City Council · 2022-01-06

Discussion and review, revisions. We'll take a break at 3:00, and at 3:15 we'll continue on with that conversation. Then we'll have a presentation. We've got a couple presentations here, one on State Street Master Plan and one on high-density residential, past, present, future. Does anyone have any questions or anything they want to bring up before we dive into State Street Master Plan?

Nope.

Good.

Okay, well, we'll turn the time over to the first presentation.

Uh, Jason's on the computer. You recording then?

What's that?

Recording?

Yeah, yeah, I got it turned on. Can you tell me to remind you?

Yeah, just get up.

You're a little late.

Sorry.

And Jason, as we go through the presentation, if we can make it more like a Q&A.

Absolutely.

So you bet. We just have them both that way.

Yep.

So just a little bit of background, well, maybe just more of a timeline of what we need to consider.

The other back.

Always a critic. Am I good?

Kind of small font, I guess, but—

Can you lower it?

Sorry.

Oh, is there—

no, do you have a book?

No.

Everybody can see that okay?

Yeah.

Not too blurry?

Okay. See the birds just fine.

There we go. Yikes.

Stay right there.

You stay back.

So as you know, just a brief reminder, the moratorium expires on February 9th, which is, uh, Jason, just, just to clarify too, so that February 9th is 6 months after the original writ of mortuorum, so it's not 180 days, right? It's 6 months according to the way it works?

Yes.

I mean, everybody goes like this, but we gotta— don't we need to make sure we get through it?

Because it was like the 5th or something.

It's 6 months.

It is 6 months for sure.

February 9th. So the Planning Commission does have a meeting on February 2nd, which is the week prior. February 9th happens to fall on a Wednesday as well, just FYI.

We need to put some tin foil on the rabbit ears.

So we have some— I'll be quick, I guess. So in order to get things advertised in the paper, because Any public hearing, any amendments to ordinances, anything like that needs to be published in the local paper. That's by state law. So we have to have it into the paper by the 18th of January. They take a couple days to get into the paper. There's a 10-day window that has to be in the paper. So in order to get it on the 3rd or 2nd of February, we need to have something decided that we can schedule. We don't necessarily need to work on the ordinance itself. But the actual location or ordinances that we're amending needs to be published and noticed by February 18th or January 18th, which is a week from Monday.

Is that— that's in front— what's driving that is the Planning Commission meeting?

Yes, because in order to get any application invested or any ordinance amendment invested, meaning pending legislation, it has to be at least heard by the Planning Commission prior to that.

So we could call a special Planning Commission.

It's possible on the 9th.

So that's 10 business days.

Assuming at the end of the day on the 9th.

In other words, if we had to buy more time, could we defer the Planning Commission meeting and call a special one?

It would have to be on the 9th, but no later than the 9th. You got another one?

Yeah, I got another one.

Sorry about this.

Oh, that's not—

yeah, do you have yours?

Mine's a different—

But Jason, if we, if we decided today, because we have a Planning Commission before the 9th, and then not—

what's on already scheduled for the 2nd?

2nd of February. Is there one before the 2nd of February? Without calling—

after we can get on.

Thank you.

Well, the timelines required is at least 14 days to get into the paper and noticed so that we can have it on the schedule. You can't just hold a Planning Commission without noticing at minimum 2 or 3 days.

So can I just ask a question?

I thought we said it was 10 days.

So it's 10 days in the paper, but it takes them a couple days to actually get it in the paper. So to be safe, in order to hit that 10-day notice, we give it to Jody at least 4 days prior.

And then just to clarify, calendar days, business days, what's that 10 days?

Calendar days.

10 calendar days.

So that builds in a day or two of factor in case we goof up and have to get on the 9th and work on the 19th. We should be able to do it next week.

Yeah, but I mean, Jason, so if we're— let's just say we make a decision, we can always have a special city, uh, Planning Commission in January and we can hear it from the City Council on the 25th.

Well, it doesn't have to be heard by the council.

It just has to be—

It just has to be go to the Planning Commission. It doesn't have to be recommended by the Planning Commission. It just has to be heard by the Planning Commission.

Right, so we could say, hey, Planning Commission, you're going to meet on January whatever.

As long as we have the time to notice it.

Okay.

That's, that's the question. So if you decide something today, let's say, Steve and I can make the corrections by Monday, then we probably could notice it and maybe have a special meeting on the end of January.

I don't know the date.

The 19th is too It's too soon. That's where the next scheduled Planning Commission, you wouldn't be able to get that meeting. And by the time you notice it for a special meeting in December— I guess the point is, if the moratorium doesn't expire until the 9th, then the 2nd would be sufficient to do it, because all I would have to do is hear it, not necessarily decide. So they could actually continue the item for a week or 2 weeks, and it would still be vested on what we're proposing. So everybody Clear on that, am I? Clear as mud. So as we've thought about what to present now, this is—

Yeah, can you go back and just summarize what we've kind of talked about?

So what we're here tonight, or today, is to try to decide how you want to proceed. So our hope is that we have a decision today between the council on how we want to move forward, because it is going to take us a few days to make sure we get all the amendments, assuming there's a lot of amendments. There's a couple simple amendments that may be easier. Which we'll talk about. But we want to be able to have that decision because we only have a week to make all the amendments happen in order to get it noticed for the 3rd of February— 2nd of February, sorry.

Okay.

So our goal here today is to try to come up with exactly what the council wants based on the State Street Master Plan. The ordinances, the districts, not the master plan. That could be another discussion another time. Does that help there?

Yes, thank you.

So the first obvious one is to just take everything back to C-2. So it seems maybe the high-density housing is the main issue that's happening. So the easiest way is just to revert it back to C-2. Now there are some other, like Smith's, for example, across the street is actually C-3. The Target is actually a P-2. There's a couple of 7-Elevens in the P zone. So we would take them all back to the previous zones. They wouldn't all be zoned back to C-2. We'd take them back to whatever it was prior to. And the majority of all those were commercial. There is some residential P areas that we'd take back to whatever residential zone it was at the time.

That would be—

that would require us to have a neighborhood meeting. That would require us to, you know, make the notices in the paper. But we could hit the February 2nd meeting. As long as we have a neighborhood meeting, probably towards the end of January. That's an obligation on our part. We have to hold a neighborhood meeting before it's presented to the Planning Commission, ultimately then to City Council.

And then on the—

if we took it back to C-2, we could put stipulations. Maybe we don't want the height at 60 feet, we want it at 45 or whatever.

Yeah, and if we know that today, we could make that recommendation as well, right? So the rezone would go forward and the text amendment to the C-2 would go forward. Could also go forward in C-2. Yes.

So Jason, we didn't have any mixed opportunities with commercial and housing. It was all just commercial.

So C-2 is straight-up commercial. There's retail, there's office, or a mix of those, but not residential.

But anything that was done prior to State Street Master Plan that was a little different than C-2 is a B-1.

Correct. But don't we also on the State Street— I mean, on 13 South State Street, Center Street, and 8th North, don't we have a moratorium, an ordinance that there's no high-density housing anywhere?

That's within the PD zone. So that's taken out of the PD zone.

So that's PD zone, correct?

So when, when we amended the PD zone many years ago, we essentially wrote out residential uses within the PD zone. So people talk about this moratorium that we didn't put We didn't impose a moratorium, we actually wrote out residential uses out of the P.D.

zone.

Because I thought it was all up and down.

So within 500 feet, that's, that's I think what Jamie's referring to. When we started the State Street master plan discussion, we actually had the council take out the option to do P.D.s because that's how all these high-density housing you see along State Street, those are all done by P.D.

zones.

Okay.

The process is 2 classifications, So that's still in effect? So that's still in effect, right. So even if we revert it back to the C-2, anything within 500 feet of State Street, 800 North, University Parkway, any major arterial or collector, you cannot have a PD zone that contains residential. That's already in place.

That was February 2014, if I remember right.

Yes, well, I don't know the date, but yeah, it was prior to our Looking at the plan, or the State Street Master Plan. As part of that, as part of the overall process of implementing the State Street Master Plan, we also took out the option for any new PD in any property that's zoned residential. And residential extends from the OS-5, so the 5-acre things that we have, holding zone we have on the west side by the temple, right, that's a 5-acre, all the way down to the R-6.5, R-6, any of those Are 8, are 12. So the way it stands now, we won't even accept an application for a PD zone in a residential zone. So that's already written out. But part of that was on purpose because we were focusing the density on State Street. So we're taking all the density out of any neighborhood and putting it along State Street. So that was— so that's also in place now. We're not proposing to change that. But that's just so you know that PD zones are not currently allowed in any—

Residential zone.

Not only are they not allowed, we won't accept the application.

Jason, we do have the PRDs, which is the 7 per acre, and that's still allowed?

So PRDs are still allowed in any residential zone except for an R-6 or an existing PD zone. So up to 7 units an acre, and that is a legislative thing with the Planning Commission. It's an actual rezone. There's a canned ordinance that the council can apply if They apply it, then they have to have the concept plan and the elevations that are part of that rezone process. They're attached to the ordinance so that any future owner has to build to that standard, or buyer, or developer, anything like that. So that's still an option. You said except for an R-6, right, Jason?

R-8s and bigger are subject to this P zone, and smaller are also—

PRD.

PRD, excuse me.

PRD, yes. That's correct.

Do you know what the thinking was to totally exclude R-6?

Well, you're already getting the density bonus.

You're already getting it with other lots.

PRDs.

Gotcha.

Yeah, we just took it out.

Thank you.

R-6 already has 6,000 square foot lots, so.

Right.

And can you remind me on the PRDs, is it the 35 max height on those?

35, it's actually 30.

Oh, 30.

And the second story, so you have a full basement and a main level, or you can have a main level and a second 70% of the main level. So you cannot currently have a full 2-story home. It's either full basement 1 or 70% of whatever.

And that's the PRD, but the R-6 is just residential standards?

Correct. So R-6 is just a residential zone.

So with the PRD, how high could you go?

Did you say?

30 feet.

30 feet.

In an R-6, you can go 35 feet. So it just—

So that's a home for So PRD can also have—

and in fact, the council is probably going to be looking at some PRDs coming up in February and March. We have a couple out by the temple, and there's another one— I'm trying to think where it is— but there's another one that's proposing a PRD.

By Walmart.

That's right, south of Walmart. They want to do smaller lots but do single-family detached homes. So that's— and that's in a PRD allotment, 7 units. And, you know, it would be a lot in that case. So those are something that's going to come to council. Council does have full discretion on whether to rezone or not rezone, but that's something that you'll be just discussing as a normal process that applicants or property owners agree.

Is that supposed to be affordable housing with financing, or—

Uh, the one— no, good question. No, they're about $350,000.

That's affordable housing?

No.

Yeah, it's not.

I wouldn't suggest They're not coming for affordable houses. What they don't want is an R-8 and they have to build— they don't have to, but in order to justify the less lots, they're going to build bigger homes, which are going to be in the $600,000+ range, which is what they're doing in Springwood, I believe. Same, same thing. So they're wanting a smaller footprint so they can then get it at least down to where the $350,000 is more of a potential reason.

Jason, so, so for example, if we, if we went, if we did the C-2, tell me about the property, the Vossen property on 8th North, just for, you know, like a specific spot. Is that now—

So, so Vossen was C-2 prior, and so you just want to go back to what it was.

So it's now residential?

No, it's part of this.

It's going to be part of—

it's part of the District 7 right here.

This is how it was though.

So this is the 2007 Because everything then that was on State Street District will be C-2.

Yeah, pretty much anything you see on it. This is an old map, 2017. This was prior to any district being adopted. You can see the red, that's the C-2 representation.

This is the Boston area.

So you can see all that.

Because Jason, my question is, are we going to hurt some residential, uh, some folks that might want to do residential That's kind of on this, on the edge of the State Street District. For example, what if someone wanted to put some 55 and older homes where that Lawson was?

They would have to do a PRD.

And I've never seen it— I've never seen us turn down, go from commercial to residential.

They'd have to rezone.

But I've never seen that happen.

So they'd have to come to us, kind of rezone for that particular project, because right now it could Right.

And a PRD would be the only option because a PD with a senior, you know, 55 and older, is not possible because it's within 500 feet.

But if they wanted to put R-18, they could. Then they can make application for an R-18 reset. Or an R-112.

So C-2 is not going to take away opportunities for residential even though it's C-2. They can still apply, you know, Like the 400 West property, before all— everything had happened, that could have been a nice residential area.

I mean, if this was—

if C-2 was in effect, that could have been residential. They'd have to come and apply for that.

Uh, it's— well, it's been 500 feet. They could do a PD. They could probably rezone it to an RA and do a PRD. That's the potential.

But it has to come to us to approve it for them to do that.

Yes.

So any future So if you take it all back to C-2, the only real option is to do a rezone to a different zone. And the only other option zone for any residential would be here, or a single-family.

So, Jason, can you maybe, uh, just for information purposes, give us the difference between a C-2 and a C-3?

So C-3 was designed, and there's only one currently, which is the Pinehurst development. And Smith, you can see on there, was C-3. The only difference that they put us in the C-3 was Some setback. When Pinehurst came in, there was concern about the neighbors to the north. They wanted to have some setback. And so the C-3 has built-ins with some, uh, like 3 office buildings that are south of Pinehurst, some shopping. If you go on the back side, they're about 150 feet setback, but they're still 3 stories. So there was a distance requirement with the C-3. That's the only difference between C-3 and C-2.

And so C-2, it's not And 35 feet is the maximum for C-3 versus 68 feet for C-2?

It depends on the setback.

Well, the height maximum for C-3 in the local ordinance is 35 feet.

I'll have to double-check that because those office buildings are taller.

Because C-3 is supposed to be the transition.

I thought they were too and I had to drive by them and they're 2 stories and they fit. I was curious as to how—

So that could be.

Sorry, I'm not supposed to say stuff.

The whole intent was the C-3 is to—

they had some concern when that was And do we know how tall the Prudential Building is on State Street? The glass building?

Do you know how tall that building is?

Yeah, by wing.

So what range? I can't hear you, Jason.

Probably 48, I would imagine.

Somewhere in there.

It might be a little taller.

48.

Okay, thanks.

I'll use my presentation.

Use your calculator voice, please.

I don't have one. That's right.

I did.

I'm yelling at my kids.

Can I clarify?

So a C-3 has a height portal of 35 feet, but it does have— it says no portion of any building shall be located closer to residential zoned property than a distance equal to the height of the portion of the building. A remote setback is required where the top of the structure is lower than the grade of the adjoining residential lot, as measured at some point within 5 feet of the property line along the entire length of the property line between the 2 properties. So it looks like it's 75.

And then the parking requirement, is it different on C-2, C-3?

Same.

So 4 or 1,000?

Oh, hold on, hold on, I read the wrong asterisk.

I apologize.

Is that 3?

I need my reading glasses.

Hey, hey, it's Ryan. I got some.

I, I— they're in my bag. Uh, so I read the wrong one. The maximum height for structures located in the C-3, which are set back no less than 150 feet from a residential Residential zone shall be 60 feet. So it can be higher than 35 if it's—

So that means it has to have a 150-foot buffer from the highway? So those— the one that's tallest, I think there's a couple shorter ones. There is one taller that's actually 150 feet. That's the reason it was built at the time, and it was actually prior to my time, but the purpose was that it was to fit into that north boundary line.

So that's 150 feet from the boundary line?

So, can you just kind of compare those 2, the C-2 versus the C-3? So, as far as the specific differences?

Pretty much, the C-2 is more designed for regional, but the uses themselves are pretty much similar, as far as retail, as far as office, those types of things.

You said regional, what does that mean?

So, you're trying to get regional draw, like a company that's located here, there's no one else in the county except maybe Lehigh.

Oh, okay. So, people are going to drive But as far as the setbacks, parking, is that pretty much the same?

Yeah, 25-foot setback, things like that, for parking.

C-2 is proportional setback, right?

C-2 is, uh, yeah, equal to the height.

Okay.

Is that C-3 we just read?

It's similar, except it does allow— yeah, it has a little different setback when it's next to residential.

Okay.

35 feet unless it's 150 feet.

So that's the caveat. When it's next to residential, then that buffering protection still kicks in. And then one back— backing up a little bit, when we were back on the timeline, you said we have to have a neighborhood meeting. Is that for like one each district, one night, or one big meeting? What are your plans?

It depends. We could do one giant meeting, notice everybody, and then See who comes. But we do have to have a neighborhood meeting and inform everybody that would be affected by the rezoning. We probably wouldn't notice— well, we could, but probably make sure that we notice everybody that's affected by the rezoning of the districts, which would be all 5 of them. And then we, yeah, send paper and whatever other things.

And when we— so the standard was changed by the legislature or something, you only have to notice the people within the district, but we would— you're talking We're going to notice everyone around the district.

So it depends on how you want to do it. So the city council, a few— about a year or two ago, it could have been a longer time, doesn't catch up. It's right now, it's if it has single-family homes or residential in nature that's not high density, it's a 500-foot requirement. If it has anything to do with high-density housing or a PRD, for example, we would go 1,000 feet. So it just depends. We could do The districts, and typically we'll do 500 feet because it's not— we're not dealing with high-density housing as a project. It's taking it back to the city zone.

I would think that we would want to kind of go overboard on the noticing just to make sure that it's dialed and it's legal and everything is covered and that it can't be undone because, you know, that has been an issue in the past where the noticing was adequate. We would just want— where this is a significant change, we want to make it adequate. I'm not completely sure that we're covered.

Everyone else thinks so? So, back to Smalls' point, the state legislature only requires us to be 300 feet. The council has taken it to the next level, so we, we do a little bit above what's legally required. So, as far as legally required, Mayor, that would be covered, but we can definitely go more. I mean, that's kind of—

The legal requirement, in our opinion, when we passed it, Mayor, was too low. 300 feet seemed like, you know, he shot over the fence and that's the only guy who knows.

Correct.

And so we went 1,000.

1,000.

And so we're 3x what the legal requirement. Now maybe that's not the moral requirement, maybe that's not all we could do.

Yeah.

But I don't know how far you go until you're satisfied.

Yeah.

Everyone in the city gets notified, you know. Then we had a Provo resident complain, well, I'm just across the border and you're building that in Orem. So yeah, it's hard to know where you go.

Yeah.

And I think it's great to go, you know, 1,000 feet or whatever. I completely agree with that. I just want I want to make sure that however we do it, we're completely covered legally. Because this is a significant change.

Oh yeah.

And we don't want it undone because of another significant change.

I concur. My guess is we'll send out an email and some other things too to let people know.

Email blast. The only thing, when we implemented the State Street Master Plan, we also did the utility bills and all that. Because we had time to make sure that it was— because the cycle is once a week for a month. there's no way for us to get it into the utility poles. So we use other methods to make sure, including mailing directly to the homeowner or the business owner, and then in the paper, and then Facebook.

The only—

there's about probably 6,000 or more people that we would invite. So that, I guess, is our only issue we would have is we hold it in the city center, for example, and we have 300 people come. That might be a little too many. Interesting challenge, but on an average, something like that, we're going to get maybe 150 to 200.

As far as that challenge, I mean, if we did put it out through the media channels of the city too, the more people would be aware of this is what we're doing, this is what's going on, you know, might help mitigate some of that.

Yeah, the idea for that is to get people beyond, and we do have the ability to do an email blast to all the utility holders and folks that need to know We can do that as well, which would get us to 26,000.

Yeah, about 20,000 emails.

And then when we livestream it too, of course, a lot of people then just choose to watch it remotely.

So, yeah, I don't— we obviously notice it, but we need to notice it to make sure that you guys are aware. And then we notice the date of the City Council meeting and the Planning Commission.

So, it sounds like we're saying one meeting.

That's up to you. I mean, if you feel like one meeting, I We'd probably be planning one meeting because of the crunch of time. We could do 2.

Or just invite everybody to 2 and they come to a 2nd one.

We could do north of center or south of center.

I think one thing too, and we'll notice all these ways, people will show up saying, I never heard about this, or why didn't I hear about this?

That happens every time, right?

And so we'll go through all those.

Somebody won't check the postcard. The post office won't deliver.

I mean, those things will happen.

So when this meeting comes, people show up saying, I never heard about it, we'll show you how we noticed, but that will happen.

It does happen every time.

So usually it just depends on which way you wanted to go with the vote.

So if you didn't want it, you'll say, hey, people didn't know about it, we can't do this. If you did want to do it, we'll say, well, we did let you know, you just, you know, so you just have to kind of play that.

Is it a legal requirement as far as the size of the postcard that goes out?

No.

So I mean, that is another thing that If we went to a little bigger postcard, because a lot of those super small postcards I can't read without my glasses.

The only thing that we did, and we designed it to be small just economical, but we can definitely go bigger. It would just cost to be passed on to applicants. Or in this case, we would just, you know, honestly pay.

Darn it.

So what would that cost to do that?

It's that large, you're looking at a couple thousand dollars.

One we did for State Street, It was about 9,000.

I can't remember.

When we do our city mailing, we send it out to everybody with an address, businesses, residents. Yeah, everybody with a forum within the city forum.

What do you think showed up for that? 1,500, 2,000 people?

You're talking about State Street?

At the rec center.

Probably 300.

And then online?

So the more quantity you have, the more you basically pay full mailing rates.

We all know about mailers, right, Tom?

Do you know how many people— so when you advertised for those meetings, how many people clicked on the link? How many people We researched online. Could you tell any of that?

So we actually had a pretty good click link on our on our last email last. We usually get up 30, 40 percent on click rate.

I mean, the hard part is when you do physical mailings, you have no idea, right?

So compare compare 30, 40 percent to the industry. It's single digits.

Oh yeah, yeah, it's yeah, we're much better.

It's good. It's a good response. Yeah, it's ten x what the industry.

So really, your messaging has to be thorough too, what you're sending out, so they know the meeting's important to them.

Yeah, and the card typically will have a link that you can go to the website where we put all the other additional information. So people can go if they want to be more interested in our— read about the ordinances or whatever, they can actually go to that link and everything that we have will be on that so they can read. Or they can call us directly and we can walk them through the link or we can answer questions.

30 to 40% is more than who hope.

We try our best to make sure that there's enough for them to not only find a link by themselves, but if they want to call, we're more than happy to walk through and answer questions.

I guess that's my question. So this is an open rate.

Yeah. You don't know.

Is there a link rate?

Yeah, we can dive in.

It's open the email rate that you're talking about.

We can do both.

We can do click rate, so they clicked on the link, and we can do open rate.

Yeah.

What defines what goes on the card?

Is it—

is there a legal description or something that has to happen?

We basically describe what the amendment would be. So like a rezone, for example, they rezoned this property from this zone to this zone. Give them the address, give them the time of the meeting, the location of the meeting, and then give them a contact, not only an email. So if I were to send it out, I'd give my email, my phone number, and And then a link so they can go to a separate link without calling me. They can go to the link and find out the information. Then they have that phone number. So basically, legally, we make sure that they understand what the amendment is. With the space that we have, we try to explain a little bit of what that means in layman's terms, right? A lot of times it's just, you know, jargon. Then we try after that jargon to make sure they kind of understand what it is. And if they still have a question, that's where we're open.

They call I think to the extent that we can have— we have to do whatever we have to do legally, but if we can explain, you know, in plain English what this is, why we're doing it, I think we mainly get support. As opposed to if people get something that's just saying this is happening, they might get all concerned and write.

Yeah, that's a good point, Mary. I think unless we send out a really long document, because we used to send out letters which were just really cumbersome. So now we work with a place to actually send out the postcards. Our intent was not to get everything on that postcard, but to give them the ability to either go to the link, give us an email, or phone, you know, give us a call so they can ask different questions. So a lot of times you'll get something in the mail, like, yeah, it's junk mail to me, I'm going to throw it out. But if somebody looks at it and says, oh, that could be interesting, I'm going to follow up, I can go to the 3 different options to find out more. And so we're not necessarily providing everything. I'm not assuming that that's all they're going to get, because if they're really interested, I would hope that they would call us and find out. Or email us, because we're going to put the email—

Or go to the link. Yeah, or go to the link.

Or use QR codes for us.

Yeah, when we—

State Street Master Plan meetings that we mailed out, we included— it was plain speak with a QR code.

So people—

of course, that was a formal mailer, but— and then we also included it in the email. So it wasn't like a legal notice, it was more of an informational?

Exactly.

Hey neighbor, here's something you might want to know about.

Exactly.

So, so Jason, on the number 1, rezoned the states. So the states you're distributing now, we had what, 5 or 6?

5.

5.

So those would go back to C-2 or C-3, but those that are in those districts, they're already a C-2, right?

The uses they can do in that district is C-2. We would actually take it back to C-2 zone, which then would prohibit residential. Oh, okay.

All right, good. Because that was— all right.

So number 2, just to feed into number 2, is to leave the districts but eliminate all semblance of residential as an option. So take out high-density housing, basically condominiums and apartments. We'd still allow— because there are some areas let's say by the post office in Normandie, there is some apartments behind there. I can't remember what they're called.

Garden Village.

Garden Village.

So that would be then subject to a PRD ordinance, which what they have there now wouldn't be able to be built. If they ever wanted to redevelop that property, they'd have to be able to PRD, which is the 30 feet. And they could have some attached units, but they couldn't be stacked. So there are some parameters that way. So this would be the simplest way, in my opinion, to Stopgap, I guess. And then we can come back and make other changes if, you know, if the C-2— or excuse me, the district still allows 60 feet, which is also pending. So there's a few things that are pending. I think that those that are on the council remember the 60 feet is pending, the 4 per thousand is pending, as it was 3 per thousand. So there's still some ordinance amendments that are out there that would still stop people from doing it, and we would bring those forward with that. So that's an option, and then we could look over time to change whatever the council feels that they need to also be changed. That would stop anybody from applying for a high-density housing.

But what's pending is it's still mixed use, correct?

This would take that option out.

But right now the application we have is—

Well, the 2 applications that we're talking about, yeah, those are, those are separate. This wouldn't kill those. I mean, that's a different issue. This would stop anybody Anything in the future, once the moratorium ends. And let's say we do number 2 as a stop, and then we have time to come back to the council, or we can talk about it today, what else you want to do. That's just another option. Rezone is also a doable option within the time frame we have, you know, the 2nd February meeting. The other one is to go— so option 3, you would go through and, like we've done before with the height and different things, is basically anything If there's anything in that that you don't like or want to modify, that's what we would do. And we're trying to identify those today, if that's the direction we go, so that we can have all that pending to the Planning Commission by the 2nd. So if you like some elements of the district, the way they're laid, the architectural features, things like that, then you can go that route and eliminate all the things that you don't like or modify, like the height, for example.

I think that's a good You know, idea.

the 3-story minimum and the C-2 zone for Harvey and the city center districts. By going back to C-2, that would be eliminated. But we could also eliminate it and keep the districts if you like the architectural requirements, things like that. Uh, number 4 would be—

So if we look at the medical, let's say we say, okay, you can have a strip mall on State Street and behind it maybe that's 55 and older. So how would that work?

So we'd have to write Mm-hmm. So that's something— so for example number 2, let's say we take out all ability for high-density housing, but in the future, let's say the hub district, which is the corner of University Parkway and State, you feel that it might be appropriate to have maybe a 4-story apartment complex along with residential. That's something we could then go back and tweak and then reintroduce residential. Residential back into that district. If we wipe out the districts, I mean, just— I'm just going to be blunt— wipe them all out, it's just going to be C-2. So we're not going to come back. It'll be cumbersome to come back and try to rezone it back to the C-2 or to the district laws. We already have it in place. So if you like it the way it is— obviously you don't like the way it is— but if there's some things that you want to tweak because you're okay with some of the aspects of the district, then number 3 might be the option where you Identify the things you don't want and you take them out.

The challenge with doing something that might work at Meadowdale is it might not work at 1600 North. So if we make them all C-2 and then let people apply for it, because what David had recommended, hey, we might like some over 55 behind this strip mall, but I'm just scared if we build that into everywhere, you're going to get it everywhere. And I don't think that's on here.

It's a case-by-case basis.

Yeah, so that's why I would favor the C-2 and then just make adjustments. Someone creates a great plan, but then they don't have the right to do it everywhere. That's my thought process.

So, um, that was what we did before, right, with the C-2 and the option to do a PD? That's why they came to the council every time to do the PD. So the Monteval on 920 North State, that was a PD. Every PD that came through, they negotiated with the council, the council finally approved based on that parameter. Every PD that you see on State Street was done through the council.

And I think that's the challenge with the PD zone is it becomes a negotiation with every single PD project. So even in a PD zone, the parking requirements are not consistent across similar projects. Nor architectural standards, nor setbacks, nor— so you're— if you're looking for a certain kind of expectation, that ground foundational expectation is not set because everything is negotiated. And that's one of the reasons back in 2014 we went away from the PD discussion for residential density type projects is because there wasn't consistency. Because it was a negotiated process and it was creating problems where you had one set of requirements or standards and then 4 blocks away you had a similar project with different standards.

