City Council · 2021-06-15

together a presentation and is available to answer your questions.

All right, we'll turn the time over to you.

Thank you.

Is the mic on? You can hear me okay?

Just make sure it's all the way there. Yeah, it's on.

Okay, great. Well, thanks for having me. I understand all of the upheaval of late regarding the animal shelters method of euthanasia and that there's more to come. There are some planned protests and, and today and some other things that go along with that. That's nothing new to our world, unfortunately. Animal rights activists often protest what we do. They have opposing views of what should happen with animals, that animals should not be owned, should not be eaten, Should not be used for entertainment like rodeos or zoos or circuses. And so they're going to oppose certainly what we do. So let me just begin briefly with the history of our shelter. And by brief, I mean everything I'm gonna say is going to be brief. But I welcome questions because I would rather answer your concerns and questions and tell you what I think you might want to hear. But we became an existing special service district in 2005, and this was to answer the needs of animal services for the north half of Utah County, which includes Orem. And we're set up as a special service district, meaning that we are a political subdivision of the state of Utah. We have a board of directors, and a member from each of our cities that we serve serves on that board. Some are mayors or council.

So can you tell us what cities are part of your board?

And I can— the easy answer is Orem and every city north of Orem in Utah County. Okay, that includes Lindon, Pleasant Grove, American Fork, Cedar Hills, Alpine, Highland, Saratoga Springs, Eagle Mountain, Cedar Fort, and Vineyard, Andorra. So we've been doing this a little over 15 years now, and the services we provide are typical services for— in the animal industry, meaning we shelter animals, stray animals, and give care to them. We provide adoptions and redemption services, microchipping, some medical services to the animals that we care for, but not for the general public to bring in. Some educational elements there as well, and then animal euthanasia and animal disposal if somebody has a dead animal that they need disposed of. And there's probably some other services I'm forgetting. So the big question is, why do we euthanize animals and how do we euthanize animals? So I think we should get to that. We euthanize animals really for 2 reasons and 2 reasons only. One is to end the suffering of an animal that cannot be served by medical intervention so that they don't suffer to death. Okay, so an animal that's hit by a car and death is imminent, we will end that animal's suffering. Or somebody brings in their, their Chihuahua that's 16 years old and full of cancer, no longer has a quality of life, then we help with that process.

And that's without fee, where a veterinarian might charge for that?

No, it's done with a fee, but it's greatly reduced from what a veterinarian would charge.

Yeah.

And also the other reason is those animals that are deemed too aggressive to be put back into the community. So we operate somewhat as an animal jail, if you will, as well. Every animal that has bitten somebody that broke the skin by law has to be quarantined at our facility. And that is to protect the life of the person that was bit. We know that rabies is considered 100% fatal in the human population, and we quarantine that to make sure that animal doesn't have rabies at the stage where it could have injected that virus through the saliva into the victim. So it protects our safety, but that means we get all the, the bad actors in. Often they don't have an owner, owner doesn't come forward, or the owner surrenders them because maybe it bit a family member. So those are the other ones that we euthanize because we don't want to put that back out into the community. We think we have an obligation to protect public safety as well.

Is that a state law or just—

It is a state law. It is, the quarantine for 10 days is. So those are 2 reasons for euthanizing. I got to tell you that euthanizing is the least of the desirable things that we do there, right? We don't— nobody there wants to euthanize animals. And every member of our staff, which is a staff of 12, they're hired because they have an affinity towards animals. They enjoy animals. They want to work with animals. They want to care for animals. And then they have to put some to sleep. So that's a difficult task for them. But we prioritize human life over that of the animal and believe that's the way it should be. So that's how we operate.

So how many per year do you euthanize?

I—

it varies from year to year. I can say this calendar year, starting in January to now, we've euthanized 86 animals. So not a lot. There are years we do much more than that. It depends on the volume that comes in. With COVID and things, that has really changed some numbers that typically we would see. But so 86 this year thus far. And then what— how we euthanize, which is the big debate. We euthanize using carbon monoxide, and carbon monoxide has been shown to be an effective way to euthanize animals, but we chose it Because we believe it's the safest for the workers and the less stressful for them, but also the most humane method for the animal. And the way it works is this: carbon monoxide produces hypoxemia, which means an elevate— a decrease in oxygen in the blood. The animals simply go unconscious and then Seconds later, they expire. There's no— well, let me quote from the American Veterinary Medical Association, which I know that Jeremy quoted from himself. This is what they say about using carbon monoxide. Uh, it has 3 distinct advantages. It induces loss of consciousness without pain. Means they go unconscious without feeling any pain. This is, by the way, the American Veterinary Medical Association is the largest veterinary association in the world, 91,000+ members, and they produce a document called the Guidelines for Euthanasia of Animals every 10 years or as needed if it needs to be shorter. It's often referred to, everybody in our industry as well as veterinary industry, wildlife, any animal-related industry uses that because there's methods on what is acceptable for injured deer in the wild, a horse out on the ranch, or a companion animal in the animal shelter, as well as veterinarians that see them in their practice. So again, carbon monoxide induces loss of consciousness without pain, and, and they also define consciousness or unconsciousness, loss of consciousness, as Not being able to feel pain, meaning once an animal is unconscious, they don't feel any pain. So the method after that point really wouldn't matter if they can't feel any pain. However, we still want to do the humane method. The second advantage they say is that it's insidious. That sounds like a scary word, but insidious means that they don't know what's happening to them, so therefore they're not afraid. When you use carbon monoxide. And the last one is that it— that death occurs rapidly. So when you look at the definition of a humane death, that's what you want: something with minimal discomfort or pain, something that acts quickly, doesn't frighten them, and completes the job. And those are the 3 advantages to using carbon monoxide, as stated here on page 27.

So is there a cost advantage?

The cost, you know, there's only been one report that, that we can find that shows a study that was done that compared the two. We've looked at costs over the years several different times. Sometimes it favors carbon monoxide, sometimes it favors euthanasia by injection. So I don't think that there's a huge cost advantage either way you look at it. My personal opinion is that it's actually cheaper doing it the way we're doing it. But I don't want that to dirty the waters of why we do it. We don't choose because of price.

And why would you not do injection?

Injection, we believe, is more stressful to the animal. You have to handle them much different. Remember, we're talking about often because we only euthanize for those 2 reasons, one of those reasons being animals that are dangerous and aggressive. So if you have a 150-pound Rottweiler that wants to eat every human in the shelter, and you have to now go and put a needle in that dog, that's much different than walking them into a unit and closing the door. So there's much less animal restraint and handling, which produces much less stress and distress on the animal.

So why are we getting such large amounts of emails and requests that you change your method— methodology? Well, because the very thing they're bringing up is the very thing you're saying works the other way.

Yeah. So I don't want to just give my opinion. Ours is all based on science, not— it's not an emotionally driven opinion. And in 2010, so we opened in 2006, in 2010, a bill was introduced to do away with carbon monoxide chambers in Utah. It failed. And then again, in 2013, '14, '15, '16, '17, '18, '19, '20, they've introduced the bill over and over. And it's failed over and over. I believe it fails over and over because the legislators see the wisdom in allowing us to have as many humane choices as possible to euthanize an animal given the situation.

So how many animal shelters are there in Utah? And how many of them use carbon monoxide poisoning?

Yeah, I don't know the answer to either of those. But I can give you a guess. I know that the South Shelter in Spanish Fork uses it, and we use it. There were several others that used it, maybe about 7 previously. I just don't know currently who does. I know several of them still have them but may not utilize them. And one of the reasons they don't is because the same thing that's happening to you guys. And in fact, if you look across the United States, you'll see that same pattern. As animal rights activists protest it and use their methods to intimidate, coerce, and misinform, then decision makers are, are absolutely doing away with that because the pressure is too great. They even state that on their, on their website, that they've been successful in pressuring other cities, other districts, other shelters to change their euthanasia practices. It's a fight we don't want. We don't hate them. We don't We don't go after them. We simply try and do what's best for the animals and the citizens. They, again, their agenda includes doing away with euthanasia altogether. And so this is just another step to remove that one, then they go for the next one, remove that one. They believe animals have the right to not be owned and to exist without any intervention by humans, meaning no hamburgers anymore. cattle industry goes away, no clothing industry anymore.

So if the cities that are part of the district, if they were to come together and say, we don't want to do this anymore, we'd prefer to have you run injections, would that directive work for you?

It would have to. Okay, but let me finish by saying this. A few months ago, before this all blew up, we began a study into this issue. So we hope to have it done by the end of July. And, and right now I've got 1,000 pages so far that I've compiled of research that we're doing, which includes this, right? This— that's why you see all these things. We did this for another issue as our board, and all of the board members, you know, you guys have a representative on the board, all of them will meet and talk about this. But when this— when our research is done, we'll come back and say, here's the advantages of doing it one way, here's the advantage of doing the other way, here's the disadvantages. And then we'll make a recommendation to the board, who will then decide. We don't know if that's going to come out and say we should change and do euthanasia by injection now, or if it should say the other way. But whichever way it says is the way we're going to do it, as long as the board accepts that recommendation.

Sure.

So, um, anyway, I'd like to allow any questions that you guys might have if you haven't asked them already. I understand there's— you guys are gonna get more pressure than, than you have by far. And we've been through this before. We had bomb threats. We were working with the Utah Terrorist Task Force. Um, we, uh, worked with the FBI, all of this for extended duration a few years back because of protests. They, they came and they threatened us. They took pictures of our license plates. They stood out in front of our shelter. We had to do a bomb sweep every morning. We had county sheriff's departments out there for all of our meetings. It, it gets hot. And, uh, we don't believe we should be bullied into doing something because they disagree with it. We believe that we should look at what the science says And consider the other considerations, which there are other considerations besides just science, and then make our decision that way.

So when will the study come out, and then when would it be presented to the board?

We're, we're hopeful we'll finish it by our board meeting, which is the last Thursday in July. That's our target date, given the amount of research involved.

And you would present it there?

Yeah, we'll present it there at that board meeting. So your board representative will be able to tell you what the outcome was, what the recommendation was, and if the board accepted that recommendation or went another way. But any of you could email me and ask me that same question after that date.

Sure. Councilmember Lamson, do you have a question?

Yeah, thank you for, for being here and for sharing this information with us. The email that we have received so many copies of Uh, describes, you know, the way that the death takes place, though, kind of the, the pain and suffering that the animals go through, and that it's a prolonged, you know, a prolonged situation, and they're stumbling and coughing and, uh, and, uh, and just experiencing a horrible thing, which is different from what you've described. Is there anything accurate about that description? I mean, does that happen on occasion?

So, uh, What happens on occasions is that an animal may vocalize, not cats but dogs, and science says that that area of their brain that is affected by that hypoxemia causes that vocalization, that it is not an indicator of pain or distress. So that does happen.

They—

I've read what you guys have heard, that they gasp for air and they're asphyxiated and It takes 30 minutes. None of those things are true. Our average time for them to be unconscious is 83 seconds and to be expired is 172 seconds. So we're not talking about minutes and minutes. We're not talking about hours. Our cycle only runs 15 minutes and 28 seconds. So that meaning that inside that unit, there's carbon monoxide present for that amount of time and then it's evacuated. So we couldn't do it for that long for one thing. And again, the science is the one that's saying this, not me. We've witnessed it and had to perform it, and we've done both methods, and we've done it repeatedly. If you were to ask these animal rights people if they've seen it or performed it, I haven't heard one that said they've witnessed it. So where they get their information, I don't know. But certainly if there was a malfunctioning unit, or back in the old days they would back up the truck stick a hose to the exhaust, put an animal in a wooden box, and euthanize them that way. We never have, obviously. So these animals certainly would be struggling to breathe. They have other irritants and fumigants that are in that exhaust that don't exist in a pure carbon monoxide environment. So the suffering is night and day, and that may be where they're drawing their information from.

Councilor McDonald, you have a question?

Thank you, Tug. We have no expertise in this field, and we're asked to make decisions often without a lot of information.

Right.

Will your report not only make a recommendation on what you do going forward, but will it— we've had an A/B discussion that's very different, the reports we're seeing in emails and what you're hearing. Will that report by some independent group opine on the most humane way to put down an animal?

It's gonna— my goal is, so I'm the one doing this research, and my goal will be to say, here's the research, here's all the documents it's based on, and here's what this part of it says. And we'll go through several parts like the methodology, the mechanism of death, and then other issues that we have to consider, the safety of the workers. You know, some of the research we've already come across shows that animal service workers and veterinarians have a 5 to 6 times increased rate of suicide than other professions, and in fact, maybe the highest profession of suicide rate. And on top of that, that is related to euthanasia by injections.

Yeah.

Because that drug is available, because of the— what's called compassion fatigue that they feel. So we have to take those things into consideration too. Do we want to have that available for abuse, which would lead to suicide for them. So I spoke with a local veterinarian who brought that up to me. He said, you guys need to look at that. And so I've been going down that road as well. So there will be other considerations.

We have to—

Waiting for the report is basically the summary, right?

Well, it is, unfortunately. And that's why we're trying to expedite it and get it done quick, because we don't want you guys to have pressure for long. periods of time. We'd like to end that for you, whichever way it goes. But in this previous research that we did on a different topic, then we presented that to the board. That was a, that was a pretty big document that had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of references. That's where we— that's how we plan to do this as well, not based on our opinion.

So I would imagine that once that report is produced the end of July, the board needs to have time to digest and go over and And examine it. So that could take another month or 2 months right there.

It could. It's going to depend on where we're at with the board, what's been discussed, what's presented to them.

I would hope they would examine it and look at it rather than just pass it on somebody's recommendation.

Absolutely. That's exactly what they should do. And, and I would hope you would do the same with regard to this issue, because you're getting a lot of information from lots of people. which I understand, uh, or I may— I should say, I hope you understand, a lot of it is not from your city constituents.

And so will you then present, uh, your research to us as a city council?

I absolutely can. I imagine I'll present it to the board. A copy can be made to you as well through you, through me, or through your board representative.

Yes, if you could do that.

Yeah, absolutely.

That'd be good.

I mean, I think that's valuable for you guys, especially as you try and make this decision.

Yes.

And it may be that one city decides they don't want to do that, the board's going to make a vote, and there may be several cities that don't— they want to go one way or the other based on— you're not the only city that's getting this pressure and these protests and these emails. But the majority of the vote will carry the decision, and then you have to decide what's going to happen after that point.

Mm-hmm.

Any other questions or comments from the council? Well, we certainly appreciate you being here. And yeah, I think at this point we'll just wait to see what the research shows and, and go accordingly.

Okay, well, it's keeping me busy, but okay, I appreciate you guys' time.

Well, thank you.

Appreciate it.

Are other cities getting the emails we are?

No, it's systematic. They have arranged to go city to city, all the cities in Utah County. So they're— they said they're starting to send letters to the South Shelter now, their district as well. It's a coordinated effort that they're doing. They think if they can get a lot of people here, that will make you guys feel pressured to make a decision based on their opinion, and we're hoping that we can base it on science.

I agree, it should be based on science. Well, thank you very much. Appreciate you being here. We'll now go to a presentation on Bridal Veil Falls Park Study. for 30 minutes, and our presenter is Kathy Wheaton, Managing Principal of CRCA. Appreciate having you here.

Thanks for having me.

And I don't have a presentation, I just came for conversation, so.

OK, so maybe I'll pull the microphone closer to you there.

OK.

Excellent, so I am— we are leading a project for this legislature through the Department of Natural Resources and the Division of State Parks, so we wanted to be able to reach out to all those folks who have a stake in the game for a state park at Bridal Veil Falls. So far, we've had a chance to meet with the city next to you, Provo City, last week, and we wanted to make sure we had a chance to hear from you as well. So I think you all know where the project is, and you have some stake in the game because you have a lovely trail system that connects very nicely to Orem City. So we thought we'd reach out and make sure that we heard from you as a constituent about what you'd like to see if there's a potential state park in that location, and anything else you'd like to to chat about. So didn't know this was such a formal meeting, but happy to.

So the question, what is CRSA?

Number one, CRSA is an architectural firm out of Salt Lake City. Hi, Tom. Okay, good, thanks.

All right, and then a state park, can you give us an idea how big, what that would encompass, what's involved with that?

Yep, I sure can. So we also have Mike Long on the phone, and Mike is from the Division of Parks and Recreation. Parks and Recreation at the state, and he can jump in if I make any mistakes here. But pretty much the study area includes only the land owned by Provo City or by Utah County at the bottom of Provo Falls. And as you know, there— the county has land that it owns there, but that is adjacent to land that's owned by Provo City as well as private property owners and others, including the federal government. But right now, the legislative request was to look at Specifically that parcel of land, which is a very small acreage.

Right. How big is that? How much land does Provo own? How much land is owned by others? Is the Forest Service, the BLM, federal government involved in any of this?

