have had a difficulty in getting people into those positions, retaining people in those positions, and encouraging people to serve in those positions and fill the mission of what the NIA was intended to do. On top of that, to Tom's point, since that time boundaries have changed. It no longer mirrors exactly how stake boundaries look, and there's also others potentially being considered, and that's just not how the neighborhood boundaries are set. It also has— whether that includes the underrepresented population, there's just inherently when it follows a stake boundary perfectly, that's going to be a tied in with the LDS faith. And so did that allow us to reach out to those that maybe weren't either a member of that faith or active in that faith or for whatever reason? One of the struggles of the current structure is allowing us to reach those underserved populations that maybe just aren't represented in the current structure. The other part of it, and this was the issue in 1980 that is still the issue today, is For neighborhood chairpersons and leaders, what is their method of when they speak? How do we know that they're representing the thousands of people that live in their given neighborhood? And so they don't— do they have the method or a way to really make that connection? And so one of the things we've wanted to do, and this is kind of the next bullet point, is to instead of continuing this issue that's really difficult for us, and that's creating a systemic sustainable model that includes everybody and that we get the pulse of as many people as possible. We feel like there's networks that are already in place that allow us to connect with people of any given neighborhood. Ecclesiasticals, through the schools, and through our neighborhood plan committees that we've been forming as we've gone through this neighborhood plan process. The other part of it is a couple, a handful of years ago, we did do a survey with our citizens asking them 2— well, a lot of things, but 2 specific questions. How do you want to be contacted? When you want the city to communicate with you about an issue, how do you want us to do that? When you want to communicate to the city about an issue, how do you want to do that? And the results were pretty clear that receiving information from the city, they want it to be done digitally. They want it through emails. They do want postal mail. We do that with some big issues like we saw with our streetlight fee. Social media, website, and then you get a big drop-off into your traditional, maybe what was available that was at, you know, best in 1998, flyers at door, NIA reps, things like that. There's clearly a message from citizens of contact us digitally, that's just more convenient for us, easily accessible, things like that. When we asked them how they want to give feedback to the city, they want to email the offices, they want to go to the website, they want to do it through Facebook. And again, we see all digital ways.

What is the green highlight there in each of those?

It was something— when we did the survey, we didn't have that available to us, so Quinn highlighted that saying this is something that you don't have that you probably should consider.

And we are—

we don't have text messaging currently available.

We do. Well, we don't, but we'd like to.

But that's something we're working on still into our 311 system.

So that's the green.

Over the last handful of years, we've done some things to increase— in response to that survey, increase the ways we do connect with our neighborhoods. That's through— by the request of the City Council, when we have planning-related issues, we wanted to increase the radius of who we're mailing it. I believe it went from 500 feet to 1,000 feet. So now we have connected that. So these big political issues or land use type issues, we reach a bigger audience when we're Considering those. We're going through our new neighborhood planning process. We're down to our final 2. One's in process right now, and then there'll be one more.

Is that correct?

And then, of course, as you know, we've opened our 311 center that is kind of that one-stop shop for communication. That includes an online chat feature, which has been—

So how aware is everybody of the 311?

Yeah, pretty— if they dial 311, You know, I know that, but I mean, how many people—

if you were to go out in the city and say, have you ever dialed 311? Do you know what it is?

Yeah, so I don't know.

I don't think I'd find very many people that know.

For sure.

But if they dial the city offices, they get the same process. So whether they dial 311 or whether they call 229-7000, they get into the same system. I think everybody knows how to call the city offices. They may not use 311, but it all gets them into the same At the same feed. And so we did release— recently go through an online chat. Pete can probably speak best to the success of that, but I think that's been used heavily.

Yeah, every week we see more and more people on that chat feature. It's really going well.

Obviously social media. Our newsletter presence has grown from— 5 years ago it was about 2,400, and we're up to 18,000 email addresses that we email monthly now with the mayor's message as well as the issues that are going on in the city.

Question. Is the online chat, is that the same group of people that are in the 311 calls? So it's not Jamie there at the keyboard responding to everyone?

Not yet.

Well, we can talk about that later, I think.

Sounds like Pete's got some other questions.

And if I may interject, I think the online chat or instant messaging was really at least our initial response to seeing that demand for texting. I felt like that kind of serves virtually the same purpose of having it in writing, but still something that is available that we can take and do something with and resolve when our citizens communicate with us. Yep, that's good.

And is the online chat mobile-friendly? So can people like pull it up on their cell phones?

Yeah, it works really well. You can look at it now. It's just not performed over.

I don't know if you've ever used Slack, but Slack is the Yep.

Is what we use.

Yep. We have the warm forum, and that's what we've used for a lot of our planning-related issues, which has been a success. Obviously, we've started to stream our city council meetings to get better access to information that way. We do our surveys and reports, and then we've— this is a part of our 311. We've created a knowledge base so that— and we continue to build this up regularly, but when people call 311 or they dial 801-229-7000, our agents are getting equipped with more and more information to be able to give quickly.

So we're tracking how many people are Looking at Orem Forum.

Yep, yep.

And as far as streaming on meetings, we're tracking that.

Yep, yep, we have all that, all that data.

Okay, might be nice if you could send that out to the council.

That's a great idea.

The data on all of that, meetings, chat, forum, et cetera.

Yep.

Newsletter.

I mean, we even, when we send out an electronic newsletter, we know how many people we've sent it to. We also know how many people open it. I think it's about 60% of the people we send it to open it.

No, it's probably closer to— it's about 6,000, but it's about 33%, 34%, which I guess is a pretty high open rate in the world of spam emails. I hope to consider ourselves better than that, so maybe that's why we have a higher percentage. But we also measure how many people, what they're clicking on, what they're looking at. It's been a really positive—

Yeah, I've had people come back and tell me that they like the newsletter.

I will say this. I was in a meeting for an ecclesiastical duty and somebody quoted the mayor's message in the spiritual thoughts. So it's clearly having an impact. Clearly having an impact on the community.

I was about to quote the devil in some way.

I won't go there.

You know, we're— we don't like to pound our chests a lot. We're really proud of that. It's a far more efficient way to get information out. It's a way that people have it, they can track it, they can keep it in their email, they can recall it, you know, a month later instead of having to take the mailed newsletter and put it on the fridge and hope— you know, it's just been a really, really good way. The other thing it's allowed us to do is, you know, when there's things that you want to share, the mayor's message, we just get it to a bigger audience now. We get it to more people. We've taken the feedback from the citizens and we feel like this is the path they were basically pushing us towards, is get it to us in a way that's easily digestible. We can look at it and watch it anytime we want. And that's kind of where we're trying to go.

So—

oh, please. One more interjection in response to the mayor's request. In the forum.org/focus webpage, there are some kind of high-level statistics. Obviously, we'll go back and and we'll provide some more. But for example, in September we had 1,100 311 cases created, and last month in January we had almost 2,000. So we see that use, you know, continuing to increase rather rapidly. And we're up to, you know, 250 knowledge-based answers delivered. So it's— You can't see some high-level growth and go back?

Yeah, just like a compilation.

Yep, yep, we can do that for sure.

So again, as we look at what the purpose of the neighborhood program was, the big— one of the biggest ones was the communication piece.

How do—

how are neighbors going to connect with us? How are we going to connect?

So, uh, we had an active chair a couple years ago, and we were getting neighbors coming, we were electing We were progressing, and the 2 biggest items on our list was trying to get landscaping at 1600 North and 4th East, that corner, which we ended up accomplishing with the city's help.

Yep.

And then the cleanup, spring cleanup. So I didn't really see much else happening. They did mention a neighbor that needed some help, but yeah, but basically it was Landscaping.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, we still see that being a big thing. You know, Kenna has done obviously a great job in this position. But one is we're looking to redo our Geneva Park. In a traditional model, what we maybe would have done is connect with the Geneva chair and talk to them and enlist vision what that park was. But what we had the resources to do was have Roger, you know, who does our GIS, just run a quick query of all the people that live in this geographic area, give us the email addresses, let us email them a survey asking about this. And we had about 350 responses to this survey about what they would like to see in the Geneva Park. And that has shaped—

Much more effective.

In many ways what has happened in Geneva Park. So, the same outcome, a different model, but again, 350 people now.

I think it's a much more effective model.

Yeah, and it's been— it's really good for us. Now the people you would imagine you're hearing from, if you're going to get 350 people, these are people you probably wouldn't have had show up, you know, to a town hall meeting. So this is the communications method.

Yeah, I mean, in ours we would only have maybe 10, 12 show up at a time out of a fairly large neighborhood. I mean, one of the main areas in Warren.

Yeah, one of the other things that we're finding very effective is working with the schools. Schools and the principals. With this survey, we're able to actually send a survey out to every kid at Geneva and at Suncrest. Suncrest actually sent it out on their, their, like, their email list to the schools. We've been using them for police picnics and other things that we've been doing, and that seems to be also a really good resource to communicating, especially with kids, you know, parents with And on our NPU side, I mean, I wonder how much knowledge are we getting out there that we're more active, that we're beefing up?

Glad you asked.

As par for the course. Let's jump into that. Sergeant Paraskeva, of course, is here to answer any specific questions. It is no surprise to you that Sergeant Paraskeva has done an incredible job with his unit. in helping to improve relationships and reach out to people. Him and Kenna have been very active in this world. So this is the communications side. The other part of NIA that was intended to solve was how do we help identify issues and help neighbors help themselves?

Right.

And that's what— I'll let Kenna—

And Stephen, maybe for the camera, I know we had a concerned citizen who thought this communication was we're going to do away with Neighborhood in Action.

Yeah.

Could you just kind of clarify what our end goal is? We're going to begin with the end in mind.

Would you help us?

Yeah, so our intent is just to continue the same mission of how do we create an environment and a government that people can easily access and that we are sharing information with them. We want to continue to serve that.

And receiving information from them.

And receiving information from them. And then what about— and Ken will speak to this— continuing a government that identifies, helps neighbors identify issues in the neighborhood, solves those problems with their help and with our help. We work together to solve these problems, which is one of the intentions. What you may see and what we're proposing is maybe not a neighborhood program like you would see in 1998. And it's not one that has the same kind of structure of chairs and co-chairs and secretaries and 2-year election cycles, but it's one that serves the same purpose. But it's using these digital methods, using an infrastructure that's already in place in the community. It is one that will serve the same purpose that our neighborhood program was intended to. We feel like it'll do it in a much more efficient and effective way. And what you would expect to see in a program that was created in 2019 and moving forward.

So what we— instead of calling it Neighbors in Action, we'd like to change the name to Neighborhood Partnership Initiative. It really, I think, it shows that we're partnering together. It's not just about us, it's about the neighbors and everyone else coming together. So what we're saying we'd like to see is that 22 current neighborhoods will be combined into the 9. These neighborhoods will be based on the Development Services neighborhood planning groups and will be used for planning and communication purposes only. There will be no elected leadership positions, like we just said. The leaders that have been in those positions will be invited to participate in some of the trainings and meetings and things that we have planned as well. So we're not going to do away with active people. We want to bring them into the fold and help us get other people more active in the community.

But our hope though is that somebody who isn't elected still feels just as empowered to show up and participate.

Like we said, communication to neighborhood residents will be done through targeted emails, mailings, social media, utility bills, newsletters, schools, and the utilization of a network of community leaders that are connected with people of the given neighborhood or area. So ecclesiastical, schools, things like that.

Ken, maybe if you could speak to—

and this may come up later, but over the last handful of months, there's been a few different neighborhoods we've had these specific kind of meetings.

And maybe you can speak to like the Sharon one and what that looks like.

Right.

So we've been in the 6 neighborhoods, the LMIA neighborhoods, neighborhoods. We've been doing what we call—

What are the neighborhoods?

The low and moderate income neighborhoods, which is defined by HUD as being those neighborhoods where at least 51% make less than 80% of the area median income. So we've done 3 neighborhood leader meetings to date. We did one at Sharon Park, one for Geneva Heights, and one for Suncrest. Dave just came to that one a couple weeks ago. We invited— we've been working with, through the LDS State presidents and have asked them to send people from each LDS ward, so a leader or 2 leaders from each LDS ward, either bishop or Relief Society president, elders quorum president, someone like this to attend the meetings. And we have an okay through the LDS area authority to do that, so they're actually helping us do this.

Mm-hmm.

We also have been working with the Utah Valley Interfaith Association to include other faiths in that. We've reached out to the neighborhood planning people that have been involved in the neighborhood plans in these areas, and then also the structure, the NIH structure as well. And we've had really successful meetings. We've probably had 10 to 15 to 20 people show up at each meeting, and they've been very engaged. We want it to be less of a complaint meeting, more of what can the city do for you kind of thing, what we have available.

When would these meetings be?

How often?

Yeah, so we've been having them. So far we're planning on doing them once or twice a year, and it would be focused mostly on those LMI neighborhoods. We could, you know, if we felt like there was needs in other neighborhoods, we could definitely do leader meetings there. But they've been very successful and people have really appreciated the information that we've been able to provide to them, the resources and things. The other thing that it's helped us do is it's given us a way to access people. So if we— the neighborhood cleanup is coming up, so I— for these 3 neighborhood groups that we've created, I was able to send information out about that and hazardous waste collection. We have, you know, some of our CDBG partner organizations, if they have something going on that they think would be great for these neighborhood people to know about, these church leaders to know about, we send that out as well. They've gone very, very well, and we've had great feedback. We have people say, now how can we help? We want to help more. What can we do to get this information out into our communities?

Are we looking at having barbecues with any of them again?

Yeah, that'll be part of the summer. Yeah, kind of our summer as we do our cleanups, that part of it would continue as well. One of the things in kind of also the school principals and in some cases the, the counselors have been invited as well. And it goes back to, if you remember our meeting with the superintendent with the school district and we were talking about mental health, and this is where this Dr. Christy who will be speaking next month, Caine, is when we identify these issues of whether it's code enforcement, whether it's mental health, these problems are bigger than any one of our organizations. And we have to start partnering together to solve these types of problems. And one of the things that I really love that's come out of this is— and I wasn't in the meeting, so I'm probably going to botch it. From what I understand, as we were talking about, you know, working in neighborhoods and school principals, what happens at home that maybe we're involved in, and maybe whether it's an arrest or something that happens at home, impacts a child's next day at school. And how can we talk better so that the school knows maybe what's been happening on the other side, so that the teachers and those can watch out for, you know, behaviors or things that might be influenced because of things that have happened? These are conversations that we can facilitate by getting the right people in the room. And that's, you know, leaders in the faith-based world, in the educational world, and in the nonprofit world together talking. When we were meeting with Sharon Park, we had the LDS faith and the Catholic Church. The individual for the Catholic Church showed up. They live amongst each other and they haven't connected, but they connected at that meeting. And those types of relationships we feel like will help solve these problems moving forward.

