City Council · 2019-12-10

Well, Dave, you're on the backside.

You're on the backside instead of the front side.

Backside of the year.

I have to be careful because I'm diabetic. I can't eat very many. I'm supposed to keep under 30 grams a day.

We were just figuring out, Mark and I, that he's been to at least 308 city councils. And he's thinking with this council assignment, it's nearly 500 Well, we would like to invite everyone here to our City Council work session and would like to go ahead and get started. We're going to hear some information on the Orm Fitness Center project. By the way, Tom McDonald is not here. But he will be calling into our city council meeting. Anyway, so we will turn some time over to Joseph Smith with Method Studios.

Great, thank you.

How's everyone doing?

Good, good.

And we do— hold on for a second— we do have one new employee, I believe. So, Chris?

Yeah, I'll do it.

Uh, okay, Mayor and Council, this is Aaron Barney.

Okay, Aaron Barney is a new full-time employee in the Parks This is his first day of work, actually. He's the Tuesday to Friday shift. Aaron worked for us this summer as a seasonal employee, and when a position became available, he applied.

He was the most qualified candidate, and we're excited to have him on. And is this the first City Council employee introduction, or have we—

No, we've got our second one.

Okay, so I know this is a new thing, so we warned him.

Is there a certain part he's over?

Uh, which quadrant?

We've switched, we've gone to quadrants now, so we're going to have him—

Make sure there's some spats and some of the—

Yeah, yeah, those are good. Did you prepare a musical number? I didn't. I actually just found out about it. If I would have had a little bit more notice, I could have.

Can you just dance then?

My boots are kind of heavy.

That could be a song.

So Aaron, if you want to say hi to the council and tell them a little bit about yourself.

Howdy.

I'm basically a lifelong Orem resident. We moved here when I was 7. Been all over the world, and it's always nice to come back to Orem. Got a wife, 5 kids, 5 daughters. Yeah, a little bit. Um, and yeah, just happy to be working at Warren, giving back to the community.

Good, glad to have you here.

Thank you. Anyway, that's, uh, that's all we've got. Anyway, maybe we should go around the room if we can and just introduce ourselves, you know, who we are. Uh, I'm Jamie Davidson, the city manager.

Richard Brunson, Mayor.

David Spencer, City Clerk. Ryan Clark, Development Services. Brandon Nelson, Finance Director.

Skip us.

Brent Sumner, City Council.

Steve Downs, Deputy City Manager.

Greg Stevens, City Attorney. Barb C. Strand, City Council. Brenn Beike, Assistant City Manager.

Debbie Lurais, City Council.

Chris, Chris Shirkey, Public Works Director. Scott Ernie, Fire Department. Paul Hirschberg, Recreation.

Sharon, Treasurer and Library.

I think with the announced quiz, we need you to point to Debbie. Good. I'm closing my eyes.

He's got a black belt.

That's right. We could ask Charlene too, and you'd probably get that one right.

And maybe your public works director, that would be your ultimate boss.

Well, thanks for coming in.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me. Welcome, welcome.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor.

All right, Joseph, we'll come back to you.

Sounds great. Joe, is it okay if I jump in real quick?

Sorry, Mayor.

I just want to acknowledge that Scott Smith and Joe Smith, congratulations.

We also have our Big D team here, Spencer, Jameson, and Brennan. They're the ones running our project out there on the ground and estimating and project management. So great, great job so far and the great design. So thanks, Joe. So, uh, the, the goals today is to bring all of you up to speed on the development of the interior. So the way we've delivered this project is in packages so that the construction can start We're going to start early, and so we've been working in that way as well. So at the tail end of that is all the interior design and interior architecture. And so we're going to walk you through the model. There is still yet to come some additional development on the interiors, in particular with some branding and environmental graphics. So you're not going to really see a lot of that today because we're just getting started on some of that. But this will give you a good sort of spatial feel. and what some of the finishes are beginning to look like. So just as an update to all of you, we have the model that we'll walk around through and show you the different areas of the building on screen. And then for those that are interested, we have just a couple different views that you can see in VR of the central sort of lobby space and then up on the running track that we'll give you at least a spatial experience of what this thing's shaping up to be, which is what we think is starting out really quite nice. And then additional layers will come into play and it'll even get nicer. So does that sound like an okay plan for the meeting?

Sure.

Okay, and then how much time do we have?

45 minutes.

45 minutes, great. That's, I think, just perfect. So we're going to take you using a software program many of you may be familiar with, familiar with, but this is SketchUp. And then we'll transition for some views to show you a little bit more of an enhanced rendering. It's not fully 3D real, but it's more enhanced than what this is. But this tells the story pretty well. So there's the enhanced rendering, and then you go back to the SketchUp, you can kind of start to see the differences of those rendering qualities. But this is the actual SketchUp model, so it allows us to kind of navigate more So as you come through the front doors, this is the kind of what you begin to see. This is halfway from the front doors to the front desk. You've got your front desk, your info boards, the running track that's clad in wood coming overhead with views and openings up above. So it's a 2-story volume space. And then the skydome panel over here. Along that wall, as you come in the entrance, we had Indy preserve some of the gym floor of the original gym.

So— That's fun.

We had taken and used those, paint striping and all, and created a pattern out of that so that somewhat brings some warmth with some energy, you know, that sense of gym and then sense of the past. Right up front along that wall right there. So as you go through, and once you get past those check-in points, there's this central stair element that takes you up to the fitness area above, or you navigate in and around this to go to the various areas of the building. And if we need a refresher on the plan, we can also pull that up if needed as well. But the The studio you see beyond is one of those children's studios, so either for tumbling or dance.

Actually, we switched it to dance.

To dance, right. So that's the dance studio. Tumbling will be behind it. Tumbling will be behind it. And then you can see the 2-story volume and sort of the sitter play of the running track kind of running through there. The stair is acting as a device for Not only moving people up and down, but also to be able to provide some seating areas. Parents will be able to sit along the backside of that, kind of create some benching, so it becomes a little more of a dynamic element within the space itself. So you want to pan around, kind of look at the various—

Yes.

So this is the teen lounge, kind of an esports area. This is the entrances to the childcare, and then the entrance to the gym area right there. We'll have a screening element that keeps balls from falling and coming into this lobby space. Here's that front desk. Looking at that front desk. So some of this is going to change, and we're going to be studying that as part of our graphics and branding efforts. But so that's just a hint of, you know, just showing that there might be something there. Back to gymnastics. Sorry if this makes you a little bit dizzy. So coming around the stair here, which is now the children's dance studio, but we're Gymnastics originally.

That's now been—

the gymnastics has been switched over there. We have ceiling elements that we have to provide acoustical absorption in this so it doesn't get overly loud. So we have some traditional ceiling tile, but we've created some slots in that ceiling tile just to start to play with it and make it a little more interesting, but still managing budget in a very responsible way. This is going down. Racquetball courts marching along right here. On this back end of the corridor, some benches sitting across from them. But that back wall not having a lot of distracted, you know, elements so that it's, you know, a lot— not necessarily a lot of traffic or distraction on those classes. And that was a request that the racquetball group made. This is the back entrance leading upstairs. The space between the racquetball courts and the studio has a corridor that leads into the gym space.

Can you tell us how wide the track is? So you have a spot for walkers, a spot for runners. Yeah, there you go.

Yeah, so each, each lane is 3 feet wide with a little bit of room on the outside. It's actually 10 feet wide, but the lanes will be 3 feet each. And so they'll each be either color-coded or Divided by these lines.

And are these the colors you're looking at?

No, the model doesn't represent the colors.

Okay.

Not yet, at least. So they'll have— each have a different color to them. The 3 of them will be— you'll have 3 different colors there. Kind of looking back to the front entrance and lobby area.

So at one time you were going to have a ramp walking up?

Yeah, it's still there. Still there. Okay, so this is the functional fitness. We have the incline ramp, the stair. This is plyometric platforms to jump. Up and then to slide back down.

Brilliant.

Thank you. So with a large opening on the floor there, you can see the track running around, look down into the functional fitness area. And Joe, just as a reminder too, there is a community room on this, on this level too. So that's—

Yep, there is.

Also part of the— He'll take us through the walls and Get us over there. So from the front entry— I'm going to have to slow down here.

Sorry.

I could actually walk a little bit slower if I use the hand cane. So that's the entrance.

The community room is over here.

We can go look in there if we have time. This one may not be. Let's check. It's more open. I mean, it's just, it's a big open room, but there's a little more to it than this mess. Sorry for getting you all dizzy to come up the stairs. There's a stretching area right here with some cubbies along the side, a little check-in station. The upstairs is going to be for 14 and up, I think. Is that right, Carl? 14 and up for upstairs, or 16 and up? 14.

You have your spin studio right up at the top of the stairs.

It takes on kind of its own look and volume. We'll have the ability to To screen this off because they really like it really dark, but then there's also a desire to sort of open it up at times as well.

So the idea you could show movies in there?

Oh, in the spin studio? Yeah, you could.

And you could, but they, they like it dark, they like the music, they like to pump the graphics and everything, so they'll have a way to black it out.

also have a way to make it light also.

Will those spin bikes be immovable or will we be able to move them around? Are they just going to be stationary, bolted to the ground?

No, we can move them.

They won't be bolted down. They'll be stationary bikes, but we'll be able to move them around.

The expression in space is going to be— there is going to be a lot of exposed structure, but it's the layering of some clouds beneath that structure. And in this space, this will be a blackened plain ceiling. Again, trying to darken it up per their request.

Will the music be— I mean, they get really loud. I've done spin classes.

Will it be insulated or will the music be able to hear it all over?

I'm sure you'll be able to hear a little bit, but there is some soundproof, and that's why that was kind of moved out. Away from everything else.

I mean, it's, it's into the middle, but it's kind of away from everything else just for that reason. Yeah, so it's separated on all 4 sides, you know, by a hallway. Your, your sound transfer weak point is the glazing, so it does manage to mitigate sound to a degree, but there is some bleed-through. But that bleed-through comes to the direction of the lobby space. Large studio space, large studio space.

You can go back out, kind of see just the car spot.

Can you, can you just go back to the entry of that studio space?

From outside?

From outside, please. One thing I, one thing I would appreciate on the community room downstairs is you have kind of that side window on that space. I think it would be helpful to have a side-type window on You're talking about the side light right here?

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, we can just— Just so that—

For sure.

There's, there's an opportunity to peek in. I know that's a ticky-tack thing. That's a good, good observation. I'm not sure now, but we may leave it that way and just not that way in our graphic model. Jamie, is it, uh, could it be accomplished with a light in the door itself, or do you want a side light in the door? You know, I I mean, I think we can accomplish both. Are the windows, all the frames ordered already? No, we'll— these 3 walls already. So just, just at least people can see it.

Yeah, so I mean, again, the look would be different, and it'd be back to method to say, would it look ticky-tack or cheesy to have a door light?

No, as opposed to a side light. We already have that in there.

I don't, I don't think it We'll look into it.

Just for security and child protection issues, sometimes it's good to just have a window. I agree.

Is that how you're going to do the lettering, the way you've got it there? No.

Again, that's a placeholder for now, but we're going to study that with— So, Mayor, we just signed a— we just signed essentially an addendum to our agreement where Method is going to help us in terms of branding communications package for the whole facility. Yep.

I mean, I actually like it like that personally.

Yeah, and yes, that's exactly what it's getting.

That'd be my preference.

We're going to study the font type and, you know, that sort of thing.

I mean, it's just the old scale. See the old words right across the top?

Yeah, this is a little more dynamic.

Nice to have something new.

Yeah, so we'll be studying the scale, the width of the letters, and, you know, how tall it is and how it's actually the finals. So right now they're quick placements. Something refreshing.

Yeah.

So this is the running track coming around. You got the glass area looking out to the north and the east. It's a— what they call a mondo floor. Not quite this. There's a whole box of it there. Okay. Yeah, it's, uh, if you've seen the one in Provo, it's the same material. It's a mondo rubber floor. That has a little bit of a give to it and some great traction. Yeah, it'll be similar rubber floor throughout, but the track itself will have more of a grip, more traction. Especially made for tracks. That's the workout area, fitness area. There's a lot of dynamic between the upstairs and the downstairs.

And so acoustically, you're planning for the sounds and mitigating those?

Yeah, so this is all acoustical panels up here, and we're doing something playful with them to, you know, sort of express the kinetic and the energy, the movement that occurs. And then even in these areas where there's exposed structure, we'll have panels up higher. Joe, you talked about the lighting kind of finding its way through those cuts in the ceiling. So there'll be lighting that's integrated throughout this, within these cuts and some of these voids that help light the space. Create that sense of layering and depth that we think, you know, brings a lot of energy. And then other pendant lights that express the opening in the floor of that inclined ramp.

So how high are the ceilings on the second floor?

The deck, it varies from 15 feet to 18 feet above the second floor. Yeah, it's pretty tall.

Nice and airy.

Yeah. There's also an admin area for the conference room. Carl, how do I get in my office? You want to take them outside of this and then show them sort of that bonus multipurpose room or extra space that we ended up with right there? It's more developed than this. There's a studio there. But yeah, let me back up a little bit.

Brandon, we just need to build you a new building where you're not stuck in Which, I'm not opposed to that.

So the main entrance to administration will be here, and then there's an extra bonus multipurpose room back here. We've added a little bit more glass to that. Yeah, we've opened that up a bit more than what's showing now. And then this is the doors that lead to that extra shelf space. We talked about potentially building outdoor space But as we talked with Method, their suggestion was, we're going to have to cover it anyway. So why not make it indoor space, we just won't finish it for the time being. And as your needs expand and grow, then you can grow into that space. So that's exactly what we've done. Look at that locker room model. This is going downstairs into the family locker room. I'm excited. Yeah, actually it's a good view. So you plan to enter the family locker room from here, which you can also enter in from up there. Then we have all the family changing rooms here, and then the center core with some Walkers. You can see the patterning that's occurring in the floor, and, you know, alternating just between 2 different colors. This is one of those spaces that it's, it's designed right here in the model. Initially, when it opens, it's going to look a little sterile— not necessarily sterile, but a little plain— and then we're going to revamp it up for the final opening of the whole building so that it looks fresh and new. So this was one of the areas that was identified as potentially receiving some of that environmental graphics and branding to bring a little more energy to the space. But for now, we're creating the bones of the space and the lighting and ceiling, functional, you know, functional working locker room area.

So So the lighting looks like it's all LED strip lighting.

It's LED.

Yep.

If you look at the lockers there in the family, what we noticed as we went to other facilities was that they have more of a mix of large and small lockers, but the small lockers never got used until the larger ones were full. So we've gone with a little bit bigger mix of larger lockers.

Carl, a small question.

Would you still need like a quarter to—

so how do you do it now? How will you do it?

I believe what we're going to do is bring your own lock. But what Provo does is they cut them off every night.

So you can't take it home with you.

You can't reserve a locker. You can bring it, put your own lock on, and then at night Jason comes in and cuts them all.

And Provo actually sells locks for $5, and they're combination locks, and it actually works really well. I've done it and used it. I bought my own lock.

I like it. That is good.

Provo does have those, um, things that will like spin your swimsuit and dry them out, and you get a lot of those because the line was long to try to line up. 2 or 3 more than that.

We have a few of those in the The other locker rooms? We've got 2 in the family locker room somewhere and then 1 in each of the individual locker rooms as well. So right now it's just 2? 2 in here and then 1 in each of the men's and the women's. There'll be 4 total.

Okay.

Will there still be— there's 1 currently out at the pool.

Is that one going to be removed or will there be 5?

Uh, sorry, the centrifuge?

Yes, we'll have those.

The one they're asking specifically— In the pool area.

Right now we had—

yeah, we had the one at the pool.

I think they're in the locker room here, aren't they?

Yeah, the one that's on the pool deck is gone.

Okay.

All the doorways changed, so some of that stuff was taken out. Do we need more than that?

Well, I would say yes, because I've, I've had to wait 10, 15 minutes to try to do that.

Unfortunately, it's already— the electrical conduit's all in.

Oh, really?

So that's how far we are on the All right.

In this area.

And those things are expensive and they break a lot.

So I—

we're probably where we're at.

Okay.

But it's more than you had before. 4 instead of 1. Yeah.

Which is improved.

Do you want to take them back into The lobby space, just pull up the still renderings. So again, these are still somewhat under development, but they'll be— and then they're going to be modified to include some branding and graphics.

So is that polished concrete?

Yep.

Then we have this space in the VR goggles, and then we also have it from the position of being up on the track if anyone is interested in seeing. If you want to be the first to try it out. Which one's upstairs, which one's downstairs? I believe this one is downstairs.

This one's downstairs.

Does anyone want to try it? Why didn't you pick them up? You can go for them like that.

The eye level on the upstairs is a little weird, but—

I can see that. Just don't jump off. I was just saying. You get a little bit of a feeling of going on the edge.

Dave, stay in the same lane.

Stay in the same lane. Stay in the same lane. Marco, pull away like that. Marco, pull away.

The walls are talking.

Can you go from the entrance?

Well, I think I can make some cement levels.

Okay, so that's all cement?

Yes.

So right up to the front doors?

Well, we'll have walk-off roofs, so it won't be concrete. Right, so you can walk off that. We may, I don't know. So the question is, on the cement, are you sure you don't have water on your shoes? If it gets wet and slippery, then what do you do? We'll put some mats or something here. That's a good point.

But I'm talking further on.

Is that going to look tacky or? It's a typical kind of thing that we do once you get past the entry. You just move ahead and walk. Okay. You just be like walking in a subway. So these are single point point of view. They usually have runners like carpet. Long, long carpeted streets.

I think you'd have to zone because if somebody slips, then we're liable.

Yeah.

Even though it takes—

Yeah, we typically do have runners in their buildings to take away the moisture on the floor.

So, uh, no skateboards on the ramps like that?

Which way to the pool? Back in the back? So I'm walking to the pool right now. This is down the hallway.

I have the upstairs. Oh, so this way there's some offices and some things here.

This is undeveloped.

This is where the locker room is.

And then through this door. I also saw that.

Anyone else?

I'll look at it. Well, I'm here to do this. So that's not the project, that's tile. I know that there's tile here, but not— they come out and they walk right through. They get on the cement and slip and fall. Yeah, we're gonna need some sort of, uh, carpeting or something. Something for kids. Yeah, that's a good question. I know that there's drains there, but you know, they run through the locker room and they go away. around a little bit. So, um, work— when we get the environmental graphics and branding kind of integrated, we're going to do a little more advanced model so that you can see more spaces and walk around a little bit more. So, and we'll come back and show you our 2 basic warm-up rooms.

So can you give us—

what's the program you used to create this model? So, um, we have SketchUp.

This is SketchUp.

And then we have a plugin called Enscape on top of that. It changes sort of very well with the lighting. So we're really just looking at this model in a kind of a more rendered form.

So can you give us an update where you are and what you've got done to date and what the schedule is?

So we, we just delivered our— the 4th bid package. We're working on the The second addendum to that package for bidding, uh, the interiors mostly, some of the exterior finishes. Um, we want Jameson to kind of give us an update on construction. Yeah, you talked about it. Um, just a general update, is that what we're looking for?

Yeah.

So right now, uh, we have a few footings left to pour, uh, then mostly areas that are kind of still up in the air as far as exterior design of the skin. They're on the south end of the entrance, but all the footings are on the north end of the gym are poured. This Thursday we're going to be pouring the playground, childcare, multipurpose room sidewalk grades in preparation to start pouring tilt panels. So within the next month we'll have some tilt panels on the project stood up, and that'll really change the view of the project. The structural steel is in fabrication right now. We've gone through that process. We have masonry walls that are 30 feet tall right now. They go up to 36 feet. We'll top those out on Thursday and then start coming clockwise around the building, back around to the south. So we're going to lose a lot of production at the end of this month just with the holidays and the weather. Right now it We've had a couple days of weather that have slowed us down, but we've had some pretty decent weather.

How many men do you have working on this site?

It ranges anywhere. I mean, on a slow day we're 33, on a high day we're 55 every day, just pushing really hard.

So all the change rooms and bathrooms and whatnot?

The locker rooms are 100% plumbed and piped for electrical, everything underground right now. So all the— they're all masonry through there, so we all had to bring the foundation within masonry.

It's all done up to grade elevation.

The floors are poured. The floors are poured. So that's why it's really hard to put another swimsuit spinner in there. They get plumbed directly into the sewer line. So, Orm City is actually out there right now tying The gas line is supposed to come in at the end of this week. The water line is going to go after the sewer utilities. And yeah, by the end of December, we should have all the utilities pretty much tuned in and ready to go. Building should be going up. James, maybe you can talk about some of the work that we're doing in the pool area as well. Yeah, so right now we've cut the pool deck. We've got about a 30-inch wide Kind of trench around the pool deck. We're replacing all the drains through there, so we've cut it and we're just about done taking it all out.

Okay.

