City Council · 2019-02-26

Very good, ma'am.

Well, we'd like to go ahead and get started. We'd like to welcome everyone out to our work session here for City Council this afternoon, and we're going to start off with a discussion on water quality. Uh, Chris Shirkey is our presenter, and I believe you have Jared Yates with you. And welcome, Jared.

Thank you.

Did we catch you by surprise, Chris?

Were there, and there's a corporate foreman who's for land at the edge of the canyon, so they would sell it at $10 million. All right, very well.

Well, Mayor and Council, it's an honor to be with you tonight. Neil and I are here to present, as well as Gerard Yates, who is over water quality at Gerard, if you want to raise your hand. He will be presenting as well regarding water quality that we receive through— water that we receive through Donald A. Kirschi Anson Water Reclamation Facility, our water treatment plant. And so we're going to explain a few things to you tonight in light of what you maybe have heard in the news recently regarding water quality. We're here to speak to you regarding what Orem does and not what others do.

necessarily.

And so any questions you might have about other agencies or municipalities, we would like to defer and wait to answer those questions until after an independent study is complete and has taken place. So in Orem, our water quality is—

Oh, did I get this one?

Water quality has a significant effect on our quality of life overall. So 200 years ago, let's see, anyone here under the age of 35 besides maybe Steven?

Me.

Steven and Mark.

That's mature.

Still be alive?

Everyone else would be dead. So let's kind of— Expected to be dead anyway. Yeah. So the US life expectancy rate was 35. 35 years, 200 years ago. A large portion of that can be attributed to water quality and water advancements. The largest gain in life expectancy occurred between 1880 and 1920 as a result of developments in water disinfection. For example, public health improvements such as control of infectious diseases, more abundant foods, cleaner water. and other non-medical social improvements contributed to that. So there's fluoridation that has taken place. Many of you might think that that's more recent, but it actually was implemented in the early 1900s. Ozonation also was a discovery in the late 1800s. Ultraviolet radiation in the early 1900s. And then chlorination also in the early 1800s. And so through these advances in science and so forth, we have Been able to receive a higher quality of life, a longer life, I would say. In Orem, we have 3 different sources of water.

We have—

of drinking water. We have groundwater, which is 25% of our water supply, spring water, which is 15%. So we have 2 springs, the Alta Springs and the Canyon Springs. And regarding groundwater, we have 9 deep wells. We also receive 60% of our drinking water is treated at the treatment plant, at Central Utah's treatment plant, and that comes through and conveyed through the Provo River, the Weaver River. We have a Provo Weaver division diversion that we participate in. We receive water from the Duchesne River through the Duchesne Tunnel to the Provo River. That comes down to the Jordan L and Deer Creek Reservoirs. We also receive water as Early as like the last few years from Strawberry Reservoir for the Utah Lake System Project. So we have a very diversified portfolio of water rights, water resources. They are abundant, they are robust, and they are also high quality.

So Chris, on that, on your deepwater wells, how is the aquifer? Have you ever noticed any variation up or down? Sure, it varies. Fairfield as an example, their aquifer is drying up and they're And we're on the other side of the lake, and I don't think we suffer the same issues that they do, but I was just curious how the aquifer is.

Well, under drought conditions, it does, the water level goes down, as you might imagine. We also have others that are drilling and developing water rights in the form of drinking water, including Central Utah Water. They have a right to About 48,000 acre-feet of water. So that will surely adversely affect our well levels. And we have made a— we have noticed that to some extent. But we don't take water out of the ground all of the time. Neither does central Utah. In fact, we augment our water supply with the groundwater. So it's something that we measure regularly. It's one of the routine stats that we check on when we do our routine daily runs.

We check on well—

on the wells in the form of water levels.

Mark's got a quickie.

Yeah, during the winter months, how much of the surface water do we use as opposed to— is that mostly used during summer month usage or How does it change during the winter?

We don't use wells as much in the winter as we do in the summer. And so we help to offset the peak demand that we have in our community through wells. Springs are flowing constantly and we have a balanced approach through all 3 sources of groundwater, spring water, and surface water. With the surface water, there's a variety of different types of waters that we call on. For which we have contracted or we have rights or we have shares in companies and so forth. And that water might be available at different times of the year. And different water has different costs associated with conveyance and treatment that are associated with those different sources of water. So it's a balancing act between what water is available and what the most economic supply or source is at that time. In the summer, we use well water as well as the other 2 sources. But in the winter, not as much. Lane, how much are we pumping right now in the middle of wintertime?

We are using, currently today, we are using one well.

Well number 4?

Well number 4.

Okay, so we're running one of 9 wells today.

There are 3 of them that they generally keep online during the winter months, and they alternate the use of those 3 during the winter months. I do have a question.

We've had a great snow year, you know, You know, so many above 100%, but where are we year to year? Are we gonna have a good year? Are we still gonna be down with all the snow we're receiving?

This is a good year.

We're at about 140% of average in our watershed.

Do you remember what we were last year?

60.

So we're gonna just be about— we're gonna be pretty much even if we were 140.

Right, so we're under a drought condition right now and we have been for a But this appears to be a wet year. We still have some time to go, but we feel like, you know, it'll continue on that trend, on that hopeful path.

We'll still be promoting conservation, I'm assuming.

Every year.

So in our drinking water, we have these 3 sources, but chlorination or any type of water treatment is not required for our groundwater. By rule, in other words, that water is already filtered. It comes out of the ground. It is clean. It's pure. We don't need to chlorinate. However, we do chlorinate at some of our for most of our wells, and we do that so we can provide what's called a chlorine residual throughout our system. So if we just relied solely on Central Utah Water Treatment Plant, then that water would be conveyed across our whole city over. 6 to 7 miles. And that water could then lose its chlorine and its ability to react with other waterborne diseases and so forth. So we need to make sure we have the chlorine residual in the system. That's why we inject at various locations throughout the city to ensure that we will always test positive for chlorine in our system.

But we don't fluoridate Utah County does not.

No one—

so it's a countywide decision. Salt Lake County does, Davis County does, there may be others. And I just read a report on the CDC that said— Central for Disease Control— that I think 70% of those that receive public drinking water, it's fluoridated in the US. Gerard, does that sound about right?

It's Probably.

Yeah. So we're in the minority, I guess, with respect to that type of treatment process. So there are a variety of diseases that have been eradicated, if you will, to certain levels, if you will. All the water that we have, surface water, comes with contaminations, contaminants. In these 2 documents we sent, we handed out to you, It identifies a wide variety of sources for different types of contaminants in our system. And then we treat that and we get that and remove that out of our system to a degree that is safer for human consumption. We're gonna kind of bounce back and forth from this point on and turn some time over to Neil to talk about the groundwater treatment. Yeah, speaking of the documents you received, those are called the Consumer Confidence Report that we publish every year, and some of it is just a quick summary of the water system. The meat and potatoes of it are those items that we measure and what the ranges are acceptable in a water system. And so it gets into some of the chemistry there. But Chris mentioned our groundwater is required to be treated. Are not required to be treated, but we do, and we do that in two different ways. We do that with solid chlorine puck, and we do that with chlorine gas. The chlorine gas comes in a cylinder that you've probably seen; it looks like oxygen or other gaseous material at 150 pounds, and the chlorine puck is a high-concentrated. You might ask why we do those differently. Everyone touch it. The chlorine pucks, yeah, please don't touch it with your bare hands. Or if you want to bleach your socks, maybe get some and rub it on there. We have that at well number 1, which is down in the ground because chlorine gas is heavy and sinks. And we have the chlorine solids At well number 8, which is right directly adjacent to Sarah Pool, where we've made a conscious choice to do that.

And Neil, the fluoride treatment doesn't come in these puck types?

No, a fluoride injection would look similar to the gas and the puck combo. It's mixed into a water slurry and then injected into the So when the wells are running, only when the wells are running is when chlorine can be injected into the system. And we've run various calculations and different things, and even at the highest concentration that we could physically put chlorine into our system, it doesn't reach harmful and hazardous levels to people. We had Quinn Fenton go out there and take it direct from the chlorinating line. Did you bring that water bottle?

It's right here.

Quinn actually, against— well, not under our direction, chose to take a sip. I don't recommend that. That's why we put tape around it. But you can take a whiff. It smells like a heavily chlorinated pool. Swimming pool, although it's at a much higher dose, but not at a harmful dose. So, so what we are injecting, if it were 100%, if we had severe malfunctions, and the probability into the millions is basically what we're going to have here. That's just to kind of try to put into perspective The questions you might have regarding what would happen if we had malfunctions or something. We're going to get into the prevention and the discovery of those methods if we had a malfunction here in a minute with Lane. Can I just mention this right here? We have a strip here to test the chlorine in this bottle. When you go to the pool, Mayor, what's the chlorine level?

I have no idea.

It's around 4 to 5 milligrams per liter or parts per million. If this turns kind of a dark blue color, this strip, that'll indicate it's about 200 parts per million of chlorine. So that is around 200 parts per million of chlorine right there. We have to get our— we have to get the chlorine. We don't dose our system and maintain that kind of a level in our system. That's not healthy. We have to maintain a residual of about 0.2 parts per million.

Okay?

Or 0.2 milligrams per liter. But in order to inject that in a system that has millions of gallons of water, then we need to have a higher concentration at these sources and then it dilutes and so forth. I don't want to hand this around to you because it can discolor your clothes and so forth. But if you'd like to afterwards, you can come up and smell it, what that smells like at 200 parts per million. Okay, at the Alamo Springs, we left this source untreated for decades and used this as our primary source in the early days of the farm. So from a water quality perspective, We feel very comfortable drinking it right from the source. But rules and regulations require us to chlorinate it, so we do right before it enters the tanks. And that's to provide that chlorine residual that we spoke of before. Wow. We're going to explain this line by line. So really what we wanted to talk about here And the message we wanted to have you leave, if anything, is how diligent we are at checking our facilities. So we want to turn some time over to Wayne to talk about what the operators do each and every day of the calendar year. Rain, sun, snow, Christmas Day. 3 in the morning.

Any time. It's not the time of day, the day of the year. So we have in the water supply section, we have 7 individuals that rotate on call. So on a Monday morning, one person is on call in water supply through the following Monday morning. And each and every day, as has been spoken, 365 days of the year, they visit every single water facility in the City of Omaha. Okay, and this is some of the data. So, uh, If you take a look at the Canyon Springs there, kind of the— is that kind of a peach color? It is to me.