And one of the other things that happened is the Sharon Park principle I guess all the leaders of all the schools in Orem get together every so often, and they've actually asked us to come speak next week at that meeting. So that was kind of a cool opportunity.

So you have 7 elementary schools that get together, you know, that were on the space project.

Yep, Apollo.

Apollo project.

And the things that I see that are major issues really are drug houses, in the neighborhoods and then illegal apartments. And I think that everybody seems to have concerns with both of those.

Yes, sir.

First of all, I think this is a great way to kind of modernize this and a huge step forward. For those neighborhoods where we do have an active NIA chair or assistant or whatever position they're serving in, can we also reach out to them and, you know, not only invite them to participate in this, But maybe just kind of compile a list of our different boards and commissions where we have vacancies and say, if you'd like to continue, you know, playing an active role in shaping some of these conversations, we do have some opportunities to serve on this committee or this board or something like that.

Good idea.

I like that.

So those are kind of what the neighborhood districts will look like. So the 9 districts, they're basically based on the plan.

Can you send this presentation to the council Absolutely.

Yes. So, um, and we'll put it in the minutes so that people can access it.

Um, so a few more things. Trainings will be held regularly for community neighborhood leaders, helping to share ideas, encourage more active citizen participation, provide resources, and educate citizens on the government process. One of the things that came out of the SLOSH meeting recently was that they would like to have a training on how to run for city council. And so we thought that might be a— maybe our first workshop, uh, maybe encourage some of you to help us do that.

But we'll do that right about a month after the filing.

The filing.

We'd be happy to come.

Yeah.

Yes, your last slide that showed the groupings, how would those determine— are they surrounding schools?

What, what made those? Yeah, how'd you decide those groupings?

Jason, as we decided the neighborhood plans, we We didn't want to do 26.

I understand.

So we broke them up into those neighborhoods that felt like they grouped together. So we came up with 9.

Thank you.

Yep, somewhat arbitrary, but logical.

Logical.

Thank you.

Yeah, and in some ways, the demographics, socioeconomics of some of the areas, not in all cases, but we tried to—

So if you live in the unclassified zone, then nobody pays any attention to you.

But you're the homeless people, you know.

Are there any homes there?

It is an uninhabited area. Yeah, there is anybody that lives there.

Isn't that where the cemetery is?

It is.

So maybe you've had your chance to speak up.

Yes.

Yeah.

Um, so the citywide neighborhood cleanups will remain and be held twice a year. So that will still be under, um, the city manager's office will still continue to do that.

And, and, and, you know, this is really props to Christy, but, um, we've, we've redefined how we do that too. It used to be somebody was in charge of scheduling it and then they would get the word out. We've now just started to schedule it and make sure that we get the word out to everybody everywhere. And it's, it's been utilized far heavier. But again, we still have the opportunity for the barbecues after, which have worked really well.

So then we'll continue with our MPU unit. Harris County does a wonderful job of that. I appreciate the chief and his support of that. We'll continue to provide code and nuisance enforcement citywide and enforce the new ALJ process, so the administrative law judge process the event approves. And we continue—

Have we given the information out to the public on that yet?

On the ALJ process?

I don't know that I've seen that in the newspaper.

But why would we give it out to the public?

Well, just to let them know that the process is moving forward and easier to use.

The process is no different until you get internally. And instead of, for example, going through and visiting with our Justice Court judge, you visit with an ALJ.

Right.

I'm just thinking it might be nice to have a paragraph or something like that to explain what we're doing.

And then you're just suggesting that we found a quicker way to resolve some of these problems and things like—

just—

Just so they know.

Okay.

And then we'll continue. We have weekly MPU meetings, so we meet— I meet, Christy meets, planning meets with the MPU officers, with the— excuse me, Provost COP officers, with DCFS, with Housing. We discuss things that are going on that we can better help each other and work with that. So those will continue as well. A matching grant fund is already in place. It isn't being well used, but A matching grant fund will be established to provide neighborhood groups with funding to do small neighborhood projects. This will be subject to availability, that kind of thing.

So that's like a yard cleanup?

Yard cleanup, something like that.

Entryway—

this is the project you're speaking of, I think, out of your neighborhood, where they did that kind of entryway to the neighborhood sign landscaping.

And that turned out really well. Everybody was very happy. It looks good.

It's worked out well.

Can you give me an idea of what that's been in the past?

$5,000, $10,000?

Like, what's our, what's our price?

I think it's $25,000.

I think it's like $25,000.

Yeah.

Per neighborhood or per—

No, total per year, fiscal year. And typically we've seen projects that, you know, they're right around the $5,000 range. We've had some come in and say, well, we want to do a playground. Well, that's kind of beyond the scope of it, but $5,000 seems to be Kind of the sweet spot for these projects.

And then the expectation is that they'll donate the time and the volunteers to do the project.

And the other thing is—

Does it have to be on public property? Or can it be on private property? You know, typically it has been— they have been public improvements. So for example, this gateway sign into the neighborhood was on a public right-of-way.

The other thing is that we'll— so we used to do critical home repair. That was given to Habitat for Humanity to do. Habitat for Humanity has kind of changed their focus, so we're going to be taking that back here as a city. So we'll be offering that for low-end— for low and moderate income homeowners throughout the city. So these are grants or loans up to about $15,000 to do critical repairs to their homes. And then we'll be doing community workshops on— will be held on topics that warm residents are interested in. So one, one of these neighborhood labor meetings, one of the older gentlemen said, I'd really like to know how to winterize my sprinklers and have a spring— get my sprinklers ready for the spring. And we've had that conversation a few times with people, so we're working with Public Works right now to have a workshop on sprinkler repair and sprinkler maintenance, and that should be held here pretty shortly. So those are kind of the things that we're looking at doing. I know one of the, you know, one of the concerns about NIA and maybe going away or being done differently is how is that going to affect those low and moderate income neighborhoods. And so I just wanted to kind of talk to you about that and some of the things we're doing and some of the things we hope to do to continue doing that. So the geographical boundaries for the LMI neighborhoods will be updated using the latest census numbers in 2020. Right now we have 6 neighborhoods. It's Sharon Park, Suncrest, Geneva Heights, Stonewood, Lake Ridge, and Hillcrest. It's kind of an L. It kind of goes like this, or kind of a big U on this way. MPU efforts in these targeted neighborhoods will be funded through Community Development Block Grant funding. A flex-time civilian and code enforcement officer will be assigned to work in the LMI neighborhoods exclusively, with their other MPU officers focusing part of their time on these areas. So right now we have a flex-time person, her name is Kelsey, she's almost 90% of her time right now is being done in those 6 neighborhoods. We'll continue to fund park and public works projects in these LMI areas with Community Development Block Grant funding. Right now, as we talked about earlier, we're going to be renovating Geneva Park behind Geneva Elementary School here this spring and summer, and then we're hoping to do Westmore Park next year. As well. Some of the things that we hope to do or have been doing, one of the things HUD has said that if we're going to fund what we call code enforcement using CDBG funds, we can't— we have to do something besides surplanting. So we can't just say we're just going to give money for code enforcement and not do anything what they call above and beyond in these neighborhoods. So that's what we've been working on doing. And we're looking at maybe doing a mobile tool library. This would be a tool library that can be taken to neighborhood blocks or houses that need to be cleaned up that MPU can use, officers can use, but that the neighborhoods can use for cleanups, things like that. We're looking at maybe doing or partnering with Community Action on what we call a Getting Ahead program. This is a program that helps people in poverty bridge out of poverty. It helps them learn the hidden rules of class, learn how to develop financial resources to help them pull themselves out of poverty. We've been doing police picnics. Well, we just scheduled all 6 of our police picnics.

Those are very well received, by the way.

Thank you. So they—

thank you.

This is where we have the MPU officers, the chief has come, other officers. We have the chaplain come who speaks Spanish and invite the neighborhood to come have Wienerschnitzel hot dogs and chili, and they are able to meet the police officers, share their concerns with the officers. We see it as a good way for neighbors to meet neighbors. I have a story. This is not in Orem, it's in a different city, but we did a police picnic one time and we had this neighbor— these 2 neighbors that never could get along. They never actually talked to each other. They never met each other. Constantly calling each other on their dogs. calling the police on their dogs. And they met at this neighborhood— this police picnic, and all of a sudden, there's no more police calls, because now they can talk to each other. Your dog's bugging me, that kind of thing. And that's kind of what we hope to see, especially when you're not of the predominant faith. Oftentimes, you don't know who your neighbors are. And so, this helps people meet each other. It also helps, especially with our minority populations that tend to maybe be fearful of police at times. It helps them to realize that the police are not fearful and that they are their friends. And so we had 2 last year— how many?

2?

2. 2 last year, and we're hoping to have 6 this year in those 6 neighborhoods that we work in. We provided— we put together resource guides with information.

So, can I— just going back, do we have a knowledge pretty much of who the other faiths are and where their facilities are.

Yes. Kenneth sits on the East part of the Interfaith.

On the Interfaith, I know.

Yep, that's right.

And I participate as well. But as an example, I had a resident come in and say, you know, are you aware that there are Muslims in our community and that they are considering a mosque? And I said, yeah, I'm very much aware of it. I'd be happy to help build it. You know, and they're good friends of mine. I mean, they invite me over for the end of the fast for Ramadan and participate with them at their home where they all get together. And I, you know, but I'm just curious if we know most of them, you know, and ways to include them.

Yep.

I know our— I don't know if it's Presbyterian, but our community church just down at the end of the street here, I know I've worked with him on various things.

Yeah, most of those faiths are on the interfaith email list, and so when we have events and stuff, I send it out to the interfaith email list. And we have been able— we'll talk about this in just a minute— we're planning to do a resource meeting at the Catholic Church.

In fact, the last one we had, interfaith meeting there, went really well.

When we were trying to put together— am I right, Kenneth— kind of these homeless bags for the homeless, backpacks and sleeping bags, and Kenneth reached out to the interfaith group to include them as well. They actually donated $500 to help purchase some of that equipment for the homeless.

It was coats for our Heroes and Helpers program. And this is the brainchild of Sergeant Paraskeva, but it's super cool. We started it last week, and I'm very excited about it. We're doing what we call Reading with a Police Officer at Geneva Elementary School. So we have officers going in reading with our kindergarten, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade students. They'll be doing that through the month of February and the first week of March. And it's a great opportunity. It has a lot of great opportunities. One of the things is, parents will tell you that if a child has not reached grade level, reading grade level by the time they're in 3rd grade, they often don't graduate from People that don't graduate from high school go to prison oftentimes. And so this is a way to get kids excited about—

So this is not a once a year, this is a regular—

We're hoping, we're hoping to continue it and maybe put it in some of the other schools.

This is kind of a pilot program.

So Suncrest has actually had a program in place where the firemen come.

Yes.

And I come with them and we read every year with the students.

Yeah, we knew about the fire one. firefighters. So we started Geneva. Actually, the Geneva principal really was— has been very supportive of what we're doing. Um, and it was a great week last week. It's been a great week this week. Have you read yet?

Uh, Friday.

Oh, Friday.

So this—

I actually came up with this program.

I don't remember if you remember when the United Way came in and did that study and the research and they gave us all those statistics.

That's where I came up with the program and the idea to do it.

get in the communities has a direct effect on police and how we do our job, but also can benefit our kids in these low-income areas. So, and the data shows that it supports it.

It also helps, like, again, with the minority children. Oftentimes they're fearful of police, and now, you know, um, Periskeeve is their friend, not their foe. And, um, it's just— it was so fun to watch them last week. We gave them pencils and couple weeks we'll give them bookmarks and hopefully we'll be able to replicate that in other schools as well. And then we're looking at doing maybe deadbolt locks or solar motion lighting for all my homeowners in our neighborhoods. And this is just a good way to get people to turn on their lights or lock their doors or, you know, to keep crime down in those neighborhoods. So just looking at programs like that as well. We'll continue with our neighborhood leader meetings like we talked about before. Also, we're hoping to do some targeted resource meetings so we can have kind of what we've been talking about in our neighborhood leader meetings, but really target it. So we'll be on April 4th, I think is what we've decided, we'll be having a resource meeting in Spanish at the Catholic Church. And so if anyone can speak Spanish, come tell me, help me, because I don't. Hopefully we can, we can do that as well. And then?

You know, I— so that's kind of been this, what about connecting with the neighborhood, identifying issues, helping to solve problems, helping work with neighborhoods to solve their own problems with our assistance. In our community development block grant program, we have a lot of resources that we fund. We fund for child abuse, we fund for domestic violence, we fund for food, we fund for all those things. The biggest issue has always been how do we make sure that people in the neighborhood know that that resources available. And so as somebody knows that maybe their neighbor is dealing with some issue, maybe it's a leaky roof or things, that we've equipped our neighbors with the information they need to help their neighbors. That's kind of where these neighborhood leader meetings started. And so as we've reached— as we've connected with them, what we do, what we provide them is here's a list of all the programs we fund and here's what they're intended to do. Make sure that those in your stewardship, whether it's your ecclesiastical, whether it's in the school, schools, know that these exist. And when they identify a problem, make sure that they get these issues. We'll help too. Help connect us with them. But you know the problems of specific individuals better than we do, as an ecclesiastical leader, as a principal, as a teacher in the school, whatever those cases are. So that kind of solves, I guess, that part of it. So I guess what our request of the City Council is, is to allow us to move forward with this new initiative. And this initiative solves the same problems. How do we help the neighbors help each other? How do we give them the resources they need to be able to help each other? How do we continue to provide avenues that they can communicate with us and we can communicate with them? But how do we do it in the world that people live in today and the ways that they communicate today? And our hope is that— and we haven't done this, but annually we can come back and report on what we're seeing, what has happened, how many of these meetings we've had, what are these statistics that are showing that we are reaching more people than we've been able to reach in the past. Neighbors know information that they weren't able to know in the past. And we feel like this initiative solves the problem better in 2019 than the NIA program of 1998, but it solves the same problems. So this is a proposal. This is what we're bringing to you to ask for your support.

But I'm interested in any thoughts, questions, Yeah, so, I mean, one of the attributes of the earlier program was city council members were assigned to different neighborhoods as to be a liaison with the chair of those particular neighborhoods. I'm wondering now if that's even needed at this point, if the city council members have even a connection with those neighborhoods. Like we did before when there was a neighborhood chair, and if that has an impact.

Yeah.

I mean, we all get some assignments to neighborhoods, but I've often thought, okay, well, who do I connect with in this neighborhood to understand what's going on?

So, I mean, to that point, if we have 9 neighborhoods and you're actively working with them, would it be a benefit to have a city council member come with you to a couple of meetings or be involved in a couple of meetings?

You know, we have a— Oh, please, please.

I think especially with all of my neighborhoods, I think it would be good to have a city council person assigned to those so that they can come to those later meetings. I think having you all there can overwhelm them sometimes.