Yes. So I think it's about 7 acres that is owned by the county and about another 7 acres immediately adjacent that's owned by the city. And if you've headed up the, the canyon to go to the falls, You get off at the first exit to go to Bridal Veil Falls, and you'll notice there are 2 places called Bridal Veil Falls. The first is a parking area that's owned by the city. That's a city park and the trail that leads up the canyon. And then if you keep on the road, kind of called the frontage road to the highway, the next area you get to, which has a parking area which you can see the falls, is owned by the county. I think most people who use the falls would have no idea whose property they were on. I think they think of it as contiguous park owned by a single landholder, but they don't, they don't know. So right now the focus is literally just on the county property, which is furthest east, although Provo City has that first parcel that you come to if you're heading eastbound. That is right off the highway there with the parking lot.

Now, did Provo City recently buy that? Have they owned it for a long time?

I don't know how long Provo City has owned that property for, but I assume it's been quite a long time.

Because it seems like it was purchased during Mayor John Curtis's term as mayor there.

Okay, we'll go back and take a look at that.

Mayor, if I may, I think several years ago Utah County purchased from a private property owner by way of our restaurant and tourism tax dollars the— I can't remember the name of the lift, but—

The old tramway lift.

The old tram, thank you. that extends all the way up to the property at the top where there used to be a restaurant. And that, that property was purchased by the county probably 3 years ago, or plus or minus a few months. So that might be—

Yeah, I'll get my history right. And if you've— you all have been involved in county politics longer than I have. But as you know, last fall, there was conversation about development. And the county made a decision to put on top of that a reserve for development right now. So it's under trust for development, and that will start to play a part. So Provo City, Orem City are all kind of being invited to the table to give us their opinion on what they'd like to see happen. But obviously the conservation easement that stands today with Utah Open Lands will limit any development at this point in time. So you had another part of your question.

Well, also, well, another part I'd like to bring up is who owns the water rights.

Yeah, so there are 2 parties, at least that I understand, own water rights currently. It's Provo City and then Utah Water Conservation District that serves this county and other counties at this end of the Wasatch Front.

Okay, and I know, I know Orem owns land to the west of the road, and we have parks there as well, so it's of concern to everyone, right?

Yeah, I think there are, there are major property owners who have land on the trail system or adjacent to the trail system and the river system. So that will maybe come back to the first question that I think you implied, which is what would make a state park? How could we make a state park? So currently pretty much almost anything can become a state park, but currently the legislature has made a mandate that state parks are revenue-generating resources for the state. So I think so far the answer has been this parcel probably standing alone would not make a state park all onto its own because there seems to be a public request that this continue to be a free amenity to county users and others. So the next component piece would potentially be something— another way of the state preserving this piece of land or partnering with others to preserve a greater parcel of land beyond this.

And would they purchase that from the county to do that?

There are state parks that have— that don't have ownership of the land, so It could be a yes, it could be a no. So there could be a state park designation with the land still being retained by the county and land adjacent retained by the city and land beyond that retained by others.

But if it was a state park, could it protect the land from development?

Yes.

By the county?

Yes.

Okay.

I think there would be an agreement between all of the parcel owners about what development or accessible development looks like.

But that's what we're trying to establish is To get that out of the hands of those who would like to develop that.

Correct. Yeah, private development. And so then the question really becomes, what is the, what is the future of development on the land to serve people who want to have access in a recreational way? So that's really what we've come to ask you is, as, as those who speak for their constituents, you know, what are the things that you would like to see on that parcel of property? or the parcels of property around Bridal Veil Falls or parcels of property throughout the valley, the canyon, to serve for recreational purposes, your constituents and constituents of the county?

Well, I'd like to see a little box there that holds little bags of fish food for the kids to give to the fish. And I'm just kidding, but anyway. I don't know, but I'm not interested in it being a development where money is exchanged. I think it should be a free and open area for people to use. Jamie, do you have a question?

Yeah, if I may. I think one of the concerns that we have as a city as we use these recreational resources is that there's appropriate, for example, facilities and parking to accommodate the growing number of people that want to use the to use the facilities. If you go there on a busy summer Saturday or a holiday, you're going to be hard-pressed to find a spot to park, for example. And then you see cars queuing up on 189, and it creates a potential safety hazard. And so I think there's some merit in investing some additional dollars into that area to further develop the property. But I, you know, obviously I would concur with the mayor that I think there's a general expectation from our public that that remain an open and accessible amenity for the community and for communities. And I think there would be significant pushback if a fee were charged in the same way that, for example, fees are charged in state parks or even into some of these areas now managed by the BLM, some of these canyons that, you know, American Fork Canyon, Milk Creek Canyon, some of these other canyons now where fees are charged. At the same time, I've seen the monies collected from some of those canyon fees turn into some really beautiful projects up in the canyon, so it's kind of this double-edged sword, I guess.

Yeah.

Johnson Peterson, you have a question?

Well, Jamie kind of addressed that, but the 2 parts. One is, so if it's a state park, there would be a fee charge to enter the park.

I mean, Currently, the mandate for state parks is that they're revenue generating, so they take care of themselves. So I think we've already answered the question in the study, which is it seems like there has been a public request to both the county and to Provo City that there is no fee charged. Now, the state could make a decision or craft a decision that says they would like to have a state park that takes a larger or broader swath, but it's a difficult thing, as I read it, to make a state park in that location. Obviously, it's a very open, permeable landscape. There's a bike path, there are hiking trails, there's a large highway that goes through. It's, it's not a parcel that's very easily controlled, and there's this frontage road which, you know, needs to be there to support kind of through traffic of the canyon. So I think everyone who has been involved in the conversation today feels like a state park is probably not the perfect solution, although it could be a solution. We are now looking at things like maybe a state monument or, or other means of being able to protect the land as it goes forward. So I must say that we are at the very beginning of our study, so I don't have an answer.

But to Councilmember Pedersen's point, this is currently county property, correct? And I think our residents already who pay county taxes already feel like they are paying for that amenity. So if you are to charge it a fee to enter Bridal Veil Falls, then I think you run into an issue of double taxation where you have a group of individuals, county residents, who are already investing financially in that property and now potentially being charged a fee. I guess the question I would ask is, you know, why, why is it necessary for the state to come in and create a state park? The county has resources and has a A number of resources to use to maintain that park. Why aren't they using the resources that they have to do what I think the county and its population expects of them?

I can't answer the question. All I know is that the legislature asked the question specifically, could there be a state park designation in this space? And as I said, the answer so far looks like no, it's probably not a very good match to make this a state park. But there might be other protection mechanisms that may be best.

Well, considering what's happened with the county so far to this point, we've seen some overreaching fingers out there trying to take over that development for their own personal use, and that's not good. And it'd be great if the county were not trying to do that, but we've seen some examples that I think this area needs protection.

So the other part of my question is, first of all, what about the county and the state? And it's always a scary thing when it says, we're the government, we're here to help. I mean, I think it's a lot better done on a local basis, like Jamie's pointing out, on the county, instead of the state coming in and telling us what to do. The other— the second part, I guess, is just a comment. As somebody who grew up riding my bike up there and swimming in that river and jumping off the trestle and all the things that I did. I would certainly hate to see the state take over and have a security guard standing there stopping me from riding my bike. I don't swim. I still ride a bike. I don't swim in it anymore. But that'd be a terrible thing for the children of our community if all of a sudden there's a guard now at a gate.

We understand, and we've heard from stakeholders from the county who also speak highly of wanting to have a you know, fee-free zone. And I think everyone who's been in meetings so far understands that fully, that that's not the intention of this study. But we do need to answer the question that has been set before us.

So what is the timing of this study?

So our study will be done before October so that we are ready for the interim session of the legislature in the fall, and then we'll have a full study ready for the legislative session.

And will you get the copy of the study to us?

Yes.

We would be happy to get a draft copy for you to review and give us comment on and participate if you'd like.

We would like that.

Okay, excellent. So I'm happy to answer any other questions.

I just— I have one other question, and I think I've answered it in my own mind, but Heather, maybe you can help with this. Is there a mechanism like a conservation easement that could be placed on that land that would protect it?

Yes, so there is a conservation easement held by Utah Open Lands currently on that property, and I believe it could be held in perpetuity. I think that the legislature has just asked this very specific question, and I don't think it has anything— I don't think it would make any change to the conservation easement that already exists. But that's a great question.

Would the conservation easement maintain— I mean, keep it the way that it is?

Correct. Right, the conservation easement limits, limits growth to very small steps. So things like restrooms and the things that you've mentioned, parking lot upgrades, safety.

If that's the case, how was it that the county was trying to develop that land for personal uses by other individuals?

I cannot answer that question.

Doesn't seem like it's very well protected.

Well, the conservation easement has only been in place since, I think, December, so it's not been there for very long.

Well, that's why then.

Yeah.

Okay, any other questions? Well, I think as Terry said, that's a jewel in our community that all of us have participated in and had great times at, and we want to keep it that way. So, okay.

I have just a couple questions for you.

Sure.

They are out of the left field. Who knows if they'll ever come to fruition. Provost City asked last week, could they be engaged in the study if potentially they wanted to aggregate their lands with the county lands under the designation of the state? And then I think the question comes forward to all other property owners in the canyon. If other parcel holders wanted to be part of a larger preservation effort for the full canyon or for a broader swath of the canyon under kind of a state auspices, let's say, recreational area or a monument, would this be something that, that the city might be interested in as well? And they asked this question because contiguous to Bridal Veil Falls Park owned by Provo City is Nuns Park that has camping in it, and the question was potentially, you know, could these things join the county property at the base of Bridal Veil Falls to be a larger preservation area?

So again, I think that all of us are concerned about the preservation of the beauty of that area and that it's kept for the public. So if you start combining parcels one with another and another, be it city or county, how does that protect— protection stay in place or get in place? So that would be my main concern.

Perfect. I think that would be then a question I can answer and bring back to you at another point in time.

Anyone else have a comment on that?

I'll make one comment, Mayor, but this will stir up an old pot. That should be Orem, not Provo. That's not Provo, that's Orem. Anyway, if they have any questions about how that works.

Okay. Yeah, right on it.

Pleasure to meet you all. I look forward to seeing you guys again.

Great, thank you.

Thank you.

Look forward to your report.

Thanks.

All right, let's go ahead and move on to our 3rd item. This is a Discussion of proposed amendments to Sections 22-24-5F and 22-24-5H pertaining to design standards and parking standards of the North Village District Zone. Jason Bench is our presenter, and we'll turn the time over to Jason.

Thank you, Mayor, members of the council. Just going to go over briefly what is coming before you on the 29th. Be glad to address any discussion or questions that you have based on our—

And just to note, this is live streamed and also recorded for anybody who's not able to watch this presently.

Is Heather in the room, Mayor?

It's right there.

Hi.

There was some discussion before this meeting as to whether we should move forward with this because there are some citizens who would like to see it At a later date. Could you please talk about what you're proposing to talk now and what the citizens might be interested in hearing later?

So Jason's just here to provide information to the City Council. It's our policy and practice when we have an issue that you will vote on scheduled that we have that issue presented to you at the work session the week or the 2 weeks before you'll actually hear it. So this is merely an informational session. The public will have the opportunity to participate at the public hearing on the 29th of June. That public hearing has been noticed up.

So that's our next meeting, the 29th of June.

Yes.

So what would be the harm of delaying this until that period of time?

I don't know that there would necessarily be harm. It, like I said, it is the policy and practice of the council to discuss issues in the work session in the, in the council meeting before you vote on something that— so you have adequate time to hear and consider and digest what's being presented by, in this instance, the land use applicant.

So, so if I may, based on, for example, the conversations that you would have today as a council, if you provided policy direction, then we need time within the next couple of weeks to amend the ordinance. To have the ordinance reflect what you would like to have in that language going forward. So we would not be able to obviously have that conversation, let's say, at 4 PM on the 29th and then do anything on the 20th.

So if we move this, we're moving that, correct?

And I think it delays everything, and staff is ready to put this forward. And it is available for anyone who wants to see it online immediately after the meeting. So, yes, Terry.

Just a comment going along with Tom's concern is we've got 2 members of City Council— Dave Spencer has been very involved with that, with the community and listening to their concerns, and he's not able to be here. So I echo the same question: what's the 2-week issue? You know, why, why does this have to be rushed today? Why can't we— and the citizens that want to be involved that live next to where all this is going to happen, same thing. Why would I not?

I mean, I think it's at your discretion. I don't think this conversation's been rushed. I mean, I think we've had 2 ordinance amendments in the last 5 months. So if, if we wait some additional time, that's at your discretion. But you as a majority of the council need to make that— take that action. That's not something that we as staff decide. Sure.

And the public is not involved here in a public hearing sort of way. So this is just a discussion and information coming from Jason, which I think will be helpful for those that are in the district to look at that and see that.

If you wanted to reschedule— if you wanted to hold the discussion tonight and hold another discussion on the 29th, That's perfectly appropriate too.

Well, it might be good for Debbie and Dave to hear the discussion.

I think Debbie's zoomed in, isn't she? Debbie's on the Zoom call.

Okay. So this information—

I'm on.

If I can just clarify, this information was emailed, you know, from Dave, Mr. Spencer, to Jamie and to the council, and we made the application based on those emails. So this information tonight is nothing that you have not already heard. Is this what was discussed at the Planning Commission a couple weeks ago?

Correct.

This is simply a review of what's coming forward and what we're, you know, anticipating coming forward with. There's 2 different things we're talking about: the project, which everybody is talking about, and then the changes to the ordinances themselves, which the council is aware of based on allowing us to make application or requesting that we make application. An email chain back and forth from Mr. Davidson, Mr. Spencer, to the council. of, you know, outlining what exactly we're changing. This is simply just a review of those changes. So, you know, we can continue if you'd like, but we can also talk about— it is noticed for the 29th for a public hearing where the citizens will have opportunity to speak as well.

And yet, if we don't hear tonight, we might have to delay the hearing on the 29th.

And again, that's up to the council. If you want to hear it in the pre-meeting next week and vote on it the following meeting, I mean, you could do that as well. It is—

that's not particularly wise. I think it's helpful to have a couple of weeks to digest whatever is brought forward before a city council meeting.

Right.

So again, this is simply just a review. It's not a discussion of what we should do. It's something what we are proposing to do because based on the direction that you got from council and from community.

So I'm going to ask a question to Terry and Jeff, who kind of echoed this in the past, David, who's not with us. What if we heard it today and then made a decision whether we delay the item on the 29th and we at least gather the information that the staff has available, how would that— and then make a decision whether we delay the public hearing 2 weeks after that.

Well, you do have noticing requirements, right?

But they're not—

and people, we would simply continue the item. So if— and frankly, if, if, for example, you're comfortable moving forward with the language as presented, then it wouldn't be necessary for us to amend the language.

Language.

But if, if you're going to come back and you're going to suggest modifications to the ordinance, then we would need some additional time to craft the ordinance or to revise the ordinance.

So, so my, my thing is, so a few weeks ago it felt like we were going to have an opportunity, a few of the city council members or all of the city council, to meet with some of the residents that have the concerns. along with staff to kind of have a roundtable discussion and see what options are available, what possibilities there are to kind of come to a win-win solution. So I'm okay if we, if we go ahead and hear the information, but I would like the opportunity also to present some thoughts from some of the concerns that we've been hearing from the neighbors. As well as maybe part of this discussion today.

And if I may, you know, this is, this is your ordinance. I think the frustration of the neighbors and of staff is the target keeps moving. This is the second code amendment that we've had for this ordinance, and then we hear thereafter that it's not doing what we want it to do. Well, tell us what you want it to do and we'll do it. But even when we do that, the target changes again, and oh, we need to—

it—

this isn't doing what we wanted it to do, so now we want to change it again. And we're spending a lot of time and a lot of money and a lot of staff time trying to fix something that I'm not really sure everybody understands or knows exactly what they want. So I, I wholeheartedly endorse the idea of having a conversation, but having a conversation as a governing body, not the have a conversation with you and then have another conversation with you and then we go back and forth. That's not productive. In fact, I think that's what's led to some of the frustration. And even from my perspective with our staff, it's not helpful for us to have a conversation with, for example, one party and then another party And then another party. Let's get all the parties together and build consensus collectively together.

I thought that's what we were going to do, and then that meeting was called off.

No, that meeting— that's not what we were going to do. In fact, specific people were uninvited from that meeting. So you as a Governing Body act. All 7 of you make a decision. All 7 of you need to be party to that decision. I'm not going to encourage staff to schedule and participate in meetings where certain members of you are excluded from those meetings. That's not how we work. Well, at least as staff.

Then, then, Jamie, the issue is there has to be what Jeff's saying. There has to be a dialogue. Someone standing up and giving a 3-minute pitch spill with no dialogue. No interaction, no questions of what, what their concern is on the night that we're voting, on the night we're voting, that, that is not effective at all.

I need—

if someone is standing up for 3 minutes and has a concern, I would like to ask them a question about it.

And I don't disagree with that. And then we notice it as a meeting of the City Council, and minutes are taken, and we run the meeting like it's a public meeting.

So that, I think, is what Jeff's talking about that I was looking forward to. also is letting people say their piece and understand their concern, and then I can react and ask a question. That, that makes a lot more sense, and that, that feels a lot more transparent than what you're saying. The staff hears something, they go that direction, then they hear something else. Well, let's just—

No, in fact, in fairness, staff has been excluded from this process. So those that were— those that you're working with are not the same people that we're working with. Because they have decided to deal directly with you and not with staff.