They've had to work in that small area, so they've got some really specialized equipment in there that they use. And over the course of the next couple weeks, we'll be digging in new deck drains around there and connecting it back into the new building underneath the footings that we've kind of stuffed in and A lot of it wasn't being used. They were old water gears that just needed to be gone.

Sure.

Good.

And the difficulty with the drains, and Amos has minimized it a little bit, is on the southwest corner here, like this deep, but on the northeast corner where it comes out, you're 5 feet deep. And so it is a big project that the, uh, the 40-year-old cast iron pipes had just dissolved.

Sure.

There is, there is a lot of work going on inside. Have we fixed the liner of the lazy river at this point? Because we were in there maybe 6 months ago, or whenever that was, and— CM is in there today, doing some maintenance and some repair work on that liner.

Great. I know we're still kind of in the, uh, design phase of our spectator seating. Can you maybe speak to that? I know there's some concern about if we cut a hole in the wall, do we undermine the brick above? Yeah, there's been some new talk after talking with our structural engineer a little bit. We're still not 100% sure which direction we're going, whether we cut a hole and then support the brick above with a big beam. with columns, or his suggestion was to take out almost the entire wall itself and then build a new spectator seating to support itself. And so that— and I like that idea, but it's being investigated right now, so we have to— I can speak to that real quick from a cost standpoint. The way, you know, we— the initial approach to this was to cut an opening Support that opening and basically build around the opening. So what you'll see from the outside is the existing brick up and above with kind of a new, you know, kind of pop-out on the side of the building. That's the way we're going to gather the bids right now, but we're keeping it as an alternate on our bid form. So as we get the pricing, we can put that together and, you know, kind of be able to show the city how much this spectator seating will cost as designed. And then we'll do some investigations. with the subcontractors to look at kind of a full wall removal, and then we can see from a cost perspective what makes the most sense, and from a schedule perspective. There are some real advantages to taking down the whole wall, but it does require some more work and actually some more materials to then enclose. So, but they may, they may be— I mean, we don't know what the costs are going to be until we start getting into it a little deeper. So we've kept those, those items separated for now in the cost so We compare them when we get to that point. So this space is a little more complicated than we first thought. We've actually sat down with some of the swimming representatives and Carl, myself, and others and talked with them. They are quite specific as to expectations. We're trying to meet those expectations, but also trying to meet a budget that frankly is probably less than than ideal. But I think we're making progress. We're going to do our best to provide something that is not perfect, is not going to meet every expectation, but I believe will meet much of the expectation that they have as related to this.

And if anybody asks, that will not be done by April.

Correct.

We were shooting for a later time period.

And the swimming people know about that. The swimming people are okay with that. The aquatics area, though, is still on schedule for April. End of April. Let's just start that now.

April 1st was a joke.

April 1st.

April.

It's end of April. It's always more than that.

As you can see, I mean, this project is moving lightning fast. Appreciate Spencer and Jameson and Brandon.

What they're doing is— I mean, you're hauling.

We're doing everything. Yeah, so it's— Has the weather been pretty decent?

It's been great.

It's been—

had a couple days, but we've been really lucky with the weather.

Yeah, we have. He just juked us for it. Dave told me that.

No, I didn't.

I had nothing to do with it. Keep the snow in the mountains, a little rain in the evenings, and the 40-degree temperatures down here. Did you want to just share a little bit about materials, or were you prepared to do that? Yeah, we have some of the samples here, but they're not necessarily finalized. So we have an example of— that's a sample of the flooring with some of the paint. And this is the wood tone that in essence we're using as a sort of cue for the rest of the wood, any of the new wood.

Is that the old gym you were saying?

That's the old gym right there. And then let's see, that's the tile. We got the ceiling done. So how do we, how do we want to do this? So do we need to pass it around or I can just hold it up? This is the tile, the 2 tiles that are going in the locker rooms. They have a little bit of a grip and a texture to them. And maybe we just pass those around. Wall tile. I don't know if that needs to be passed around. And then this is the CMU, the home-colored CMU block that you see in the renderings in the locker room areas. On the wall or the floor? Some of the walls.

Walls?

Basically this wall. Yeah, and that's just a thin sample. These are 8-inch thick, 16 inches long. Full blocks. So they're a full block. This is just a cut-down sample. And we have just some samples of what we're looking at. We're still— this is a quartz that would be countertops. So there's 3 different samples of that that we're looking at. And then this was a sampling of some of the paint colors that are just being explored. The brighter colors are going to be part of that branding and graphics from 9 Little Mermaids. Some of the neutral colors are what the background's going to be. So those, those brighter colors I'm laying it on is just some initial ideas.

Yes.

That's what we've got.

What do you think?

Looks very nice. Good job. Be interested to see the colors when we get closer.

Yep. One of the things we really like about what Method has put together is obviously stairs need to serve a purpose, but there's additional function in having them serve as— Some dynamic to them. Yeah, seating. And this kind of serves as a gathering spot in the middle of the facility, which, you know, there always seems to be one in a public space, you know, whether it's a fountain in the outdoors or Or a fireplace or something like that, people gather around. We see that kind of stairway as being one of those gathering spots for the facility. The other thing that we didn't really talk about is the indoor playground, which you mentioned, which is also going to be something that is new to Orem. We're excited about that, as well as we're working with our engineering staff and Method in the design of the outside approach to the front doors. We do have a north-facing space and entry, and so we're concerned about obviously temperatures, snow, ice, and such in the wintertime. We're trying to do our best to mitigate those kind of conditions, and then at the same time trying to adjust for an elevation change that is different between the parking lot And the building itself, and you kind of see that in the exterior of the building, we'll actually have to drop down a bit to get into the facility so that we can essentially build in a manner that it flows into the parking lot.

So I imagine it's probably too expensive to put hot water heating in?

We actually are planning to do radiant heating. Yeah, right at the front entry here.

Okay.

So that's in the drawings right now.

Good.

And rock climbing wall?

The rock climbing wall is planned for that area that's kind of blank right now, just to— just around here. Once we kind of see where the numbers come in as far as In this area here. Once we see where the numbers come in with this next big package, we'll see if we have the money right now to go forward and get someone on board to help design it. So we're really hoping that someone would come and donate for that, but as of now, nobody has.

But it will go there.

So right now, including the contingency, Which is approximately $3.2 million, $3.4 million?

I don't know off the top of my head.

I can look it up real quick. So we are, we are over budget. However, that over budget number also includes a pretty significant contingency. So if we can manage this in a way where we don't use a supermajority of the contingency, To date, the pricing has come in close to what we were estimating, or close to what Brandon's been estimating. Yeah, so we put together an overall budget a few months back, and then with each of these bid packages, we're kind of buying off chunks of the project. We're into 3 bid packages now, and for those first 3 bid packages, we've been tracking really well. In some categories we're under budget. There's been a few that were right on our close, but for the most part we're really doing well. This, this last bid package that's currently out to bid will really be the most important kind of— This is the big time. This is the big package that'll show us where we really are overall. And right now we're slated to get the bids from our subcontractors on the 19th of December. It's going to take a few weeks of time of follow-up phone calls and reviewing scope of work before we are locked in on a total number, but we should be able to know before Christmas if we're on track or not. So that's the goal, is get the bids on the 19th, compile as much as possible, and then communicate to the team kind of where we stand and how we're feeling. But we're feeling good thus far and optimistic we're on the right track. And I've said this a few times, Method's just done an awesome job of not only trying to meet Orem's needs, but they've been collaborating with us daily on, on cost just to make sure that the design is meeting with our budgets, and we feel optimistic we're on the right track. But we're not ashamed to take any additional donations or contributions, so if there are places you'd like us to go, people you'd like us to talk to, we're obviously Very interested in doing that, and have since in recent months. The mayor's been a big part of that, has helped us kind of get the word out.

And I did follow up on Zion's Bank. They have been redoing their foundation, and they will have a number for us first quarter, but not until then. And they have said they are donating.

So that's awesome. Anything else, uh, that, Jamie, you want us to cover? Questions, council? Anything that you can— you're interested or concerned about?

Looks great.

Looks good to me.

Well done.

Well done.

Appreciate the professionalism and the expertise.

Yeah, just Method, Big D, wonderful partners, really appreciate their efforts. And like I said, this is a very fluid project. You guys don't show the stress I know you feel. Let's just say I need a sunspot over the kitchen when this is done.

Well, thank you very much. Appreciate it. All right, now we'll go into a discussion of rental license and utility building changes. And Steve Downs—

doesn't sound as fun, but I need a vacation when this one's over. Yeah, let me know where you go.

I—

this is really just an opportunity to say I don't have a presentation. I know many of you have been getting questions, so I want wanted to answer a couple things that have been asked of some of you just to get everybody on that same page, really. So just, just a couple things I wanted to highlight. One, again, the proposal tonight is that the utilities— it is really as simple as the utilities would be required to be in the name of the owner on all residential properties, and then a landlord license of $50 annually would be proposed. A rental licensing ordinance would be adopted. Given that we, as we have when we've made changes to any of these rental properties, we've usually always given a lead time so that they can make any adjustment or change they need to. This would all go into effect on July 1st. And so the actual fee of $50, which is what's being proposed, would be adopted during the annual budget as part of the fee schedule.

So—

Beginning in January, people can start putting utilities in their names. July 1st is when we would start billing for the license.

So that is the general overview of what the proposal is in front of you tonight.

And the license will be renewed each year, $50?

Correct, correct.

But no per-unit charge, correct?

No per-unit charge.

As we mentioned, we have the ability to do a per-unit charge only on single-family rentals and Like townhomes or condos, because those are the only ones where the data suggested that the impact on city services were greater than a standard owner-occupied single-family home. So we have had questions about why are these large apartment complexes getting off with just a $50 rental license and somebody renting their basement's getting charged the same $50. Again, the $50 is to cover the cost of licensing, and it's Doesn't take more time to license a unit, you know, one owner just because they own 500 units as it does, you know, one another individual. So that's, that's, that's why $50 across the board.

And Science Bank determined the $50 because I had some pushback on—

Science Bank determined—

so what we used was their, their When they did a study to show how much it costs to do a home— a business license, it's basically the same process.

That's—

it's $105 is what you could charge. We do charge that for a homeowner home occupied license. We just cut it in half to be sensitive to the cost and just to feel like we're being fair. So it is $20 in Provo if they own one unit. If they own more than one unit, they pay $60.

Okay. So, just to— yeah, so that's not quite— that's as simple as 20. Do you foresee that going up in the coming years?

You know what, we haven't— that would absolutely be the call of the City Council. If it does what we think it'll do, we don't think anytime soon that that would be the need.

But that would be your decision into the future. I guess I would qualify by saying we look at our fees annually to determine The cost of providing a service within the city, you know, whether it be a rezone application or providing a customer a police report, if that cost increases because the cost of doing business increases, then we would anticipate that potentially this fee would adjust commensurate with the increase in providing the service and providing and essentially maintaining it. Right now we don't intend to just increase it.

Yeah, we don't have a status indicator or something. Just so you know too, this came up before, there are a couple of exemptions in this. One is, and you brought this up, what about the family who's maybe their young married couple moved in with them and they want to charge them a couple hundred bucks to help with utilities? We're not requiring a license for somebody renting it to their family. And in the same spirit of that, where we wouldn't be requiring a license for the— we have an exemption that allows somebody who's 65 or older if they're just renting a room. They haven't created a separate dwelling unit, they're just basically renting it almost as if it were their kids. Those would be the 2 exemptions to this.

How do you define family?

Same way we've always defined it.

I mean, it does list it in the ordinance as far as, you know, parent, child, uncle, But we're not changing the definition of how we define family.

Yeah, it's, um, I think that when we talk about the exemption for renting to a family member, I think it's actually defined right in there. So it does say it's a— they're related to the owners, a spouse, parent, child, grandparent, grandchild, etc., etc. So it spells it out right there. That's in 12-9-3. So, Steven, maybe I can clarify something you said.

Please, please.

We haven't written into this the exempting out the 65 and older renting to 2 people. So I guess maybe that's something that needs to be discussed because that's not what's before you right now. So if you want to make that an exemption, then we'll have to add that language.

Yeah, and I appreciate you saying that. Yeah, that discussion came up from a question that a council member had asked. Yeah, we talked that over. Yeah, we already have a signed affidavit from them allowing them to rent that as a 65 and older exemption.

So you're saying if they do that, that converts their property into a rental dwelling then?

If they do what?

So if there's a senior that's renting it out to, you know, a couple that they're not related to, for example, to help take care of the property or something.

Yeah.

That then converts their home to a rental dwelling?

It does for anybody. Anybody who does that becomes a rental dwelling. The question is, do we want to exempt that category of the 65 and older from having to pay? Because right now, if you have a— say you've got a married couple, they cannot rent to 2 unrelated individuals.

Right.

Because that becomes 4 people who are not all related to each other. But we made an exception for people who are 65 and older. They can. So the question is, do you want to exempt them from, from getting a rental license? Do we have a lot of those, 65 and older? Not— I don't think there's a lot.

And the exemption is to them personally, not to the property?

Yes.

So if they move, the exemption on that property goes away. And in the ordinance, they're not allowed to create it into a separate dwelling unit.

They can't create a basement apartment.

Would you be able to kind of draft up what that language might look like for tonight's meeting, or would we have to put that on hold?

No, we could do that.

We could do it 2 ways. We could try and come up with some language beforehand, or you could just— if you want to tell us to do it, we'll come up with it after the meeting. The other option is if you do nothing, it goes in as is, and if, if you see that becomes a problem, you go back and put it in.

Correct.

Yeah, but I don't think you have too many that— we were surprised at how few took advantage of that option, so I don't think there's Not very many, but I think that clarifies that you are renting and you do become a— it's a rental. We've just given you some carve-outs that make it easy for older individuals to be able to utilize houses that are used in a way that's not being used.

Because it's only specific if they're renting it out to a non-family member, right?

Correct.

If it's family, then they're already exempted.

Yeah, they're already exempted. I think you're okay to leave it.

The other thing, just, this has come up, we've had a couple of council members ask questions about what does our shutoffs look like right now. One proposal that some of the landlord community has said is to just, well, just don't wait so long to shut it off and then the amount going to collections would be less, which is true, of course. So we did look at We did look at that to say if— so how it works currently is if you've gone 2 months behind and you have a 3rd bill in hand, you're going to get a shutoff notice with a date to come in full. If we moved it to 1 month, I had our utility billing look at how many did we send— we just send a delinquency notice saying you're a month behind. We did that to— we'll do that to approximately 800 people a month. So we would be significantly increasing the number of shutoffs if we were to do that.

That.

And we'd be impacting a lot of people negatively that currently, as we all know, sometimes we all get maybe a month behind and we're going to catch up, but we just are. So it wouldn't be our preference to make a change like that that would impact everybody else when we've really narrowed the problem to an empty apartment type. So, but that is how it currently works. 2 months behind, 3rd month bill in hand, then we'll start the process of shutting off.

It's about 3 3 months by the time they actually shut it off. The other thing is—

What's the difference between 1 month and 2 months then?

You said 800 for 1 month. What would it be for 2 months?

Well, that's kind of how it is right now, right? You're 2 months behind and you're gonna get the shut-off. So if we went to 1 month— so that is what we currently do, which is we end up shutting off about, I think, about 20 a week.

So 80— so almost 100. Yeah. Versus potentially 800. Do you look at their past credit history? I mean, sometimes you just forget.

Yeah, we know.

Well, yeah, when somebody has actually been shut off, we start looking at that and requiring deposits. But yeah, what we have, if it's a single-family rental unit, again, about last year, almost 9% of those accounts went to collections. In an owner-occupied situation, 0.79. So in all other situations, almost every time they end up— he ends up getting paid and we don't have to go through a collections process. So it's just—

it isn't an issue on any other type of property, and so we don't want to make that resolution.

The other thing that I didn't realize—

Chris could speak to this too—

but when an account has been shut off, we have to monitor that as property still. We have to drive by it. Make sure the lock hasn't been cut. Make sure they're not getting water from their neighbor or something like that. So there's a lot of maintenance on these shut-off accounts too. So again, we go from 100 to 800.

We're—

we literally would be hiring people to drive around and monitor shut-off accounts. So it wouldn't be our preference to do that, but it has come up and I wanted to bring you up to speed on that. Are there any other Those are just those couple things I wanted to kind of touch on.

So I just had a question for Brent. He's a current landlord in this situation. What are your thoughts?

Well, I think I'm probably looking at it as a kind of a safety issue as well. I mean, you got these single-family homes that are Statistics show us the problem. A lot of those are being run illegally and dangerously. And I think— I'm looking at the database, probably American, you know, so public safety knows where they can go exactly, who the owner is, and they don't have to look in Texas or wherever. I don't, I don't see a problem with it. I've been in this business a long time, and if a landlord said, well, I've got to up your rent $100 because the city's doing this, that wouldn't hold water to me.

So rent hikes—

Well, it's $50 a year.

Well, yeah, but, but some, I, I don't know, I'm not—

Some will use us as a— Some use this as a Is that an exclusion?

So Brent, I have a question for you. I've had some landlords say, well, if I'm paying the bills, there won't be any conservation incentive on my people who live there. They're just gonna run it and use whatever they want. So my question is, are you thinking that's gonna be a problem or do you think you'll monitor it more?

Well, I think they'll look at it closer 'cause I had that very problem about May. My water bill shot way up and I went and inspected every, Toilet, faucet, and I found toilets that were running and faucets that were dripping.

So you think you'll use it more as a tool to find problems versus letting— I just had someone tell me that if I'm paying the bill, they'll just water, they'll take longer showers.

They're paying the bill.

Yeah, yeah, you're passing the bill on to them.

So it doesn't— if you get a bill that's high, You're going to watch if they're watering the lawn? I mean, my people don't water the lawns. I take care of that.

So you don't think that'll be a problem?

I don't think so. I think it'll be more of a benefit for conservation of water.

I think the landlords are going to pay a lot closer attention to the people that are renting, making sure they're complying.

And I think it'll— Chief Giles, he can speak to this, but I think it gives him a little more direction or maybe speeds up some processes on, you know, where, where the owner is or isn't?

Well, the rental licensing definitely makes it— I think would make it easier to track down the owner. I mean, because if they don't have it, then we can—

then, then it's a clear line. Yeah, you know, if they don't have a license, then it's kind of a clear line for us. And if they do have it, then obviously they've left this good information available. Yeah, and, and one concern I have is if there's an illegal rental, a residential home, and for some reason they get complaints that turned in for 15 cars out front, and then you go there and it's an illegal rental, does that start your process of, of, you know, getting them to Can it get legal? It can. And I think we've talked more about this, I guess, in the exec staff rather than in here, but that's still—

it sounds really easy, but it's difficult to figure out who—

you know, when people tell us that they're all related, it's hard to figure out who is and who isn't. And, you know, it just depends. If they're honest with us, that works out really well. If they lie to us and say they're all cousins, Or they're all brothers and sisters, it's hard for us to figure out who can and can't live there. So I don't know that this will resolve all of that.

We still have to investigate, and that's just part of being a police officer is investigating all of that. But I think it helps.

It definitely doesn't make it harder.

So I think it would help us, but it doesn't solve all of our investigative needs.

But speaking of that, what is the definition of family?

And I don't think cousin was in there, was it? Cousin is not. As far as, uh, yeah, one family occupying a dwelling, cousin is not. Right. Just, just, it used to be that, and the reason I said that, it used to be a lot more broad where it said blood related. Blood relative. And so, you know what I mean? But we get to the point where now we finally have honed it in a little bit better, but we still get people lying to us about who they are or if they're non-paying guests or something. Or, I mean, it's just, it still takes a lot of investigative efforts is what I'm trying to say. It doesn't just make it simple, okay, we get there and it's all laid out for us. Sometimes it's still a little difficult to figure it out and bring them into compliance because people do lie to us a lot. Well, I don't like to pay $50 any more than anyone else, but I think it's a good plan overall. Maybe I can— Keep track of. Just to add something, I think Steven and I kind of agree on this, that we've kind of started out with a program that we feel is very basic and not very onerous because really the only requirement is that you come in and sign up and get a license, get contact information, etc. There are potentially a lot of add-ons that we could add on to this program if we find that it's warranted. For example, one thing that I've sort of preliminarily researched is if we have a rental dwelling where we have constant problems, say, with too many unrelated people living there, but we can never identify who they are, there's some case law that suggests we can require the owner to tell us who the tenants are that are living there and what their relationship is to each other. And that might help the police officers to— That definitely would help. You know, we didn't want to take that broad— that additional step right now, But, you know, this kind of is a launching pad for the future if we identify problems and ways to address that later on.

That's one reason I asked about the increase, for that very reason.