No, I mean like one.

One, yeah, one. But having one would be good.

I think it would be good if one was invited The neighbors got to know him and said, you know, he's our special person that we can call up anytime.

So we've only done a couple of these, of these leader meetings, so not everybody's had— but, you know, Dave did show up to the Geneva Heights one, was able to connect with— in that case, there was the state president was there, but there was also tomatoes and pies and the eggs, other, other citizens. And so, yeah, I think our intent would be to continue to involve you in that, and, and in this case, it would connect you with you know, kind of leaders, the men and women that are kind of identified leaders in that neighborhood.

So maybe you— yeah, we'll restructure that.

And then I think it's a way to ask what being a neighborhood liaison—

yeah, what, what are the things we can do?

I think that's a good point.

And then if we do, for example, if Mark's assigned to a particular neighborhood, you know, can we get information to And as to when the leadership meeting is, you know, what's occurring, and so there's active participation.

I think also, like, even with the neighborhood planning process, you know, I'm sure at some point we'll be updating those plans when we— after we finish the ones that were, you know, I think, you know, it's nice to have council members there.

You know, the police picnics, I think, have been very effective. And I really like— I mean, you know, I've attended a couple and I really like sitting there with the residents just talking, some of the kids. And then of course the trash cleanup, it's always great to be there with the residents and be cooking the hot dogs and talk to them. Anyway, so I think it'd be nice if maybe we were more actively involved with these leadership side.

Yep.

Yeah, I just wrote down, send you the dates for the police picnics because I know them now.

So just out of curiosity, are the 9 neighborhoods, are we gonna rename them or have we gotten that far?

You know, we haven't. I don't know with the neighborhood pro— with the planning program if you've had any discussions about that.

We have.

We just named them what they originally were, so combined them into multiple neighborhoods.

And I'd say probably just stay that way. See, you know who they are.

Yeah.

So, I mean, Geneva, Suncrest, or whatever. I like what you're doing. I think it's much more effective, um, and I think we're much more involved with the public. So I really support it. I don't know how the rest of the council feels. The one that I really wish was here is Councilmember Sumner, and, you know, I'd certainly encourage you to have a—

We actually talked today.

We're going to sit down with him individually.

And he— I know he's watching, uh, now, so— but we will sit down with him one-on-one to make sure he gets all his questions answered. I know this is something that's really—

And like I say, if you could send this out to us.

We'll do that, absolutely.

Any comments from the council?

So I think to sum up, no, the, the success of this will be in the details. Yeah, I know we have pretty committed people here. I think the council's committed to meet as So that will be what makes us successful, all the details.

So thank you for your continued effort.

Yeah, and I think just to reemphasize what Tom kind of brought up at the beginning, so that there's no— there is no attempt to just to get rid of this neighborhood, you know, focus, and it's just to retool it, use the resources we have that are available. But as any initiative, we plan to reevaluate and make sure that it's meeting the needs every year, and we'll talk about it.

Oh, go ahead.

I'm sorry. Please.

I mean, in the business world, there's kind of a movement where a lot of organizations are trying to be flatter and not have as many levels of, you know, middle management, things like that. And in a sense, this kind of flattens our relationship that we have with the community, where instead of having, you know, 2 or 3 levels to get to this resident, it's just come talk to us directly, and we have all these channels that You can do that now. You can participate more directly. You don't need to, you know, worry about whether you're elected as a chair or not.

Anybody can take part in this.

Yeah, I hadn't thought about it from that perspective.

That's a good point. And then maybe to kind of build on Sam's comment, the intent is to make this less people-intensive. And by that, historically, the success of this effort has risen and fallen based on who's sitting in that committee chair position. But if we can set the foundation right, like you said, and the systems in place, then it can be a kind of a plug-and-play type opportunity. And if Kenna goes on vacation for 2 weeks, that doesn't mean everything comes to a halt. Everything else will come to a halt. Yeah, many other things. But the program can continue to operate and function in a way That meets people's needs and it's not so person-dependent, but rather the system can accommodate whatever is thrown at it.

Tom, do you have a comment?

Yeah, I just didn't want to allow her to go on 2 weeks of vacation.

Second.

Yeah, we negotiated down her vacation and we hired her instead.

So I would say continue on. I think this is great.

Yeah, okay.

Well, thank you for your support. Again, we look forward to continuing the conversations about it. We know it's important to you, but it's important to us. And we're lucky to have Kenna, who's just passionate. She's dedicated her whole career to this. So dedicated the next 30 years to this.

So a question, what is the status of Habitat for Humanity? And what are— you said some changes are occurring.

So, well, they have a new director. They are trying to, I think, Focus more on building right now than neighborhood revitalization. I think that they would like to go back to neighborhood revitalization and critical home repair in the future, but because of land costs and things like that, they're really needing to focus on the building side of things to continue with the mission of home building.

If I could speak to that too. I think one of the— HUD puts some requirements on doing rehabilitation. That's like value of homes, and the way that home values have gone up, Their numbers haven't kept up with what reality is in Utah County. And so when they had had a staff— the reason this has come back to us, the program, is they had a staff member that was dedicated to housing rehabilitation for Provo, Utah County, and Orem. But over the years, the number of people applying for that program has gone down and down, and especially the people that qualify for that program. That employee left the organization, and then they said, does it really make sense for us to hire somebody back when there's so few you know, actual loans and grants that we're doing. So we've taken it back. They've expressed interest maybe in the future. We've identified somebody who can do this on a contract basis and then just add it to TENA's influence. But it happens so few, we feel like that's the best way to do it right now.

And is a lot of that activity now kind of like South County and some of those areas?

Yeah, we were seeing, like when I worked at Habitat, we would— it would seem like we weren't getting a lot of Applicants from Provo-Orem. It was all outside of the county. I think part of that is because we have a higher rental situation and this is a homeowner-occupied loan or grant. I think that's part of it.

I don't know.

We're trying to work through that because we know some of it is because people are older, they're concerned about, you know, having a deed put on their home, things like that. So we're looking at— I'm actually going to work on that tomorrow on how we might make it more popular and more people wanting to use it.

Okay, thank you so much.

Thank you. All right, we'll go ahead and move forward to the discussion on amendment of Orange City Election Code, and Jody Bates is our presenter.

Thank you, Mayor, Council. I don't have a presentation.

Hopefully you— Oh no, you're fine.

You're getting the gist of it.

Yeah, we—

so, so it's the recorder's responsibility at the beginning of every municipal year or municipal election year to check our city code to make sure it matches with the state code based on changes that the legislature's made in the last year or so. I realize they're still making those changes, but we tried to streamline this a little bit. There was Quite a bit that was out of focus. So we tried to streamline it in saying that a lot of the things were as required by state law. That way when they change a 5 o'clock, they add a 5 o'clock thing in there, we don't have to go back and change this code every year or every other year for simple little changes like that. We can just say we're referring to Utah State Code. So that's what a lot of these changes are, are just especially the filing.

Go to the second page. I'm gonna go backwards.

Okay, I had a question on that first page.

Yeah, we're going to go backwards today. So a lot of this stuff down underneath the reporting that's all redlined out, a lot of that was put in there in 1995 when we first did this code. And it may have been in state code, I don't know, but it's not there now and it doesn't make any sense. Um, so, so I'm just updating the code.

I agree with that. And going backwards, I like the fact that the fees are upped. I've, you know, Jamie and I have had this discussion, but I've felt like the fees have been so low that those that just want to have their— and we've had some of these— just want to have their name on the ballot are paying the fee and then we never see them again. And that's not the purpose. And so, I mean, it's not a huge jump. It's what, $35 to $75?

But—

Correct.

Do other cities—

how do other cities charge?

So she showed how Yes, they're charged and we're kind of in a mid-range.

Provo's probably the closest to us and they're— they split theirs out. It's $150,000 for council.

The mayor should be $50,000.

Or mayor and $75,000 for council.

See how bad he really wants it.

But no, I—

It's up to you. We can do—

charge whatever you want.

We just thought that was a happy medium.

Yeah, you know, I like the $75,000 to $150,000. I think that's proper. You know, like I said, in the last election round, I thought We're getting some people in here that just, you know, are not really desirous of running. They just want their name out there.

We had, for example, anecdotally, we had a candidate last election who thought, well, this would be a fun school project.

Yeah.

So he came in, made application. You know, a fun school project, if you get over the primary threshold, That fun school project costs him or her $35. It costs the city tens of thousands of dollars because we have to operate a primary potentially when we wouldn't have had to operate a primary with— now thankfully, he was one of a number of people who came in. Some of it's volunteer effort. Yeah, so it necessitated a primary, but at the same time, We would hope people would say, I'm very interested, I want to run, but I want to take this thing seriously. This isn't a project for my school civics class.

I say where we have 2 colleges, one in our area and one pretty close, the students may live here, that's— they get residency here, they can run, they're 18 years of age, they can run for office. So that's one. The other is people look at it and go, oh, There's 3 seats up and there's only 5 people running and they're not having a primary. We better get our names in there so that we can have a primary. We don't have to have a primary, but people panic and go, I'm going to run just so that we have a primary. So you have those off— those issues that you run into. I've seen the latter happen.

Yeah, I'd really support the change in the money side.

I think, you know, Jody, just to make clear, I think with our intent of just saying as required by state law instead of Every time we update this, we copy and paste what the current state law— now it'll always reflect whatever the current state law is.

Because basically, honestly, all of this is by state code. Sure, for the most part. There's a few things that are ours that we've stuck in there, but for the most part, it's by state code.

And is it in a single place where we can, you know, tell candidates, this is where you go, here's the page, or is it kind of spread across several different—

Nope, it has its own code.

It's right here.

Okay, and we'll have that in the code too so that they see where to go.

Yeah, it's at the very bottom. It says that we referenced 28.

And obviously too, the intent of bringing this to you today is so that we don't do it in close proximity to an election, right? So this isn't a political change. This is more of a procedural— we need to update our code because in fact the code that we have today is reflective of a code that— or a state code that was several decades ago, right? Or a decade ago.

I don't even know when the last time—

But hasn't been updated.

Yeah, the filing period was in July, so I don't know when the last time that was.

So Tom, first page you said, back to the—

Yeah, I think you and I were talking about it.

I still had a question on that effect. Oh, oh yeah. So, so I was curious because I know there was a fair amount there in terms of the finance disclosure. What typically happens after, you know, my experience is most of the candidates when they run, they end up putting a fair amount of their own money in to make it happen. In some elections though, there's a lot of surplus left over that candidates have. How is that, how is that managed or recorded or rolled over? That if somebody has a balance of $5,000 or $10,000? Well, Is that just now part of the IRS management stuff, how they spend that, or can they spend it any way they want? Or what typically happens with—

I have never seen an overage of—

I believe there's—

Abundance, Greg?

I believe that responsibility is left with the candidate, right? It is. There are certain things that you can spend it on. There's a section in the Utah Code that prohibits you from using it for What they call personal use expenditures. But there are certain things that you are allowed to do, like donate to a political party, donate to another candidate. So if you do have excess funds, there are ways under the law you can use those funds, and there are also certain things that are specifically prohibited. Does the state code require reporting on that? If you've got a leftover balance of $10,000 or $20,000? That you have to maintain that and report? The reporting is related to any time you get a new contribution and any time you make an expenditure. So those are the things that are reported. If you just have money left in the account, there's really no reporting for that.

But whenever you spend it, you're supposed to, but we don't have a way of really policing that.

And that's my question, is from a city standpoint, once it's done, we—

I sent it to the Lieutenant Governor's office.

So does the state require ongoing reporting of leftover campaign funds? Is that a— is there a tie-in to the state, or do we need to even lay that out as part of our city code? The city code says if the candidate receives contributions or makes expenditures after the date the candidate files the 3rd campaign financial statement, which is the one after the election, the candidate shall file an additional campaign financial statement Within 30 days of receiving the contribution or making the expenditure. Or he could file it to who?

To me.

To the city recorder?

To me.

And then we file it with the Lieutenant Governor's office.

So if a council member received a campaign donation today for the committee to reelect council member, at the next— within 30 days, provided he or she has spent that money, he'd have to They'd have to file some sort of— Or receive a report. It's receive or spend. Or receive, okay. So it's not one and the other, it's one or the other. And it's just up to the candidate to assume that responsibility of integrity to file those reports.

Yep.

From that standpoint. Sam?

I'm not sure what the status of the bill is, but I saw a news article talking about how For childcare, you know, there's a candidate that would like to run but has young children, and they can now— I'm not sure if it's been passed or—

I think it's going to pass.

But they can use that so that they have more time available to go to campaign events and things like that.

Could we go to the first 2 sentences there? That was the one that I had a question on. I realize those are a duplication, but I kind of like leaving them in there so people people know that that's what the story is. My preference would be not to cross out those first 2 sentences.

I don't know where everybody else sits, but that's exactly what I was going to point out.

And that's a good point. And I think, you know, obviously as we mentioned, if somebody's a— they have to be residents of Orem to run.

Right.

You realize that you're, you know, if you pay attention to the rest of it, it's going to include that.

But for sure. But for anybody in the room that was thinking we're taking citizenship out of the qualifications. It said to be a registered voter in Orem, you have to be a citizen of the United States. I just think for the benefit of the public, let's leave the 2 of them in there.

I think though that the second part of question 1 though could be taken out. Where it says in the municipality. I mean, right below in 3, it says the candidate must be a resident of the city of Orem.

You could, but I'd prefer to keep it.

Is it the citizenship of the United States though?

Is that what you're most I think, yeah, point 2, I, I don't care really about the second half of 1 because paragraph 3 or point 3 says the same thing. Yeah, so you could say candidates must be registered voters and number 3, they must be residents of Orem.

Understood.

So 3 doesn't actually say the same thing though, because they could have been registered to vote in a different city, moved here a year and a half ago, but they never changed I think it's more specific.

It tells you what it takes to have—

number 1 is more specific, and I think that's beneficial. Unless there's a real big objection, I'd really like to—

it's really not a big deal.

And the rest of it, any other concern?

Yeah, any concerns with the other parts of it? It'll prevent us from having to bring this back every single time to make a tweak.

So if, if everybody's all right, we would propose that this go on a consent agenda. I realize this does not require public hearing, but it does have to be approved by an ordinance. So we would put this on a consent agenda next city council meeting for your approval.

We're okay with 75 for the mayor and 75 for council.

It's up to you.

Um, it's fine.

Yeah.

We didn't— we— I don't really think that $75 is going to be a great deterrent away from the guys doing a city, uh, a class project.

But I'm okay with raising it. But at least it raises a little higher. $35—

You've got cities that are a quarter of our size that are still charging $35.

Yeah, well, and the flip side of it is we don't want it to be onerous to run for office. And so there's that mix between the two.

$75 for both.