Pink.

That's just a snippet, if you will, of the data that is collected at each of the spring sources. As Chris mentioned a few moments ago, we have 2 natural flowing springs, which are Canyon Springs and the Alda Springs. So similar data would be collected at Alda Springs as Canyon Springs. Okay, so we're looking at the pump hours. At this particular location we have 2 pumps and that's the hours on each of those pumps. I'm going to sneak down to the highlighted residual, the chlorine residual. So at that particular point when that snippet was taken there was a 0.3 parts per million or milligrams per liter of chlorine residual at that location.

Okay.

And then going down through, we're looking at the pressures in the system at that various location. And if you come down and you take a look at the cylinder weights here, at each of our springs we have it set up to where there's 2 150-pound chlorine cylinders. We're only feeding off of one of those at a time. And if one, let's say one empties itself, is used up, it will automatically switch over and the other chlorine cylinder will begin to inject chlorine into the system. These are physical readings, not automated? There's not a machine? They're both.

We're going to get to that part too.

Yeah, we're going to get to that.

It's the check and balance.

So you can see that there's 2 cylinders there. One is completely full, 150 pounds, and obviously On this particular day, we were feeding off of Cylinder B. At the wells, while I'm speaking of the chlorine cylinders, you'll only see Cylinder A at the wells. We only have one cylinder at those wells. As it has been spoken already, or mentioned, we do not need to chlorinate our groundwater. We do this in excess of the minimum.

Yeah.

We have to meet every rule and regulation to make sure that we have a detectable amount of chlorine in the system. And so we are not concerned if the chlorine cylinder empties overnight or even on a weekend because that water is already mixing with the chlorinated water. So that's not a concern. So that's why there's only the one cylinder weight at the well shaded area versus the 2 at the Cayman Springs area. The second bullet point there, that information is manually recorded. They have a digital device in which they manually enter that information as well as it's recorded electronically through the SCADA system.

So the SCADA system is a fiber optic network that connects to all of these remote sites, communicates all of this data that you see here back to us. That's coming continuously to us and it's being recorded. We do go out there to verify that and manually make observations, do audio checks, video checks, or visual checks and so forth. So at each site, there are many different pieces of equipment that are They're measuring and monitoring and watching. And all that information is sent electronically. Alarms are sent to our cell phones. Alarms are sent to the SCADA system. We have that. But as an extra measure, we go visit the site and double-check these measurements to watch and physically see so that if there is a break in the communication or for any other purpose, even when our wells aren't running. When they're sitting there, we are checking that well, looking at it, looking for intrusions, looking for anything that might be out of the ordinary.

So what has been out of the ordinary? What have you found?

We occasionally find a monitor that needs to be calibrated or something, nothing catastrophic by any means, but that's a way that we double-check the metering devices, The monitors, if something gets stuck. But even ahead of that, we try to replace the equipment before we even get close to that. Well, I wouldn't say before we even get close, but in the manufacturer's recommended timeframe. So this, this right here is a chlorine analyzer that costs around $5,000. This year we have 2 of those in our budget. If you approve it, then we will get those this coming year. For example, we are also replacing this piece of equipment at 2 of our wells. Each one of those is around $15,000, $15,000 to $20,000 each. So we replace these on a regular manufacturer's recommended basis as well. We do calibrate them during the use as well.

So when I was growing up in our swimming pool, periodically we would find an animal that had drowned and gotten into the pool. You have no means whereby an animal, a small animal, can get in?

We pass with flying colors our audits that have fine 200 millimeter or mesh, 200, number 200 mesh screens over all and any locations to enter into the system. They do check all the doors and locks and the hatches at every single It's every single location every day. And oftentimes we'll have double doors as well. So we have redundancy built into our system on many levels, from a power source, from locks and so forth, from supplies, from materials to parts, and redundancy in, in some of our equipment as well.

They put on the cameras, security cameras as well.

We do have security cameras that are activated by motion, and if you'd like to look at any of that, we're more than welcome to. We have some very interesting pictures. Including what, some bears, mountain lions?

Bears, mountain lions, mountain goats, other stuff of which we won't mention in this setting.

Do the benches need to be cleaned off periodically, or?

Are they— do they typically—

Cleaned off or replaced. Yeah, we unbolt the pipe and replace the mesh.

This is an example of some of the data we collect at one particular well.

It tests your water, your drawdown, Mayor, like you asked. So this is data that we're collecting constantly throughout the day. Your flows, your pressures, valves to make sure they're on and functioning and so forth. All of this data is recorded here. And it also shows the chlorine level and the chlorine residual at point 2. So at every one of our sources we have different snapshots of all that.

And you were talking about backup generators in case we had a major power failure?

Yes, yes.

We have backup generators to operate one well and we're looking at doing another one to operate 2 wells. So in the event we lost all of our water from central Utah, there was an earthquake and they were shut down, We could function as a city. You couldn't water your grass and so forth during the peak times of the heat, the warm season. So this identifies all the locations where we have this SCADA system and fiber optics and so forth. This is kind of a dashboard or a snapshot. Every one of these is a different tank in our system. And it shows flow rates. It shows—

Temperature.

Residuals for chlorine, residual pressures. It shows flows, and so on and so forth. Valves that are open and closed remotely that we can't access.

It shows water levels in tanks.

So we have a lot of robustness in our data.

We collect it.

We maintain that.

We we review it regularly, not only as we go out there, but After we post-process it and download it, we can evaluate it too. It's very helpful in the event we have any kind of a failure in the system, then we can go back and reevaluate what actually occurred. And those types of things don't happen very often.

So are our springs pretty constant, or do they ebb and flow as well?

They fluctuate with the season. Your peak is going to be in August, and you're— we're probably at the lowest flow period.

You see them fluctuate with the year as well?

Seasonally.

Seasonally I know, but annually is what I'm talking about. In other words, a drought year versus a wet year.

Yeah, they fluctuate quite dramatically.

Okay. Yeah.

We'd like to invite Gerard to come up and speak to his system a little bit, meaning Central Utah Reservoir. And again, they provide 60% of our water altogether. Or they treat 60% of our water, I should say, that we consume. So Gerard, if you want to use this or do you want to go to your slides?

And Gerard, maybe a question right up front. How many cities have rights to Deer Creek and how many have rights to Jordanelle?

So the downstream cities were going to be basically coming down. Provo and Orem and everything from here to the Salt Lake Airport.

And in between.

Okay.

So, I appreciate the chance to talk a little bit about the water treatment plant up here on the hill.

Going the wrong way. No, no, that was right.

You just had some slides in there for me.

Keep going. We're done.

So while Chris is finding my slides, I'll just tell you. So we deliver water for bigger to cities as a wholesaler. Treatment plant in Uinta County, Duchesne County here. We deliver water basically from Vernal all the way through to Provo and from here to the Salt Lake Airport. And I work with a lot of cities and talk with them and know their systems. And I will tell you that oftentimes when they talk about A lot of cities, they'll have springs or they'll have wells or they'll have springs and wells, but many of them don't understand what a robust system is. Robust means you have all— you have wells, springs, and surface water as you do here, which means that you can provide both quantity and quality in all conditions. And And I will say, they didn't pay me to say anything about them, but that you have really— Orem City has such high-quality water. You have the robust system to provide that. And you have really bright, sharp, talented people delivering your water. And they do a fantastic job. And I enjoy working with them. So, but I'm just going to talk about this little treatment plant up on the hill. It can produce 100 million gallons per day. That's its rated capacity. And we have groundwater as you do, and groundwater, Mother Nature does a great job of treating water as it goes down through and makes its way down through confining layers and gravel and sand and everything. And it comes up out of the ground and you pump it and you test it and then if it's a good well you assume that it's going to be safe and it's— Safe to drink. In good safe drinking water like you have in your wells, you can anticipate that. Well, I know, I know a couple of things. One, that water that Mother Nature treats to make safe might take from months to decades to centuries to treat that water. For us, we have about 2 hours to take water that we know isn't safe to drink in the river and make it safe and send it out to meet all the water quality criteria. So you're saying that the water that you're treating is safe to drink? In fact, I will say when I compare our water leaving our treatment plant to the groundwater that we have coming out of our wells, the water quality parameters are better coming out of the treatment plant than out of the groundwater. The groundwater is fantastic, but it shouldn't surprise you that we treat it to even a higher level because I know that it's surface water that hurts that.

Okay.

And so as I go through, there are 2 rules to safe drinking water that we, that we talk about in our organization. And rule number one is don't make the news. And that doesn't just happen because there are things that can happen and you could say, well, the one way to do that is just say we're never going to have any challenges. Well, we do have challenges and I'm just going to share one little one with you. This year I have a whole presentation on different Different effects of fire, but you're going to get one little piece because we had one little tiny fire up here by, right on the west side of Deer Creek Reservoir on August 22nd. They put it out really quick. It was 300 acres. And some of the agencies who receive their drinking water that we deliver, either finished water or raw water, they said, hey, is that fire a concern? I said, you know, it's 300 acres, probably it's, you know, You know, it's not the fire, it's the runoff. That's what we really get concerned about. I said, probably not. But then of course I proved, as usual, I proved her wrong as this little storm went across. And here's what happened. This is just blocking up and showing 300 acres. And this little— this is coming off that little area right by the dairy. And so that runs right into the property. The Provo River and coming right down to this treatment plant. Well, part of what we do is we have an early warning system at Olmsted Diversion where we divert the water. And we knew that this was coming. We get an alarm telling us, hey, the turbidity, which is a measurement of how much dirt's in the water, just went from 3 to over 500. And so we were prepared for it. So what do we do? Well, here is the water normally coming in clean. And this is coming into the plant. And this is This is how this is being settled out. Just a quick glance at what that means, chemical feed. Here is the chemical feed to add chemicals to be used to remove those solids. We went from 9 inputs to 30 to 150. And here's a screen showing our computer. Monitoring system. Basically what we saw is at Olmsted it was 650, at the plant it was 459. Remember it's usually 3 or 4. Our settled water goal is less than 2, that's the peak, and our finished water goal is less than 1 NTU, and that's the highest turbidity leaving the plant, 0.023, which is what it would have been Without this storm event. For us, coming out of a well, that turbidity limit is 5. But this is what we put out during this. And so I'm proud of that because, because why? Well, that doesn't just happen. There was an impact, and the only impact to that little storm event was solids production. After we filter all of that out, then we have, then we Then we run it through a sludge collector, run it through a belt press, and then we end up with all these solids. And this is the amount of solids that we ended up with from that event. But other than that, we did it. I was proud of what— of how we were able to just— no one knew anything and water quality didn't change and it was perfect. As a matter of fact, here's a graph from 1996 to present day. And remember, this is the regulatory limit on finished water. This is our own internal goal. We don't even want to ever get close to there. We set it clear down here. And you can see that over time, by setting goals and making— really, it's training people and having Expectations, and you can see it's— we're actually down to a point where it's questionable whether or not you can even measure that low. It's that clean.