You can do a lot of add-ons and next year it could be $100 and, you know, then it gets to be, is that fair for the small guy that has a few apartments compared to Woodbury? Well, to tell you the truth, state law says we can't charge more for a landlord that owns more than one unit. So it's not just us being reasonable. Unless we have the good landlord. Unless, yeah, unless you can show disproportionate service costs. That's right. But the issue there is the multifamily just doesn't show the disproportionate cost. Question.

And I'm not even suggesting this is the right way to do it or a good idea. I'm just curious. With what you just mentioned about having them say, here's who's living here, here's how they're related, could that be— I don't want to call it probation, but if they've had like 2 or 3 violations that have piled up, then those people need to start providing that information, but not something that is just sweeping across the whole city?

Yeah, I think that'd be really difficult to do for across the city. If we do implement that in the future, I think it would only be in specific cases where there are crime problems. If I may too, just to note, and Stephen, maybe you can just tell, tell the group of our meeting with the Utah Apartment Association. We did in fact reach out to them and had a conversation with them. Kind of speak to their feedback.

We did, yeah. We had, we had lunch with their attorney that represents them, spoke through both, both sides of this, right? And I want to make sure that we It's because there's two— these are two kind of separate issues, although they affect the same people.

We wanted to bring them together.

The utilities being in the name of the landlord or in the name of the owner, they actually said, we see no issue with that.

In fact, we would support that. We would publicly support the idea of utilities just having to be in the name of the owner.

So that was the Utah Apartment Association that represent landlords all over the state. Then the second part was the rental dwelling license, and they said, hey, I think our membership would prefer not to pay the $50 fee, and we understand that.

That's—

I'm sure that's how they feel, and we don't argue. But they actually do get involved in licensing programs all over the state.

They do.

When there's a Good Landlord Program, they're actually the ones that the landlords have to take the class from in order to get the discount. So they financially benefit actually from a lot of these programs. We're just not offering a Good Landlord Program, so they don't have any financial benefit in our program. But we had a pretty good discussion. I think they were pretty reasonable and understanding, as they should and would and are hired to do. They, you know, gave some arguments that maybe some of the landlord community would feel, but nothing that we didn't feel like we could talk through and just in some cases agree to disagree.

So, Mayor, can we go back to the seniors? Yes. Um, Mark, I think, said they shouldn't be included, or We shouldn't change the—

Give them an exemption.

The exemption. So I feel they should have an exemption. So if you're 65 and, you know, she's a widow and needs help, somebody can move in and help them. I think that's a benefit.

I don't think—

I think we're doing a disservice to the seniors. So I think they need to be excluded. Now that provision is already in the code, right? But the fee— The requirement to get a license.

Yes.

So I mean, the fee, I don't think we should charge. Your concern is, is the fee type thing? Sure. Okay.

And I'm more like Dave.

And I agree with Dave as well.

So I think we should add that in.

So that would just be in the motion, correct?

Yeah, Steve.

Yeah.

And there's a couple options. You could either say they don't have to get a license, or you could say they gotta get a license, but we're not going to charge them a fee. In that case, that would be a possibility too. Well, we've got the information, but And since there's some benefit still having it, since it's tied to the over-65 individual, I think our recommendation would be please still get— Absolutely, more information the better, and that's why we're doing this.

And we do have, again, we do have signed affidavits from them, and that may provide us all the information.

We could look at that. Okay, so, all right, anyways. bring that back, what we charge back as part of the budget process when we propose the actual fee structure. We probably won't remember it then. So it might be a good idea to put it in the ordinance area. I think we remember. I'm pretty confident we'll remember.

Dave will remember.

Absolutely.

Okay.

And then one quick last thing. And I mentioned this about a couple of them. We did go through every neighborhood plan. We've adopted 7 so far. And all 7— well, 6 of the 7 specifically speak to absentee landlords and wanting to do something. 2 of them, and ironic, they're the ones that have the most, the highest percentage of rentals, Geneva Heights, Suncrest, Hillcrest, those areas, asked us to consider a rental licensing program to help manage those. And then 2 of the— 3 of them asked to help get additional resources to our neighborhood preservation unit.

This proposal does all of those.

That's good to know.

And what about our last 2 ones, one in Southwest? Do we have any feedback from—

I don't know if that's come up yet. It's working in Southwest Village.

Are you in Grant? That's your area.

Maybe we're doing the late— he's at Whispering Hill and Sunset East and West. Was there any concern from them? Because I think there would be, right? So we just talked about the housing, and yes, they want to see, you know, owner-occupied units for sure, um, and to get those, you know, more, uh, less managed, maintained homes to be more up to speed. So, okay, so with confidence we could say the neighborhood—

I'm sure right around the university that'd be the case.

Oh, while we're on that, we also— Dave and Sam were there— held a meeting night before last about this question with the Orem Neighborhood Association. There were about 20 people there. 13 voted. 10 were in favor of the proposal, 3 against. If you'd like, I'll read the comments.

It's all right, we don't have enough time for that.

Now this is just rentals, nothing to do with commercial business?

Just residential.

Residential.

Right.

The only residential. Residential rentals, yeah.

Yep. So regarding the exception for seniors, at a high level, I think I like the idea of still having them be part of the program, just exempting them from the fee. The part I do wonder about is if they don't comply, meaning they've been renting it out, not realizing, for example, that they actually have to get a license even though they're not paying the fee, are there penalties? Are we going to penalize them for not getting the license they didn't know they needed? And are we— rather than just exempting them altogether, but if—

There are penalties. Yeah, there are penalties for people who don't comply, but we always give people notice and opportunity to comply before we try to go that route. Our goal is always just to get compliance. Steve, all an owner really is going to need to do is get the utilities in their name.

Once the utilities are in their name—

Which is probably already the case.

Which is already the case. So once that's done, all the information is extracted into a license. They pay $50 and agree to certain things. So in these cases, we have all that contact information for them already.

Is it something they could do online, or—

Yes.

Okay.

All done online.

Okay.

And they will be in the name of the owner. The property manager can be added with access to the accounts, but they will be licensed by owner so that even if they change property management companies, we don't have to change all the licenses.

So, Stephen, has the computer programming been done for this, and will that go live?

Very close. Yeah, they're working on it and working through all these issues, but it will be ready to go in January.

Okay.

If this passes, you will have an open house or—

Yeah.

Information session? Yep.

Yeah, we— the plan would be to— I got it right here, this will be in tonight's presentation— hold an open house with all landlords and by property managers, letting them know about the changes and what they need to do.

Um, and then January, February, or when's your timeline?

Uh, yeah, January, as soon as, as soon as the program's ready. We talked about doing this earlier, but until, until they can make the changes, there's— we don't want to do this and then have them have to wait again.

So, all right, good, appreciate it. Let's go ahead and have a prayer on the food. Dave, could we ask you to give us a prayer?

We thank our Heavenly Father, the heavenly powers, the forces of good and evil, for blessing the property, services, and the warm meal. We thank for this food and bless the major sanctifiers in this food. Go out in joy believing this thing you say, Savior Christ. Amen.

So I was in Arizona last week. We went to have a family gathering.

So you probably didn't show up at the house.

My granddaughter Well, I don't know.

Well, they wanted to go over and use credits.

Department cards. Buy the gift cards.

I'm good with it.

It's great for the brand.

I don't mind it.

You're taking way too long to put it on.

We made homemade pea soup.

That's how poor we were.

Did you eat lots of tomatoes?

Lots of what?

Pork.

Uh, yeah, yeah, you're right.

Particularly out on the street if we were hungry.

What is this? Pork.

What is that part of it?

It's kind of a So what they sell on the street is corn with the toppings.

You got to be patient with it because we have a bunch of mashed potatoes and hot dogs all side by side.

Yeah, so Denmark, they probably take it right out of their hands and do it. They would have a roll and they would stick it on a— kind of like a roll.

A fish like halibut, they let it rot, put it in a can, they don't cook it, and then the can starts to mold, and then you open it up and eat it, and it's delicious. It stinks up the whole apartment.

It does.

Actually, we open it up underwater and then we feed it to the salmon, not eat it like that. And they would have smorgasbord. Yeah, big smorgasbord. In Denmark they had flæskesteg, which is a pork roast with a very thick rind that they would roast in the oven, and the rind was the doughnut. Then they would have brown sugar potatoes and then gravy and red cabbage. With the cherry sauce, and we called it bread pudding. Bread or rice porridge with chocolate in there, and we had little almonds in there, and they would chop up the almonds, but they would put the almonds on top.

If you got the almonds, you threw them on it, you threw them on it, everybody did it.

The whole dessert.

So in Sweden, we would have St. Lucia celebrations for, I think, 12 days or whatever, 24 days.

I can't remember.

But anyway, that was really fun.

The biggest Christmas-loving country is the Philippines. They start playing Christmas music in July, my daughter said, and stores start decorating in September. They celebrate for 6 all at once. She said it's the craziest fun.

That could get old.

I know they love it.

It gets kind of Christmas music going during November.

I know we won't do it until after.

I watch a few Christmas Hallmarks in July, I'm not going to lie.

Have you been to the, the, uh, the giving machine?

So we went to them. And then a big crowd out in Gilbert.

I've been 3 times.

I took my family.

Do you just use like a credit card or something?

Yeah, exactly. You just pick what you want. There's different things based on— yeah, and different— and each line is a different charity. So I've just been going on each row, and every week I go and do a new—

that's pretty cool.

That is pretty—

that's a great idea.

I haven't thought of it.

3 tickets.

3 tickets.

Do we need to pay taxes?

Yeah, it's a tax.

Yeah.

You go around out back and you get your page.

They'll take you to the mission storehouse.

They usually have 2, 2, 4 elders there all day long. They have red scarves. You can take pictures.

They give gifts.

Stickers. Yeah, like I voted.

Do you know that—

you're gonna laugh— but in Mexico there was a tribe that worshiped— there's a Pepsi can, there's some Pepsi with the bottle cap. They would literally do special ceremonies. This was true. I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. They worshiped the Pepsi.

Why don't we go ahead and get started? On our agenda, if everybody's ready.

Sure.

So, uh, going over what our agenda review is, um, our consent items are approval of meeting minutes November 19th, 2019, annual meeting schedule, which most of you probably have seen, for 2020, appointment to boards and commissions. We have appointment to the CARE Advisory Commission, Spencer Rands, who most of you know, having run for City Council. Appointment to the Summerfest Committee, Andreas Wiest, and I believe that she is in a wheelchair, but she loves Orm.

Yep, and it is a gentleman, just—

that is a gentleman. Appreciate that. And Shelley Seestrand, who we all know.

Does anybody know her?

Have the second half of the family there.

And thank you for her carrying on the family business.

Then we have reappointments for a 13-year commitment. Reappointments to the Arts Council, Barry Merrill and John Reinhardt.

They're both good.

Great. And then amending city code, allowing the city manager to appoint department-specific records officers. Do you want to address that?

Yeah, this is driven by in part by the police department and the number of records requests that the police department gets. And so this would essentially appoint a department-specific record officer that could manage all of those requests and not need to run all those requests through Jody in the city recorder's office. So Chief Giles is— and Heather is the one who's been working with that, and Chief Giles is supportive. And of course, Jody has supported to do that. And this is not exclusive to the police department. This would also allow other departments, if desired and there was a need, for example, the fire department, they too could become the records office.

Is that—

is that right?

Okay.

All right, then on our scheduled items, we have mayor pro tem coming up for January through June. We want to thank Thank Brent Sumner for serving for the last 6 months. He did an excellent job. I would like to suggest Debbie Laree as our next mayor pro tem. Any thoughts from the council on that? Okay.

Let's all be well behaved.

Then we'll move on with that one. Adopt the Orem voter participation area map. I think most everybody has weighed in on that. Seeing that, any comments?

Was this the one or—

Jodi?

The majority of you chose option 2. There was 2 of you that wanted option 1.

Okay.

Whoever makes the motion just says in the motion which one you're making the motion regarding.

Okay. The other one is a resolution for the fiscal year 2018-19 audit. Brandon, any thoughts?

I'll just give a few high-level comments about it and then turn the time over to our auditor who will do his thing. And I guess we should note that the city audit committee did meet— Councilmember Sumner, Mayor Brunson, myself, Brandon, and Brent— and reviewed the The audit in more detail with our accounting firm last week.

Okay, then a resolution establishing a community renewable energy goal. Um, Jenna is presenting. Anything you want to mention?

Just doing a brief overview and giving you guys the opportunity to choose to adopt or not adopt the resolution.

Okay, any comments from the council?

Do you know if, um, Jeff Boussoin from Utah Clean Energy is coming?

Um, I did not liaise with him. Um, I think Sarah was going to do that. Um, I know he expressed interest in that.

Okay, and then an ordinance to enact Article 12-9 of the Orange City Okay, this is a code rental dwelling license, and amending Section 21-13, require that bills for water service be in the name of the property owner. Any comments or questions from council? Okay. Um, then, uh, Jamie, do you have anything you want to bring up?

Yes, if we have a few minutes, I do have a couple of things.

Okay.

Do you want to go first or anything?

Well, I was just going to mention one thing real quick.

Sure.

And not take too much time, but if you get a chance, drive by the mall and look at Macy's because the North End is not there any longer and demolition has started.

That's all I have. Just a couple of things for your information. The Geneva remediation, the smell that everybody is concerned about, just provide a little bit of an update. The State Department of Environmental Quality has been chasing after the smell, and they have in fact identified the process that they are using to remediate the tar pits on the old Geneva Steel property as the culprit in The originator of what everybody is kind of calling the mothball smell. The DEQ set up, essentially what they did is when they were notified of this concern, the contractor, U.S. Steel, that was working through and trying to remediate the problem shut down operations. The DEQ came in and installed air monitors. And they're still there. And they essentially began tracking air quality in the area to develop somewhat of a baseline for what was going on down there. They have since initiated— and operations began again, and they also had those air monitors, and they reached the conclusion that what is taking place does smell bad, but it is not a hazard to the air. So there are limits that are, you know, obviously things are being emitted in the air, but the levels of emission do not reach the point where they're posing any sort of health hazard. So as you can As you might expect, this is of concern, and the DEQ has said, well, we are going to continue to monitor and we're going to expand the reach of this monitoring effort. So they are actually setting up air monitor stations essentially downwind from this effort. One of the places that they've set up a station is Bonneville Park. So there's actually a device in our park that is monitoring the emissions from the project and the effort. They are checking that daily and will be taking essentially levels, readings, on a daily basis to determine if in fact what is happening down there and what is being emitted down there remain in the normal or acceptable So that is what they are doing from a monitoring perspective. That doesn't change the fact that there are very specific smells that are coming from that effort and that project.

Which is very irritating to a lot of residents.

So the good news is there's a monitoring effort underway. They have identified what the concern is. The concern is not posing a health hazard, at least per current standards with the DEQ. The bad news is that this effort is going to take 5 to 6 months to work through. So now they are looking at what are some other things that we can use, what we can do to minimize the smells. One of the things that they're using is they apply a specific foam to the process that has essentially an ability to soften the smells or temper the smells. They are looking also at regulating when the work can be done. If wind conditions are such where they exceed a certain wind miles per hour in a given day, they can shut down operations. They are also Potentially looking at, for example, you're not required, you're not permitted to just leave the process to the open air. There may be an opportunity to cover some of the operations. So yes, there are things that they can do to mitigate some of the smells. The downside though is, for example, if you stop operations because the wind is more than 15 miles an hour, then there is a day that you're not going to be doing work, and that potentially extends the duration of the project. So the contractor, U.S. Steel, is specifically working with the DEQ, and tomorrow there is a scheduled phone conference that city administration staff in Pleasant Grove, Linden, Orem, Vineyard. Vineyard, thank you, is invited to participate in. You as elected officials are invited to participate in that as well. And I'll just give you the call-in number if you have an interest. It's scheduled tomorrow at 2:30 PM, and they are doing it by way of Google Meet. And the phone number for you to dial in is 1-909-906- 0-9-5-3, and you will be asked to enter a PIN, and the PIN is 5-8-1-3-9-8 and the pound sign. We continue to, we continue to get calls into our 311 center, on our social media feeds, people complaining Hey, Orem, you've got to do something about this. Uh, we're trying to keep everybody informed as to what the problem is. The problem is actually not in Orem, but we're doing our best to educate and provide information and to cooperate with the DEQ as they collect air samples, uh, in, in the surrounding communities. So unfortunately, this is part of the remediation effort.

So do we know, is this material being moved offsite or just moved in another location onsite?

Apparently it's, it's not being removed offsite from what I understand. It's more of a treatment type process that they go through.

Okay, alright.

If you have additional questions, I'm happy to, to talk with you. I have a contact at the the DEQ. I have also contact with the other cities and U.S. Steel, who is kind of working through this process. We also are in the process of meeting with council— in fact, the last day, day and a half, we met with Council Member-Elect Pedersen and went through an orientation process. And are kind of bringing him up to speed as to city council operations. He had an opportunity to sit down with all of our departments over the last day and a half and talk about city issues and be introduced to each of the respective departments. We're still looking to do that with Councilmember Lamson, and we've also put together an orientation guide which we've made available to all of you in PDF format. If you have any questions about what's included in the guide, you're more than welcome to contact us as well. Bren, just can you take a minute and talk a little bit about this council fundraising letter that we would like council members to consider signing? Yeah, so Charlotte passed this along on the dais. Essentially, uh, Mayor kind of briefly mentioned that, for example, we continue to follow up with big potential donors like Science and Tommy Peterson and Fight for Fighting with Ryan Smith. We're also continuing to follow up with IHC. We want to go back to the Eckles Family Foundation. We want to go to the county and request additional dollars As part of the TRT grant award process. So as we, as we do that, we essentially wanted to have a statement as part of kind of the packet or presentation materials that had all of your signatures supporting it. And it kind of speaks to, you know, on the one hand, of course, we went out for a bond to do this project, but there are kind of specific upgrades and/or unique additional Things that make it especially family-friendly and accessible to those of all abilities. So, yeah, again, really with the effort to kind of finalize and continue to follow up with corporate and even personal smaller donors as well.

If I might, the fundraising team has identified a large mailing list and we are going to list this out here at the end of the year. We hope to catch people at the end of the year and the first of the year. And it includes a how-to-donate sheet and a level of donorship information sheet and a recognition sheet. So there's additional information that will be coming out, and we will have it printed on mayor and council letterhead or a recreation of the letterhead. So it's just a clean white paper, but it won't go out that way. It'll go out with a the mayor and council letterhead. Just to keep it away from the food area, I did just leave it on Jamie's end of the dais and he'll just send it down. So we're hoping to do that this week.

Yes, thank you. So it'll help us create another reason to follow up with the bigger donors but also kick off kind of the small donation efforts.

Okay, nice.

And just lastly, if I may, obviously Obviously, several months ago an announcement was made by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints relative to a temple in Orem. We have met with the church and they did let us know that this would be a relatively quick process and they were anxious to get underway. Phase 1 of that effort actually begins tomorrow morning when I received a call today and the church is prepared to make an announcement as to the location of the temple tomorrow morning. So you may get a call from the media.

How will they make the announcement? Through the media?

Somebody's going to dress up as Brigham Young and stack the witnesses. No, so they're—

Will you let us know before?

So I've asked if they have any embargoed material material or anything that they're sending out in advance. They said no, they are not. They are actually making this announcement and, and another location in Utah announcement. They gave me the estimated time of 9 AM, and that's, that's really all the information that I have. And it is going to come from Church Public Affairs, so they'll just actually issue it. My bet is they Their primary go-to is the Deseret News, so you'll probably see it on the Deseret News and KSL 9 o'clock tomorrow. And then we can anticipate that we will begin in earnest with them on plans to obviously move that effort forward. When Mayor and I first met with them initially, they represented that they were Anxious and wanted to turn dirt on the project this upcoming summer. So they're staying true to— in fact, they told the mayor and I that they were going to release the location in the first quarter, the last part of the first quarter of 2020. And the phone call I got today said, hey, tomorrow's the day. So exciting things right before the holiday. I know it's going to generate a lot of, a lot of energy in the community. A lot of people are excited. You probably get weekly questions on our social media. Hey, where's the location?

And we know it's not Vineyard or Lyndon. It's actually in Orem.

We know it's not Vineyard. We know it's not anywhere but Orem. It's on church-owned property, and they're just finalizing the details of that property transaction.

They must have seen that Orem was ranked I actually demanded it happen before I leave, so that was good.

So before we run out of time, Sam, did you want to make a report?

I'll just hit a couple highlights here. So, um, HB 411 with NRSC, we're already going to be talking about that, so I won't dwell on that for now. They have introduced an idea of possibly having an anti-idling ordinance in Warren to discourage people from letting their cars run and, you know, generate exhaust fumes when they don't necessarily need to be running. This is the NRSC, but they, they were talking to staff and it would be difficult because the goal wasn't necessarily enforcement of ticketing people. It was more just kind of educational and trying to change behavior. And so what we're— what they're approaching now is just trying to do kind of an educational and awareness pilot where they'll put signs up in locations where people are more likely to be idling, maybe, you know, school drop-offs and things like that, shopping areas, those types of things. And we'll see how it goes over the next few months.