And the reason we did $75 for both is we looked at what What is our commitment when somebody files? There's things we have to provide, we have to follow up. It's no different for mayor or city council, so we really didn't justify a different charge.

The only difference is you need a lot fewer people to force a primary at mayor than you do at city council. Yeah, that's fair, that's fair.

And I mean, to that extent, I wouldn't even mind raising it up for mayor to like $125, but—

Well, probably just $75 and $150 if you want to mimic that.

Yeah, and I'd be more comfortable actually with that, $150 for mayor and $75 for council. The only reason I'm saying that is to weed out those that are just jumping on to put their name on there.

Any hesitation? Just again, if we're planning to put on the consent agenda, make sure everybody's okay with that.

I'm fine.

Everybody okay with this? So we want to do $150 for mayor and $75 for council?

Just to say though, Generally speaking, when we assess these fees, we're supposed to be able to say, this is what it costs us. So can we say that it costs us more to process an application for a mayor than it does for a— Of course.

Because if 3 run for mayor, you have a primary. You have to have 6 run for city council— 7 run for city council before you have a primary.

So arguably, you have to have more than double for city councils to get a primary.

So yeah, it should be double.

Okay.

Okay, $150 a year instead of $50 a year.

It would help.

Trust me.

Okay.

That's it.

Thank you.

That's that.

Thank you.

Okay, now we'll go on to a street lighting fee. Chris Scherke, we'll turn the time over to him.

Well, Mayor and City Council, we've had an opportunity this last week to get enlightened.

We had—

sorry.

It's better than Neil's jokes.

Yeah, it's a little bit cleaner. So we met in the city council chambers last Tuesday from 6 to 8 o'clock. We had an open house. Uh, 5 of the— or let's see, I think 5 of the council members were there. We missed 2. And then we had probably 6 or 7 staff that were there.

And how many people did you invite? Was that an invitation?

We invited about 33 people.

No, I'm sorry. Let's just say we had a lot of cookies.

100,000 people. We sent mailers out to about 33,000 addresses. And so that was above and beyond just the account holders. It was everyone who lived in Orem apartment complexes, whether or not they were account holders or not. And so I did confirm that.

And so we did, we did send that out to everyone.

Did everyone hear Did everybody here have a chance to see that flyer? And what did you think of the flyer? Was it helpful? Was it informational? We went through—

It was a low enough level that I understood it, so.

Okay, yeah.

And then at the meeting itself, we had about 9 posters. Yeah, those that were there saw all the posters that we had. We had more cookies than posters, I think. But, and we had less comments than posters. We had probably, I think, 5 comments. I'm going to review those with you here tonight. There were probably 7 or 8 total citizens that came. Some came with a child who didn't provide a comment.

And again, of those who came, did you differentiate whether they owned an apartment or whether they owned a home? Or whether they're renters?

Yeah, that will come out in the comments that we provided. They provided addresses and phone numbers as well. We've blocked out the names and last names and addresses and phone numbers for— just to keep their privacy. Right, so last time we met was in November in this room to present to you This plan that we had developed, the audit was completed. We spent a lot of man-hours on that. We went through a couple of thousands of accounts to perform the audit. We confirmed some numbers. We had multiple presentations from the Public Works Advisory Commission who unanimously supported this. We also received feedback from Other committees as well. We presented it here at the City Council meeting in the work session in November, and then we've since sent out over 30,000 mailers, and we hit the social media, I think, pretty, pretty well. I don't know, Stephen, how many comments do you think you've received back altogether?

Yeah, probably 50 or 60. Bren mentioned that we had a huge uptick in the 311. All we have to do is post about our streetlights. And they go up. So anytime we want to see an uptick, we just take down the streetlights. But most of all, the comments were just about their physical streetlight and what do we need to do to fix. We did put them all in 311, and Justin Gaines is in the process of working through that.

We thought that we might get inundated a little bit. We did, in part. We have about 95% of the lights that are on currently, well, at night. So I'd say about 5% of them are out, and that's about 250 or so. We have over 5,000 lights. So it's just an ongoing process.

But of all the comments on social media, there really weren't any about the actual rate structure.

It was just about the physical lights.

So Justin's been busy.

I'll just say that.

Except for those that say, I don't have a light in front of me, I shouldn't have to pay.

There was some of that.

So I'd like to just go through these, these 5 comments with you.

I'll just read them.

This comment was from David. He owns a duplex in South Orem, and it's, it's on a regular-sized lot.

He said he didn't want to pay 2 fees.

He pays 1 utility fee right now. And this is a quote from his comment card. It says, I've been paying for the light on my city bill. I don't think I should be charged for the extra fee for the lot with all the illegal houses He says people renting in their basement should be charged with that same fee.

And I think we would agree with that, right?

Yeah.

If they're doing it the right way, they should be paying. It's per doorknob.

We would agree with that, right?

Yeah.

John made a comment. He says, I think that a billing model— I think he was a single-family homeowner. I think that a billing model for streetlights that models the cost burden is appropriate, which we've done. It's fine if private homes don't pay for the city streetlights. Charge based on frontage. I say this as a resident on a public street. The new structure puts a disproportionate burden on residents, leaving businesses— business properties to pay less than they ought.

Do you concur with that statement?

I do not.

Okay.

My understanding of it is that that wasn't inaccurate. It looked like We were allocating— who knows what's fair?

It's whoever's getting paid has a different feeling, right?

But I, I thought we were allocating somewhat equitably over businesses and private homes.

We feel strongly that where we're heading right now is the fairness and the equitability, if that's a word— equity, equitability— are more in line with what we're putting And that's going to become more apparent. I wish Brent Sommer were here tonight because— He's watching.

Brent?

Because we had quite an extensive communication, email communication back and forth. He was wondering about larger developments such as like a Palos Verdes development where—

I'm sorry, the green on Campus Drive.

I'm quoting from his email.

Okay.

All right, the Green—

what is it?

The Green on Campus Drive.

Very good.

That's the new name.

The Green on Campus Drive has a plan of 450 units. If it were built already today without this already occurring, they would be— they would have 3 ELUs. They would charge— be charged $9.75 a month. That equates to On a per-bed basis, about 0.6 cents per month per bed, which is 2 cents per unit per month. Okay, um, if we propose— if we do what we're proposing right now, then they would— which is $2.34 a month per door, that's about 66 cents per bed per month. So in your home, you're going to be billed $2.34 If you have 3 beds in your home, well, that's 80 cents. So that's pretty much in line with what we're looking at down here.

How is a property that large only 3 DLUs?

I'm trying to make sense of that.

They have, they have about 250 feet of frontage on 400 West.

So it would only be on 400 West, it wouldn't count any of their internal—

Because those are private streets, right?

They are public. But they are not owned by the city, they're owned by the state at UVU. That was an interpretation I received from our utility billing professional.

I think part of my confusion, I was thinking more of storm drain where it's how much of the—

That's based on the purview area inside, right?

I was getting that twisted, I'm sorry.

So that example alone, I think, speaks to the equity concerns concern. This doesn't work up here. It's, it's, if anything, it's making it more proportionate. It's not a disproportionate burden on residents, at least on the residential side. Now, if you're comparing the residential units versus businesses or industries, manufacturing or commercial retail, whatever it is, I'd say there's never going to be a perfect Perfect analogy there. Perfect analysis, if you will. But we do feel that the residential alignment is accurate and it's fair, it's equitable.

Okay, let's see.

Lane mentioned he's glad to have the street lighting. It's good to see that all the multi-unit housing properties will contribute. It's good to see a plan to maintain the lighting. And then Ralph, who I was able to have a nice long conversation with that evening, he is a Windsor crossing guard. Perhaps you know Ralph over at Windsor. Chief Giles, maybe not. He says, I'm a school crossing guard at 1300 North Main Street, Windsor Elementary. The north yellow flashing light is not working on the west side of Main Street. This is a solar-powered light that may not be functioning properly because of the snow No, the light is very weak, it's hard to see. Well, it had nothing to do with street lighting, but I thought I'd throw it up there. And we have since fixed that problem. So he came and we had a nice conversation. He supported where we were headed as well.

He didn't put that on the card.

So this speaks to what you were just suggesting, Tom, that residents, students, businesses, industries, consumers, everyone in Orem benefits whether they live here, travel through here, Have a business here, play here, whatever. Street lighting contributes to a safe and vibrant community where people want to live, work, and play. Since everyone shares in this benefit, everyone should pay for the benefit. Although this proposal is not perfect, equitability and fairness are most closely aligned with this new philosophy.

So, you know, to that point, when we went through the sewer base rate, You know, there was a fair amount of discussion. We had some apartment owners come and speak to that. But to be honest with you, after that was put in place, I heard very few comments afterwards of anybody who was upset with it. Most people felt like it was the right thing to do, that it was fair, both apartment owners and residents. And I feel this kind of follows that same program. Thank you.

I do too. It was a challenge, but then when they came to grips with what we were trying to accomplish and they saw that it was fair, and then it was implemented— that was the hardest thing I think for them was implementing an increase. You know, that's hard. Change is hard for anybody. I get it. I understand that. But in the end, we have not received any negative feedback from them since it's been in place.

And the Apartment Association of Utah That's correct. And most other cities follow that same philosophy.

Right.

And I believe the same thing here. I also believe that the streetlights are a great benefit to our community for safety purposes, and I don't know what Chief Giles has to say, but I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on that.

I think that it directly affects our safety. I don't have any numbers right now, but I mean, obviously, when, you know, one of the things I've always been proud of in Orem is when you're flying in, you know, you're flying across and you're coming into the airport and you can actually look down and you can see Orem. You can see it perfectly gridded out just because we've got such a good streetlight system that you know when you're seeing Orem.

I know when I go into another city, like to the north or whatever, I really I really miss it. I mean, it just feels different and it's dark and you wonder who's going up and down the street.

And now, thanks to University Place, I know what time the show is from the billboard. That's why I did the subway.

You can read it without glasses.

If it wasn't for the traffic, you could probably make it back down again.

I had one thought.

There was one of the comments we had a few years ago was there are still some spots in the city that because they don't have sidewalks or they've kind of been an unfinished street, they don't have the streetlights there, and yet we're charging the residents for the street lighting application. I think one of— I remember one of the individuals has since passed away that made that comment, but are there spots still that we have Are lacking in the street lighting, and does that have an impact on whether they should pay for that in their area or not?

We do have 6 street lighting districts that are currently owned— well, Forum City owns them now. We've since bought them in the last year, and they have been maintained historically by Rocky Mountain Power. And then those, they pay a premium through their subcontractor to maintain those lights. We've since purchased them and all of those lighting districts are under design and nearly completed. And so they will be replaced with the new Washington lights that you see in your neighborhoods right now. But they are lit, but they are lit with different lights, different types of lights. They're Cobra lights. They're not a decorative light. They're much— they're very industrial looking and they don't fit in the neighborhood.

Thank you.

The residents hate them.

Pardon?

The residents hate them.

Well, that may be true. Yeah, but you know what, looking back on that, back in the '70s when the lighting districts were created— was it the '70s when they first started coming on, Richard? Yeah, you remember?

'70s through the '80s.

'70s and '80s.

These were some of the most progressive neighborhoods because they were willing to form districts independently of each other. in areas where they felt like this is a need. They identified that need and then they stepped up. And then they had to pay for those lights to go in. They've been paying for those since.

Please, Richard. Mark, your question of— there are some areas that, yes, currently do not have them. There's a fare that they pay once they leave their immediate neighborhood and they're into the lighted part of the city. And the reason, you know, the one that comes to Mine is Carterville Road. They wanted this rural thing. It has a unique designation in the city, and it wasn't going to get streetlights because of its— they didn't want a rural road or something. It's the designation it has, but it's a— wanted to maintain that kind of quaint country feel. I think there were some down on 900 West and 800 South area. Those should all be getting filled in. Okay, that was kind of the key thing, was it's one thing on charging where the lights aren't there for whatever development reason, but it's probably the bigger issue of can we finish those areas that have not been able to get them done. And they will be.

If they don't have lights now, they will have them. And if they have the old lights, they'll be replaced with the new. And in fact, just so you have an update, the State Street contract is went out to bid and that pricing came in about 70 cents on the dollar in terms of the estimated amount by the engineer. Came in around $70,000. We were thinking it would come in closer to $100,000. So that's for 100 lights. We have purchased about 225 other lights and they will be put in and we have to purchase another 100 lights. So we have a ways to go, probably another 1 to $1.5 million worth of work to do above and beyond State Street. So that will come online.

And what are the State Street lights you're talking about?

Chris, those State Street lights, when are they— when are we going to start? We've awarded the bid.

They're through the contract, through the contract, signing the contract, confirming the insurance, the bond.

Are these additional lights, different lights?

What are these?

These are the new, the new green Memphis-style lights.

With the hook.

And all of the Cobra lights that you see there will be removed.

Okay, that was my question.

So essentially, we purchased all of those poles, Mayor.

Yes.

And we're going to replace them with the city lights, and they'll go on a different fee schedule through Rocky Mountain Power. Sure.

Okay, so that's—

I just wanted to make sure I understood.

But that's more attractive than what we currently have.

Much more.

It's from center all the way down. To Provo on State Street.

Will they be black or green?

Green.

Green, okay.

They'll be similar to what we have along State Street from Center.

From here north, this is what you'll see, or on Center Street, it's the same.

Okay.

I have a question about the Siemens contract we had replacing.

Where are we at on that?

So I actually followed up with Brandon and the The estimated savings annually was about $430,000 a year, and Brandon represented last week that we're about $460,000 to $465,000 in savings annually. So it's doing what we anticipated it would do.

And that includes more than street lighting?

Yes, yes. Everything associated with this in this contract. And of course the street lighting is a A big part of that, right, retrofitting all the existing lights.

Yeah.

And how many— how much have we done? Are we like, have we replaced all of them? Are they retrofitted, or are we still in the process?

They're all done. They're done.

They're done.

Okay.

Yeah, they are. They all have LED.

We hired— we had a contractor come in and—

Do them all.

Blow them all out. Okay. Thanks.

You might ask, well, why are there 5% of them out? It's not the light itself that's out. It could be a driver, it could be a fuse. It could be a disconnect on the wire. The wire is still, you know, 17 years old or whatever it is. So there are other components of it, or the light sensor might be out. So there are about 4 different components on that that might drive that light out, to be off.

So Keith and his crews continue to monitor and repair. And like Stephen was saying, anytime we have a conversation about We'll get a flood of calls into 311 saying, well, what about my light? It's actually not a bad— it's actually helpful. Yeah, I didn't know that. But it's that ongoing cost in maintenance and the small replacement that we included in the calculation of the new streetlights.

So here we are in February. January, we had this outreach. But so for the mailers, we had the open house last week, and here we're presenting this back again to you to provide this feedback that we received from the community and any discussion that we might have.