Well, that was the PEG project or whatever by Osmond. That was a commercial mixed-use thing, but you know what, what, um, what we were shown on the little small slides of what it's supposed to look like, to me it's horrendous.

And if you go back to the minutes, If you go back to the minutes, that's what they represented was, oh, we will make it look nice. And there was nothing within the PD to require a certain architectural standard or use of materials. So their interpretation of looking nice was significantly different than your interpretation.

I saw that.

So the high— okay, what you have, isn't there a high-density housing ordinance?

That's been eliminated years ago, probably 25 years ago.

It seemed to me that that had a lot of protections, a lot of great stuff in it. Green space protections for homes.

What they found, and I wasn't here at the time, what they found though is that Village Park Apartments, about 1,200 Northeast.

Oh, Village Park and Berkeley.

Because they, yeah, they basically cheapened it to where there was pretty much, they They would take one building that was flammable, take some fixtures out of that building and put it in this building so they could get that one flammable. And so we found out they were just kind of skimming. So the city decided to just take it all down. So that was eliminated probably 20-plus, 25 years ago.

Did it have a good framework though?

I mean, it seemed like—

We had 4 or 5. Kirk Portland Ridge, which is next to the hospital, Ten Oaks Hospital, was done. Creek Valley was done. Entry Springs was one of those.

Village Park was done.

Apartments under that, those standards.

And tell me why it was bad again.

I'm not understanding.

They just took it out. They figured the 4 was plenty and they didn't want any more and they took it out. Did you say why was it bad? Why was Village Park bad?

No, why was that zone bad?

Well, I'm not saying it was bad. I think the council decided that they didn't want any more and they took that option. Because they were anti-high-density housing back then, not necessarily the format of the That was probably a combination, maybe, of the quality they were getting wasn't what they intended. That was, I think, what I—

Could you just upgrade the standards?

It's possible.

But again, that's then, that's back to the council to negotiate how you want to do it. So the whole intent of the State Street Master Plan and the districts was to identify what building materials, what look we wanted, so that they wouldn't have to come negotiate with the council. I mean, the bottom line, the intent was to take the council out of the equation because they would then adopt the ordinance first, get all the stuff they wanted, and then we would implement it over time. That was the intent of the districts. And we focused the high density on 5 locations instead of anywhere along State Street, which is what we were getting with the PD zones. So that was kind of the main intent of this, is to focus that.

So as far as your opinion on the PD zones, Because I'm just learning about this, but when I would go through the map of Orem, and I would see all the different apartments that were built, you know, in the last 10 years, all down, up and down Orem Boulevard. I mean, there's, you know, probably 8 projects at least up and down Orem Boulevard. I was told that those were PD zones. And so, the PD zones were like a workaround to, you know, consistent C-2 zones.

There's only one on Boulevard, the one that we just talked about. That's the only one. The other one—

What about the Boulevard by the 7-Eleven?

That's a PD zone.

Because that was approved way before our time.

So they were all PD zones.

But my question is, my question is, is fundamentally, are PD zones a problem for us? I've also heard that Norman has more PD zones than anyone, any other city.

Well, each city does it differently. So Provo doesn't— they don't do PD zones. They do a special something zone. A different city will call it something else. They're similar, but they're just— each city has a different nomenclature that they call it. We call it a PD, Planned Development. Some call it a Planned Unit Development.

So where do you think the happy medium is? That, you know, having PD zones, not having PD zones, where they— we accomplish our intent, which is to, you know, well, we're trying to There you go.

I think this was our intent or our attempt to get the council— I think at the time the council was getting frustrated with having to negotiate every PD zone that came through. So, I mean, if the council decides that that's— you want to go back to that and just say no, I mean, that's another option. But the PD zones, they were getting to the point where they would come back and forth, back and forth, back and forth until the council finally said, okay, that makes sense, that's agreeable, that's doable, and then they would approve it. So all the developments that you see, the high-density housing projects that you see, so basically all the blue, excuse the glare, all the blue you see are PD zones that were done individually, independent. That specific zone only applies to that property.

Were most of those done in the last 10 years or prior?

No, most—

these are the ones that were done in the last 10 years.

And you can see they're all on State Street. So there's only, uh, Sun Canyon, which is the pay property you're talking about. Sun Canyon, Midtown Village, which was done years ago. That was done in 2015.

And then the economy—

I mean, 2000— well, it was 2005.

Yeah.

And then the one with Boulevard, which is the 7-Eleven in front, and then 920 North. So those are the 4. And then we got the one on South State, 1400 Canyon Crossing.

I vote against it.

This one was—

there was only a building on the back side, so these were done in the '70s. So that was already an existing project. They came back and had some densities upped a little. We came back to council and modified and had a smaller 20-unit building built in the back.

Which one's that?

It's called Summit Ridge. So if you look at— you go down and drive by Summit Ridge, you're just going to see some older flat-type roof buildings, and you wonder— and it's been there forever. The building is in the back. And then the, uh, Cieno Villas, which is the one down on Columbia Lane. Yeah, that was one. And then the one south of that, they've got the existing apartments and just retrofitted them back into better units. So they were already existing apartments, they just took everything out and rebuilt it.

So having a conversation, I mean, it seems like PD zones are an important part of this whole conversation, right? Because PD zones are the way that it goes sideways potentially. And then also, to your point, it makes it a lot more work for the council because they're constantly having to deal with it and then people bring up stuff and all the rest. Do you have an opinion on if we go back to C-2 with everything else, where we go with PD zones?

So I guess right now they're not allowed, not permitted, but the question is if you want to then take all the Districts out, go back to C-2, and then take out the 500-foot parameter on State Street to allow PDs to come in and then negotiate with the council on that as an option. If the council decided they just don't want high-density housing, period, then any of the options is not a good idea. But if you want to consider some, if there's some locations, let's say on the Parkway, or there's some in that city center district area or location area, you think high-density housing would be okay. Then a PD zone would be that probably avenue that would make it work. In order to do that, you'd have to eliminate the 500-foot. And maybe you only do it in a certain area, right? You leave everything else in so many feet on State Street, so many feet south on, let's say, Center Street. Maybe you allow a PD zone in that area, but anywhere else you don't. I mean, that's one way you could do it and use the PD as an option to rezone that to get an excuse for adding to the housing.

If I may, Mayor. I think we did, in doing the State Street Master Plan, we did try to get rid of PD zones and kind of rethink that. But I think in the last year or so, it's been pretty obvious it's hard to think through everything. And so the— and I don't remember getting a PD zone request every week. If we got one every few months.

I think in the beginning it was, and that's why we did sort of the moratorium or changed that to say no high density on these roads. because it was crazy.

So in my mind, I don't know how you get a new master plan agreed to that isn't going back to C-2 that has everyone in agreement before February 19th.

To your point, I think the simplest option— this is just my opinion— is to take it back to C-2 and then consider amending the PD zones to allow them in certain strategic areas If I may, David, when we saw that rush of PEs, we were coming right out of the recession.

And so all of a sudden financing and availability of opportunity was there at that point. And so we actually did get a lot of them in pretty quick succession.

Yeah, I see.

And at that point we said, wait a second, these are happening now. Too fast, we don't have a plan, they're just going up haphazardly, we need a plan. And that is what initiated the changes to the PD zone, when we took it out of the PD zone within 500 feet and initiated the State Street process.

And that boulevard, I mean, that was approved way before we got on the scene, 2007 or something.

It was on hold.

So that's when Obama—

and this is a number of a number of these projects too, they were approved, like Midtown, were approved back in 2005, and then the economy from 2007 to 2013 sat idle. But they still had the approvals. So when we came out of the recession, people said, well, I've got these approvals, I've got the project, it's permitted, and they started construction. So we started seeing a lot of—

Midtown is a great example.

A lot of construction all at once because it was essentially pent up for 5+ years of nothing.

We didn't approve all that time.

They were—

had already been approved. Like the monoplane, the boulevard behind 7-Eleven was built in 2014, but it was approved a year before.

Yeah, I mean, that popped up like, we didn't approve that, but that was made before because it was, it was entitled many years before that.

So, oh, go ahead.

Well, one of the goals was to beautify State Street, and we did a lot of work by going on all those field trips, the sugar house. And the idea was that, you know, the design and the materials and walkability. And so that part I really want to— because that was a lot of work in it. And the idea was when it did, you know, come through, it would look good and be better. And I mean, Orham State Street is not an attractive You know, it's really not an attractive area. So I'd like at least to keep all of those materials and the walkability and all of those things because that was— beautifying Stacy was one of the major goals. Whether it has a bunch of residential or not, to me that's not the main thing. It's to beautify it, improve it, make it look good, the signage, the, you know, and all that stuff.

So I would just say that some of the stuff that had gone in since, the Alpine Credit Union, I mean, if some of the other things happen, you can unify State Street.

Yeah, I agree.

But it's a long haul.

That's what I'm saying.

But can I just say one thing?

I kind of— when you talk about walkability, I kind of have an issue with that on State Street because you've got cars going 50 miles an hour and out by Credit Union you've got a sidewalk right there. There's no longer a shoulder. There's like a 5-foot— there's not a car-width shoulder anymore. So I would not walk on State Street. That's so dangerous. I would not ride my bike on State Street.

Well, you can still beautify it though.

I mean, I'm just saying, I think that—

I'm more worried about beautification than walkability.

No, and I agree with you, but I'm just saying we keep using that walkability word as we compare it to Scottsdale, some of these other places, and those are beautiful on those types of narrower roadways, but on a highway, I don't know that that should be our goal.

Well, so the intent of that is get about 15 feet, right? So if you look at the front of the bank, there's a 15-foot landscaping strip and then a sidewalk. Just barely north, barely south, it veers back into the curb gutter sidewalk. So you, I mean, obviously you don't necessarily want to walk on that, but it gives you a little bit more sense of the BD7, a 15-foot buffer than the sidewalk right next to the curb. That was our intent, is to give it a little bit of buffer off of that sidewalk.

And I think the location of like trees or Yeah, size of trees, materials. I mean, we really spent a lot of time.

I mean, that's important to me. That's the component that I don't want to go away. I'm going back to C-2. I mean, I think we still need those components, those materials, the look and the feel of that. And whether it has a residential, I think we can negotiate that.

So if you remember about a year ago or so, Matt just came through and we did between the districts. So we updated the State Street corridor with additional So in the C-2 zone, we now have, not necessarily to the extent of districts, but we do have building materials, we do have different things. We made them a little bit more restrictive than districts, but we do have design elements now in the C-2 zone. So if it were to revert back to C-2, it would all be applicable to the design standards that council approved that year.

In the section that followed on the walkability, maybe don't think of it in Not only in terms of walkability, but in terms of improving safety and comfort. Because people do walk on State Street, not a lot of them, but if we are going to have redevelopments come in, we should at least make it a little bit more comfortable or safer situation. So by having that plow strip, we do improve it and we make it better than it is now.

I thought UDOT was going to take that plow strip though?

Partially, if the BRT were to go down.

So wouldn't we want to put the buildings back a little farther so when they take that, we still have the safe buffer?

Um, right now the buildings are—

they're not that much different than if they would have a normal setback from the back of the curb, correct?

Yeah.

Which is the current standard.

And if I can just pipe in here—

Could you introduce yourself?

Oh yeah, I'm so sorry. I'm Jill Rustad, local real estate agent in Utah.

You're with what?

Jill Rustad, a real estate agent, local real estate agent Utah County or— Utah County, Salt Lake, St. George, the whole state. So into a lot of— mostly this. I'm working with a developer right now, Jason. Nice to finally meet you. I've talked to Grant a lot. But I just have a question for you. Like, if people look at— I agree with all of this so far. I would just like to know the beautification of State Street. You look at downtown Salt Lake, the safety, there is no setbacks. There's a sidewalk, there's a main road, State Street, walking downtown. We have a lack of inventory. We have a lack of housing in our state. I have buyers, developers over there. We have a we have an inventory problem, obviously. I love what they've done. Anybody's walked downtown Salt Lake recently, but we need more housing. These high rises—they're beautiful buildings. You can actually walk up and down to what was constructed. It's a little crazy right now, but you can walk up and down safely. There's bike lanes. I come from high density. city backgrounds— California, Colorado, Seattle— so I'm familiar with those kind of— I love this beautification. I think State Street needs some love, I'll just put it that way. Um, and I also— I don't know who this gentleman is. Who are you, sir, on the corner?

David Spencer.

Do you also remember Spencer?

Okay, Spencer, nice to meet you. Um, because I know we also need homes. I don't know who said it, but for seniors, we don't have enough places, complexes. In California, Rockwood Developers are doing wraparound buildings that are beautiful on the front. They are on a main street off of I-515. They are beautiful buildings. They kind of look like state. They have a resident— you have a freeway going by. There are trees. They have beautified it amazingly. They have seniors in there, 55+, which we don't have enough of anywhere in the state of Utah. And so I'm curious, what would be the opposition? The PUDs— we call them PUDs— PDs, whatever you want to call it, doesn't matter. The premise— what is the opposition from the council? I know we've had some that have come in on Orem that are scary. They don't follow the rules. Their, their parking is horrible. They're, you know, offsetting, upsetting neighborhoods. That's a huge concern. What is the general— I'd like to know the top 2 concerns that we have on having a multiple increased, more residential, and yet hitting all these terms possible, like downtown. You have the retails here and then we put the homes above. We do the Joseph Smith Building, perfect example. Drive down underneath, park inside, you have a level. What, what are the options? What is our—

So all due respect, Joe, let's go back to what we're talking— I mean, yeah, you're not conducting the meeting.

No, absolutely not. I'm just curious as to what the concern is on the PD.

Yeah, um, so a concern on, um, kind of going on what Renee's saying Putting the buildings right next to it takes away from what Debbie's talking about, where we have trees and parking in front. The Canyon View Apartments, I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I think it looks like a prison. You know, right against the sidewalk, there's just these little skinny trees and then buildings. And we're not California, but— No, we're not.

Thank goodness.

Yes, absolutely. So we picture, you know, trees and parking in front of the building. Even the Alpine Credit Union, I did— sorry, I did talk to someone that works with Alpine Credit Union. He said, how'd that go building that Norm? They said, if we would have had a chance to do it again, we wouldn't have built Norm. So, and I don't know what that meant. I mean, I don't know if there was a lot of hoops they had to jump through or whatever.

They built it in the They volunteered to bring that to us.

So anyway, my view as a lifetime resident of Warren, and I think a lot of them say the same, we picture trees, parking, have a setback with the building, especially with what Ryan's talking about with, you know, we have 2 more lanes going down State Street, we take out Huey Shawnee, we take out a bunch of other businesses. Boy, that's, you know, that's not our review. But my, my other comment is on option number 1, could we do option number 1 and just add a couple of things? One would be increased parking and reduced height. We could do it, we could do it, go back to C-2 and just add a couple of elements to that.

Let me clarify again. So parking in the commercial zone right now, 400,000.

You want more than that?

It depends what the group wants.

So, well, I'm going back to C-2. You would not have the option or opportunity for residential. So the parking issues that we're having with residential would be there. It would be like the Kmart parking lot that now is full, the Smith's which is full on occasion, the Target which is full depending on the time you go there. So 4 per 1,000 seems to work. In 2000, I think it was 2000, we had a 5 per 1,000 requirement. They actually— it was just a Sea of asphalt. And that's where they changed it to 4,000. We had KFC, Denny's, all those came in and built into that parking lot because, you know, it was just way too much parking. So I just speak up, 4,000 seems to be a reasonable—

And I'm not—

yeah, I'm not saying we should do this or that. I'm just saying that we could do one with other— another modification too. So the option 2 with reducing the height—

so what you're saying is modify some of the C-2 standards at the same time?

The answer is yes.

Yeah, so I'm saying we can do C-2, but just instead of saying a blanket C-2, we can do C-2 and modify a few things on C-2.

So we just need to know in this discussion, hopefully by the time we leave, we know what those things are. If it's more parking, then we'll do that. If it's the height limit, we want to take it down to 48 feet or Whatever that determination will be, the C-2 zone.

Can we take the parking below? I'm sorry, can we go under? So we can— I like his green space idea.

Well, we can't force them to go under.

That's pricey.

But I think an issue for me, and I hear— I think I'm hearing this from Monday too, is I don't think a lot of us picture this beautiful district of buildings in front and the parking in back.

And, you know, so you want to go back to the C-2 or less?

Well, maybe that's a more comfortable city Because we don't have to go right up against— we don't have to go against the freeway, or we don't have to, you know, we don't have to jam the building right against the road.

So, let me just walk you through the State Street. So this deals with State Street, not the districts. So on State Street, we require the 15-foot buffer, and then the sidewalk, and then maximum 10. So what we could do, if you don't— the question is, do you like the buffer for one, or do you want to go back to the same standard where we had curb to sidewalk and then a 20-foot setback and then parking and then the building further back. I mean, that's, that's the standard. Kmart— this is an example— Kmart, Target.

What is the Prudential building? Prudential, right, by Weger's.

So you've got the 20 feet, you've got the parking, and then you've got the building.

So I like that.

I think that's a pretty low pedestrian street.

Your question would be then, we need to either, if you are comfortable with the 15 feet, the separated sidewalk, keep that standard or get rid of it. I mean, that's the question. Or, and then add some additional setback, take out the minimum setback, and let them build and have a maximum that could be, I think, is it 20 feet? And then they can build wherever behind that? Or is there some type of minimum?

What do you want?

Right now there's a minimum setback, not a maximum.

They think In my opinion, I think it needs to be like a C-2, C-3-ish because I like the 150-foot setback on residential. Because that's what we had a problem with on the State's investment with the North Village District. It was just encroaching and we don't want that.

So the other option is to take your districts and put the districts back into a C-3 zone.

That could— I think that would be appropriate in some areas.

But we have to— you have to know what those So it's either all the districts, or— because then between those districts would still be C-2.

But Jason, couldn't we, for example, could we rezone to C-2? Obviously, that eliminates the residential concern, and then proceed with, you know, selective C-3 designations? Because I don't feel like—

I don't like 60-foot height, because then that's 70 feet. I don't like—

I'm saying C-2 with amendments.

So, we could do that too. Yeah, so we could take the standards out of the C-3, rezone it to C-2, and just put those setback parameters that are in C-3 into C-2.

But the one other thing I'll have to address is the C-2 and C-3 have different land uses allowed in each of them. So, the C-2 allows more land uses than the C-3.

So, well, if you rezone to C-2 and just work on the setback issue, then I think what you may I mean, I think we're, you know, campaigning that people didn't campaign this year loud and clear with high-density on Station Street, bottom line, right?

So number 2, number 1 is get rid of that road, right? We eliminate that as an option because if we go back to commercial, we wouldn't allow high-density housing. So the question now, I mean, if that's the direction, then do we want to increase parking, which is right now 40,000? Do we want to eliminate the setback that Minimum setback, which is 10 feet. We want to eliminate the curb bed or the separated sidewalk now and just go back to what it was in 2017, where somebody could build curb bed or sidewalk, 20-foot parking strip, and then whatever they wanted to do. They could build the building up to 10 feet, or they could build at the back and then parking could be in the way, just not within that 20 feet.

So can I just pass through to say something that I heard in the campaign? Um, the businesses, business owners, there were several of them that said this requirement of putting my business, not having parking in front of my business, is not desirable. Um, to have all the parking around the back.

So you can have it on the side as well.

So yeah, could you do a percentage in the allowed percentage in the front? An allowed percentage in the back or a standard in the front, your handicaps in front, you know, have— you have a few stalls for— and I brought this up before— for women at night. I don't want to drive behind a building and I won't, you know. So, so, sorry, I think you got me dissed.

So parking is certain width, right? So that's just basic. If you have one Row of parking in the backup space, that's 42 feet. So if they choose to put it in the front, which if we change it back they could, just the building would be set back. In order to make it work physically by ordinance, it has to be at least 60 feet wide with double rows, or 42 feet if it's just a single row. So there is a certain parameter.

Then that would be a 4 if you're—

what I'm saying then, see if I'm saying this so What you're describing is what I'm saying is if I were to say, okay, I want this 15-foot buffer, this sidewalk, and then this 42-foot parking, partial parking, the building, and any additional parking if they need it to meet their 4,000.

So does that work or not?

I'll try to rephrase what you said just so I understand. So you're okay keeping the 15 feet landscaping?

Yes, we can plant the trees.

Yes. And then have the sidewalk.

But it's at 20 right now.

15-foot planter strip. We require them to flip the sidewalk, basically put it behind the 15 feet, and they plant trees in the front, right, back 7 feet. And then what you're saying is maybe soften or get rid of the minimum setback and just require a certain setback, and then they could build parking or whatever in that area.

If they needed additional parking.

So here, basically the bottom line is you want to get rid of the The minimums are the maximums. Right now it's either 0 to 10 feet.

So what was the 20-foot setback?

That was the C-2 zone prior to us adopting the 15-foot setback.

We're going to go back to that, but there were going to be amendments.

So it's a little, yeah, so it's a little confusing. Let me try and be sure. So we're not going to go back to the original C-2 and the fact that you could do the curb set aside Unless you tell us to. Corridor sidewalk, 20 feet, and then whatever parking building. That was the standard in 2017.

Okay.

What has changed is now we require the 15-foot planter strip and a sidewalk behind that. So the prior one didn't require anything other than the sidewalk and the 20 feet of landscaping.

What we have now is the 15-foot planter sidewalk, and then we require them to bring the So right now, under the code, they have the option to put the building against the sidewalk or within 10 feet.

Okay, so what I hear— what I'm hearing is we like this standard, but we want to be able to have them put the building or parking in front, parking in the front.

Is there an example of that somewhere currently right now? What buildings? I'm thinking wingers, The title building, like, where would that be?

There's the—

so Rent Me Shoes, all those older 20-year-old buildings.

What about the one that Belliston built?

That one was really nice.

Which one?

1000 South of Belliston.

That's under the Old Line West.

So what was that standard on Belliston's village?

20 feet of landscaping with parking.

So sidewalk, 20 feet of landscaping.

That's what I like.

Now, now let me just throw this at you. The other option you— one option you could go with is we keep this, but from here back you could let the building owner do what they want. If they wanted to bring the building up and it serves their purpose, great. If they want 20 feet of landscaping, great. If they want parking, great. You could make it more flexible because one thing we want to keep in mind is 20 feet of landscaping is beautiful, but as we go to water-wise landscaping, what's going to fill that 20 feet? 20 feet. Do you want 20 feet of cobble, or is it better to have maybe 10 feet of cobble with nice plantings? Really, you're going to get— you're going to have 20 feet of cobble, but could some of that be used better? Like, would it be better for more square footage for the building, or would it be better for that to be parking for the homeowner? So if you want to make it— you can make it more flexible for the business owner to have more advantages as they redevelop.

Right.

How far—

if you put the parking in front, how many feet does that make it?

If the parking is in front?

Is that a 10?

Well, if you had a 20-foot planter strip or parking— sorry, 20 feet landscaping, and then you had 2 rows of parking with the aisleway, you're going to be another 6, so 80 feet from this point to the building.

But did they have to do another landscaping after the sidewalk?

Well, that, that is if you did 20 under the old standard. So if you did no landscaping, you'd be 60 feet, but I would recommend you need So right now, some buffer between the parking lot.

If we allow it on the side, so we don't allow parking between the building and the sidewalk right now. If we allowed it, we would want to put some type of buffer between them. So right now, if, for example, somebody wanted to put parking on the side of this building next to State Street, they would have to be 20 feet high. So they would have a 20-foot landscaping here, then they could have their parking under current standards. So I don't think we want cars to be So we either want to keep this with some landscaping or go back to the sidewalk and planting.

So I love what you're both saying, but what Brian just said, it's nice, I think, to give that owner flexibility. Here's the standards, and now you make this work with what your building is and what you're trying to do. And we still, I'd assume, would have You know, guides as far as, we're not going to allow you to stick a bunch of this kind of tree. You know, there's certain things that we require to beautification for State Street.

Yeah, we do have the State Street standards that were adopted along the whole corridor for beautification. Those can be kept in place, from what I understand. Correct, Steve?

Yeah.

So, we can still require certain building materials, certain trees. All of that can remain in place.

So, question to this poor guy that It came up when I was running, it came up again when people 2 years were running, the Subway sandwich store, you know, just north of the building. So, with number 1, with the C-2 option, he can build his building 15 or 20 feet more, or 10% bigger, no problem. Doesn't have to go up, doesn't have to— he can just build a really nice Subway sandwich store.

We would take that option. Yeah, that requirement out.

Okay, that, that good.

That, that requirement, that's an initiative. If you change 15% or more of your building, you have to redo the whole thing. You'll take that out?

Yeah, we would revise basically if you wanted to modify it. Now, you would have to come up to the beautification standards.

Yeah, I agree. And that's— I think we all want that.

But if you want to modify 15%—

So the other question that we have a restriction on is drive-throughs in front of them. Basically what I'm hearing is you want to take that out and they can allow drive-throughs to come between— so the building is obviously back here, but to have them come through to front.

What's the downside to that?

The purpose of not having it was so you'd have more of a pedestrian zone where you have here, past here, you can go past here.

It's also a beautification thing, right?

The drive-through doesn't look good?

Well, not necessarily. Prettier cities all have drive-throughs in front, but there are ways to mitigate that with hedge requirements or things like that that can help you.

Chick-fil-A, their drive-through's in the front.

It's in the front.

It's in the front.

It starts about a mile behind it, but it does come down the front. But like Arby's by 8th North is on the side.

So to speak to that, sorry, Chick-fil-A has So it's separated over the sidewalk.

So I think the essence of what I'm hearing in a way is that we want, we want the beautification aspect, right? I mean, that's really a priority. And beyond the beautification aspect, we should be pretty flexible as far as how that owner decides to design, as long as they meet all the beautification requirements. I mean, you guys agree with that?

So are you comfortable, let's Let me just throw out a number. So if somebody wants to build their building back here and have a parking lot up front, can we keep this? Are you okay with the 10-foot or some type of width so we don't have cars hanging over the side?

How about, how about, um, this is not obviously to scale, but we'll just say there's a 10-foot minimum of landscaping right here.

So not a maximum.

And then they can build their building So from that point back, they're free to fit whatever they can that meets the setback requirements from the neighborhood and whatnot.

We'll take the height minimum out, right? But the district's— all that will go away.

Are the beautification requirements pretty set right now? Are they— I mean, are they the way you want them to accomplish what we're trying to accomplish?

This is set right here. I'm behind that right now. So that's what we're negotiating.

As far as—

but as far as Building materials within the districts are set. So if you went back to C-2, those would go away in the districts.

From a water-wise perspective, are they—

Yeah, they're subject to the new standards. So they could do xeriscaping, they could do water-wise with rocks. They would just have to have 50%, you know, shrubs, ground covers, things like that. We don't require grass, but we do require some living material in that landscape. So like the city center, That's a good example. We have trees, we have certain shrubs, and then we have areas that are just rock. That meets the requirements.

Because I do think that's— I mean, to me, that's the next step, is the beautification of State Street. And so if we have a structure in place that allows us to do that, I'd like to see, you know, a lot of investment, you know, a lot of money come into State Street, as long as we've got the right framework, which I think is to give them flexibility to do what they want to do, but then keeping it beautiful.

So if we come back with a standard like this, we'll keep that, take that, and take the setback issues. They can put parking right through any of the— they can be flexible in how they want to do it. So a Subway shop could bring his building up, or he could put it all the way back, or he could do a drive-through.

I mean, his property's not that big.

All right, so he could tear it down if we go to C-2 and all the local talking about it, he can tear it down, rebuild. In or on site, as long as they've met the criteria.

Oh yeah, especially. I think another guiding principle is to make it— I mean, we meet the beautification, we give the flexibility to where we have that beautiful look. But we also encourage businesses. And one of the big complaints we heard about was, you know, it was too difficult for businesses to do what they wanted to do once Stage 3. Hopefully this would— we don't really want to create impediments to that.

Yeah, part of the design of the State Street District was to try to get people to mass or redevelop the property into something beyond a new Subway shop. But I mean, that sounds like you want to go back and allow them to do it the way we had it.

As long as they can meet the beautification requirements, which I think should be fairly easy.

So we're all comfortable with it?

One more clarification for me, just on this parking in front.

What's—

so they have that option if the business, they want to have their parking lot in front and the building in back, this gives them that option?

So yeah, yes, the only thing we'd require is the 10-foot landscaping here to buffer the site or buffer the parking. So if they chose to Put their parking here and the building back here, they could do that. But if they chose to put the building up here, they could. So I'm assuming you're comfortable with a 10-foot setback behind the sidewalk. If they want to, they could build it 30 feet back or 80 feet back if they wanted to. But there needs to be some type of, I guess, minimum setback. So it sounds like 10 feet maybe. Are you okay with them bringing the building up if they choose to?