Question for you before you go on.

In 1996, or whenever it hit that 20, well below the EPA, would I have noticed anything if I turned on my phone?

Oh no, this is not 20, that's 0.2.

Okay. Well below the 0.3, excuse me.

Yes, yes, and that's 0.3, and no, you wouldn't have noticed. And this isn't— this is, you know, 0.2 water. Most utilities would like to get to that quality. And so, but we are continually improving, and that's the message is we've reached a point that I've been saying for all of these years. I don't know that you can really get better, but I think we are. And how do you do that? Well, we set some goals. And this is the employees up at the treatment plant. And this is an award they received from— it's Partnership for Safe Water Award. It is phase—

there are—

this is for surface water treatment.

What is that?

And this means that you go through a process and you have completely optimized everything in your plant demonstrated by all these rules. They do a peer review and at the end of the day there are, there are not very many treatment plants that can do this. This is the only one in the state. As a matter of fact, in June we'll be going over to Denver to American Water Works Association annual conference and And there we'll receive an award for 15 years of water quality for meeting this. It'll be the Presidential Award. And do you know how many treatment plants there are in the country that will have this award?

2.

And it's a water quality award. And so we're due, and it's in Flint, Michigan, actually.

It's not.

It's Champlain, Illinois. And so 2 that have been able to maintain this type of water quality. So how do we do it? I think we hire good people, and we provide a comprehensive training program, and we We— and when I say hire good people, there's hire them, train them, and it's also important to retain them. And we went through a period where it was hard to retain employees. You have to retain them by compensating them fairly or else they leave you. But the other part is providing them with the resources and the resiliency so that it can be successful. You might say, okay, I heard you asking about water, how do you monitor your water quality? So for us, every drop of water going through every filter has on it monitoring. We monitor chlor— we monitor a number of water quality parameters, but we measure turbidity on every filter. We measure the particles on every filter. And Very few treatment plants do this. But for us, it's important that we actually look at— we use laser particle counters looking to see if there's any particle in there at all. We don't want to know if the water is cloudy, we want to know if there's any single particle and what size that might be. And I won't give you details on why that's important. And then we monitor— if you hear about lead and copper and somebody having high lead and copper, well, that's due to corrosion. in the premise plumbing in their own homes. And so we make sure that the water leaving is never corrosive. We do that in 2 different ways, and I can talk about every process we have. We have redundancy, we have— and so that, so that if one goes down, we can start another. And we have, we have looked at every single source Potential single source of failure and address that. We have coming into that treatment plant, we have 2 different power sources coming in. We have, and then we have our emergency generator in place too on top of that. So 2 sources of power and emergency generator. And then back to this, we monitor to make sure our water is not ever leaving the plant corrosive. We monitor looking at streaming current, which is telling us that as long as there is a positive charge to the water, we're in the right range. And then we can, in the lab, we actually look at— this is zeta potential. We actually take a sample of water, run it through a cell, and we can actually apply a charge to the water and see, looking at an actual particle in the water, if it's positive, negative charged, or how strong that charge might be. And so that Part of that is for a coagulation process, but part of that is so that the water leaving the plant is not corrosive. And they— EPA made water utilities responsible for that. So in the end, rule number 2, don't make the news. And I gave you more than you wanted, and that's it. Well, if you—

If you have an opportunity, we'd recommend that you would look at this on your own. We do send these out annually. It'll be a requirement that we send these out twice a year coming up in the near future. But they do their own report, we do our report, so I would encourage you to look at that. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.

So one question, one comment. I think it's good to bring up that 2 years ago, 3 years ago, we won the award. I'm wondering if you could tell us how you got the award for the best tasting water in the state of Utah, 2016. And then the other question I have is, how much of potential water that we have do we use as a percentage? So if we have 100% available through all these sources, what percentage are we using of that total?

You're asking how much water right do we have in a 100% year?

Yeah, and I'm just saying, like, are we using 50% of our availability, 75% of our availability on average, or is that not a figure you can really tap into?

Well, we have more to us available than our demand is right now. today, and but we plan also for the future of buildup, which is in 50 years. So we, we have enough for buildup in 50 years. That would probably be the best answer we could give you. Okay, thank you. Appreciate it. We had to pay Gerard to pay— to say it was what we had to pay and not to say it was—

Is that contingent on drought conditions or is that— It is.

Yeah, our supplies that run through the treatment plant, a lot of it is subject to the weather and the supply that's available directed by the River Commissioner. And so those vary depending upon—

I think it's nice being this close to these mountains that get that much snow compared to other mountains And on the other side of the lake that don't get the water as easily.

So, Ormond is in a very good position with respect to water quality, robustness, and quality.

So I just had a group of citizens yesterday ask me about water. So it is something people are concerned about, and we certainly appreciate the great job you guys do.

Thank you.

We do.

When those flyers go out, I see We seem to get a few comments about the arsenic levels.

Is that—

Arsenic is naturally occurring in our water system. And it is in many water systems. You can see in there, it never reaches any level or degree of concern.

The high level, is the high level 10 compared to 2.2, or is there—

I'd have to refer to that specifically.

Yeah.

But it never exceeds We don't have any violations.

No.

That's a good question. The relationship we have with Central goes well beyond the treatment but is a major part of it. Conveyance, storage, just overall we have as a city a long history with the district and we want to always just maintain that and we share Well, thank you, Chris.

I have a question.

Yes.

So I know you'll— actually, what happened to Sandy, but have you reviewed our protocols or—

Oh yes.

And so will you at some point tell us what those are or what to expect?

We will.

I'll just let you know that— do you have that with you, Wayne?

Yeah.

He has—

he brought with him the with him protocols in the event of any types of emergencies that we would have.

So—

We've identified several scenarios that we could— that could occur here in the city of Oregon.

We have case histories of past experiences too that we review as well. But this has brought to our attention a need to review that, to update it even more. So it's constantly being reviewed.

Thank you, Neil.

Thank you, Lane and Gerard.

Appreciate it.

We'll now move on to a budget discussion of revenue and compensation, and Richard Manning is our presenter.

Okay, first out, the one thing that kind of explains why the Utah economy is not reacting the same way as the rest of the world. Where things are slowing down a lot is this Hackman or Heishman Index of Economic Diversity. A 1 in this would mean that your local economy exactly mirrors the economy of the United States. Utah's economy is 96.9. There's only one other state in the country that is better than Utah. So that explains why The Utah economy is weathering this a little bit better than you would presume when all around us are signs that things aren't as good as they seem to be. But we're hanging in there. So heading straight into the revenues, we're looking at—

He's saying something to me.

These are the major revenue points that we have. Property tax is the single most difficult one to project because we are given that information. We don't have access to look and see how things are going. Sales tax is definitely slowing, but we're still looking at still growing some. Franchise tax, again, is pretty steady. Building fees, Slowing but still growing. Water, wastewater, stormwater, because of program rate hikes, you're seeing increases in that.

Before you go off that, those are all negative numbers on the right.

No.

You show they're up.

They're up.

It was just to say this is the dollar amount that is. Yep.

And fiscal year '19 is the year we're in, is that correct? Yeah, correct. And I blew that one.

Thank you.

Now, what if we kept our property tax rate the same? Each year the county gives it to us, it goes up or down according to what it takes to give us a pre-programmed amount of money. And I don't know why it's making that sound. If we left it at the rate for our last fiscal year, we would have $280,000 more It would be equivalent of a median home in Orem is $320,000. The taxable value on that would see an annual increase of $8.61. Or for a business, a $4.90 per $100,000 valuation change. What's that mean? That's a little bit better than the cost to hire— to hire any Okay. What would it do to our rates in comparison to others? We would be in the exact same position we're now in, even though we'd have a slightly higher rate. We wouldn't trade places with anybody. Now, sales tax. Here's a look at the top 10 producers over time.

They change.

But our sales tax continues to grow. How each category is doing changes over time. As you can see, auto sales, the building area are doing quite well. Building has surged up. And that's a little worrisome because that is why we had the problem last time. But that was more on how the— The mortgages, et cetera, were put out there. Our general category, the second from the bottom, that's just the big— that's where grocery stores and the types of things that you have to live off, have to live. And we continue to do quite well there. Our projection is we're thinking will be about $23.5. I want to leave it open that we can—

$23.5.

We can amend that as we get closer and things fine-tune somewhat. But it is still going up, but as you can tell, the growth rate is flattening out. We think this year we'll get in about $23 million, maybe a little over $23 million. Franchise tax, it's kind of up and down. It tends to flatten out because people don't have the number of of phone lines they had. And that's a source of revenue and franchise tax. And growth rates, also our utilities pay a franchise tax. So you have, as those rates go up, you'll see an increase in that.

So, Richard, restaurant, hotel taxes, back in, Sales tax.

In the sales tax, okay.

Yes.

Building fees, this can be very— depend upon what's happening, but as a rule, we do not budget what we really think we're going to get. Because it is every building, every house, every office is a one-time. But you have enough of those one-timers coming through that you can build some ongoing revenues with it. But we don't want to have too much and have to really cut back whenever a building goes down.

By the way, considering this is our centennial year, the building you're showing right there is on our historic register.

It should be. I remember this when I was a wee lad. So we think we'll get just over $1.4 million. $4 million in building fees. Now this year we'll see the beginning of a second dedicated fund for street maintenance. Have the sales tax, which is a tenth of a percent. It's easy to budget. Whatever you budget for CARE, you budget for this because their tax rate is the exact same.

Which one is the new one, 24?

Fund 24. That's the new one. We're building in $2.2. We'll start to receive that July 1st, so September is when the first actual money will arrive. Sales tax comes in 2 months in arrears. And then we have our gas tax that's showing some good increases of late.

Water.

Base rate for 3/4 inch only changed from the current $18.70 to $20.20. And water sales with the rates that you see over here, the changes from in each of the tiers, we're estimating $16.4 in revenue from that with a total revenue of $20 million. And that's everything in. Ongoing revenues where you cut out some things like impact fees, et cetera, $17.6.