And we brought that up with the Alpine School District, that they adopt a program whereby the cars will not be idling out in front of the school. Schools as well as the school buses. They have 280 school buses that are outside idling for an hour waiting for kids, and Granite School District actually worked with another company where they can install a device that the school bus can stay warm without being on, which is huge. Anyway.

Yeah, so Utopia yesterday actually got some bad news, not necessarily with the network, but We got some unfortunate news that one of the members of the Utopia board that represented Lightning passed away. Bruce from— what might be his name, last name? I've got it in my notes. But anyway, it was unexpected. I don't think he was sick that anybody was aware of, but Bruce Davis passed away on Sunday.

Mm-hmm.

But as far as the actual performance of the network, you know, all trends are continuing to just climb and actually accelerates. Revenues should be hitting $2 million on a monthly basis, probably within the next month or two. The bond closed at a really good interest rate. They actually went and did kind of a roadshow with investors, and that got the interest rate down to 3.48%. And this will be the second to last round of bonding to finish out the core UIA cities.

Let's see, they—

we just purchased a building in South Salt Lake because we're going to be bringing the blue staking in-house. So any, anytime they mark somebody's yard to say this is where the gas line is, this is where the phone line is, those types of things, we used to hire that out and it cost about $820,000 a year. They're going to be bringing that in-house and we think we can do it for less than $600,000. So that'll be more than $200,000 We also changed insurance companies. It saves about $180,000 a year. So it's just been phenomenal to be part of that, you know, kind of see all the graphs that we want to see going up, going up, and the numbers we want to see going down, going down. So I would share more, but we've got to get to our other meeting.

So thank you.

All right, let's go ahead and adjourn and close the City Council.

Hello.

Hello.

Mayor, if you'd like, after the, after the flags are rung, if you want to shake their hands, you can. They're pretty excited. So what was part of the property sale? That was part of the deal?

We would like to welcome everyone out to our city council meeting this evening. I would like to call this meeting to order. I would like to make mention that Councilmember Tom McDonald is not with us this evening but is on the phone. Tom, are you there?

I'm here.

Okay, sounds good. We would like to begin by having a prayer that will be given by Brittany Lentz, after which a flag ceremony by Pack 982, after which we'd like to have the Pledge of Allegiance by Kenzie Lent. So we'll start with Brittany first.

Our kind and gracious Heavenly Father, we are so grateful for this beautiful day and for the opportunity we have to gather together as a community. And please bless that we'll be able to be thoughtful and understanding as we deal with these issues.

And please bless that we'll be able to be mindful of our neighbors.

And we're so grateful for this Christmas season, and please help that as we go about it, that we'll be able to be mindful of the needs and service around us. And we are so grateful for this beautiful city that we live in, and we say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

Amen.

Color guard, attention. Audience, please arise. Scout salute. Those not in uniform, please place your right hand over your heart. Color guard, forward march. Color guard, halt. Post the colors.

Can we have, uh, Kenzie come forward?

I pledge allegiance to the flag of United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

2.

Audience, please be seated.

We'd like to thank Brittany and Kenzie and PAC 982 for your service. I'd like to go over upcoming events, and we have one at the moment, and that is an open house farewell. at the City Council Chambers on December 18th from noon to 2 PM for outgoing council members Mark Seestrand and Sam Lentz. And if those 2 council members could come forward and stand with me in the front, I have something I'd like to give them. Thank you.

You're back.

You want to sit down?

1, 2, 3.

Close shot.

We— our city manager would like to make a comment at this time.

Thank you, Mayor, City Council. As you know, we've had the good fortune of working with Councilmember Seestrand and Councilmember Lentz for a number of years and have come to appreciate them. Next week we'll have an opportunity to formally recognize them for their service, and, and an invitation is extended to all for all to come out and recognize them for their service. As employees, we got together as well as we thought to ourselves, what is a way that we can recognize and remember both Councilmember Lentz and Councilmember Seestrand? And so we have put together just a couple of awards that we believe speak to your service and your dedication to the city. We would first like to present Councilmember Seestrand with this award, which we think is representative of his time of service. If, if you're familiar with Mark, you know that he carries with him at all times a large Big Gulp cup that we have with very, very limited success, tried to get away from him and replace it with something a little more current. But hey, old habits die hard, Mark, right? And so we thought, what better way to memorialize Mark and his service than to provide to him a gold-plated— not painted, not gold-plated cup. So we'd like to present that to Mark.

Thank you.

If you know anything about Councilmember Lentz, you know that he is very technology-minded and has been very passionate about our fiber infrastructure here in the city of Orem. And he has played a critical part in extending the reach of our Utopia UIA network. throughout the community for many, many to benefit from essentially the fastest internet service on earth. And so we're grateful for Councilmember Lentz and for his contributions relative to fiber, and we would like to present to him this particular sign of our appreciation for his fiber efforts.

That's awesome.

Just, just so you know, we threw away all the receipts, so you can't take those back.

Thank you, Mayor.

You bet. Thank you. We now would like to go on to our personal appearance portion of our program. We would ask that anyone coming forward hold their comments to 3 minutes and give us your name when you come to the podium. The first person that has signed up is Sullivan Love. After which we'll hear from Martin Wright.

Thank you, Mayor and Council. And although I'm not a current resident, thank you for your service, Councilmember Lentz and Cease-Wren.

I just want to take a minute.

I own a home located at 955 North 400 East. I've owned that home for about 35 years. In the last 5 times that home has been flooded by stormwater from Warren City. So the first time it occurred in 2013, I notified the city, had response from the city. At that time, they, you know, they notified me to say that was a 100-year storm, nothing we're really going to do about that. And so I didn't even bother to file a claim on it. But I did have to spend thousands of dollars to repair carpet and damage from the flood. 2 years later, in 2015, it flooded again. Again, I contacted the city. They responded and said, hey, you know what, sorry. This time I filed a claim against the city. Libby with Irma made contact with me, said she'd get back to me. Didn't hear anything back from her. So again, in 2018, my house flooded again from stormwater. Obviously, I'm kind of upset about that.

Again, I filed a claim.

Libby met on site.

We took pictures, you know, I had taken pictures of the stormwater drain in front of my house after the second flood, the same picture, or took pictures again after 2018, the flood.

The same debris that was in there in 2015 is still in that sump.

So leads me to believe that there was no maintenance going on with that stormwater facility. So I filed a claim again.

Libby promised she'd get back in touch with me.

I've had zero response.

So A little bit frustrated as a homeowner.

3 times, I think, is—

you know, homeowners are required to keep water to their own property, you know, irrigation runoff or whatever. And I just feel that my home kind of deserves that same benefit and protection from stormwater from the city.

Could you give us the address on that home again?

955 North 400 East.

Okay, thank you.

Great, thank you.

Now hear from Martin Wright.

Do I need to state my name again? I'm Martin Wright. Have a couple of things I want to say. Thank you, by the way, for all your hard work and effort. And I want to thank the city for fixing the problems last time that we talked about. There's still the problem with Ameron parking on the street. I don't know what's wrong with buying red paint and putting red curbs up so they don't park on the street where you can't get in and out off of State Street safely.

Please.

That's one thing I want to talk about. The next thing I want to talk about is accountability. And we just elected a new city council, and I know we're here tonight to discuss certain things, but I'm very strongly that I'm sure everyone here, we voted for who we wanted in the city council. They won. And there's some items, I think at least one, that should not be— they should be delayed till the city council, the new city council is in place. And I would encourage you to do that because it's not fair to the citizens of Orem. For the old city councilman to vote and not represent what we want now. And that's why a change was made. So I think we can wait on that. And I think you know which one that is. That's— we'll talk about that later. I'll probably be up to talk about that too.

But I think we need to all think about how we can be accountable to the city, how we can be accountable to ourselves, how we're accountable to our neighbors.

And, you know, I appreciate the effort that the city goes through. You know, I try to make an effort to pick up the garbage as I'm walking down the street, you know, make sure that a storm drain is unclogged because I know what it does to the rest of the neighborhood down the street.

But I think it's important, and I think it's important that we maintain that accountability.

And we elect you To do that, we don't elect somebody in a different office to make rules so that they're not accountable, and I can't—we can't have them removed from office. I think at this point in time, it's time for the city to make a change. We are not a small city anymore. We're—we're a growing, thriving city, and we need to have. a full-time mayor and a city council that's responsible so that the citizens of the city can make their voices known in an election, whether they're happy with what's going on or whether they're not. And I think we're at that point where the city needs to think about looking at changing the form of government. Because I can't fire the city manager. He can do whatever he wants. His people can do whatever they want. I, as a citizen, can't fire him. It's only up to the city council. And that goes to— I'm done, but thank you.

Okay, thank you. Appreciate it. We'll now move on to our consent items. These items are listed here, and if there are any items that the council would rather move to a scheduled item, Please let me know any items anyone wishes to move. Okay, I'd like to go over the consent items, and then we will take a motion and a roll call vote. First is 9.1, approval of meeting minutes of November 19th, 2019, of the City Council meeting. Number 2 is an annual meeting schedule for 2020. which we have reviewed and agree with. Number 3 is appointment to boards and commissions. Appointment to the CARE Advisory Commission, Spencer Rands. Appointment to this— yeah, Spencer, would you like to stand if you're here? Appointment to the Summerfest Committee, Andreas Wiest and Shelley Seestrand. If either one of them are here, if they could Raise their hands. Okay. And reappointments to the Arts Council of Barry Merrill and John Reinhard. Are they here and would they stand? Okay. And 9.4 is an ordinance amending city code allowing the city manager to appoint department-specific records officers. So I would accept a motion to go ahead and approve the consent items.

So moved.

So moved. Okay, is there a second?

Second.

Okay, and we will start first of all with Councilmember Seestrand.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Tom?

Aye.

Okay, great. So our consent items passed. We'll now move on to our scheduled items. The first is appointing a mayor pro tem for January through June of 2020. I would just like to thank Councilmember Sumner for having served the last 6 months and appreciate his service. And we would like to appoint Debbie Luray as our new mayor pro tem, um, and I would like to have a motion on that.

I move that we appoint Mayor Debbie as the mayor pro tem for the next 6 months.

And is there a second?

Second.

Okay, we'll start with Councilmember Seestrand.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Tom?

Aye.

Okay, we're going to keep you awake here. Um, so we'll go on to 10.2, which is to adopt the Orem voter participation area map, and our presenter is Jody Bates.

Thank you, Mayor and Council. This is some— something we reviewed last month. It came about in the legislative session of HB 119, where we are required— they changed the referendum initiative policy that we're required to adopt a voter participation area map based on population. These areas cannot be changed. They have to continue with the precinct boundaries, but we have to have 8 different participation areas. So when they go out for signatures for a referendum or initiative, they have to have a certain percentage of the areas and a certain percentage of the number of people in each area in order to be accepted for a referendum. So we have 2 options. We have Option 1 and Option 2 that you've been given previously. We just needed an approval on a resolution.

Sorry.

Excuse me, Mayor, could she please speak up?

Can you speak up, Jody?

Sorry.

She would love to. Okay, so we have Option 1 and Option 2 before us.

Yes.

Um, any comments or questions or thoughts from the council? This is not a public hearing, and I would actually like to make a motion and move that Orem adopt the voter participation area map option number 2. Is there a second?

Second.

Okay. And we will go ahead and start with Councilmember Seestrand.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

I'm going to pull a Mark here. So I'm going to vote aye, but I just wanted to point out the reason why I support— supported option 2 was And I— sorry, I wanted to talk about this earlier, but I guess I didn't get my buzzer in fast enough. But Option 1 was narrow strips kind of cutting through different parts of the city, whereas Option 2 was much more contiguous blocking. And actually, the, the balance of voters— or not voters, but residents in those areas— is more balanced where the— sorry, I'm a numbers guy—

the standard deviation was only 545 versus 624 between Can you put up option 2 again on the screen?

Yeah. So anyway, I vote for option 2. So thank you for that.

And Councilmember McDonald?

Aye on option 2.

Okay. All right. So the motion passes and we will go with option number 2. Thank you, Jody. Next we have a resolution on the fiscal year 2018-19 audit. And Brandon Nelson will be our presenter. And Brandon, maybe you can introduce who you have with you here.

I will do that. Didn't know we had so many people interested in our audit.

Don't get a false assumption.

So, Mayor and City Council, this is Ron Stewart from the firm of Gilbert and Stewart, and we'll be hearing from him regarding— Mr. Mayor, the same request for them to speak up, please.

Is this loud enough, Tom?

It's better.

Okay, um, so Ron Stewart will be discussing our audit here in just a minute. I wanted to just touch on a few things related to our fiscal '19 results. The first one is noting that were major items related to it— the reduction— our sales tax, while it did still go up for the year, the prior year increase was 7.2% while the current year increase was 2.4%. So we did see a softening in the increase in our sales tax revenues. That, that softening was bolstered, however, by a rather large increase in our building permits, which kind of offset that decrease in the sales taxes that we received. And then just pointing out within, within the document, if there are, there are some other variants that are noted in there. If on in the MD&A section on pages 25 and 26 if you're interested in finding out what some of those other variances in relation to the budget or to the, uh, our fiscal '19 results are. I know debt is always a concern. This last year, debt was reduced by $3.1 million excluding the new GO debt that was issued of $24.5 million. And more information within the CAFR document can be found also on pages 172 and 173 if you're interested in seeing what that outstanding debt is. So without further ado, I will turn the time over to Mr. Stewart to discuss the, the, their audit and the procedures and what their results were. You're on.

Thank you.

Like Brandon said, we are contracted to perform the audit for Orem City for 2018-19. What I'd like to do is just take a couple minutes and talk to you about the conclusions that we came to and what procedures we went through to come to those conclusions. Mr. Mayor, the same request of Mr. Stewart. So what we did as auditors to come to the conclusions— what I'd like to do is, in the CAFR document, if you look at page 13, that's our independent auditor's report. And the opinion paragraph states, in our opinion, the financial statements referred to above present fairly in all material respects the respective financial position of the governmental activities, business-type activities, each major fund, and the aggregate remaining fund information of the City of Orem as of June 30th, 2019, and the respective changes in financial position and, where applicable, cash flows, and the respective budgetary comparison for the general and major special revenue funds thereof for the year then ended in accordance with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America. That is a clean opinion. That is an unqualified opinion, or the best opinion that you can receive. So what we did to come to that conclusion is we perform a number of tests on the trial balance or the balances of the city. We send out confirmations to third parties. We perform tests of invoices. We'll pull invoices, we'll look at those, we'll review them to make sure that they're appropriate and recorded in the proper period. We'll do recalculations of balances, and we perform all those tests so that we can come up with this conclusion that your financial statements, the documented draft here, is materially correct and you can rely on those numbers. We feel like through those procedures that we performed that we're confident that we can give you that opinion. The second thing we do as auditors is to test the internal controls of the city. While we don't necessarily give an opinion on that, we do review the controls to make sure that, one, that they're designed, that they're implemented, and that they're working effectively. So we'll do interviews, walkthroughs, lots of procedures to make sure that the controls of the city are working and the assets that you have are being protected. Some of those procedures will take an invoice and kind of walk it through the process until it gets to the financial statements and see all of the controls that are in place and make sure those controls are working. If, if there was a portion of the city that wasn't working, this would be the part where we would tell you that we have deficiencies in our internal controls. Through our procedures, through the testing, we found no deficiencies in the internal controls. We feel like the city has good controls, that they're working, that they're effective, they're protecting the assets of the city. The third thing we do as auditors is we provide an opinion on the state compliance. State Auditor has asked us to review certain parts of the city every year. They give us prescribed forms and procedures to perform, and then we test those, those against the city. We did do those testing. There was one finding I think Brandon is going to talk about, um, that we'll let him talk on that one. Sure. So that finding is, uh, as per usual, our fund balance exceeding the state ceiling of 25%. Um, we exceeded that ceiling by just over $2.6 million on the reserve balance, on the reserve, on our unassigned fund balance, or yeah, I guess I shouldn't say because it's both, more than one.

But needless to say, are we— the fund balance that is available to spend at the city's discretion.

And so as we've done in years past, this upcoming year we will be coming forward to you to make a budget amendment request to move those funds out of the general fund and into the capital projects fund so that we can get back below that state ceiling limitation. And so the 4th thing that we do as auditors in particular cities, in Orem, if the entity spends more than $750,000 in federal dollars, they're required to have a single audit. So we performed that audit this year. What that means is every agency, federal agency that provides those dollars has certain criteria and compliance that they want to see is being handled by the city. So we'll look at each one of those. We'll, we'll pull one of the major grants and we'll pull invoices and make sure that those compliance issues are happening. And through our procedures and testings, we found no issues of non-compliance with federal awards. So that's a real quick review of what we did as auditors, how we came to our conclusions. And I'd be happy to answer any questions if anybody has any questions from the council.

So we're going to move the excess of the 25%, but I thought as our council we had said 15%. So are we going to take only the overage of the 25%? Are we going to take 15% and above?

Yeah, so the $2.6 million is the minimum that will be required. We will, we will come to with a proposal for the amount that would be over that to get down to that 50% mark.

Okay, thank you. That was my question. Thank you.

I always appreciate the audits.

A couple of questions.

How many years have you audited Orem City? Is this, uh, 4 or 5? This is 5.

5.

Great. And I know we change— we have to change every so often. Every 7 years. Every 7 years is fantastic. The question I have is, as you've observed over the last 4 to 5 years, are there any trends that you're seeing that while the audit or the books or this particular year may be consistent or in great shape, are you seeing any trends and not a problem we should look or be aware of? Trends in terms of cash management, financial management, reporting management? No, I don't see any trends that are leading to things that need to be addressed specifically. I will say that we live in a changing environment, and so controls and processes that we set up in day 1 aren't always as effective in day 100. And so always being aware and taking a step back and looking at those controls and processes is always a good thing. Do you feel like we're doing that or are we making— So, Mark, let me— Councilwoman Seestrand, let me ask— or not ask, let me— so one of the things that, as you know, technology, more electronic transmissions, more of those things, so those are becoming a bigger area of our focus in relation to safeguarding those kind of things and being able to not only safeguard but to actually record those, knowing that those things are happening and being able to record those. And so that, I would say that that is one of our areas that we're trying to focus on more often than not, than many of the other things that we deal with.

Right.

I just, I know you've had a number of years, decades, where our financial records have been sound and solid, and I really appreciate the work and the energy and the effort, both from auditing standpoint as well as from this— from our staff and the work they do. So thank you.

Any other comments from the council? I'd just like to mention that as a city, we balance our budget and we stay within the limits that we've set, and we save for a rainy day. I think those principles are important. One other principle that we go by in our budget, which maybe many are not aware, is that we typically overestimate our expenses and underestimate our revenues so that in fact we do have a cushion there. So I would like to go ahead and, and move that we by resolution accept the fiscal year 2018 2018-19 audit as presented. Is there a second?

Second.

Okay, we will start with Councilmember Lentz.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Councilmember McDonald.

Aye.

Thank you. So the resolution passes, and thank you, Ron, and thank you, Brandon. We appreciate it. We'll move now on to 10.4, which is a resolution. Establishing a Community Renewable Energy Goal, and our presenter is Jenna Elbers.

Good evening.

Sorry, I don't know why it's not working. Anyway, can you guys see it?

Yeah.

Okay.

Have it on our screens.

So this is about the HB 411 resolution for your consideration. As you might recall, HB 411 is the Community Renewable Energy Act. City governments who wish to participate—

Jenna, maybe I could mention also the legislature passed this earlier in the year.

Correct.

Just so we're aware of that.

City governments who wish to participate in this act and participate in the negotiation period must adopt a resolution by December 31st of this current year. Orem City was able to during the October 29th work session hear from a Rocky Mountain representative. His name was Michael Lang. He addressed, you know, what the act is about as well as addressing your questions and concerns. Since then, our legal staff has drafted a resolution which was included in your city council packets for your consideration this evening.

Okay, any questions or comments from the council? I have some comments, but Debbie, would you like to go first?

So I know, you know, as a city and the state, we in nation, we are moving for renewable energy. And so I like the idea of the goal. And I know for many businesses that I've worked with, if you don't have the opportunity for renewable energy, they don't consider your city. My one problem that I don't like about this is it's an opt-out program instead of opt-in, and I don't, I don't like that part of it. So tell me, um, we do the study, we get to the point, we see whatever cost it is, then at that point we can change our mind if we don't like how it would be implemented into our city. Is that correct? Correct. There's no, um, there's nothing binding saying that passing this resolution, it means that you have to participate. It just means that you're able to be a part of that negotiation period in which when things are being established for the Act, you guys can have a seat at the table explaining, you know, how things are going to be established. And if you choose to back out, there is no stipulation saying that you have to participate. You're— there's no—

I'm sorry.