Well, I'm working with both. I'm listening to the city and I'm listening to the citizens.

You're not in the majority.

What?

You're not in the majority. There are other people who are involved in this issue that are going directly to council members and are not going to staff. So I endorse the idea, but it's a, it's a public meeting held by the governing body. Advertised as such, and that conversation can take place where everybody has an opportunity to voice opinions and ideas.

That's a great concept. And then we can have dialogue back and forth and get an understanding of where everybody's at.

If I may, Terry, sorry, is this an item we could call an additional meeting to have that in the next week or so?

You can call whatever— you could call a special council meeting. Yes, it needs 24 hours notice. Okay, that's all.

I think that would help the staff. I think it'd help us all.

No, I think it would absolutely help put everybody in the room. We've been in the dark.

Yeah, let's work it out. Let's hear the concerns and discuss it.

So do you think we ought to hear this and then do that?

No, I'm fine with that.

Yeah, I think that unless the 4 of you want to delay it, I think it'd be helpful to hear what Jason has to say, and then if we want to hold a special meeting with the public and with the council, where there's an interchange back and forth, we can do that.

So, so, so is that public meeting— they'll stand up and voice their—

Yeah, we would, we would have a meeting where we could have discussion back and forth.

With reasonable time restraints.

So I, I think it'd be helpful to listen to what Jason and Scott right now, and then if we want to do a different another meeting with interchange, we'll do it. So, so, Jason, why don't you go ahead?

If I can just make a comment on that. If, if this meeting introduces other ordinances that we want to amend, then this would obviously be put on hold and we bring it all back together. So I can definitely discuss this tonight. Sure. If we want another meeting, you know, in 2 weeks or whatever, then we wouldn't hear this on the 29th. We would wait and see if there's other ordinance amendments we all want to bring just at one meeting rather than going piecemeal. Every 2 months we come back with some other modifications. I would rather get together as a group, come up with a direct distinct direction from the council, and then come forward because right now we've got these 2 items which sounds like may or may not be enough. And then we're going to come back again in, you know, 2 months to do the same thing.

So I'd like to hear what you have to say.

So a couple things that we're waiting for. One, and there are 2 different projects, 2 different thoughts, so I don't want to run it again on our screens.

Should it be easier?

We need to turn—

you need to turn the screen on.

Is that all?

Yep.

Okay.

So there's 2 different processes that we're going through, 2 different issues. One is the site plan that's going through, which people are combining into one issue. So we're still waiting for a traffic study. for that particular project that has not been submitted this time. They've received corrections based on their application, and that is in process. We have not received that at the moment. I just want to give you an update on that.

So, you know, when that traffic study is going to be—

It was anticipated this week or next that we would get that in. I talked to Mr. Kelly today, our engineer, and he hadn't received it this afternoon. So I know that they did some counts last week or the week before that. So anyway, that's a different issue than what we're talking about tonight, but I just wanted to update the council on that because that was one of the issues that Mr. Spencer brought up after our couple different discussions. We talked about the North Village when the mayor— you asked Mr. Spencer to come up with a list of things that we wanted to bring forward as possible changes. Based on that discussion, the top one was traffic study, the second was parking, and then meeting back and forth with Dave, he indicated that the 1.75 was not sufficient. He suggested that we go to the 2 stalls per residential unit over and above what the requirement was for the shared parking. So tonight we'll, we'll show you an amendment that would change the parking from the 1.75 to the 2 stalls based on anything over the shared component with a commercial. The other issue that was brought up was the height. There currently is no height restriction except for the requirement of setback equal to the height next to residential zone. He wanted a height limit of 60 feet. That was the— what the height limit is in the C-2 zone. We have several sections of State Street that is currently zoned C-2. These districts were previously zoned C-2, so we're basically taking it back to that height restriction of 60 feet. This— the 60 feet still represents or still requires an applicant to meet the height equal to whatever size of that building, in addition to the 75-35 limit that was passed a couple months ago by the council. So number 4 was the setbacks. Mr. Spencer indicated that he wanted it at least to be consistent with the C-2 zone, which is equal to the height. Currently, the 75-foot setback and a maximum of 75— or 35 feet, excuse me— is over and above or exceeds the 60 foot C-2 zone. So we're increasing the setback by 15 feet, which meets and exceeds the C-2. So we didn't make any proposed changes to the setbacks.

Before you leave that page, if I may, Mayor, much of State Street before we had a State Street master plan was C-2, including this property, for the last 30-plus years. Is that correct?

30-plus, yes.

And, and when we say there's a 60-foot height limit, a point of clarification for me is that If you had a swamp cooler on top, or you had something on top, does that go above the 60 feet? Can you have HVAC on top of it? And the building 60 foot and then other structure, and then is there a limit, or could they put a 200-foot tower? Please help me.

Yes, and I'll explain as I— the next slide shows that, but that, that is the case. So currently the C-2 zone does allow a maximum. So what you're seeing from the street, the 60-foot top of the parapet or top of the Roof or whatever is 60-foot maximum, but it does allow up to 50% of that roof to have some type of penthouse suite, which is the HVAC or the coolers or chillers or whatever.

Not operating areas. There's no livable space, table up there, right?

So flagpoles, those types of things could be on the roof that would not count towards the 60 feet. The main structure itself, so the main livable or occupiable floor, the maximum height is 60 feet. But there is the ability to have that other equipment and things on top.

And is there a limit on that equipment height?

So in the C-2 zone right now, it is 75 feet. We're proposing in this particular zone to go 70 feet, so they could have an additional 10 feet, but that is limited to anything that's non-occupiable, meaning it's, it's a surround that it's either the HVAC, elevator shaft, HVAC, elevator, things like that. But the maximum— so the maximum height of that which is still limited to 50% of the rooftop, can have that additional 10 feet, but the main structure itself is 60 feet.

So Jason, could you go back to that slide previous to— go back one more. So these are outstanding issues for Phase 1 or Phase 2?

This is not related to Phase 1 or Phase 2. This is related to the North Village district zone. So items 2, 3, and 4 are not pertaining to the site plan, they are pertaining to the overall zone. Any changes made to those will affect everyone, not just the Phase 1, Phase 2.

But you've already had an applicant put in his application and that's accepted, so that would be different than what you're showing here.

These changes would not affect Phase 1. There is no application for Phase 2, so any, any new— basically talking Phase To here in any new application that comes in, regardless of this property or, you know, the property we're talking about, or any property in the district would be required to meet these requirements.

So with the application in-house, the traffic study was relating to Phase 1 and Phase 2. Traffic study is not back yet. The application has been accepted. So is the traffic study then Going to affect Phase 1?

Traffic study will be based on Phase 1 only. That's correct. They may reference additional development on the site.

But the traffic study is only on Phase 1. The parking, is that on Phase 1 or Phase 2?

Parking— this parking requirement would relate to Phase 2 and any other project that comes.

Okay, so 2, 3, and 4 is Phase 2. Item 1 is Phase 1, right?

Yeah, I mean, semantics, but yes, Phase 2 or any other project. I just don't want to be stuck on just—

no, no, I—

that, right?

Yeah.

Okay.

And then the other requirement was to take the 1.75 to the 2 stalls. And so we have required that. So there is a base density where we are going to share the commercial space with residential because there are off-hours based on when residential units occupy those stalls and when they're off to work or what, you know. So there is a small component that would be shared. Anything over and above that would be required to have 2 stalls. We brought up— I think it was brought up a couple weeks ago about parking and other projects, particularly North Abbey. I just want to bring this to your attention. We had one of our staff members go out at 5 in the morning on the 10th of June, and you can see the top line right there under the outline in red. At 5 AM, there are 34% of the stalls available. So there is no overoccupancy on that one, and that's of course just one day and a snapshot in, in a long many years of project. But you can see the different projects are over and above what meets the minimum standards and even have extra stalls based on the On this count that we did.

Anyway, so those that have over 2 stalls per unit are showing vacancy rates of between 20% and 35%.

Even the Aston and Devon, which was specifically designed at 1.5 stalls per unit, have had a 1%, right? Realizing that the mall and Woodbury Corporation own the mall, there are some, you know, sure, differences in line that goes across who owns what and where they're parking. But based on his observations that morning, there were several stalls available on the site itself, and not counting those that were on a Costco or other parts of the mall. So anyway, just by information, that was nothing to do with tonight's modification. I'm just showing you that by way of information.

I'm following this a little slower. The demands per unit and the stalls per unit, please explain what those are.

So what he's, what he's saying is it's provided 2.31 stalls, and what they're using is 1.3 per unit.

Okay, 1.53.

Sorry, sorry, just clarifying.

Okay, so, okay, so we're on all of these, even those that are only allowing 1.5, the demand is less than that. We have other projects on Geneva Road where there— we might have other problems, but with all of these 1.5 or above, we're safe. So it seems to me a 2-stall unit is a fair degree of safety net for us. Is that—

Well, and that's what staff is—

that's what you basically said. That's what we're thinking.

I mean, 1.75 was okay for us, comfortable for us. A 2 is going to be that additional ability to have, you know, more parking for the project.

I'm also shocked that there's any vacancy in this city. When I hear about real estate, these have— some of these have 40-plus percent vacancies. Are these as of relatively current?

These are as August 3rd, or I mean, sorry, June 10th of this month. Okay, so not vacancies as far as units, but parking availability.

Yeah, it's not residents, it's parking.

Thank you.

Thank you. So it's not a matter of units vacant, it's the stalls that were empty as he was investigating.

What they're basically showing is that they have more stalls available than is needed.

I thought they were talking about apartments.

No, it doesn't. I want to clarify, it doesn't mean that people aren't parking elsewhere for convenience, right? Some people may park on the street, some people may do something, but doesn't mean that there's not parking available on site. It's more convenient if you go out to WinCo, for example, and drive by the beautiful development out there, you'll notice that 9th West is full of parking.

Because it's closer to there.

Because it's convenient, because their front door is right there. Well, it's public street, they can park there, but they have available parking in their garage. They just choose to park on the street. That's, that's what we're seeing on a lot of these projects. Now there are some projects that have issues with parking. I know Mr. Peterson, you know, has done some research and understands that. And we're not saying that there's no projects in the city that have some parking issues. What we're saying though is the standards that we have for the most part meet the requirements and exceed—

yes, exceed the project.

So anyway, Jerry, any other—

So yeah, Jason, I've already had this conversation, but there's a study and then there's the reality. So Tom, just drive by Village Park and drive by the neighbor— drive by the neighborhood north of Village Park and talk to the neighbors.

Yeah, all the—

friend who lived there. Yep.

And actually, where the people are parking is a lot farther away than where the apartment is, but there's no parking at the apartment. The Aston Apartments— and we've had this conversation before— this— there's probably tonight, if you drive by there tonight after Costco closes, there'll probably be 150 cars parked out there from the Aston. In the Costco parking lot, which I understand Costco is not real happy about, but which would be bad for us as a city.

Councilman Peterson, if I could clarify that, we've actually talked to the Woodbury Corporation about that parking with the Ashton— or Aston. That property is actually not Costco's parking lot. There is a line, an invisible line that you cannot see, where parking is designated for Costco, parking is designated for the mall, and that spillover parking is occurring on the Woodbury Corporation parking. And so they are handling any spillover that is an issue on their own property. But again, with the Aston, some of it is convenience parking because their units are located on that west side versus they don't want to park in the garage or on the east side. It's easier to go up the west entrance.

And well, it costs you quite a bit of money to park in the garage also versus outside parking, but there's a difference. But, but the issue is we don't want to lose Costco because all of a sudden they don't have enough parking for their clients.

Correct.

And we've brought that concern up with Woodbury, and they've, they've told us that's not a concern because Costco is their client and just renewed a 20-year lease with them. But just to clarify, we have asked Woodbury about that concern because it is a concern for us as well. We don't, we don't want to lose Costco as well.

Yeah, thank you for doing that. One of our biggest taxpayers. And then Village Park, same issue with a gentleman who has a business there has complained to me several times about people parking in his business. And, but, you know, it's throughout the city. You can just, you can leave tonight and drive to any of these major developments and there's a part, and it's not always just convenience, it's just because there's no parking stall.

So—

But isn't this, isn't this a count of physical parking stalls on Thursday, June 10th at 5 AM?

Yep.

Well, drive by tonight, Jamie, over at Ashton and count how many.

I'm just saying that you're asking if this is, if this is reality or if this is just supposition and somebody has counted the actual stalls at 5 AM.

So, well, there's a study and then there's driving by. So, well, I mean, there's a disconnect somewhere.

But this is more than driving by. This is somebody getting out and counting stalls in the parking lot.

Yeah.

And what time of the day was that?

5 AM.

So you can see it goes down from 5 AM on the top. North Abbey was 5 AM.

5 AM.

Sienna Villas was 6:30 AM. So 5 AM is when you're going to expect most people to be there. You're going to have parties at night, but the actual people that live there and actually physically park there are most likely going to be there at 5 AM.

And then we ought to change it to just 1 or 1.25. We don't need 2. We got so much parking in our city, people can park anywhere. That's amazing.

So I've, I've actually done some similar research and I've driven around and I've I've seen the same thing. There are a lot of open parking spots. It wasn't at 5 AM, but there are a lot of, a lot of different facilities where there's, there are extra parking spots available. But the bigger concern is, you know, people parking in front of— I guess if it were me, I'd be concerned about people parking in front of my house. that I don't know who they are. And, you know, there's a kind of a safety concern, a safety issue perhaps. And, and so I don't know if that's something that we can look at. You know, parking passes or something to maybe keep people parking in those complexes instead of spilling out into the neighborhood. Now, on a— and I know it's a public street. They're public streets, and I know, you know, for instance, on State Street, there's We've had this discussion that there are a lot of people that park there because it's just easier to jump in and go. And, and I get that, but I think if it were, you know, in my neighborhood, I'd be a little concerned about not knowing who's coming, going in the middle of the night— or not in the middle of the night, that's a little extreme— but coming and parking throughout the night.

So as part of the districts, when we developed the districts back in 2018, We knew that there was some issue with charging for parking, right? So people would opt out of that and park in the neighborhood. So in the districts themselves, it is prohibited by ordinance that they can charge separately for parking. So what if I go in and it's $1,500 a month for rent? I will get that one or 2 parking stalls as part of my rent. I don't have to pay an additional $50 or $100 for that stall. So by ordinance, we have tried to resolve some of that issue where they They're not going to opt out. Well, I don't want to pay that, so I'll just go find a spot somewhere and conveniently go in a cul-de-sac and park. We've tried to address that. So in the districts themselves, they are not able to do that. They have to provide whatever the rent is, has to include the stalls. And so we've tried to address that issue because of that issue.

So, you know what, Jason, maybe another study would be going along with what Jeff's saying, a study at 6 or 7 o'clock at night. Because if I'm a single person living at the Ashton, 5 in the morning, that depends on my lifestyle. I probably don't have a lot of people there staying with me, but 6 or 7 o'clock at night, you know, it might be a whole different story.

So to answer that question, the parking study that I think you all have a copy of that we just did a year and a half ago, 2 years ago, they spent all day. So it was 7 AM in the morning all the way, I think, till midnight or 1 AM, and every hour they counted. the stalls. They intercepted the people that were parking off and they're walking in— why you parked over there and all that. So if you're interested, I would encourage you to read that parking study because it does give you a broad day of what people and the counts that are associated with those projects.

Can we get that sent out to the council? That'd be helpful.

Of course.

You know, one thing I was going to mention, I, um, I have neighbors that have friends and friends come over and park in front of their house. And I don't know who they are, but I have friends that come over and park in front of my house, and my neighbors don't know who they are. So that's just the normal ebb and flow of people parking throughout the city. So anyway, all right, let's keep going.

That's all I have, Mayor. If you have other additional questions, be glad to address. But the point of this was to then bring this to the council, these 2, the parking and the—

Can you send this to us as well?

So this is going to 29th unless otherwise directed. We will bring it forward or continue it depending on the direction we want to go.

So, okay. All right, thank you. Let's go ahead and move on then to a discussion of Sunset Heights residential parking permit program, and Lieutenant Paraskeva— Paraskeva, sorry— is here and We invite him up.

Thanks.

Well, we're going to continue the theme.

Hopefully we'll show you a little resolution on this one.

Let me know when you've got that up and on your screens.

Got it.

We do this.

This relates to UVU and the UVU students.

So Sunset Heights neighborhood parking permit program is residential parking permit programs, what I'm here for. So if you're looking at the Sunset Heights neighborhood, this is kind of a map of the Sunset Heights neighborhood.

So they're taking up spaces.

So on April 7th, we received a petition, the police department did, from signatures signed petition from residents in the Sunset Heights neighborhood, and that basically that petition was requesting a residential parking permit program in their neighborhood. So I went out several times.

Signatures on there?

Over—

we had over 100 signatures.

I didn't know.

Okay, no, that was just—

that's just a little example.

Yeah.

We can— I can send you the actual petition if you want.

Good.