I don't particularly care for that, but—

So you'd rather have a minimum of at least a 10-foot setback? So 10 feet is okay.

But if some—

but if the property owner— I mean, we're talking about flexibility. So if the property owner says, hey, I want my building right up there, would we give them the flexibility to do that?

I don't think so.

I think we're trying to beautify State Street. If we're going to lose 8 feet of that planter strip to UDOT, then you're negating a lot of your beautification there.

So whether— so let's have a building, 10-foot building, or parking set back. And then they can either put the parking building or drive-through.

Because even in parking you can put trees, you know how they have—

that kind of adds pretty—

A 10-foot would be wide enough for a building right there, the tree roots and things.

Lots of trees.

So 10 feet, it's 10-foot enough. I'm just wondering if we lose half of that, would we want to go 12 or 15? I don't know, I'm just trying to visually see how far.

Well, we are requiring a foot sidewalk, so that's an expense we're having to do. Like, putting 15 Feet in the sidewalk, so that's already a 15-foot. Okay, we're making them do— now we're going to require them to do 10 feet each.

Okay, it's 30.

One thing to clarify is when they put trees in the planter, we're requiring them to be 4 feet back. So when 7 feet is cut off, the tree will be in the center of the future 8-foot planter and it doesn't have to be removed. So like at the park, we won't lose the lines.

Jason, we're seeing quite a few property owners want to come in and locate businesses. Obviously, they have an existing business they want to subdivide and they want to put new businesses, generally fast foods or So Delicious or Slick type. Are you concerned that if we do this, or not we, but is the council concerned that we're going to see some of those additional Uses along the frontage.

To add to that, Jamie, the empty former Staples building on the corner by Chick-fil-A to the north, yeah, they, they're looking at putting in like another So Delicious on the outside there because they can't fill anything behind them. So as you will see, we're seeing a lot of those types of requests coming in because, quite frankly, big box retail is dead or struggling.

They still would be required to meet whatever parking needs associated with the center plus whatever building they put on. But they would be required to put the sidewalk behind the 15 feet, have a 10-foot setback of grass, and then whatever building they want. So it all had to meet all the different requirements.

So we have added a lot of other businesses in the parking lot of Target. And even before Christmas, that's a disaster. Yeah, so what are— is that a 4 per 1,000 target still?

So if you look at the— on the side, as you go south, they're doing some reconstruction, so they have a lot of trailers and things in there. That's also required parking around there, but they're staging their remodel. So a lot of that parking, people are parking out front because that's been taken up.

So why are we letting them count that as parking if they're using this retail space?

They're just remodeling their stuff, and so they have all their supplies. So within a month or 2, they're all going to be gone, and you'll be able to have—

Are you talking to the east?

I think they might be going because they have always had those shipping carts.

Yeah, so containers there.

Target was over parked to begin with, and then they developed their own house sites out front. So that was what they did.

I think there's still more than 4,000.

That just goes back to that question of mine, but they're counting that place on the east. Where there's a staging area for them and has been for years, right? They always have those shipping containers, right? But it's not available parking.

So Target, example, Target is very busy, right? My wife uses it to drive up right now. So there's no end, she just parks there and they bring it out. But if you go towards Center Street, I mean, yeah, there is available parking, but it is There's no requirement that it has to have parking within 100 feet.

Even like a dead end, the one in the parking lot dead ends into Taco Bell or whatever. If you drive down that, you're stuck. You're kind of like, yeah, I can't even get out of here.

So one thing, if I could add in through my economic development days, these retail users, they know how much parking they need.

Need, and if they don't have enough, they're going to make sure they have enough.

And Target, they're the ones that actually developed the Taco Bell and developed the Corner Bakery out front. They sold their pass sites off. They had held on to those for years, and they made that decision. Now, as a consumer, it's not great if you're a Target shopper because they're busy and you have to walk farther to get in, but that's kind of the trade-off reward, right?

I don't know that it's always even walking Farther. I've had times I've been driving around at night just waiting for a stop.

But as far as meeting the requirement, they do meet the 14,000. I guess that's right.

Probably their problem is they're successful.

Successful.

Yeah.

That's the issue right there.

In fact, they've had 4 drive-ups. If you've noticed over the last 6 months, they've actually done— I think 8— where you can do your phone order drive-up. They've actually added because that's very popular. So it is a bustling place.

But just because they're a PD zone, they still— do they have their own?

So that would go back to the PD-1. That's actually zone PD-1. So what I'm proposing is whatever was zoned prior to—

here's the old—

oh, sorry.

This would take—

so Target is right here. So take it back to the PD-1. Whatever was prior to, we'll take it back. So not everything's going to go back to C-1.

To you.

But they'll— whatever standards they were built under.

And what is PD-1 standards?

It's basically setback off of that south side.

So there's nothing to manage?

The only advantage of PD-1 was the fact that they wanted a little bit special requirement as far as the size of the building and the setback, because the neighbors were having the rear setback.

But there are— I mean, they've already built that. So it's Even if it goes back, there's still retro. I mean, it's—

it is what it was.

That's a great example. That backside of Target is a great example of buffering of neighborhoods. You drive back there and you can't tell that that's Target.

Harmon said you've been in the backside.

Yeah. And that Target, for what it's worth, as an example, when we first built our house over there, that was a big controversy because they wanted to put 500 apartments right there where that Target was. And I believe that It was approved and then it somehow changed and morphed into a retarget with the landscaping. So as far as the impact on our neighborhood, it's been great.

Because there's no access, right? Right.

So question about PD zones then, you go back to C-2, did the State Street Master Plan, uh, do away with the PD zones?

So we just overzoned over the top.

Okay, and then if we take—

go back to C-2, they can just We propose to rezone them back to that zone. So we— so your list of zones would be rezoning all these properties to C-2, rezoning these properties to whatever zone it is, PD-1, PD whatever that one is, PD-3. I mean, all those would be going back to what they originally were built under, just as a standard.

Downside to that?

There wouldn't be a downside because they'd be subject to that ordinance anyway.

We have an unintended consequence.

I just reviewed the PD-1 zone quickly. And it doesn't refer to parking in it, which means the C-2 zone—

So go to the citywide zone. The general standard, which would be—

So are we covered on the PD zones? We talked about that earlier, that that's a potential problem.

Correct. So right now, as we go do what we're going to do, number 1, reserve everything back, make some of these changes that we're talking about with the Exactly. The drawing, make those changes at the same time, PD zones would still be prohibited anywhere on State Street. So, except for the ones that are existing, right? So then we would come back, if the council is interested, come back and try to figure out a way in which you would be encouraging PDs in certain areas or none. I mean, that's the—

that's—

How many PD zones would there be if we reverted all this in the ones that would go back? So each of those 6 would essentially be a conversation with the city council?

No, they're done. They're done developed. There's no other density or anything they can get. It's just going back to the zone that they were built under.

Those are all built?

They're done. They're out. So future demolishing and rebuilding, they would be under the same standard as they are, unless they want to come back to the council to renegotiate.

Jason, for consideration though, PD zone has a minimum size.

3-acre size. 3 acres.

You couldn't, you couldn't go in and take a specific parcel on State Street and turn it into PD zone unless it was 3 acres or more.

So yeah, so if there's a property on State Street that comes back in a month, you know, sometime to come to the council and says we want to take our property, which is let's say 3 acres, We want to negotiate. Right now they couldn't. But if, you know, if you guys as council want to say, well, we'll consider a PD in this geographic area, wherever they are on State Street, then that would open that up again to allow them to come in and manage it. But they would still have to meet the minimum requirement, which is 3 acres. Right now we don't have a set parking requirement. They're negotiating. So we could set—

I mean, we could still set that.

We could set the— If you decide to reopen. Then that's something that we could look at. As a general rule, in the PD zone, you had to have this much parking. This, you know, so they wouldn't have those things. And Steve can testify to this, but the majority of our arguments back and forth as PDs came through was parking. That was the main—

So we should probably set that, right?

So you could, if you chose to count on this, this is months down the road.

If you want to bring it back, we can do that.

Is this, you know, discuss what the parking ratio would be, if it's 2.25, if it's 2.5, whatever it is based on the size of the unit. Then there wouldn't be a negotiation. If you want to come to a PD, you have to have this much parking. There's no question about it.

Why would we want to just take care of that right now?

Well, right now there's no option for PDs.

Well, I mean, if we change to this, if we— at the same time that we—

So, I would just suggest, you know, we're trying to solve the immediate problem. I I think we want to try and keep it manageable if we can.

You think that would be too complicated?

Well, not that it's too complicated, but it's just another thing to add to a pretty lengthy list of things to do right now. And it's not something that needs to be done right now, but certainly we could tackle it after we take care of this.

I'm not sure that council is real interested in bringing it back anytime soon, because that would open the floodgate to—

The PD box.

They don't want to have doors locked.

So yeah, so if you don't want any housing, this doesn't— the parking standard doesn't matter. But if you were going to allow housing, then you would want to modify the parking standard. So to clarify, one thing Jason hasn't mentioned is a PD zone can still happen in a manufacturing zone or highway services zone if they come and apply to the City Council.

Correct.

And that is about the only high-density Housing option left in the entire city outside of the POD option.

So we could, though, your point is to come back with an amendment probably after this, next, in a month or two, just amend the PD zone. We know it can't be applicable except for commercial, just set apartment standards. So if, for example, we get a request out here for the M-2 to do some type of housing project, you guys might be interested, at least there will be a minimum parking standard that they'd have to meet.

So if I wanted to do a PD zone and I see what's happening here with the city, so I run out to do it, you know, and file for one in 3 weeks, am I going to be okay because of the old PD parking, or will my PD zone be unique to me? Will there be rules just for my PD zone that might be different than University Place?

So back to what I'm saying, PD zone is negotiable because it's an actual rezone.

So each one's— everyone's site-specific, so it doesn't matter.

That's what you're saying, right?

So 4 of you could say, you know what, we can still deny it, right? So it's still up to the council to say yes or no, and it's within your right to say no. There's no reason that you have to adopt or rezone something to a new PD zone.

And I think we're fine with a few of those. We just don't want to have an endless situation.

So my, I guess, advice would be to come after we get this done, is to maybe come back in a study session and talk about what areas maybe we have to do a PD zone. Then we can go try to talk about how to reduce or allow those in that certain box.

Right.

No, that makes perfect sense.

So—

oh, sorry.

I just said I kind of like the flexibility of the PD zone in that we certainly haven't figured everything that's going to change. Like the Sonya Alicia, that I'm not I hate to say those things.

Sugar drinks.

So that's the fad now, but that might go away.

Subway and latte bars.

Yeah, but there might be something in 5 years that comes along that we hadn't even thought about, and somebody comes to the PD zone saying, I'm going to take this 10 acres, here's what I would do, and we might be saying, great, that's really cool, we never even thought about that, things have changed, this would be appropriate. So I like that flexibility.

And that is exactly what a PD was designed for. Just to allow flexibility, allow some unique user to come and say, you know what, Council, this is what we want, and the Council says, perfect, let's tie you down to that, and then we'll do that.

But the PD zone minimum is 3 acres?

Yes.

So, 2 questions. So, but the PRD—

oh, go ahead.

So let me just say one thing. So, Jason, I don't know if you're at a point— we'll have one answer up here, but I don't know if you're at a point that you're ready to break. We're supposed to have a break at 3 o'clock. Okay.

Can I just ask a quick question?

You need 3 more votes, Dave?

Yeah.

So the PRD zone, just so I can clarify the PD difference between PRD, my understanding—

maybe I'm confused between the two—

but the PRD was only supposed to be used when no other— it was a difficult fit for other zones.

That's PD.

That's PD?

Yeah. So if you can develop your property as something like a C-2 or whatever, then typically we haven't allowed PD. But there is an exception.

So what kind of—

we have allowed it though?

Well, because the residential component wasn't allowed in C-2, so that's the unique part of it. So that's why they were coming to council and saying, we want to do this mixed-use type thing or whatever, and that was the exception.

Okay, so real quick, second question. When you say go back to the existing district zones, some of these along here, as I looked at the map, were R-6.

So we'd take everything back.

We would take all those back.

So the Res B portions or Res A or whatever, we'd take them back to whatever underlying zone was there at the time.

That's correct.

So, uh, just east of, uh, Vasa, there's some we had Res B. We'll take it back to R-8.

Oh, what about the Yeah, there's one behind Macy's and one behind Waterdoors.

Does that even matter anymore?

They were core zones.

They'll go back to whatever zone they were.

That's a commercial reboarding back to residential.

If it was commercial, it'd go to commercial.

Well, I know, but core zone is technically commercial.

They would go back to whatever it was.

They'd go back to whatever it was.

You don't have a problem with it going back to residential? No.

Would there be unintended consequences for the developer, for the owner of the land?

That's the way it was.

Not unintended.

Obviously there'll be intended consequences. They may not like it.

So just one more. So if it was legal on McCormick before, it would be legal on McCormick.

I know, Mayor, I'm not trying to add to the length, but I think we also need to kind of review within SLUs to make sure that the unintended consequences— if you go back to C-2, there's certain land uses that don't lie within the C-2 zone.

Well, the districts require or allow anything So we just go back to what's already allowed.

No, what I'm saying is if you go back into the C-2, this is probably a good time to make a decision as to what you don't want in the C-2.

Like the higher tattoo parlor. Oh really?

That'd be awesome.

You hear what I'm saying?

So if you go back to the C-2 and something is permitted, something used to be permitted under C-2, So might I suggest, Steve's point was to do the main rezoning back, eliminate the high-density housing component, and let us come back in a month or two and retweak or redefine what you think. We can still do the height.

We still didn't figure out the height.

We can still do the height.

C-3 mix or whatever. And I want to— we come back, I wanted to get Stephanie and John's opinion on, as they're citizens in Orem, and unless there's a village district We can take care of that after.

Okay, let's take a break.

It's 5 after.

Let's meet at 3:20.

Thank you.

Thank you. One.

Very much. I mean, basically it won't change really the position that we're in because we're basically right now, we've already got a public planning commission with an ordinance that says you can't do what you want, right?

Because like, for example, lowers the heights and all those kinds of things. So, and, and the same thing for the So they, in the current proposal to the Planning Commission, they couldn't—

They have a lower height.

It's a 60-year building permit.

I mean, I guess, I guess what this does, if you go back to the same—

you can't even lowering heights, and that would allow parking director to be a part of this.

I think it's just too— I think we're developing there.

Yeah, we still have that already.

What's that?

C2 can go to 60 feet.

Yeah, right here.

Okay, so you can double off if you want to.

I've got presidential.

I've got assigned to the vanity presidential.

There won't be a residential.

I mean, not residential.

So there's going to be no service.

Okay, never mind.

Oh, dinner.

There's just right there with the dinner. All those are No residential.

Well, unless— so I'm okay with pockets, but what are we talking about?

What do you mean small inner copy doors? Why do you say— even Jill's point, what's your analysis? You know, now, now, now, seeing as you do that, you can— that brings in a whole ways of out of state that I don't know. 1,600 more.

I've got buyers right now.

I've got one in Colorado.

I've got one in California.

What's special about—

right, all the license artery, per se.

Yes, but you can come find it on Center Alley. They want to go true downtown. They can go on it right now.

No true downtown.

Park over there on the street.

They've already discussed it.

So they're in—

we're going to have to investigate because they don't have a design standard for But anyway, it's just tricky because—

oh no, yeah, yeah, crucial.

It takes up 5 miles. Thank you, thank you.

So I mean, that's why parking requirement, like same thing with David. So I'd love to—

Thank you.

What happens if our grandparents have kids come to stay? Where are they going to park?

Where—

if we do owner-occupied, they're going to have friends over.

Where are they going to park?

You need an owner-occupied with visitor parking.

Exactly, exactly. So you understand that. And so to— I don't want to be knocking my head against the wall because we would like to really just get something in.

What is it, just water?

I think it's sparkling water.

Yeah, bottled water.

Different flavors.

I scroll a lot, so thank you.

Okay.

Yeah.

Terry, how's your day going? Good.

Terry, do you have a home up here?

We do. We're just a couple miles from there. Midway formally, or yeah, we're in Midway. We're in Belize, which is from well from from golf course right over here. We are probably two miles just going towards Park City.

But my doctor just said let's go for color because we got no.

So you're not?

We don't back up.

No, we're we're all the way. So we're gonna get this a plan. Community, so there are all these little homes.

PRD?

Yes, it is a PRD, correct.

Yeah, I think—

yeah, let me explain what a PRD is.

But, uh, which is great because, you know, we just lock the door and drive away.

Do you use it more in the winter or the summer?

We don't use it near enough because the problem is Yeah, I need to know.

So, the next item on the schedule is to talk about past, present, future with the State Street Master Plan. But from, uh, your perspective, do we need to continue the previous discussion some more to get where we're going?

Well, Mayor, I think we still have half an hour for State Street.

We have a couple more comments. And then Dave had some questions.

Oh, okay.

You want to come up here?

Yeah, that's fine. And I would like this conversation— I mean, whatever we need to get where we're going.

So just a couple of, uh, things right now in the district. So all 5 districts, we've eliminated pole signs, so they have to do monument signs or wall signs. ...signs on the buildings, which is one of the reasons the building came up. So by eliminating the districts, I just want to make sure that you're comfortable with the fact that we still allow pole signs in between the districts, but they have to be equal to the height.

So if somebody wants a 35-foot-tall sign, it has to be set back 35 feet.

That's the current standard. By taking the districts out, it would go back to that standard.

Go back to 35 feet.

Go back to allowing pole signs. Right now we don't allow new pole signs in the districts.

We can write that up later if we want.

We could, I mean, or we can do it now.

I think if you're— I mean, this whole thing, if you change— if you go to one, and Stephanie brought this up, you know, as a commercial person, I want to develop my property the way I want to if I can fall into the beauty But, you know, I want to advertise my business. I think that was, in fact, 8 years ago, I was like, we need to have more advertising for these customers. They have to be, they have to look good.

So, we did change the ordinance about probably a year and a half, coming to a time, to require that the building or the poles be set back equal to the height. So, if somebody wanted a 10-foot pole sign, for example, They could be within 10 feet. But if somebody wants a larger one, which typically the maximum is 35 feet on State Street, with I think 250 square feet, that would have to be set back.

They could still have a pole sign, but it would have to be set back.

So what's your opinion on that as far as with where we're going, where we're reverting back to the C-2 zoning?

Yeah, if council's fine with that, we can take it back to the pole signs, but they would, they would be under the same restrictions.

existing, but if you took them away before, was there a compelling reason not to go back to them now?

It's a beautification reason.

Is there an example on State Street that's the old?

Cutler's new or old?

Old. So the one you mentioned, the city center, they crossed down on one of those.

That's the new New standard, right.

So there's 2 standards now that we've allowed a little bit bigger monument sign in exchange for getting rid of the pole sign in some areas. So right now we can have an 8-foot by 50 square feet instead of the 6 feet by 36 square feet, which is the typical monument sign. So if you have multiple buildings, you know, and you share one sign, you can have a larger monument sign.

So if our goal is beautification along with business Versus being able to operate, where do you land with that? I know we're talking about—

So, can I jump in? Is that okay? Most communities are going away from full signs because of beautification. So, it's kind of, it's a balancing act in what you feel comfortable with. Highland City, Alpine City, they don't allow full signs. They only allow monument signs. So, you'll notice in Midway, you don't see, I doubt there's any full signs in Midway.

Pole signs are not on a pole.

There's a number of communities that are trying to bury their utilities as well, their utility poles and things, just because aesthetically it looks better.

Are the pole signs more like your McDonald's, your Arby's, your Sandy's, or whatever?

Anyone that can do a pole sign will do one.

So, and part of the way we do the beautification is they age, the paint starts chipping, I mean, it just starts to have some aesthetic look. So when the citizens brought the idea of beautifying State Street to us, they thought, hey, these pole signs really do become obstructive. And then it's kind of a fight for who can get the most, you know, visual—

the biggest signs that they can see, be seen.

But a lot of it then is they start to age and they're weathered. I mean, they're in the weather all the time, so you start to see the paint chip. We're not all keeping up with paint, but, you know, we're not going to go cite everybody for paint chips.

Well, that starts to look—

I think the compromise though was a bigger monument sign.

So Wienerschnitzel, for example, they're the ones that kind of spearheaded the amendment. So if you look at Wienerschnitzel, that's a little larger monument sign, but they don't have a pole sign. They took down their pole sign in exchange to move the monument sign closer to the street, but it's a little bit larger. They have a video board or whatever.

So you still have the visibility, you just don't have kind of the And, the bigger picture, you know, is an overhaul of State Street.

You know, it's what we want to do with everything. And so, I think, with that in mind, with beautification, I mean, it would make sense to stick with whatever the standard is for a beautification type of thing. As long as it doesn't completely impede businesses, and I don't think it would. It's kind of like if everyone had a pole sign, and now it's an issue. But if everybody has a button inside, then all of a sudden it's not an issue. So that looks a lot better.

This might be a little hard to see, but that's currently your Schnitzel Monument sign versus the old pole sign that was similar.

It was quite—

I mean, there's your traditional pole sign that you're going to get with your multiple tenants on it.

So the problematic legal challenge could be that if they're all on C-2, it might be difficult to Force one over the other.

Yeah, I mean, what we potentially have to do is create a different sign zone for those.

So we could do it that way.

We could do it that way.

So we could—

that's the direction we could make that happen. And that would be an amendment to bring in the sleep time.

I, you know, you might get some business owners not terribly happy that they're in the same zone as other property owners, but they have a different sign zone standard. Yeah. So, you know, it is a beautification But if you're treating them all as C-2, maybe you want to have kind of one standard for most of the C-2 and decide what that ought to be, whether it's allowing pole signs or not allowing them.

And for the most part, the people that come in and redevelop, or not redevelop, but just repurpose the building, they're just taking out the plexiglass or whatever and using the existing sign. So it's a legal nonconforming sign if they choose to redevelop the entire site, and then the district would require them to take down the pole sign. But if they're just like a, let's say, Wendy's or whatever, just want to go to a different fast food, then they could take that sign and repurpose it and not have to take it down. But if they're tearing down the sign, raising the site, then they would have to comply with that.

It seems like if, I mean, in general you'd build a monument sign, but you won't want to preclude some really good business from coming in if that was like a big deal for them. And so it seems like you'd I think we could do additional things from a creativity standpoint. Maybe if they're going to have a pole sign, this is an exception, but they have to do additional landscaping, they have to do a water feature, they have to do something that makes it not look like an ugly pole sign, you know, but they can still get that height. But that's probably a whole other discussion. But, you know, there may be other options. Probably not at this point in time, but You know, as we've sort of used it out over time.

So, for example, just really quick on the theater at the mall, on 8th East, where they have that sign that projects out this way and you can read down, Cinemark, that's— we've added that as an option within the districts as well. So they can not only have a flat sign against the building, but they could also have those projecting this way. So we added double the signage they could do on the building. So that's— we'll have to look at that as well, keep it or not, but that's— we allow more signage. So, that was the exchange.

Because we do have an issue with State Street, right? As far as, like we talked earlier, State Street is not a walkable situation per se. It's going to be a corridor, and as a corridor, we don't want to really preclude certain types of businesses from being able to come in if that's a big deal for them. So, anyway.

So, there's—

when I bring my White Castle in, I gotta have a pole sign.

So, right now—

And what's the first of those, White Castle?

So let's say White Castle came in, they want to do a 35-foot pole sign on a C-2 property. Right now they would have to be 35 feet back. The pole sign would have to be 35 feet back. So typically what we see is they lower it a little bit so they can get closer to the street, or get a bigger monument that can be 2 feet from the sidewalk. So that's why— that's the advantage of having a larger monument, is you move it forward and it's really an eye level with the cars you're sitting in.

And that is a factor as far as, if the whole idea is to beautify State Street, that barrage of signs, you know, a lot which look like junk, I mean, you've got to overcome that.

So, yeah. There's also one other issue with the pole signs. So, in front of Kmart, they have the old Kmart sign that says now NPS. That, that is so tall that now the trees have become mature, so they top all the trees every year so you can see the sign. But the trees mature and the monument sign stays down and you can see it, and then they can just trim the trees. So you actually lose some of our beautification if you're topping trees.

So how big a monument sign would we want them to make it?

So right now we allow 8-foot 50 square feet. That's a pretty good size site. That's what Wiener Schnitzel has. That's what who has? Wiener Schnitzel.

To me, it didn't seem like a big building.

Across the street from Wiener Schnitzel, there's the car wash.

That's Supersonic. To maximize their pull sign.

That's the pull sign.

Yeah.

It seems like, you know, as far as getting into the weeds with this guy, I think even It seems like we're going to have to wind up at, you know, a C2 or whatever. But then if you can also have essentially a list of things that we're going to work on over the next several months that are these kinds of things.

So maybe we kick this main topic, get it back to C2 or C3, and then we work on the other ones in the next month or two.

Yeah, just kind of prioritize what we have to do when, and then we can be working on the But other ones. at least we can get to where we're trying to go before more time.

Okay.

And that was one thing that you just brought up that I talked to Jason during the break, is there's a particular area up in North Village District that I think would be a good fit for a C-3 because it's right up against those homes on 400 West. So is anyone, you know, what's your thoughts about some areas putting that zoning in to create a I think we—

if we do C-2 and we end up blending C-3, if you butt up against residential, it has to be a buffer. Maybe 150 might be too big in that area. Maybe it's 125.

I don't know.

Well, since to your point, 35 feet is still allowable.

That's what the storage room has.

So anything above that, up to 60 feet, that's when 150 would be So if somebody wanted to come and redevelop something on the corner, so you still have 35.

But that 35 is the size of a home. So, I mean, so is that John and Stephanie on the setback on— because you live right behind Ace Hardware and now behind Credit Union.

So, Jack, if you guys could— if we could take a second, because you guys just went through a major battle for like 11 months with where you live trying to get it to work. We're not done, but I'd be interested to hear from your perspective with the path that we're going down, uh, what you think would be any unintended consequences or anything else we should consider.

Well, as I looked at the C-3 and the C-2, and I appreciate the additional information about the 150 feet, which I didn't realize.

So the property that Lenee is referring to is actually landlocked.

It doesn't actually have direct State Street access, but it's right surrounded by single-family homes. So the land use C-3 would be more appropriate there because it doesn't really have State Street frontage. Technically it does, it's within 500 feet. Around the corner. Yeah, it's a roundabout way to State Street. But anyway, my home abuts Ace Hardware, which does have direct State Street access. It's State Street frontage. I feel C-2 is appropriate for that landowner. I would not want to impose C-3 land use on Ace Hardware's property. I think that'd be inappropriate for him.

He needs to have that flexibility to use all that's available for C-2.

So being a property— it's residential property over next to C-2— there could be some buffers, and that could be written in, like, where a C-2 abuts a residential zone, there's this additional buffer. Because all C-2s don't need to have that written into them.

Right.

What would be a comfortable buffer?

I would love 100 feet. And we talked about 100 feet with the 35-foot-high buildings.

It's not 100 feet of no build, it's just within 100 feet of a residential, your height limit is 35 feet.

So it's 115 in C-3. So I think it's appropriate because I'm trying to be sensitive to the commercial owner because he has rights and he needs to maximize his property too. But then I need something on my end if they're going to want to build something big to protect me. as well. So I think, in my opinion, it's a good compromise to say C-2 zone that above residential property has a 100-foot buffer of 35 feet maximum in that first 100 feet.

So there'd still be 35 feet off?

Right, but you can have a taller building than 35 feet within that first 100, and then you can go up from there as you get closer to State Street. But that property Lorraine's referring to has like no State Street around it, so put C-2 there.

What property is it?

It's Orion's backing behind the State Street Storage.

Okay, so it's behind the storage.

Behind State Street Storage. And right now there's nothing there.

It's a parking lot and pieces of marathons. But that would be a C-3 zone that doesn't have— it has different land use, so it's not like— I mean, if you correct me if I'm wrong, but C-3 is more like professional, more office-y. It's less retail. You can have retail. Less high traffic though, right? It's not like putting a McDonald's in there or something.

The Sonic, for example, is a C3 zone.

Is it a C3 zone? You're right, it is, right next to Primrose.

So they could do fast food.

But it's not—

it'll lend itself to one because it doesn't have the extent of the uses that C2 has, but it still has retail uses.

So that's where I think going back to C2 is great for a lot of those properties, but then, like Linnéa says, be strategic and say, well, you know what, this C3 might be more appropriate in areas that are really close to the networks. But we're going to press them as an example. There's a couple of them that I found in looking between the 2 different maps that would be better as a C-3, but I think generally going back to C-2 is a really good start.

So we could, we could, we could do this change to C-2 with the height restriction or whatever, parking, and then always come back, as Steve said.

Yes.

And say, okay, maybe this looks— is better for C-3 or whatever.

But I don't—

didn't you say now would be the better time? More appropriate time for that, or what?