Nothing binding, as you've mentioned. Okay, thank you.

Councilmember Spencer.

I'm all for renewable energy, but I'm not for this resolution that we're talking tonight because it doesn't change the fact next year, the year after, that it's still going to be an opt-out. If it was an opt-in, I'd be all for it because we have a choice to opt in and go through the door instead of getting busy and figuring out, and then all of a sudden when you don't opt out, it's going to cost you— we don't know what it's going to cost.

And I don't like that scenario, so I'm definitely not in favor of this resolution.

Thank you.

Councilmember Lentz?

We have some representatives from our NRSC. I was wondering if we could invite one, or if any of them are here, to just come and kind of give your perspective, because I know this is something that they've been researching for the past several months, and I was hoping to get our Citizen Advisory Commission that's been focusing on this chime in, if that's possible.

Sure.

Sarah, would you like to come forward and introduce yourself?

And my name is Sarah Bateman, and I've been with the Natural Resources Stewardship Committee now 3 years. This was brought to our attention earlier this year, and we found it quite compelling to engage in this conversation about renewable energy. We know that the market trends show that energy— renewable energy is becoming much more affordable than it was 20 years ago or so. And so the idea that communities who were interested— this all came about because there were communities as a whole who said this is something that we value and we would like to pursue this course of action to to move our community's energy from renewable sources. And so now it's to the point where they're opening it up to other communities who might be interested in engaging in this negotiation to see if this is something that also is a fit for the other communities in Utah. So in light of that, I was interested in doing a simple poll or survey of some residents. So I conducted a survey of residents at attending the Touch a Truck event. I tried to find an event where there were a lot of Orem residents just hanging around, standing in line with nothing else to do but answer a couple of questions. And I found it quite interesting. There was a decent spread of opinions about this conversation. Including those who were not at all interested in renewable energy under no condition, and up to those who were interested in this option of renewable energy even if it cost them personally more than 10% more. So I found that really quite interesting. And, and passing this resolution, I think if we were to pass it, we could extend that survey period and education period to see if we can broaden the discussion and get more feedback on that. Perhaps a targeted survey to businesses to see if that's something that Orem businesses would be interested in. I think passing the resolution would just allow us the further opportunity to educate and engage the public on this issue broadly and specifically for Orem. And Again, as has been said, by passing the resolution, there is no obligation or cost initially.

Yep. Darren, come on up.

Are you—

I'm part of the committee, yeah. I'm the chair of the national—

And can you give us your name?

Oh, yeah.

Hi.

I'm Darren Hawkins. I can just make a super brief point. I guess my point would be that I think that I think that we all believe in market-based principles. That involves the consumer should have options. Consumers rarely get options on utilities. So by doing this, you're actually giving consumers options. And that, to me, is a really valuable thing.

Okay, thank you.

I was going to go through some things— I guess, the reasons why I've been advocating for this. Sarah, did you get a chance? And Darren, did you get a chance to say kind of what you wanted to? And if you— if there's something that you wanted to follow up on some of these points, feel free. As has already been mentioned, this resolution is non-binding. And so even though this is my last city council meeting, I'm not, you know, putting anything on the shoulders of the incoming councilmen that is forcing them into anything that they don't want to be a part of. So this just gives us a seat at the table, the opportunity to participate in that negotiation. And I totally understand the concern as far as, you know, we wish it was an opt-in program. I don't necessarily disagree with that, but the problem is it's already in law. So if we wanted to argue against that, we would have had to have done that, you know, last year going into the legislative session. And so this program isn't necessarily designed the way that some of us had hoped, But that's a result of us not being part of the conversation at that point. So with us adopting this resolution tonight, this gives us a chance to step into that conversation now so that going forward we could be a part of that conversation and help shape it. And I'm not trying to suggest that we're going to be able to convince them to go opt in, but certainly if we have a seat at the table, we can be one of the, you know, potentially 15 or more cities that are discussing this going forward. Anyone can still opt out. So even if the, the future council adopts the full resolution and we participate in this program, anybody can still opt out. They can do so for free for the first 3 months, and after that they can still opt out, but there would be a fee associated with that simply because Rocky Mountain Power needs to go out and build all of this solar generation capacity. So if they're building a solar farm out in the desert and you're part of the program and then opt out 6 months later, they can't sell back those solar panels. They've already invested in that infrastructure. And so that's, that's one of the reasons why it was designed as an opt-out. But I frankly, I don't expect the rates to be that much higher. We don't know what the rates are going to be, so you can't take anything I'm going to say as This is how much it's going to change. But I think some people were expecting, oh, if we go solar, then that's going to cost another 20, 30, 40% or something like that. We talked to someone at UVU who's familiar with their budget for energy consumption, and they pay about $2 million a year. And they're doing a program like this as a community, essentially. So whether or not Orem participates, UVU will be doing this. And that— they're only expecting this to increase their bill by about $8,000 a year. So that's a 0.4% increase. Or if we translate that to— if I, you know, have a $100 energy bill for the month, that would be a 40-cent increase for that month. So that 100% of my net renewable energy comes from— or my net energy usage comes from renewable sources. If we wait another 20 or 30 years, you know, there's a chance that Rocky Mountain Power might end up trending this direction anyway. They have plans to start transitioning off of some of their fossil fuel generation and eventually get to a point where they have at least a higher percentage of renewable energy. But you think about waiting another 20 or 30 years, it's not just about the cost that we pay on our monthly bills. There's really a cost to society when we think about burning our, you know, our fossil fuels. And we have one of the worst quality of air in the nation right now. And it's because of things like this with our vehicles, with our energy generation. We need to find ways that we can sustain our quality of life that we're used to without—

Thank you.

burning so much smoke and putting that in our atmosphere. As far as consumer choice, I absolutely agree with, with Darren. As of right now, your choices are essentially go with what Rocky Mountain Power provides you, or in some cases you can install solar panels. There are some people that aren't in a position to do that, whether they're renting, whether the cost is too high, maybe there's zoning or code issues that they have to work through. Some people live in an HOA that doesn't allow solar panels. They might have geography or even a tree across the street that would shade their— the roof of their house, making it not as efficient to do solar panels. And some people have an older roof where it doesn't make sense to put solar panels if you're going to have to replace your roof 5 years from now. So there's all these different scenarios where somebody might want to do solar and want their power to come from a clean energy source, but they just don't have that opportunity. And as far as you look at the long-term cost of ownership of a coal power plant, for example, you think about mining the coal, transporting the coal, running the plant, all these types of things. They're very— they're very fuel and labor-intensive processes. And as the cost of fuel has gone up, that our energy rates have gone up significantly. And when you think about a solar farm out in the middle of the desert where you're not, you know, spewing smoke up into the atmosphere, and the labor and the maintenance involved with keeping that solar farm operational is very, very minimal. You know, the— everything's automated where they can have the solar panels follow the sun throughout the day so they're getting the most efficient output. And, you know, they might have one person on site just to make sure that nothing terrible goes wrong, but you don't have to have a full staff like you would have at a traditional fossil fuel burning power plant. So I'm— I think this is an opportunity for Orem to be on the forefront of this issue, even if we don't necessarily have that chance to make it an opt-in program. I don't think that the financial cost will be very high if we do, but I do think the societal cost will be very high if we don't.

Thank you.

Thank you. Councilmember Sumner.

Just a couple of brief, short questions. Sarah, what you mentioned about a survey, did you have a Age breakdown on, on your results?

Then I've got a question for Jamie.

For the sake of simplicity, instead of making a really thorough survey to break it down into demographics, I just had 2 questions and I didn't include demographics. However, at the event, it was mainly parents And grandparents with children. So they're— and they were all Orem residents that I asked, but I don't have any other specific information as far as socioeconomic background, neighborhoods that they live in, age. But there were parents and grandparents with children at the event.

Then Jamie, Sam said something about the time clock begins, or the cost begins in 3 months.

How can you explain that?

I didn't quite understand what he was referring to. So municipalities have until December 31st to elect to participate in this program. At that point, that would initiate a review by the, the city's power provider in cooperation with all the municipalities that have a relationship with that provider. So in our case, Rocky Mountain Power is our municipal power provider. Any other city that would have a relation— that has a relationship with them would also engage in the same study and that same level of review. That kind of speaks to kind of getting your seat at the table, so to speak, by way of the resolution. At that point then, the private the private power provider, Rocky Mountain Power, would work with the cities in putting together— essentially, I would anticipate a request for proposal where they would actually look at the costs associated with this in the future and would hire a consultant or a series of individuals to help us understand what it would mean to power rates in the future. As Councilmember Lentz and others have noted, this is a non-binding resolution. This simply expresses the City Council's intent to be 100% focused on renewable energy by 2030. In the event, for example, we were to come back in a few months and say, yes, we have a number from Rocky Mountain Power, that number is X, If you're not comfortable with the city moving forward and spending those dollars on this particular effort, then the city is under no obligation to move forward with the study. No cost to that point?

No.

So within the— within the law, and our city attorney can speak to this, there are a series of off-ramps, so to speak, that we could exercise through this process. before we get to the point of, for example— or excuse me, our Deputy City Attorney— before we get to the point of, of, uh, getting into an opt-out relationship, we would have a, an off-ramp or a series of off-ramps to exercise before we, you know, actually commit to something. Is Heather—

That's correct. Um, our understanding of the bill is that the first financial obligation would occur in this negotiation and investigation period with not only Rocky Mountain Power but the Planning Commission. There is going to be a cost involved in building this program and getting it approved. And the city would be— you know, it would have to contribute to those costs. We have no idea what those costs might be. And I don't know if Rocky Mountain was able to speak to that ever in this— during this investigation?

If I may, the greater the number of municipalities and organizations that participate, then our commensurate share of the financial responsibility with that study would decrease. And cities have until December 31st to exercise that. So as more cities sign on, we anticipate the cost of this evaluation— our share of costs would actually decrease.

Yes.

And then the— after that whole process is completed, the City Council will still have the opportunity to look at the program, discuss it with Orem city residents, determine whether or not this is— whether or not this is the direction the city would like to go. And at that point, that is when you would consider passing an ordinance that would essentially adopt the key elements of the proposed plan. after adoption of the ordinance, then there will be a period where residents will have their opt-out period. So that's— it's, it's quite a, quite a, quite a length down the freeway before we hit our last exit ramp.

And, and that 3-month window is what I was referring to. So once a future council potentially adopts that ordinance and it actually goes into effect, then residents would have 3 months to choose if if they're going to opt out.

Yeah, it's 3 utility billing cycles they would have. And the law actually requires significant notice to our customers, and the city would actually participate in providing that notice if the program is adopted and the ordinance is passed.

Thank you. Councilmember Seestrand.

Thank you.

As I've talked to a number of individuals trying to get a better perspective on this. I find that they kind of coalesce into 3 groups. There's, there's the group that says, as Mr. Spencer indicated, that, you know, the opt-out is a no-starter for me, so I'm a definite no, no matter what the future of this program looks like in terms of cost or viability. Just can't, just can't buy the opt-out, and I understand that. There's a group of individuals that say this— I would support this no matter what. This is so important for the air quality and for the future that they would be completely supportive. And I understand that. And then there's the third group, which is where I kind of fall, which is I don't know because I haven't seen the data. I haven't seen the study. I don't know if this is going to be good or bad. But I know this, if we don't go forward, we'll never know. And if we just cut it off right here, then we're for sure not going to be able to participate if it does end up being a positive thing. So because there are off-ramps and because there is no commitment other than to say we're interested in discussing and that there's a big enough interest to, to try to find a solution that would work.

Yes.

I, I, I'm in favor of going forward with the study and to find out because that helps us answer the questions what we don't know so that at some point we can more definitively say this is a really good idea or this is not a good idea. So I, I lean in that direction just because I think that allows us to answer those questions.

Thank you. What's the question?

The question is, is if, if the, um, what is— because she said there was a cost. She said that the cost involved before you go into the— before you go into the program with the student city, there will be a cost there.

And it sounds like this is— you don't get all over for anything because there's a cost there and we don't OK.

We don't know when, what the deadline is. If you can get out at no cost, you won't pay any money back.

So this is not a public hearing. And appreciate the comment. And we'll let Councilmember Seestrand continue.

No, I think that's it. I think, though, to your question, the concern is if we find out the cost is going to be significant to do the study, We say okay, we don't want to. So there's no commitment on. We're not we're not writing a check that says we're going to fill in the amount later.

There is no check being written.

There is an intention to say we want to find out, and once we find out, then we'll decide whether it's feasible to make the check or to not write the check. And if we say it's not worth it, then we're out, and there is no cost, and there is no go forward other than to say. We need a better plan or a better option from our state legislature to allow us to look at this. And that, again, that's why for me to say no at this point just limits the options that we have.

And there is no—

I don't see any risk in this go-forward on the upside, or I don't see any risk on the downside because there are exit strategies that we can do all along the way. So to me, it seems seems like the, the most prudent, logical go-forward plan to be able to fully understand what, what the options are here.

Okay, Councilmember Spencer. Yeah, so right now Rocky Mountain Power does have a renewable energy option right now that you can sign up today.

And how—

what's the percentage of them people that have signed up?

Very minimal, because it was an opt-in, it's not an opt-out. So I'm still against I'm all for renewable energy, but I'm not—

there's already a program today that we could, we could use.

Our citizens could sign up right today.

The bill, there's only one option in this, in this bill, and that is an opt-out option, and I'm against that.

Thank you. Jamie, if, if I just may yield some time to our city attorney, Greg Stevens. But again, I will reiterate, the resolution before you tonight It does not speak to opt-in, opt-out. It speaks simply to the council agreeing to essentially work towards a goal of efficiency and working towards 100% renewable energy in the future by 2030. So there are other pieces of the legislation that speak to, for example, the opt-in, the opt-out. the process whereby a review is undertaken. But the resolution this evening is purely a decision as to the council and your opinion towards setting a goal towards energy, essentially efficiency, and using renewable sources.

So, Jamie, one thing I could maybe mention is the resolution before us does have a bullet point and a line in describing the opt-out portion of the act. And so I believe that's incorrect, what you've mentioned.

No, that—

what it does is it specifically references in the preamble kind of some of what is, uh, is noted consistent with HB 411, but the specifics of the ordinance— or excuse me, the resolution itself— it reads Now therefore, be it resolved by the City Council of the City of Orem, uh, number 1, the City Council declares the goal of achieving an amount of renewable energy resources equivalent to 100% of the annual electric energy supply for participating Orem customers by 2030. Item number 2, the city manager and city staff are authorized to take steps to implement this resolution.

Second.

Number 3, this resolution shall take effect immediately upon passage. Number 4, all other resolutions and policies in conflict herewith in whole or in part are hereby repealed. Those are the 4 specifics.

Um, Greg, did you want to mention something?

Maybe I could clarify one thing. If the city moves forward, thank you, there is a 3-step process.

Thank you.

The first step is the resolution that you're considering tonight. The second step would be an agreement where the actual cost for the study that the city would be responsible for would be set forth. Then the third step would be after that study is completed, there would be an ordinance where saying the city wants to participate in the program. Each of those steps provides the city with a jumping-off In other words, you could elect tonight to just not do anything. You could elect when we get to the agreement stage that you don't want to move forward because you don't like the costs associated with the study. Or you could go forward with the study and then decide when we get to the ordinance stage that you don't want to proceed.

Okay. I wanted to mention a couple of things that are of concern to me. in regards to this. First of all, HB 411 was passed by the legislature. Whether we have a seat at the table or not, it is not going to change whether this is an opt-in or opt-out program. It has been passed as an opt-out program. One thing I want to mention is 60 to 70% of our power through Rocky Mountain Power comes from coal-fired power plants. They have a set schedule on the closing down of these power plants, and they will close down most of them within the next 10 years. Market forces are driving renewable energy, and right now, as you probably are aware, that we have many new natural gas power plants that Rocky Mountain Power has built. We have the Lakeside one out in Lyndon, We have one out in Moab. We have one in Payson. And Payson's is their own power plant. But Rocky Mountain Power has built various power plants using natural gas. And if you're following at all the futures market or the pricing of natural gas, the price of natural gas has been dropping. And right now, it's at an almost all-time low. It's getting close to— $2 on the BTUs, and if it drops below that, then it's going to be a very, very low price. So natural gas is very attractive, and the emissions from natural gas are very low. As far as usage and things that pollute our air, cars are 60% of the items that pollute our air here in Utah Valley. The State of Utah has given incentives to the 4 major refiners at the— at North Salt Lake to put in Tier 3 gas and to build the facilities to do that. They actually are moving forward with that, and the first one is going to come online and selling gas first quarter of next year. And Tier 3 gas, actually eliminates 70% of the sulfur in the gasoline that we burn. And it's the sulfur that is the problem in our air and our air pollution. And so they actually expect within about 5 years that buildings will be a larger contributor of pollution than will cars. And you'll see a major shift here in the state of Utah. We do have choices. People can put in their own generators, run off of natural gas, to produce their own power. They can do their own solar power panels. They can participate in the Blue Sky Program Rocky Mountain Power has for that. And so there are many choices out there. On the opt-out program, the reality is If in fact we accepted this as a city and required every citizen to have to sign up and be part of this program, they would have 90 days to excuse me opt out. 90 days may seem like a long time, but if you're on a vacation, if you're elderly, if you're disabled, if you're not paying attention to utility bill, etc., etc., there will be some who will be caught. by this and will not opt out. And if in fact they don't opt out and then want to cancel, they have to pay a termination fee. And the termination fee is yet to be determined, won't be determined until they have all of the participants signed up within the state. And then they will determine how much it's going to cost for those people within a certain city to terminate versus what the costs are for the entire group. And so we don't know what the termination fee is going to be, just like we don't know what the cost is going to be for the solar. I'm very much impressed with where solar has gone. It's amazing to me that renewable energy, wind and solar, are bringing their prices down so low that they are now competitive. But I am, in principle, not in favor of an opt-out program for our citizens. I don't believe that's what our citizens want. Sarah, I understand your survey and I appreciate your good works. I still don't believe that the majority of the citizens want an opt-out program, that they are forced to have to do this unless they take an action to get rid of it. And if they don't do it within a quick period of time, they're going to be in trouble. So I personally am against this. And I understand that if we do this, we say that we're interested in renewables. I am all for interest in renewables. But at the same time, I believe this is a flaw in the program that should not be there. And it should have been an opt-in program.

Thank you.

rather than an opt-out program. So consequently, I feel like this is not advisable for our citizens, and I would not vote for it. Councilmember Seestrand, do you have a comment?

I do, and, and thank you, Mayor. I appreciate the points and your, your perspective on there. One question I have as it relates to that is, if we don't know the cost of the opt-out, Would you be okay if the opt-out cost ended up being zero? Because it's possible as we go through this process.

Are you talking about that for the study?

No, no, after this.

I mean—

You're talking about if we adopted it as an ordinance for the city?

Well, yeah, so, so the whole issue that you're concerned about—

You're talking about a termination fee if there was no cost.

Let me finish.

Your issue and concern is that you don't like the opt-out because that forces forces people to do something that to get out, then they have to pay money to get out.

And if the—

and we don't know what that amount is going to be. We don't know because the study hasn't been done. But it's possible that the opt-out cost could be zero.

So there is no cost for opting out. You have 90 days, you can opt out for free. But if you don't do that, then you have a termination fee.

And it's possible, as I I'm continuing to express my thought is that not only is the opt-out okay, it could also be that the cost to— if you miss the opt-out, the cost to terminate could be zero as well, in which case it continues to be a no-cost scenario. The issue or the point that I'm making is you're rejecting a program that you don't know the answers to, and I think it's worthwhile to say, well, let's find out the answers. Because then we can make a decision that says if the termination fee after I fail to opt out is zero, well, then that's not a problem.

So Rocky Mountain Power has said it will not be zero. They have said there is a cost for those that have signed up.

Okay, 10 cents.

So, well, they actually talked about $10,000, but I don't know what the fee will be. My My feeling in principle is I'm against the opt-out idea. Even if it's free. Even if it's free.

I'm just saying that the option is that because we don't know the answers, it's hard to make a determination on that, that to proceed and go forward and find the answers I think is a prudent option. But I understand where you're coming from is that you want to— you just don't want the opt-out principle, period. I understand.

Sure.

Councilmember Lentz.

So I guess my, my first question is, where did that $10,000 number come from? Who from Rocky Mountain Power said that would be the application fee?

The one gentleman mentioned it as a possibility. That's all I heard.

Okay.

I've been— I've spent a lot of time with him, and I've never heard him say any, any number at all. But that just sounds absurd.

But he did say a number.