And we're continuing to use the additional money to replace pipes, etc., etc., the long-term maintenance that we talked about a few years ago.

Yeah, so that's why, for example, in some of these graphs you'll see some pretty big jumps in the size of revenue this year, because we're actually allocating fund balances, putting it into revenue to pay for pipes, etc.

Pay as you go.

Yes, and as impact fees come in, etc. The one-time revenues are quite significant in these funds. Water Reclamation, again, they have some programmed increases. The base rate, $10.72 to $12.33 a month, and that's on all doors. And they see a growth rate there projecting 1.3 given new revenue this year. And again, that's a fairly significant capital program in this. So over in stormwater, again, they have a rate hike that's programmed in there. $6.75 is the current to $7.10. That's based on The service units, which is 1 E-issue for every 2,700 feet of impervious surface area that's monitored. Businesses can have multiples. They get quite a bit, they can do quite a bit to lower their own fee if they have some good practices on handling their stormwater. But, a big focus here, as we'll learn in our next session, is going to be on the West Union Canal. Their total recurring is $4.8 million. Solid waste fee increase in each of the can types, as you can see. Total available revenues bring it up to $4.025 million.

The only thing they're required to, though, is the first can.

Yes, they don't need to have recycling.

Well, if you move in, you get recycling.

New subscribers, yeah, green is still flexible for everybody.

Yeah, and we— there for years we've told people, don't get a second garbage can, go recycling, go do something else, and you won't need— unless you have a giant family.

Talk to Sarah Bacon. Yeah, just Just have.

Just do it.

You'll save yourself money. Now, looking at estimated monthly impacts, I drew the water rate on a home account that I'm very well acquainted with.

Yeah.

Cheryl, if you'd mind if we go back to that other slide just to ask a question.

One of the reasons recycling is so much cheaper is because it's only every other week. Is it also cheaper to distribute that stuff than the regular garbage is up, or are we encouraging people to do recycling? What's our pricing idea there?

Well, our— what we're doing is we're covering the cost of essentially pickup, pickup. And then part of that fee right now in the world markets, historically, all of this has been going to China. But China, given the current, I guess, back and forth that they've had with President Trump and some of the trade relationships—

They've actually put in the green fence policy a year ago in March.

Yeah, have kind of stopped accepting a lot of American waste. So some of this additional cost is to actually process or to even warehouse some of our existing waste. But again, the green, the recyclable waste is cheaper to handle than garbage waste, it looks like. Yeah, because we don't have to, we don't essentially have to process it by way of landfill.

You don't have the tipping fee.

Yeah, correct.

Okay, so on your average home, about a $9.62 increase. Now if you live in the neighborhoods where the streetlight will be coming off, You'll see a little bit of mitigation from $3.25 to $2.34.

That's the increase or the fee?

Monthly increase.

Monthly increase about $9.62 over time.

From all fees?

From all fees, yeah.

Okay.

And again, part of the reason for that is that we've adopted the policy of pay as you go.

Yes.

And which later on will look really good, right? Right now might be a little hard.

Yeah, there's a lot of water.

Okay, can you go back? Are you a heavy water user at 46,000?

I have a bigger than average yard. Are you up into the 4th tier or just in the 3rd? I've hit the 4th tier one time. And I looked at why and there was a week difference between reads, so it was a week longer, kicked me up there. Now the HR director, he's a proud 4th tier participant because he has a wonderful yard. And so he goes, I will be there. I do nothing to try and keep it self-published.

Maybe we'll name it the Gar Smith Bar.

The Gar Smith Bar. As you can see, over time we have revenue growth both citywide and in the general fund. A lot of the citywide So as we have to bounce funds back and forth, it shows up as both an expense— a revenue somewhere, an expense somewhere, and it's higher than the actual cash that flows through. But to make sure everyone can follow the money, things get inflated up. Okay, compensation.

Sorry, a decrease in compensation.

So Richard, do you have a graph of just revenue that hasn't been transferred or moved around?

I don't have it on my—

If you go back to my previous one, how much of that, I can't see what it said, $123 million?

$123.

How much of that would be transferred?

It's like $13 to $15, somewhere in there. For total revenues, we're generating about $110 million.

And going back to—

what year is that? '72?

No, '11. Oh, the '70 point is fiscal '11.

So it was about $60-something then, $65 million. So it's almost doubled.

There are more transfers. There's more transfers now than there were back then. And that's just to keep the state auditor happy.

How much of that do you think is one-time monies and how much do you think is going to be recurring?

So your $4 million of it is your transfer that we did to see it from excess general fund reserve. So that's obviously a big piece of what we can see lately. In fact, it's recorded, it's shown in the transfers.

So as we head into fiscal year '20, we estimate probably around a little over $3 million in new ongoing money that is available in general funds. Just in general.

Correct.

How that shakes out at the end, right now it would look like other than equipment, there'd be a one-time shot, most of it is going to be operational in nature.

So in other words, a good portion of that increase is transfers between funds, but also So essentially a reappropriation of fund balance both in general fund and in our enterprise funds, correct? Yeah, fair amount goes on there.

Is that still maintaining our 15% fund balance?

Oh yeah, that's when you get the figure of, you know, moving $4 million or so, that is to get to the 15%.

The compensation.

In 2018, across the nation, there's a 3.8% increase in wages. That was the average increase given. We're looking at about a 3% unemployment figure for our area. Utah per capita income growth, they're projecting a 3.1%. And Kiplinger is projecting for the nation a 3.5% going forward.

And again, your 3.0 unemployment basically speaks to the fact that you're negative as far as availability goes.

Yes.

The Department of Labor defines full employment as 4% unemployment.

Yeah.

And I saw something a while ago that in the United States there are over 1 million jobs more than potential employees.

Which explains—

Came out in the news today that there's not enough employees in the United States to take care of all the jobs.

Yeah. So, looking at the general fund, full-time compensation coming in at $21.3, almost $3.50. Non-benefited, another couple of million. We're proposing a 1% market adjustment. That would be that all benefit employees would receive a 1% increase regardless. And that's to kind of keep them up with the wider compensation. Survey we do every year says kind of where we need to be as we adjust the individual pay grades. We also need to say how are is the group doing. So we recommend, uh, a 1% there, then up an additional 3% according to how well they're performing. And Richard, some could get 4, some could get 2.

Maybe you don't know this, but, um, as far as our health insurance goes, we're—

we built in a 4% change.

4% increase?

Well, thinking that for the year we ate We only need to cover 4 in this budget.

Gotcha.

Because we run on a calendar year versus—

And I know that in recent past, Jamie's tried to let the employees know that that's part of, part and parcel of their benefits, and that that increase is something that we as a city have to cover. So when you're looking at a COLA, That actually plays into that.

Yes.

So we, if I may too, Mayor, we have been working closely with PEHP, which is our healthcare provider this year, and we actually are trending quite well. So what essentially what they're seeing is for the amount of premium that we're paying, We're covering our claims and all of their administrative costs with the current essentially premium that we're providing.

Even with Mr. Bybee's surgery?

Well, maybe.

But yet you're still looking at a 40% increase?

No, we're looking at a higher increase because medical essentially cost of living is 8 to 10%. So even if we were running perfectly, The medical world is adding 8 to 10%.

And we need to cover 4% of that.

Yeah, we cut— well, we're covering 4% in this fiscal year because our health plan runs from January to December. So we would cover part of the increase in this fiscal year and then the next increase.

Well, we are suffering an 8% increase basically.

We're anticipating.

And overall. And that doesn't include, for example, in today's news, the state of Utah just released their tentative idea as to tax reform, and it includes a 1% premium tax on medical insurance that I would anticipate will be employer— employer responsibility. So that's not included in this conversation.

So that may translate to a 3% increase.

Yeah, 1% premium tax.

We're going to pay sales tax on health insurance insurance. So just like you do now when you purchase other forms of insurance, there's a sales tax fee assigned to it. There would be now sales tax assigned to health insurance premiums. Not when you go to the doctor and receive service. I hope you feel free.

Citywide, looking at the same costs, as you can see, the bulk of everything is in the general fund. That's where the bulk of the employees are and our costs. Now, the additional URS, that's very— well, we can't pin it down. It looks like we're going to have some increases. However, until Until the legislature makes up their mind what to do, particularly with the public safety Tier 2, we really can't say where it's going to go. So we'll fine-tune this number as we can. And we're keeping a 63/37 benefit split, same as it was this year.

On that, the 1% sales tax on health insurance premiums, is that just for the state?

So like the The city, the county, they don't see any of that? It's just 1% to the state?

That's a good question.

We don't know yet. The details of the bill, we understand, are 240 pages, and they will hopefully be released by the end of the week.

Thank you. Retirement systems as they look to be, again, this might change. Changes are seen in the Tier 2 for fire and also Tier 1 for fire.

There's a change there.

Everything else is pretty static.

Richard, one thing I want to mention with the Tier 1 and Tier 2 pensions, many cities across the U.S., particularly in the East, are getting hit really hard. with defined benefit insurance where it's actually bankrupting the cities. And so, I mean, you know, I really want to thank all those who've worked hard to make it where we're not in that kind of situation.

Yeah, the state of Utah has done a good job to keep us as fully funded as possible, and so we've always been pretty, pretty good. And they, they have a heavy hammer if we don't remit as we're supposed to.

So for example, in the state of Utah, our Tier 2 public safety retirement is funded at 99.6%. In the state of Arizona, their comparable public safety retirement is funded at 45%.

Wow.

So a lot of it too has to relate to the richness of benefits and the way things are structured. So we do have a retirement system that right now, if you read the newspaper, and in fact, even as I had to pull away from the tele— from the meeting to take a call, the suggestion is that the state of Utah has neglected their law enforcement professionals by way of state retirement. Because back in 2011, the legislature adjusted retirement rates and created the Tier 2 system. And so now an employee, a public safety employee, instead of being able to qualify for 50% of their wage after 20 years of service, can qualify for 37.5% of their wage at 25 years of service. But that's why we have 99% funding, and that's why the state of Arizona has 45% funding. Some states have chosen to proactively address this issue, while other states have not, and it is very controversial, and the message in part shared is cities are not taking care of their law enforcement professionals. I could go into a lot as to why the perception is a little different than reality, but one, I think we need to tackle retirement. Two, I don't necessarily think that it is a wholesale One-size-fits-all solution. And 3, it's gonna be very expensive. So for example, right now— I'm sorry, my contacts all of a sudden went crazy. But right now, based on what the legislature is talking about doing in terms of modifying retirement for Tier 2 employees, public safety employees, we have about 35% of— 35% of what?