How many—

we had a pretty small group, at least I had to leave for another meeting, but we had a pretty small group, half dozen or so. Did it get a lot bigger later?

There were 8.

Okay.

8 total.

Yeah, and cookies for 100.

Yes, and I watched who took home all the cookies, but I won't mention who it is. Anyway, it wasn't me. Yeah, it wasn't me.

It was actually Dave Spencer, but because I eat cookies all the time, provided they're slathered in ranch dressing, right? Yeah, that's a good weight loss program.

It's working well, buddy.

So here we are at this time, February. We were proposing that we would come back at maybe the next council meeting or in 2 more council meetings, whenever the right time is, and, and then make that recommendation and formalize this to adopt this new fee. The new fee could be implemented as early as April, or if you wanted to be consistent with the county The calendar or the fiscal year? The fiscal year, we could do it July 1st.

The suggestion that we have as staff is we have a certain section of the community that is rolling off of the capital fee at the end of March. So the suggestion would be the roll-off at the end of March with the old fee and the new fee would come into place April 1st. The reason being is if we have something disappear and then reappear in July next year, probably going to have more calls for concern than if we just kind of transition to a vote.

So what Jamie's referring to are these 7 neighborhoods in red. I did put July 1st here, but I knew that was going to be flexible based on what you're up Recommendation and ultimate decision would be.

But if we do April 1st, we could simply change that.

In the subsequent years, then we have 5, another 7, and 3 neighborhoods that would come on on July 1st of 2021-22, and that would be completed, um, with the capital payment.

Okay.

All right.

I appreciate the presentation.

I would just say I think it makes sense as the capital fee rolls off to replace it with this because those ongoing maintenance expenses hit. I mean, we're already, we're already paying now, so I don't think it makes sense to take it off completely and then put it back on.

Okay, um, there's one last item with this, and that is the 0.64 to 6%. Which has been used for this?

No?

Okay.

I won't talk about that right now.

Thank you, Peter.

Okay, thank you.

Thanks.

Looks like our food is here, so why don't we have a prayer?

Tom, could you give us a prayer?

Sure.

Our Father in heaven, we're grateful to be together in favorable circumstances and Protected from the elements outside and have a good meal prepared for us.

Great for those who bring it to us and great for our work together. May we serve well and may the food bless us this day, we pray in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

Amen.

So my son has a new baby, and they just barely had about 5 hours of sleep this weekend.

It's easy to make that stuff correct, so I just take the rules and impose them.

We can have a look, right?

That was nice to have the President's ministry. So my son works for Boeing. He has 6 weeks paid leave.

So now you have a line for me.

1/12, happy birthday next week.

I know.

Sam, you feel bad for that?

Only 6 weeks? That's shortchanged.

So it's better than—

yeah.

Changed from like 6 to 16.

Their baby was born January 2nd, so they were just praying, don't come in December, stick it out.

Luckily they came when they were supposed to.

She's 13, so I've been a grandma since my 20s.

Are they forgetting about that tax deduction from last year?

I would love to see— Yeah, yeah, that's pretty amazing.

20 years ago, nobody got off.

Kind of lonely. Yeah, yeah, a lot of her friends are back at school, you know, and she missed the school deadlines, so she's just looking for work. Trying to encourage her to go to the young single adult board, and she's like, oh, I'm not sure. Saturday night we went out to a movie, just she and I. Hey, look, your social life involves your father. I'm sorry, we're in trouble. You need a different plan. Kind of sweet though.

So my daughter didn't want to go to that, and I got her to go.

Now she's there all the time. She's there. How many of your kids ride? 19. That transition back into the FLC position, it's a hard few months. It really is. Who knows, you might be there soon as he is.

Yeah.

My daughter's gonna have to step right up.

That's like England's America.

This is the motherland.

He used to have a cocky Brazilian companion.

He's very good at the language. So he's asking for that and the roadie's all getting all over it. Finally he looks at him and goes, you want to?

Yeah, yeah.

But it was interesting, he just put his hand in his pocket. How could this American know what he wanted to eat?

Kind of smug, but he's like, ask away.

You're lucky. Okay, Becky, come with me. She's actually my relative.

She's a Hamlin, my dad's Hamlin.

Yeah. Well, you know, Rebecca's their daughter, so. Uh-huh.

She married Brown.

He was a widower. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're maybe winning that.

But technically, do they get to? I mean, if they left, then if they come back, they're contributing relatively more.

They're all into character.

They're making your job harder.

Yeah, that's fair.

So she, when she comes down to Kenosha, she's cousins to my dad.

They're first cousins. They'll, uh, they'll always reference. So it's kind of funny. Yeah, my dad is— my wife is, you know, Lisa said that he's running against President Smith. He's still campaigning against President Smith.

Why don't we go ahead and get started? Looks like everybody's pretty much finished. And we'll go over our agenda first of all. So this evening—

Probably was down.

We will start out and we will go over the upcoming events. We did have a good ribbon cutting at Moabeta this past week, and we have 2 more ribbon cuttings coming up. So we have Spherion at 11:30 AM on February 19th, and then IMART Express at 5 PM on February 21st. On March 7th, we have the futsal court kickoff at Geneva Park. Anything there, Steve?

Nope.

The students from the school will be there, members of the RSL team will be there, then of course the foundation will be there. So we'll just kind of get it all started.

Okay.

Councilmember Dave Spencer promised to be there as well.

There we go.

The inaugural kick.

March 7th.

There'll be lots of ranch dressing. Sure, I'll be there. Well, this is a no-hands—

Basketball game.

Futsal.

Soccer.

Yep.

It'll be super fun.

March 7th, also we have Dr. Christy Kane. Speaking at Orem High School at 7 PM on Unplugging and Connecting. On March 9th, we have UVU men's basketball Orange City Night.

We actually have made that change. Okay, we'll be on the 7th, and they're actually going to accommodate a 6:45 presentation to the council so anybody that wants to head to Dr.

Christy Crane after that can make it.

And then we have Pillar of the Valley, I think, on the 9th.

The Sarah Gala on March 9th.

I'm sorry, Sarah Pillar's on the 19th, correct? And the Sira's on the 9th.

That's correct.

So are we going to both?

I think that's something we met as a council, right?

Christy sent out a message in regards to Pillar of the Valley. Thank you for all of you for RSVPing or not. Um, with the Sira event being in such close proximity, we were wondering how we want to handle that. If there is an interest to attend, and if we might suggest to them that your contribution by way of care at least qualifies you for a table at the ceremony.

So you're going to check with them on that?

I'd like to have your blessing to suggest.

How much is the table usually going?

It's $100 a person.

And who wants to go to the ceremony?

I like going.

Well, you know, I'd probably go if we think we ought to.

I think that's a question that we're raising as to, is this expenditure we ought to make?

If they give us a table, I think we ought to go.

You're available to go? I'm available to go.

Okay.

Anybody not available to go?

I guess the reason I asked is, you know, for many organizations, the contribution we make to participate in some of these events is, for all intents and purposes, the contribution we make annually to that organization. Chambers, case in point, we pay a membership fee, which is a small amount, plus we purchase tickets to that event. The Sierra, it's a little different. The initial contribution we make by way of CARE every year is thousands of times greater than any other contributions we make to any other organization.

So I would like to go to the Sierra as well as the pillars. I have no problems with asking the sheriff, you know, to—

I think most of us do.

When you're there, spend—

We do spend money when we're there.

You and I bought that.

I haven't used it yet, but— It's okay, we weren't going to spend anything and I blew 2 grand or whatever it was.

So just tell them that Dave and Tom will be spending $2,000 each.

This side of the table.

We've had our turn.

Yes, Sam was heavy last year.

I spent $200 and I walk in there and I'll spend it.

Kelly has found plenty of baskets too. And I was going to suggest, I've sat next to Mark too.

So I would bring that up as well, is that our members usually buy—

I mean, if y'all go, maybe pay for a table and then give us a $10 table or something.

Have we traditionally brought a basket too? Like we could put a puzzle in there and and some of those types of things.

Oh, I'm sure we'll know that.

Yeah, that'd be good.

And Pillar of the Valley?

We have more on the water meter to be done by then, right?

Yeah, water meter. Pillar of the Valley is how many are going? Who's not going?

I asked for a fee that I'm gonna be out of town, not able to go.

Okay.

I think we have, I think we have 10. So we have 1 table plus 2.

Okay.

That's RSVP.

You don't have to buy a full second table, you can buy it by—

yeah.

Okay, with the Seara, are we okay with buying one table and donate the other table?

We did.

It was a, I think, $575,000 table.

I'm—

that's for—

that's for, uh, for the— yeah, every money we give to the Seara will come come from taxpayers of Utah.

So whether—

I'm okay with asking for a table.

I'm okay with asking for 2.

Letting them know that our council usually buys things, and I think it's worth the ask for whoever is going from the council. So then we have on the 25th of March, the Nordis Center for Performing Arts. Ribbon cutting at the same time we have President Tomenes, who will be inaugurated at that time, so her inauguration. So I think that's important to go. The April 20th, Sunset Heights East neighborhood will be a picnic at 11:30 AM at the community park. April the 24th, Utah League of Cities and Towns, St. George Mid-Year Conference.

Has everyone let Christy know if they're going? Do you know if we've gotten RSVPs back on that?

I believe Christy has been working with those of you that RSVP'd to get hotel rooms and such.

Is there anybody not going?

I have a confirmation on my hotel, so I'm going.

Sam, you don't know?

You're going?

I'm going.

You're going? You're going? Okay.

I'm going as well. And then on May 4th, we have the City of Orem Centennial Birthday Party. 9 AM to dusk.

What was the date?

May 4th, um, at the orchard.

We—

that time is probably going to change. We will be doing— going to the evening for fireworks, but after, after kind of what we saw with that first party, we don't feel like we can sustain the energy from 9 AM till 9 PM. So we'll be shortening the day, but we'll get that updated.

On May 4th, if you need an RSVP, I'm out.

Oh yeah, yeah, appreciate you sharing that. It won't be RSVP, it's just kind of an open birthday party type And when is—

oh, Summerfest is in June.

Okay, so, um, we do have a city manager staff appointment.

Uh, Jamie, would you like to bring that up? Yes, uh, as you well know, we went through an interview process in the hiring of a new development services director, and we hired Ryan Clark, who obviously is with us tonight and has assumed his responsibilities. facilities already within Development Services. Ryan, of course, has spent the last 5+ years as our Economic Development Manager. He's done a fine job. Previous to that, worked in Development Services, specifically in our engineering section. He's very familiar with the department and the issues that the department is working on, including master plans that we've been engaged in, as well as—

Planning.

some of the key, obviously, development projects that are happening in the city. So that appointment requires your advice and consent, and so tonight I would ask for that in a formal meeting, and we will swear Brian in as our Development Services Director. Brian, is there anything you want to add?

I'm old.

This is your time. This is your next 15 or 20 minutes. So, not a fan of attention, so this is really awkward for me, but, um, I'm excited to work with Development Services. They're a great team, great department, or different divisions in there, good leadership in place, and, uh, just excited to keep the momentum going and keep doing good projects and good things and having fun and making sure the doors are open.

Thank you.

And we do like the suit. This is his very first suit he's ever purchased.

Oh, is that right? It's true.

Wow.

And it's impressive.

Really cheap, so why turn it down?

He says his arms—

That's not why we hired him.

He said his arms are one length and his waist is another, and they don't necessarily fit a normal suit.

I prefer basketball shorts and t-shirts outside of work, so if you ever see me Okay, then we'll have personal appearances.

Then we have consent items. Somebody has written a little thing on the back here. I'll just read it. Consent agenda is a meeting management tool to allow the city council to handle several routine items with one action. Once I have read each consent agenda item into the record, council or staff may request an item be pulled off the consent agenda and be considered separately under the next agenda item in the order they are listed. Approved meeting minutes of January 16th City Council and Alpine School District January 22nd— and January 22nd City Council meeting. Any desire to pull off something from the consent agenda, let me know. Any further discussion? If there is none, we'll proceed with one motion and a second, followed by a roll call vote approving all consent items. Okay, then we will go on to our scheduled items. First one is a public hearing for an ordinance with regards to rezoning approximately 2.6 acres of property Located generally at 575 East University Parkway, from R-8 and C-2 zones to PD-34 zone, University Place. Jason, you're the presenter. Any comments?

We had one member come, or one neighborhood resident come to the council— or excuse me, the Planning Commission. Their only concern was the wall. Molly's proposing an 8-foot wall, so moving it over next to 1000 East, and they just talked about the openings. And while it is going to keep the opening that's further south that enters into the park area, and then there'll be no opening from that way north up to Costco. That's the only neighbor that we've had. I haven't received any phone calls, so it sounds like it's very positive for the neighbors.

All right, uh, the next one is a public hearing.

Sorry, Mayor.

Yes.

Do we have more information about plans for financing and how this is all going to work before we actually start down this rezone path? Do we have more information about what's, what's the long-term plan for that?

For the theater?

We do, but I suggest we're not ready to bring that forward to you. It's a plan that I personally think I think the council will appreciate, but we're just not ready to share that.

And I spoke with the Woodburys on that today. They're pretty excited. As we know, they're willing to donate $1 million towards the facility.

I think one of the things, Mayor, if I may.

Sure.

These conversations have been ongoing ongoing with the understanding that we would not be the first dollar in, so to speak. And so we want to have that conversation while at the same time we want to allow Hale the opportunity to go do what they said they were going to do, and that is visit with other, obviously, donors, potential donors, as well as legislators. Other, yeah. Public partners to see if they can garner support. And we have essentially endorsed the idea with Hale Center Theater and with Jeff Fisher, Mr. Fisher, that the city is pursuing a funding option for the center. And we are excited to move forward, but we also recognize recognize that there needs to be others who participate to make it all work. So I guess to your point, Councilmember Lentz, in your question, we don't necessarily want to roll anything out yet when the signs are not yet suggesting that this thing is gaining momentum. Once it gains momentum, I think we want to have that conversation. And we will not bring it to you in the 11th hour. We will bring it to you— Thank you.

Okay, next is a public hearing amending Sections 227.12 and 7.5 of the Orem City Code pertaining to PRD requirements. Jason, any comments there?

The main thing behind this amendment is just adding clarification on the ability for the council not to approve a PRD application. A PRD, if somebody comes in to request an existing PRD, somebody comes in and got approval for an X amount of density, they come back, sell the property, come back and say, hey, I want to now add 10 more units. This clarification gives the council the ability to say no, we don't meet your—

And we have that, that's going to be coming up with that same thing.

Is this targeted to that 1,600?

Not necessarily targeted for that. It's going to go— it obviously can be used for that.

But it's brought to your attention.