Okay. So Maybe he was referring to something else. I just wanted to speak to the Blue Sky program that has been brought up as suggesting we don't necessarily need this because we already have an opt-in program. Blue Sky has been around for a number of years, and when that program went in, the cost to build solar was significantly higher than what it is today. And if you look at what it actually costs, if you have a, let's say, 1,000 kilowatt-hour month of usage And I'm not sure what the exact average is, but it's probably somewhere in that ballpark. To be part of that Blue Sky program would cost you an additional $20 a month. So again, I'm not saying that the, the cost UVU is going to experience is what we're going to have for our residents here, but you're essentially comparing a $20 a month increase to a 40-cent a month increase potentially. But again, we don't know what that answer is. Let's do the homework and find out what that number is. Another issue that I have with the Blue Sky program, which I haven't even participated in, is you have to forecast what your usage is going to be, essentially. You have to buy it in blocks. And I've got solar panels on my house, and so there are some months where I'm actually going to put more power back into the grid rather than using their power more. And so If I opted into that, I would essentially be buying into a program that would cost me a certain dollar amount that I might not benefit from at all. So the, the concept that we're dealing with here with HB 411 would just build it into the rate structure rather than having to have residents forecast out, this is how much I'm going to be using on a monthly basis. And you also get the economies of scale because not only has solar gotten much cheaper, but Rocky Mountain Power would be able to build a solar farm at scale for entire communities rather than trying to predict how many individuals are going to opt into the Blue Sky program.

Okay.

Any other questions or comments from the council? Ready to make— okay. Make a motion.

A motion. I'd like to make the proposal the city council adopts a resolution establishing a community renewable energy goal.

Tom, did you want to make a comment?

I just wanted to second that comment and make a motion.

Can you tone it down a little bit? You're way too loud.

We don't hear you.

Go ahead. Now we can't hear you at all.

I can hear you, I second the motion.

Okay, we can't understand you. Hold on, we're trying to make some changes here. Go ahead, Tom. Tom did—

I'm seconding Mark's motion.

So Brent Sumner made a motion. Brent Sumner's. Yeah, not Mark's. Okay, we'll go ahead and vote then. Councilmember Seestrand?

Aye.

Aye.

Nay.

Nay.

Aye.

Aye.

Tom?

Aye.

Okay.

Aye.

All right, the resolution passes. Thank you very much. We'll now move on to an ordinance, which is not a public hearing, and this is enacting Article 12-9 of the Orem City Code Rental dwelling license and amending Section 21-1-3B1A1 to require that bills for water service be in the name of the owner. And our presenter is Steve Downs.

Mayor, council, appreciate the opportunity to be in front of you. This is a discussion that we've been having for, for a number of months. I've had a lot of feedback and input and discussion about a couple of changes that we'll be proposing tonight. Oh, sorry. The basis of this is kind of going off of one of your areas of focus this year, and that's strengthening neighborhoods. And as we'll get into the discussion further. This is an area of focus that the citizens have asked you to take, and they've made clear through their neighborhood planning process. The idea of strengthening neighborhoods, we believe, is similar to the 3 legs of a stool, and it takes residents, landlords, and property owners and the city working together to solve some of these problems. If any one of those legs come off, the stool would not stand. And what we believe is we're bringing a program forward that without being overly onerous does bring all 3 of those parties into an alignment as we, as we look to strengthen neighborhoods and make improvements in those areas. The desired outcomes that we have as listed here are, are 2-part. One, with a rental licensing program, we want to improve neighborhoods by gathering the contact information from landlords, property management companies, and owners. connected to each rental property. This will allow us to proactively notify landlords about items pertaining to their property— citations, code violations, ordinances, etc.— and bring landlords into the conversation about strengthening their neighborhoods.

That's the 3—

the stool of the strong neighborhoods. The second part of this is putting the utilities in the name of the owner. Currently, we have a significant amount of utility accounts that go to collections each year. A large majority of those accounts are in single-family rental situations where the tenant has the ability to have the utilities in their name. And one of the tools obviously we use to ensure payment is shutting off water. But if a tenant has left the property, we don't have the ability to use that tool as effectively. Keeping the utilities in the name of the owner eliminates Eliminates that challenge. It would ensure that those utility bills are being collected on— by the property as opposed to the rest of the citizens having to make up that deficiency. We also want to reduce the amount of time dealing with rental properties and changing the names on the accounts, collections, verifying lease agreements as people switch the accounts into different names and the various work orders. And we'll show the data there. There's 2 types of rental, or there's— I want to make clear at the beginning the types of rentals that are, um, we're proposing, um, be included and those not included. Those impacted would be an accessory or a basement apartment, single-family home that's being rented, a townhome or condo, a duplex, fourplex, an apartment complex, and anybody who's using their home as a short-term rental, Airbnb and and such. Those not impacted would be a single dwelling renting to family members. This is a situation where you have a child that is living with you and you've decided to choose to charge them rent. We wouldn't be doing that. And then we have a part of our code that allows an exemption for somebody who's 65 or older to have non-family members live with them in their unit. They can't create a separate dwelling unit. but they can live in their home with them. And that, that group where we've proposed to exempt, and as we mentioned in our work session, that isn't included in the current ordinance. This came from feedback since the ordinance has been put out. I wanted to touch on the neighborhood plan goals. We've completed 7 neighborhood plans. One more is in progress. All of these speak to this challenge that we're trying to address tonight with the proposal. Those first 4 that you see all specifically had a goal to better enforce ordinances with absentee landlords. The next 2, which are areas of our community that have a higher percentage of rentals than others, both asked the City Council consider— to consider a rental licensing program or other programs to better manage absentee landlords in single-family residential neighborhoods. And then you'll see a couple of those neighborhoods also spoke to the need to increase staffing in our Neighborhood Preservation Unit to work with these property owners to bring their properties into compliance. Again, we believe that the proposal before you tonight addresses these issues identified by our neighborhoods in their neighborhood planning process. I'll begin with speaking more to the rental licensing program. The intent here is to be able to notify landlords when citations are issued on properties through a rental licensing program and database. We'll be able to program this to happen automatically. So the information we have by way of an email address through our rental licensing program will allow our officers, as they issue citations in their system, to have the property owner automatically notified that, for example, they were out at their property last night at 1:00 a.m. for a specific issue. Currently, the process for our officers is to work through county records. County maintains records of property owners. They only provide— they only have mailing addresses. So we have— we start with just mailing addresses, and that's— that becomes challenging for our officers to get in quick contact with these owners in order to bring compliance into whatever the issue might be. So as we work with just a tenant on a given situation, like it is with utility billing, that tenant may move out before any— anything has been resolved. Therefore, we start over with a new tenant. Our idea is to bring the landlord and property owner into the discussion help us solve this problem. I think this is what we're— that our neighbors are speaking to as they talk about better enforcement of ordinances with absentee landlords. That speaks to that second point as well. We want to be able to address illegal rentals as well. This, this new program where there's a requirement to have a rental license will allow us to quickly address that. If they don't have a rental license, therefore we have something that we can move on. Currently With no requirement of rental licensing, it's a much longer process to try to determine if it's a legal or illegal rental. We believe it'll make for better government, more efficient operation. This will allow our NPU team to cover more ground and resolve additional cases. Our officers can speak to the amount of time they spend trying to track down the owners of these properties and the landlords. If that time is eliminated, it allows them to move on the next case much quicker. The funding for this program would allow additional civilian employee in the neighborhood preservation units to, to assist in working with landlords and rental properties and getting the information that we need. We know this will take some time up front. It'll be an investment in our time as well. We believe that the benefits on the back end, though, are significant as we live in a college town with a growing percentage of rental properties and investors looking in this area to invest their money in rental units. We did a study with Zion's Bank to determine what types of rentals are causing an additional, additional impact on our police department. So we, we determined a base level of calls. We looked at all of our owner-occupied homes based on the records that we have. Tom, your question? Okay, we, we did— we, we And this is all done by Zions, and this is required, but we determined a base. And what we found was, on average, a homeowner has a call every other year to their property, whether it's, again, code enforcement because of their property or, or other things. We then looked at every type of rental situation and determined, do they have more or less of those types of calls? The only 2 that had an additional level of additional calls Above and beyond that of owner-occupied were single-family rentals and a townhome or condo-type rental. You'll see listed a cost per door. We don't have a proposal tonight to begin charging a per-unit fee. If we were to charge a per-unit fee, state law would allow this to be the maximum we could charge. Again, our intent is to not charge that tonight. But we found that as you get into apartment complexes, there's actually less calls per unit than that of a single-family. In those situations, they're usually professionally managed. The landscaping is taken care of professionally.

There aren't—

we have kind of a line of defense between the police department and a given issue on a property.

Steve, I think Sam has a question.

Please. Just to clarify, if you have an owner-occupied townhome, would that fall into the first row or the townhomes and condos?

The owner-occupied would be on the first row.

Okay, so then whether it's a condo, townhouse, yep, owner-occupied home, you know, yep, owner-occupied.

Okay, just making sure.

Thanks.

And then the townhome condo would be a rental of, yeah, of that, of that property. You see that obviously that's, that's less. And while we don't know for sure, we didn't go into every issue. We, a lot of, we have a lot of townhomes and condos are in HOAs and they don't have the property maintenance issues that maybe you see on a single-family rental. The proposal tonight is a $50 per landlord fee. This would be regardless of the number of units they have. It's just the cost of licensing their, their program. The anticipated revenue from this program is between $100,000 and $120,000 a year, and as we mentioned, would be used to hire additional help in both the licensing and code enforcement to proactively work with landlords and getting information that they need in order to help us solve the problems that we're seeing in our community. We did look at other communities to see what those licenses look like. We believe that our $50 is very comparable, and given that we don't have a per-unit charge, which you'll see in, in a lot of other communities as well, the operating of the program would be done through our utility billing system. And done through the the help center, our 311 center, with the help of our civilian code enforcement employees. Additional employees, as I mentioned, would be hired for this program in those areas. The license would mirror the fiscal years July 1 and June 30. Signups can begin in January, meaning putting the utilities in the name, but the actual license would not expire until June 30 of 2021.

And so.

So again, what we'll— what we would allow is in January they can start moving the utilities into their name. Come July is when we'll start billing for the actual license itself, and then it would go for 1 year and it would be required to be renewed each year. A couple questions we've received and I wanted to speak to tonight is how was the fee calculated? A few years ago we did a study for business licensing to determine how much it costs to, to do a business license. Given that the information we're asking is very much similar, we mirrored that. A home occupation business license in the City of Orem is $105 a year.

We're—

we then took approximately a 50% discount and knocked it down to $50 as our rental licensing proposal. Why is the proposed license for an apartment complex the same as a single-family rental? This is again another question that we've received. The $50 is to cover the cost of the license itself and not the additional impacts that a unit may have on city services. Those, those would be recovered in a per-unit charge, which again we're not proposing. But if we were worried about certain types of units causing additional services, then again, a per-unit charge is how state law allows us to recoup for those. Again, we're not suggesting that tonight. As referenced earlier, we looked at a per-unit basis. A single apartment unit does not have a greater impact on city services than an owner-occupied home. Additional impacts to infrastructure— roads, police, fire, parks, etc.— those are covered when impact fees are paid as those are constructed. I spoke to this quite a bit, but where's the money going? It's to hire that additional staff. I did want to make clear that the money for the license program is not used to quote, cover the gap for our utilities that haven't been paid. That gap will be covered by the decrease in accounts going to collections. The second part of the proposal tonight is our utility billing improvements. What we're suggesting is, is to require all rental properties to have the utilities in the name of the landlord. They can add a property management company to, to give that property manager access to all the information as they're working on behalf of the property owner. Landlords can still assign the tenants to pay the bill and have the bill electronically sent to the tenant. Tenants will pay any of the ways that they currently pay, including autopay. So if a landlord wants the tenant to still be responsible for the bill, again, that is an option. We're just putting the account in the name of the landlord so that that's who's ultimately responsible if that bill goes unpaid. Reduce the amount of time we deal with collections and the number of work orders on rental properties. We'll go into that in a few— in future slides. Reduce the amount of work our employees spend doing shutoffs, reading meters, reviewing lease agreements, and disproportionate time spent with rental properties. One of the big questions we get is why should the landlords be responsible? This is a bill of a current customer. As you can see there, what, what we argue is that the majority of the bill pays for the fixed costs of the system. That's both infrastructure and the personnel that it costs to manage the system. Even in the summer months, the usage charge is not the cost of just the water, but a large portion of the fixed costs of the system is built into the usage charge. That's both the infrastructure and the personnel. If we were to take all fixed costs and put it in a base fee, it would be a very, very high base fee, and it wouldn't reflect those that are using the system the most. We believe when a bill goes unpaid, the full cost must be made up by other Orem residents and businesses. And that's currently what ultimately has to happen. If, if when those $50,000 don't go collected, some project that we were funding that year or saving up for the future year ultimately is underfunded by $50,000. 75% of rental units are already required to do this. All of our multifamily rentals, which is— that's 75% of our units, already have the utilities in the name of the owner. In that situation, it's because 4 units are sharing 1 account, 1 meter, and so there's no way to split that up into 4 different accounts. So throughout the city, we have 75% of our accounts responsible for the payment. The other 25%, we don't have the owners being responsible for the payment. This proposal brings all of those into the same responsibility for ensuring that a payment is made. This data is, uh, what we've pulled over the last handful of years, and it shows the percentage of our single-family rentals. Again, those are the ones that are in the name of the tenants, most likely. In most all— in most cases, uh, we send about between 8% and 9% of those accounts to collections every year. The blue represents multifamily where the utilities remain in the name of the owner. In those cases, we're sending 0.3 to 0.5% of those accounts to collections every year. We believe this is a proposal that will help reduce that amount. Um, another comparable, and they have the data here as well, is single-family rentals. Again, we send— in 2018, we sent 8.73% of those accounts to collections. So that's a single-family rental. A single-family owner occupied, we sent 0.79% of those accounts to collections. Again, the tool that we have to shut off the water doesn't work if the, the person responsible doesn't live there any longer. So again, given that we believe that the majority of the bill pays for the fixed cost to service a property, that, that property owner should be ultimately responsible for that bill, not the rest of the citizens. We also looked at just the, the work orders, and this is The number of times we touch the account. A single-family rental, again, in the name of the tenant, about 55% of those accounts have a work order in a given year. A multifamily that stays in the name of the tenant or stays in the name of the landlord has about 10— about 11%. So about 5 times more work orders when it's— when it's changing over with tenants every— basically every other year, as you if you take 50%. So this is the opportunity where we believe we can reduce the amount of staff time that we're spending dealing with these rental properties. Over the course of the months, we've had some involvement with landlords and property managers. A lot of this has been done online. We've had a lot of phone calls, a lot of emails, a lot of comments, a lot of social media interaction. We also had a focus group with a handful— a couple of property managers and a handful of landlords as well. We had a discussion about this and some of the things they'd like to see, and they frankly gave some really good input as to how we can do this. Here's some of the takeaways that we have from that meeting that was, that was a couple months ago. They were, they were clear from the beginning that they're not excited about an additional fee, and, and we understand that. Other than that, there was no specific concern with the rental licensing program. Many other cities have this. Basically, every college town in Utah has this. So especially the property managers that deal across other cities, they understand the nature of a rental licensing program. When we talked to them about the utility billing, their feedback— and they did say this— was if they were going to ultimately be responsible for utility bills, then they would rather the utilities be in their name. They did say, ideally, we don't have to worry about the utilities, but we understand why the city would be interested in that. But the cities that they don't have to worry about the utilities, obviously, is less— is what they enjoy. But their preference, if they were going to be responsible, was to have the utilities in their name. In the cities where they're responsible but the utilities aren't in their name, they find out a few months down the road that the bills haven't been paid, and then they have a $300 or $400 bill that they have to satisfy. If the utilities are in their name and they have access to the account, they're able to stay on top of that. And they know every— each month that passes if the bill is still outstanding. So our proposal is to keep the utilities in the name of the landlord, the property owner, with the— again, the property manager would have access to the information. One of the key feedback we had was our ability to give access and allow property management companies to do things on the account. As was pointed out by one property manager that does a significant amount of management in the area, was if, if we want something done, that's who we work with, if they have designated a property manager. Some cities want to work with the owners at all times, but if the owner happens to be out of the country, out of the area, the reason they have a property manager is to take care of those issues. The property managers want to know about those issues as well so that they can resolve them. We did look at some other alternatives. There's, there's a handful of suggestions that were made as to other ways we can take care of this. One was to ask landlords to provide their information but to not require a license or a license fee. Now, I mean, this was the end of 2018. We did work with a specific neighborhood, Geneva and Suncrest. This is an area where we have, in some, some parts of the neighborhood, 60-70% of those homes have turned into rentals, to try to obtain the contact information. We mailed 1,800 letters using county property records to landlords asking them to voluntarily provide their contact information, and we had a total of 10 responses, so 0.05%. So we tried a voluntary opt-in type situation in one neighborhood, and it didn't, didn't avail to much. We had another suggestion of taking deposits and running credit checks on future utility holders. We believe that this is a— we've determined that this, the issue that we're dealing with here with utilities, is an issue being caused by a small portion of our utility accounts that are being operated as single-family and townhome rentals. And while it's their right to buy properties and rent them that way, we don't want to change the system on the other 20,000+ accounts to deal with an issue that we believe has been clearly clearly identified. It would be, obviously, administratively, a lot of time for us to worry about running credit checks, to try to pick and choose who— if we were to try to separate to determine which accounts we're going to run credits, which accounts we're not going to run credit checks, which accounts we take deposits, which ones we don't take deposits. Again, when we, when we have clearly pinpointed this, this situation and the issue, we want to be able to identify it with a, with a solution that addresses those. We don't feel like everybody should have to be punished or penalized for what we have identified as an issue that's specific. The other, the other resolution that we've had suggested is to not wait so long to shut off the water. So currently how it works is we allow a bill to go 2 months behind, and then they have a 3rd bill— month's bill in hand. When that time comes is when we begin a shutoff. notice. We did look at what it would take if we switched to 1 month. And currently, we looked at just this latest, this latest month.

And the—

what we now do is just a delinquency notice saying you're behind. We would be doing, uh, shut-off notices to about 800 accounts per month. Uh, currently, we shut off, from what I understand, about 20 to 25 accounts per month. So— or per week. So about 100 a month. So we'd be— Upping, upping by about 8 times the accounts. Administratively, this would be extremely burdensome for us. We'd spend a lot more time doing shutoffs and reconnects. But when the property is shut off, we have to continue to monitor the property to make sure that the locks haven't been cut, they're not accessing water from a neighbor. And so there's, there's reasons that banks don't repo the car the first month you get behind, and there's a reason the mortgage companies don't kick you out the first month you get behind. The truth is, most of the time you catch up. Sometimes it's just a tough month and you just need a little extra time. We want to be compassionate in those areas. And again, we believe we've pinpointed where the problem is. And so to enact something that impacts the other 20,000+ customers doesn't seem to be the ideal resolution to the issue that we're facing. So assuming the— if the proposal, the resolution is adopted tonight, or the ordinances, I call it the ordinance, I I apologize. The plan would be to hold an open house with landlords and property managers, letting them know of the changes and the fees and how to comply— come in compliance with the changes. Given the amount of questions we've received, we believe that this open house makes— we've done a lot of digital and a lot of other outreach. This one makes sense once they can actually do the changes that we would be requiring. That is the number one question we get from most property managers is, what do I need to do? So that they can come into compliance. The city would forego a per-unit charge. If this— if the city were to ever want to do a per-unit charge, additional steps would be required, including a good landlord program. Getting licensed would be as simple as getting the utilities.

Oh, Steve, what is a good landlord program?

Yeah. So if we were to offer a per— so we, as I mentioned in this other fee, we could charge up to $60 per unit. In order to do that, we have to offer a way for a landlord to be able to reduce that fee. And frankly, the, the Utah Apartment Association is here. They're the ones that administer the program and can probably speak best to it. But generally, there's a program that a good landlord— a landlord can go through to show that they've taken some proactive steps to improve their ability to be a landlord, and then they would get a reduction in the per-unit fee. And so, again, the Utah Apartment Association works with the cities that have a per-unit charge offers a good landlord program for those landlords to take— to participate in. So again, the licensing would be getting in— getting their utilities in their name, and then we would, out of that system, pull the information that we need for the rental license and issue a bill, and then have the information for the rental licensing extracted into a separate program for our police department and others to be able to use as they work with rental properties. They don't need and shouldn't have access to the entire utility account. They just need specific contact information that will be housed in the utility account and extracted into a rental license. And then as part of that—

please, if, if you could, Councilmember Sumner has a question.

Yes, I could wait till you're done, but I, um, question on if it—

as me as a landlord, if I decide to put the tenant responsible for the bill, do I get monthly bills as well, or am I in the loop on a communication from the city?

Yep. So what you'd be doing in your utility account is naming a tenant with their contact information, the electronics or their email address, and they would be emailed the duplicate bill. You would be the one that would be— you'd be getting the bill as well. They'd be getting a duplicate. Okay, so any delinquency notice you would get, they would get.

Okay, you'd be—

it'd be mirroring.

If the tenant changes, who's responsible for getting the bill in the other tenant's name?