So well, we're doing the height. I still need to clarify the parking because 4 per thousand is full out parking. So what did you want for a commercial standard at 4 per thousand? That's the question.

Well, we have 4 per thousand in the in this state's master plan, right?

We have 3 per thousand in the district.

So what vote we're proposing was pending. Now is going back to C-2 standard, or a general commercial standard. At the mall, for example, it's a corporate 1,000. All the strips along University Parkway, excuse me, corporate 1,000. So corporate 1,000 is the basic one used for years.

And that's what you're talking about going back to, right?

Well, that's what going back to C-2 would take it up to, corporate 1,000.

Yeah.

And to me, that's, that's enough. If you're going to add in different elements like residential, then that's something you want to talk about.

And you're not proposing doing more than 4 per 1,000?

Well, no, why would we?

Currently in the districts it's 3 per 1,000.

So are we going back to that?

Are we going back to 4 per 1,000?

It's only 3 per 1,000 because there's an assumption that you're sharing parking with the residents.

So you're going to have commercial residential parking sharing.

But since we're—

what's C-2? C-2 is what?

4 per 1,000.

So it's 4 per 1,000?

Of course.

I just want to clarify because you said parking. I didn't want to make sure we weren't changing the parking.

No, I think we're still—

We're just going to limit the height to 48 feet in the C-2?

Correct. Sorry, my bad.

You're fine. And then add in the C-2 elements that would allow a different setback. So I guess to your point is that if we do C-2 but allow next to residential to have a difference of 35 feet, you know, within 100 feet, that would accomplish the same thing as C-3?

Yes. So I'm trying to figure out what's the best way to address that. Is that what you're saying?

So yeah, so adding into the C-2 zone would be the 35-foot line, and that would buffer any residential.

And is that 100-foot good? I mean, is that a good compromise?

100 feet before you could go to 48 feet. So you, you know, it would be a pretty good distance away. 100 feet.

Do you know behind the Ace Hardware, if you just walk back in there, you can see behind how—

Yes.

There's a huge grass area. That grass area is 100 feet.

So the question is for O'Brien. If he wanted to do something, he could go 100, and then could he go up 48 feet? Is that going to be low?

Between the 100-foot mark and the—

But is that going to be okay for your neighbor?

If it's commercial.

Okay.

Hi, let me ask you a question. some parking on State Street are 300 to 500 feet deep. Smith is an example of that. If they wanted to build a 5-story office building on State Street that's 60 feet tall, would you be in favor of that, or do you want to cap it at 48?

Cap it.

Cap it at 48.

I mean, well, that's my thing.

I don't know.

Well, let's talk about other office buildings that are 5 stories.

Or the only other—

we have 360 That's tall. What else do we have that's tall?

The Upstar building at University Place. I think you could probably only get 4 stories in 60 feet.

Office building next to Timbrogus Hospital is 60 feet.

And the Truman Building is 48.

I would guess it's in the 40s, under 60, but it's probably—

I just think—

So the office building at 10th and August, I'm fine with it, but it's on a big piece of ground connected to a big building.

So how do you make those So what I would suggest is if you have the general standard of 48 feet, somebody wants to come in with a beautiful 80-foot commercial building, they can propose a PD on that.

Okay.

And then you can consider that as a site-specific application.

Yeah.

So I mean, on the counts, are we okay with 48?

So that's basically a 4-story.

So we have one clarification.

You can't get 48 feet and 48 feet.

Yes, the items on top of the building.

So yeah, that'd be the— so right now we have the ability for that.

So you'd be 58 total if you had the 10-foot architecture.

So 10 feet is comfortable?

No, no.

Well, I mean, but it's air conditioning.

Air conditioning shouldn't be 10 feet.

Sometimes your screen walls—

You basically—

penthouse that surrounds those things are typically 10 feet. You get the elevator casing, elevator casings, those type of things that that project into the roof are typically not counted into the overall height.

So can you do a—

have it—

so my concern with that is, I don't want— you know, it's all about the resident, the impact on the residents. So if you have a facade at the very front of the building on State Street that adds this little attempt at architectural feature, great, right? The residents are way over here and they're not even going to get a shadow from that. They're going to be fine. But if they're putting it all the way around and it increases their view of the— their exposure to the building, that's a 58-foot building.

So how about within that 100-foot buffer, you eliminate the extra 10 feet for the architectural features or you lower it?

Well, here's the other compromise is to allow only a certain percentage. So like in the R-12 zone, we do allow a residential home to go up to, I think it's 42 feet. feet, as long as that percentage of 42 feet versus 35 is no more than 30%.

So, Jason, we don't have a 60-foot office building in the norm, do we?

Yeah, yeah, next to Timpanogos Hospital.

Oh, that's what you're talking about.

Yeah, okay, so we have one security measure, and that's down—

That is actually set away from the— has parking behind it. It has a little bit front and a bunch in back.

So I guess my question would be, is if we're going to limit to 48 feet, to allow maybe 30% of the roof to be, you know, additional 10 feet to surround mechanical equipment?

I'd be fine with that.

So are you talking about the need for not to screen the entire roof?

I'm talking about, uh, you know, versus 48 versus is 58 foot.

Yeah, typically we don't have them screen the entire roof. It's typically just screening the equipment that they have up there.

That's expensive. So in reality, the roof's going to be 48, and then internal would be the middle of the property.

58, but it's limited to 30% of the roof.

You know Center for Change, where that is? So that's right— I don't even know if it's 20 feet from the property line. So they've got A balcony that they've added on, and they've got like the fireplace hood to the fireplace, which is huge. So, you know, I can tell— I can kind of see the line where it was supposed to be this height because it's right next to homes, and then there's this huge architectural thing that just makes the building seem that much taller. I guess that's what I'm trying to avoid. You know what I'm talking about, Steph?

Yeah, but that sounds like usable space too, which Aren't you talking— isn't that outdoor usable space?

It's the fireplace, right?

I mean, something that's—

Is it just a chimney?

It's the chimney.

So typically, the things that are surrounding the roof are not going to be— you're going to have the mechanic go up and change out the filters or whatever. You're not going to have anybody having to occupy that space. So it's simply a surround to protect noise and other things that would allow them to project out. Otherwise, they're going to have to find Trying to place on the grounds to do something, it just makes it chaotic on the ground.

I'd like to see, from my perspective, I'd like to see some flexibility on that. I mean, I think we could come up with a set number of this is the general idea, but I think alterations to that could go through the City Council and have that whole conversation. Because if our goal, I mean, we're basically taking high density off State Street. We want to go to office, retail, and service. And if we're going to go to office, there may be some— I mean, some of those lots may be redeveloped into pretty cool office space. And so I don't— I mean, from my perspective, I don't think we just cap that without a conversation, you know what I mean?

So can we—

Steve, can we add a— allows them to go to city council to get some type of exception on the top?

Well, I'm talking commercial.

You're talking commercial business.

I think that was the PD zone comment that was made, then they could go through a PD zone process.

I just think there's certain office structures that could look really good, you know, and fit in and be great. The biggest problem with the high density when you start doing, you know, super high like Midtown Village or whatever, is you create this whole parking disaster. You wouldn't necessarily do that with office, you know, then you'd be down to the lower density. Does it look infillable and does it intrude on the neighborhood? But if those could be resolved, then you might have more flexibility with office because I think it's a completely different creature than high-density apartments.

So are we comfortable with some type of limit or do we want to just cap it at 48? And then, and then if I want to do something different, they come back to the council.

I want to cap it at 48 for now.

So anything on the roof, 48 or below, right?

No, you still get the roof on top.

10.

So it's still really a tall building.

48 is not even 4 stories anymore.

Well, but you're adding another 10 feet.

Yeah, but it's only 30% of the building, and it's only for the elevator shaft and for HVAC.

So, so I agree with what the mayor is saying. If Adobe says, we've had it with, uh, Traverse Mountain— that's a joke— we want to come to Orem, we want the flexibility to say, guys, we will build out something, we'll get you You know, we'll get to your episode story over there. But, um, but here's just one comment from a neighbor. I, I shared this with Archie— uh, Artie.

I call him Archie.

Artie Woodbury. A neighbor told me, said, you know, Terry, I will never see another sunset.

Yeah.

That hurts.

Lifelong resident of Forum, I will never see another sunset. They live on 800 East across from the Aston Apartments. And if you think they're full of it, just go there in the afternoon. They'll never see another sunset. Anyway, so I want to be sensitive to that with what we're doing.

So what I'm hearing is 48 feet max, including any type of mechanical, and then they could come back maybe and negotiate a PD or something like that.

I think that's too hard with 48.

I think you can still have the 10 feet.

Maybe, maybe it's not 30% of the roofline. Maybe we make it Smaller, I don't know.

From an economic development standpoint, anything that is more difficult to work with, it's not a known, will impede economic development. So if someone has to come in and apply for a zone change, that would be something we will compete with another city against. So if that's not known now and they say we want to build a 5-story but we need 5 feet of mechanical room but it's not in the code, it will be It will be a detriment for us.

There also is the 3-acre consideration too, which—

or PD, that's true, to move with PD.

So this is an incredibly great problem to have. Let's deal with this problem. We've got businesses wanting to come and put a 4 or 5-story building on State Street.

Yeah, we'll deal with it.

That's great.

So, well, I think so.

What Ryan's saying is they won't come if they think it's going to be a fight, right? Right, right.

They want to know, they want to know When they do their entitlement process, or they will, they will go where it's easier? I mean, I'm not trying to disparage you or anything.

Well, but for a lot of these, I've seen so many rezones over the past 10 years in Orem, from residential to PD specialty zones, you know, that did they— there was obviously a message from Development Services that that type of rezone was going to be welcome. So I think those kind of messages can be, can be sent, and they don't have to— it wouldn't be an end run then.

Or it could be an amendment to the TIF. So yeah, but if somebody comes in and wants to build a 5-story building, they could come back and maybe have an amendment to the zoning itself, and that could be a consideration.

Well, I mean, they're coming here because Orem is the center of Utah County, and they want to be here. They don't want to be in American Fork.

Property, for example, along State Street is $30 a square foot, and they can go to Greenfield in Lehigh at $10 a square foot.

We lost that.

That's—

we lost the telephone or whatever.

That's why, because the price of property is so much more expensive in Orem because Orem is the center. But that's why, that's why we don't have campuses in Orem. It's so expensive.

But if it's $30 more, whatever, it's not— I mean, if it's 10-foot height, I don't think that's going to be a selling point.

They're going to go to the cheaper.

Would they? Would they?

No, but if— what I'm saying is, if they can build 4 stories instead of 3 stories, then maybe it pencils. But if they have 3 stories and then they have to have mechanical all within that 48 feet, it may not.

I mean, we're not I mean, but they have to go down half a floor.

We're open to look at that case-by-case basis.

Either you have one floor or you don't.

So what is the ideal number that would meet the economic development numbers you're talking about?

Well, we've had the standard in Orem the entire time, and I've not ever heard us have a problem with having equipment on the roof surrounded by walls.

Most buildings have that configuration.

Even the Trim Building, which I have pulled up right here, And so, and how does it work? Center functions— centerpiece functions as a screen. If I go back to, uh, the aerial view—

How tall is that one?

Plug that into this.

You can see right here that they're— all of their rooftop chillers are surrounded by that.

Yeah.

That higher wall that's in the middle.

Yeah, I like that. I think that's— it's, uh, pleasing.

How does it look from behind?

So if it does something like that, fit into that 30% standard that Jason is talking about.

So how tall is that?

Is that 48? Is that 60?

What is that?

He thinks it's 40.

Well, or look at the new business building at UVU, right?

It's got a—

it's 4 stories.

It's probably, I don't know, 60 feet tall, and then it has stuff on the top, but it's on a hill and it's around. So that's to Terry's question. If Adobe's coming, how do we make a whole campus And you make the campus work somehow.

We'll make it work.

So if you can keep—

even if you acquire turf on your own campus—

roof space at 40 feet or less and just have a small piece of it be for the mechanical stuff.

But would it need to be 10 feet or could it be 8 feet?

Right now it's 15 feet. So we basically modified it to go to 10 in the districts. We did in our village just to kind of accommodate, so it's not as intrusive. So right now in a C-2 zone, it's a 15-foot.

So like an elevator shaft coming out the—

how tall is that?

Depends on the size of the elevator.

So I mean, would it be if we did 48 and 8 foot?

That's better than that.

Does it work?

I mean, yeah, mechanically does that work? It depends on the size of the building, the size of the chiller, the size of the—

But I think if you give them 8, they can come back and ask for 10. That gives them something to at least run with, right? To know that maybe there's a chance to get it.

And I'm not as concerned about the mechanical as I am the architectural.

Yeah, that's my thing is I want the building to look nice.

I don't notice anything on top But what I— what you do notice is, as you drive by, you notice the front of the building and what it looks like.

And typically, I mean, you know, there's stuff on top, but you don't— I mean, I personally don't even—

Not always.

Typically they have it more of a central core, so you're not really seeing it as you're standing on the street.

So if that's where it's going to be, I'm great with the 10 feet. But if it's going to be like the new Hungry Howie's where they just They just put all these big huge, you know, they redid the facade. Yeah, that's just raised at 20 feet.

But would that be the 30%?

Is that an architectural structure?

But what you're suggesting couldn't happen because that's— folks could only do 30% of the roof surface.

Because if we did 30%—

Just in the height here or in the whole square footage of that thing?

If you have the roof, only 30% of that area could be—

So 70% open.

So if you're taking pictures—

so if this is looking down on the roof, okay, so we're going to take—

it's only 30% that roof can have sometimes.

So if I want to put a little thing all the way across the front, am I going to get— am I going to exceed the 30%?

You would have to be 48 feet max.

That's—

so you couldn't do that unless it was within the solar impedance.

We're just talking about screening walls.

So we're just talking about this To hide the HVAC. Now, this— now, to your point, if they put a screen and it's still under the 48 feet, they could do a carpet or something as long as it's 48 feet at that point. So there will be a hard cap on the 48.

That's the question right there.

You want to say something?

Yeah, just a visual. So the Devon and those build those Those apartments that Terry was talking about over by Costco, how tall are those?

Those I do know.

The ones along 8th East have a height on them.

That was 45.

Like 55 or something.

45 in the end, and then we'll do a step back.

Next to Costco is like 55. Next to 8th East is 40. 45. And that's all I have, unless there's other discussion on Stage 3.

Okay.

Could we maybe just go through and have Jason list our findings that we're running forward with, just to make sure we're on the same page?

So can we do 48 and 8 feet and 30%? Yes.

That's what I'm—

And then if they—

if they—

if something else, they go to competitions for 10, 2 more feet.

How do you do that in the zone?

Say that last part.

If they want to petition this for 2 more feet or something, so it's 10.

Well, the issue would be it would be a citywide— it would be a C-2 wide petition. So if you change it to 10 feet, then anybody else—

Okay, so I'm talking about 48 and 8 and 30%, or the PD zone.

Yeah, the PD zone, but 8 doesn't allow them to put an elevator shaft up. An elevator shaft's taller than 8 feet to go up on the roof. So you're really reducing the height to 46.

Is that right?

Are you sure about that?

I don't know, depends on the building.

Depends on the building, depends on the elevators.

I mean, if it's a Midtown Village, it's probably going to be 10 foot easy.

I think most elevators are taller than 8 feet as you walk into them. And it's Class A office, so it's much higher.

But I guess as long as— so my understanding is we'll come back, probably we'll do this first, we'll come back in a few months in a study session, talk about PDs, talk about potential issues in the back. If, to your point, Dave, if they have 3 acres and they want to have a larger building, let's say a 60-foot-tall office building, then the PD would work. If they have less than 3 acres, the PD option is not an option.

Okay.

Unless we wanted to change the 3 acres.

No, I think, I think 3 acres would be good.

But I think on this— so anyway, so we're going to use the C-3 setback, so a modified version of the C-3 in the C-2, 100 feet.

Is everybody okay with 100?

Or you want more?

100 feet.

100 is good.

Okay.

Okay, so 100 feet, 35-foot max, 35-foot minimum setback from wherever you start, and the C-2 is And then we're going to keep the parking ratio at 4 per 1,000. We're going to, I guess, potentially figure out a way to do the no-pole sign zones in the districts by a new sign zone.

We can tackle that later.

Well, we can tackle— well, we can do that, or we revert back and just let it go 35, whatever the height of the sign is.

So Jason, with what we're doing So, what we're doing right now, if you're sitting on the city council, what should we know that, you know, hasn't come up? Is there anything you're saying, yeah, you guys should have thought about this, this will be a consequence?

So, the things in here, right here, these things will go away by eliminating the districts, right? So, you're going to not have the class route. The maximum height, we require a 3-story building. That's going to go away with the district. So the Subway sandwich shop can just redo it with a 1-story. And we've had several that wanted to do this. So that, that goes away. Basically, we're going to keep this.

So that's going to keep—

we're going to modify this.

The drive-through is going to be modified. So we're going to allow a drive-through now to come in front, as long as they have this 10-foot strip. So they could do a parking lot. So, Building back here, they could do the 10-foot parking lot, however they want to configure. So it's going to give them flexibility.

So if I may, just a standard elevator, just a width, height in an elevator is anywhere from, for a front opening door, anywhere from 7 feet 4 inches to 9 feet 8 inches. So to 10 is probably the more appropriate number. And I'm just, you know, if you split the difference, you're 8.5 feet.

Yeah. And you need something to pull it up. You need something above the height of it.

And to me, if we're trying to make it desirable for businesses, we would make it— we wouldn't worry about 2 feet. It's not going to make that much difference, right?

Amen.

Okay.

Amen.

You want to hallelujah too, or is amen enough?

I'll give you praise the Lord.

So I guess just to clarify, we've done this before. I want to know what number we want to bring forward because we've brought numbers before and then we've got half the council that said, I don't know anymore. So are we comfortable with 8 or are we comfortable with 10?

10.

I'm good with 10.

If it's—

yeah, if it's more— if it's better for the businesses, I would say let's do 10.

So we'll propose 10 and then say 30%.

35.

35.

30 is fine if limiting—

They said 35.

No, I said 30.

No, 32.7.

So I guess bottom line is rezoning it back to C-2 will take care of most of it because it eliminates the residential, eliminates all that stuff. And then we'll do these small parameters and then we'll come back at another time and talk about introduction of PVs and other parking.

So let's say, um, Larry H. Miller.

Okay, so if there's a strip mall in the front, then they do a PD zone in the back, maybe for twin homes or something?

Well, right now they couldn't, but that's another—

But that's a PD zone type thing.

Another discussion.

I'm good with that.

So right now, let's just use that as an example so we can make sure everybody's on the same page. So if they decide to just tear down that building and want to build a new building, they would need to do this because right now They have the sidewalk and they have the landscaping.

Correct.

They would put the 15 feet sidewalk and then they would have a 10-foot minimum and then they could build either parking lots or display a lot more automobiles and then they could put the building in the back. Or they could put the building up front, parking on the sides, in the back. So there's more flexibility. With this, this section right here, cross-section, would be constant. That would be required anywhere on State Street.

Correct.

Because it's beautified.

And then, so then the flexibility comes in the back. So they could either put it up front, or they could put parking in front, they could do a drive-through. So the biggest things, to be honest, over the last couple years, the biggest things I think are the drive-throughs, the people have had some angst with, and then the restrooms. So I think that's going to probably solve a lot of our— and of course the residential. But so those 3 are kind of the bigger things that we've seen over the last couple years.

So, if I may, in terms of timing, it would be your intent, Steve and Jason, once everybody's now agreed to the changes, to have this noticed by January 18th?

Correct.

In anticipation for the February 2nd Planning Commission meeting. At that point, the commission hears it, kind of locks it in, the oratorium is lifted February 9th and we're subject to the new standards.

And between the 18th and the meeting, we'll have a neighborhood meeting during that time.

Can the Planning Commission stop it, or is that formalities?

The Planning Commission is simply a recommendation body. Whether they vote for it or against it or have no vote at all, it still forwards to the city.

These standards will be blocked In other words, whether the Planning Commission recommends approval or denial.

So, John, sorry, I didn't hear from you.

Just asking what would happen with the—

Are you okay there?

Is that all right?

Yeah, go ahead and talk.

Just my overall comment. I think it's going in a really good direction from a resident standpoint.

I think it's going in the right direction.

I like the beautification part, like Debbie's part. I think everyone's kind of in agreement with that. For commercial developers, they need flexibility. And so I like, you know, you put building in the front, you put building in the back.

It can be one story, it could be, what, 4 stories?

You know, I think that's good. The one thing I guess I would say, the biggest angst, I think, I mean, if you look at the things that have blown up, so North Village District, my pet peeve project, and then maybe Meadow Gold.

is that the neighborhood meetings—

my opinion is neighborhood meetings occur so late in the process with the developer that they're entrenched financially in it before residents get any say. And I don't know if you can stop that, but, but I think that if there was some mechanism where they had some input before, before they've been Invest in $250,000 like BetterBuild, it might, it might be better.

That's kind of what this is because you're setting parameters that are acceptable for residents so that any developer that goes in, you know, will be acceptable because you've already set the parameters.

Right, and I think, yeah, I think we've minimized it, but I think, you know, my biggest pet peeve is that when I'm told there's nothing you can do about it, it's, you know, the application is accepted, or, and I'm not sure it's accepted. And so that's, you know, from a resident standpoint.

Yeah.

So, but I think this is going to send everything in the right direction. So I think there will be less— Like, Steve and Jason, this is, this is our ordinance though, right? So we're not required by state law to hold a meeting. And are we required to hold it at us? It's actually our own ordinance who requires the Neighborhood meeting for a rezone? For a rezone, I know. But what I'm asking is, are there state requirements that require some sort of neighborhood?

No, it depends on the application, like an annexation.

If it's within—

right now it's not a rezone.

The only thing—

not a rezone, but if it's within a specific distance or a residential area, there has to be a neighborhood. So there are some. Under state law?

Yeah.

So I'm just— the reason I'm asking is, is there any flexibility in just shifting that, that meeting date? That's why I asked if it was our requirement.

We have time to get the notice and have it probably last week or so. But you're asking—

Yes.

Can we require the developer to hold a meeting if it's within X number of days of application?

Or whatever.

That's what I mean. If it's our requirement, then why are we holding ourselves to a requirement that we can change to accommodate what we're talking about?

Well, to be quite honest, the requirement is that all the neighborhood meetings before making application, right? In this instance, we're making the application first because we have to notice it, and then we're going to have a neighborhood meeting.

But we're not talking about this instance right now. John's talking about it.

No, I'm talking about violating our orbits right now.

Right.

So I'm saying there is some flexibility on how we deal with that.

I see what you're saying.

Depending on what circumstances are there. So even though—

well, this is a moratorium though. This is a little different.

So even though we're not technically complying, we're doing the best that we can to make it all work. That's what I'm saying. Sometimes we do have that flexibility. Well, we allow them that flexibility just because of the parameters of the act.

Hey, can I give just a great example of what you guys Did. So this same O'Brien property, right, November— before the November, before everything happened, he had a Zoom call and showed us a whole different plan, right? From the very first traffic study that they did, the plan where they were trying to get the access on 400 West. Neighborhood not responsive at all, gave a lot of great feedback. He came out with a different plan. It wasn't accepted either, but it was better, you know what I'm saying? So to me, I think to John's point, that's it. You know, can we get some type of engagement before?

Typically we try. I mean, not all the developers come in and ask us months before, hey, we want to do this, here's our concept map. A lot of them do, but a lot of them will come in and say, we've spent these last 3 months, here's our plan. And then we tell them, well, by the way, you have to have a neighborhood meeting. We haven't as staff had any opportunity to talk about any of this stuff. So it just depends. We have developers that do multiple things and do it differently, and so we just try as staff react the best that we can as far as making them meet the requirements. But sometimes as staff, we don't— we haven't seen it either type of perspective they have.

But regardless, I think we're going to have way less conflict with this plan going forward than we would have had.

So yeah, to your point, Joe, we do our best to make sure Does that always work?

I think too, on the neighborhood meeting, I think the, the clarify adjacent.

Yeah.

Okay. I think we need to, you know, because that was a thing. What's adjacent? Was it across the street? I think we need to clarify that to say, this is what we mean by adjacent, and you live by it instead of saying yes or no, or this is my, my definition of this. So, I I think the adjacent thing is what we need to look at too on these.

I think that will go away, Councilman Spencer, because that was tied into the districts.

But I mean, the neighborhood meetings, are you talking about the adjacent?

Was if it was adjacent to residential, and the issue was all there, right?

Yeah, totally.

Can you rezone the street itself? To residential, I guess, at the same time. And then that commercial would butt up to— if it's butting up to a street, it would butt up to a residential zone.

Okay.

It seems like maybe you could help the cause a little bit as far as these meetings. If you got your set requirement, whatever it is, but then you make a recommendation to these developers as they come in, we recommend that you meet with neighbors first, you know, or soon, early in the process. Uh, we don't Require it, but we recommend it. Because if they go down the whole path and spend a whole bunch of money, then that's—

it's bad for them too, right?

And to that point, Mayor, one thing none of you ever see is how many times we tell a developer it's not a good idea, don't do what you're suggesting. So it doesn't even get to the neighborhood before we tell them there's no way you're going to get this, the council's not going to look at it. You weren't— if you want to go forward, that's at your own risk. We still will do it, but we try to cut all of those off.

To Ryan's point, we do a lot of discussion and negotiation before we just say don't even bother. I mean, we do it nicely, but sometimes we just have to be blunt. It doesn't mean they don't— can't have that opportunity. Anybody on that topic?

That's—

are you good as far as you got everything wrapped up? Any other comments before we move on?

In your inauguration, you said, I want to see a time when the citizens, the staff, and the council are aligned. And I think in our first 2 hours, whatever it's been, we've hit that on this issue. And while we have 2 of 100,000 citizens here, they were 2 of the most vocal on a pretty hot issue.

Right.

And so I think you represent much more than I think they represent more than an insignificant number. Forgive me for using— Statistics.

Low math.

I think they represent more than an insignificant reference to our citizens.

Yeah.

And I think our staff, who frankly did exactly what the council asked them to 5 or 6 years ago, quickly got on board and said, okay, what does the current city council want? What do our citizens want? And this is how we can make it happen. And so I think a round of applause for all 3 of those groups, and that, that I think was part of your mission, right, if I'm reading that right.

Absolutely.

So congrats to our, our citizens, to our staff, and of course to us who deserve a lot of applause.

Can I say something too?

Go ahead, Jeff.

If we ever play Pictionary, can I be on Ryan's team?

Yeah, he's good.

It'll never look like this.

Sorry.

Thanks, Jeff.

I'll tell my wife.

Would you sign that for me?

And I'd like to have that on the wall.

If it's okay with you, Mayor, I would like the 3 of us to get together and actually put this in writing, what you've given to us today. And I would like to send it out like Monday to all of you to make sure that you're on board and we've interpreted everything correctly, if that's all right.

Okay. Okay.

And I think we've talked that through pretty good, but as you go through it, whatever you send out to us, yeah, essentially our goal is for it to be ironclad, you know, no workarounds, no nothing, you know.

And so I want you to just verify that for us.

And I would also say, usually get those white and black postcards, and I realize they're small, but I think if we really want to make sure this— I'd be willing to make sure it's brighter, a little You know, nicer in a sense. Well, I think this is important because this is a response to campaigning, going door to door, and I think I think it just needs to be a little brighter. You know, revisions to safety.

Let's just make sure.

No, but really, that's what we did, right? That's what happened with the old house.

Yeah, and I think that's follow through. little white and black thing that gets tossed. I was just going to say that if it's a follow-up to the open houses and let residents understand this is in response to all the input, it's to what you did, then what you showed up, a little bit more engaged, I think, to recognize like, oh, what did they learn from our comments?

Yeah, no, I think we can make it really—

and that's, that's probably appropriate, something more than just to residents.

I think we can make it a really positive PR thing that ties into all the things we're talking about. So I, I'd like to have a little bit of input as far as what that postcard opener looks like.

Sure.

And that'd be at the rec center like you did before?

Well, I mean, no, so we want to stream it.

We want people to be able to have good audio and visual for sure.

And the city council chambers would be over by it, centrally located. People know where that is.

So you ever have a satellite location?

What about the library hall?

We could do across the hall and we could do something that's closed.

We just got to be able to give the same information.

I'm worried about the time to get this done because in general it's showing a week.

Yeah, can you modify this one?

We've got the city council chairs and And we can help you a lot with the mailing as far as just what you're doing all through the campaign.

So we don't want to get them done again fast. No, no, we'll take your contacts because I know that's a concern, or has been a concern.

Yeah, I mean, part of it is there's a review schedule too, right?

How quickly we get feedback back, hey, change this, you know.

Like that, right? I mean, that, that's generally— we kind of— that'll slow things up. So, so we just have to be quick. We have to be quick about that, get it set. We'll have Pete start working on it Monday.