Yeah, for any projects right now. Right now we've tied them, if you recall, to the appendix, so they're actually part of an ordinance. So any change to a PRD has to come back to the council because that concept is now tied to the ordinance, which is why they're coming back. So we've kind of put language in here to clarify, to give the council a little more discretion to say either yes or no.

And when are we going to— when are we going to be seeing that?

So the Baxter, they actually filed this week, so it'll probably be 4 to 6 weeks.

Okay.

All right.

Have they scaled that project back?

They're proposing 10 units.

In total?

In total. They had 6, they've added 4. They've worked with the neighbors. A lot of the neighbors are now happy. Have they acquired additional property?

They haven't.

They have talked to the Gallants, and it sounds like they're willing to consider selling. I haven't got confirmation on that at this point.

And they are tearing down the Baxter home, right?

Yes.

It seemed like they were going to go for more units than 10.

They were. Originally they came in with like 15 or 16.

Yeah, and that was crazy.

16 is what I saw, and the neighbors were pretty livid over that.

They changed the design. They've gone back to the neighbors, back and forth, and I think they've come to some consensus with some of the— majority of the neighbors that 10 is okay. But of course we have to go through that process.

Because that's in a tight area. You have neighbors that back up against that property. I don't like the switch.

I don't like that. So it's a 1-story— well, 2-story basement and then 1 story above. So they've kind of lowered that elevation.

Because they were looking at 2 stories plus a basement.

The main issue with the neighbors is they didn't want any connection to the park, no pedestrian connection, so they severed that connection as well. Okay, Mr. Sausch.

Uh, next we have a public hearing Ordinance on budget amendments. Brandon, any comments?

Richard, it's the usual $700,000-ish. Okay. So maybe just an added notice. In a couple of weeks, we're going to come back to you with an additional budget amendment to incorporate the bond monies that we will receive for our library and Recreation center projects.

So can you give us an update?

So tomorrow is the day where we go out. We had, in fact, just before this meeting, we had a pre-pricing meeting, and the underwriting desk that we talked to in Denver that kind of coordinates these transactions is feeling good about kind of the timing timing at which we're going into the market, and we are hopeful that there won't be any calamities between now and 8:30 tomorrow morning that would impact pricing.

But— Well, don't go too far ahead.

Yeah, no, we're— obviously this discussion of government shutdown was something that was in the air, and then the last 24 hours there's an announcement that's been made that they think they reached a tentative deal. The market, the stock market kind of jumped, which is good for all of our personal finances, bad for our funding situation.

I mean, it's not bad.

It's gonna— it would have an impact of what, a few basis points? But it wouldn't have been bad today if the market had dropped rather than risen from a city perspective. But we're actually confident And hopeful that we will end up with more money to place in our construction account than we had originally anticipated. Not millions more, but, you know, a few hundred thousand dollars more would be very encouraging.

And to that point, we've selected the same architectural firm for both projects.

Yes, we have selected Method Studio and Ryan, and our project They've met twice with them already in regards to the fitness center. The first meeting was more of a kickoff meeting, and then the last meeting was an engineering meeting. And then prospectively, in fact, next week or the week after— That's the 20th. The 20th. We have essentially a— what is that, 26th? A visioning meeting. Yeah, it's a visioning workshop for 3 hours with staff for the first time. Where we can kind of kick that off in earnest.

But by using one architectural firm you were mentioning, there's a $400,000 savings there.

So Method Studio came in and offered a pretty significant price discount, equated to about $450,000, because of their work on the library. So we were very encouraged by that. At least those of us who have— and I'm sure all of us have toured the UV Library and the new Nordis Center and the—

Newby Center.

The Newby Center.

The classroom building.

The classroom. All of those facilities were a Method Studio product, so we know they have obviously a vast amount of experience and we're excited to work. We are— Ryan's kind of Hustling right now to go out and find a general contractor for our fitness center. So that's kind of next on the big rock list of things to do. Brian, I don't know if you want to add to that. Yeah, we're hoping to get it out Friday. The RFP is about 95% done. We're just tweaking last few insurance things.

And you're thinking 2 to 3 weeks for return?

I think we are advertising We're advertising it for 3 weeks, so then we'll have about a week after that to select a contractor. It may take a little longer than that depending on schedules to get introduced. The feedback that Ryan and Char received initially on the library project was the scope of that project wasn't necessarily one that was going to garner a lot of attention from some big firms, big contracting But I think the recreation project is going to give us a little bit of a different pool of contractors, probably some bigger names, the names that we're kind of used to seeing.

With that said, there's a lot of interest by contractors to want to bid on the library hall.

Yeah, kind of a different niche.

A different group.

Yeah, as we represented too, this— I'm sorry, Tom— this project This rec project is going to be quite a complicated effort in that we need to maintain existing operations for our pools while at the same time trying to phase in construction, at the same time trying to be sensitive as we build this project to our neighbor, the high school. And so there's a lot of moving parts to it.

And finding the right When you know timelines, i.e., start date, what will be closed, what will be open, you'll let us know.

But that's—

you're still a month or plus away from knowing those.

In fact, a lot of those initial discussions, the architect said, you know, this is a good conversation to have when you get the contractor on board, because they're going to be the ones who can say, yeah, 3 weeks is too, too tight, that's an unrealistic expectation. You probably should shoot for 5. Yeah, whatever.

Perfect, thank you.

But the method of construction we're using really facilitates doing your value engineering and adjusting your schedule accordingly.

Yeah, and we can actually release phases of the design in pieces, so they can start on the footings and foundation while we're designing the rest of the space. For those of us who use the rec center regularly, You don't go in there without several people saying, when are we starting, what's going to be used, etc. When I do my, you know, hoking heroes, I know nothing. So there will, once we start obviously nailing down some of those details, we'll kind of engage a public communication campaign, let folks know where we're going and what some of the milestone dates are going to be.

And to that point, we're still struggling with the county to have them fulfill their obligation that they had committed to several years ago for putting money in for the—

So I had a meeting with Nathan Ivy, Commissioner Ivy today. It was about separate funding for the futsal courts. I wasn't aware of the details of the struggle, but he mentioned to me when we asked for the funding for the futsal courts, He said, I've been having a hard time with this one because of this other outlying issue with the library auditorium. But he said, and again, not knowing the details, but he said, but those ones are resolved, so we can move forward with this. So I don't know what that looks like. I didn't know the details.

Wow.

You better— I better jump on that.

Anxiously waiting for his phone call.

Yeah.

So, because as, as late as yesterday, per Greg, they weren't. It wasn't.

Yeah, so, well, and that could mean a good or a bad.

So yeah, it's been resolved.

And you're gone, and don't worry about it. Okay, um, so, and I believe that after our, uh, meeting this evening, we're going into room 107 for some leaders refreshments.

Uh, yeah, Debbie has care of Debbie. Perfect. Debbie has a birthday. We'd also like to recognize Steven and Brent, who also have milestone days this next week.

Sam's is around the corner.

Let's just count this termine so that we don't have to do this again in 2 weeks.

Okay, a couple things I wanted to bring up. We had a regional planning meeting last Thursday with Mountainland Area Government, and they have a preservation fund that we've been working with them on as far as homes go for 1600 North. We're pursuing the legislature to see if they'll take it over as a state road. If that were to occur, any money we expend towards the homes, we believe they would pay us back. But anyway, there is a preservation fund. It's replenished every year, so there's a $10 fee on vehicle registration And that money goes into a county preservation fund for homes and places that cities would like to preserve for future transportation projects. So we applied for a $3 million preservation fund amount, and they were going to table it because the gentleman doing the presentation was sick. But Paul was there, and he'd gone through it, so he jumped up and carried us through it, and then I participated in the motion on a second. But anyway, we received $3 million for 1600 North to purchase homes. So 2 of the homes are related to medical and problem situations. where the timing is critical and we need to buy those people out of their homes. And then we've had 3 other homes that learned about it that I believe approached the city. So that's 5 homes. And I believe the $3 million, you can figure out, you know, it's probably 8 homes or something like that. But there's 31 homes along that south side. And so this— And I believe we already own We bought that one home, if I'm correct. Or did we not buy that one?

I believe you purchased that one.

Okay, so anyway, so we'll own 7 or 8 homes out of the 31, and then we'll see how the legislature moves forward. And I think the neighbors, to be honest with you, are, uh, most of them kind of feel like this is going to happen. We notified them 2 years ago that this was going to happen. everybody's kind of on board, and so they're looking at, you know, moving forward with this. So, um, Jason, any comments or thoughts on this one?

Okay.

Anyway, I wanted to mention that we did have—

What will we do with the homes once we acquire them? Will we take them down immediately? Will we rent them?

What's our plan?

I believe we'll rent them. Yeah, I mean, because it's not immediate that it's It's going to be beautiful.

So depending on how things go at the legislature, I mean, it could be a matter of just hiring a property management company to come in and maintain them in the short term. But ideally, we hope that that window is quite narrow between when we acquire those properties and when we begin that kind of work. We do have a big environmental process still to go through.

This is something that's really needed because you have one There's one lane there from 12th West to State Street, and if any of you have been on there during rush hour, it backs up all the way almost beyond 12th West.

So I think— and Ryan and Greg may be able to correct me— but if I understand what Paul has represented, the acquisition of property right now, those that have, for example, some sort of immediate need or circumstance like a medical condition, We are permitted to do that and to make those purchases in advance of going through a required environmental process. But there will be a process required related to determining the appropriate, essentially, corridor and alignment of that corridor.

And—

but there are limited opportunities for us to acquire property. But We can't, for example, just go out now and knock on everybody's doors and say, we want to purchase your property. One, because we haven't determined alignment. Two, we don't have funding. And three, we don't have environmental clearance to do that. But there are provisions within the law that say, look, if somebody has an extenuating circumstance, there is an opportunity for us to acquire the property now rather than later.

So, Various cities in the county use this preservation fund. Springville has used it, Provo has used it, it was used up on North County Road. And this particular fund has $14 million in it. It's replenished with $3 million new money every year. And it's meant specifically for this purpose. So, but you have to be a certain—

Community.

Point along your process before you can apply for it. And all of the cities are welcome and can apply for it. So depending on projects they're doing, they can use it. We did have the groundbreaking on the green on Campus Drive today, which is the Palos Verdes project. I think people are pretty excited. The contractors The contractor was there, and he's ready to go. He's built a lot of projects in Orem. And so the Woodburys and Peg are ready to go, and that went well.

Who's the contractor on that?

So it's like RSO?

R&O Construction.

It's R&O Construction, yeah. So they've got a really great reputation, and the one thing the Woodburys like, and I noticed it today, The CEO of R&O Construction was there at the groundbreaking, and he's involved with everything that's going on with it. So I think it'll be a good project. Certainly something needed. NPS, just to let you know, should open up this month sometime. They were hoping to have a pre-walk this week, but we don't know yet. And if not this week, next week. And then they'll have a soft opening and then a grand opening 3 or 4 months later. And if you look through the windows, they're, they're pretty well along. It looks good. Um, I don't know that I have anything else. Jason, do you want to tell us what's coming up on the agenda?

So next meeting we'll discuss We discussed the Jive, the old Jive property will be rezoned, requested to be rezoned back to the HS Highway Service.

And I want to cry for that one.

We've lost a lot of brain cells on that one.

Yes, we have.

So they're requesting that to go back. Their ultimate long-range plan is to put office buildings, but right now they're just, uh, probably seen some RV storage and they've been wanting to have sales there. And then they've redone the existing building into a Mexican market event center. That's completed. So they want to hold that until they decide to redo some offices there.

So the lady who owns the blue building to the south of that property and owns a bunch of businesses in Orem— pardon me?

Mrs. Hammond?

Yes. I ran into her at a—

I don't remember where—

a market somewhere. We started talking and she said, Mayor, you realize my husband told me that I am never to sell a single property as long as I'm alive. And she said, so I made a commitment, I will never sell as long as I'm alive. So, and a lot of people have tried to buy that blue building, and, and so anyway, she's hanging tight to that. So, um, anybody else have anything? Yes.

Just one quick note, and Jamie covered most of this in an email. I'm just mentioning With Utopia, we recently decided as a board to proceed with Morgan City to build out their, you know, fiber network there. It's essentially less than what a regular Orem footprint would be, so this isn't a really large network in Morgan City, but there's already fiber running out there that we can leverage. And I think one of the things we talked about on Monday was it'll be kind of nice to have some of these smaller communities like Woodland Hills and Morgan City to kind of test the waters on what would it be like bringing in a new city to that network because there's really not financial risk to the existing cities if, you know, if their take rate isn't as high as what they were hoping, that city would be on the hook for covering that gap. But anyway, I think it's a great opportunity to continue to expand the network, but the board is still pretty in agreement that we don't want any of these builds—

and currently they haven't—

to impact our build-out schedule for the existing Utopia Cities. And right now we're actually ahead of schedule with what was a 5-year plan, and now they're thinking maybe 3.5 to 4 years to get all of the remaining Utopia Cities built out. And what we're hoping to do in the next couple months is to not only just have this year's build schedule on the website, but to have— here's the whole, you know, for each neighborhood that's left to build in the Utopia Cities, this is when it's tentatively expected to be built.

So if they actually put that on there, a person in the neighborhood could go on and say, all right, now I know when I'm going to have it.

What I'm hoping they can do is to— right now there's a form where you can enter in your address Yes. And it'll tell you if you have it or not. What I'd like to have is just make that interactive where it says, oh, you're in this footprint, this is when you're scheduled. So rather than having to look and figure out, okay, I'm right there, I think I'm in that neighborhood, you know, people can do that, but it would just save some extra steps and make it a little bit more user-friendly. But that's still probably a few months out, but we're hoping to get at least, you know, here's what the next few years look like, just so that there's a light at the end of the tunnel. And we can actually answer some of these questions. When am I going to get it in my neighborhood? It might not be as soon as what you'd like, but we at least have an answer for you.

That would be great.

All right, well, let's go ahead and close the meeting and move over to the council chamber.

You were one hour into the job and you were ready.

Steve.

Tell them about the same thing.

Yeah. The mayor is not—

he's not on right now.

He needs to call in.

Let me—

I can call him and see if he can.

Okay.

Probably in the hot tub.

It could be.

We would like to welcome everyone out to our city council meeting. Uh, Peter, Jackie, I'm not sure our sound's turned up. You can hear it? Okay. All right, we'd like to welcome everyone out to our city council meeting and would like to call this meeting to order. Appreciate having everyone here. Our invocation tonight will be given by Marion Baxter and our Pledge of Allegiance by Vernon Stout. Yes, you could come to the podium.