It's just a fun little image. Okay, so I went out and did my traffic study. Ultimately, this is what I found. In summary, vehicles parking in the neighborhood are mainly from the apartment and student housing complexes from 800 South Geneva Road. Vehicles also park in the neighborhood due to the proximity of the Frontrunner station and the UVU pedestrian bridge. In the past 6 months, we've— as the police department, we've issued numerous citations in the area. In the past 6 months, police tomorrow also— we've also responded to multiple calls stemming from parking problems, neighbors getting upset with residents, or excuse me, neighbors getting upset with people parking in front of their driveways, etc. And then we've also having private properties such as the LDS Church on 800 South and others are starting to restrict access and they're towing vehicles from their property, which is forcing vehicles into this neighborhood as well.

And the, the overriding issue here is UVU students coming to UVU from outside the city and then finding a place to park so they can attend.

That's, that's one of the issues. Yes, Mayor. Visitors going to the Access Apartments and other of those high-density housing. A lot of the issues are over the weekends, but we'll also see it during daytime during school hours as well. So my request to the council is that we create a residential parking permit program at the designated streets found within the Sunset Heights neighborhood. Based on my study, I believe the, the following streets should be recommended for the residential parking permit program. That's 1370 West, 1420 West, 730 South, 1490 West, 1525 West, and 1545 West. So if we look at the map within Sunset Heights, that's kind of what that looks like, the affected streets that we would implement.

Now we have done that before. Years ago.

A residential parking program? Yes, we have about 3 of them currently in the city, one down by UVU, close to 800 South, but just on closer to the school.

And how are those working, and is that why you're recommending it for this neighborhood?

Well, I'm recommending it based on the track— on my, on my study.

The—

we received the petition from the neighborhood. and the residents. And then based on my findings, speaking with Chief Adams, we've, we've decided the best way where we can solve the issue as a city and help the residents is implement this neighborhood parking permit program.

Mike?

Yes.

Where I live on 8th West, there's some parking permits required, but the problem is the city doesn't react.

to these problems, issuing tickets and so forth. And it takes, it takes residents, a number of them, to phone in to kind of get the ball moving.

I, I don't know how we remedy that, but that has been the problem.

Well, one of the things that the police department is working on is creating a civilian parking enforcement team to help these issues as far as issuing citations, taking care of these abandoned vehicles in these neighborhoods to really help, you know, those issues that you're speaking of. Obviously, as a police department, our number one responsibility is to handle priority calls, and sometimes parking issues get put on the back burner until we can get to them. And so obviously, you know, by being a little more proactive, Chief Adams is looking at ways to, you know, make these neighborhoods better by creating this team. And so we're hoping to have that up and running by September 1st. But yes, they would definitely help enforce. This would be one area of a violation if someone was in this neighborhood that they would enforce.

Okay, thank you.

Any other questions?

I have a quick question. So I'm sure In your study, is this going far enough? I mean, will this just push students and others into other neighborhoods? I mean, is this a large enough area to kind of give them pause in parking in the neighborhood rather than going to an actual parking spot where they could or should be parking?

Well, one of the things I'll mention that Jason had mentioned is the Access Student Living. A lot of those spots are unoccupied, and they're going and parking in the neighborhoods. And so Jason's actually working with that, that complex as far as not doing a fee structure to where their students and residents will actually park in their parking lot. And that's another phase that will actually help this neighborhood. But as far as answering your question, is pushing them out further, I guess it just depends on how far they want to walk. I mean, we're—

So your, your Axis Luxury Housing is a new housing complex, relatively new, and I don't know how many units are in it, but it looks like it's 5 miles long. And so I think that's why you're seeing what we're seeing.

Yeah, but Mayor, if I may too, we have similar programs at Orem High School and Timpanogos High School, and that seems to essentially address the issue and push parking to where it needs to be had rather than on city streets.

Ultimately, as a police department, see, we don't want to have to issue a citation in these areas.

Sure.

You know, and we will do the appropriate signage at the city, make sure residents have all their, you know, their passes and everything as far as our code goes. And whatnot. So, so I mean, this is basically just for your information, but this is the code, Orem City Code 1955, that basically gives you as the City Council, upon direction from the City Manager, the authority to vote on a residential parking permit program. And I'll also email you all a copy of this so you have a copy of this PowerPoint when we conclude. Yes, Tom.

If I may, Mayor, you mentioned many citizens signed this. Sometimes you'll get 1 or 2 homes that don't like it when we've passed this before because they have friends over and they don't want to have to run out a permit, etc. Did we have any exceptions here? Can you tell us about this?

Well, what was great about this petition is that they had all their addresses, contact phone numbers. It wasn't just 100 signatures. And so based on where they were located on these streets, that they're throughout the majority of where we're recommending as well.

Because we had one neighborhood where we had a little 2-house gap where we, we didn't have the zoning requirements. So if a neighbor objects, he or she still can have it not in front of their house. But that's just gonna— I mean, I wouldn't do that if I were that neighbor, but they'd have that right.

Well, so it would be for the whole street. So if you, if you designated for the street, it wouldn't be for One house has it, one house doesn't.

Thank you. And, and is this coming before a vote at some future date?

Yes, I'll get to that.

Yes.

But 1956, just for your aware, is where this just kind of gives you some criteria to base off of as you look forward here in the next couple weeks. Review this, review the information. Also send you a copy of the petition. that we received. And these are some of the factors that is in our city code that you can reference prior to your vote. Won't go over that in detail, but that's just more for your information on a later date. So we're going to— this is on the docket right now to be voted on on June 29th. So at this point, we're going to, we're going to notify residents of a pending vote on the 29th. We'll make that notification so they can come in, give potential feedback, whether they're for it, against it, and then you guys can make the determination on, on the 29th.

That looks good, and I think that will be beneficial, and I think the neighbors are in favor, so I appreciate your good work on it.

Okay, any other questions? Okay, I also wanted to let you know I am the city's animal shelter board representative, so if you have questions regarding New Voss And the study, you can reach out to me directly.

Okay, thank you.

Mayor, can I just add that there is a provision in the city code that allows for providing visitor passes in those permit areas, just so the council's aware?

Okay.

Yes.

Yeah, and every residence will get 2 free visitor passes that the city will provide.

Gotcha. Right, in case their son or daughter comes to visit from Ogden or wherever. Yes. All right, let's go ahead and move on to discussion of the state drought declaration. And Chris Shirkey, Public Works Director, and Mark Sanderson, Arm Fire Chief, are here to talk.

And Mayor, if I can just introduce this topic.

Sure.

Last, last week, Governor Cox signed off on a 3rd emergency declaration addressing drought conditions here in the state of Utah. And as part of that declaration, he mandated that certain things happen as related to outdoor irrigation on state properties throughout Utah. And he encouraged cities and other government jurisdictions to follow suit and to adopt standards that would work towards water conservation. At the same time, he issued a press release, not included part— not included as part of this emergency declaration, but he also, by press release, banned all fireworks on state and private unincorporated lands throughout the state of Utah. And he left the decision as to whether or not— and as you might expect, there are not a lot of fireworks that are discharged on state lands or in unincorporated areas like there are in municipalities and urban areas. And so what he specifically did with that is he said, I'm going to leave that to the discretion of local elected officials. So I'm going to give them that opportunity to make that decision.

Didn't he hint he might take that back?

He suggested if things go the wrong way, then that he might. My sense is it, it appeared to many as more of a, well, that's a contentious issue. I'm going to pass the buck and leave that to you as elected local elected officials to address. And frankly, it's probably something that rightfully you, we should address as municipalities, because we're the ones who know, obviously, our jurisdiction best. This then begs the question, As to what the City of Orem is going to do in response to this drought declaration and in response to the governor's invitation for us to consider additional limitations or restrictions on fireworks. And so in the last couple of days, we have come together as city staff. We've had this conversation as related to water conservation and also fireworks. And we'd like to present that information to you today. Ultimately, it's at your discretion what you decide. We believe that there are some differences between what the state of Utah does and what the city of Orem should do, but in principle, we believe that the governor is wise in issuing this type of declaration and invitation for us to be concerned. About water as well as concerned about fireworks, especially given these difficult drought situation conditions. So I'll turn the time over to Chris, and hopefully the presentation is up.

Thanks for delaying as long as you could, Jamie. We'll get this up and running here in just a moment.

Maybe I will add that other cities, other jurisdictions are also having the same conversations. Some have adopted in a very direct way the governor's recommendations. Other municipalities have developed Their own plan. The city, for example, of St. George have given— obviously St. George being in southern Utah, being different than northern Utah, what they do is going to be a little different than what we do. However, St. George City, for example, was quite aggressive in banning fireworks and limiting where you can discharge fireworks this year.

Our goal is to assure that we don't have another fire like last year.

That's the whole goal.

Correct.

There we go.

Perfect timing.

I couldn't agree more, Mark. Well, as I was sitting out there pondering on what— how to start our meeting today, or this discussion, Brandon challenged me to start with the a really good dad's joke. So I think maybe I could do that. I will be addressing the dry part of the presentation.

I don't think we have time for the dad joke.

And then Mark will be ending with a bang.

So that's fine. Go ahead.

That wasn't bad.

Okay.

Drought 2021. Here we go. So what is a drought, you might ask yourself? There's no real universal definition for a drought.

drought.

Although a normal and recurring climate condition is something that occurs when we have drought conditions where we have deficiencies of precipitation over an extended period of time, severity of droughts depend on the degree of moisture deficiency, duration, size of the affected area, and so forth. Drought impacts can affect the economy in the form of failed crops and also livestock and wildlife herds can be devastated over an extended period of time. So I don't want to be the presenter of doom and gloom, but this shows, in summary, what the western United States has looked like in the last 18 years. There's been some form of drought off and on, as you can see on this graphic. In 2021, it has the darkest red, or the extreme drought condition that we're experiencing right now. Of those 19— of those 18 years, about 9 of those years there was actually virtually no drought conditions. So about half of the 18 years preceding us today, we did not even experience a drought. This is another form or graphic that shows on the right, you can see that that's 2022. And on the left side, you're down at 2000. Over the course of that period of time, it kind of shows how frequently we have droughts in Utah. We have some form of a drought off and on that seems to have been recurring over the last 20 years, although severe drought conditions occur today, more severe than we've experienced in the last 20 years. And this is what the US Drought Monitor and NOAA have projected in terms of What we're looking like for the next month. There's no relief on the horizon. The drought is going to be persisting at least through the month of June, and there's no immediate relief on the horizon. With that said, I would like to say we are in great condition. We're in great shape here in the city of Orem. Over the last 100 years or so, Orem forefathers have prepared and planned for days like these. In our recent master plan, our 2000— excuse me, our 2021 Water Master Plan, it suggests that we have sufficient water to meet our needs at build-out conditions, even during an extreme drought condition. So we're not here to suggest that we are— we need to make immediate harsh changes in what we're doing. We do need to be aware of what is actually occurring in the environment. And in our watershed, we have 15%. We have a diversified portfolio of water, if you will. If you're making investments, you'd like to be diversified over an extended period of time, time to withstand the highs and lows of your investment. Much like investing money, water resources, we have a very good diversified portfolio. We have a variety of sources, including 2 mountain springs, the Alta and the Canyon Springs, at 15%. of our water today, 25% of our water comes from our deep wells, and then 60% comes from surface water. Our snowwater equivalent this year at Tryon Lake was 81% of average, so it was lower than average. We've had in the last 10 or 15 years, our snowwater equivalent has peaked at around 65% or so. So we've had challenges, and this isn't our first, and it's not our worst necessarily in terms of the data at that particular location.

Chris, I think John's got a question.

Yeah, before you leave this slide, if, if either of the dams were to fail, we're in trouble.

Is that correct?

If you say we're diversified, 60% of it's in one pot, right? If, if one of those dams failed, we'd be— particularly if Jordan L fails, because if it fails, you've taken out the Deer Creek Dam as well.

Right, so you'd be left with the remaining 40% of our water. So in that kind of an extreme condition, we would only be able to provide water to sustain life, most likely, and we would have extreme restrictions on outdoor water use.

Okay.

Okay. That's certainly on the, on the one end of the spectrum, but It does speak to the fact that we do have other sources that are close by and in our city where we can still retain about 40% of our drinking water.

The wisdom of building the well— the dam— not the dam, the tank.

Oh, certainly the tank. So on a given month, indoor usage is around 10 million gallons a day, to put that in perspective. So we currently have around 21.9 million gallons of storage, and we're looking to increase that by about 50% or 10 million gallons. So that would give us 3 days worth of storage for consumption. In the event we wouldn't have surface water and other sources, we would need to restrict back to sustain life. That's 10 million gallons a day. Putting that into perspective, We're looking at 60 million gallons a day on a peak day in the month of July. That's our record high. So we use 6 times the amount of water in the summertime as we do in the wintertime, or in the indoor water consumption. So it's important for us to recognize that the biggest bang for our buck in terms of water conservation comes outside, not inside. You know, you can change your gaskets on your toilets, you can, you know, check a leak. inside your house, that's going to help. But what's going to help even more is if you have a leaky water system, irrigation system that is constantly leaking water, or you're continually spraying water out into the street and not into the landscaped areas as designed. So there's a lot we can do. We're going to speak about that right now. In the last 2 months, Governor Cox has issued a series of executive orders. 3 of those have addressed Drought, drought conditions, water conservation, and extremely dry conditions, and the concern for forest fires and addressing fireworks in addition. And Chief Sanderson is going to speak to that at the end of my presentation. These are the 3 executive orders. This will be available to you to review. I know that Jamie has given you one of these. I think it was the May 3rd executive order regarding water conservation where it explicitly details what the state is going to do at its state facilities outdoors and also indoors in terms of water conservation, but specifically outdoor water conservation. The executive order issued on May 13th is actually a state of emergency that will allow for agricultural users or farmers, those in the ag business, and those in communities that they can find some form of relief in the event that that is needed at a future time this summer. So I wanted to refer specifically to the May 3rd executive order, the 2021-10 executive order. It outlines a few things that I wanted to bring to your, to your attention specifically, and then share what we are doing as a city. And we want to make the community aware of these things. We're going to publish this on our website. site, orem.org/drought, is where we're going to have all of this information made available to citizens, consumers, residential, commercial consumers. The first item is to immediately consider implementing residential and commercial water restrictions and watering lawns during the current year and develop a supporting enforcement strategy. So as Jamie mentioned, we met as a water management team last week, and we are considering those types measures. However, at this time we feel it's prudent not to issue any mandate to require citizens to reduce in the form of a punitive measure. We are going to be requesting that they do follow wise water conservation measures at this time. The second component of this actually should be B— says there's a second A there— says implement same practices that we are recommending for state facilities. Orem will do that. These are those items that the state is doing: irrigating lawns, lawn areas only twice a week in northern Utah and 3 times a week in southern Utah. What we have discussed as a water management team is going to every 3 days, which is equivalent to nearly 2 times a week.

And we feel—

and I have Jim Orr here and Reed Price and Neil Winterton are here to answer or any more detailed questions during this presentation. But Jim Orr is over our parks. As we've discussed this, he said that we can do this. In actuality, we are not going to be implementing our smart water technology by doing this because we're telling it not to water even less than what you would normally water. In other words, it's tied to evapotranspiration sensors at local weathering stations. and it makes adjustments in real time at about 85% of our parks that have this smart irrigation technology. What we're actually telling it is, you're going to not do that, you're going to maybe water 65% instead of watering up to that 100% threshold. So we were going to follow the state's mandate, or their request, I should say, to do that as a city on all of our public property. properties. You can see here also that they've asked us to prioritize irrigation, to prioritize number one trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals, and then grass. We'll do our best to follow that. We do have over 7,000 trees in the city, and we can't drag a hose to every one of them and spot water the trees. That's just impractical, if not impossible. And those trees are primarily watered by the, you know, irrigation systems that do water like the Arboretum out here. They're, they're watered by the irrigation system that waters the grasses.

And Chris, I spoke with Jim earlier in the week, but it's my understanding that the trees cannot be stressed by lack of water. We've got to keep their roots watered appropriately. That's why your prioritization puts trees number one, where grass, on the other hand, can withstand less water and still live just fine.

That is correct, yes. And so they're going to be extremely sensitive. We have an arboriculturist, an arborist, Josh Story, who's going to be monitoring that situation, as well as all of our park staff. So we do know that grass is resilient, it will rebound, and we can't kill it.

So should we then expect some brown areas of grass throughout the city?