So, uh, first thing—

So we'd have to have it mailed out probably by Thursday or Friday just to make sure. Yeah, I'll be there on the 31st, 1st.

Yeah, by the time we get the meeting.

Yeah.

And then we'd have the notice for the 2nd. So it's got to be in the—

it's going to be close.

So we'll make that a priority to get that out by Thursday or Friday.

Yep. Appreciate it.

All right, anything else? Let's move on. We've got about 45 minutes for this last part. This is density, residential, past, present, future. And just education on the history of how we wound up here.

Well, in a nutshell, Jason, I can jump in.

Go for it.

Each project was approved by the city council that's on these boards. So at the time, they were done under the current code and were approved in that manner. So I'll be quiet now while you go.

How about you're going to—

So I'm not sure what, uh, information you want, really, other than the fact that this was acquired in 1994. See, these are not necessarily PDs, but different projects that have come in over time. So on 8th East, there's a lot of smaller, you know, 8-plexes or things like that that have been There's lots of fourplexes.

I mean, you drive through the city, you know where it is.

This one represents what's happened in the last 10 years. We've already talked about that, but there is some— obviously the student housing zone on the west side of I-15, but that's kind of zoned purposely back in 2000, actually, for the Parkway crossing. It's kind of a Wolverine crossing, and then some other zones. But all these on State Street, you look at all the high-density projects, they're typically on some type of corridor. So 12th West, on Boulevard, State Street, or some— 12th West and Interstate Highway. All of them, you look at the— this, for example, here's Center Street, here's State Street. So you can see in the last 10 years there has been no— other than the option 1 pending— no high-density housing in that, as far as the PD goes.

I will point out that's where most of the pre-existing mayor, city council, all that—

is that right?

No?

What are you trying to say?

I'm not trying to say that.

But the majority of— to Ryan's point as well, is that all of the PDs were something that developers came in, got the 3 acres, came in and negotiated with the council. So all of these went through that negotiation process. So that's That's kind of where we are.

I'm sorry, so what's the— what were the light blue?

Is it a bigger—

I see the dark blue.

What are the light blue ones?

The gray?

Is that gray?

So these are the 2.

That's the Meadowbrook property and that's the other one, the 16th. So that's the future.

So the gray are the pending.

Oh, but I guess I need the lighter blue.

Isn't there a lighter blue?

Am I saying that wrong? There's lots of dark blues.

So these are out there on the other map.

Oh, am I seeing words?

Okay.

Yeah, sorry.

They're word bubbles, is that what they are?

Okay.

Those are just descriptions of each PDU and where they're adopted.

So as far as density going back, just a quick history, and you know, the '60s, '70s, there was a lot of duplexes, a lot of fourplexes. If you look around the Catholic Church area, there's a lot of fourplexes. If you look around some other areas, there's pods throughout. That used to be a land use that they allowed back in the, I think, In the early 2000s, they stopped doing that and converted more to PRDs. So there's a lot of PRDs. Evergreen East, on the east side of the City Center Park, that's along there. There's across from Ticonderoga or Mountain View High School, there's some PRDs that have been developed under a different zone. It used to be R-75 or R-8 or R-6. They used to allow PRDs in any residential zone. Probably about 10 years ago, 10 years ago, we changed it to require them to go to council and actually created its own zone. So now there's a PRD zone. So any rezoning of a PRD has to— or any project has to come to council to get rezoned first.

So that's—

that was more—

So high-density housing, based on our discussion today, it would be limited to whatever future discussion we have with the PRD zone. So, you know, any high-density housing other than a PRD Which is still a rezone. We're going to be looking at more of single-family, whether they're smaller lots or bigger lots, whatever the boundary line zone is, is what we're going to see. Across from Timpanogs High School, the field that's owned by the LDS Church, we'll be coming through this month for a— I think it's 23 lots, about an 8,500 square foot lot average. So they'll be just building single-family lots similar to what you see north of Do you know the developer on that?

I don't have the name.

It's not any of the—

Not Agri?

So they're going to be, you know, $500,000 to $600,000 to $700,000 homes. So that's kind of where we are. And then we've got, like I said earlier, there's going to be a couple PRD proposals that come to you. They're going to be smaller lots, but they're going to be single-family homes.

So can I just get some clarification there? Single-family homes, um, not like a number of twin homes owned by the same developer that he's renting out?

So the 2 that are proposed, and they can always change their mind, is sell— for-sale units that would be its own standalone single-family.

That's what they're—

not, not twin homes, although Well, that is an option. And what we've seen in the last 10 years, we don't show these on this map, but the majority of the PRDs that have come in in the past, like Peach Haven on West Center Street, are very nice twin homes. By Templeton Oaks— or not Templeton Oaks, but the Warren Community Hospital, there's a lot of twin homes that are, you know, very well done, red brick and different things like that.

The ones on 8th East?

That's typically what we've seen in the past, and that's what typically they've done. It's more in line with the older community, not necessarily restricted to 55 and older, but that's who we've seen moving into those because they're downsizing, they have the funds to do it, or the means to do it. It's still an expensive home, but they can downsize.

So what about the Jones homes?

So Jones are going to be single-family homes. It's already been approved.

I know they were doing some moving some dirt, so I don't know.

So they decided to do all the improvements before they actually recorded. So they don't have to pay a bond. So typically a developer, if he wants to come in and record his plat, somebody's vested in the lots and whatever, we require them to post a bond for all the improvements. There is an option for them to do all the improvements at their own risk. We still do all the inspections. Once that's done and passed out, then they record the plat and then they can start building homes on the lots.

And that's zoned?

R-8. R-8, okay.

So where is that property?

What's That's down by Cherry Hill Park.

Oh, the place we—

yeah. So the big house, big house has been demolished. If you've driven by it, it's been flattened.

And do we know how the roads are going to go?

There'll be public streets connecting into the—

because it goes through and—

but then go by the school, go by the school, and then by the south end of the park.

Yeah, it has a couple entrances.

That'll be there as well.

Because I think that's definitely win when we turned it down how many years ago, and the Planning Commission voted yes. So I think that's a win for Ormond on 26 homes or whatever.

Yeah, but you've taken credit for it 6 times.

It's been 10.

Oh, 10.

Okay.

And then Baxter Gardens, that one's under construction, but that's more twin homes?

Those are single-family.

And there's—

I think there's 1 or 2 twins, and then the rest—

The rest are single?

Okay.

I think.

Where's that?

That's off of 1600 North and—

isn't that just right off there?

It's right south of Northridge Elementary.

No, they've been moving dirt.

They've got the cul-de-sac.

Yeah, it's attractive. It's a good-looking development.

So I guess to go forward to the mayor and city council, just to say, as far as density Things going forward, we're going to obviously have single-family homes. We'll potentially have people ask for PRDs, which could be twin homes. Could be— there's townhome as an option as well, but it has to be approved by the council. And the second story is limited to 70%. So there are some parameters already built in. It's a Phase 2 canned ordinance. If the city council wants to approve it, they can, but there's no negotiation with it. This is the standards. If you want to build it, this is what you do. And the council can say yes or no based on the concept plan and elevations. Now, I am pretty encouraged with the option of having— coming back and maybe having a discussion with PD zones on State. Maybe there's a property that you're comfortable with some mixed-use high-density housing. That's another— that's another negotiation on another day, but that's the only other option we have other than single-family and PRDs is potentially PDs.

All right, sounds good. As far as on your agenda here too, you're going to talk about access apartments. And the issue with access apartments that we're kind of wrestling is that just on so many levels—

We're going to blame that on the council as well.

It seems to be just kind of a mess. And so I'm just curious, I guess, how we got there and how we keep from getting there ever again.

So, so we weren't there when we had the plan. The train runs right through here. This is the— The train runs right through there. We had Wolverine Crossing, which was Parkway Crossing at the time. This was supposed to be all Parkway Crossing. They had some financial issues in 2005. They ended up selling the yellow and the orange piece off. They finished their development, changed it to Wolverine Crossing. But this whole thing was part of the student housing. At the time the train came in, this was UVU's property here, and then this piece was put into a transit kind of hub where we were hoping to have some mix of people that actually lived there without a car use the train, use the bus, things like that. When the developers came in, we had some negotiation. Ryan was the one that Initial concept plan, we proposed the ordinance, it was approved by the council.

What year was this?

That was probably 7, 8 years ago.

Or longer.

But we used similar standards than what was there. So we basically put the standard on 0.65 per bed is what the standard was, because we were hoping that we would get some— and basically the long The discussions with developers and looking throughout the country is that if you're next to a transit station, typically people have a mix of alternate modes, right? What we found in hindsight is that everybody brings their car. So what we thought was a good plan has turned out in the end not to be.

And they were approved at 0.66, weren't they?

So what we've got pending now, which will go to the City Planning Commission— actually, it's going to the Planning Commission. This portion that has not been developed back to a 1-stall per bed. So instead of the 0.65 or 0.8, it's going to be 1. So obviously we still deal with this issue. I don't know if anybody knows, but UVU has leased them 200 parking stalls to help compensate for the access— or Axis. Axis is working with these 2 properties to try to buy them and build some other type of parking. Parking, whether it's a structure or not. UTA is considering potentially building a parking structure there, maybe working with these developers to pool some money. There's also a state program that the council may be looking at with the applicant in a few months.

So how are you incentivizing them to do that, to move away from the 1.66 that was approved and make it so much better?

If I may, their residents are forcing them to do that.

Okay.

Because I've talked to some of them as students and said, hey, I can't get a place to park, I'm going to move out of here. That's why they went to Val Peterson, the vice president of this area at UVU, and said, we've got to rent your space. And it's really ideal for UVU to rent it because they want it basically at night.

Yeah.

And UVU students needed in the day, so they're selling parking passes, if you will, to the access apartments. Because when I rent an apartment, I also want a place to park my car. And they guessed wrong on that. And the city council at that time approved it. I think it's all— it was before David and I were on, so it's been pre-8 years. And frankly, we might have been talked into it too, because they sounded, hey, this is a This is a TOD deal. We're going to get a lot of people who are going to commute to Salt Lake and they don't need a car. But in Utah, we have the right to own a vehicle and park it near our home.

Amen.

And so these guys, these students, well, 6 cars per individual.

Oh, is he down to 6 now?

Yeah.

So we're going to force David to build a parking garage.

Or go underneath.

Access went to Stephen and to UVU and said, this isn't fair. And we said, look, you sold it based on what you thought your residential residents would want.

Yeah.

They clearly want something different. So you can build a parking garage that was very expensive per stall, as you know, right?

Right.

Surface parking's cheap. Even if they have to buy that land and put surface parking, it's cheap. But Access You have a responsibility to fix your problem.

Yeah, they're going to work on it.

And I think UVU was very kind to them to lease them price property because supply and demand, they could have charged a lot for that parking, but they charged the same thing to them that they charged the students, which is $135 a year or so. So they could have said, yeah, we'll sell you— we'll rent you these at whatever, right, until you fix your problem. And I think Steve worked closely with UVU and with Access, is my understanding. I wasn't involved on the UVU hat other than hearing about it. So they have a problem. Yeah, they asked for it and received it, but it's still their problem if their 0.66 was a wrong guess. And I think Wolverine's more at 0.8, aren't they?

They're 0.65.

0.65, so not— they're terrible too.

This one's actually 0.62. Actually Wolverine, when they built it, they actually built it more perfect than UVU.

More parking than was required, not more parking than was needed.

Well, right now they have more parking than they need.

Oh, good.

But there has been more than required.

Okay.

So, so just to, just to point it out there, as a, from a planning perspective, this type of project would work and has worked in other communities. Unfortunately, to Tom's point, in Utah, we're not really quite there yet. If you're downtown Salt Lake, there are some projects that they don't require any Parking because you're right on tracks and they still themselves have parking issues.

And you've got an entire walkable area in your downtown.

So from a planning perspective, I mean, we'll take some of the blame, but, you know, the developers came in and convinced the council, the council agreed, and so there is some issues. But I think going forward, from our point of view, like we're doing with University Downs, we're not going to be sucked into the 0.65 or some type of share. It's going to be one 1-to-1 ratios, and that's how we proceed.

Okay.

Yeah, I did.

And so it sounds like you got a path out of it.

Are there—

are the neighbors in the neighborhood—

is that—

I mean, if this all gets fixed, I mean, that's what the big problem is.

There's several hundred cars.

So there is a parking permit system there. They're considering doing one over here, but I think access eventually, hopefully sooner than later, will solve their problem by buying the properties to the east. Or combining with UTA in order to have a shared parking structure.

A couple months ago, Mayor, we had a picture of a guy who got beat up because he told some guy to move. Oh, maybe you weren't at that meeting, but you might have heard of it.

But in fairness to KFIJ, we still do have a parking problem in the Springbrook area because it's not a— it's not an access to parking much. It's a convenience issue.

Right.

And so that's why the parking permit program is being recommended in that area, so that we can eliminate that convenience aspect and literally force them to park in the lot that's been available. So it still is a concern until we get that permit, and the neighbors don't necessarily like that permit program. So we're in kind of a a hard spot. I think if we have the permit program, we address the convenience issue and force people to park in different lots, right? But it does inconvenience the neighbors, and several are frustrated that they're gonna have to do that.

Yes.

So just, you know, I have a question.

Do you know if the parking's included in the rent?

Because that's—

it's not.

It's not.

It's an add-on.

Okay. Sometimes that's been a problem though.

So in the districts themselves, we did require So that's something we'll go over as well.

So of course, but there's no residence.

So the one next to UVU on the other side, Greenlawn Campus Drive, that's built into the agreement so they cannot charge separately.

So that's what their PDs on the stage—

so going forward, Mayor, you're considering more PDs on stage 2, that would definitely be something to be included that they can't charge extra for. Parking, or excluded parking, park somewhere else.

Right.

And that is a big issue with people trying to live in apartments, is when they go in, it's like $800, and before you know it, it's like $1,200 because they add all these different things on.

So, just so you know, the Axis Apartments, there's people that own Axis on this property as well. So, when we bring that forward, they may have some, obviously, some things to say. 0.65 to 1.

Yeah, I think you definitely need that. I mean, it just makes sense. We're in a different environment than the places where they do 0.6.

One of the things the Access owners have brought up, and they've met with Councilman Spencer, but we've asked him to reach out to all of you, there's a state program called an HTRZ. It functions like a tax increment finance district, like an REA, and what it does is it allows a development within a certain distance of the train station to capture some of their future property tax and use it towards parking. And they want to use that as a tool to build their next phase out, but also fix the access problem with possibly a combined parking garage with UTA. So it's a tool the state's created that we could possibly take advantage of to help solve that solution. But it's something that you'll obviously have to learn more about, and they may be reaching out to you just so you're aware.

And there are some— I think there are some density requirements tied into that program, isn't there?

Correct. It is created and incentivized to basically maximize density within, I think, a quarter mile of a train station, but to create that park. Okay.

So does it only have the city Component, or does it have a school district?

It does have a school district component, and right now in the state law, the school district is required to participate, but it doesn't specify at what amount. So the reality is the school district can participate at 1%. So as of a couple months ago, this has not been done anywhere in the state yet.

So interestingly, you wouldn't be the decision maker in this. It would be the state of Utah. a specific board set up by the Governor's Office of Economic Development. Now they call it GOEO. And they actually statutorily have made up a board. And if the board were to approve it, then they could compel taxing jurisdictions to participate. The question is at what level, right?

Well, it's all going to be driven on how much you need and the length of time.

So, I mean, a long-term From the school district, it's not going to give them the money they're going to need for—

to do what they need to do.

Right, and that's a big problem. I think the legislature realizes that they're going to be reviewing it, from what I understand. But I think a simple way to look at it is essentially the developer would get a coupon off of their future property taxes to help pay for more parking. It's kind of a simple term.

The other thing we've done in this area Several years ago, we submitted a request to the Mountainland Association of Governments for some help with MAG money, and we got money for— well, I guess it was UTA— for a structure. That FrontRunner station is actually quite busy. In fact, it's one of the busiest in the network.

Yeah.

And so we put together a proposal, and UTA was on board, Orem was on board. UBU, not so much. And so there's going to be an opportunity for us in the future potentially to make a similar request because of the success of that station. Hopefully we can get all 3 parties involved because if we collectively can go to MAG and make that request, it's much better than if we just go on our own.

So that would be a structured partnership.

And we could bring a developer in as a partner and build a number of levels for them as well.

Correct.

To help address the issue.

Gotcha. Correct.

So they might have offices above or whatever.

So they did a similar project in Draper by their eBay campus in, uh, next to their Draper station where they, by way of a public-private partnership, eBay uses it and continues He's also eligible to use it as his next door solution.

So it sounds like, from what you're saying, we've learned a lot of things over the years. I mean, this would be one that we should only have one per room, you know, if we do anything like this again.

And so going forward, we—

It's per bed, isn't it?

Yeah, you can have more than one.

But the point being is we've learned a We lot of learned things. a lot of things that should make— help solve some of these problems going forward. Are there any future BOMs that are all approved and that we should know about going forward, or do you think we're pretty much—

we are where we are?

So there's no active old application PDs other than the 2 on State Street that we have, and that are PDs for the 2 projects that are pending. There's no other active or in limbo project.

I mean, there is university place that is—

So that's an active project, right?

It's already been approved.

But there's nothing that has been approved and now are just waiting for some timing. Everything has either been developed or there's nothing out there. There was one next to— I don't have to show it, but next to, what's it called, the Steel Properties, which is the triangle piece.

Oh, next to UVU by the Institute building.

By the Institute building. There's 2 buildings on 8th Avenue. Across the street, there was a property they wanted to do high-density housing. They had an application in. They basically— their application a couple years ago, as part of this whole process, we basically brought an ordinance that applications expire after a year. So we basically processed that through, sent them a notification because it had been going on for several years, sent them a notification that their project would expire. Last year, actually. And so they're officially expired, so there's no pending PDs out there.

Okay, let me ask you one question because it's along these lines. As far as, um, the current apartments in University Place, uh, the Access Apartments, different groups, there's been a lot of talk about their parking is infringing on Costco's parking lot. I'm just curious from your perspective Because Costco is one of the highest sales tax revenue generators in our city, so it would be a bad thing for us to have any issues with it. I just, I'm curious if we're having conversations with Costco and University Mall to make sure that's not an issue.

So University Mall actually owns the ground Costco comes on, and if you look at the property, so you have Costco's physical property in front of the building and then to the south, it was usually That's not part of Costco's property or the leased space, so when we're having the spillover from those, we're actually talking about the mall's property itself. There obviously might be some spillover into the actual Costco parking lot, but they—

yeah, I think I understand that Costco's renewing their Costco one through the end of the year.

I think there's a good negotiation or a good relationship between the two.

To your point there, I think most people assume That was Costco parking even when it wasn't. So they had overbuilt Costco parking. This— and they do not have the legal rights to all the parking that in my mind was Costco parking.

Okay.

So, but it was a lot of parking by the gas station.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, a lot of resident parking.

And you know Costco's looking at moving their gas station. Yeah, because they're using up that parking to get the line, because people will wait for an hour to say We can teach them some economic classes, but I don't think that's the right time.

So down the rabbit hole, they're actually going to expand in place.

Oh, are they?

Eventually they expand, they'll add another 4 pumps to the west, and then they'll— right now they're— I don't know why they're not doing it, probably because it's so busy, but they've actually got a plan that was approved. It's like administratively into that.

The light from those But I laughed because this is the second plan they've submitted. There was one. So it could change.

Thomas wanted that south.

Yeah.

Sandy has 3.

So Jason, I don't— Costco's not probably thrilled with the high density because I know Costco told Woodbury no high density along 8 South.

So there is, yeah, I mean Costco plays a big part in their negotiation with their leases. And so you can see that they don't have any high density.

Housing.

Or will they have housing on the inside. So they do carry a big card, and it sounds like they're comfortable. A few years ago, this is probably before many of your time, Costco had an issue with their reefers in the back, with their refrigerator trailers coming on at night. And so we actually made an ordinance that the people within Aspen and stuff couldn't complain about the noises within the mall itself because they're part of the issue. Part of the overall development. So Costco specifically came to the mall and said, we can't have complaints about noise. And so council, we wrote a thing, and Steve helped us develop that, that basically says you are moving into the Aston or others within the mall, you agree that you are part of the mixed-use development, therefore you really can't complain about any noise associated with that. So Costco has been proactive in making sure that there's they're not going to go out and have complaints with people from Yastin complaining about the refrigerator trucks and things like that. So over time, Costco has been part of making sure that they're kind of protected on what they want to see. So they're not going to have anything—

I don't think it's a perfect marriage.

I think it's a marriage, but it's a little rocky.

Well, I spend all my money at Costco.

Doesn't that describe all marriages, Terry? Doesn't that describe all marriages, Terry?

I've got a question about the mall and the PD zone and the neighborhood just north that they're buying up all the homes. They're still zoned residential. So do we know what the mall's plan is? Because the neighbors would like to know, and I'd like to know, because they're going to have to come to us and say, do we take residential into the PD zone or don't we? So, there's not an appetite, at least for me, to do that. So, do we know what their plan is?

I don't know what their plan is on that edge other than they are trying to buy the ones that are very next to the edge. The one lady that owns the field, they have first right on her home. And there's a couple homes, there's 2 that they've torn down, and then there's a couple around the corner that they want to expand.

And they're still trying to move the entrance over?

I know that they're updating their overall master plan. I think they want to present that to you in the future, but I think they're still buttoning some things up.

So UDOT is the one that wants to move the light?

No, it's not the mall.

The mall's actually not thrilled about it necessarily, but it does lengthen the light between there and University Parkway. So UDOT is the one that wants to do it.

Because, you know, the expense of the PD, I mean, it's just keeps encroaching. It's like, you know, what is the best option? But what are they going to do for the neighborhood? You know, because it's going to be mall right there in the neighborhood now. And then, you know, so I just hopefully we'll see the plan because—

Yeah. And I've seen the plan, but it's not public record yet. So I can't share it in this meeting because I'd be violating that confidentiality. What I think I can say is I think this may be a good thing because it will draw a line in the sand. Right now there's not really a barrier, right? Final barrier would be that masonry fence, landscape buffer, and they're done infiltrating into the neighborhood.

That's still—

that's what you need is the line in the sand, really, so people know what's going on with that area.

And I think that expectation needs to be set.

Yeah, because I mean, I don't have an appetite right now. And, you know, I mean, I'm thankful that we have them all, but—

And any rezone is obviously subject to council approval, right? The council can approve it or they can deny it. So it's still legislative action. It's really in the council's court to say yes or no. So it's not something they come in and have to do. It's a negotiation.

That's why you want to say, hey, you need to do And I talked to Taylor Whitman and I said, you need to go meet with the neighborhood. And they sent stinking donuts or something, or muffins.

I'm like, that's not what I was talking about.

Cupcakes.

Yeah, cupcakes. I said, that's not— okay, maybe that's a start, but they need those cupcakes. They need to see the plan, which I think hopefully they have that.

So that's kind of a question I have tying into that. So these PV zones we're allowing these PD zones to happen under certain parameters, um, but it seems like we're also allowing them to expand those, to request annexation into their PD zone.

So right now there is no prohibition from expanding the PD zone.

Because Sienna Villas is a— I'm not the neighbor, but that's a good example of that, right?

So right now we haven't looked at into the ordinance the fact that you can't expand.

Perhaps you can't have a new PD, but you could expand an existing PD.

But again, that's up to the council. So Sienna Villas, for example, realized that they weren't going to get any expansion and withdrew their application.

I mean, and to me that would be better to put that line in the sand because Sienna Villas bought that property. They, you know, invested in those 2 homes with the anticipation of expanding. Well, if they know that that's not an option, they won't spend their money and to needlessly not get their zone changed.

Well, I mean, and to me, I mean, whether you expand the BDD zone or not, it really comes down to does it potentially destroy the neighborhood? And to the extent it does, that's where the line in the sand should be. Otherwise, if they're just going to the west or north or whatever, there's nothing there, then that's kind of a different story, right?

I think that's a really good point I was going to say. If there's a commercial entity involved, As well, and it benefits the commercial dispatch and being able to have more tools in your toolbox.

So, where are we at with the 4th South Main?

Before we go there, have we finished this? What's up here?

I—

can I just bring up one addition before we go to another new one? Potential, which you refer to as bomb there. I think we always need to be mindful that we've been using and their continued growth and development. And to this point, they have not necessarily adopted a student housing mindset, but that was representative of President Holland, who was there previously. I think that is a conversation we need to continue to have with UVU to reinforce to them that Obviously, that whole area in and around campus has been a spot for development of student housing. Logically, would be a spot for future development of student housing, and that became obviously a very big pressure point a number of years ago. So obviously, all of you continue to have relationships with UBU when those conversations. When those conversations come up, I think it's incumbent on you and all of us to suggest that, you know what, the City Council remains focused in on allowing UVU to grow and develop.

Is that in development stock or student housing?

And that's the issue, is it's not property under necessarily our discretion to the same degree as the rest of the city.

I mean, if the state owns it, then—

So if all of a sudden they were to pivot and say we are going to become more student housing minded, our ability to affect that is limited.

Understood?

Good.

Yeah, that's a whole other conversation, but I mean, UVU's— I've been on several boards at UVU. UVU is a great school, but I don't think we've ever had a conversation about where Where is UB going? I mean, I was, you know, when I was going to school a million years ago, BYU, they had about 28,000 students. Now they've got like 32,000. In the middle of that, UB's gone from nothing to 40,000 students. So I just think there needs to be a conversation. What is the plan? What does this look like? How does this impact the world?

And they do have, in fact, they're in the process, I'm not sure if it's complete yet, of updating their overall master plan.

They presented it to us a handful of years ago, trying to get—

when President Holland was the president.

Yeah.

Now they have an update, I understand. Or they're working on an update.

So, did we finish this? The Commons Point? So, just on the 4 south of Main, that property, they had quite a few neighbors call and they wanted us to put them in the PD zone, which—

So, what they want to do is rezone to PD. Midtown Village, but only made it parking or parking only. Proper, proper, proper development agreement would stipulate that they cannot have items in the house, but strictly be parking. And only surface parking, that's surface parking for the, for the, basically the tenants of the restaurants or the working staff at restaurants could park there and then leave that surface parking for the clients to come into the restaurant. That's what they're wanting.

So, still taking residential into a PD.

So, do they have—

Yeah.

Yeah, it is. But, do they have a, uh, I mean, because I live around the corner from there, and when I saw that whole new building going up, I know it's approved years ago, but I saw, when I go over to that, looking down Village, the restaurants, whatever, there's nowhere to park. And so, is there some additional parking Some magic glacier, that entire project that's going on.

So there's 2 levels of underground parking underneath that building, only for not only that building but under the main 2 main buildings. There's 2 levels.

Okay, so is there adequate parking for—

It meets the ordinance, yes.

What was the number on that?

Uh, I think what was never intended was having successful restaurants that are You might afford the restaurants on the edge of that building, right?

So also the school that's there, because the school does not hit the commercial property tax.

What school?

What school during the day those kids go for? There's 50 of them, right, that go and park all day long to take classes? So, and that's something that in the mixed use, there's no direction on the commercial leases potential there. So you don't know what the parking's—

There would be, right? Is some of what we're grappling with here too convenience versus—

I don't think so.

Restaurants are right by there.

No, but I mean, are they— the current structure that's there, is that generally well parked?

Yeah, I mean, I went to the open house, the neighborhood meeting, to talk about parking.

There was nowhere to park to go to the neighborhood meeting.

It's just crazy.

Yeah, if you've been to the best restaurants, I think, in town, I mean, you're waiting an hour to get in.

Which one's that?

I'm not sure of the religion, Asado.

But Asado is yummy here too. They're suffering from very good—

yeah, suffering from success, right?

Yeah.

Which does kind of make the point that there could be more high-quality restaurants on State Street because there's definitely demand wherever they put them.

Was there already Burger King and McDonald's?

What more did you want?

I'm never going out to dinner.

So they are making an application probably in the next week or two, so it'll be February, maybe 1st of March before it gets to the council for decision.

But it sounds like At least kind of stated that it's not a non-starter potentially.

It's a what?

A non-starter.

Putting parking there?

I'm okay with employees having a place to park.

You're okay with taking a residential piece of property?

What residential do you think will be built on that piece of ground?

I don't know.

I mean, but no one's going to be—

we're setting the precedent.

It's going to be an R-8 picket fence.

Just down the road from it. I don't know, wonderful retirement.

Can you pull a twin home?

It's across the street from the daycare. You know that well.

So they don't—

oh, the daycare.

Okay, so they don't have an acre and a half, so they couldn't do a PRD. It would have to be either a single family or something else.

But if they get her other property— that's because they don't have her other property, right?

Well, that's the other thing is the neighbors—

it's dead in the water, assuming that they're trying to, you know, Can you pull—

can you pull that up? Do you have the ability to pull it up?