Our dear Creator and Heavenly Father, as we gather as a community this night and as a council and the representatives of those who work on behalf of the health and well-being of this community. May we have ears to hear and eyes to see and hearts to understand, that there be clarity in communication and explanation, and that the work and effort that has been put forth together by those who have responsibilities, that they have jobs and that their contribution to the completion of what is to be considered here tonight will be handled in an orderly and a clear fashion, that there will be open discussion and that there will be understanding reached. We are grateful for the beauty that we exist— That lives— that we live among the mountains and the beauty that We are blessed with in every day, and that we have the richness of community and mix of culture and resources that we do. We give gratitude for those who give of service and much time beyond, beyond what is ever sometimes counted or known. And we say these things humbly, according to thy will, in the name of thy Son, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Amen.

Please stand and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you.

Thank you for the prayer and the pledge. We would like to go over our upcoming events. On February 19th, we have a ribbon-cutting for Spherion at 11:30 a.m. on 1143 West Center. On February 21st, we have a ribbon-cutting for IMART Express at 364 East University Parkway in Orem. At 5 PM. On March 7th, we have the futsal court kickoff at 3 PM at Geneva Park, and the school students will be there as well as representatives from the RSL. On March 7th, we have a UVU men's basketball Orange City night at 6:45 PM, and then at Orem High School, we have Dr. Christy Cain speaking about unplugging and connecting at 7 PM. On March the 19th, we have the Pillar of the Valley, and also on March the 9th, we have the Sierra Gala. On March the 25th, we have the ribbon cutting for the UVU Nordis Center for Performing Arts, and it also will be the inauguration ceremony for President Tamínez of UVU. On April 20th, we have the Sunset Heights East Neighborhood Picnic at the community park, 11:30 a.m. April 24th to 26th, we have the Utah League of Cities and Towns 2019 Mid-Year Conference at the Dixie Center in St. George. On May 4th, we have the Centennial Birthday party for the City of Orem at the Orchard at University Place. I believe we have a city manager's appointment. Jamie, we'd like to turn some time over to you.

Thank you, Mayor and City Council. As you're aware, with the recent retirement of our Development Services Director Bill Bell, we began the process of recruitment for a new Development Services Director. And tonight we're pleased to have Ryan Clark, who's with us here and has accepted the opportunity and assignment to serve as the city's next Development Services Director. Ryan has several decades of experience here with the City of Orem, both in economic development and development services. And is a wonderful representative of the community. And I feel very confident he will continue to move forward many of the great, if not all the great things we have in process in the Development Services Department. Given his appointment as a department director within the City of Orem, it requires your advice and consent. And so this evening, I'd like to present the name of Ryan Clark to serve as the City Development Services Director.

Second.

Thank you. So I would move that we go ahead and accept Ryan Clark as the director of the city's Department of Development Services. Is there a second?

Second.

All in favor say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Aye.

Okay, thank you. We do have Brent Sumner who is in St. George relaxing by the pool and on the phone, so we appreciate having him here. We now would like to have the city recorder administer the oath of office to Mr. Clark. So if Jackie could move forward.

I don't know, Ryan, if you invited family or anybody to be with you tonight. You're more than welcome to invite them to come forward and to participate.

I'm not sure they're exactly wanting to be front and center, but it's great to have them there.

I think they're worried about singing a song or something, musical number.

Would you please raise your hand?

I—

say your name. I, Ryan Clark.

Do solemnly swear.

Do solemnly swear.

That I will support, obey, and defend.

That I will support, obey, and defend.

The Constitution of the United States.

The Constitution of the United States.

The Constitution of the State of Utah.

The Constitution of the State of Utah.

And the laws and ordinances of the City of Orem.

And the laws and ordinances of the City of Orem.

And that I will discharge the duties of my office.

And that I will discharge the duties of my office.

In the city of Orem with fidelity.

In the city of Orem with fidelity.

Congratulations.

Congratulations.

Great to have him on board, and we know he'll do a great job, so thank you. We'll now go ahead to the personal appearance portion of our meeting. We would ask that anyone who would like to speak Keep their comments to 3 minutes, and when you come to the podium, please give us your name. So first, we'll hear from Lon Bowen, and then afterwards, Corey Jensen. Okay, we'll hear from both of you at the same time.

All right. I wanted to give you one of these. You've probably seen it before. Thanks a lot, ma'am. This is a booklet that we have of historic places in London.

Thank you.

And, uh, the reason I'm here is to tell you that we have, we have a committee called the CLG Committee, which is Certified Local Governments. It's a historic preservation commission. We have not met for over two years, and the reason being was budget cuts, I'm assuming. But we still haven't met, and when we did meet, we didn't have very much support from the from the city council. But what we would what I'm saying is that we really need to set that commission back up because it's our hundredth year, and. This booklet is almost out of print. And we don't have any— I don't know if there's any. I think on the city site there is some. But we need to have that booklet reprinted. And we also need to have that commission set up. Corey here. And by the way, I just want to mention that the value of our commission is we would not have Milton Grove as a park if it hadn't been for our commission. And the reason being, when we did our recon site, that we found the place and it was set up. And then when the time came for property that belonged to the city to be— they gave property for the park from somebody else because of our— because we had this recon and we knew what it was. And, you know, without this committee, there wouldn't have been a lot of different things in Orem. So I think we need to have it and put it back into action. Corey here is from the state, and he lives in Orem, but he's a state employee.

So many years ago, I served on the Orem Historic Preservation Commission as a chair. I was here— I'm here as an invitation from Lon just to discuss a little bit. About the Preservation Commission, the Certified Local Government program. As he mentioned, it's been inactive for a number of years. And prior to that, we got a lot of work done. The whole city of Orem was surveyed, inventoried for historic buildings. Chris Teal Acres Historic District was nominated using a Certified Local Government grant. A number of other properties were nominated and listed on the National Register too, as well as other buildings being in what we call an intensive level survey with more research done on those properties. I think the perception is there aren't a lot of historic buildings in Orem. Using National Register criteria—

You're fine. Keep going.

Yeah.

Using National Register criteria, they use a 50-year rule. So Anything that meets that 50 years and retains historic integrity could potentially be eligible for National Register. There are a lot of buildings in Orem now that are at least 50 years old or older. That doesn't mean they're all important or significant, but there— there's a lot of history there that people aren't aware of. The Certified Local Government program is great. It's a grant program from the state where the city matches a grant with a a 50% match. All of this work previously done from about 1989 up to when the commission went inactive was done using those grants. The application process has already started, but if Warren City wanted to reactivate their commission and apply for another grant, they could do so by the end of this month. It would— getting the commission up and running, getting new commission members That could be done fairly quickly too, I think.

The grant could be used to reprint this booklet or to update the booklet or to get a reprint and then do some work and upgrade the booklet. I've served on— by the way, I came to the Commission in 1989 and asked if they would set up this Commission and they voted to do it. And I'm just a very concerned citizen that this Sure.

All right, thank you. I, I would ask that you give my secretary a call and come in and see me.

Okay.

So thank you very much, appreciate it. Seeing there's no one else here for personal appearance, we'll move on to our consent agenda. I would like to read a statement. The consent agenda is a meeting tool, management tool, to allow the city to council to handle several routine items with one action. Once I've read each consent agenda item into the record, the council or staff may request an item be pulled off the consent agenda and be considered separately under the next agenda item in the order they are listed. The 2 items that we have is to approve the meeting minutes of January 16th, 2019 City Council joint meeting with the Alpine School District and the January 22nd, 2019 City Council meeting. Is there a desire by anybody, council or staff, to pull an item off of the consent agenda? Seeing none, we'll proceed with a motion and a second followed by a roll call vote.

So moved to approve them.

Is there a second?

Second.

Okay, we'll start with Councilmember Lentz.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Councilmember Sumner.

Aye.

Okay, thank you. Those are approved, and we'll move on now to our scheduled items. First one is a public hearing. This is an ordinance amending Section 22-5 —3A of the Orem City Code, rezoning approximately 2.6 acres of property located generally at 575 East University Parkway from the R-8 and C-2 zones to the PD-34 University Place zone, amending portions of Appendix BB of the Orem City Code, and amending Appendix A and B of the Orem City General Plan. And Jason Bench is our presenter. And Jason, maybe you can introduce the applicants you have with you.

Sure.

So Kathy Olson is— and sorry, Rick, I thought it was going to be Chris, but then you looked and— sorry. So for the Woodburys, thank you for coming. So tonight is a request to rezone a couple portions of adjacent properties next to the University Place There's approximately 1.7 acres east of— or excuse me, west of 590 East, this location here. And then there's a property that's this location, which is the former UTA transfer station. Those 2 properties are— properties in general are proposed to be expanded into the PD-34 zone. Right now, they're R-8 and C-2. As part of the rezone, the general plan will also be amended in the R-8 section. The C-2 zone is currently regional commercial, so no need to rezone or to general plan that. So these areas, the general plan map is proposed to be updated as well. As part of that, the 4 pages of the Appendix BB that also goes along with the ordinance will be amended. And basically extending out the portions that you see at those locations to extend the limited area zone and the mixed-use area. Basically, the concept that was already in place is now just expanded out into these properties. The sign zone and also the restrictions as far as building setbacks and things that were in place in the current one will just be expanded now to this extended property. They did hold a neighborhood meeting, and maybe we'll have Kathy explain how that neighborhood meeting went. I know there were several people who came out. We had one member of the community that came out at the Planning Commission. His concern was to make sure that an 8-foot fence was installed on that west property line, which Kathy indicated that that is the case. There will be an existing— there is an existing pedestrian access in this general location which will remain, but no other accesses, vehicle or pedestrian, will be as you go north along Costco. So be glad to address any questions. I'll turn some time over to the applicant as well.

I have some questions, but why don't we hear from Kathy?

I guess I'm here mostly just to answer questions. The neighborhood meeting went very well. It was very positive. People were very complimentary of University Place and and the things that are happening there. Their major concerns were mostly the making sure that there was no vehicular connection between the University Place and the Northwest neighborhood, making sure that the 8-foot wall was 8 feet high because the teenagers are very athletic these days. And in some areas where our wall is less than 8 feet high, they're just jumping over it.

Thank you.

Okay.

So I guess we'll open it for questions if you have any.

Councilor McDonald has a question.

First of all, I believe Mr. Woodbury could jump that 8-foot wall, not just teenagers. All this property is currently owned by the Woodbury Corporation, right? It's, it's not under contract. You own all these— this property we're approving. Is that correct?

That's correct.

Yes.

Thank you.

Any other questions? Councilor Laree.

And if I remember correctly, there was a concern about a Costco ability at the Costco, some entrance in the wall, and I'm assuming that you're not going to put that in?

That's correct. It was a suggestion on our part just to increase the amount of pedestrian access to and from the mall, but the neighbors do not want it.

Okay.

So we will not put it in.

The question I have is, what is this property going to be used for in both pieces?

Do you want to answer that or—

So we have a franchise for a Marriott Courtyard used on the east piece. On the UTA property?

Yes, on the UTA property. UTA has a right to stay there for a period of time, but we have obtained the franchise and intend to develop that as soon vacates.

On the other side, we're not sure, but we, we are proposing that we have a Health Center Theater built there, relocated from their current location into a new facility.

Okay.

A lot of things have to take place. There'll be parking for that.

Okay.

That's primarily the use.

Okay, great. Any other questions from the council? Okay, this is a public hearing, so we will open it up to the public. Anyone who would like to come up and make a comment is welcome to do so. Please hold your comments to 3 minutes and give us your name when you come forward.

Hi.

My name is Bryce Barron, and I'm the person he mentioned that was concerned about the wall, that there would be no vehicle access of any kind through those neighborhoods. And so I just came by tonight to make sure. They said that wasn't going to happen at the planning meeting, so I said let's make sure it's going to maintain that at the City Council meeting. So they have confirmed that, and also that they're not going to do the pedestrian walkway. So I'm happy, and I think the neighborhood's happy.

Great.

Glad to have you here.

Thank you.

Anyone else wish to make a comment? Seeing that no one else is coming forward, we'll go ahead and close the public comment portion of our public hearing and bring it back to the council. Any comments from anyone on the council? Seeing there are none, I would like to make a motion that we amend Section 22-5-3A of the Orem City Code, rezoning approximately 2.6 acres of property located generally at 575 East University Parkway from the R-8 and C-2 zones to the PD-34 University Place zone, amending portions of Appendix BB of the Orem City Code and amending Appendix A and B of the Orem City General Plan. Is there a second?

Second.

Okay. Councilmember Sumner, we'll go with you first.

Aye.

Okay.

Councilmember McDonald?

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Okay, the ordinance passes. Thank you very much, Rick and Kathy, for being here. Thank you, Jason. We'll now move on to another public hearing. This is an ordinance amending Section 22-7-12 and 22-7-5 of the Orem City Code pertaining to planned residential development requirements. And Jason is our presenter.

Thank you, Mayor, members of the council. Tonight there are 2 things that we're proposing to amend. One is limiting the density and total number of residential units allowed in a PRD to what was— what's been approved or what would be approved by the City Council. So we're adding— clarifying that in the ordinance. Just a way of clarification, any PRD that comes forward now, the actual concept plan is part of the ordinance and is added to Appendix KK of the ordinance. And then we're also adding a caveat that allows the City Council the discretion of whether or not to approve any amendments to an existing PRD as it comes back for additional review of— for an existing concept plan. And so that— those are the changes that were proposed. It's really small text, but in gist, that's the— what we're proposing at this point. I'd be glad to address any questions. The Planning Commission did make a recommendation that the council approve it as been proposed. So I'd be glad to address any questions.

Any questions? Councilmember Leary.

So one of the reasons that I like this is that if someone— if a developer comes in, you can't really bait and switch, right?

You can't You can't—

you have to go with the original concept plan that we originally approved. You can't come in and say, oh, well, we really want to do more.

I think—

am I reading that correctly?

This— yeah, this does add language that gives the council now some discretion. Beforehand, the way that it's written, the council may not have had a lot of discretion to say if somebody comes back and wants to amend a concept plan, the council may have been obligated to do that. This gives you discretion to say, no, we like the original, I don't have to approve the proposed.

OK. Thank you.

Councilor McDonald.

Mayor and City Council, we have several students here, and I don't know if they look at all this stuff coming up here and think we decide this very quickly. And I just would like a minute or two, if I could. We get information sent to us several days before, after the Planning Commission has vetted this, and we read these minutes at some length. We come together for a few hours prior to our City Council meeting. So this is not the first time we're hearing it. So we want you to know, as voters and future voters, that this is not a decision we make lightly, but we study it out. We normally have several days to study it out over the weekend and several days before that. So we are well— while you might be hearing it for the first time, the council is not hearing it for the first time. So even though we may not ask many questions, it's because we've already reached some conclusion and been able to vet these things before. So—

Thank you.

In just a few moments, my guess is the mayor will call for a vote, and I want you to know we had more than 2 or 3 minutes to consider this.

Thank you. Any other comments by the council? Okay, this is a public hearing, so we will open it up for public comment. Anyone who would like to come forward may do so. Please limit your comments to 3 minutes and give us your name when you come forward.