You should expect to see some areas where it's not green. some brown areas or lighter green areas or yellow areas for sure. You should expect to see that. Develop an implementation plan for updating irrigation technology. As I mentioned, we have this already in Orem. 85% of our controllers that manage our irrigation systems are in place today. That started back in 2004. Manually shutting off systems during rain and wind events if they're not controlled by smart controllers with rain and wind sensors. We do that today. You'll notice that we do most of, if not all of, these things right now. Audit and repair landscape irrigation systems. We do that currently, and if we have problems where water goes into the street, or if there's an arc that needs to be adjusted, we do pay attention to that. We, we take calls through our 311 system or our Hey Orem, and we try to promptly make those corrections as soon as we can. The next point by the state is to develop plans to replace inefficient plumbing fixtures with WaterSense-certified flow fixtures. This is primarily targeting facilities and new buildings. I know that our Development Services and then our facilities group in Development Services With new facilities, they implement new WaterSense-certified low-flow fixtures, and they are actively looking at doing that in areas where they have an older building that might have a replacement that is needed, and they will replace that with the WISE Water fixtures. The remaining points here for the state government entity recommendations are to update facility management technology. We're updating, as you know, our meters Currently with AMI, and so we anticipate that that's going to help tremendously in putting the power of the usage, the water consumption, into the hands of the consumer. We do meter all of our facilities, including all of our parks. We've been asked to implement leak detection and repair programs. We have those in place today. We actively find and repair and replace those promptly. Park staff also checks outdoor bathroom facilities on a daily basis. We've also implemented water-efficient methods, so that's an ongoing effort that we have today, and we think that we're consistent with, with that suggestion. Check other— with other— with a local water provider to follow restrictions for the local area. We are the local water provider. Not every city is the local water provider. They may be provided water by a water district like Central Utah Water. I'm going to throw this up here. These are our goals and our proposed practices. They are consistent with what I just read in that executive order regarding the state properties. We're not going to water during the day because a good portion of that water will evaporate and not be effective. We're not going to use our smart water technology. We're going to actually trim it back to 3 or 2 waterings a week. And so on and so forth. On this, you can have a look. I'm not going to go through every single bullet point, but I just want you to be aware that we are actively making some adjustments, and we are, however, primarily complying with everything that they've already been suggesting as of this drought. So we are doing our part as a city. Another major point of this water conservation executive order was that M&I water suppliers and secondary systems should implement water restrictions where appropriate. We will do that when we feel like it is appropriate. We'll bring that to your attention. We've been asked to encourage efficient water landscaping. We are doing that actively today. To develop drought-resistant response plans— or excuse me, drought response plans— we have that today. We have a 2017 water conservation plan that's been adopted and will be adopted— excuse me, it'll be re-adopted in 2022. It has to be updated every 5 years. And then they're also asking us to notify customers in our system of any current water supply status and system plans. We will be actively doing that at this new website that was just created through our PIO, through Pete and Steven, at https://orm.org/drought. We'll also use any other standard social media feeds that we use today. The last point in this recommendation, or this executive order, is that we encourage residential water users to follow the best conservation practices identified here. I'd say the biggest one that I wanted to bring to your attention is that the state is requesting that residents in the state of Utah do not water more than twice a week, and no more than 3 times per week in southern Utah. Now, we don't have a water police. We're not going to go out there and actively police that, but we are going to strongly encourage that in support of the governor's executive order. We're also going to recommend you don't water when it's windy and during different time periods, so on and so forth. They also recommend to mow your lawn a little bit higher. That'll help retain some of the water down by closer by the root systems. There's other information here. I'm not going to go read everything off, but I think I've said enough. The Water Conservation Plan has been adopted in December 2017. I did want to bring to light 2 other aspects, or 2 other things that we've noticed that are data-driven. One is on the back end of our system, when we collect the water and it goes through the sewer lines, we meter that information and that data and the flows. One thing that has been brought to our attention by our Water Reclamation Section Manager, Giles Demke, is that over the course of the last 6 weeks or so, we've been noticing a decrease in effluent flows at our plant to the tune of 500,000 to 750,000 gallons a day. Water that gets into the pipe system comes from indoor water usage, so we can clearly see by this, assuming there's no errors in our readings at our facility, that there seems to be a conservation effort or movement that's taken place naturally occurring, perhaps even organically. And on the other side of it—

Inside the house, not on the lawn.

Inside the house, yes. So there seems to be an indoor water conservation movement. Also, on the flip side, on the production side for water, drinking water, I'm quoting this— this email is from June 14th. This is yesterday I received this email. from our Orem Water Supply field supervisor. He's over all of our, our wells and springs and our sources. He said, with this heat and drought, are people conserving? The 10-year average production for June 12th is 40.9 million gallons. This year's production for June 12th was 38.5 million gallons. It's 2 million gallons less. The highest June 12th in the past 10 years was in 2012 at 49 million gallons. Another point for consideration to add to these figures is that the population has increased by over 11,000 people in the last 10 years. So on a per capita basis, it appears that our consumers, our citizens, are being wise water stewards. They're actively making some adjustments based on this empirical data that we've collected. So with that, I end my part of the dry presentation, turn the time over to Mark, unless you have any questions or comments or any discussion items regarding the drought and water conservation principles?

It has been a dry presentation. Terry's got a question.

So, so, so, Chris, question, please. I think the city— I'm impressed, especially with that sensor that we saw a presentation of in the League of Cities and Towns where the city's using that. It shows you how dry the soil is, and I mean, that's great. My concern is a question about some of the private organizations through our city. There's a local bank by where I live, and of course we used to— when we used to get rainstorms, you know, but their sprinklers are on all sorts, you know, middle of the day, even when there's major rainstorms for a couple days. And I don't know, you know, I don't want us to be a militant city, but I wonder if we could do some things maybe to recognize those that do show water conservation, you know, in a positive way and show some kind of appreciation, because I think the city sounds like we're doing a great job, but we could have some help from some of these areas that are watering, you know, they're watering some big chunks of grass.

But we have some very creative minds in the city organization. We can come up with maybe some ways to promote water conservation in a way to To sort of gamify it of sorts, where we can promote perhaps wise water users and, and maybe, you know, provide some kind of a reward of sorts. Or on the flip side, I know the state of Utah really promotes public shaming. I don't know that we want to do that or engage in that, but they're okay with that. So if you're okay with that, we can look into that too, if you'd like. But it does allow people— I'm not kidding when I said that. It does allow for people to make it— to provide feedback and say, hey, this person over here is doing this and they probably shouldn't be doing that. In the spirit of water conservation, try to fix that. All right, so I wouldn't necessarily promote that, but that is a tool that's out there with the state of Utah.

The only concern too that I have is maybe some kind of coordination with the Alpine School District. Just to see what they're doing and how they're doing it, because sometimes we get accused for what somebody else is doing. And I, I don't know where they're at, but it'd just be nice to know where they're at.

In our drought response plan, it does say that we should identify the largest water users and reach out to them and encourage them to do exactly what you're saying or suggesting.

So yeah, I would recommend that.

The LDS Church is sure letting their lawns go brown. Is that in direct response to this?

I'm not—

I can't speak for them. I don't know. But certainly we'll reach out to the— we'll identify— we already know who the largest water users are on a volume basis, and we can reach out to them and encourage them to follow the same— the lead that we're taking right now.

Mayor, this is Debbie. I had a similar question about the Alpine School District. I've noticed that they're— that they are watering their stadiums and a lot of their schools, and obviously school's out, so I'd like to maybe even have a conversation with them because I've seen it multiple times over the last few weeks.

Chris, could— maybe to Debbie's question, Mayor— Chris, could you speak to maybe the need to maintain athletic fields at a different standard than some of our other facilities? Because I think it's important that we, that we mention that.

Okay, thank you.

Yes, so we do have programmed athletic facilities including soccer fields, softball fields, and baseball fields. I think Jim Orr is here, he can speak to this. I know I've spoken with him directly on this. If you're comparing 3 out, you know, outfielders In a— on a baseball field compared to maybe 20 to 25 soccer players in the same relative-sized area, that soccer field is going to get— it's going to get damaged a little more, have broader use. So we would suggest that in some of those areas we continue to water and monitor that, maybe not twice a week, we might need to do 3 times a week in some of those sporting areas.

What I was mainly referencing is the Mountain View Stadium by our Family Fitness.

Their park strip between the stadium and the sidewalk, I've seen that sprinkler on many— I mean, maybe I'm exaggerating, but at least every other day and in the middle of the day.

So that's an artificial turf? field that within the stadium, so they may be watering to keep the temperature of the field lower for the athletes that are participating in events on the field. So I'll have— we're happy to have Bren, who has a relationship with the school district, follow up, but that in part might be the reason too, because those artificial fields get pretty hot.

Thank you.

I think it's worth the inquiry.

Mayor and Council, when it comes to firework restrictions, I mean, obviously our, our focus is the East Bench. That's the borders of Linden through Provo Canyon area that we serve. We don't want to have a fire up there. We're currently working 2 areas of focus with our wildland fire team. That is that whole East Bench. Matter of fact, there's a mitigation effort taking place tomorrow. in conjunction with the police officers academy recruits and our wildland team up in that area. In conjunction with Public Works, there's— we've had a discussion over the last couple months of servicing the Murdoch Canal area, just because it runs all the way through town and it's one of the overgrown areas within our, within our borders. And the decision has been made that Public Works is going to actually mow those areas. There have been some— I mean, I think there's conflict depending on the neighborhood, depending on what area of town. Some neighbors want it cleaned up for fear of a fire, and others want it left just based on the aesthetics and the appearances. And so, but the decision has been made that Public Works is going to be working the Murdoch Trail area while our wildland team And our efforts are going to focus on the East Bench. When it comes to firework restrictions, whether it's city administration, whether it's the fire chief or elected officials, I really believe it's like lose-lose when it comes to restricting fireworks. Obviously, there are specific areas that bring greater risk, but there's also great satisfaction in blowing things up and And what comes along with our city's celebrations.

So I think the restrictions that have been made on the East Bench have been effective and have done a good job. And of course, you'll be doing that again this year, but I'm trying to actually get that—

Chris is working on trying to pull up that map. It's on our website, orem.org/fireworks. There's a map of the restricted area, and it's my understanding that that is Same area that last year. It's no different. We haven't extended based on the governor's recommendations. We haven't brought that.

My only concern is that none of our associated resources such as BLM or Forest Service or somebody like that do any controlled burns in areas close to our city, because I've seen those get out of hand.

Yeah, and, and that's why one of the— that's why our area of focus this year is just our team up there on that hill. We actually have neighboring fire departments who've been currently deployed. There's a fire in South Utah where a lot of our agencies are already being deployed, firefighters are leaving. We've made the decision not to deploy our team members till after the 4th of July so that not only we're keeping our brush trucks that we normally would send out during wildland fire season, in town for our highest risk times, but just to also keep our resources available to us in the event we have an incident.

That's good.

Tom, of course, in Utah we have a double holiday in July, right? The 4th and the 24th. I live on Palisades Drive, and so I see, in theory, on the east side of it you're not supposed to do fireworks, and on the west side you can. My guess is people are being careful, but I don't believe they're all following that, that plan. And frankly, as aerial— with as much aerial fireworks as we have, you can shoot it from, you know, a couple blocks away and it can go over. So I understand you're not— we can't be too hard. We can't be too hard on this issue. We have to be helpful and encourage. But, you know, it's a risk all night on the 24th.

Yeah.

24th and the 24th in a few days either side of it.

But—

Well, that's why I say it's a lose-lose, because regardless of who the decision comes from, when you look at it, by the time the firework goes off, the— and we can be out patrolling, this includes police and fire personnel— we see it go off, we don't see who lights it, we see where it lands, and we can mitigate it. But by the time we get there, there's just— there's no way to police it, there's no way to control it. Yeah, we're certainly not going to show up at somebody's house and go in their garage and confiscate their fireworks. It's just a— it's just a—

we just need to be careful that, yeah, those evenings, right?

Yeah, we need to educate. We just need to be prepared. And that's our plan, is to have all of our brush apparatuses out deployed on the East Bench in our hazard areas and just be ready.

And when we go over that hill, we are into Provo. Are they doing something along the bottom there? Do you know?

I haven't talked to Chief Miguel yet to See what that coordinated efforts— absolutely.

Thank you.

All right, any other comments or questions from the council? We appreciate—

Mayor, I just wanted to make sure that you're okay with the direction that we're going. Again, I think fireworks, we're maintaining the same path we've been on. Water, it's more of a recommendation and encouragement than a mandate.

And I'm glad to hear that Chief Sanderson is on the alert with enough personnel to mitigate a problem. So thank you very much. Appreciate that, both of you. We'll now go ahead and move on to a discussion of our agenda items.

You want to talk about mayor pro tem there?

We do want to talk about that.

Yeah, this is the next item.

It is. Sorry. So going through our list of those who have served, it's come around to Dave Spencer's time to serve as the mayor pro tem. So I'm suggesting that we appoint him. Is everyone okay with that?

Yes.

Okay, thank you. We'll now go through our agenda items. Um, our spiritual thoughts— our prayer will be given by Lenee Millett and our Pledge of Allegiance by Stephanie Visna. We do want to recognize the Orem High School girls track team, 5A champions. We'll then have our personal appearances. Approval of meeting minutes for our consent items and the ordinance approving the amounts to be awarded to the CARE grant recipients. I don't know if each one of you have had a chance to go through that and look at our recipients.

They're as we discussed with that one minor change.

With the changes, yes. Is everybody okay with that?

Yes.

Okay. We'll then go to our scheduled items, the public hearing on enterprise fund transfers. Brandon Nelson will be our presenter. Brandon, anything you want to mention there? Okay, it'll be—

Hardly wait. I'm gonna go get an extinguisher.

It'll be a real drought. So the next one is a public hearing on ordinance adopting the City of Orem fiscal year 2021-2022 budget. Again, Brandon is our presenter. We'll then go to communication items. Tonight we're going to adjourn to a meeting of the RDA. agency of the city and look at approving meeting minutes and adopting the RDA 2021-2022 budget, and then adjourn to a meeting of the Orem Special Service Lighting District, again to approve the meeting minutes and the public hearing on adopting the 2021-2022 budget. Is everyone okay with the consent items of both the RDA and the Special Service Lighting District, which is basically just the approval of meeting minutes?

Okay.

And that is it. Anyone have any questions?

Do you want Terry to report on his board items? That's number 2 on the—

yes, he will be. Jamie, do you have anything you wanted to bring up?

Mayor, the only thing I'll add this evening is just to thank you to, obviously, to all of you for your participation in Summerfest, but more, I guess, more significantly, our staff and the wonderful job they did in carrying out our Summerfest 2021. We are one of the first communities this season who ran with a city festival, and so many of our peers were looking to us as kind of the path forward. And do we do it differently under obviously post-COVID conditions versus where we once were? I think our staff did a fantastic job, and kudos to them for their dedication and preparation, as well as our Summerfest committee and the, the many hours that they've spent on it. I know Councilmember Larray served as a member of that committee and just appreciate the efforts of everybody in relation to Summerfest. And, you know, thankful it wasn't this week with 100-plus degree temperatures. We had good weather, we had great attendance, we had vendors running out of food. And we had, I think, a good time had by all and very limited injuries and, and nothing of great significance on the negative side of things to report. Obviously, there are some things that we need to take a look at. We, we modified to a limited degree the parade route, and that led to some, obviously, some logistical issues that we'll address in the future. And then the mayor and I have talked about those. But other than that, I just really appreciate the efforts of our staff in making it a great City celebration. So thank you.

It was a great celebration, and I think I've seen twice as many people this year as I've ever seen attend. So it was a great event. On our consent items, one item that was missed that is not on our council meeting agenda here is to assign Dave Spencer as the mayor pro tem from July to December 2021. It is listed under our work session, but it's not listed under our consent items.

Mayor, I think we would, we would probably just include that in our 29th meeting because we would include that as part of the agenda on your 29th.

Okay, that's great.

Correct.

Okay. All right. If nothing else, let's go ahead and adjourn, and I believe that they have a meal over there. Sure, go ahead.

Okay, never mind. I'm not—

I'm not sure I'm ready for you, but please do.

Well, I'm going to take 15 minutes on each of my responsibilities. I have 3 of them, so.

Okay.

My responsibilities, one is to be on the policy committee for the ULCT. We just heard from Cameron, you know, a few weeks ago, so I think we're pretty up to date on what's going on there. And, you know, they're very involved. They know I've reached out to them. Cameron hasn't got back to me. I called him a few days ago, but just to get an update if there's anything new since, but he presented to the City Council just a few weeks ago. UVU Community Outreach. I talked to Steve Anderson the other day, trying to get an update with what's going on. The next— they are reorganizing their community outreach program, and he mentioned you, Mayor. He mentioned Jamie has a good relationship with the city, and they plan on the next meeting to be in September, October with the community outreach. Planning Commission. I just want to mention one thing to Jason. Jake took your place at the last Planning Commission meeting and did a great job. You know, there was a lot of questions, a lot of clarification of things, and I just think— I'm just passing it on to you. I just thought Jake was very professional. And anyway, I just thought that was, that was good. Sorry I didn't take longer, Mayor, but that's it.

Okay, okay, you're concise and to the point. There is one other thing I wanted to mention before we adjourn. On the 26th of June at 11 AM, there's an organization that works with hospice here in our community, and they're going to have a celebration over there. Communities from all over the county are invited. It will be at the All Abilities Park between there and the pavilion. And specifically what's going to occur is that several of us will give speeches, but then we will release 500 butterflies into the air. So these butterflies are on ice and they're put in little containers And then when they open them up, they start to warm up, and then they fly out. And so it'll be quite a celebration if any of you would like to come. I know they'd love to have you there.

So—

What time is that?

11 AM on the 26th, at, uh, between the pavilion and the All Abilities Park. So if nothing else, let's go ahead and adjourn this meeting, and then we'll start our city council meeting at 6 o'clock.

All right, did you see that attached to your agenda for the girls? Okay, I've got to get this to the boys, but I just want to make sure that you saw that.