That's right.

That our retiree base that is Tier 2, so you can kind of— we have, I think, a little bit higher percentage in public safety that are Tier 2. So let's say 40%. To cover that increase on just 40% of our law enforcement right now and fire is $110,000 a year in increase.

If the legislature passes it.

Yeah, and by all, you know, appearances, it looks like they're going to pass it. So long-term, this change could potentially impact us to the tune of $300,000 plus going forward in terms of additional—

So the legislature's gonna fund 2/3 of it and they're asking us to fund the other 1/3?

No, they're not. Because today on the Senate floor, they amended the bill and took out all ongoing long-term funding from the bill.

From the state?

From everything. From the language. And then they gave— several senators gave a blistering editorial on how cities have not been taken care of. So our responsibility prospectively is going to be 100% of the costs that are tied to these modifications.

What happened to land acquisition costs?

That's a good question.

They—

the suggestion was cities and towns need to have skin in the game. I guess that skin is 100%. But cities and towns, as part of the league process, have been concerned that they have been essentially given the option of getting behind a retirement reform amendment that they had no involvement in essentially crafting. So the suggestion is, look, this is an unfunded mandate, just like many other things are, allow us an opportunity to be part of the conversation and to tweak the system in a way that financially makes sense for the state and for us as locals. And I'm afraid the legislature is taking it as, well, you're not supportive.

That doesn't—

no, we're not.

That doesn't mean we're not supportive.

That just means we'd like a voice in how the future future system is put together and addressed. So it's a difficult situation where you have essentially administrators, elected officials at the local level who are trying to do the right thing, but they are being pitted against State legislators and law enforcement and firefighter professionals, because the message being sent— one side is, please work with us in trying to fix the system, and the other message is, you don't support us. So it's, it's a tough, tough dynamic. But it's one that we are going to have to face and have to pay for. And unfortunately, we're not going to have a voice in how that solution is crafted.

Are there any questions? Because this is easy.

I've got one.

And it kind of goes back to one of the earlier slides, talking about if we kept property tax rates the same, and the impact that would have You said that would essentially buy us 2 new police officers, and that would be both the one-time cost and the ongoing cost?

Yes.

If we took the one-time cost out of that and say we funded that with building fees or something like that, how many—

what—

how many police officers would that cover from an ongoing cost perspective?

It's about $100,000 an officer.

Yeah, roughly 100.

Um, when you factor in—

because their cost of benefits is higher than the average authority. So that would— yeah, their salary would be like 3 or 4 up. Yeah, brand new officer is just under 50 grand.

2.5, probably 2.5.

But you would have to hold the taxation Yeah, any change have to go through the 15 taxation process, which would mean wages and, you know, we can't adopt it till August, uh, in a formal way. And you have to really fund public hearing other, you know, miscellaneous.

On that, wasn't there, wasn't there a bill last year that froze it in place?

Was that just at the school district level?

I like how our students are involved.

Changing to where it's not a fixed amount now, but for a 5-year period. Ours is tax rate.

It's tied to the school district.

Yeah, ours is tied to the school district.

Any other questions?

So the non-benefited employees, that was 1% increase for them too?

Right now there's nothing programmed in. So do you make—

there have been here and there, and you get 1%?

Typically we don't spend all the money that we budget. So based on that, when we— for our seasonal and flexible employees, we don't budget to a headcount, we budget to a dollar amount. And departments have the latitude to adjust as is needed within parameters. To bring employees on board. But even with the tightness of the hiring market, we still are not spending that—

the money like you would think we would.

So one example—

We have to have some cap space, so to speak.

One example of that are our flex employees are typically the ones that we have on a year-to-year basis more permanently, right? So the starting rate stays the same.

So we had, for example, across here, we had an issue with lifeguards recently where we were having a hard time staffing the fitness center and the pool at specific times of the day. So we got together and the discussion was, well, what if we offered essentially a different rate of pay for some of those difficult hours to kind of be an incentive for people to work those hours, meet the requirements of keeping our pool open. So there's that flexibility within the system where we can make those adjustments rather than do a wholesale increase on all of our lifeguard wages. We can kind of tweak them. And then we also, for example, recognize that some of our employees who, for example, are with us in the Parks Department year over year, we appreciate the fact that they're here and we probably give them a little more than somebody who just starts day one with the Parks crew to kind of reward that longevity and the good job.

Any other questions?

I have one more. We looked at the police compensation. Were we going to do the fire This year?

Fire has already been done.

Okay. Anything else?

All right, well, thank you, Richard.

And Public Works.

Public Works.

Public Works is in process too.

All right, well, let's go ahead. Looks like our food's here. Uh, Brent, would you mind giving us a prayer?

Our kind Eternal Heavenly Father, we're deeply grateful for the opportunity we have to meet as City Council, staff, and members of the community. And we're thankful for the information we've received today, that we may digest it and be able to understand what's presented to us. And we'll be able to help the citizens of Orem make this a better community.

And please bless this food that may nourish, strengthen our bodies, I do the good we need.

And we say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

Amen. The huge, huge question right now is tax reform, what it means. Can we continue with the non-vote? The Republican caucus met today and they were introduced to it. And the suggestion is the rest of us will be introduced to it.

I didn't hear any train noises.

Yeah, he's got his fair share of things. For example, he wants to require state oversight if Steve, did you give these out?

Yeah, yeah.

Is there a dinner with it or just a game? Just a game.

There are— there will be though, like, an area that has like snacks and drinks. Although, maybe we'll send you one, just email you one, just so you don't have to potentially—

because we'll tell Nate, but whether it'll get to that front gate.

Yeah.

So Brent, were you in the snow down in St. George?

Cold? That's in Vegas.

I never saw it snow in there.

So my son teaches there and he got a snow day.

My brother-in-law sat on the tarmac at the airport for 3 hours waiting for the planes to defrost, de-ice in Vegas. Yeah, they don't have any de-icing equipment.

And someone's complaining it's cold at 68 degrees.

We're all going blind.

Richard, thanks for a great report. Easily understood.

Thank you.

So when one time we were over there, we did the bike ride from Hollyhock Road down to the ocean. And when we were up on top, it was so cold it just froze on the top of the mountain. Get the straight. I bike down.

I've never got—

I don't think I've got it up.

Sorry, in my voice you could probably pick up the question.

They took us up by bus and then we rode. I admire everybody who rode us up. I was over at the BYU Hospital with a friend of mine who crashed on his motorcycle, and we were riding motorcycles together and he crashed and broke his collarbone. But in there was a kid coming down the hill on a bike who lost—

slid on his face, and he was in pretty rough shape.

Carl, are you going to charter another, uh, did you charter a boat or something, a sailboat over in Europe?

I did, and, uh, this year it's—

Did you get hooked on that drug?

I did, but I can't afford to do that every year.

This year's in Alaska.

But the highlight of the whole year, of course, is the challenge to St. George to learn about being a city of—

when's this P-Day?

So what are you going to do in DC?

You've been there before.

In the current status, in the current zoning, what was the issue? Because you could certainly go less high than 9 stories if you wanted. I think vehicles, is that right? Vehicles less tall.

Why did they need to switch?

Why did they have to go to highway service? Okay, but were auto sales or RV sales included in the original PE?

Is DARF at all interested in the old Central Utah Water building?

We have, we have plans about, in fact, we're We've had multiple conversations, but they're asking—

so from what I understand, they received 2 full-price offers.

Is one of them from Wood Bank?

Um, that's what I've heard, but a contract was not submitted with them. So the party that has it under contract right now is Pete Rossi, who's a local retail real estate agent.

And he has the property listed right now for $10 million.

So a 6-acre parcel for $10 million is, I think, particularly if he needs the land, right? Yeah, Central Utah was asking, I think, $7.5 million. Oh, so they bought it and then are listing it? They have it under contract. They haven't closed yet.

So I think they actually bought it for $6.5 million. I was with Gene earlier in the week, or last week, and then they also Are listing, I want to say, 10 acres at the mouth of the canyon.

Yeah, canyon.

Which is where they did the laydown for the power plant.

Correct.

And they're asking $4 million for that. They bought the Xactware building for $16.5 million, and it's around 75,000 or 80,000 square feet. They could actually buy that cheaper than if they were to build on their own.

So somebody bought it just as a quick investment?

I believe so.

Now he's also— is he the one who also bought the Meadow Gold property?

He was tied in with that somehow, but I believe Wright Development owns it now.

Wright Development?

We haven't seen anything on that coming in yet.

Grundles.

Grundles.

They are like grundles.

Yeah.

It's a term that means lots of things.

Why don't we go ahead and go over the agenda for this evening? Dave, do you know who is doing the prayer and who—

Yeah, I've given that.

Well, I've got these 3. So those are the ones—

that's the truth.

Those are the kids doing the—

Yeah.

You know which one is doing which?

Well, the, um, we should have one for the prayer too.

Chase, Chase. He's gonna—

yeah, we have a—

anyway, if you can figure it out.

Let me—

I can get one right now.

Yeah, and let me know.

For all the boys, um, let me make sure that there's not— we weren't having— you're okay. Okay.

We have our upcoming events. We have on March 7th, City of Orem futsal court kickoff at 3 PM at Geneva Park. March the 7th, we have UVU men's basketball, Orem City Night, 6:45 PM. And I believe we have to be there on time because they have a certain time for us to get in the building.

So 6:45 is the presentation Be there at 6:30. They'll, they'll be done before 7 for those that want to get to the Christy Cain presentation at Orem High.

Okay, so we don't want to be late. Don't be late. March 7th, and we also have the City of Orem at Orem High School Christy Cain Unplug and Connect presentation.

And that one's just obviously an opportunity for you to come and spectate, like there isn't any presentation or anything there.

Sure.

She's doing this across the state and is well qualified, I understand. Uh, March 9th is the Sierra Center for the Arts, uh, 14th Annual Benefit Arts Gala at 5:30 PM.

Does Christy know everyone who's going, or should we do a quick roll call?

I don't know how that's gone.

Um, I believe Christy has.

Has everyone told her if you're going?

Okay, I have 3.

It was Chase Taylor, Hayden, and Josh.

We got one more, Chase, in the front half.

Okay, and then if you can let me know who's doing the prayer, who's doing the pledge.