No, I don't have access to the internet.

You can copy from my desk right now.

He does have access to the internet as well as the desk, right?

The problem is it's the second block of businesses.

It's just clicking, right?

Got Interstate Street, Warren Boulevard block.

Already up.

That's Midtown Village, and then they're taking another block within Advance, another block into And what's the other piece they want to acquire?

Well, so the neighborhood's here.

There is a potential to buy that, or there was a potential to buy the back, but they wanted to do surface parking.

And then are those 4-plexes south of it, or—

So these are twins.

I think they're twins.

They're not your single-family homes. And the twin homes are down in this area, so you got a field.

How old is that picture? Is that field still there? I don't notice it as I drive by it being a field, so sorry.

Yeah, but that's a great point.

I don't know what the rules are.

I'm not going in.

So that becomes pretty senior.

Yeah, they're from like 7 and 3.

Yeah, so they're going building these new apartments that they're putting in right now.

They will have enough parking. Because they're going down.

They're not going down. They're going to have surface parking.

So they'll finish this parking coming down, and then there'll be parking here with an access here.

They're actually putting a turn lane here.

They're putting what there?

Turn lane.

Turn lane. Thank you.

So we'll have access here, surface parking here, and overall underground and surface.

That's where the new building is, right?

On the—

in the left dirt.

It'll be here, and then there'll be parking Jason says, I want to have an underground connection like Northgate does to an underground garage.

That's all your height issue on mobile parking.

Yeah, that'd be awesome.

That's what I don't understand is, I mean, if there is underground parking, that makes sense, but if there's not underground parking, is there additional parking for that?

So that would count into the overall parking, including underground parking.

Underground at surface meets the requirements, is what I'm saying.

So from your perspective, does that really meet the requirement? Because it seems like it's jam-packed over there all the time.

I just don't know whether they're going to be fined.

The ordinance could be low, but it's definitely much like we were just talking about on Geneva Road, right?

It meets the ordinance, but it is like the 0.661.

They also have an agreement with Pep Boys that they're allowed to park in part of their parking lot. I, I've always been able to find a space when I go to the restaurants there. They limit the amount of parking time for retail. So I'm not sure where the spillover is going, if there is spillover. There's a few cars on State Street, but a lot of it's right here for safety.

So Hoi Salon used to be in Midtown 360. They are leaving it because of the parking issue, and they are— they purchased their own building. Poise Salon. They purchased the old Society Bicycle Building because they wanted to have control of their own parking.

That's right across the street.

Right from Medical, yeah. They were very frustrated with Midtown to succeed as a business.

That's where my question is. If there's not a— I mean, from what we were talking about, I thought we were putting underground parking underneath the next phase, but that next phase is— that's a lot of parking right there. I don't know where it's going to go.

So we're talking about protecting the residents. That little house that, you know, doesn't matter because it's right next to that lot, that was my Sunday school teacher when I moved back to Utah in the 5th grade. She's in her 90s. And you know what? What a disturbing thing for her to keep hearing all these rumors of a high-density apartment complex going in next to her house.

You know, she should have—

she should be entitled to live in peace.

Her Her husband died 40 years ago, 50 years ago.

She's living by herself. I haven't talked to her since all this. I need to go visit her. That's, that's the kind of stuff that—

So right now it's all residential. And to Tom's point, I don't think we're going to see single-family. So you're going to be, you're going to be every now and then going to have some request to change it to something.

So why not? I mean, if Tippin Oaks, that field by Tippin, I mean, I recognize it, but it's just just to block off one of the other busiest— 1600 North, right?

You're not going to have access here, here, and you're going to have access right there. It's the only thing the city's going to allow access. So you're not going to have typical frontage.

You won't go right out onto Orvolver?

No, there'll be no access on Orvolver. The only access they'll have is this flag lot. So we have one here and a flag lot here. We have one access there as well.

So I guess you just wait until—

In honor of Brent Sumner's 12 years, He hated 4 south traffic, right? If you were here, that's crazy.

So another option is to wait. I mean, this council does not have to do it. All I'm saying is eventually you're going to hear another application.

So here's the question. So I'd like to say I went to the neighborhood meeting. The guy's doing all this solar, $2 million worth of solar on top of the carport. So why is he not instead taking that corner and going down parking garage? Isn't it the same amount? I mean, is it a lot more than the 2 points?

Well, it's about $20,000 to $30,000 per stall to go down.

It's probably now $35,000.

How many stalls does he have with the 2 buildings?

I'm not sure.

But it might go down.

He could add a 2nd building.

So across the street, the yellow, nice yellow building, I've had people call me that That's going to be a park or something.

Yeah, we are purchasing property on the right-hand side.

So that's going to go?

No, we're just buying a little sliver for right now.

You can see there's a sidewalk.

Okay, so that may be— maybe that's the rumor that the owner's going to sell, that it's going to be a park or something like that.

Yeah, the owner told me somebody keeps trying to make him sell.

He doesn't want to sell.

I don't know who he's talking about.

Well, lots of people, developers, are always out trying to buy properties. And that's a free, uh, that's the free market at work. A sunny parcel right in its current state, it's very attractive.

I mean, I have those on my door. couple times a month, somebody wants to pay cash rent.

Unless it's an old lady, and then I'm coming after you.

Yeah.

I think we're about to wrap up. I just have one more comment, um, and then let's wrap up because we're there. So we'll keep this short. But you were basically lobbying for that, the builders, yeah, the new parking. But on State Street, that there There are a number of builders that want to locate in Orem. They want to go down, you know, to build their parking. They're willing to spend the big bucks to do it. Is there anything restricting people from going down in Orem for parking on State Street? No.

Other than return on investment.

Well, it's just their cost.

So they can have more square footage if their parking's underneath than doing surface parking so they can still have the R-4000 for parking or whatever.

Right. What the argument is, is it's never penciled out before, but with the price, the cost of property going up so much, it's starting to pencil out. And so that's where a lot of things could go.

So, Mayor, how—

and how—

what are we talking about? Are we talking about, for example, 48-foot buildings?

Yeah, you're talking everything. I have, I have literally— that's why I'm here. I have vendors and developers in other states— Texas, Colorado, California, and Seattle right now— that are lobbying to come in and they want to go. For example, we all— I think I'll speak for my clients— they don't like the village. That's just ugly as sin and not practical.

The town.

We all love the restaurants.

We all—

that's an issue. I'm seeing cities and businesses, fringes on State Street, they're having issues. I am currently selling the Larry H. Miller and the strip mall, and we have 3 vendors that want to come in and investors that want to go high-rise. We're saying no. We have some, I was telling Spencer, that they want to do a senior, you know, we don't have enough 55+ community in the back. I have people that want to keep the strip mall but fringe, and then my Metal Sport left because there's no parking. They can't park on State Street trying to pull into that car dealership. They're on a lease-by-release. They can't— there's no parking. They can't get off the state, get into parking. So they're all leaving.

Okay.

So I have people that have gone to state going, hey, we'll come in, we'll develop, let's take it down. We'll go down 2, 3 levels, kind of like the Joseph Building downtown. And, and they're willing to do it. And the numbers right now are working if they can come in now. But because— bless you, I'm just— oh, kudos, thank He's amazing. He is telling everybody no, no, no, by the way. It's not just me, it's my other brokers that I work with, agents. So they do a very gracious job helping our vendors hold off on our buyers, but, um, and they're very good to work with. But we're literally waiting for this moratorium to see what happens. And I love the beautification, but there's money out there and they're willing to pay $80 million to come down 2 and 3 up. So it's there.

And from what they're saying, there's nothing restricting Well, no, we know there is.

We have moratoriums.

We don't know what we can do.

Until February 9th, we can't do anything.

Right now, yeah.

You got to give us a proposal for what they're thinking.

Well, we're trying, but we're told it's all held, and so we're just waiting. That's why I'm here, and I apologize for not speaking out.

And that is the goal of getting past the moratorium, right? That we have real clarity on exactly what investors can do. And with that in mind, I think that's where they'll come in.

I mean, I'm going to be in Vegas in like literally one And I'm talking to a lot of developers in that, and that's why they're waiting. That's why I'm here. So thank you.

And there is a, there is a ton of money out there that's trying to find a home right now.

So just to clarify, underground structures like Midtown Village, you can actually build underground up to the property line as long as the surface meets whatever's required. So if there's a set or landscaping required or some type of thing, you can go all the way to the property underground without having to set back.

If I can even just tell you about Costco really quick. I used to work there, was in management for 10 years prior to real estate. The Lehigh Highland American Fork property, they actually encroached on— so your Costco, you guys are right on the money there. They did encroach into the Lowe's parking lot due to the lack of their business got so crazy, so big. The homes behind, they actually encouraged— they do technically like the high-rises buildings because it brings them more business, but they want the higher-end business. They don't want the Lowe's. They're, they're opposite. No, is everybody goes to Costco or Walmart. Walmart takes one side, Costco takes the higher end, upper educated, more expensive. So to use that, if you would like.

Well, thank you.

Thank you for that input.

Thank you everyone for coming. We have made a ton of progress today, so we'll carry on.

Dinner right here at 6:30 at the job. At the job.

At what time?

6:30.

6:30 at the restaurant. Alrighty, welcome back. Got a smaller group today. Uh, do what?

Be a Brandon.

So just going through the agenda really quickly. Uh, our first item will be Brandon going through our State of Warren finances. As we talked about this—

what?

Do you need the scout sign?

Hey! Anyway, what's—

what the point of this conversation is, just to get everybody on the same page, is, as I talked to different city council people, some people understand the finances, some people don't understand the finances. So we wanted to have kind of a bird's-eye view, uh, Forum Finance 101, uh, just so everyone has the idea of how the different pockets work. And because it's different than—

Pockets or bucket segment?

So anyway, so there's that. And then, uh, we'll discuss the city center, and that's part of why we're having this conversation about the finances, so we understand what our options are. with the city center as far as financing. And after that, we'll just go into the roundtable and talk about different things that people might like to talk about.

So, Mayor, one thing on the roundtable, one of the items on my list is to talk about the charge we make of landlords. We charge each landlord, and, and I know that Steve needs to leave. I wondered if I could request of others that that could be the first item since Steve's the most well-versed on that.

Okay, this is during the roundtable.

During the roundtable. Yeah, when do you leave?

About 11:30?

I got to be in— yeah, I have to be in Oregon at 12:30.

Okay, so he needs to leave shortly after 11. So yeah, if you don't mind, Mayor, just when we get to the roundtable, that could be the first thing so we get Steve in.

Sure, I'll probably come.

I'll give it that time.

Okay, anything else? No, we're ready.

Other items of business?

Okay.

So yeah, appreciate that. So Brandon and I will just kind of talk through. Brandon's for sure over kind of the— he's over our— he's our finance director, of course, over all accounting and budget, and I just kind of partner with him on the budgeting process. But I'm helping— we put together this presentation to overview, just like Mary Ann said, the basics of it. So everybody should have a printout of these slides, which may make it easier to follow. Some parts of it may get a little bit small. You don't have to take as many notes and you don't I did go each page just to limit paper. So 3 types of funds: governmental funds, enterprise funds, internal service funds. This is what Mayor Young said, we're starting to get into our restrictions of what can be used for what. Government funds principally supported by taxes, fees, charges, intergovernmental revenue support general government: public safety, library, parks, building and safety, etc. Enterprise funds. Intended to recover all their costs through user fees and service charges, separated into separate functions: water, sewer, stormwater, fitness center and outdoor pool, solid waste, street lighting.

And those are most like a business, the enterprise. Correct.

They operate, they do accrual accounting, they operate just like any of you who might have your own business. That's the way they operate.

Yeah, and so to clarify, our governmental funds is like our big city budget and money coming in, money going out. The enterprise funds are all these independent entities who are supposed to be self-sustaining.

The governmental funds, there are a whole slew of them, and we can—

we'll touch on those as well.

The general fund being the biggest one.

So while exceptions to that, generally you're more kind of general use money that you can choose kind of where you want to go.

There are some restrictions we'll get to.

Debt.

Again, we are to charge water fees that will pay for the water system, so we try to match that. Internal service funds. These are established to account for internal activities that provide goods or services to other departments. We'll get into it, but this is like your facilities and fleet and IT that just service the government itself, different departments or funds. So those are the 3 types of funds. So here's the list. You have them too. So, some of our governmental funds. I won't go through those. Again, you have a couple that impact fees, fares, B&C roads, some that do get restricted as to how they can be used. Enterprise funds, we have 5 of those: water, sewer, water reclamation or sewer, storm, recreation, solid waste or garbage, and streetlighting. Internal service, fleet, risk management, our purchasing or our warehouse, IT, and facilities. So those are all the funds that OREM keeps.

Any particular questions in relation to any of those?

Right.

So those funds, especially the governmental ones, those are usually set up because they have some sort of special revenue source that, again, is generally either required or restricted It to be used for that particular function.

So that's why they are separated and they have their own fund.

So just for example, so each one of those government funds has its own source of revenue?

Other than like capital projects.

Yeah, like if you break out, say, CARE tax be defined that way because it's got a percentage of sales tax?

Correct.

And then it's spent a certain way and it's its own?

Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

CARE tax is a little like an enterprise fund. Because you can only get the money in and spend it for that.

Yeah, I mean, it's a restricted fund.

A restricted fund. Yeah, some government funds are more restricted than others.

Yeah, because you also have impact fees that have to be, you know, and there's a few others.

But would it be a government fund because it's funded by part of the sales tax more so than enterprise funds?

Yes.

So enterprise funds are determined by a user fee, right?

You You use something, therefore you pay a fee for it.

So that's what usually makes the determination between enterprise type, and it's meant to pay for itself.

So those are the 2 pieces of it. You get something that you're paying for, and it's intended to pay for itself.

So those are the 2 things that make it an enterprise.

Otherwise, especially tax, anything tax-related, right, where you didn't have a choice, pay the tax. Those generally fall in this government fund category.

So enterprise funds could change depending on what the city decided.

You bet.

Recreation is a good example, right?

If we decided, you know what, the user fees aren't—

we don't really think they're intended to cover the entire cost of the recreation center, maybe you would want to potentially switch that to just a governmental fund. And you're, in essence, you're going to use taxes or something to help support it.

Okay. So that's a possibility. As far as that question is, can it go away? Was the recreation in the past when we were subsidizing it, was still in the enterprise?

It was, yeah.

So we had to move it?

It was in the fitness center specifically.

Yeah.

There's a charge from the general fund to the—

Okay.

And a lot of times we'll do—

I mean, that'll happen.

What, you know, golf courses, for instance, are the one that a lot of people point to, you know, that historically don't make money. But a government entity might want to know, well, how much am I actually losing?

So if I want to know how much I'm actually subsidizing that entity, I make it an enterprise fund so that I can specifically see how much it is that it's costing.

Yeah, great.

Great question.

So again, list of all of our funds. You're going to recognize this spot here. You have a printout that'll be—

Sleepy Ridge is different because that's it.

Yeah, we don't— we're going to operate it.

We own— we have the property.

So these are— and I won't go over them— this is our current budget. These are the revenue sources making up our $131 million budget. Gets a little Some of this money is double counted, isn't it? Yeah, like for example, the internal services fund, our IT fund, has revenue charged from other funds. But that revenue has come into the water fund this year, and they were charged, and revenue was accounted for here as well. So we don't have $131 million of revenue, true revenue, every year. Some of our funds So some of it kind of gets double counted, if that makes sense. It's just an accounting way to do it.

So is that—

and that's where, I mean, I've seen the $131 million, I've seen the $60 million.

Yeah.

What is the actual gross real number if you don't transfer between departments?

I'm just curious.

So the $60 million is referred to as the general fund, and that would all, for the most part, That is almost all real rent.

It's usually some of the other funds that we work with where they have a charge. Well, I shouldn't say—

Because you have administrative charges.

Yeah, because you have admin—

so the general fund, my services as the finance director, the water fund pays for a portion of my services as the finance director. Yeah, and there are lots of people obviously within the general fund that all these But is our net-net budget about $100 million? I think that's your question. Yeah, I'm just curious.

What's our total revenue in before we start? I give you $5, you give me $5, and we double counted it.

So it's $100 and just short of $110 million.

Okay, so 110 are real.

Real.

21 million is transfers.

Correct.

Transfers.

Okay.

And what page are you on there?

This—

it's in the budget, page 9.

So again, you kind of see our— obviously sales tax and our utilities.

So question about sales tax.

So when we—

8 years ago, Tom and I did— wasn't it like $15, $16 million?

It was It was about at the bottom of the recession.

No, I mean, when we took over in—

'13.

Yeah, it was a little higher than that, I think.

In fiscal year '17, for instance, it was $20 million.

Yeah, we were probably $17-ish.

But we kind of hit a low during the recession. We lost about 20% of our sales tax revenues, about $4.3 million.

Well, part of it is Transportation sales tax doesn't exist.

Gotcha.

You know, so there's some new ones that have been put on.

So we went—

so fiscal year '17, I mentioned, was $20 million. That's direct.

That's not—

this is the total of those, all 3 of those elements.

So just normal, our 1% that we as a city collect, that was $20 million and is now $28 million.

So most of the $30 million is real taxes, wouldn't you say?

Yeah.

CARE tax is roughly $2 million.

And transportation is approximately $2.3 million too. Excuse me?

CARES II.

I mean, transportation's roughly $2 million.

So this is budget, right?

This is budget.

Yep, yep.

And we, we did very, very well, right?

So we will break down the sales tax. There's a slide coming where it breaks down the sales tax.

We understand it now.

So this is just a pie chart of the numbers that you just saw showing, again, proportionally then how much different revenue sources make up the total revenue.

So some of those revenues are fairly inelastic, for example, property taxes. There are a number of them that are quite elastic, sales tax being probably the most most pronounced up and down. If you look at, for example, the current water conservation situation we're in, that actually is having a significant impact on our water revenues. It's a good thing that we're conserving water, but at the same time, we lose 15% of our revenue. So, you know, and that applies and affects what we do on water reclamation because our water reclamation fees are charged in part based on what water services are rendered. And so some of these fees have relative connectivity. In addition, you look at franchise fees. If we have a really warm, warm summer and everybody's using their air conditioning, then you can see how those fees will increase because power is assessed a franchise fee. If we have a very cool summer, then you can see a dip. So in recent recent years too, things like court fines and ambulance fees. Because our police department, for example, hasn't been engaged in as much face-to-face contact, they actually haven't been writing as many citations as they have in the past because of COVID because of those concerns. That revenue can fluctuate. Ambulance fees, when we had Obamacare come in, that actually led to an increase in ambulance fees based on the law that was written. So it's not necessarily really static and predictable for some of these fees and some of these revenues.

So on the water fees, you know, we did decrease the tier.

Yes.

But that's on top of the—

Yes.

So those 2 things working together, right? The reduced fee amount and conservation. With the same capital needs, right, to take care of as well. So here's the sales tax breakdown. So our sales tax rate generally is 7.25%. You'll see at the bottom on restaurants there's an additional 1% administered by the county called our TRRT tax, transient room tax, restaurant, usually used for like tourism and recreation type things.

So I have a question on that. How much are we getting Back more, because you can get a portion of that restaurant tax back.

Yeah, Brent maybe can speak best.

I know you've been—

sorry, what's the thing?

Oh, so the restaurant tax, how much do we get back?

Um, we, we, uh, get back much less than we create for the city. Last we calculated, it was— we're in the negative about $1 million a year on average.

We put in $2 million, we get $1 million back.

It goes to the county.

When you say we put in $2 million—

$2 million is generated from our restaurants and hotels in Aurora.

And then it goes to the county, so we get $1 million, lose $1 million.

Well, we don't lose it, we just don't get the value coming back to us.

It's been a significant source of consternation because we feel like as we've looked at how that money is divvied up, it's divvied up by the county commission. By recommendation of a board that is created. We don't really feel like we get our fair share of that money. And we've had several conversations with the County Commission, and other cities feel the same way. American Fork, for example, is another community where they generate in excess of what they've received in tax. The County Commission has treated it as a county county fund, and they are blind to municipal boundaries, and they have used it in many respects as an operational fund in some respects. And based on the relationship that we have with, or that a jurisdiction has with the county commission, they'll get more than others. So they play favored status with some of these—

So we need lobbyists, our commissioners?

Well, Part of the discussion we've had is, do we need to change the law? Because the way that the money is administered in counties of the second class and third class, for example, to which we are a part, is different than the way the money is administered by counties of the first class. And so part of the conversation we've had is, should we lobby the state legislature to change the rules? The rules seem a little fairer in Counties of the first class.

Who are they?

Salt Lake County.

Only that's it. What's the size to become a first class?

A million, or actually it's 750,000.

And we're at about 600,000?

We're about 670,000. So we're going to get there in 4 or 5 years.

But it's also difficult to generate enough, I guess, momentum amongst enough cities because it's Again, there's a favoritism, so some cities benefit.

Who are the favorites?

Provo, Stevens Point, and Lee's Fork.

So if you remember, this tax was put on to help build the UVU Event Center.

Oh, is that right?

Yeah, that's where that—

that's how they built the McKay Event Center.

And then once that got built and paid for, a lot of it went to build the downtown convention center.

Yeah, and a lot of it going to the airport now.

10 million of them.

So we've committed—

we commissioned a study about 2 years ago, an equity study. We said, let's look at all the projects that have gone through and who's benefited the most. And that's why we can with confidence say we're net givers, not receivers of this money. And we approached Congressman— or Commissioner Ange at the time, Mayor Brons, myself, and others, and said, hey, this is This is not fair. The way you're not—

And he—

his response was essentially, it's our money and we will do with it what we will. Well, it's their money because the Tax Commission remits it to them, but it's generated in Orem restaurants. So we have 35%— or is it about 35% of money? 35% of the overall money that is collected in Orem And they distribute it outside of Warren. So the only question we have is we want our fair share. And part of this really came up initially when we had our All Together Playground discussion and we approached the County Commission to have $100,000 of this— $250,000.

$250,000.

And we wanted $250,000, and the commission kind of gave a head nod, and then We got to the commission meeting, and right there in the commission meeting, they cut the amount. Oh, futsal courts.

Oh, these are the futsal courts. But yeah, yeah, but the same exact same story, futsal courts. Yeah.

And they—

and we're like, wait a second, we thought we had a commitment for you. Yeah, $100,000 or whatever the number was, and now you've just cut it in half. And technically they have discretion to do that. So we started digging into where they were putting all this money. And they were, they were putting in significant amounts of money into the Spanish Fork Rodeo Grounds.

They were putting—

They were taking some money just to pay for their general park—

Their operations. Yeah, their park operations. And they were taking money, and they were— there's a piece of property that is above, you know, the old tram at Bridal Veil Falls. And there was property They bought that property and—

And their skating rink.

The Peakes Ice Arena they were using to offset the cost of that. And we're just saying, well, let's be transparent about how you're spending this money. And their response was, well, you know, we don't really have to be, and you're welcome to come to the meetings and see what we do. So we actually do have now Kathy Stone, who's our economic development manager, She actually goes to every single one of those meetings, and I get a report back as to this is what they discussed and this is how they're allocating the money.

Do we need to lobby the commissioners?

Well, yeah, I mean, that's part of the conversation of now we have a different commission, and we have been wanting to work with, for example, the Hale Center Theater and other organizations within Orem to get some more of this money. Obviously at the time, Commissioner Ainge, it's a little while back now, but they were not interested in having more of a conversation about how this money is allocated.

Do you think that was Ainge?

No, I think it's the commission.

I mean, yeah, that's something we should look at because it is a different commission now. We actually have— I mean, I know those guys well. Yeah. And so it's an issue we can talk about. Not to mention the fact that they raised their taxes significantly. On the other side, they backed them off some, but I mean, they've got plenty of money so they can be fair.

It is interesting because they looked at doubling and they say, oh, guess what, we're only raising a third, and they look like heroes.

Yeah, right.

But they raised them a third, right? And if we did that a third, even if we had done the smoke and mirrors, we're going to raise it double, oh, only a third, it'd be amazing. So we generate 1/3 of it and get 1/6 of it back.

Yeah, that's a conversation we should have.

Because we have—

yeah, okay.

So I'll let you— this is, again, you can see the breakdown. Care tax, Utah County, right? So 7.25%, Orem City doesn't get all of it. The other thing I will say, there's a 1% for City of Orem. 50% of it goes to a state pool that will get divvied out by population. That's why cities with no commercial base still get some sales tax because they'll be out of that population base. So then 50% of that, of that 1%, just stays in Orem. So, and this is all— this is naturally going to happen. Other cities are growing at a much faster rate than we are, so we're going to have our proportion of that population one continue to shrink. Yeah.

So.

And the point of sale is based on a brick-and-mortar retailer, so if it's in Orem, and a delivery address. So if you have Amazon that sets your business in Provo but not Orem, Provo gets the tax. If you have it set at your home in Orem, Orem pays the tax.

It was a good day when Vineyard didn't have their own zip code yet.

Those days have changed.

You—

we brought up with our state legislators last Tuesday the concern, and at least all on the phone they said we're not looking at changing this. Yes, that's pretty important.

It is 50/50.

That is very important to us.

Yep. Because we get treated just like the county. We have 1/6 of the population of the county. We generate 1/3 of the tax revenue. We get a pretty bad—

That's right.

For example, when we talk about economic development, jobs are important. And I'm just saying from a revenue perspective in the city, jobs are important. But they do not create immediate direct revenue. We essentially get revenue from jobs based on people's discretionary spending. But when somebody goes and buys a Honda in Orem, then we get direct sales tax dollars.

Yep.

So when we talk about economic development, and when Honda came to us and Nissan and Volkswagen came to us and they said, we're looking to go somewhere Because we needed to expand. Yeah, we needed to expand. We needed to really jump on that because if you look at a car dealer and what they generate in sales tax, it is significant. So we did all that we could to accommodate and allow for expansion. And you're probably familiar with the new Golden Corral that was under construction. Well, we actually worked a deal. We actually worked that deal so that Nissan could expand where the existing, or where the old Golden Corral property was, and then we purchased the old Sakura restaurant that used to be there, and we did a property flip, and then Golden Corral built a new restaurant. That was all in an effort to allow Nissan to have the appropriate amount of space they needed to operate their dealership. And they're pressed, and I know I'm telling I'm telling you way too much that you don't want to hear, but auto manufacturers will say your dealership needs to look like this, it needs to be this size, it needs to have this number of service bays, it needs to have X, Y, and Z.

So much inventory.

And if you don't, then we're not going to send you inventory. But if you meet all the criteria, we'll send you all the inventory you want. And that's what we were running into with Honda and Volkswagen and Nissan. They needed to do redos, they needed to expand, because if they didn't, they weren't going to get inventory. And that's why they were looking to go somewhere else, because they could find a plot of land that wasn't constricted by other retailers, other homes, other properties, other commercial interests all around.

So is Brent Brown Totes fine?

Yeah, in fact, we worked— we worked with them. They purchased a strip mall, right? Which we helped them do that as well so they could add their lube bays and their, their quick service. But yeah, that's, that's an incredible— that's in fact the number one. I know, Brandon, I'm sorry, we're not allowed to share specifics, but I think they're our number one dealership and have been for—

Well, we can say that. That's our CAFR.

Yep.

And then, I mean, because we have Mazda, we have We lost Hyundai that landed, but other than that, I think—

but you'll be, you'd be surprised too, even, you know, even the old Hyundai dealership, the auto sales, what's the name of it?

Action.

Action Auto Sales. Yeah, they move a lot of inventory.

Their lights are bad for the neighbors, but other than that, it's okay.

Yeah. Yeah.

And the Mass Transit Fixed Guideway. What are those specifically for? These are the—

I think these are the county.

So they're— and Lynnae and I had this conversation a few— about a month and a half ago. There are what we call 4 quarters of a cent for transportation built into our sales tax. Back in the 1970s, 1980s, the first quarter Was adopted, and it's just labeled mass transit. If you became a member of UTA back in the 1980s like we did, then you agreed to assess yourself by way of a sales tax 0.25, or a quarter of a cent of the sales tax. So that's what the money that they use to run the day-to-day operations of UTA. So everybody in the In fact, everybody in Salt Lake County and Davis County and Weber County, they have that 0.25%. The next 0.25% is actually— we call it the second quarter, but it's actually 0.3%. Back in around the early 2000s when we were building Frontrunner and we were building I-15, They brought that to the people and that was voted on. And the people voted to assess themselves another quarter of a cent sales tax for transit and other infrastructure in the county.

Does that go on into perpetuity or does it have a shelf life?

Okay, it goes on. So are those 2 essentially combined or are they for specifically different things?

They're for specifically different things.

So the first quarter goes The first quarter goes to operations.

The second quarter goes to capital, capital projects. Frontrunner, the UVX system, for example. They're going to expand Frontrunner down into South Utah County and implement other, you know, express and BRT type systems in South Utah County potentially. That will be the quarter of a cent that they will use.