Yeah, perfect. I'm gonna have to I'm surprised that they get like, you know how it is, like your lotion dries up. They get kind of closed shut. I thought it was like when somebody takes off the cap and releases the cap. Someone threw up at Summerfest.

What?

I used a contest. And that made him throw up? Does he not like bananas? Okay, that's what I heard he wants, but he threw around and threw up. Too much air, was it?

Really? Come on.

Wow. So it's because the thing is the whole bottom layer— Oh, I would love that. Do they have crusts? Yeah, crust with—

That's incredible.

That's the best part. Well, yeah, because it's real. But that was hilarious. No, I'm sorry, I shouldn't say— Just alcohol for an invited I know. Yeah. Okay, well, I'm gonna put up a little Oh, you're connected to this one, right?

Yeah, so I'm trying to share as if I was in a presentation.

We got that because I'm on all the screens. Okay.

Farm City Council meeting. Would like to call this meeting to order. We would like to begin with an invocation to be given by Stephanie Visnott, and afterwards a Pledge of Allegiance by Lenee Millett.

Our Father in heaven, we are grateful to this day to be able to meet together as city residents and council and those who are in need of a resolution to issues. And we ask you to help us to continue to be respectful and kind as we share our opinions and with those we come in contact with throughout the evening. We're grateful for the organization of, of the city and for the government, the freedoms that we enjoy, and for those who have taken on the hard jobs to protect us with our police department and our fire and those people that are serving in the military. We know that there are many that put their lives in danger each day. We ask you to watch over and protect them. We ask you to continue to watch over our area with continued improvement on the pandemic, that those who are making those decisions can continue to do what is best for the citizens and the residents and for themselves. We thank you for these freedoms and for these blessings and these abilities that we have before us, and we ask you to watch over this meeting, that we would continue to have The guidance and direction that we need to have this, this city improve and do those things that would be pleasing to those that live here and that visit here. We thank thee, we ask thee for these things humbly in the name of thy Son, Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Amen.

Will the audience please rise and join me in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

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

Thank you.

Thank you, Lynnae and Stephanie. Um, We have a chance to recognize a special team tonight, and that is our Orem High School girls track team, 5A champions. And if their coach is here, could we have the coach come up to the podium? Coach is not here. Are the girls here?

Yes. Okay.

Well, that's fine. I would like to read a certificate of recognition. And then we'll move on. Whereas the City of Orem wants to recognize the Timpanogos High School girls track team, and whereas the City of Orem is impressed by their teamwork, and whereas the team members did everything they were supposed to do and then some, now therefore I, Richard F. Brents Jr., Mayor of the City of Orem, Utah, do hereby recognize the Timpanogos School girls track team as the 5A Division State Champions. Can we give them a round of applause, please? Okay, we now like to go on to our personal appearances portion of our meeting, and I'd like to read a statement. Time has been set aside for the public to express their ideas, concerns, and comments On items not scheduled as public hearings on the agenda. Those wishing to speak are encouraged to show respect for those who serve the city. Comments should focus on issues concerning the city, not individuals. Those wishing to speak should have signed in before the beginning of the meeting. Please give us your name and limit your comments to 3 minutes or less. So I would like to go down the list of those who signed up. The first one is John Barrick. And then Stephanie Visna. So, John.

Mayor Brunston, members of the Orem City Council, let me start with a couple of key phrases from the Orem City Code 22-7-3. The preference is for Orem to be predominantly a single-family community. Standards are necessary to protect residents from the harmful effects of a Excessive noise, population density, and traffic congestion, and strict standards require developments to fit into the surrounding neighborhoods. The North Village District purpose, Orm Code 22-24-5 Cap A, says— calls for smaller-scale development compared to the other 4 State Street districts. If a 70-foot, 6-story luxury apartment building across the street from the Heaps' home is smaller scale, I cannot imagine what is planned for the other districts, Orem districts. I'm one of these people, or those people, as we've, as we've been referred to in recent City Council meetings. We are not going away. When the Orem city staff referred to my wife and her neighborhood friends asking questions about this issue were referred to as the angry housewives, I got drafted. Now I'm the president of Orem Residents for Responsible Development, with the emphasis on responsible.

We have—

we would like to have open meeting laws. Utah's open meeting law states that the legislature finds that and declares that the state, its agencies, and political subdivisions, which includes Orem City, exist to aid in the conduct of the people's business. And we would like to state our business. Sunlight really is the best disinfectant. Orem City has several outstanding leaders, and we would like to personally thank David Spencer, Tom McDonald, Brent Sumner, Jeff Lamson, and Terry Peterson for leading this charge. Let me review Orem's recent history on high-density housing on State Street. The Daily Herald said the Midtown Village started as the it place to live in 2004. It was followed by bankruptcy, foreclosure, and litigation. In 2014, the Deseret News called Midtown Village Orem's most notorious eyesore. And, and, and the Daily Universe called it infamous, an infamous Midtown project reborn. One of our city officials called it the wave of the future and a real jewel for the city, and I'm not sure which of those statements is true. I have been an Orem resident for 20 years, and while I'm new to Orem politics, I'm not new to politics. I agree with Jamie Davidson, who in our work meeting today said we keep moving the goalposts, and we would And welcome that meeting that was discussed in that meeting. Let's agree to sit down and discuss these issues as a cohesive group of residents, city elected officials, and city staff. As residents, we want assurances that you'll follow the purpose of the North Village District, which is smaller-scale development. I hope we can all agree that a 6-story high-density development doesn't fit into the existing neighborhood, but if that was the case, I wouldn't be here tonight. Thank you very much for your time, and we look forward to working with you in the future.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Stephanie Visnaw. What would a city council meeting be without North Village District comments, right? I know, probably a lot shorter than what you guys are thinking, right? Because you're tired of hearing about it. So for many of you, the council members are working really hard to adjust the zoning ordinances in North Village District. which I appreciate wholeheartedly. I recognize that the process has been slow and often tiresome, and I hope to come to a desirable agreement for all— the city, developers, and residents—

soon.

And a special session, I feel, is imperative to resolve this very discussion. Although there are several zoning issues to discuss, building height and land use are of most importance. With single-family homes bordering nearly all of the North Village District, an appropriate height maximum is needed. The proposed 60 feet is not an appropriate height in the edge zone with homes being adjacent. Properties in the core zone that have direct State Street frontage and are not adjacent to single-family homes can have a different height maximum and land use to provide direction for redevelopment. Given all the emails, comments, and direct conversations the council and staff have had over the past several months, I'm certain that the message is loud and clear that residents are concerned and generally against the zoning that is currently in place. The master plan is intended to improve State Street, and at the same time, it is the responsibility of the city to ensure that this is not done at the expense Being able to revisit and adjust the master plan with a conversation balanced between residents and development will direct appropriate future development while protecting the quality of life residents enjoy here in, in Orem City. I look forward to participating in the upcoming special session where all voices and information can be shared and heard.

Thank you.

Okay, we'd like to hear now from Erica Olson. And Julie Davey.

Hello, Mayor and City Council members. My name is Erica Olson, and I'm a very prideful member of Utah Animal Rights Coalition. I am accompanied by our director, Jeremy Beckham. I'm sure you've heard from him before. But really quickly, I just have a question.

Who here has children?

Do you all have children?

Yeah, everybody.

Do you guys have kids anywhere? Awesome.

Perfect.

Well, I've spent weeks pondering the words that I'd share with you, um, once this day would finally come, but my 70,000 signatures on a petition I created by myself with no help of anybody, um, kind of speak for themselves. I'll keep it short and I'll keep it simple, but the only reason that this is still happening is because nobody knew about it. Now, not only do we have over 70,000 people across the United— the state of Utah, the United States, and surrounding countries who have taken the time out of their day to read, sign, and type their feelings about this matter, but we also have the municipal election year on our hands. These changes truly do begin with you, and it is now at this time that we ask for, with the utmost importance, for you to add this to the top of your priorities. is ending the use of gas chambers in the state of Utah, but especially in the city of Orem. These changes, like I said, they begin with you. And if I had the power in my hands, things definitely would be very different. But I'm here today to present to you the power that I do have, the 70,000 people who are backing me, who are backing YouARC, and who are backing our family members. These animals are our family members. For somebody who's infertile or even if it doesn't go to that point, if they just need a family member, our dogs and cats are our family members, right? These are our family members that we are talking about, and these animals were never even given the opportunity to find a home, to find our homes. I'm an adoptive mother of 2 little fur babies. That's the best that I can get because I can't have kids. These 2, my 2 little girls, are everything that I have, and if they were thrown into a gas chamber, It'd be just the same to me as it would be for your sons and daughters and their sons and daughters. I understand that it's not going to be to that extent for everybody, but it is very important to understand that it is to that extent for very many. And now we've done what we can to make our voices heard, and as I mentioned, we are asking you from the bottoms of our heart and for all the animals that we're speaking on behalf of today to put this at the top of your priorities. And in reference to your children, I'm just very curious to find what everybody plans to tell them, knowing that you did have these matters in your hands and chose not to make a change. Thank you very much.

Thank you. We have Julie Davey.

I'm sorry, really quickly, we just brought some of our signatures. The printer broke and we weren't able to print out all 70,000, but we just brought some of them to show you. And these are just Utah state residents.

It's hard to physically make this fit in the space, but this is 13,000 Utah residents just in 3 weeks that want the gas chambers banned in Utah County. And there's another 45,000 names that didn't even fit on the scroll. So we just wanted to try to find a way to visualize this amount of public opposition. And I'm sure you've all been getting your email inboxes rather full as well. So I didn't even finish up on it.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Hello, gentlemen. I come to you as a Linden resident just across the street from you all, but I did grow up in your community, and I come to you tonight as a witness. I worked at New Boss from 2013 until 2014, and I need you to understand that it has taken hundreds to thousands of dollars of very intensive therapy and time and support to loosen my tongue to the point that I can be here physically tonight. I am not here as just as an activist. I'm here as somebody who was traumatized by the shelter in question. I cannot briefly tell you what it was like Just about every week at North Utah Valley Animal Shelter in that euthanasia room. I still— I've been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. I still will smell a black garbage bag, or I will hear something hissing, and I will experience very vivid flashbacks, and I am back in that room killing your animals. I need you to understand that It is not humane. It is a very cruel method, and those animals suffer. We were told that this was the option that was given us. I was 20 when I started working there, you know, and in the meetings it was presented to us as if this was the cost-effective choice and anybody protesting just didn't know any better, you know. Euthanasia is a part of shelter life, and it was presented to us that this gas euthanasia was our only available option. We were never given the chance to use an injection. It was only the director and the assistant director who were able to give it. I only experienced this gas chamber, and I need you to know that these animals suffered. They screamed. They broke claws trying to get out. They howled. The cats often would be put in multiple into a cage at a time, and so they would often get into fights. If a dog was too big for a cart, animals would be dropped on top of them in the other segment. It didn't matter how much I was there to save them. It didn't matter how desperately I tried to contact rescues in the 11th hour. I was forced every week by— you know, nobody held a gun to my head, but I could not help those animals if I wasn't there, I felt. And I need you to know that I am not okay. And I will never be okay for the rest of my life because what is still happening down the street from me. And I just need to tell you, as somebody who was there as a witness, that this is— I can't briefly convey the horror. And I hope that you will make a change. Thank you.

Thank you. Let's go on to Talene Perkins.

Hi, my name is Talene, and I'm a very new resident to Orem. I've been here about 2 and a half years now. I've worked in the animal rescue community for 30 years. My kids have all joined in, and they're all adults now and have joined in with me. And thankfully, I, I keep a really good eye on the animals. I feed a lot of stray animals in my area. I get them fixed. and vaccinated. Um, just last year I, I had an incident where a neighbor had seen one of the, um, strays that we care for and thought he had burns on him and took him down there. And the absolute horror in me knowing— because as she discussed, it is— I don't know if any of you have ever been on YouTube and just watched euthanasia by gas chambers. It is the most horrible thing you will ever see in your life. I don't wish anybody to go look at it, but if you've seen it, it's, it's awful. And we're all about, especially in Orem, growing and change, going with the way the world— I mean, everything's moving. Why is NuViz not moving? They're still doing the gas chambers. And why? Especially being as the Humane Society of Utah provides a quarterly euthanasia by injection training at their shelter in Murray, and they, for $50, they completely train someone. That is so much cheaper than using gas. The animal is put out like that. No 15 minutes of suffering, gasping for air. I have asthma, and I was recently in an accident and had to be put on oxygen. You take the oxygen off, and I felt— I knew that just suffocating feeling. And to me, that's I don't care if it's a chicken, anything that dies with suffocation is absolutely awful and horrendous. So I just, I beg all of you to help change because we need to grow. I'm sure you guys are tired of hearing about this. It's not going to cost much of anything, if it's going to cost the city at all, to get rid of that gas chamber.

It's cheaper.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Now I would like to hear from Trevor.

Hello, my name is Trevor Bellacomo, and I was born in Orem. I've been a Utah resident my whole life, and I would just like to start out by taking a moment of silence for all of the animals that die in the gas chambers. all the ones that still make it out alive. Thank you. 30 minutes is the average time that it takes for an animal to die in a gas chamber. Think about that, 30 minutes. A lot of these animals, they still survive after this, and I want Orem to be known as one of the cities that does not have a gas chamber. Right now it is known as one of the only cities that's left with one. Even prisons, the worst criminals that are supposed to be given a humane death sentence are not given the gas chamber. So the North Utah Valley Animal Shelter, um, the UARC has given them everything that they need to be able to transition to be able to do euthanasia by injection. And And they even have the next training on June 26th. So it's all up to you. You all have the power to make this stop, and all this can be put to an end very quickly and can have a very quick transition. And, uh, thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Now I'd like to hear from Kristen.

Hi, my name is Kristen. I have lived in Orem my whole life. I brought my son with me today. I have a Labradoodle named Bochy. I have 2 ESA animals, 2 cats named Sunny and Ling Ling, both from the rescue. And, um, I saw that Erica had posted this and it just affected me. I have, I have lots of kids also, and I love my animals as much as my kids, and I can't imagine the idea that this actually exists and continues in a place that I live that I think is supposed to be the best place in the world. And here we are in Utah, we claim to be beautiful and wonderful people, and I can't believe that this actually is a thing that is still happening. And it's affected me the same way that she said, that if something happened to one of my kids, if I found out that one of my animals was treated so cruelly and so inhumanely, and I just couldn't stand the idea that I just Didn't say anything or even just showed up standing outside in the sun for an hour was nothing compared to the idea that I didn't get to say something, that this wasn't okay. So thank you.

Thank you.

We have Natalia.

Hi, my name is Natalia Garcia. I've lived in Orem for at least about 12 years. I moved from California, and even though I'm not new to Utah, not anymore anyways, being a dog— I have my own little dog. This is him. His name is Pogo. He's a tiny little poodle, and his name is Pogo because he likes jumping on his hind legs like a pogo stick. So though that little dog here, he was rescued from a horrible situation. Now he suffers from a lot of separation anxiety, which it's a lot. Those who have dogs and who have rescued dogs know it is hard to deal with. I have my own problems, and this little guy here, he's kept me alive for the last 2 years that I've had him. That's the impact that dogs have in our lives. If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't be here. Now, if you think this little guy right here, this little one right here, can actually keep me alive, imagine all those dogs in there.

One of—

how many of you guys here have dogs, have pets, cats, parrots, you know, lizards? Do you guys— I'm assuming you guys love them, obviously. I'm sure your kids love them. Imagine telling your kid, your, your dog, your cat just suffered the horrible pain ever. He was suffering. He was trying to gasp for air. How would that make you feel? How? Just how? That's so inhumane. And actually, how about we try to put this money that they're using for gas chambers and try to put all those animals in there to help them get a job, get good homes. How about we use that money? Orem is beautiful. I lived here in Orem for 12 years. I have people who want to— family members who want to move here because they know how beautiful it is. Yet me telling them the atrocities that happens in a shelter, it's horrible. They're not going to want to even move here. Just think about it. Just think what your kids and your sons and daughters and family members would think if you guys don't do anything about this. Please reach into your soul, reach into those animals' soul, and feel what they actually feel for those minutes they're in there— 30 minutes, an hour, for how long. Imagine you guys feeling the same pain they will.

Thank you.

Uh, Dr.

Megan Browning.

Hi there. Hi, uh, Dr. Megan Browning, but not medical, it's in chemistry. Um, so I've lived in Orem forever. If you know any Brownings or Mangums or Stonemans, those are my people. Um, and, uh, I super love Orem. It's got all the best kid activities. My little one is in the Orem Rec Center summer camp, just like his grandpa was back in the '60s. I love it. Love Orem. Except maybe one thing. I just would love to live in a town where if my little neighborhood kids find a kitten, it has a place to go, a safe haven, a shelter.

Maybe.