Hi, my name's Martin Wright. Um, I want to thank the city for doing this, to looking at this. This was brought to pass because of a PRD that was going to be in my backyard, and they tried to bait and switch what they wanted to do. And I appreciate the, the Planning Commission looking at it and the council looking at it, and I, I encourage you to vote for it so we don't have the bait and switch go on in other neighborhoods where where they put a plan out there and then somebody else comes in and decides 4 homes isn't enough, 15, I want 15. So I appreciate you looking at it.

Thank you. Anyone else care to make a comment? Seeing that there is none, we'll go ahead and close the public comment portion of our public hearing and bring it back to the council. Any comments on the council? Okay, I would be open to a motion.

I move that we—

nope.

I move that we amend Sections 22712 and 2275 of the Orem City Code pertaining to planned residential development requirements.

Good. Is there a second?

Second.

Okay, uh, we will start with Councilmember Sumner.

Aye.

Okay, then we'll go to Councilmember McDonald.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Okay, the ordinance passes. Thank you, Jason, appreciate it. We now have a public hearing on an ordinance to accept fiscal year 2018-19 budget amendment, and we have Richard Manning and Brandon Nelson as presenters.

Well, thanks for having us. Another one of our—

You're always welcome.

Thank you.

One of our budget amendments, as you guys are well aware. As Richard gets that up on the board.

As we're getting—

Okay, there we go. As many of you know, we have regularly received many grants and donations throughout the year, which require us, in order to spend those, to come forth and amend our budget to add those awards and donations so that we can put those in expenditure accounts for those folks who those have been granted to and awarded to so they can get those monies spent. As you see on here from those items marked with a 1 in the note category, those relate to various— those grants and Any questions on those particular ones?

Can you explain what the HIDTA grant is?

So the—

what we refer to as the HIDTA grant is part of our Major Crimes Task Force. That's High Intensity Drug Trafficking, and I forget what the A is.

And is that a federal grant?

That's a federal grant. It's straight from the— actually the President's office. And so It's a direct grant, and we receive that— we've, ever since I've been here, we've received some funding in from that grant, obviously used by the task force for drug-related stings and whatnot. Any other questions related to any of those? Okay, item marked with a 2, which—

right there, Richard.

Okay.

ones at the top. Our gun range has recently gone— going under some changes and renovations, and they've decided they needed either a new fence or a better fence. I'm not sure which one it is, a bigger fence. So they've had some funds that they have had, in essence, saved from the past from various sources, and we're simply obviously bringing those forward to be able to be used For the intent of putting that fence in up at the gun range. Item number 3 is related to our impact fees. As you well know, you passed some impact fees related to the southwest area, and those impact fees from— have been collected from that southwest area that was annexed into the city. We need to specifically identify those and, in essence, carve those impact fees into their own account so that—

Brandon, maybe you could explain when you say southwest. So you don't necessarily mean like the Sunset Heights neighborhood. You're actually referring to the annex property that we brought in a couple of years ago.

Correct, Mayor.

In the southwest corner.

Yep.

On the other side of the freeway there.

Yes.

Yep.

And so that area has its own impact And so we're just separating those accounts from our normal impact fees that we passed so that those funds actually get— they need to be spent in that specific area.

To cover that area.

Yes. And so this is an amendment to take fees that we've already received from actually from fiscal year '18 and put those into an account that's specifically identified as such for that area.

And the civic auditorium, can you tell us about that?

Yeah, so down there At the bottom, we received a grant for the library hall, I believe it was specifically from the Sorensen Legacy Foundation. That went through our Orem Foundation Trust, which is a 501 entity. And in order then to get the money from out of the foundation into a spendable form in a capital expenditure type of account—

You need to move it over.

We need to move it out of that fund into a separate fund. So that— this simply does that. Any questions about any of those?

Okay, I don't have any questions. Anyone on council have a question?

I just wondered, you mentioned the grant for the gun range. That's not the gun range in the fitness center, is it?

No, no, it's the gun range up on the side of the hill.

Yes.

Yeah, okay, up the canyon.

Just clarification.

Okay. All right, well, this is a public hearing, so we'll open this up to the public. Anyone who would like to make a comment is welcome to do so. Please, uh, hold your comments to 3 minutes and give us your name.

Hi, my name is Leon Bisnow.

I just And I don't remember who said this—

introduced to the future voters that you guys are aware of all this information, you've had a chance to study it beforehand. Could you explain to them where they would find this information so that they would be more informed when they came to meetings such as this, rather than just seeing an agenda item and then hearing it for the first time themselves?

Thank you.

So one thing, when they can go to orm.org and you can pull up Under government, you can pull up the agenda for the City Council, and on the agenda it has in italics or a different color listed the items that we're considering in more detail. So you can pick up all the information there. You can also pick up our financial statement on our website to reference, and you'll see the capital improvement projects there. the grants there. And so between the two of those, you'll have a pretty good idea of what we're discussing. So you just need to spend some time on the city website.

Would that be something you'd want Richard to show them how to do? I don't know if you can access the website from there.

I can get it up in just a second.

Okay.

And on that same page, we also have recordings of both video and audio of this meeting that we typically have at 6 PM, as well as the work sessions that occur in that conference room back there. So you can look at our, our past meetings and see when those items were discussed and watch the video. And you can actually click on the agenda item and it'll take you to that spot in the video, save you some time.

Sam, did you push the button so it comes out on yours?

Yeah, there.

No, I can't. Okay, all right. Anyone else care to make a comment? Okay, seeing none, we'll go ahead and bring the public comment portion back to the public hearing. And any other comments from the council at the moment? Okay, so I am open to a motion. Someone would like to make a motion?

Peter?

If not, I'll go ahead and make it. I move that we accept the fiscal year 2018-2019 budget amendments as listed by Brandon Nelson and Richard Manning. Is there a second?

Second.

Okay, we'll start with Councilmember Sumner first.

Aye.

Okay, we'll move on to Councilmember McDonald.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Okay, the ordinance passes. Thank you very much, Brandon and Richard. Do we have any communication items from the city manager?

Mayor, thank you. Just a couple of thoughts relative to our ongoing legislative session that is happening up at the Utah State Capitol. We are now officially 1/3 of the way through the 2019 legislative session. And there are a number of bills that we're tracking and watching that have local government ramifications. The first 2 weeks, honestly, of this legislative session has been— I won't say hijacked, but it has essentially surrounded almost completely around Medicare. And as you saw or maybe read about, the governor has signed into law modifications that were made to Medicare as a result of the initiative that was on last year's November ballot. And it looks like that issue is behind us, and the work of the rest of the legislature and the other issues tied to the legislature will begin in earnest here in the next couple of days. Just a couple of bills that I want to let you know we are, we are monitoring closely. Councilmember Lentz, just for your information, House Bill 102 is the bill that speaks to dependent care for those who are running for elected office. In addition to that, SB 90 relates to political signage and the prohibition that it places on municipalities to remove political signage during a campaign on public property. So you're actually aware, on occasion, we will have individuals who run for office who place campaign signage on city-owned park strips or in public spaces. SB 90 would essentially permit that kind of signage to be placed on public rights-of-way prospectively. So it's something that we're watching, and I know some of you have been concerned about in the past as we, during the election season, seem to have a large number or large amounts of signs that find their way onto our public rights-of-way. HB 228, which relates to towing within the state. And this is not necessarily a concern in relation to process, but there are provisions within that bill that would allow tow yards or tow storage facilities to be set up in any zone In a community. So you wouldn't necessarily need to restrict this kind of use to a commercial or an industrial property, but technically under this bill, you could actually site and locate a tow facility in a residential neighborhood. So we obviously are watching that. We have concerns with that and would, would hope that we could find a way past that. And allow some protections for our neighborhoods and allow those kind of uses to be more appropriately placed in areas that are compatible with that kind of business. HB 59 relates to public competition. And in the event a municipality were to engage in a recreational activity that has a private competitor, the local government would be required to complete some sort of feasibility study to identify potential impacts, positive or negative, that would result from the city engaging in an enterprise that could compete with private enterprise. HB 119, which is a referendum bill, Obviously, last year, with a number of state initiatives that were brought forward relative to Medicare and election boundaries and marijuana and other local issues, the state legislature has taken quite a bit of interest in referendum law this year and trying to improve communications so that constituents and voters have an opportunity to understand and appreciate both sides of every issue. At the same time, there are provisions within these— within this potential law that addresses signature gathering and how in the future, for example, that may happen in terms of an individual identifying themselves as a signature gatherer, identifying where they live, As you are probably aware, there are businesses in the state that will actually hire individuals to go gather signatures. And so while they may be collecting signatures in Orem, their place of residence may be in Kaysville. And so there needs to be, at least in the opinion of the legislature, greater transparency in relation to how those signatures are collected. In addition to that, there are concerns associated with referendums and land use and specific thresholds that must be met in relation to current land use law. I will mention, as you know, we were involved in a land use referendum this last November, and those who were involved in that conversation and in that effort have had an opportunity to meet and counsel with Representative Dawe, who is sponsoring this legislation. So they've actually had quite a lengthy sit-down with the Utah League of Cities and Towns and Representative Dawe, and they have made him and the city— the League of Cities and Towns aware of some of the concerns that they have with current referendum laws in the state. The last specific bill I want to talk to you about is Senate Bill 129, which addresses Tier 2 retirement specifically for public safety employees. Several years ago, actually back in 2011, retirement laws in the state of Utah were revised and a new retirement system was created for those that entered into the system post-2011. And what that did was it changed the benefit that individuals are eligible for at retirement. In the case of law enforcement and firefighters, a full retirement equated to 25 years of service at 37.5% of their wage. Previous to 2011, they were eligible for 50% of their wage after 20 years of service. There is a current move in the legislature to essentially shift not the years of service before qualification for retirement— that would stay at 25— but there is a recommendation that the percent that a firefighter or police officer could receive in terms of retirement benefit after 25 years of service be moved from 37.5% to 50%. The state is looking to fund approximately 50% of that bill, or the cost associated with making that change. That change on an annual basis equates to about $5.5 million. So the state is willing to step up and has identified funding sources from additional revenues that will come by way of additional liquor taxes and additional insurance taxes, where they believe they can cover $3 million of that $5.5 million annually. That, of course, leaves a $2.5 million gap that we would need to fill as local governments and others, including the state, who has the Highway Patrol to to be concerned about as well. The League of Cities and Towns has taken a stand that they believe that this conversation is moving the right direction. However, to leave local governments with a $2.5 million shortfall annually to cover is not something that is acceptable. And of course, there are a number of cities who are also concerned that this fix only addresses public safety employees and doesn't address public employees and some of what, you know, similar circumstances that public employees are in in relation to the Tier 2 retirement system. So that's something that we'll continue to work on, and I know the legislature is anxious to have this conversation whether or not we can find the means to make it all pencil specifically for public safety employees remains the big question. The last thing I will leave with you is a conversation that both the House and the governor has been having relative to broadening the sales tax base in the state of Utah. The suggestion and representation is traditionally we have been a goods-based economy and we are transitioning to a service-based economy, and is it appropriate for us as a state to apply sales tax to a greater number of services within the state of Utah, thereby broadening the sales tax base or the services and the goods that would be subject to a sales tax? The real question is, okay, if that's the case, Then what does broadening the base mean, and who will and what will be included in that broadened base? They have not yet released a preliminary, essentially, recommendation as to what that means. And so as cities and others, we're anxiously waiting to find out what broadening the base means. The governor and the House have represented that in broadening the base, The intent is not necessarily to reap a windfall as it relates to sales tax. They would broaden the base and at the same time make tax adjustments elsewhere so that base broadening could be a tax— I guess you could say tax-neutral situation. Where the governor and the House differ is the governor is interested in Lowering the sales tax percentage that is charged on all goods and services as he broadens the base. The House has been focused in on essentially lowering income taxes in lieu of a reduction in the sales tax. But again, we do not have specifics, but we anticipate by the end of this week or next week we will have a better idea of what it means to to broaden the base. Finally, there has also been conversation at the House level about a redistribution of sales tax and moving away from the 50/50 allocation formula, being 50% of our sales tax is based on our population, the other 50% is based on point of sale or what individuals purchase here in the City of Orem. The conversation has been to gravitate to more of a population-based system rather than a point-of-sale-based system. If we were to transition to a popu— 100% population-based system, all else things remaining equal, that would result in a drop of revenue of approximately $2.6 million for the City of Orem, or about 14% of the city's sales tax base. So that would have a very, very significant impact on us as a city. Of course, we are a retail center within the county and even within the state. And so when you look to change the rules of the game in the middle of the game, and we've built our economy and all of our infrastructure in and around sales tax and that point-of-sale formula, and then you make changes to that, it has a pretty significant impact. impact on the city. If you're wondering what it would cost to replace that $2.6 million annually in sales tax, if you, for example, were to shift that $2.6 million from sales tax to property tax, all else remaining equal, that would equate to approximately an $85 a year property tax increase per homeowner Orem with the average home price in the city at approximately $320,000. So it's a very significant shift, and it's one as a city we have been aggressively opposing. To this point, there has been no language introduced by way of legislation to do this, but these are just rumblings that we are hearing up the legislature, and it's something obviously that we're very concerned concerned about. So that's kind of where we are with this legislative session.

Thank you, Jamie. Appreciate that. Councilor McDonald, do you have a comment?

Yes.

You mentioned a $2.5 million shortfall on the police retirement— police and fire retirement. About what would be Orem's percentage? I did a cocktail napkin, seemed like about less than $100,000 would be our share.

No, it would be more than that.

I would anticipate we're probably Can I tell you how I did my math? We have 100,000 people. There's 3 million people in the state. I took 1/30th. You obviously did a different calculation. Why would yours be double that?

Well, it would be calculated by way of the state retirement system and the current retirement rates that we have in place. So for example, our— Our employees, our fire and police employees, their retirement contributions, for example, for police is about 40% of wage. And so it would be— the increase would be based on that.

Yeah, I just assumed other cities were about the same. That's why I took 1/30th.

But no, there are other cities have different rates of— their retirement rates are different based on what retirement pool that they're in, whether or not they're in a contributory or non-contributory system. It's not a universal— It's not the universal—

It's not simple math. It's not simple math, straight-line math. Thank you.

Correct.

We can talk about it when we know more detail.

Councilmember Lentz, do you have a comment?

No, I'm still on my question. Okay.

All right. If nothing else, then we are going to adjourn and go into Room 107 to celebrate Councilmember Larray's birthday. And before we adjourn, If there are any youth here that need to have their agendas signed by the council, please come up after we adjourn and we'll be happy to do so. And I would make a motion that we adjourn.

Second.

Okay, all in favor say aye.

Aye.

Thank you. Thank you, Brent, for being on the phone.

Thank you.

No, no.

Anyone at PayPal or anyone up here?

No, we're not a—