So Chase Taylor's doing the prayer.

Chase Taylor's place, Ian Ferrer, and then Jason Taylor. March 14th, we have the Hillcrest Elementary School celebrating 65 years, 6 to 8 PM at Hillcrest. That's an open house. March the March 15th, we have Orem High School Hillcrest Elementary School Gala from 6 to 8:30 PM. March 19th, Chamber of Commerce Pillar of the Valley at 7 PM. By the way, you may have seen, but David Archuleta is going to be singing, as well as the honoring of John Valentine and—

Elspeth. And then—

Elspeth.

Again, does she know everyone who wants to go to that?

I believe so.

Okay.

So then March 25th, we have the Nordis Center for Performing Arts ribbon cutting at 1 PM. Also on March 27th, we have the inauguration of President Tamínez at 11 AM at the Nordis Center for the Arts at UVU. April 20th, we have the Sunset Heights East Neighborhood Picnic. At the community park. 24th through the 26th, we have the Utah League of Cities and Towns mid-year conference at the Dixie Center in St. George.

Mayor, before you leave us, we often start with some kind of a dinner on the Wednesday night. Do you know of any of that going on, Jamie? Do you know if there's a dinner?

I'm not aware of one right now.

Okay, so in theory, it won't start until Thursday morning at this point, and it's normally Done about noon on Friday, is that correct?

Yes, yeah, 1 o'clock, 1:30 lunch.

But I think that depends on who we get an invite from, so I would imagine an invite might still get them coming for the dinner on Wednesday. On April 25th, we have the NPU Spanish Resource Night at 6:30 PM at St. Francis Catholic Church. which many of us here won't be to. May the 4th, we have the City of Orem Centennial Birthday Party, 5 PM to dusk at the Orchard Park at University Place. And May the 11th, we have the Miss Orem Organization Scholarship Pageant at 7 PM at the Sears Center for the Arts. Um, We have a report from the Transportation Advisory Commission. Aaron Aurelian will be here for that. Have our personal appearances. We have consent items, approval of city meeting minutes, city manager's appointments. Jamie, you want to say anything about Barry Roberts?

Yeah, this is an appointment Mr. Roberts has made. Application to serve as a member of the Planning Commission. He's a 23-year resident of the city, and Ryan and Jason had an opportunity to sit down with him. He is— he actually, as noted in his application, got interested in volunteering and working with the city based on his visits with Scouts to city council meetings. Initially, I think, had an interest in the Board of Adjustment?

Transportation.

Transportation.

As an avid biker. But there were no vacancies on the Transportation Commission, and so the suggestion was consideration of Planning Commission. Both Ryan and Jason felt like they were good—

he was a good path.

And he's aware of the requirements for that?

He is going to replace Carlos Iglesias, As a member of the Planning Commission, Carlos resigned several weeks ago from service on the commission.

Does anyone on the council happen to know Mr. Roberts? I don't. I just wanted to—

Do we know why Carlos resigned?

His wife, I understand, said you need to cut one thing out of your busy, busy life.

Okay.

And Planning Commission was—

It's nice to have you on here. Right, I understand.

Are you down one more?

The other one is an ordinance for the amendment of the Orange City election, which we have discussed here before. Then we will move.

It's a minor change we discussed last time. I know it was put back in, and so require citizenship and then the first few items. Yep.

Then on our scheduled items, we have a public hearing amending Section 225-3A and the zoning map of the City of Orem by changing the zone on approximately 6.2 acres of property located generally 1187 North, 1200 West from the PD45 Drive zone to the HS Highway Services zone. Jason's our presenter.

Jason, any From that, other than they just want to rezone it back to highway services to allow them a little more flexibility.

Okay.

So I've had some residents— Jamie asked me, we had discussed if Jive was going to go in and put in these buildings that we were going to make adjustments to 12th West, a stoplight, widening of the road, etc. How does this play into that, or does it not?

So, from what I remember, the addition of those improvements were contingent on Guy's Building, what they would propose.

Correct.

So, as currently, if we were to rezone, we do not have plans in the immediate future to build a signal, for example, at 12th West and 12 North. And that intersection, for example, would still be subject to the same warrant process we go through for any of our interchange intersections. And when it in fact did meet warrants, then we would proceed with construction of a signal if necessary. But we do have money set aside to rebuild 1200 West, not expand 1200 West. From approximately 10th North to close to 1600 North.

Curb and gutter, fix the road?

It's currently under design now.

It'll be a reconstruct of the driving surface itself, and they'll put in curbing wherever it's missing.

Still 2 lanes, or would it be widened at all?

It would not be widened. So no real estate would be purchased?

It's just taking care of the surface?

We do anticipate one day the need to look at expansion of that road, but within the approximately $1.6 million that we have to do that project. What about the intersection? There was discussion before about changing some of the access at the intersection. Again, I think a lot of that was contingent on the intensity of use. Sorry, I'm thinking 1600 North interchange.

That's different.

This is 12th West. This would be 12th West. I would imagine, I would imagine as part of a future 1600 North expansion project, that that conversation would be had in cooperation with that project. rather than the 12th West project we're talking about. Is it still looking likely that the state's gonna take on the 1600 North as a state road? I think we actually have the support of our legislative delegation. We have Senator Hemmert, who is part of Senate leadership, who has been a very helpful and strong advocate for that project. And so I'm quite confident— I had a conversation yesterday morning with the Deputy Director of UDOT about exactly what is Orem looking for as part of this overall discussion. And I reiterated to her that our focus is one, on the expansion of 1600 North from essentially 12th West where it necks down to 3 lanes, to State Street. And then our second priority is Center Street from I-15 to Geneva Road, and expanding the width of that road as well. So that is kind of the marching orders that we've given those that represent us up at the legislature, and that's been reconfirmed with UDOT. Senator Emmer is doing a great job of representing the city and our interests, and we have included a request for $20 million to help expand that 1600 North corridor. The state has not come out yet with their UDOT appropriation bill yet. We are quite anxious to see if it does include the $20 million and feel pretty It's going to be part of that appropriation bill.

I just wanted to bring up one thing real quickly. NPS opened up, and within the last week, they had 250 people waiting outside the door before they opened. They had 800 people that morning, and the entire parking lot was filled. And it's been filled almost every day since they've opened. And the store is doing very well. Because several stores have closed, they've been able to pick up people from other stores. They had so many people at the grand opening, they had to go back to Toys R Us, pick up some of their shopping carts, and bring them up because they ran out of shopping carts. But anyway, they're doing well. It's going to be a great addition to Orem.

Thank you.

Jamie Gibbs from City Manager.

Yeah, just a couple of FYIs. The first one is we closed on our bond this morning. So Richard received— we need to do some sort of one of those big checks.

$27 million and change.

Yeah, $27 million deposited into the city, obviously for the project. And so—

And the effective interest?

3.7%.

7. 7.

Across the 6 schools. It's an average because some are higher, some are lower.

So, you know, obviously we're very pleased. We also today had a family fitness center visioning effort. We spent 3 hours with the architects and tried to make sure we advised the architects as to what were the top priorities within the project. Everything from obviously family change rooms to multipurpose spaces to a track to some of the other amenities that we hope and need to include in the fitness center. This is just kind of the precursor to the public process and to the public conversation. They just needed kind of a foundational reference as to what they're going to build on. And trying to identify potential square footage of the facility and trying to fit all those pieces into the future building. So I thought it was productive. We went about 3 hours and 15 minutes, and we'll reconvene in a couple weeks, actually, or next week. Yeah, Thursday next week. Things continue to progress with We've completed our library, and I think I mentioned to you that we are out to bid on our contractor, general contractor, construction manager for the fitness center, and we'll anticipate bids on the 12th of March. There's a mandatory contractor meeting for those interested in the project this upcoming Thursday morning at 8:30.

Just for—

you may be interested in a couple of legislative issues. We talked about Tier 2 retirement and public safety. Just tax reform, yes, it's going to happen, we think. The Republican legislators met in caucus, closed caucus today, and the group of 4 that have drafted this tax reform bill essentially shared it with the Republican caucus. It's 240 pages from what we've been told, and we anticipate that we will see a draft of the bill by the end of the week. The representation of the 4 that drafted the bill is, in terms of broadening the base, everything will be taxed unless it isn't. That's their representation.

So, Genius.

We don't know exactly what that is, but by the end of the week we should have a better idea. There are provisions within the bill apparently that hold us quote-unquote harmless. And by that, if we are earning, for example, a dollar today in sales tax, there are provisions in that bill that says with these changes you are still going to at least earn a So you'll be held harmless and will not be negatively impacted from the bill. That's problematic, however, because there are certain things that the state wants to uniformly apply to every city and town in the state that may not necessarily ideally fit with Orem. For example, we have a CARE tax. Many communities do not have a CARE tax. What does that mean for us and our care tax? Will that be held harmless? Are we going to be in a situation where if they lower the tax rate, we're also going to have to lower our care tax amounts? And if in fact that's the case, are we still going to, for example, see $2.2 million of care tax prospectively? They've talked about putting a cap on sales tax growth in the future. They're concerned that nobody reaps a windfall from this broadening of the base. With that said, we don't know what it means. So we're very much a good-based economy. We have many retail outlets. If they move to a service-based economy and they look to tax attorneys and accountants accountants and others, we don't know as they lower the overall sales tax rate if we have a sufficient number of attorneys and accountants and other folks within the City of Orem that will be paying sales tax that will quote unquote make us whole. So, um, we'll know hopefully by the end of the week, but it's a very, very aggressive effort with only about 8 days left in the session.

Then we'll have to respond.

I have a few other things, but I can wait till after.

Okay, let's go ahead and adjourn and head over to City Council.

And then really quick, there's new mics. We got new mics for the last week.

You don't push the button, you just kind of put your finger over and kind of touch it when you touch the button.

It recognizes our finger length.

Yeah.

And then we, we We set it whether it'll let you talk or not.

Maybe, yes. Yeah, I don't know why.

So we, uh, maybe we're asked to speak in church next month.

Who? Maybe children's control or something. What's the church?

Children's meeting room.

We're not sure yet.

They're not sure if they can finalize it, but it's not for another month, like, any match.

So is that while they're doing speakers?

Is that the council time?

What was that?

Yeah, that's what—

for the pre-meeting.

So, hey guys, how are you?

Want to shake your hands?

Took me half a year. Do you know most of you?

Have you admitted to 12:45?

Sorry.

I like it kind of the way she did it.