So until we have that, we end up with a ragtag team of volunteers and advocates trying to keep these animals safe and to make up for the services that some of us feel are a little lacking. So I don't know if I speak for everyone, but I don't know any animal lover that will That knows what New Voss does that will take in animals there. So we really, like, as advocates, we want to work with the shelter. We really, really do. We want their help and we want to help them. We're volunteering all these hours, but we could be volunteering these hours, like, with them, like, as a group, as a partnership. But instead, we're kind of doing it under the radar. So my neighbors keep dumping animals on my porch because they threaten to take them to New Voss. And I'm like, oh, I can't, I can't let that happen. So I'm just taking all these pets in. Now, we, as it stands, we just like cannot trust the shelter. And we're exhausted.

We really are.

And I wish I could really. So this just brings me to that little parable where with the starfish, remember the starfish parable, where there's a little boy walking along the beach and an old man is throwing starfish back. That's sort of what it feels like, where I'm out at a business park in Orem, and there's a bunch of kittens. And somebody will ask me, why are you doing this? Why are you saving all these kittens and getting so tired and so overwhelmed? when I'm actually like, my full-time job is to try to do science and cure COVID and things. And that's because that one kitten that I'm able to save makes it worth it, you know. I also am doing my full-time job and doing the COVID stuff. But on my free time, saving kittens. Um, if you want to reduce suffering in the animals and people who care about them, uh, we need your help.

Thank you, appreciate it. Now hear from Lori Bigelow.

Hi there.

I'm actually a Lynden city resident. I've lived in Lynden for, oh, 17 years or so.

I was born in Lynden.

Supposedly my second great-grandfather was the first baby born in Orem, so I have strong family roots here. I care about the community. And Yeah, I care about the animals in our community as well. My story is 6 years ago, I had a little feral cat that adopted me, and then she had kittens in my barn. I didn't know what to do with her. Oh my goodness, what can I do? I started looking for fix options, called the animal shelter, there were none. Wanted to be able to help them. So, you know, so luckily we had Best Animal, you know, Best Friends Animal Society. I was able to fix them there with that resource. And I've used that resource as long as I've lived here, relied on that resource. And right now we don't have that resource. And like Megan said, we'd love to have that support from, from our, our county, from our shelter. We'd love to work with, you know, the animal shelter and have those programs that save these— the lives of these animals, that offer us low-cost spay/neuter options. I really do think that the problem begins with us. If we can all work together to solve that problem, you know, everyone I talk to that, you know, I help some of the cats in my neighborhood. There's so many feral cats in my neighborhood, and I've helped the neighbors try to trap them and fix them, take them to Best Friends. I belong to a group of volunteers of 80 trappers in Utah County, and that's what they're doing. They're out there trying to fix these these cats and help them. And we just don't have, you know, a lot of times we pay out of our own pocket. We really care about these animals. And everyone I talk to, I've got several neighbors that care about these animals too. They feed them. A lot of times they don't know that, oh, I didn't know that they still gas the animals, and especially the feral cats. They have no options. And yet a lot of times it's because people don't know, they don't have the awareness and education to know, hey, I need to get my cat fixed. If I don't, I could have 20 cats in a year, you know, with how fast they overpopulate. So I mean, a long story short, I'm kind of rambling here, but everyone I know or that knows about the feral cats or the animals that are being gassed, they care or they want to do something to help. And like that petition, I don't think you realize that Our community does want this. We want, we want the programs. We want things to help our animals, our pets, to get them fixed. It doesn't cost $300, you know, to fix a cat. We want that support. We want our community and our, in our county to provide that type of service like the other animal shelters do. And I think the gas chamber is outdated at this point. I think we need to step up and provide those life-saving options for our community because our community does want want them. Thank you.

Thank you, we appreciate that. There are no other persons signed up, so we'll go ahead and close the personal appearance portion of our meeting. I would like to mention that on the North Village District, we appreciate the comments made and we're looking to do a special meeting with our council and with residents on the issues there. And as far as the North Utah Valley Animal Shelter, we've met with the director. We're looking to receive some reporting back from the director at the end of this month and to do some additional study as to appropriate action. So we appreciate everybody's comments and we take it seriously. Thank you. We'll now move on to our consent items. The first one is the approval of meeting minutes of City Council meeting May 25, 2021. The second is an ordinance approving the amounts to be awarded to the CARE grant recipients for the 2021 CARE granting round. Anyone on the City Council wish to move these consent items to a scheduled item? Seeing none requesting that, we'll go ahead and make a motion. I make a motion that we approve our consent items as listed. Is there a second?

Second.

Okay, we'll start with Councilmember Spencer.

Aye.

Terry?

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

I vote aye as well. Is Debbie Luray with us on Okay. All right. Our consent items pass. We'll move on to our scheduled items. The first one is a public hearing, and this is for the transfer of enterprise funds within our budget, and our presenter is Brandon Nelson.

Thank you, Mayor.

City Council.

So, as part of ordinance change state law that was brought into effect approximately 5 years ago, prior to adopting a budget, we need to bring forth any transfers that are occurring out of enterprise funds and into our general fund or any other fund that is not an enterprise fund. So, so this first discussion discusses those items that are being transferred from enterprise funds, and in this case it is all to our general fund. Why do we do these particular transfers? They, they pay for water, sewer, and stormwater and street lighting use of the city as a whole. And so those funds are transferred back because, as stated here in bullet point number 3, you can see the state auditor required us to charge. So those enterprise funds have to charge the city for the use of water, sewer, etc. And then in order to make the general fund whole, we simply transfer that exact same dollar amount back to the general fund to, in essence, have to be able to keep our property taxes low, for instance. So this is not anything new prior to when the state law went into effect. the state law just caused us to have to, in essence, show both sides of the transaction. And so that's why we do these particular transfers. And this just points out what those amounts are. We transfer $900,000 from the water fund primarily for parks. And, you know, in the various grass that primarily is related to those, but obviously also water inside this building and other public facilities that, that we, that we use. Same with sewer in our restrooms throughout the parks, as well as in city facilities. Stormwaters are related to any parking lots, etc., where we have stormwater infrastructure, and then any streetlight or any lighting that the city has throughout its facilities. We then are required to show what percentage of each of those funds' budgets does that transfer out represent. You can see on the right-hand side the percentage that is related to those particular transfers. We're also required to kind of indicate what the revenues for each of those utility funds are and give a breakdown in relation to the various components of their revenue for those funds. And we're also required to show you the expense side of their budgets and what the associated breakdown is for those utilities, which obviously, as we mentioned before, as those percentages are in relation to these expenditures. And then required to also provide a breakdown of any charges that we charge those fund— those enterprise funds for, such as administration, any use of our— where the warehouse, our IT services, the insurance that The general fund provides fleet maintenance for their vehicles, as well as maintenance for— on their facilities. And then you can see at the very bottom, the transfer fee that we were talking about, as well as any other transfers out where they're sending money or being charged for other services that they pay for. Gives you a breakdown here of those— that expense information and how each of those expenditure costs are broken down based on personnel, supplies, administrative charges, utilities, etc. And you can see again, next to bottom line, the transfer-out component related to those expenditures. We're required to break down the contracted services amount, and within our contracted services, we have a charge for our 311 center, the utility billing. So obviously their services are being provided, and so therefore those funds are charged for their services. The public works secretaries are also within the general fund. Obviously they provide a large amount of service to those enterprise funds. Our engineering group. There's a— we have a management analyst that helps with those entities as well, as well as Central Utah Water and various other third-party companies that are entities that we pay for various services. Are there any questions about all that? I promised you it'd be drier than drought, so—

No.

Are there any questions related to those transfers?

Any questions from the council? All right, well, this is a public hearing, so we will go ahead and open it up to the public for any public comment. If you wish to speak to this matter, please give us your name and keep your comments to 3 minutes. Seeing how no one is coming forward, we'll close the public comment. We'll close the public comment portion of our public hearing and bring it back to the council. Is there a motion on this enterprise fund transfer?

I don't know how formal it needs to be. I move—

Go down to the last part of the sentence.

I was trying to do that, that the, that the, that regarding— we've moved the transfer from the enterprise fund to the General Fund in fiscal year '21-'22 budget and move to approve the transfer.

Is there a second?

Second.

Okay, um, let's go ahead and vote. Uh, Councilmember Spencer?

Aye.

Terry?

Aye.

Aye. Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Okay, the Enterprise Fund transfer passes. We'll now move on to a public hearing for an ordinance to adopt the City of Orem fiscal year 2021-2022 budget, and Brandon Nelson is also our presenter on this item.

Great, thank you again.

So just as a—

this will be hopefully relatively quick.

Just kind of a—

we've seen all of these before, I kind of brought it down to re-summarize for maybe anybody who hasn't run across this. So just a brief calendar review of the things that— the budget pieces that we talked about: council retreat, various work sessions throughout March and April, and then the tentative budget that was presented to you in May. And then obviously we are here to adopt our— that tentative budget. And So for next fiscal year. But budget highlights, despite the COVID pandemic, obviously revenues continue to be very good, other than some, you know, the court, for instance, still suffering a little bit based on that. And but most other revenues seem to have been either unaffected or have rebounded from the initial impact of the pandemic.

And our sales tax revenue is up how much this year?

Well, it's up 14-plus percent year to date.

Okay, thanks.

So it is just incredible to me.

Shows the strength of the economy within the city of Orem.

I think the strength of Utah, strength of Orem in particular, is the strength of our sales tax base. Obviously, stimulus money probably helps a lot, both back in the December, January timeframe, as well as the most recent one. So, lots of things like that have been in Orem's favor in that particular regard. But that said, obviously, our building permit fees have done well as well, and franchise fees continue to be steady, be unaffected by it. So lots of good positive elements within that. You know, talking about personnel, we have built in 3% merit increase, health insurance rate increases at 8%, moving our fleet replacement program. We've dropped it obviously significantly from— in here on our fiscal '21 budget based on projections with COVID We've moved that back to pre, pre-pandemic standard, as well as various capital projects. Just a general budget overview. Our total tentative budget is a little over $131 million. You can see how that translates in relation to the prior 3 years. Our revenues by fund, just to give you kind of an idea of where the makeup of those revenues come from. Obviously, the largest portion being the general fund, just short of $62 million, of which obviously, as we mentioned, a large portion of that, $25 million-ish, is sales tax. General fund revenues, you can see the breakdown in relation to prior year actual.

These are—

this is the tentative budget comparing against actuals as well as our estimated for the current year. Keeping in mind, when you look at estimated, a lot of the times we have grants. You guys know all about the budget amendments that I bring periodically, so that fiscal '21 has a lot of grant-type stuff in it. We don't budget that as part of our tentative budget, so that plays a big role in sometimes why, oh gosh, it went down. Well, by the time we get to the end of the year, year, it won't be down, it will be up. Just a breakdown of where are those general fund revenues come from, whether it be taxes or fees or grants, or those charges for services that we kind of mentioned. And as you would guess, taxes, you know, be it franchise tax, sales tax, property tax, are a large portion of those revenues. Again, the kind of that you've seen this last presentation, our sales tax projections moving forward, and I will tell you that I believe those are especially based on the last couple of months that we've received, these are even still quite conservative. I fully anticipate that, you know, for fiscal '21 we will exceed that, that budgeted number or that estimated number. I mentioned business building and business. We talk about— I mentioned building permit fees, but even our business licenses, for instance, those have been doing very well as well. So obviously a strong business base continues to be here despite all of the issues surrounding the pandemic. Moving on to expenditures citywide, you can see the breakdown is primarily just giving you an idea of where does all of that money, all that revenue go. Large portion, obviously, personnel, a large portion to operations. Capital within, you know, keeping in mind, of course, we have a lot of bond money that's going to capital that's not reflected, of course, of course, in our, in our budget. That's, you know, its own bucket, if you will. And so, you know, you have $19 million in capital, but we have obviously a large amount of money we're going to be spending on in relation to those bond funds, as well as ARPA, the ARPA money that we are receiving, just received. You can see a breakdown expenditures by fund, again, a breakdown of the, you those personnel, the total personnel costs, where, you know, where do those reside as far as which funds those reside within? Where do the operations and that capital, where do those go for that and make up that $131 million? Some additions for the current fiscal '22 budget being proposed. We have some evidence lockers over public safety that were the original evidence lockers that they're still using when the building was built some 20 years ago. So they believe not only is it time to replace those because they're pretty beat up, but obviously new safety measures can be put in place that those lock— original lockers didn't have. Some consulting services in order to, you know, as I mentioned, to try to obtain more, even some more grant funding. I'm trying to get those folks to be able to help us get those grants. And then a development of a human resource information system so that we can do even more stuff online and be able to track things paperlessly. And those are one-time items. Ongoing elements are the, you know, our ebook in our library. Obviously the pandemic brought about an even greater— it was already going that way, but I think it pointed out even more that people are more and more going towards the idea of having this, whether it be a podcast or whether it be reading the book through your Kindle, etc., or having it read to you, right? Our fire department had an upgrade to their reporting software. And again, then there's that HR information system that that we talked about in the one-time, there's an ongoing maintenance cost related to that as well. In the personnel side, we are adding 2 civilian ordinance enforcement officers who will be civilians, as I mentioned, and then those officers who are in our MPU unit will be moved back into a, a unit so that we can, in essence, produce a traffic division that can actually be functioning. And so they'll— we'll maintain those officers. We won't be dropping the number of officers that we have. They'll just be, in essence, reassigned. Administrative assistant for our fire department receives tons and tons of calls related to various elements that they have to deal with as far as reports and different things like that. This individual can help with not only answering phones, but doing various filing items and, you know, responding to some of those requests for information. Our legal department has need for, you know, a prosecutor and civil attorney, especially as we backed up— I mentioned the court, they, you know, extremely backed up because of the pandemic. So, they need some help in that regard going forward to get through all of those. We have our fleet replacement program that I mentioned. And, you know, this is just an outline of what some of those elements are in relation to, you know, where we are intending to spend those dollars. You can see, you know, police vehicles were primarily one of the ones primarily hit last year when we cut stuff. We're reinstituting that as we move forward.

So, Brandon, I was just going to mention, I'm appreciative of the fact that we replace police vehicles when we need to, fire apparatus when we need to, to keep these areas in good condition for our first responders for what they face out in the field.

So.

Yeah, it would be pretty hard to have a police officer or a fireman ready to come help you and their vehicle breaks down, right? And that'd be pretty sad.

Well, I remember the day when I first got started that many of our police vehicles had the paint falling off.

They didn't look very good, did they?

It didn't look very good.

Yeah.

Because they're Fords.

I hate to tell you, Dave, but they're still going to be Fords.

They all still are Fords.

I see some Chevys.

Talking about our streets capital project items here, the breakdown— obviously we have 2 sources of primary sources of funding. from the B&C Road Fund. When you purchase gas at the— and there's a fee that is associated with that, that a piece of that comes to us, as well as the new transportation sales tax that was on all of any sales tax purchase.

And Brandon, one thing I wanted to mention there, it takes a lot of money to keep our roads in good condition. And if you go to other cities, you'll see roads that are not in good condition. And I remember a few years back we had a lot of complaints in the city for all the potholes that we were facing, but, but you don't see that anymore. And I think that we're spending more money on our roads and keeping them in better condition, and that's important.

Yeah, I mean, these 2 funds are, you know, approximately $5 million every year to fund those very things.

So yeah, we used to only have $2.5 million, now we have And that makes a big difference.

Does.

Okay, now getting into our enterprise fund, at least our major ones. So our water fund, again, giving you obviously the proposed— you can see the revenues on the right side there, the $18 million, reflecting the change we are making to the water fee and reducing that water fee. Then that has a corresponding impact, obviously, in that capital projects number down in the left corner there, $2.8 million, which is lower than it might normally have been because of that. But obviously we have a large amount of bond money available to do those projects.

So, but that's really important to note, that paragraph, that there are no proposed water base rate increases for the upcoming year, and the tier usage rates will Rates will each decrease for fiscal year '22. You don't see that happening in any other city in Utah County.

And it'll be very interesting to see how that translates out with this drought that we've been talking about. You know, hopefully that doesn't encourage people to actually use more water. So hopefully that's not the case. Hopefully they see it as a— can do not only conserve, but realize that by conserving, they also can even save even more money.

The report we just saw wouldn't indicate That would indicate that, would it? The water we're using this year versus the last 2 years.

Our internal water usage is actually down, right, this year from the previous year, even with our population up higher.

Yeah, Chris's presentation where he showed that internal water use rate. So hopefully that continues on, right? And not only will they— we see a benefit from that, but they'll see a cost decrease to themselves as well. You know, our water reclamation or sewer. Again, you can, you can see, you know, no proposed sewer base rate increase, but we have other— there are other things related to the revenue in relation to the water reclamation fund. So, so it still will be up comparatively to '21, but that has nothing necessarily to do with any rate increase related to the tiers. Or the base rate, I should say. And you can see that there's still, still a reasonable amount of capital expenditure. Most of that capital expenditure has to do with stuff at the plant. And so, you know, there are some projects that fall outside of what we intended to use.

And I think it's important to note at the same time that we've— the city has— staff has worked hard on Setting up base rates and setting up plans for future investment in our infrastructure to keep our water lines up to date, our sewer lines up to date, our stormwater up to date, our fire hydrant lines up to date. And that makes a huge difference. I, I work with a lot of mayors, and one city I'm aware of They did not plan for the future and did not move forward with master plans for their water system, and now their water system is in very bad condition. They're having to replace things that should have been replaced years ago, and their water rates in Utah County are double what our water rates are here in Orem because of a lack of a planned infrastructure.