Is that the landlord?

The landlord. Okay.

The licensing fee would be adopted as part of the budget, the upcoming budget, because again, it'll take effect July 1st. Any questions?

Councilmember Larey, you have one?

So Steve got tired of seeing me because I had many friends who were landlords and were really concerned and sent me many questions. Um, one, one of the landlords said to me, if my renters pay this, because they pay, they have an incentive to conserve And if I'm in charge, there'll be no disincentive for them not to, you know, use the water. So do you have any idea about the conservation part of that? And also, another gentleman said that Provo was only $20 for their— why were we $50? Now, you've answered how we came up with it, but can you— do you know a little bit about Provo's as well as my question about conservation?

So I'll answer the Provo one. They do have a $20 fee if you only own one unit. If you own multiple units, it's a $60 fee. So—

Do they have a good landlord program?

They don't have a good landlord program.

So if the state didn't allow them to do a per unit—

That's their, their licensing fee. I, I can't speak to how they came up with that charge, and it's—

yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, I don't speak to the way that they went about charging. I just have a list of all the different fees that different cities charge.

Okay.

Thank you.

And then conservation, do you have anything to say?

Conservation, yeah, we— so Again, the utilities being in the name of the landlord, that's the way it already is, again, currently with 75% of our rentals. I don't think we see anything in those 75% that would suggest that the showers are significantly longer or anything like that. The majority of the water goes to the property itself. Any given unit, the majority of anybody's water use—

Landscaping?

Watering their lawn. There probably are different arrangements with every, every landlord. I can only speak to a handful of conversations that I've had with landlords where the landlord, you know, controls the, the sprinklers and they can, you know, because they obviously want to preserve their grass and make sure that their property is being watered and doesn't— that the tenant doesn't let it die. So we have, I think, situations where the landlord controls the water.

Okay.

And the tenant pays the bill. And again, whether that means the landlord doesn't have the same incentive to conserve— in the one instance I can speak to, we had a landlord who was watering the grass every minute, every night for 45 minutes in all the properties. The landlord was paying— or the tenant was paying the $300 bill every summer— every month in the summer. Ever— even when this proposal came out, they actually Got— it got the landlord and tenant talking about this together and they've reduced their water usage to 15 minutes every other day on the sprinklers. We also have some issues where there's a leak in a pipe. That would be the landlord's responsibility to fix. But when the tenant's the one paying the bill, there isn't the same incentive to maybe fix. That isn't every situation. But what we believe honestly is if the landlord is getting a bill or the bill that they'll be responsible for and it's getting high, What we see in other situations that we currently have is that the landlord typically calls the tenant and they talk through it, or they check the leaky toilet, or they, they do those different things. And it usually actually becomes a conversation about—

So you're seeing this more as a tool to—

We believe it can be. I don't, I don't think in every case it will be, but we believe it can be. And that's a conversation that the landlords and the tenants can have if the landlord feels like the use is being And can you speak one more thing?

You said some focus groups. Did you have how many? One or two?

Yeah, we had one focus group with 2 property managers and, I believe, 4 landlords.

And how did you select them?

Comments that we're getting on Facebook. We wanted to honestly bring some in that maybe weren't as positive. So we wanted to get the perspective. And then the 2 property manager companies were ones that had reached out to us. to ask us more information, and they were willing to provide their feedback. And so we brought them in to have that discussion, but then we also put online forms for people to fill out and submit questions, and then we followed up with those individuals. We had a website running for the last few months, orm.org/landlords, that answers a lot of the frequently asked questions. And then I probably had phone calls with, I would honestly say, probably 25 or 30 property owners or property management companies.

Okay, thanks.

Councilmember Spencer. Steve, can you give us a brief history of how we got to this point of what we're doing?

The Goodland— I mean, why are we doing this right now today?

Yep. So we've, we've been looking at a lot of different things with our utility billing system, our 311, ever since we became a 311 center. Over the last couple years, we've just looked at opportunities to make make it more efficient in what we do. And so we asked for, for input from the staff on where the pain points are, where they're spending a lot of their time that they feel like maybe we could improve and become efficient, the way any, any business looks at their operations. This was one of the things that came out. And then what we did is we put together a group of employees to look at putting on— reducing the amount of utilities going to collections. We looked at that specifically.

So, but the—

our 311 agents looked at mostly was the amount of time they spend with rentals, um, change as they change over. So one of the things that happens, and we looked at a couple of accounts where one, one specific single-family rental had gone to collections, I, I think 4 times in 5 years. And what had happened was it was rented to some single— singles, and whether they were students or professionals, I'm not sure. The utilities would go to collections in one name, and then the, the students would then— or the individual living there would then have another roommate put it in their name and then say that they had moved out. And it, and it started just moving from roommate to roommate to roommate, and they kept going to collections each time. We have situations where somebody comes in and wants to move the utilities into somebody else's name. What we have to do is verify Did that person actually move out? Again, are they still living there, but they want to put it in their spouse's name or their brother's or sister's name? Multiple times we found that it was— this was the husband putting it in the name of the wife or the wife putting in the husband— name of the husband to try to take. So we have to go back and look at lease agreements, contact property, you know, do a lot of different things in order to try to verify. So this is where they saw the efficiency in time. If it stayed in the name of the owner at all times, we wouldn't be having those conversations and those kind of games being played. Then a group of employees looked at the collections part of it. And so we looked at all of our utility accounts and determined where are we seeing our losses. We look at that with a lot of different revenues. Again, it's— we believe it's our stewardship to the rest of the citizens to be efficient in how we collect any of the revenue that we currently charge. What they did in pulling that data is where we really saw this jump out at that these townhomes and single families have a significantly higher percentage going to collections than everywhere else. So it was through just looking at our operations for efficiencies in both collections and in processes. And what, uh, what was the total collection for the year?

So that we sent to collections?

Yeah, it was about $70,000.

Okay.

And we generally collect 30%, so that's where the $50,000 lost.

Okay, so we're losing $50,000 a year.

That's— yeah, approximately $50,000 a year. And then just in 2018, we sent $45,000 of single-family utility accounts to collections, $13,000 of townhomes. In this— in that same year, we sent $1,000. So that's $58,000 worth of collections. In our multi-units across the city, we sent a total of $1,000 to So $1,000 to $58,000.

And what other cities are doing this rental dwelling license?

Yep, yep.

So the, the licensing, the ones I have, and I'm sure we don't know all of them: Provo, Ogden, St. George, Salt Lake City, Midvale, Clearfield, West Valley, West Jordan, Taylorsville, Roy, Logan, Cedar City, Murray, North Salt Lake, Washington Terrace. The ones that I have.

And I think, I think my point on this is, um, at least the city will have the information of landlords and we'll be able to get that information to them if there's an issue with the property. So I think it's a good, good idea.

Thank you.

And then I think if you asked as well, the, the cities that are doing what we're proposing with utilities are American Fork, Pleasant Grove, Vineyard, Nephi, South Weber, Midvale, Nephi, South Weber— oh, I mentioned South Weber— South Ogden. I apologize. Those do it that way. And you'll know Vineyard has been doing this for basically its existence, which is only a handful of years. In that time, they've sent a total of 3 properties to collections.

Thanks, Steve.

Councilmember Lentz.

Stephen, do you want to go back to the slide where you had the list of exceptions that the staff was proposing? And as you're pulling that up, Mr. Earl, I had a question for you, and we talked about this by email and the work session As I was reading the ordinance language, I could see how someone might read it as though this only applies to long-term rentals. In other words, if somebody's trying to rent a house or a townhome for the long haul, this would apply. But there's a phrase in there that comes straight out of our— the state law, correct? That defines a rental dwelling, that it's anything that's rented out for at least 30 days. So if somebody had an Airbnb, for example, or a short-term rental, would they be exempted from this as well? Again, I mean, we have it listed here that they're impacted, but can you just clarify why that phrase does not exempt them from this?

Yeah, we— this, this does apply to the Airbnbs or the typical short-term rentals. I think the, the key phrase there in the definition of a rental dwelling is that it's A dwelling that's available to be rented for a period of 1 month or longer, not necessarily that it actually is rented for that time period. And I think that if you've done any— had any experience with these Airbnb-type rentals, you'll— my experience, at least, is that they're all, virtually all available potentially to rent for a period of a month or longer. You might have to schedule it out. 6 months or a year in advance, but they all seem to be willing to rent for that time if you want to do it for that. So I think that they, they would clearly fall under that definition of rental dwelling. If for some reason you had one that their policy is they never rent it out for, you know, a period that long, then I suppose that they might be exempt, and we probably just wouldn't have any control under that because of how state law has defined rental dwelling. But my feeling is that 99.9% of them are going to still fall under this.

So if somebody, let's say they take a 3-week vacation every summer and they always rent out their home for that 3-week period, they could potentially be exempted from—

Yeah, yeah. In a situation like that, I mean, that's probably not a true Airbnb. You know, maybe they're doing, you know, some people do property swaps with somebody in Hawaii or, you know, something like that for a couple weeks a year. So yeah, that, that situation would, would probably, uh, would be exempt under this definition.

Um, if I could say just to Airbnbs, because this is something I didn't probably touch on, we, we have been working with some companies that help us identify where the short-term rentals are. And you'll be interested to know that in, in just the last year, there's been a 40% increase in the number of properties that have become available for short-term This is another issue we start seeing creep up in neighborhoods. Some people may have one in their own neighborhood that they, that they're aware of. This is something that we need to begin understanding and licensing and working with as well, we believe.

And the second exception on the right side there, for a senior who is currently permitted to rent out a portion of their home to up to 2 adults and their dependent children, We were talking about this in the work session, and help me understand, is staff proposing that we exempt them from the licensing program altogether, or just that they need to be licensed but they're exempted for the— exempted from the $50 fee?

Yeah, I think it was being exempted from the fee rather than the license. I think we still want to have the information that the license provides, but exempt from the fee.

That was the Okay.

The discussion, I think.

And as far as if somebody refuses to participate in the program or, you know, protests, I know that we have the administrative law judge process. Can you talk a little bit about what happens if somebody kind of fights against this program? What would be the next steps in addressing that?

So the last section in the ordinance, which is Section 12-9-12, talks about violations.

You know, like most sections of our city code, if somebody doesn't comply with the requirements, in this case, they're guilty. They would be guilty of a Class B misdemeanor potentially and could also be subject to enforcement action under our administrative nuisance enforcement ordinance.

So I guess if we have a senior that's in that situation, maybe just doesn't even know that they're required to signed up for something like that. I'm assuming we would have some kind of grace period to just educate them, get them into compliance, as opposed to sending them off to court or something.

Yeah, our practice in enforcement is never to bring the hammer down on somebody, you know, right at first. Our objective is always just to get compliance. And in this case, I anticipate, like with many situations, we're not going to issue citations. Until they've had ample opportunity and notice to comply.

And in the case where somebody is renting out an illegal accessory apartment, essentially, where— and that's really one of the issues that I think we've been trying to address with this, this program. Is there anything unique or different about that situation, or would it just be following the same protocol that we have with our other Well, are you talking—

did you say with illegal apartments or with accessory apartments?

Yeah, or both. With illegal accessory apartments. Yeah, yeah.

With accessory apartments, for example, which are of course, you know, legal licensed accessory apartments, it's— that's just a normal rental license you'd be required to get for that. You know, I think quite honestly, the illegal rentals, that's going to be tricky, right? Because somebody who comes in and tries to get a license for that is obviously going to find out that what they're doing is illegal. It's going to put them in a bit of a conundrum, I suppose. So I think that's actually part of the objective of this, is to sort of crack down on the illegal rentals that are out there. Because, you know, if we find out that somebody is— let's say that there's a report from neighbors that, you know, this is being rented and there's problems. Neighborhood Preservation goes out there and they say, well, is there— first of all, is there a residential rental license? And they find out, well, no, because it's not legal for them to do what they're doing. So that adds sort of an extra enforcement mechanism to help crack down and eliminate these illegal rentals in the city, potentially, whereas that mechanism doesn't exist right now.

Last question. The good landlord training program that you were talking about, I know that we don't need that for part of this program. I was just curious for that administrative law judge process, if somebody, you know, goes through that and they've had some violations and they're trying to come into compliance, could that potentially— that training potentially be used as one of the sentences or, you know, the tools that's used to say, you know, in order to get your license back, you need to go through this Good Landlord Program?

Or—

I'm just kind of thinking of like the traffic school analogy. Sometimes somebody wants to get out of a traffic ticket, they go to traffic school, and that's part of their, their discipline or so.

I, if I could, I don't mean to put Paul, Paul on the spot, but I don't know if you do Good Landlord classes for somebody who's not in a city that has a Good Landlord program.

We do them for anyone that asks, and any city has the authority to use that as a Okay.

Okay.

Thank you.

And not to suggest that we need to put that in code and say this is what happens, but just so that that ALJ process has that as one of the tools in the toolbox, I guess.

Yeah.

You know, when you look at the reasons that we have in the ordinance for revoking a license right now, we don't have multiple or repeated violations as one of the reasons you would get revoked.

revoked.

And that's where I think the good landlord training would be most valuable, is in those situations. Right now, it's only— you only get revocation for, you know, not paying your license fee or providing incomplete or false information in your application, you know, not paying administrative fines that have been levied with regard to an incident that took place at the property, that sort of thing. Potentially down the road, I think that could be incorporated into a modification of this ordinance if it's appropriate.

Thank you.

Jamie, did you have a comment? Okay.

All right.

Anything else, Steve?

No.

You sure?

Oh, well, I always have something to say, but I'll spare you.

But if—

yeah, just any other questions you may have, if there are.

Any other questions or comments from the council? As far as questions on what we're discussing. Steve, do you have something you want to say?

Well, I guess— okay, I'll just let you know what I'm asking Steven about.

We—

in the— Steven and I had previously talked about not having the requirement for the utilities to go in the name of the owner, that that part of the ordinance would not go into effect until July 1st. I just heard Steven say that they could start doing that January 1st, so I just wanted to make sure with him that that's still his intent, that the requirement to do that would not take place until July 1st.

That's—

yeah, that's correct. So that's— and that's, that's the point we administer the license. What we've had is, is just a lot of landlords calling that just want to get this taken care of.

Okay.

Coming. So at any time, even now, some— but there are a handful—

Well, they can come in and do it now.

They're currently saying needs to be done by July, but have to be done by July. And that gives us 6 months to, one, communicate with them, Let them know, give them multiple—

Well, that clarifies your January 1st, July 1st dates.

Yes. Yeah. Sorry.

Yeah.

That, that probably was confusing. So again, if somebody wants to do it now, there are some that already operate that way. Sure. And so anybody can put their utilities in their name at any time. It's for the 6— this will give us 6 months to notify, work with, kind of roll out this online system that's allowed them and allow them to do all this electronically come July 1st.

Okay.

And Mayor, we're also— we're going to ask for one minor change or correction to this in Section 1296, which is the license fee. We say in there right now that the, the fee would be established in an amount established by the resolution of the City Council. We just like to modify that by saying established by a resolution or ordinance of the City Council, as I understand that sometimes we're setting those fees now by ordinance as opposed to resolution.

Okay, Sam, did you have a comment?

Yeah, I just wanted to— it's more of a philosophical comment, I guess. I think sometimes we're making a decision to, say, bond for a large building that costs millions of dollars, and it's important that we do all of our homework up front to get that right, because once you issue the bond and put up that building, it's kind of tough to change that decision after— I mean, you could remodel it or something. But one of the things I like about this program, we've still done our homework. We've done the research. We've talked to different stakeholders. But even if we only get this 90% right or 95% right, there's still going to be opportunities to tweak and refine this over time without, you know, a really high risk if we got part of it wrong. So I just wanted to commend the staff for for, you know, bringing the public in and getting input on this. And I think this is a great step forward to address a lot of the issues that, as we've been doing these neighborhood plans over the last several years, this is, you know, kind of a direct solution that we can present to the public. This is how we're implementing these neighborhood plan goals that you've set.

Okay. Thank you. Councilmember Sumner.

I was just going to say, Stephen, I think most landlords If they're renting their home or residence, they know if it's legal or illegal. But in case they don't, they have questions, I think it'd be a good idea if this passes to maybe put a bullet point on what's, what's legal and what's illegal on you— on our website, so they understand, you know, the ordinances. Sometimes the ordinance—

if you read the ordinance, it kind of—

a lot of gobbledygook.

But a bullet point or something real simple so they know if they're legal or not.

Yep.

I appreciate that. We will.

So I think this program brings greater responsibility to the landowners, which is where it really lies. The landowners own the particular property. And they are the ones that profit from it. They are the ones that should be taking care of that property in a proper manner. And if someone is not paying the bill, I don't believe the citizens of Orem should be the one footing that $50,000 per year. So I feel like that this licensing fee is good. I think it's helpful. I think it will also help our police with the data.

Thank you.

that they need as to who the property owner is and who they can contact. I think it will lend itself to better ownership and better licensing of the properties for the city and for the residents. And I think the residents around those properties that are being rented will appreciate this, that the properties will be better taken care of. So, so I'm in favor of it.

Thank you.

I'd like to make a motion.

Okay. Wait, this isn't fair.

So this is—

There are landlords here who have never talked to anybody that would like to say things. I think they deserve a chance.

Okay, so this is an ordinance and it's not a public hearing. And on the council appearance sign-in sheet, it states there that anyone that's not listed— any item that's not listed as a public hearing would have this to speak to. So let me just ask a question. How many are here that would like to say something? All right, well, I'll open it up for some of you to come forward. This is not a public hearing, but if you'd like to say something, we'll go ahead and leave you some time. So if you'd like to come forward, again, you have 3 minutes, and please give us your name.

Thank you.

My name is Paul Smith, and I'm the executive director of the Utah Apartment Association. And I'm here to tell you that we support your ordinance. Many cities have utilities— their programs where the owner is ultimately responsible. And it actually is a win-win for the landlord, the tenant, and the city. I've got some information I'm happy to pass out on that. We also appreciate the administration. They've done a great job explaining this tonight. They've also done a great job involving the community. They haven't produced a product that everyone loves. There are some landlords who are just going to be mad about anything, but the reality is professional landlords don't mind paying a small license fee to cities in exchange for the ability to be contacted if there are problems. It actually is in a landlord's best interest for you to be able to contact us and notify us if there's crime on the property or notify us of the— if the tenant is maintaining waste or not taking care of the yard. We really appreciate it, and a $50 fee is very reasonable. We very much appreciate that, and I'll take any questions if you have any for the rest of my time.

No, we'll just go on to the next person who would like to make comments. And don't forget your cell phone.

My name is Sullivan Love.

Been up here again. I didn't realize I'd need to sign in to talk with this. And by the way, Mayor, just poke a little fun, that power plant's in Vineyard.

But, uh, and then, uh, Brandon, I don't know if he took off or not, but, uh, uh, you know, it might have been other issues that brought me here tonight, but I'm interested Glad to hear that.

Good job, well done, stuff like that. Isn't there an ordinance already in place dealing and regarding with illegal rentals and stuff like that?

And if it's already in place, you know, the enforcement—

this program is not going to change the enforcement of that. I mean, you got to enforce any ordinances that are already in place to make that that, you know, successful and to create those desirable neighborhoods that are affected by illegal rentals. The implementation of this fee doesn't help keep rental rates low. No landlord is going to absorb that fee without passing it along to the renters. If the utilities are in the landlord's name, do we have the ability to shut the water off if the renter doesn't pay their rent? I don't think we do. We do? Okay, I'm in favor of that then. But it was my understanding that state law wouldn't allow us to do that, but I don't— I'm not sure. Because it's kind of a health issue, you can't shut the water off because it creates an unsanitary environment, or—

You do shut off accounts when they don't get paid.

I know the city does, but does a landlord have that ability to do that? Okay, so that creates kind of an unfair advantage of us, you know, for the landlord if they're not paying utilities. Or rent or stuff like that. The city has teeth to do stuff like that. Most businesses have built into their business models, you know, if they have bad debt, it's covered under their rates and fees. You know, I'm not a resident of the city, but I do pay taxes.

And so as not being a resident, I don't have the opportunity to vote for elected officials.

And so it kind of takes away, you know, one of the options if I don't like, you know, policies or whatever. I don't have that chance to vote for those. And the only way I found out about this was through Facebook posts.

Unfortunately, I spend way too much time on Facebook, but I would have, you know, liked to have had more information, been able to get in on the front end a little bit of, you know, in the conversations and the focus groups and stuff like that.

But anyway, and then also perhaps we need to have a little bit more discussion, get more landlords in you know, their feedback and stuff and put this off for a vote, you know, in the coming year instead of tonight.

Thank you.

Anyone else care to come forward?