And that's the money that's coming from the gas tax?

In large part to fund those projects prospectively. So, for example, the quarter of a cent right now is paying for, let's say, Frontrunner, but they're soon going to come to close out the debt associated with the Frontrunner. So then they'll free up some of that money, and then they will actually dedicate it to another project. And that's something, Mayor, as part of the Mountainland Association of Governments that you're part of, You'll be on the board that makes some of those decisions. So UTA, the Mountainland Association of Governments, will come to you and say, this is the relationship we have with this amount of money, this is where we want to put it, and you as mayors will have a voice in, in how that money is allocated.

Okay.

All right.

So can I ask something about—

Yes.

That's something that concerned me in the MAG plan, the TransFund 50, because they said 2030 that all auto-related sales tax revenues report to transit.

Where is that?

That hurts our—

I don't know.

I'd have to go back and— so I will represent though that it's not an incredibly clean, you know, first quarter, second quarter, third quarter, because in some cases they've borrowed from the fourth quarter to pay from the second— for the second quarter, and then when that's paid off, then they'll use the second quarter to pay back the fourth quarter. So I don't—

if you could get me this tax they're talking about. Okay, I've actually got the report in my room.

Yeah, if you could get me the citation, I'd be happy to look into it.

Okay.

Because I don't know exactly. The third quarter that we're talking about here for Utah County Airport, Highway, and Public Transit, that was another A number of years ago, there were a number of key transportation projects in the county that we needed to get done. They were things like North County Boulevard over by the Timpanogos Temple in Pleasant Grove. There were the— what were some of the other ones?

Timpanogos Highway.

Timpanogos Highway. Some of these other big, big projects. And, and that was adopted by the legislature for those kind of big projects. The last quarter was actually adopted in 2019. And that is divided up 40% county, 40% cities, 20% UTA. And that's where we get our new transportation sales tax from. And the intent is for those dollars to go for the operational needs of Orem and our transportation system.

You said it was about $2.3 million?

About $2.3 million.

It's a tenth.

It's essentially our share of that $0.25 is $0.10. So it's effectively the same, close to the same number as our CARES Act.

And we're going to redo the 950 north right by Kennedy Jr. High.

Thank you.

And do we have that targeted, or is that just for street maintenance?

No, so we, we actually have a separate fund every year, and we have projects that are budgeted in that fund every year to go towards a priority. We have a pavement management system. We identify where—

Don't go down that road, you'll lose your fillings, man.

Where the issues are, and We bring them to you as a recommendation as to how we're going to spend this money.

So if it's 7.25% sales tax, we effectively get 1%, and then we get 0.1% for CARES, and we get 0.1% for transportation.

Is that the deal?

Yes. And then everything else is, for example, you'll have a voice in some of these transportation dollars, but it'll only be one of a number of voices to make those allocations.

And of this 1%, 50% goes to the state, gets allocated back. If we kept one— all of it, we'd get another $250,000. That's kind of our deficit based on the population split. We generate a lot more than our percentage of them.

So we lose $2.5 million a year.

Sorry, in a month. Yeah, monthly.

So if I understand right, Orem gets 1%, half of it stays We get a portion of it back. And over 1% of what we pay in sales tax goes for our free busing.

No, it's— it goes for— the 0.25 goes for the operation of the UTA system, and then the 0.2— the additional 0.30, a portion of it goes to build transit. The free busing that you're talking about right now, that actually comes from federal congestion mitigation air quality money. So we're actually using federal dollars, they're called CMAQ dollars, that are being applied to provide the UVX system for quote-unquote free.

Until when?

10 years.

No, it actually is, it was actually initially set up for a 3-year, a 3-year period, and now they're having conversations about potentially extending it and looking for the revenue to extend it.

You know what, you can see my point. There's plenty of revenue, they just keep raising our sales tax. You know, we're at 7.25%. I mean, you can call it, you can put it different labels, but this stuff isn't free. Yeah, the buses are not free. the Frontrunner's not free. And when I talk to people, say, it's free. No, no, it's not. We pay 7.25% sales tax in the city now. If you go out to eat, it's 8.25%.

So that's—

yeah.

And you say, well, that doesn't technically go for this. But like Jamie's saying, it's kind of blurry what part of MassTrans that goes to MassTrans and what goes to the fixed guideway and fixed, you know.

Steve, what's the— so the restaurant tax, that's That's called what?

The transient room.

Okay, yeah, we call hotels TRT and TRTT.

Okay, what does that even mean? Transient room?

Like hotels.

Hotel type transient rooms, like rooms for people who are coming and staying transient, not homeless.

Yeah, so Airbnbs, hotels, but restaurants also are in there. And restaurants also have—

TRTT is what? TRTT is tourism restaurant Recreation tax.

And it's supposed to be used for like tourism things, like the convention center and things like that. So, but it gets muddled.

I know there's like a bookmobile that— I mean, it's a wonky tax. So this was a big thing when I went to the League of Cities and Towns training with like Park City, Heber. Why are they— I mean, tell me their, their, what they're trying to get from it. They want more too, obviously, because that's what they do, the restaurant and transient.

Yeah, so they— yeah, and based on where you live, it's— the code's a little different. So for example, in St. George, they have SunTrans, so they don't have UTA. So there's hard feelings that they don't get treated the same way as UTA. And then Park City has their own transit system, and then Park City is And some of these other communities will make a pretty big argument that they are so tourism-focused that they just don't have the means to, to cover their bills, so to speak.

So they're lobbying really hard for that now. But is this being lobbied on a county level too then, to keep this percentage in the county?

No, I mean, there's no—

there's been no talk. It has to be used in the county. So if we have TRTT TRT monies has to be used for that. We can't send it to them.

There will—

and you will hear about the 5th quarter of a cent for transportation. That is actually a Salt Lake County tax. So they actually decided to tax themselves one additional quarter of a cent, and that's what they are using to build roads like the Port of Rockdale, Port Rockville Road and some of the improvements along, for example, 13th East and Redwood Road and 90th South and things like that. We can—

I mean, this is an interesting conversation as far as the tax piece. I think we can come back at some point and dive as deep as we want. Yep. But I appreciate your presentation. We'll probably just keep going.

So we'll go over this unprepared food, your groceries. This is how that is set up. 3% tax, not a 7.25%.

See the breakdown there.

So then let's go into property tax, and I have a video that I'll show you kind of explaining this a little more, but the city gets a fixed— it's a fixed revenue. We get a certain amount of money every year unless we have changed the rate through a Truth in Taxation. We get that amount of money, $6 million about a year. There's 3 3 ways essentially it changes how much we get. The rate doesn't— the rate will change, we'll talk about that, but new growth. So when new properties get added on to the tax roll, we start capturing that sales tax.

Property tax.

Yeah, sorry, property tax. If we do a tax increase, if we go through a Truth in Taxation like a handful of years ago for police officers we did, so the city increases the revenue-neutral tax rate. I'm going to show you a video that explains that a little better. So the rate, that rate is provided by the county, which was intended to produce last year's revenue total.

So this is again, this is what the city did in 2019.

We actually adjusted the rate from what the county dictated we were going to set as our rate. Or the citizens vote for a general obligation bond. This revenue is then dedicated to a specific bond payment, isn't eligible for general use. I'll go into this a little more, but again, as a note, again, you're You're taxed on 40— you get a 45% residential exemption, so you're only taxed on 55% of your value, and then the rate is attached for if it's your primary residence, not a second home, not—

Which, that was the thing that I found out that was quite interesting to me, is these apartment buildings that are owned by development corporations, they are qualifying for that because the apartments are people's primary residence. Correct. To me, the benefit's not going necessarily to the people. You can argue that, right? But I think resident rental charges find their place, you know, with the free market system. But I mean, that's, that's a complete tax benefit given to development corporations that I feel was designed to be given directly to the people, but it's kind of being filtered there. Right, because the apartment Each apartment, then that, that, that development corporation that owns that 300 apartment unit, they get that property tax reduction versus if that same footprint held a building, an office building, commercial building, we get 100% of that.

Yep, that's true.

Same with duplexes, same with— right, so you can go down basement apartments, like, right, should you divvy out the part that the basement apartment charges at 100% because the benefit is to the homeowner. Yeah, so they definitely look at who's living in the unit, but is it their primary— this is just how it's done. Is it their primary residence?

Yes.

Therefore, they get the exemption.

That's how it's done.

Here's how property taxes is broken out. Again, gets a little blurry with the screen, but 71.5% goes to Alpine School District. 0.8%— this is just coming from the county website— 0.8% goes to Alpine Through Alpine for the state charter schools. There's a 1.9% kind of administration fee for assessing and collecting. Utah County gets about 8%, Central Utah gets about 4%, City of Orem gets 13.8%, Orem Metro Water gets 0.3%. Those are all the pieces of your property tax bill.

So when people say my property taxes went up last year, there's a good chance There's a chance that they have gone up, but it's generally historically hasn't been Orem, it's been other agencies that have been assessing.

Well, of course Alpine's the alpha of the herd, right? Alpine, no matter what it is—

I think the Alpine School District has raised taxes 3 of the last 4 years or 3 of the last 5 years. So it's a, it's been a pretty big jump.

How do they consistently do that?

Because it just seems like where the kids It are.

just seems like it happens. It doesn't seem like they're a part of our conversation.

They go through the treatment of taxation the same way. Yeah, you just may— unless you're paying attention and watching for it, you know.

I just notice it. Yeah, it is a moving part of the property tax.

You're absolutely right. The level of attention that is given to the school district and their— and we're not talking, you know, I joke with Rob Smith, the business administrator over at the Alpine School District, They say, you know, Rob, you have— we have conversations in the millions, you have conversations in billions, and you want to nickel and dime us for stuff. So, you know, it drives me crazy, but they just don't seem to have the same level of engagement across the district that, for example, cities do. So I'm going to—

so truth in taxation is the process we go with if we're going to change our property tax rate.

Right.

So this is a video, this is the— if you know the Utah Taxpayers Association, this is the watchdog on government. So they're explaining the truth in taxation. This is actually taken from a video from the state of Iowa looking— interviewing the state of Utah through them, trying to understand how their truth in taxation— because in many states that rate stays the same and as your value goes up, the rate— you're just paying more and more and more. In Utah, your rate goes up, your property tax drops.

Your rate drops.

Your rate drops.

And he'll explain that. And again, this is not a pro-tax person.

This is somebody who's the watchdog, right?

Oh, hold on one second.

There it is.

Yeah, just the volume wasn't coming on.

Such as your income tax or your sales tax, which is generally a flat rate that you pay regardless of whether you purchase, for example, a dollar it's going to be charged the same amount of sales tax as if you were to purchase a $30,000 car, right?

With truth in taxation, it's very much like you mentioned, revenue-based. So as an entity, let's say a city for example, collects $1 million in fiscal year 2020, they can only collect $1 million in property taxes in fiscal year 2021. And that's based on, like you mentioned, those assessments. As property values and assessments increase, the rate decreases to make sure that that entity receives the same amount, that $1 million in revenue.

Obviously, there are some different calculations that factor into that, like new growth.

You know, any new buildings automatically get captured into that. But generally, it is a revenue-based system that is—

that really does protect not only taxpayers, but it also protects the governments and the municipalities and the school districts by making sure if property values do decrease, that those entities do not lose any of their any of their purchasing power, any of that revenue as well. So it really has a good— it's really a good balance.

So this is part of like a 20-minute interview. This is just the portion that he talks about the truth in taxation.

So the way we get a tax increase is if I take raw land and develop it, I have 9 homes going into an empty lot next to me. They're—

they—

we will get additional revenue for having Service those homes, as will the school district because they have to educate new children, as will the county, etc.

Yeah.

But if my home is now worth $100,000 more than it was last year, if everyone's home's worth $100,000 more or percentage the same, no change.

So unlike traditional— So in order to do that, the mill rate will actually drop. Right.

But because every 5 years they reassess homes, I might get a bump. Getting a benefit as they even out things.

Yeah, and there's a lot of different factors that go into this, right? So the intent was for the city or the taxing entity, whoever it is, to get the same amount of revenue next year and next year and next year, plus new growth and things like that. But there's like, right, here's like a weird thing. Let's say, let's say UVU used to be all taxable property, right? Like, let's just say it was a A business park. A business park. UVU buys it and suddenly that becomes not taxable property because it's exempt from property tax.

The city—

the law is set up so the city is going to get the same amount of money. Whatever was captured, used to be captured there, has to get spread out amongst everybody else now, right? So little by little, Provo deals with this in a big way. BYU is all tax-exempt. Every church property is tax-exempt. Every time BYU purchases new property, every— all that money, all that tax revenue has to get pushed out.

So in Orem, we just lost a farm to a temple.

Correct.

The farm used to pay a pretty small amount, but they paid X, and now the temple's going to pay zero.

Exactly. So enough of that happens and you start to see—

so there's a lot of people— That is a positive thing, but totally agree. Well, but it's sticking on agricultural land versus some prime land, right?

Right, absolutely. Yes. Or even from a But the lot right next to me used to belong to the LDS Church. Now it belongs to taxpayers. It's a taxpaying entity. And so we get an increase. No, that stays even until they develop the land.

Got it.

Yeah.

So again, it's not as simple as— it's not as simple as your tax bill stays the same. There's so many different factors. The city just gets the same amount of money.

So go to this number, $6 million or whatever the number is.

So that—

what's that? So that's— where's that coming from? That number is set and that's your set amount you're getting. And then as property values go up and down, you're saying they're adjusting that. But then new growth is where you get additional funds.

Yes.

So from 10 years ago to 20 years ago, all the change in that $6 million number, whatever it comes from, that's happened because of new growth as far as the city's portion. Is that right?

Yes.

Yes. And you heard me with legislators trying to lobby at least to get something tied to inflation or a lighter mix because the amount of buying power of that $6 million is much less than it was.

But I think Provo doesn't, don't they?

They increase their Well, some cities do. They just schedule a truth-in-taxation hearing every year and they say we're going to essentially assess a CEA to our rate and they're going to adjust the rate. Other communities don't. One of the challenges we face is, you know, the good news is we have incredibly low property taxes. In fact, I think it's one of the lowest, if not the lowest, in the county. The bad news is anytime we have new growth We don't get a lot of new revenue because our tax rate is so low. So, you know, it's kind of a good news, bad news.

And Provo doesn't necessarily have a school district issue every few years, right?

And I don't know what Provo School District's property tax is, but of course there are city-centric school district. So, you know, if Alpine School District, for example, passes a $500 million bond and Provo School District— and they spread it across all of the Alpine School District and Provo passes a $200 million bond, the impact could be greater in Provo. I mean, I haven't done the math, but it could be that way.

Any question? Any other question just on propertytax.org?

And I know, you know, we just did the increase a few years ago for the cops, and then there was the— I call it the utopia one that failed through the referendum. So we really haven't raised taxes for 35 years.

Since '78, with the exception of the one we did in 2019. The 4 police officers.

4 police officers.

2019.

We raised it. It was a dollar a month on the average.

Quarter of a half Yeah, I'm just saying sometimes we get, oh, you've always raised our taxes, or this or that. It's not real.

It's not Aurora.

It's other jurisdictions.

And I think you can tell from like the video explanation, it's a— it's not the easiest explanation to give to just, you know, yeah, in a digestible way to the average citizen. So yeah, when you do— when the city comes and says, hey, we're just trying to capture cost of living, right? Inflation is at an all-time high. We need to be able to capture— because our road— I mean, construction costs have never been higher, concrete costs have never been higher, police wages have never needed to be higher to— we're going to just try to do a cost of living adjustment. It's hard to explain in a simple way how this whole thing works, that you haven't had a tax increase for a few years.

I know that, you know, anyways.

It feels good to raise taxes, but it's also, you know, you're But Steve, being a taxpayer, we need to remind— as we tell people this, our fees have gone through the roof. So, and we call that a tax or a fee or what we call whatever we want, but that guy on a fixed income, if he looks at what he paid for his property tax, what he pays for sales tax, what he pays on his monthly utility bill from the city—

Yes.

It hasn't stayed level.

No, no, no, no, no, you're right, you're right. We were just talking property There are others for sure, for sure. And, you know, Terry, to be fair, we want to keep lower rates, but we don't get to turn to the contractor and say, give us a deal on the construction because we can't— we don't want to charge as high of rates. We still have to pay what the private sector will charge us for concrete, for construction, for asphalt. We don't get a deal there because we didn't want to raise rates, right?

But it still costs us money.

We have more retail Than anybody else in the county.

But water—

we should have lower fees.

But we've talked about we don't use water sales tax. Water fund has to sustain itself. We have to have the user fees to cover the system based on how the structure is set up. No, I don't disagree with what you're saying.

Our saving grace is the sales tax.

Yeah, in our general, in our general governmental funds, that's what covers.

And to Debbie's point, as it relates to this, uh, well, why don't you know the cost of living What the legislature— the legislature intentionally has said this truth-in-taxation process is not necessarily easy.

We're going to make it challenging.

Yep.

And don't put it on our shoulders to raise the property tax and to build in the CPI into the law. If you need more property tax, then you raise the property tax. So it's kind of a, okay, who should bear the responsibility for making recommendation. Yeah, they don't want to raise the prop— they don't want to change the law that effectively raises taxes for us. They say, if you want to raise taxes, it's your choice, you raise it.

But I also heard Howard Stevens say he didn't mean for it— because he was one of the original.

Yes.

And he— I also heard him say that he didn't mean it to be so burdensome.

I heard him say that personally.

And that is one of the comments that has been circulating in recent years is it is so difficult to do it that many, many shy away from the process completely because they just— it's just not worth the brain damage in some respects.

It would probably be helpful for people, the general public, to understand how this works.

Yeah.

If there were some way to have some kind of ethical educational something available, because if you go online and try to figure it out It's different in every jurisdiction all across the country. And so you pull up different things. So educating people would be a good thing.

So if I can just raise one more issue. So we talked about property taxes and sales taxes. Our neighbor to the south, which we often compare to, in addition to sales tax and property taxes, they actually operate a public power company and they actually take 11% of all their revenues from that power system and they put it into the general fund as revenue. So sometimes you may ask yourself, well, why does Provo, you know, we have one communications person in the forum, why does Provo have 4? Well, because they actually have other streams of revenue that they are using and they call it a payment in lieu of taxes because the argument that they make is we have so much tax-exempt property In Provo. Schools, churches, public buildings, it's the county seat. We need additional revenue to offset the cost of providing basic services. So they actually will assess all of their enterprise funds, what they call a pilot in lieu of taxes, or a payment in lieu of taxes, a pilot. And they will take 11% of each of their water fund, of their sewer fund, of their power fund, of their garbage fund, And they will shift it over into the general fund, and they will use some of the fees associated with all of those utility operations to pay for general services.

And didn't they enact a transportation fee that those people—

They did.

They had to adopt that as well.

That didn't exempt the churches, the BYU, but you had to pay transportation.

Yeah. I wanted to Terry's point, because I think, I think you make a good point, and I'm actually Remember 2 years ago, our retreat here. A dollar in property tax, sales tax, user fees, to the citizen, it's all a dollar out, right? It's still money to them. So it is still on us to be as prudent as we can in every one of these funds, in every one of these services. Which is why— and again, I remember we were in this room 2 years ago and we talked about, should we— is it still smart to try to pay cash for every service? single capital project in water. And I think, you know, Terry actually kind of led the charge on this. This bonding makes sense. We're going to save the taxpayers a lot of money by bonding for these projects because inflation, construction costs keep going up. We can lock our prices in at a much lower— and we did that and then lowered our water fees 15%. So we do have to be prudent in all of those areas.

We agree.

So major— keeping going— major revenue sources, restricted, unrestricted. Brandon was good about, hey, let's put some parentheses around the restrictions. Enterprise funds are restricted to the water fund. However, like Provo, technically we could transfer money out into the general fund. We just haven't historically done that.

The only thing we do is we get our water for free from the city.

Correct, yeah.

And we charge back and forth. What we pay to water our parks as a city, we don't— we kind of pay for it, then we get it back. So when you see that, that's what you'll see, a transfer.

You'll see a transfer.

Yeah, because they don't understand. So what Provo does is they only hold half of that hearing. They shift the money to the— yeah, but they don't shift it back.

Gotcha.

Yeah, we follow— they would follow the same process As a default with water, albeit with all of their utilities.

So yeah, we charge water fund and then we pay the water fund for the services with their money rather than having to go again raise taxes or find some other revenue source to pay for water because we're required to pay for our water as a general number. So restricted funds, unrestricted funds, the restrictions are a little different in Every one of those. And then unrestricted, again, these ones that can be used for whatever intent the city can.

I want to make sure B and C are from the gas tax, right?

Yes.

Okay.

And that is based on also a formula of lane miles within the city and then purchases within the city.

Do you know how much of our gas comes to us?

Like, if you're paying 3-something, it's a, it's a It's a fixed amount per gallon, and we get a certain— it's like 24.5 cents for all of the taxes, and we get a certain amount. So if, for example, gas prices get really high and people stop buying gas, that hurts us because it's a tax based on a fixed gallon amount. It doesn't fluctuate based on— it's not a sales tax percentage. It's a fixed amount.

Per gallon.

And our— we get about $3.2 million in B&C royalties.

So again, these are restricted and unrestricted.

So now let's talk kind of fund balances and all of those. We have unrestricted and restricted. You'll see there's some notes on the sides of a few of these, and on the next page you'll see those notes, but In each of those funds, here's the amount that's sitting restricted and unrestricted, again with notes.

And define that, restricted and unrestricted.

Yeah, just that has to be used for a specific purpose. It can't be, um, so restricted, we got like CARE tax, 2.4 has to go to recreation and arts. B&C has to go to roads. Unrestricted, it can whatever you would choose to spend it on.

We have a big restricted in general. What is that like mostly for?

ARPA?

The federal— most of that. And there's a note on the next page you'll see.

Sorry.

No, you're doing a totally good job.

And we have how many years to spend that?

Yeah, December of '26, it has to be uncovered by December of '24. But we have essentially uncovered most of it with Hillcrest property. Just kind of continuing down, down those areas where we get to this kind of final number of unrestricted and restricted. We're about $29 million in unrestricted, $27 million in restricted, for a total of $57 million. So again, note the general fund restricted amount includes $5.1 million of the CARES Act, which is the first round of stimulus, and then $7.4 million We have $13 million of ARPA, and in May of this year we will get another tranche of ARPA as well. So that unrestricted will go— or that restricted will go higher.

But, but again, building that park can use almost all that $12 million or $13 million, whatever it is. Yeah, let it be $16 million.

Let it be about $16 million, and $11.5 million of it is dedicated to Hunters Park right now.

Okay, so can you go back to— yeah, so in this particular case too, just we have unrestricted available, but for example, we do have some of these funds, previous slide. For example, we have $2.5 million in the water fund. More often than not, we have capital projects that we're looking to build and we're collecting revenue and monies to build those projects. So We don't— it's not like we have $2.5 million in idle money just sitting there.

We have a plan.

We have a plan where we anticipate that in, you know, we may have a $6 million improvement we need to make, and we're essentially saving money to make the improvement in 2 years from now. And that $2.5 million—

It looks like you're negative on your revenue.

So there's a note. Yeah, go to that. Go to the notes, page 3. So we have a target of what we want our balance to be in the rec fund, which is $300,000. We're below our target by $184,000. So we're $184,000 away from the $300,000 mark that we want.

But that's for the whole year then, right? This is just the first 6 months?

No, this is just the fund balance. This isn't revenue.

So they have $116,000 in their account, we want them to have $300,000.

We're moving in that direction with our fitness center. We just had it closed for a long time, and we operated a subpar one for longer than that. So we're moving that direction, and it's moving— the same thing is with facilities.

So if you, if you go to the next page. So we also have, for example, a self-insurance fund. As a city, we're self-insured. So if we have a major insurance claim, We need to cover $500,000 of a claim, say a fire.

But I thought we were also part of this insurance? We are.

And the reason we're part of IRMAA, and that's an insurance pool, and through the pool they have a separate reserve and we can pay back our losses in 5 years, 5 consecutive years. But we need money to pay, so we do set aside money in our self-insurance fund to cover any unexpected, you know, claims. If we have a pretty significant claim and it ends up hitting our constitutional cap of, you know, $890,000, let's say, well, then we have at least close to that to meet that obligation within the fund.

So it's like a line of credit.

Yeah, I mean, it's not— yeah, it's not just sitting. It's It's not just sitting there. Our information technology, as you know, there's certain things that we swap out on a, you know, every 5 years, every 7 years. So we try and create sinking funds to set some money aside on an annual basis so that we don't have to incur the cost in just one year that we're planning for those replacements. The facilities fund is the same way. And the street Street lighting, some of that goes to cover— we have some street lighting projects that we want to build, continue to build. We have some areas of the city that still have some old streetlights. That money will be used to replace them.

I do have a question on back to your rec. In the presentation on increasing the policemen's pay, some of that came from a rec surplus. So tell me the difference.

Is that over the course of the whole year?

You know, if we don't have as much here, where are we going to pull that police pay?

So we were— when we were closed years past, the old fitness center, we were subsidizing the operations of the fitness center for about $400,000 a year. Because of the new center, because of the new operations and the success of this facility, we do not anticipate having to subsidize that So we are going to— recommendation was we reallocate that $400,000 from subsidizing the fitness center on an annual basis to rolling it into this police compensation.

And then where does this negative $184,000 figure into that?

That's a really—

that's a—

that's a—

right, so keep in mind fund balance is a cumulative effect, right?

Year after year after year.

Okay, so this is through the years.

Okay. Yeah.

So when we're over—

We expect that to flip.

Yeah, when we're— let's just say we're over our, you know, we have more revenue than expenses of $100,000, and that's going to go down to $84,000, and then the next year we jump to, you know, positive. The other note I'll say, there's— all of our enterprise funds have a 2. The note you'll see there, it's unrestricted but within that fund. So it's sitting in water, it could be used for operations, It could be used for a project, but it's unrestricted within the fund. It couldn't be used for something else unless you were to go through the process like Provo does of transferring it out to use for something else. So unrestricted, but with an asterisk.

But we're careful about doing that because then the public concern is, well, wait a second, if you're taking money out of water and you're building tennis courts or baseball diamonds or whatever, would that be Why are you assessing our water rates so high if you're building, you know, a fire station out of it?

Yeah, I mean, a Provo resident can essentially say, hey, okay, so my rates are 11% higher than they need to be to pay for power. Now they would say, okay, well, we'll just charge you a different— we'll charge the property, we'll make up that money some other way, right?

But on our utilities, they have plans, master plans, Correct. So really they're just, they're like saving to do something big.

So it's not available to just—

Correct.

But that, that was one of the concerns with when we adopted a pay-as-you-go kind of utility construction process is we would get some very, very big balances and people would say, well, why are you increasing my water rates when I have, when you have a $7 million balance in my account? Well, we have a $7 million balance because we're saving up for a $13 million project. And it was—

And that goes away now that we're kind of bonding to build.

Yes.

Yeah.

So it was— it became a difficult narrative to have.

And, you know, back to kind of the philosophy of that, right? We, we could save up in 5 years to pay for that. We can charge the resident for the next 5 years and stick it to them. That resident moves out, a new resident moves in, the old resident paid for the whole water tank and the new resident didn't have to. When you bond it and spread it 30 years, whoever is living there at the time is the one paying for the use of that project. So there is a lot of sense in bonding. So this is— these have just a little more definition to what the restrictions mean. Because of time and for sake of questions, I won't go through I won't go through all of them. CARE tax, for example, annual revenue $2.4 million. State law restricts the money to be spent on recreation and art-related expenditures. That's oversimplifying. There is some additional detail.

And we only have 2 more years of that, right? 2 and a half more years.

Yeah, it expires March of '24.

And we have our own parameters also, right?

Correct.

We put some additional— that we have, state has, so we can change those at any time.

Yes, we had the 50/50 split.

So you would have to go out— we want to continue the tax, you'd have to go out to another vote and extend it for another 2 years.

And that would be on the next municipal ballot, '23. So to take, uh, so, but 2 years. So the next time we do an election here, that would be on the ballot.

I will say that the tax has been very well received. It's probably a tax I can't remember the last vote, but it was 75-25.

Yeah, the last time it was on the ballot with the property tax increase. The property tax increase was shot down 75-25. The CARES tax was approved 75-25. So it is a very popular tax.

So it was a positive because it shows people at least thinking about what they're voting on.

Exactly, exactly. No, exactly, exactly. It wasn't just a no across the board.

And virtually every Every city who has proposed one of these has won a similar percentage.

There were 3 cities, I think, on the ballot this last year that passed their care taxes.