Not too early, but not too late.

So you can just go completely surface.

There's power in a total Here's power, there's trouble. Good to see you.

Hey, how are you doing?

Good.

Yeah, I think we have the same parole officer. I see. Hi, Elaine Parker. I live on Palace Station on about 5th North. Where do you live? Oh, I'm sorry.

I knew that.

I am so sorry. I knew you guys lived down the street, but you're normally with another woman when I see you.

Who's that?

That's my girlfriend.

Oh, okay, good.

The sun came up, man.

You got to open up for Mom. How's it going? Good to see you today.

Good.

How you doing?

Yeah, I knew his wife Carrie passed away, but that's been a couple months, right?

Yeah.

Hopefully your pressure's a lot less this time.

Oh yeah, the mics work.

The mics.

Good. So you just have to touch them and they turn on and off.

There's no buttons.

Okay.

But you'll see an LED light when it turns on.

I'd shake all your hands, but I'm kind of fighting a little bit of a cold, so I'll do kind of an air, air five.

An air knuckle.

I know your son. Hi, how are you?

Test, test.

Gosh, there's a familiar face.

How you doing?

Good. How you doing?

Francis.

How's the fishing?

It's not happening right now, but hopefully soon.

I'm itching.

I'm really itching.

This is, uh, I'm missing my mom.

Sorry.

These look uncomfortable.

Good-looking shirts.

Wow.

We would like to welcome everyone out to our city council meeting this evening. And would like to call this meeting to order. We would like to begin with a prayer by Chase Taylor and then the Pledge of Allegiance by Kason Taylor.

Dear kind gracious Heavenly Father, Thank thee for this day.

Thank thee that we could be here together for this meeting. And please bless the city council that they can be wise in their decisions. And please bless that we can all be safe. And thank thee for the safety in the city. And thank thee for all thy many blessings. And in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

Amen.

Color guard, attention.

Audience, please rise.

Scout salute.

Color guard, post the colors.

Please join me in saying 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.

Color guard, please form in picture. Color guard, at ease. The audience may be seated. The audience is seated. You should have formed and get a picture.

I have 3 right now.

He gave you another one.

Okay, I'm sorry. Why don't you—

could we have the Scouts come forward? We want to give you some certificates. Just come forward right there and stop.

Thank you.

I might.

I don't know that I am.

Thanks for coming.

Great job.

Thanks, guys.

Thank you.

Thank you, Scouts. Always great to have you here. We would like to begin by going over the upcoming events. First of all, the City of Orem on March 7th will hold a futsal court kickoff at 3 PM at Geneva Park. On March 7th, we have UVU men's basketball Orem City night at 6:45 PM. On March 7th, we have Dr. Christy Kane presenting a presentation on technology at 7 PM at Orem High School, Unplug and Connect. On March 9th, we have the 14th annual benefit arts gala at the Sarah Center for the Arts at 5:30 PM. March 14th, we have the Hillcrest Elementary School celebrating 65 years from 6 to 8 PM. March 15th, we have the Hillcrest Elementary School Gala from 6 to 8:30 PM at the Orem High School, not at the Hillcrest Elementary School. On March 19th, we have the Utah Valley Chamber of Commerce Pillar of the Valley at 7 PM at the Utah Valley Convention Center. On March 25th, we have the UVU Nordis Center for the Performing Arts ribbon cutting at 1 PM at UVU. On March 27th, there will be the inauguration of President Tominez, the new president of UVU, which will be at 11 AM at the Nordis Center for the Arts. April 20th, we have the Sunset Heights East neighborhood picnic at 11:30 AM in the community park. April 24th through the 26th, we have the Utah League of Cities and Towns 2019 mid-year conference at the Dixie Center in St. George. April 25th, we have our NPU Spanish resource night at 6:30 PM at St. Francis Catholic Church. On May 4th, we have the City of Orem Centennial Birthday Party from 5 PM to dusk at the Orchard. In case you haven't heard, this is our 100th year and we are celebrating with many events. So, uh, on May 11th, we have the Miss Orem Organization Scholarship Pageant at 7 PM at the Sears Center for the Arts. We now would like to go to a report from the Beautification Advisory Commission, and I believe that our presenter is Aaron Aurelian, our commission chair. And Aaron, maybe you can introduce anyone with you.

Be happy to do that. My son Sean's gonna— Sean O'Roulian's gonna run this. So I have Elaine Parker here and Jason Bond. So we have 2 new people on our commission. We were hurting for commission members, but we do have some new people.

Great.

So we're excited to show you what's going on with the commission and some of the things that we've done and some of our goals for the future. So I'm going to let my— let Shawn take over and—

Mayor, I don't think you had them all introduced. I only wrote down 4 names.

Sorry. Is this working? Can you hear me well enough?

Yes.

OK. So yeah, Sherilyn is right behind us here. And then there's Jason Bond, Elaine Parker, Aaron Aurelian, and Shawn Aurelian.

Right.

As always, we're excited to be able to present to you guys the things that we've done the past year and also the plans that we have for the upcoming year. So to start off, I'll just read the mission statement that we have for our commission. The Orem Beautification Advisory Commission seeks to preserve and enhance the beauty of Orem City. We strive to inspire businesses and residents to continually beautify their surroundings through city-sponsored initiatives events and programs. There are the commission members that we have currently on our commission. The one that's not pictured in that photo is Melvin Rodriguez, and then we have David Spencer as our City Council rep, and we're looking forward to working with him this year and getting a lot done with what our goals are. We are currently 2 commission members short for a full Commission. So if anyone's here that wants to be on it, talk to us after. We can tell you how to do that. We're always recruiting. So 2018—

go ahead.

I think we got to get Jason on it. I think he could help us.

He could help you for sure.

So 2018, we continued the Adopt-a-Pot program where we would petitioned businesses throughout the city to purchase some pots that were subsidized through our budget to be able to—

Clarify that.

So yeah, to beautify their businesses, places where they usually don't have green space to do that. We didn't— we've kind of been declining in the productivity of that project. So we have decided after this year that we're going to focus our efforts on something else. And we'll probably talk about that later on. And then our participation in the Summerfest parade, which was very entertaining.

We—

our entry was with Cook's Greenhouse. And was it just Cook's?

You gave away a lot of plants, as I remember.

Yeah, Cook's. And they handed out— yeah, they handed out a lot of plants. So that was fun and exciting. It's crazy how people, just for a little potted plant, go crazy on the street.

Yeah.

It's like candy for kids. plants for the adults.

There you go.

The next thing we did was the Arbor Day participation. And also, we have done improvements on our Facebook page, which is continually growing and doing very well for those that follow it. If you don't follow it, you can just get on Facebook and look us up— Beautification Commission— and we have posts constantly throughout the year on different things related to our commission. And then we continue, obviously, with our Hollywood— our holiday— I was going to say Hollywood, but no, it's Holiday Decoration Awards with the winner certificate. And then our Beautification Awards with a resident and our business signs. Those are the signs that we've been putting in yards. But this year, we've decided to do a little different. We're going to be making— we have temporary signs— I'm sorry, how would you describe it? Signs that are kind of like the holiday award sign where you—

Pickle?

We can just give it to them, kind of like the, uh, when people run for office, they just post those in their yard, those things, and we just give it to them. They can keep it. It's kind of like their prize for winning, and they can put it up whenever they want. So we're going to have those made, and that makes it a little bit easier to facilitate the—

Great idea.

Awarding. So let's go right into the Residential Beautification Awards that we've given out. This is just a snapshot of the few that we've, we've done. Um, we'll just kind of scroll through these pictures. As you can tell, every year when we, uh, bring these pictures and show you, show the council. It's amazing how much time and effort there are that's put into a lot of these yards that our residents do. I'm always, I'm always grateful for their efforts and always thank them when they— when I do give them awards. We have some very amazing yards in our ward, in our, in our neighborhood, and that's self-evident with the pictures we have here. And, and I would say 9 times out of the 10, But we go to a house, people are very excited to get these awards. You get occasional people that are kind of shy and don't want to be recognized, but that's understandable. I'll let Aaron talk about these business awards that he handed out.

Yeah, we're excited that our businesses are starting to do things that are beautifying their businesses. And so these are some of the pictures of some of the places that that we shot pictures— that I shot pictures and gave award to. And they're so appreciative. This is Nord Orthodontics, and they just got through on State Street redoing their place, and they were all excited. They all came out. And, uh, this is a care center on State Street. Um, can't see the name of it.

Covington.

Covington. And it's a beautiful job they did on, on decorating, and exciting they were to get the award. Go ahead.

Those are the, those are the 3 I've posted. Okay, let's, let's move on to the Hollywood—

I keep saying Hollywood—

the Holiday Decoration Awards.

He has aspirations.

Yes, not really, but, um, we, we had a lot that we handed out as far as these awards. Here's just a few of the pictures.

We—

it's amazing some of the effort that people go to to to decorate their yards, and it's always nice in conjunction with the city's efforts on the grounds here to beautify the trees and that. But this has been going for a few years now, and hopefully it'll just get bigger and bigger as we go along. It's a great way to show Christmas spirit and decorate in that way.

Very excited families during the holidays.

Yes.

I've seen some over-the-top decorations, schemes, and yards.

Yes. I mean, I've been giving these awards to the businesses, and we have several businesses now that are decorating their business. It's interesting, you go down State Street, and you'll see some of the businesses have done some real good jobs on decorating. And so, you know, it's catching on. The businesses are catching on along with that.

I think as far as government beautification awards for Christmas, you actually should put a plaque out in front of the City of Orem. Uh, the lights— I was thinking of—

we were thinking about that, uh, but, uh, I guess we could do that.

The City of Orem is receiving a lot of attention from a lot of residents for the lights.

You guys went out of your way this year. It's really, uh, it was really beautiful. Um, love to drive by it and see it, so Next year you'll have a sign out there that we'll give you.

All right, so that's, that's just a little bit of what we've done this past year. We're going to go into our goals for this coming up year, and for the first goal, I'm going to have Jason talk about that. And this is the first goal. You can go ahead and start.

Yeah, so the, so the centennial celebration is happening all over the city, and we just want to commit ourselves to participating. So participating in and supporting the city's planning efforts to plant 100 trees for the centennial celebration in 2019. We want to be involved in project considerations, the Center Street improvements between I-15 and 800 West, and be involved with any other centennial activities or events that help to beautify the park.

Thank you.