My name is Rick Lewis, and my question is, it's going to cost $50 to register me. He's done the studies to say it really costs that much, but if you If you only have one apartment that you're dealing with, do it— does it cost $50 the second year and the third year? Are you going to make any allowance for renewal fee in that for one person or one— a person that only has one apartment? The other question I have, which is not directly related to this, if the apartment is illegal, do you have some program to correct that situation in a reasonable manner. Thank you.

Steve, did you want to mention as far as the yearly—

So we— the study showed the $105 is what we could charge for a new business license. The renewal is $59. We're just charging below even the renewal price.

And we charge a business license to anybody who's operating a business. And they have to renew that each year.

Correct.

And just like the state charges you to renew your corporation registration each year. Correct.

So we— the rate we set from the get-go is lower than the renew— than what we can charge for a renewal. So we believe we're charging fairly.

All right.

My name is Jeremiah Maughan. I'm one of the property managers that had a chance to participate in that focus group. And frankly, I was shocked at how well our feedback was captured by Steve.

That's not something we're used to when working with cities, and we just want to say thank you.

In that focus group, there was probably 2,500 to 3,000 units represented. My company manages about 1,200. And so we've seen a lot of— we've had a lot of experience with cities.

What is your company?

My name is—

my company is Vision Real Estate. We're based in Provo. We've got a large contingent here in Orem. And being able to participate in the process and having been included was extremely valuable to us. There were several property managers in that group, more than just 2. There was actually a few others in there too. And we appreciated that the city was willing to hear our concerns with the other programs that we've dealt with in other cities. We feel like the feedback was well received, that the proposal that's been put in front of you has met a lot of our concerns. And we feel like it's something— our primary concern is making sure we have an effective way to communicate, to have control. As property managers, we like having control.

We like to preserve properties.

We like to be able to make sure things are going right. And so the fact that the city is trying to design this around the giving us the opportunity to still participate and have some control over that.

That's been—

we've really appreciated that.

So, so yeah, obviously we love free.

We don't—

but we understand that there's some challenges here, and it seems like the way they're trying to structure it has been good. Even some of the others have been learning from other cities that have been onerous. The rental dwelling license programs of other cities have been real challenges, and and us being able to get those and comply with those, that we've had to jump through a lot of hoops. And we feel like that OREM staff has worked really hard to try to make that something that we can handle, which we appreciate. And we're doing it across thousands of units. And so we just want to say thank you for your efforts and time, and we're in favor of this.

Okay, anyone else wishing to speak?

My name is Marion Roberts Baxter. I'm a property owner, so I'm going to give another perspective. I've been a property owner in the city of Orem for 37-plus years and primarily down in southwest Orem, which has borne the brunt of a lot of the growth of that area, specifically as Vineyard has grown and UVU has grown as a— into a university from a technical college. So some of the things that I look at is we also in our area of single-family residential have had to deal with a lot of illegal residential rentals going on. Sometimes homes divided up into duplex styles that were not initially built for that. One of the first comments tonight had to be as a property owner— or I mean as a landlord— they— and who isn't a resident of the city was saying, well, another bill, it'll have to get another fee, it will get passed on to our tenants. The concern that I have with that is when a property owner chooses to rent their home, they have just brought a business into a residential area, and they've also done business according to zoning legally if it's multiple-use or multiple dwelling and residential, you know, higher density. So the challenge that I find with saying, oh, why should we have a fee, but they're a business owner in a residential area. To me, what the city is doing here is really clarifying and leveling the playing field for how everyone exists in a community.

Thank you.

To me, to look at a renewed business license for an at-home business person, you know, running an independent or an entrepreneur from home, is literally $105. And a person that is bringing a set income in, for a $50 fee a year, that's going to be an onerous burden? To me, that seems out of proportion that that would be a burden.

Thank you.

if they're not even having to pay a $105 business fee, licensing fee a year. So I would just say I really applaud the city staff, the effort that they've gone into. We've been— I've been spreading the good word about Steve's work. I think it's Steven right here, right?

Yes.

Of their willingness to talk with neighborhood groups and community groups. And guess what? Our quadrant hasn't even had this program get finished in our area yet. And I still champion it because I'm hearing good feedback from all the other areas. So one of the things that I would suggest is that I think this has merit. Growing up in Jackson, Wyoming, my husband and our kids living in— one of our married kids living in Santa Cruz, they are paying for an Airbnb licensing that has to be renewed every 5 years. And in Jackson, the same kind of thing happens. Are we not willing to stabilize this so that the city and the landlords can work to find this balance? And I think it's a good program, and I appreciate your time.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

Hi, my name is Mark Porter, and I'm terrified because I've never done this before. First of all, thank you all for your service to the city. I very much appreciate the town in which I live. My wife and I bought a very old home in a very old neighborhood of Orem with a basement rental, and we found out that it was not legal. And so this year we took 18 months' worth of rental income to do all the updates to get it above board with the city because we wanted to be good citizens and responsible. And, and I'm not opposed to clear management and expectations with rentals and things. I do think that each piece of new regulation that, that restricts entry into the market for people who want to maybe open up their homes for people, especially people like us who started out with nothing and caught a break by generous landlords who were willing to offer low rent prices. I think any new barriers to entry in that market sometimes unnecessarily restricts the supply and forces all the prices to come up, because if people have to jump through more and more hoops every year or every few years, then they're more incentivized financially to maybe report more of the illegal units or try to increase more regulation that keeps them able to do what they're doing and restricts others. And I think with the city and its citizens having so much concern for the rising cost of housing, I think it's important that we're very cognizant of, again, even $50 at a time, $100 at a time, of every new regulation that we impose on people who really are just trying to earn an extra buck that— or have their houses earn extra dollars that immediately go back into improving those houses and those neighborhoods in which they live that maybe those homeowners would not be able to afford if they weren't able to get some of that rental income. That's all I have to say. Thank you again. Appreciate the time.

Thank you. Anyone, anyone else willing to come forward?

My name is Mark Haney. My wife and I have apartments in North Orem. Probably shock the council, but I think this is a great idea. I've had calls late at night from police officers looking for landlords of adjacent properties to me.

Tenants had no idea who they were.

They mailed a check to a PO box, had no way of reaching them, didn't— and anyway, this I think is needed. The $50 fee I think is appropriate. One concern I do have, and you had mentioned that there's no consideration at this point of a per-door fee. I would be very concerned about a per-door fee. There's been a couple of those implemented in the last few years, and it's killing us. It is a very heavy burden to carry. And the chart you put up about the police calls per door, for my complex, would fit in the over 100. Looks to be the lowest one up there, which surprised me. Actually shocked me.

And I—

You know, just from my perspective, the per door fee, I think, would not be appropriate with what we're seeing here. And that would be my concern. But as far as what you've discussed tonight, I support it. I think it's needed. The database, I think, will benefit everyone. Thank you.

Thank you.

My name is Carol Miles. We are residents of Orem for 31 years. We do not rent out property here, but these issues have come to our attention in homes that we've lived in and currently rent out in other areas. One of them— actually, both have the problem of notification. St. George did not, um, bill us for a renewal license, and they state that they do not have to advise us when our renewal is due. So I would ask that you please make sure if you are going to have a license— I gladly pay my $50 plus $10 for having an agent in St. George But I would like to be notified when my renewal license is due. Another situation also with landlords who are not advised when their tenants have not paid the water bills to their city. This was a problem again Idaho Blackfoot said we do not it's a privacy issue it's burdensome. To notify an owner that their tenant has not paid for water. And we're saying, but our property depends on being notified and knowing that water is there to water the landscape. It looks better for the City of Blackfoot to have, um, a nice-looking outside. So notifications on both of those issues are important to landlords to know when utilities are being shut off and to know when their renewal license is due. Thank you.

While they're coming up, what we're proposing will take care of both of those things.

Okay.

My name is Linda Payne, and I Yes. I know of a 65-year-old person renting that does have a legal accessory apartment and also rents out part of the— her basement to her part of the house. And I'm wondering how this is supposed to affect them. Does she have to pay $50 for the accessory apartment and then $50 for renting out— but she would have to pay $50 for the accessory.

Okay.

Unless family's living in the accessory apartment. She's 85. Yeah. So she wouldn't have to pay anything for any of it.

So for the accessory apartment, they would. The 65 and older exemption is for a not— a non-separate living unit in their home.

Right.

But if they have a separate accessory apartment that they operate, they would be charged a $50 fee. Is that correct?

Right. Okay. So in a situation like that, you— the City of Orem doesn't have separate water for a bit where everything's all in one, right?

Like—

Yes, there is. There would— for an accessory apartment, there would be separate water, water account.

If it's a legal accessory.

For a legal accessory apartment, yes.

Okay.

Hers is a legal accessory apartment, but No, the City of Warham never made her have a separate water bill for the apartment first. So she pays the whole—

Maybe I misspoke.

I thought that was the case, but maybe I'm thinking something else. Steven, maybe you know the answer to that.

Pesto found something on— no, I'm just kidding. I don't believe that they— that that's the case.

Okay.

Maybe I'm mistaken on that.

Ryan, do you know? I don't believe we require a separate meter to be put on. Just on duplexes.

So, so just maybe I'm thinking separate heating and cooling. I think that's what it was.

Yeah.

Yes, that's true.

Yeah, but you guys aren't involved with the power and gas. So, and I really think this is a great idea as far as, as knowing who owns the homes and they are informed. if people are doing something with their property that shouldn't be done or that's causing the city costs. So like a single-family home that's being rented out or a single-family home that does have a legal accessory apartment and they're renting that and the home. And I very much agree with this. But I'm sorry about my time, but I do have to say this one thing.

Thank you.

I just want to ask one thing. What about the illegal apartments?

How—

You can check with Steve afterwards. We do have to respect the time of other residents who wish to speak, so just check with him afterwards, if you would.

But is this for this cost-per-door incident? Is that for criminal stuff?

That's police calls per unit that we have experienced. So Steve can go over with you that later. So if we can move on to the next resident who would like to speak.

Hi, my name is Daniel Johnson. I do, at least if I understood correctly, I do appreciate how simple it seems it will be to pay for the license and get it renewed, because it seems it will be just on the utility bill.

Is that correct?

You'll receive a separate bill, but it will be done through that system. There's not 2 systems to fill out.

Oh, thank you for making it easy.

One thing, I have no problem with landlords paying their water bills and having that in their name and all of that.

I understand all of that.

I don't like how it seems landlords have been painted in a bit of a bad light.

I think we provide a great service to, to the city and to the— to everybody.

I think most of us have interacted with a landlord at least once in our lives. Throughout the presentation, And it shows that the majority of these problems are with single-family rentals.

I own a small triplex, multifamily rental. It's, it's below owner-occupied service calls per unit.

It's not adding to the utility bill collection and all of that issue. So I'm wondering why this fee is extended to us if we are putting less stress on the system than a homeowner. Also, with the fee, I understand the reason. You need our names in case the police need to contact us. I have no problem with that. I do want to make sure that that information is private, that it's not being out for telemarketers. And I get enough junk mail about my stuff anyway, so I'd like to know that that's not out to the public. Um, and then I'd like— it would be nice if there were some type of good landlord incentive where you don't have to pay the fee. My, my home is without— not just my opinion, but it's the nicest home on the block. You know, the triplex. The lawn's always green, the flowers are nice, the trees are nice, the landlord—

the tenants are upstanding people in the community and leaders in the church and And I do a lot of work to ensure that I am not a drain on the community.

I want to add to the community. I feel like I add a lot to our neighborhood. And I just don't like being penalized and fined for doing that. So if there were some type of way to, you know, if you don't incur calls or don't go to collections, if you can earn your way out of this fee. I have no problem giving you my name and phone number if the cops need to get a hold of me.

I just don't like the fee.

And I also don't like that the fee is not capped, so it could be raised or changed or, or whatever easily.

So I'd like to keep some of those protections in place for those of us who aren't straining the system. Thank you.

Thank you. Anyone else care to make a comment?

Just real quick, my name is Jeremy Shortz. I'm an attorney here. My office is just down the street in Orem, and I primarily deal with landlord-tenant issues. And so I just wanted to take a minute, and as soon as I heard about this, my first knee-jerk reaction was to be a little bit defensive. I know I have a lot of clients and friends that would be concerned about this. But I do want to thank Steve and the council and the city because I think today we live in a headline society where who really cares about the details.

But I think a lot of the details have been worked out.

I know that, you know, there are some serious problems that need to be addressed. The communication with the owners is a significant issue. The losses to the city of the unpaid utility bills are significant, and putting the owners' names on the utilities helps to solve both of those really nicely.

And it helps to pinpoint a lot of the problem accounts, because if there is—

and if there is some abuse, that can be focused on. I think that a lot of the primary concerns that I've heard about this is the increased regulation and the fee. And I understand that there's an increase cost as well. But I do appreciate the council being— looking beyond just the headlines. As I do trainings with clients, I tell them that landlords are often villainized, and that's a shame because they do provide a very valuable service. And, and again, we also live in a headline society, and in the days of Facebook, people don't read the details anymore. And I just want to emphasize the city— thank you for your efforts there— and look for opportunities to assist those good landlords, because there are a lot of good landlords out there. There are a lot of good tenants out there, but nobody likes talking about those because they're not interesting and they're, they're not exciting. But just, just realize that most people are willing to, to do what's right and to be fair and look at solutions to the problem.

So thank you.

Hi, I'm David Buseith, and I just have 2 comments to make. As we evaluated this concept with the Orem Neighborhood Association last week, one thought that came up a lot was that it— we would Without saying we want to stick it to big apartment complexes, our feeling was there ought to be some scaling. And if you look at the slide, 100 units brings 9 police calls per year to that apartment complex or more, compared to 0.9 for a single-family rental. Nearly 10 times as many police calls to the 100 apartment unit. Not 100 times, but 10 times. 10 times less. 0.09 times 100 is 9. This is calls per unit.

Right, so you multiply it by 100 units.

So you multiply— that location receives 9 police calls per year. You seem not to be paying attention to me. I'm reading it, $0.09 per unit times 100 units.

It's, it's okay, Dave. Dave, keep going. We understand what you're saying.

So to me, that means they should pay 10 times the fee, not 100 times, not a per-door fee. But you could easily justify with the ordinance that Steve sent me, the— I mean, the code from the In the state, in my opinion, you could justify a 10-time increase for such a group. That's comment number 1. Comment number 2 is that the old folks could— this could be an opportunity to say to them, you don't have to worry about having somebody live in your place. You don't have to register.

You don't have to pay a fee.

Thank you.

Not just you don't have to pay a fee, you don't have to register either, and make a clear distinction between that aspect of city rental code and the aspect where they have a legal accessory apartment and they do have to pay. To me, that would make a lot of sense and it'd be appropriate considering the people I know who are old folks who use that part of the city code to help themselves as they get older.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I'd first like to apologize.

Tell me your name first.

Martin Wright.

I'd first like to apologize for the outburst. I think, I think we have 2 issues here, and, and I, I, I don't think it should be categorized in one ordinance Maybe there needs to be 2. One should be, hey, the landlords need to pay $50 and be that— you know, I'm fine with that. And then the other should be separate. And the question is, is we say it costs $50, but what does that $50 go to times how many people? That's a lot of money.

And is that money, once it's done and it's left over and it's What I'm saying is, when we put in the general fund, where is it really going to?

Is it going—

is it just going in the general fund? Is it just going to pay an employee, you know, $100,000 salary a year to manage the thing? I think if we knew it was going to something to help, that would be great.

But I think this needs to be separated out into 2 things. A, how we deal with utilities.

And B, how we deal with landlords who are renting. And I don't mind paying the fee.

I don't mind them knowing who lives in the—

who owns the house.

And I don't think anybody here would object to that.

I think it's been clear from the comments.

And I appreciate you taking the comments because I felt from day one that this was just, hey, the city came up with it and we're just going to jam it through and we're not going to listen to anybody.

Thank you.

And, you know, yeah, they had focus groups, but one of them had 1,300 units.

Well, that's not really a big focus group compared to the number of individual landlords that this affects. So I appreciate the effort. I think it should be divided into 2, and I think it would be more meaningful that way and would clarify. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Anyone else wish to make a comment? Um, this is your third try, so—

Very quick.

So if we go with the—

What is your name?

Sullivan Love.

Thank you.

That's the third time.

Anyway, um, so if we go with the utility billing with landlords and stuff, does OREM provide an option where they do level equal pay throughout the year?

Because that would probably help the landlords you know, even out the—

Get with the utility department.

All right, thank you.

Anyone else willing to make a comment? All right, well, we'll stop the public comment portion of our ordinance. One thing I'd like to just say is we appreciate all of the landlords and the services that they provide, and we ask that they provide those services in a legal, proper manner that is beneficial to them, those who rent from them, and to the city. And would just like to mention that I think— I don't have a count, but I would say almost every one of us here have rented before in our lives. And so we do appreciate the service that's provided. Dave, you were going to say something before we changed.

I was going to make a motion.

Okay, would you like to make a motion? Sure. I'd like to make a motion that the City Council, by ordinance enacting Article 12, 12-9 of the City of Orem Code, rental dwelling license, and amending Section 21-1-3B to require that bills of water service be in the name of the owner, and also that those 65 and older are exempt from paying the $50 license fee, but they do have to include their information. And take the license out.

Yeah, take the license. And then also the 12.6, you said that— With regard to the fees being set by resolution or ordinance. Okay, and I said that, yeah. Second that motion.

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

Before I vote, Stephen, thanks so much for your time.

I know you've spent a lot, a lot of hours on this and a lot of, a lot of time, and you've done an excellent job.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Tom, are you still awake?

Yeah, I'm still here, and I'd like to, before I go, echo what Mark said, but also, Mayor, thank you for allowing the citizens to speak. I've been grateful—

although this wasn't a public hearing, I was grateful to get so many comments and their thought-out procedures as well Okay, you bet.

So the ordinance passes. And again, Steve, I'd like to thank you as well and the rest of the staff for the good work that's been done and for listening to a lot of people. Um, we'll move on. Jamie, do you have any comments?

No, sir.

Okay, uh, Councilmember Seestrand has requested a chance to make some comments prior to adjourning.

It's just a few pages, David.

Thank you.

I, I have really enjoyed my time, and I wanted to say a couple of words, but things can be emotional, so I wrote them down.

And if I can—

if you'll indulge for just the last thing, I'll just try to—

So let me just ask one question before you start.

Yeah.

So you came on the council in January of 2006?

Correct.

And how many council sessions have you been through?

We don't know, but we figured around 300.

Around 300. Though you have the right to make a comment. Okay.

I'll try not to ramble, Tom.

How many committee assignments?

Oh, don't worry about that.

My Orem Council service and last meeting is really here.

The feelings in my heart will sigh, but the thoughts in my mind might cheer.

Woo! It began 14 years ago with a sad death and a vacant slot. Encouraged by my father, I applied for the open spot. In the back of the city council meeting, my wife and I sat with shock and unexpect when Mayor Washburn announced to all that— there that my name had been selected. My council work began in haste from the very first official day. Should we split from the Alpine District or should we try and stay? A complete public works building, a huge new water tank, the CARE tax allocations, and how our budget priorities rank. The Sleepy Ridge Golf Course is open, road construction underway, the economy is booming, contractors building without delay. Then came the unexpected recession of 2008, and all of a sudden the city wasn't doing all that great. Utopia was struggling, Midtown Village is now on hold. Nordstrom's is leaving Orem, and cars aren't being sold. Revenues are quickly decreasing. Our savings won't last for long. We must make things last a little longer, for capital improvements are all gone. We then lost Jim Reams, and Mayor Washburn died of cancer.

But Bruce Chestnut and Jim Evans And their calls they would answer.

A tax increase was requested, but the people would really holler.

You've got to find another way to stretch out every dollar. 2 dozen retirements extended with grateful thanks and praises. The rest of the employees would work many years without any raises. Yet the hard work would still continue, and the recovery had finally begun amid much Political contention and several votes of 6 to 1. Now UVU is setting records. The economy is back on pace.

Utopia is making progress.

And the University Mall is now a place.

The student housing project was approved by almost most of the people.

We're wondering where we'll finally see that Orem Temple steeple. The Frontrunner connects to UVX. and thousands ride each day. Splash pads, parks, an all-abilities playground are where our kids can play. A library hall addition and a rec center nice and new. Arts and recs are thriving, the Sierra and Health Center too. Workshops, meetings, pageants, calls, emails, texts, and letters have helped to shape the master plan to make Orem even better. So let me say a final word of thanks and heartfelt gratitude.

Told you.

It's been an honor and quite a ride for this old hometown dude, working with the employees and the residents who are great, the volunteers who get involved and give hours without a rate. That's why we read that Orem is the best place to live, work, and stay, and with my wife and kids and family. Orem is where I will stay. Thank you for this wonderful experience, and good luck for a fantastic year. Thank you.

So, Councilmember Seestrand, would you like to make a motion to adjourn?

Second.

Okay, all in favor say aye.

Aye.

Aye. Thank you, Tom.

Thank you.

I thought it was like 4 pages.

Thank you.

Thank you.