Yeah, and I can't imagine having a situation where you have to replace something right now. You have to because that's crazy. Yeah, I mean, that, that would, given the high cost of a lot of the construction going on, that would just double down on that problem.

And again, a dollar spent today equals $6 spent 10 years from now.

You bet.

So, a stormwater fund. Again, the base rate will increase by 2.6% as recommended in our master plan. We'll obviously in future years will be continuing to review the stormwater needs around the abandonment of the West Union Canal. But for right now, that's moving forward with the, you know, as much as we can do in relation to that fund and those capital projects in For that stormwater fund. Our recreation fund, obviously, we're pretty, pretty hard to make any comparisons here given our new fitness center, but just to make you aware, you know, where we're anticipating us being, and things are looking very good there as we evaluate these since they've opened, so look forward to that. watching that fund very carefully as we move forward. Our solid waste fund, where we have a contract obviously with Waste Management, and, you know, again negotiated those fees and we pass those increases in fees on to our customers, and this fund simply tracks that payment in and that payment out. And as one of the items here related to the rates, I just thought I'd mention and show, you know, here's what is anticipated in relation to those solid waste rates to cover those costs. Again, just obviously we're very proud to always show our total utilities and how we compare, keeping in mind, of course, this includes all of are any changes that we've made to our budget, it does not necessarily include any changes any other city has made to theirs. So, you know, some of them— granted, we did decrease some of them this year, so, you know, maybe look— makes us look a little better, but wouldn't surprise me if many of these cities have increases in relation to their— any of their utilities. Any questions about any of that budget information?

Any comments from council? All right, well, this is a public hearing, so we'll go ahead and open it up to the public for any comment. We'd ask anyone coming forward to hold their comments to 3 minutes and give us their name, and we will open it up for public comment. Seeing as how no one's coming forward, we'll close the public comment portion of the hearing. portion of our public hearing and bring it back to the council. Any questions or comments from the council? Okay, well, I would like to move that the City Council of Orem adopt the City of Orem fiscal year 2021-2022 budget. Is there a second?

Second.

Okay, we'll go ahead and start with Councilmember Sumner first.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye. I'll say aye, but with a caveat that I'm still not happy with the recreation fees to the co-sponsor group, so we'll maybe revisit that and maybe open it up later.

Did you want them raised?

No.

Oh, just checking.

Decreased.

Okay, okay, for that clarity, David. All right, the ordinance passes. One thing I'd just like to mention is that the City of Orem balances its budget every year. Our budget is now reached $131 million a year, and it takes a lot of money to run a city like this. But we are listed as the 17th safest city in the nation, and our rates are one of the lowest in the county. So I feel like that our budget is a good budget for our city and for the citizens. Thank you, Brandon. Appreciate it. Jamie, do you have any items you want to bring up? Okay. Well then, I would make a motion that we adjourn this meeting.

I have a question. Yes. So, and Jamie sent us an email about this. This is regarding Hillcrest Park. So we did receive an email talking about that Hillcrest is going to start to be built out in 2022. And I've received a couple comments from some citizens about that, so I just wanted to share those. One was, one citizen said, that doesn't surprise me because this park is the one that the city spends the least amount of money on in the whole city. So, and you and I have looked at that park. So they were saying that doesn't surprise us.

That is changing.

Pardon me?

That is changing.

But, but not this year.

So it's been pushed out now till It takes quite a bit of time to design the park. We're still in the design phase.

So the citizen said, this doesn't surprise me that it gets pushed out another year. And anyway, so I'm just passing that on.

We—

in October and November of 2020, I was up at the Sharon Park pickleball courts talking to the citizens there, asking about their input about wanting pickleball courts. And we've been meeting with Landmark for about 6 or 7 months, so I didn't have an answer why the city's not even going to start. And we've seen the plans, you know, for the last 6 months, so I'm, I'm confused why we don't even start it until 2022.

So we didn't actually purchase the park until the end of December. We continue to meet with Landmark and Method Studio. In fact, we had a meeting today with Landmark. The park obviously needs to be designed and engineered, and then we need to bid it. And the hope is that we would bid it in a favorable construction environment. And contractors honestly are out a number of months, and so it would be our intent to bid this project in part Over the winter season so that we could actually get some good bid numbers. If we go out to bid right now in this current environment, one, we don't have a plan, so we don't have even documents that they can bid because we don't— we have a concept as to where we want to go, but we don't have it designed, so we can't provide contractors as-built drawings so that they could bid the project. So we need to get to that point. And then when we get to that point, then we would bid the project. And that typically takes— I mean, Trevor's here, he's our purchasing agent. What are we talking about, Trevor, in terms of a 30-day bid, and then we review, and then we award, and then they mobilize?

I think the turnaround time right now is like 90 days from the time it's posted until construction starts.

So I think our plan is to begin construction of the park in the next construction cycle, the next construction season, which would put us in the spring of 2022. So, so I mean, I, I think we remain in, in pretty good shape in terms of where we are in terms of conceptual design of a project and working towards construction. I mean, it took us 11 years to build Library Hall, so I think we're lightning fast as compared to Library Hall. Even our, even our fitness center project— oh, I think we were probably designing that project for 9 months.

So, and compare apples and apples, what was Palisades Park?

Which was not a structure, it was a park.

No, and well, and we didn't even build that park, so that was— yeah, but, but even, even the Altogether Playground, I'm looking to see if Steven's here. I mean, in terms of design of that, it took us how many months to design that and go through that process? So I think we're, I think we're responsive. to what obviously we want to do there. I think we're staring down a $10+ million price tag for that part.

Yeah.

So that's part of the discussion is how do we, how do we build it and how do we make it all pencil? But our intent would be to move forward this next construction season. We're talking about demolition of a school or a majority of the school essentially demoing the entire site and starting over. So it's, it's not a simple— like, for example, with Sharon Park, where we took an existing park and added 6 pickleball courts to it. We're really talking about lifting up existing asphalt, taking down trees, play structures, demolishing a school. So I know it's probably not moving at the pace that everybody wants, or the neighborhood wants to have it go, but I actually think we're making good time as compared to other projects.

Okay, because I just, I need to be able to give them an answer when they were, you know, where they've been waiting and there's no park. And then the other part that you mentioned is—

Well, we just didn't know. I mean, we didn't own it until 5 months ago.

Yeah, we haven't approved the park yet. As a city council.

We haven't approved the park as a city council.

The design of the park, we haven't even seen it.

We've seen, we've seen a lot of designs.

We haven't seen the design.

The final, the final design has not been put together. Method Studio and Landmark are doing that, and they've taken all the comments that have been given, but that takes a lot to put all of that together and design it, and we're waiting for that design and giving You know, they're taking the time it needs to do it right. I don't want to do it rush, rush, rush. I want to do it right.

Well, we're not rushing.

So in our conversation with Landmark today, we have targeted July 13th as the date that we'll bring you the quote unquote final design for your review.

So, and hopefully— and I appreciate what you said about we're going to listen to what the input we had from the 500+ people that signed petitions, the 2,000-something people in the city that— so hopefully that's—

Yeah, I mean, I think, like I commented before, actually, Brent used the statement better. He said, we're not going to be able to please everybody, but what we're trying to do is make everybody happier than when they started. So what you see, and what you'll see in the preliminary design, is a walking trail. You'll see pickleball courts, you'll see 9 square, you'll see a splash pad, you'll see a gathering kind of area, you'll even see a demonstration garden for drought-tolerant plantings. You'll see a play structure, you'll see pavilions, you'll see adult Kind of outdoor workout machines.

Walkway.

Yeah, the walkway.

So I—

you'll see new restrooms. So I think we're heading down the right path. But frankly, I'm not even sure if going out to bid right now is even a good idea, given where we are with construction pricing and where contractors are with, with work these days. Even in some of the existing work that— even some of the existing work that we are putting out to bid, we're having a hard time getting bids. We put out a concrete bid, we didn't get anybody. So, I mean, yeah, that's just kind of the environment that we're in.

And thank you, because I just, I just wanted to give people hope, Jamie. So they're hearing from the city, this is what the— this is what what's on the table, here's what we're going— the direction we're going, so that they don't get discouraged.

No, I mean, we are not— this is not something that we have set to the side. We're meeting quite regularly to move the project forward.

Thank you.

All right, with that said, I'd like to make a motion to adjourn our meeting to a meeting of the Redevelopment Agency. Is there a second to adjourn this meeting?

Second.

Okay, all in favor say aye. Aye. We are now adjourned and we're now into a Redevelopment Agency meeting of the Redevelopment Agency of Orem. We'd like to start out with a consent item. The first consent item is the approval of meeting minutes of the RDA agency meeting of May 11, 2021. I move that we accept those consent items of the RDA. Is there a second?

Second.

Okay, I need to have a vote on that. Brent, we'll start with you.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Okay, the consent items pass. We'll move down to the RDA scheduled items. This is a public hearing on a resolution adopting the Redevelopment Agency of the City of Orem fiscal year 2021-2022 budget, and Brandon Nelson is our presenter.

Thank you, Mayor. So just a review of Redevelopment Agency. We see—

I'm trying to know.

So we have several—

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8—

we have 8 redevelopment areas, including the most recent CDA down at University Place. And so the redevelopment agency includes those historical RDAs that are all, all expiring. Several of those are expiring this year, and then one next year, and then I think the other ones are the year after that, or it might be 2 years. I can't remember for sure, but they're all just about done, if not already done. So, so those revenues will, as you can see here in the tentative, the $1.6 million, and they will continue to decline outside of what happens at the— with the CDA down at University Place. That obviously will— is a kind of a wait and see, although that's a— it's been around $1 million, as you can see down, down below the University Place, you know, approximately. You know, that's how much we're paying, and the $990,000 and the $255,000, so that's approximately how much obviously we're budgeting, expecting to, to bring in as far as property taxes related to that particular CDA. And then you can see at the very bottom total, that $569,000, so, you know, you add those 4 items up in the expenditures area and that's what equals the $1.6 million, so You can see that the majority of it is related to the CDA. Are there any questions about any of the project areas or about anything? I didn't bring any, you know, the actual budget as far as showing each of the project areas and the impact that the RDA, by creating the RDA, the impact that it's had on all of those RDA areas, but it's pretty significant when you look through that budget, the impact that that's had in every one of those.

You know, I just like to mention, and I mention it every time that our redevelopment agency meets, but we had 5 areas that we put into the RDA program back in 1985. And these areas, if you look at them today, are unbelievable. One was where the mall is, one's where our car dealerships are, one's where our business development down off of Geneva Road and University Parkway is, one is where the Canyon Park Technology Center is. All of these areas have prospered, have brought in tremendous amounts of property tax and sales tax, and continue to generate revenue and income for the city and for our ability to deal with the costs of government. And it's important that we realize what a great thing the RDAs have been for the development of our city.

So, yeah, the school district should really, you know, pat our backs pretty heavily.

Yes, they have received—

They gave up money, of course, in the interim, but In the end, again, a point of clarification, they never give up money. They just freeze money and give up an advance and an increase. When an RDA is passed, it never gives up money. It only can increase money because the floor is set. And I think sometimes that term is used inappropriately. So they didn't give up anything.

And in fact, they received because generally every single CDA RDA has a pass-through. In the case of University Place, it's only 65% of the increment. Yes, that's held back for the project, and they get 35% of the new money that's generated. So they actually do better in the short term and much better in the long term.

Actually, the Alpine School District will receive over $90 million through the CDA over a 40-year period. That's pretty impressive.

McDonald. I was being facetious, of course. That's the term that obviously most people out there use, right, when you start talking about RDAs, is how much they're giving up. Yeah. So, are there any questions in relation to that?

All right, so this is a public hearing. I'd like to open it up to the public for any public comment. I would ask anybody coming forward to I would ask everyone to give us their name and hold their comments to 3 minutes. Seeing as how no one is coming forward, we'll close the public comment portion of our public hearing and bring it back to the council. Any questions or comments from the council? All right, I would— as the Chief Executive Officer of the Redevelopment Agency of the City of Orem, I recommend that the board of directors by resolution approve and adopt the fiscal year 2021-2022 budget and amend the fiscal year 2021 budget. Is there a second?

Second.

Okay, Brent, we'll start with you.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Okay, resolution passes. I move that we adjourn. Our RDA to a meeting of the Orem Special Service Lighting District. Is there a second?

Second.

Okay, all in favor say aye.

Aye.

All right, we are now called to order to the Special Service Lighting District, and we'll start with the consent items. The first consent item is approval of the meeting minutes of the Special Service Lighting District May 11th, 2021. Anyone wish to move that to a scheduled item? Seeing not, then I move that we go ahead and approve our consent items. Is there a second?

Second.

Okay, we'll start with Councilmember Spencer.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Okay, the consent items pass. We'll now move on to our scheduled items. The scheduled item is a public hearing on a resolution adopting the fiscal year 2021-2022 Special Service Lighting District of Orem budget, and our presenter is Brandon Nelson.

Thank you again. So we have a breakdown here of the street lighting revenues in relation to where those funds are now coming from. Obviously, you can see that they're primarily all the street lighting fees. As we've discussed in prior meetings, the changeover for paying for the streetlights to more of a maintenance-related fee that is being charged to each resident. And then you can see the contributions that were reduced there at the bottom. as we make that change— changeover to a maintenance fee. The street lighting expenses, you can see here where those primarily are being— are going. We have primarily the operating budget, you know, related to, again, that maintenance of all of those lights, whether it be actual lights, poles or the lights, the bulbs, etc., the cost of the power to run the lighting system, as well as we currently had— have a lease in relation to converting all of the lights to, I believe, to basically LED or cost-saving type fixtures that occurred a number of years ago. Well, that's much smaller than I thought. And the street lighting fee. Currently, all neighborhoods except for Canyon View neighborhood have switched— will be in this current upcoming fiscal year, will all have been switched over to that new $2.42 per month fee. And all businesses are charged for that fee in advance when they renew their business license. And then the only remaining neighborhood that will go in July 1st, 2022. So fiscal '23's budget will be the Canyon View neighborhood, and that'll be the last one to switch over to that, that new maintenance fee. And that's all I have. Is there any question?

You go back to the budget. Let me see it, the incomes and outgoes. So that's where we get our money from, primarily the street lighting, and it all goes to— let me see that again, please. And the big ones, operating budget. I know what we're doing with the lease. We're buying more energy efficient and paying for that lease payment. I understand that. What, what all goes into that operating budget line?

So like I said, so there are personnel, some personnel within that. As you can see, the $185,000 related to personnel. And then in that $262,000 operations, that's all equipment repairs and maintenance type things.

Thank you.

And as Tom referenced, We have replaced all of our streetlights with LED lights, which is pretty amazing throughout our city.

Yep.

And for the throngs who are here tonight, we did that by getting— having a lease that saved us more than the utility. The utility savings more than paid for the lease. So it's like maybe putting solar panels on your home or something to pay for it with your savings, and that's what we did there.

Correct.

That power line, it was 5,500 streetlights.

Yeah.

And we actually are— it obviously in the short term we have to pay, right? But in the long term, we'll realize significant savings in terms of power costs.

50% savings. Councilmember Spencer, do you have a comment? Just a question or a comment on the highway lights over by Orm High. Those are being put in, and the one I was talking about was put in just a week and a half ago, so it was good timing. Well, after 8 years, congratulations.

Is that Alpine School District doing that? Is that what you're referring to?

No, that was—

there's some highway lights that have been there forever.

So we've had some districts that, that before we actually put in our street lighting system, they put in their own street lighting system.

I see, special taxing districts.

Yeah.

We're in the process of replacing them out for their— for our streetlights.

And they'll join the fold.

Correct.

And when we bought those lights, it came out of the street lighting?

Yes, yes.

So, but we're done. We bought all the lights, so we're just going to put them in and we'll be done.

So I don't know if we bought all of them. We actually bought— Chris is— I don't think Chris is here anymore, but a couple of years ago we acquired a Utah Power and Light actually sold— has to sell us these lights, and we bought a big chunk of them. I think a good majority of them, including all of the lights that run along State Street. You've probably seen in recent years we've been swapping out south of State Street. We've been swapping out streetlights and replacing those old cobra lights, those highway lights you're talking about, and replacing them with with our standard streetlight, our standard commercial streetlight that runs along key commercial corridors. So those, those green lights that you're seeing are our lights. It looks good.

We're making progress.

That will make the residents very happy in that neighborhood. So this is a public hearing. And I want to go—

I haven't done Right.

Yeah, I want to go ahead and open it up for public comment. Anybody who wishes to come forward and make a comment, please do so. Seeing as how no one's coming forward, we'll bring it back to the council, and I would like to make a motion that as the executive director, I recommend that the Special Service Lighting District of Orem, by resolution, I'm sorry, that the Special Service Lighting District of Orem Board, by resolution, adopt the fiscal year 2021-2022 budget. Is there a second?

Second.

Okay, Councilmember Spencer.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Okay, resolution passes. I move that we now adjourn from the Special Service Lighting District. Is there a second?

Second.

Okay, all in favor say aye.

Aye.