So I guess with that last bullet point, that means if you guys have any suggestions or ideas of way we can get involved, I'm sure David Spencer can relay those on to us in our meetings, and we'd be more than happy to do that. As far as the Center Street improvements, from what I understand, that's going to be bid pretty soon and started, and we're excited to see how that's going to look as a major corridor into the city, how that's going to look as far as making that street look a lot nicer coming up the hill. So we're excited for that project. All right. Goal number 2.

Elaine.

OK. This is to promote worthwhile practices that enhance the beauty of Orem. We have several things we want to do there. Encourage Orem's residents and businesses to beautify their yards and properties through the recognition awards. Recognize residents and businesses during the holiday season for their efforts in decorating with lights.

displays.

We want to encourage the City Council to approve the proposed xeriscaping policy that was put out this last year. We want to participate in the city's Arbor Day activities that help sustain Orem's Tree City USA designation. And one we've added this year is to educate residents on city codes regarding posting of yard sale signs and advertisements on city streets.

Do you guys have any questions on any of those goals?

So the last one—

Yes.

—might be applicable to the campaign that will be coming up this summer. Oftentimes, I've seen campaign signs posted on city property where it is not supposed to be, so—

Yeah.

And we believe that too much and putting it in the wrong place does make the city look cluttered. And it's not— it's not what we want for our city. So that would be something we would consider in that goal as well. And then for our 3rd goal, that is to promote the roles and activities of the Beautification Commission, which are: to update and maintain the commission's bulletin board at City Hall; to continue to promote the commission and beautification activities and education opportunities through its Facebook page and city newsletter; and to again participate in the Summerfest parade. And those are the goals that we have for 2019.

Yeah, I might say that we appreciate your support in us and helping us with making the city beautiful and all the things that you've done. Several, several of you have been on— worked with us on our commission and And I think we're excited about the centennial. I'm really excited about West Centre Street. I've been yelling about that one for years. And so we're going to be excited to see how, how that turns out. But we want to thank you for your support and your help in all that we do.

Well, thank you for what you do. We appreciate your efforts and appreciate your activities. We like your shirts as well. You look good.

So, Councilmember Lentz has a comment.

First of all, it's been great serving with all of you and wish you luck as I transition to another commission. I did want to mention too, I was at a ribbon cutting for Spherion on West Centre Street just a week or so ago, and they mentioned that they were actually wanting to do some kind of beautification project on that corner because we have that new kind of fountain across the street on Centre Street kind of welcoming people into Orem.

North corner.

They were thinking of trying to do something to kind of balance or mirror that on the other side, so that might be an opportunity in tandem with that West Center Street project over there to work with Spherion on something on that.

We appreciate the new signs that are going up and, you know, anything like that. We even thought about maybe even as you come out of Provo Canyon to have a sign there that you're now entering Orem, you know, that they know that they're on our turf.

Yes, Jamie?

Just by way of information to the committee and to the City Council, we are working to put gateway signs at each one of our entry points throughout the city. However, we are facing significant, I guess you could say, concern from UDOT. So on roads that are state highways, there are very stringent requirements and regulations as to where we can post those signs. And so, for example, 800 North is one of those. where we'd very much like to post more prominent signage, but given the limitations that UDOT has given us, we're not able to. So we're having to find alternate ways of, for example, posting signage on our infrastructure and in our right-of-way rather than on the right-of-way of UDOT, because they govern, for example, that road, 800 North.

We need to get a member of UDOT on our commission, and I think that will Resolve itself real quickly. Thank you very much. Appreciate having you here. Uh, we'll now go on to, uh, personal appearances. Uh, Steve Downs, uh, any personal appearances? No? Okay, we'll move on from there to our consent items. Uh, consent items are 3 of them. One is the approval of many minute meetings from our City Council meeting February 12th, 2019. We have a city manager's appointment to the Planning Commission. Jamie, you want to say anything? I think we've already talked about it. So anyway, that particular gentleman is Barry Roberts, who part of our staff has met with, and an ordinance for the amendment of Orem City Election Code 2-3-3 and 2-3-4. I move that we go ahead and accept these consent items. Is there a second?

Second.

Okay, Councilmember Lentz, we'll start with you.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye. Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Consent items passed. We'll move on to our scheduled items. The first one is a public hearing for an ordinance amending Section 22-5-3 A, and the zoning map of the City of Orem by changing the zone on approximately 6.2 acres of property located generally at 1187 North, 1200 West from the PD-45 zone, 4 Jive, to the Highway Services HS zone. And Jason Bench is our presenter.

Good evening.

Thank you, Mayor, members of the council. The program just decided to reboot itself, so I'm not sure why it's not coming up at the moment. This property, as you know, is the Jive property on 12th West. Hopefully I'll have a slide here soon, but they're simply wanting to rezone it. Back in September of 2015, if you recall, that's when we rezoned the property. The council rezoned it to the PD-45. It was Highway Services at the time. The applicant is simply wanting to— the new owner of the property now wants to take it back to Highway Services to give them a little more flexibility. The PD-45 does require them to meet the concept plan. As you recall, that's a 9-story, 140-foot-tall office building, and they're not position to build that at this point. They want to do a— they've remodeled the existing building. They want to do an RV sales and then over time be able to build some office buildings as the market dictates that. So they're simply wanting to go back to Highway Services, which does have a limit of 60 feet height. There are some setback issues— or not issues, setbacks typical to the Highway Services zone. So there, in our opinion, there's not any issues that would be related to that. The Planning Commission did recommend approval.

Thank you.

And they're here before you tonight to get rezoned back to that Highway Services Zone. I'd be glad to address any questions.

Any questions from the council? Okay. This is an issue that we went over extensively several years ago, and we're putting it back to the original zone that it was. This is a public hearing, so I will open it up to The public, anyone who would like to make a comment, is welcome to come forward and hold their comments to 3 minutes and give us their name. Seeing as how no one is coming forward, we'll bring it back to the council and continue on. Are there any comments from the council?

No.

Okay, I— Would you accept a motion? I thought I clicked the button. You just did.

Okay.

Jamie, clarification. 2 and a half years ago when this came up, I had to recuse myself because I knew the then-developer. I don't have any relationship with the current developer, so I'm good. Okay, then I would like to make a motion if no one else has a comment. I'd like to make a motion then that we amend Section 22-5-3A And the zoning map of the— of the City of Orem by changing the zone on approximately 6.2 acres of the property located generally at 1187 North, 1200 West from the PD-45/Jive Zone to the HS Highway Service Zones.

Is there a second?

I'll second that.

Okay. We'll go ahead and start with Councilmember Lentz. Aye.

Aye.

Aye. Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

The ordinance passes. Thank you, Jason, for being here. Uh, much quicker this time than last. Um, we do have some information items from our city manager, Jamie Davidson.

Mayor and council, just a couple of additional legislative issues that you may be interested in learning a little bit more about. Um, one is House Bill 320, the Container Regulatory Act. This is a specific bill that was introduced to prohibit cities from essentially outlawing plastic bags. So you may be familiar that there are several cities in the state that have moved forward with an effort to ban the grocery store plastic bags. This is a bill that would essentially limit a city's ability to do that. I would suggest to you that the conversation being had is not necessarily about plastic bags, but more so local control and an opportunity for a city to make that decision independent of state oversight. And the arguments, for example, that municipalities are making is, shouldn't that be a locally discussed and approved issue rather than having a— for example, umbrella law that is passed on the part of the state of Utah to essentially limit our ability to determine what is best for our respective communities. There are a number of bills this legislative session that just kind of serve to do that, and I think are concerning because it suggests that the state legislature is reaching even deeper into municipalities and requiring them or not requiring them to do certain things. This relates to land use, this relates to things like plastic bags, state retirement, addressing the state homelessness issue, housing affordability. All of these issues have state oversight that is somewhat concerning. Another bill that I want to bring your attention to is HB 119. This is referendum language amendments, and this is specifically Representative Dawe's referendum bill. And I'd like to just give a special thank you to Representative Dawe. He has been very willing to have a conversation about this bill. Granted, we don't agree on all pieces of the legislation, but he is open to Having a conversation and understanding different points of view relative to the referendum process. One kind of sticky point that we have yet to agree upon and may not be able to agree upon is this question of when a referendum becomes a referendum. The city, as well as the Utah League of Cities and Towns, is suggesting that is an issue currently before the state Supreme Court, and rather than legislate a determination as to when a referendum or when a petition becomes a petition or a referendum, let's allow the state courts to decide. But as currently drafted in this language and in this bill, a referendum or proposition would be considered such with 5 signatures and an application to the city recorder. There are additional provisions relative to communication and, for example, helping the city council by way of a petition, a referendum information pamphlet to be distributed in advance of a vote to help provide voters with some additional education as to, for example, why you made some of the decisions that you may or may not have made in the course of a referendum discussion. There are some additional conversations and pieces in the bill related to due process. So in the event we have somebody who has, for example, violated the terms of communicating in regards to a referendum, there is a process outlined whereby an individual can seek seek and go through a process to determine whether or not a fine or a fee was appropriately assessed and the like. But very appreciative of Representative Dawe and his willingness to continue to have this conversation. And finally, just another bill that is of concern is House Bill 311 that deals with government immunity. and some changes that are proposed that relate to not just the city recorder and the filing of a claim, but the potential even for a claimant to approach you and to file that claim with you or with me and not exclusively through the city recorder's office. There are other provisions of that law that, for example, Right now, if a notice of claim is filed, then an individual claimant has an opportunity to commence legal— or it has a requirement to commence legal action up to 1 year after the notice of claim. Our understanding is now it's 2 years, at least.

It might be a little bit more nuanced than that.

Okay.

But it does change it.

And then there's some other provisions. So this, I think, goes again to hurting the way we, for example, administrative—

some—

administrate some of our risk management practices here in the city and provides people with more of an open window to stake a claim against the city in the event that they, for example, have been harmed or they're interested in litigating something with the city. And then, of course, the tax reform discussion that's ongoing, and we should know more about that by the end of the week.

Okay. Thank you very much. If there's no other comments, we'll go ahead and take a motion for adjournment.

So moved.

Oh, do you have a comment?

Yeah, some of the people who are here were looking for an agenda for the meeting and they printed out new ones.

Yeah, grab those and come up and we'll sign them after the meeting's adjourned. So I do have a motion to adjourn. Is there a second?

Second.

Okay, all in favor say aye.

Aye.

Thank you, we're adjourned. So grab your agendas, you young people, and bring them up here and we'll