And especially the major retail centers all want it because a large portion is being paid for by not even residents more. Those that come into our community are paying into this fund and helping us keep our parks and arts top-notch. So revenue restrictions. I want to go quickly through what our budget process is. Everything in yellow is the City Council involvement. We start now with the City Council retreat areas of focus. We will leave this retreat with an understanding of your kind of direction and the things you want us to focus on through the budget year this coming year. We will take those goals and areas of focus, and then we will go in the next few months into our internal budget planning. Jamie will communicate as he has in the past. This is what the council was prioritizing. This is what they want to see. Any requests you make for new money, I want to see tied to one of these things that the council is focused on. We'll go through that. They will submit budget requests. It will be submitted, reviewed by our budget committee internally. This is all to do that. And then Jamie will— again, this is all creating the city manager's budget, which will be brought to the council. We will have a series of work sessions, one focused on revenue and compensation. And get— understand, by the time we get here, we're not done either. We're just starting to provide you information we do have. Revenue compensation discussion based on what you want to do as far as compensation and based on what we think revenue then creates what we call available money. So for departments with requests, here's the pot that's available. City Council wants to do this as it relates to compensation. Here's what we think revenue is available. We'll then talk about in April those requests that did come in for operations, fleet, information technology, so you know all of the requests that have come through that are being recommended in the budget. We'll then have another meeting in April where we'll talk about our capital projects that we plan to build throughout the year. So those are work sessions, all right?

These are the—

these are These are definitely more interactive type discussions that we have. In May, we have a tentative budget that we present to the public. There's a public hearing, then there's a period of time, and then we adopt the final budget in June.

So in kind of logistically, everything up into April is kind of a working document, and then we will transmit a recommended budget to you the first meeting in May. So then it goes from being a city manager's recommended budget to your budget, and you have discretion in May and June. You have to adopt a budget by the end of June of every year, but those 2 months then become your opportunity to make adjustments and changes, to ask questions at your discretion, to how you want to best pursue it. So my preference, however, has been to make it more of a collaborative process from the beginning rather than saying, no, I'm going to keep it until April and then May I'm going to give it to you and surprise, this is what it is. I would prefer that it just be something that we work on together throughout the process so that when you get the budget in May, you have a general idea of what's in the budget. And we've told you what are the things that are, you know, most prominent. Now, I'm probably not going to tell you that the utility office increased their postage budget $2,000. But I am going to say, we are going to say, hey, we're buying $925,000 in fleet. And these are the fleet items and the computer items. And these are the projects we're working on. And this This is the compensation we're thinking about, and these are the hires, or the increases, or the decreases in budgets that we think are relevant.

So everything in yellow, public meeting, livestream, citizens are welcome to be a part of until it's adopted.

Do we have a, like, feel for sales tax? Do you think it's going to level out? I mean, it was remarkable that it didn't go So far we haven't seen anything that's indicating—

it's certainly not as good as fiscal '21.

Yeah, but we haven't seen anything yet that's indicating it's not going to do pretty well this year.

Now we did—

yeah, we did just— I mean, obviously the last round of these child tax stimulus, you know, right? The big thing for Utah is job employment didn't drop, and then billions of dollars got poured in, right? So We were, as it relates to revenue for the city, we were beneficiaries of national issues that were bigger in other parts of the country, but we all know that all that stimulus money as of now is out.

So you're going to adjust down your—

Well, that's what we'll have to— we'll have a few months to kind of see what that looks like.

You're going to be conservative?

But we certainly need a conversation, I think, of where we want to sit, where we think that should be.

Christmas sales is always a number we look at very closely, and we get that number right towards the end of February, beginning of March. But nationally it was up. Yeah, so that in many respects is the last number we look to before we lock in kind of revenue estimates.

And all the, like, Amazon sales, are they coming through with the tax commission?

Is that by address delivered to? Correct.

Any other questions? I hope that's helpful. Again, you have all those printed out. We're happy to answer. We will sit down with anybody one-on-one and talk through kind of specifics because we did give a high level, as Barry mentioned, more specifics.

Appreciate the time.

Yes.

I've heard about a rainy day fund. Is that a real thing?

Well, that's this unrestricted, unrestricted revenue of $29 million.

I mean, that's to some extent all combined.

The fund balance.

Fund balance, yeah, yeah.

But I think you're talking about the rainy day fund meaning our difference in what we carry over from year to year is our rainy day fund.

Yeah, we budget— we're legally allowed to carry 30% of our revenue. As a fund balance, right? That's our max. We choose 15% as our— every year we try to keep 15% as a fund balance moving forward. So whatever that amount is above 15% in the budget process will be allocated to projects.

So that's our rainy day.

Yes.

I need to step back though. The 15% was a council-directed decision. So we have recommended, yeah, we can keep 30, But if we have 30 and we have projects that we need to build and things that we need to do, does it make sense for us to maintain 30? And historically, the council has settled on 15. The minimum you can maintain is 5.

That's, that's by the state law, right?

We have to have at least 5%.

Yeah, so that has been your direction. If you want to change directions, then obviously the amount could increase or decrease.

But when we, when we were elected in the beginning, it was 5%, wasn't it?

It was a little above that.

The max was 18. But when we came in, we were pretty low.

Yeah, we were just coming out of a recession and we got as low as 7.

So the states even raised it from 18 to 30?

They raised it from 18 to 25 and then just barely raised it from 25 to 30.

What is the number 4 million? Except for once you have 4 million, you can't go over a 4 million number?

That might be tied to our percentage.

I've heard if we have too much money, we have to give it to the state or something.

No, so in recent years we've transferred—

this may be where $4 million, because it's been between $4 and $4.6, right? So it's been in the $4 million range.

And that's that. So we recently were talking about the 30% ceiling. Once you go over that ceiling, you are required to transfer the—

to get underneath that 30%.

Transfer it to who?

Where?

And in the case, we transfer it to our capital projects fund.

Okay, so we don't have to give it back to the state?

You don't have to give it back to the state.

We just have to rearrange it?

We have to put it to use.

We have to spend it.

Put it to use.

We don't get to pay down the bonuses either. That's the only thing I can think of that maybe lower that.

Yeah, to Jamie's point, right, like we can keep up to 30 and some would, and some would say it's prudent, but citizens sitting there saying I've got a park that I want redone and we're sitting on a 30% fund balance. We're just trying to find the balance of what's really prudent in a rainy day, as Ken said, and what should be—

reconstructing that park next to that neighborhood, although the state may have they raised it to 30% because they're seeing 7 years of plenty and 7 years of drought. You know, that maybe that's why they raised it from 15 to 18 to 30.

It was during COVID

And yeah, they did raise it during COVID

And so there was this— The great unknown. The great unknown.

I mean, you remember our budget process during COVID we slashed thinking we were going to go to Great Depression.

Yeah, 20%.

So anyways, okay, thank you so much. Thanks, Brandon. Brandon, of course, did most of Yeah.

All right, well, we appreciate that. Hope that was educational as far as everyone's understanding. Uh, the next item on the docket is going to be, uh, the new city center. And I don't know how much you guys have explored that, but you're going to give us, uh, an overview on that, where that's at, and And that ties into our money discussion too, whether or not we have money to do it.

Maybe I can answer a little bit of how much we've explored. Mayor Brunce, as you know, was a great champion of it.

Right.

And he would— he met with all of us individually telling us we can do this, but we never had a report from the staff telling us how we were going to finance it.

Okay.

So he had— he had a great internal feel or gut check that we could do it.

Yeah.

We never had the kind of support that I think we're going to get in the next little bit to say, oh, we really can feel— afford it, excuse me. And so there was this, how much is this feel, how much is reality? And I think what we're going to do is marry those 2 together. So we've heard a lot about the discussions of the needs and we can afford it, but we didn't know how we could afford it. So maybe at the end of this 15, 20, 30 minutes, we'll know better than that. Right. Dave, would you weigh in on that? Jeff, have you been on that?

Well, then you have a presentation in the work meeting, right?

Or something.

I've seen these. Was that City Council meeting?

Yes.

Yep.

Back in March of 2021. Okay. I'll go through history and everything we'll go through. And yes, by the end of it, we'll come up with where our initial or current look of where money might, might come from to do the project. But this is kind of the latest updated numbers and info as well from Method Studio, the architecture firm. So yes, I'll give a little more history about all the different studies and looks and relooks that we've done into I'll go through the details of the assessments that engineering firms, architectural firms, electricians have gone through and identified as some of the issues of our existing facilities. I'll remind and/or educate a couple of options that we've looked at and what those would mean in terms of how we would construct construct a new city center, then finally look at those 5% goals and then how we might engage the public in that process. Um, okay, so yes, Mayor Brunson was a big proponent of it. It has been looked at over the last 15 years.

There—

we had Method Studio look at a master plan, could back in 2005, which looked at how an expansion could be added to the existing city center and go up on the 2nd level next to where Legal Services is. And since then, well, that kind of sat on the shelf for a while.

Other projects were done.

Since then, I had a big kind of seismic study done in 2015. I'll show a little bit of ultimately the summary results of that. And then in the last handful of years, we've looked more specifically at our HVAC, our electrical. And then I'll also go into the difference between remodeling, reconstructing, and adding an addition, and what those cost differences would be versus All right, uh, just quick FYI in terms of how much square foot we have in our entire campus. We've got library and public safety, court building that is owned by, by the state, and we can't at least—

As far as I can see.

I just had my soft voice. I want to make sure you guys can hear me. And then those are all separate from our city center itself, is the 45,000 square feet separated by a different— and I emailed a PDF copy of this so you can view it. So right now we've got 45,000 square feet Yes. Our city center, now built in 1970. Technically constructed in 1969, dedicated in 1970. What the architectural firms will tell you is that the efficiency in the use of space was much worse back in 1969 than it is today. So a lot of that space is wasted in hallways.

So is the only thing we're talking about the city center piece of that?

Yes.

The rest of that would stay intact?

Yep. So children's wing of the library built in '96. Adult wing, we went through a seismic upgrade and remodel in about 2002. Justice Court, it was built in 1984.

And we don't own that. We're just leasing it.

We don't own it, and the state just recently did tenant improvements Over the last couple of years.

We're not looking at purchasing that because it's too expensive.

We lease the portion that we use for our investors.

Because they actually wanted a ridiculous amount of money for it.

They did.

They wanted $2.5 million for it at the time.

Above market value for the year that it was built. Safety building, that was in 2000.

Is that where we had that meeting, Jamie, with the police?

Yes, yes.

And the library hall just, just published.

So all that stays intact? We're just talking about the wall?

Just this, the city hall itself.

Okay.

A $45,000. So part of the, the help that we've gotten from, from Method Studio and before that for from a different architectural firm called JRCA. It's a look at, divided by use, or the type of employees or services that are using the space, how much square footage do we currently use, how much might we project we may need over the next 2 to 5 years if there is expansion in personnel, personnel, and how much, even looking further, 5 to 15 years, might we project that we need. So then, and that's all divided by public areas, so lobby area, also 311 and building services, versus how much we need for IT and servers and switch closets. And then And then one thing that we recently haven't really looked at is with our police needing to expand within the Public Safety Building, what if we moved Fire Administration over into the City Center and added an Emergency Operations Center? How much square footage would that— would we need to add to a And in part, we've done that because we're accumulating fire and police impact fees that we need to use within a 6-year period for new growth.

Wasn't there also some COVID funds that could go for the EOC part of that?

Yes, yes.

So when JRCA architectural firm suggested it, they thought we needed to build 49,000 square And now Method is suggesting near $59,000. That's a pretty big raise in 4 years. Do you have any feeling behind that?

Yeah, I think Method was far more detailed than the work that they did. JRCA was—

Okay.

And, and we haven't really— what do you think post-COVID, how much of your employees will be working from home part of the time? Or do you think you'll We'll get back to a fairly normal thing whenever normal happens.

So we do have a remote work policy in place, but that remote work policy really only affords or allows an employee to work one day a week, maybe 2 days.

So right now we're not hoteling. I'm not using your desk on Monday and you're using— okay, or using yours on Tuesday.

Okay, thank you.

Now, another part of, uh, An answer to that question, Tom, is there's a difference between the net square footage and the gross square footage. Method Studio believes that you need to factor in more space for elevators, for stairs, for storage, mechanical rooms.

And we've also brought over the fire administration, which accounts for 3,000 of it.

I see that right here, 26 and change.

But anyway, so in addition to the let's say 100 square feet for my office. To accommodate just that net office space, we need to add another 55% for hallways, several rooms.

These numbers were developed in cooperation with each of the respective departments. So we met with— the architect met with each of the departments and identified current existing needs and anticipated future.

Yeah, they had more growth where JRCA maybe didn't handle as much growth potential.

What was their long-term goal? Were they looking at 5, 10, 15 years that the department needs would be, or—

so that's 5.

Oh, 5.

So they— okay, so really only what's that administrative services, 204?

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's really not— we really don't anticipate Dramatically increase in staff.

And so it would be like an office, one office or something?

I, I, without looking at the detail, but I'm assuming yes.

Okay.

Yeah, it was probably mostly associated with like our help desk, and if we— if trends were to continue in terms of how much we Get phone calls or instant messaging. We wanted to continue to support the one-stop shop. Interestingly, honestly, the total square footage, it actually hasn't changed a terrible amount. We've been in that 55,000 to 59,000 square foot range. Again, it's relooking at efficiency And, you know, could we, yes, add an EOC, but then also use it for, for example, a multi-purpose room or a type of conference room? Those types of things have looked at. We also previously, to your question earlier, Dave, looked at do we bring the Justice Court and make it part of the new city center? Since with the improvements that the state's made and then just keeping Is our lease rate reasonable with them?

I want to say it was around like $12,000 a year.

So much cheaper than building.

Thank you.

So, Brent, have we thought about using Library Hall for city meetings like city council meeting and planning commission meeting and some of those things?

Intermittent basis, not necessarily on a week-to-week basis.

Because I'm wondering if that would save us, because how much is that, the city council room?

Where is—

where's that in the description?

Probably on here, the other public areas.

So other public areas, so that's 5— that's 10,000 square feet. 9,000.

A portion of it.

Yeah.

It's probably—

you're wondering if we can double use, right, Terry?

I'm just wondering, instead of us building out a 10,000 square foot room to have meetings, we have one next door, um, that would be a beautiful place and that we don't have problems if we have COVID in the future.

We don't have problems with spacing and, you know, there's plenty of room for people to spread out and sit and So they, within the study, this is the JARCA study, I'll have to find the method, but they identified 1,000 square feet for the chambers and then 650 square feet for the dais. So about 1,650 square feet for city council.

The rest of those public areas are going somewhere else.

They're hallways, Yeah.

So then there's no place for people to sit, come to the library. How big is that room now?

Yeah.

It'd be bigger than that.

Uh, I think it might be about— I would say it's probably less than 2,000 square feet for existing chambers.

Yeah.

Just the chamber room.

What is it?

Probably in Falcon Park.

Falcon Park sounds pretty teeny.

Yeah.

2,000?

1,000. Which is very frustrating if there's a reason you want to come and you can't sit, you're standing in the hallway. And we've got an auditorium next door.

Well, you know, I think we, I think we obviously are trying to build to a standard that accommodates many, not all meetings. So I think if there were, for example, large issues to to work through, then obviously an alternative could be found.

But I haven't—

I'll find the— keep talking, Brandon, I'll find the method.

Although this is similar to the budget. We're going to get kind of rough numbers, and then we're going to get drafts, and then we're going to be able to fine-tune this, right?

Correct. So again, valuable question.

I think—

This room is probably the tallest room we have yet.

Yeah, yeah.

Just gotta get these slices right. Okay, so let's come back to that, but at the very least, I know we've thought about using the library hall for bigger type events or council meetings, for example, and, and/or even overflow.

You gotta treat the taxation like when it's $30 million.

We could set it up technology-wise so it wouldn't have to be overflow, right? So people could do their session overflow to the counseling center.

There's one caveat with it though that we can come back to when we start talking about seismic and different seismic standards. Library Hall was built to, remember this, risk category 3. Talk about the difference between that and risk category 4. Existing building, some of this you know, but It's not just that it's an old building. I mean, the city's done a decent job of keeping up, of making little fixes and maintaining it over a 50-year period. So for a 50-year-old building, it's, you know, it's not all bad news. But we are at our limits, right? We don't have ability to Kind of grow from here, unless we want to start to put people in the hallways, which we can't because of building safety code.

So, Brad, may I just kind of interrupt? I'm sorry. So the method studio does include a It's a couple of them. It does include 650 square feet and 1,000 square feet in the method studio and another 160 feet for a conference room, but it also includes 2,400 square feet that would be an extension of the city council. So you would have a city council room that would be 1,600 or 1,700 square feet. But adjacent to it, we would anticipate an additional—

It's like the cultural hall.

Yeah, or like in the rec center, we have—

it could be expanded.

So you then effectively would have a, you know, 3,500 square foot space.

Got it.

And the existing space in the council chambers is 1,880 square feet.

I'm wondering if COVID, that would help because you had to really spread out.

Yeah.

Right now you can't get anybody in there.

So, uh, kind of going through this quickly, we still have issues with ADA. We addressed some of them with, uh, some of the improvements we made with our restrooms, but our older restrooms aren't ADA compliant. I'll show what our maintenance costs have been. I already spoke to there isn't as good workflow. It's a bit dysfunctional in terms of how much hallways there are and how we have to spread people out based off of where load-bearing walls are and that sort of thing. Yeah, it's because it's old, energy efficiency is The maintenance is very poor. They have old electrical. The big thing here though is the seismic deficiencies. I thought it was the county department in the basement.

I used to be a black man, but I spent so much time in the basement.

We do have a lot of employees that we put down in the dungeon. And it's easy to get lost. Okay, if we were to remodel and add, this just kind of shows some of the things that we— those are things that we would want to address in a remodel or in need to have more space. So we would anticipate we'd need to add another 5,000 square feet, make the Seismic upgrades, and some may remember from past presentations, to do seismic upgrades you essentially have to tear things down to the bones, if you will, because the bracings that they would need to add, it would start—

Not something you would want to do. You could go in. Yeah, yeah, remodeling the kitchen, right? You're not using the kitchen.

Would this be a remodel like the rec center was remodeled?

Just tone it down.

We kept the pool.

Are you kidding?

We kept the pool.

This is an Ogden Temple remodel.

A Robo Temple.

I mean, you joke. Essentially all it does, it would keep the look and where it's at and make it completely— if we wanted to meet These goals of making it more energy efficient, making it a seismic upgrade, making some workflow and space improvements.

There's a reason he had to add that dorm on the northeast, because we have one of the worst windows to collapse on us.

To that point, real quick, the existing assessment on seismic, we have a risk category 0. So essentially there's no bracings. The way they built masonry walls and how they connected it, we have no risk.

There's no risk.

It's a done deal.

There are—

there is no seismic support in the building, and that's been deemed a life threat.

So what we require the citizens to do when they build their construction— we're not there at all.

No, it was built before those standards were even thought of.

So you have a, you have a wall structure and roof, and you have nothing connecting the wall structure and the roof. So there is a strong probability that the roof is going to collapse. There is a lot of seismic movement. It's not strapped together. It's not strapped together. It's all reinforced, unreinforced. Reinforced concrete too, so there's no rebar in the masonry, so you can have a wall collapse and you're going to have the ceiling fall on top of it.

And some of those details are in the PDF I sent you. Just real quick, so what we build typical municipal buildings at today is typically Risk category 3. Basic summary, that's just keep people safe, make sure the building is up long enough for people to escape. However, it would— in the event of a real earthquake, it likely wouldn't be operable. You wouldn't be able to continue to work out of the building. Because HVAC systems would likely—

It's just saving lives, it's not really functional, right?

Yes.

A risk category 4 is what makes it immediate— immediately safely occupiable in the event of a— Something like an emergency command center would have to have the highest because that's going to be your Right, so we want to be able to manage and respond to the media and give direction to our first responders and our public works staff. We need a space to, of course, do that.

We could build a building that is in— so for example, accounting, we could build that to a 2 standard. But we can build the EOC to a 4 standard.

Just ship your office to the EOC. Just know you're better off.

I'm just giving you a hard time because you're here.

I would give you a harder time if you weren't.

To that point, we have looked at a portion of the new building to be Category 4 and the rest be Category 3. That is a potential thing because there is There is an estimated 15 to 20% cost increase to go from risk category 3 to risk category 4.

Okay.

With this new building, would you be using the basement like you're using the basement now, or would everything be more up?

It would probably be a slab-on-grade, and then we would go up.

Well, like our rec center where we don't have a basement for track anymore, you're upstairs.

Right.

I mean, we have talked to people. We have talked to the contractor, the architect, about, well, let's put a basement in, that's cheap. And the architect has said, well, it's not necessarily cheap. It is cheaper, but it's not cheap.

As far as the quality of our workplace, I thought I'd want to include that.

Would you need it for storage then or something like that? I wouldn't know, people down there.

I mean, that would obviously— we have not gone anywhere close to that depth of conversation.

But you'd need 2,000 or 3,000 feet. A whole basement for storage.

Yeah.

Or, you know, at $400 a square foot, or I don't know what the number is, it's pretty expensive storage.

Yeah, that's true.

Are there alternatives that are significantly cheaper?

Do you have earthquake insurance on the building?

We do.

So would that continue? That, that would go into your 3 versus 4 conversation.

Yes.

You're not suggesting that's the way to pay for it, are you?

If those rates go down, do you build them stronger?

Your legacy's going to get damaged.

Well, it's, it's all based on the— it's on our property insurance, so I don't think it would necessarily change.

There have been jokes when things overheat and a little fire starts and fire comes over, or, you know, they take care of it and we think, hey, you shouldn't have come over as quickly. We could have gotten some things taken care of.

I think for us, the real key in terms of the decision between 3 and 4 is how operable do we want to be immediately after.

Right.

So just for comparative purposes, when we looked at this, the cost of a remodel and addition that I showed there back in March of 2021, we were thinking that construction costs would be in the range of $21 $22 million. That doesn't include furniture, fixtures, design fees, engineering fees, environmental surveys, and that sort of thing, or a contingency, you know, if there was unforeseen—

Is that what you're saying? The soft costs aren't modeled in?

F&E.

So that would go up 20% higher than the overall cost?

$4 million.

We did pretty good on the library model.

We did. We were able to do it at less than 20%. In fact, we actually got contingency back.

But it's better to over-budget than under-budget.

And part of it is the way we built the structure. We used a construction management general contract, CMGC process, rather than the standard process, and it allowed us to build some efficiency into the project.

This number's from this week from Method Studio. Cost increase compared to last March, they're essentially suggesting about an overall generally about a 12% escalation in the administration costs.

Sure.

So rather than 350 to 370 square feet, Per square foot, they're looking at $400 to $450. As a note, they think we're going to be on the higher end at a risk category 4 versus a risk category 3. So just quickly, and again, you can look at it, these just identify over the last handful of years what we've done to maintain our existing facility. It's in the $100,000 to $400,000 range. And including what we did most recently, we needed— we didn't have any ADA accessible restrooms before, and we did.

Okay.

Then you can look at the details in the PDF, but we did look at 2 options.

The main—

one of the main differences between them is Could we occupy the existing building during construction? So this option one shows that we could if we put the building as far into that southwest corner as possible.

It's hard to see on the red line.

There's a red line shows where the red lines of the existing building, right? Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah. And then they kind of list there's some kind of. Pros and cons that you can look at. And then just some visuals of how we think that might look. We're talking, you know, 3 stories here.

So with that visual, we are right up against—

With whatever setback.

So whatever we discussed yesterday in terms of setbacks, 15-foot sidewalks, it complies with that.

And the dotted line shows essentially our back of the building. So again, in summary, nice plaza space, allows construction while existing building is occupied. Cons are main entry isn't prominent from State or Center. Operations City Hall, even though they could accommodate it, it would be difficult to operate right next door because it would literally butt up to where our existing building is to even to build those. Okay, so then option number 2 here, you can see that there's a portion that would go into where our existing building is.

So that takes out all our pine trees and, you know, all of them?

Yes, this does. It changes, um, it would change the landscape.

So we have to rent space while we'd be building?

Correct.

Is what you're proposing?

Yep.

Or at least option 2 is proposing.

I'm sorry.

Yes.

Yep.

So we'd have to, you know, strike a deal with Canyon Park or put in some trailers or What's the timeframe?

Is it a 2-year plan?

Yeah, I think about a 2-year plan. And then the, you know, for the lights on, you know, our nice LED lights, then we— I don't see anything.

Oh yeah, they don't exist.

Well, we would have to obviously change it and we could shift the focus of it to the internal—

what do you call it?

Thank you.

The internal courtyard, perhaps, rather than the external. But it wouldn't have visibility in the same way from the street out.

But the building could be, you know, obviously really nice and quiet and everything.

So those are specific design questions or ideas that we'd have to flush out.

But I mean, if you relocate it, Yeah, but can you just explain what you're thinking there? Where would we be?

That's where I was saying we'd have to strike a deal with like Camden Park, or we'd have to—

somebody has some access to some trailers.

Or do you have to leave elementary?

There you go.

Go be another seismically unsafe place?

Elementary?

It was only 2 years.

We're working on it.

So are you saying the relocate option is just with the second scenario?

Just with the second scenario.

But that would be a relocate option?

It would have to be.

And the more we pencil this, the more likely even option 1 is going to crowd in that corner. You know, when they get actual drawings, our only option may be to relocate.

No, and the architect was pretty upfront about saying, look, we think we can do this, but I'm not sure. But in thinking they can do it, there's a cost, right?

Yeah.

In working in such close proximity. We did it with the library and the library halls. It can be done. The bigger concern too is staging. There's steel and there's— it's a lot of construction. So where do you stage all of that at the same time you park it and you have employees that are working? So it's not an easy puzzle.

Okay.

From my opinion, which is just mine, but I really think we need to honor green. If there's any place that shows green space, it should be our city center. That we have trees, and I'd love to see it set back and have a beautiful landscape, have our Christmas— I think our Christmas lights are incredible. I think that's really cool. And if this is the center of the city, I don't want to see a building jammed up against State Street and Center Street.

So now you're talking about option 3, if you will, Terry. That moves it all back one unit. And we're relocating, which I think we're going to end up doing. I don't know why, but it's just tough to build.

But I mean, we have— I agree to Terry's point. We have, again, we have not touched but the surface of this conversation. We've tried to— Mayor Brunch, as you mentioned, was very passionate about this, and so we tried to Do what we could, but we haven't really done a very deep dive.

Do—

if you presented when I ran to the restroom, I apologize. Have we talked about potential utility savings?

We voted on them while you were in the restroom.

Oh, good.

How'd it go? Good.

So this whole thing here is because the state's your master plan, we're pushing everything to the state. That's what it is. So with that gone, I think—

Well, that is kind of the That is the modern architecture. I mean, that's what Provo City has done. Some of the other buildings, the courthouse down in Provo, and that's kind of the architecture of today.

Sure.

Keep in mind that because we'd have more space, we'd have to add more parking. Yeah, yeah, this includes more parking too. So we'd have to figure out what that balance is between coming back off of State Street some and still fitting in the But do we have—

have we run any numbers on potential utility savings? I mean, well, clearly anytime you have a new home, you have less repairs and maintenance. I get that. We'll have a cushion, a runway for 6 to 8 or 10 years before the water heater goes out and the dishwasher, whatever that you fix in a home. So we'll have those savings for sure, but we'll also have some ongoing— we'll build this, you know, a green building, I'm sure.

Or efficient building.

We may stick some solar panels on it, who knows what. But we haven't really built that into it.

No, the conversation we've had has been we would build to a greener standard. It wouldn't be a LEED building, but close. But it's going to be dramatically better than single-pane windows and no insulation and an HVAC system that is struggling and old boilers. And so, yeah, yeah.

Okay, they can be old boilers to the City Council in 40 or 50 years to worry about.

But knocking it down, the con is only we have to relocate.

Yeah, and we would, again, to Terry's point, maybe we prioritize what is the bigger, bigger focal point. Is it the trees that front State Street, or is it the courtyard? And if we build on this campus, then, you know, then we would have to go deeper into the courtyard and lose those trees versus towards the frontage of the road and lose those trees.

I thought Terry was suggesting a while back we should have bought the building that the water district bought, you know, when they moved out of that one on 8th North, whatever that was.

Yeah, I mean, I will note about the trees too, and this is probably a conversation we need to have with our forester. A number of those trees have a life. Yeah, and they look great now, but I'm not the one who knows the science, but we could ask him and say, Josh, where are we with—

Yeah, I will say back in March, initial reactions were option 2, at least design-wise and stuff, was kind of the preferred option.

Okay, again, but if we do have to, if we literally have to move this city employees and everyone somewhere else, then we'd have a lot of flexibility.

I believe so. I mean, we could even, we could even attach it to the Public Safety Building, which back in 2005, from what I understand, there was a plan to do just that, to try and literally connect both buildings. Yeah, these options obviously keep it apart given the conversation we had a number of months ago, but there's a pretty broad flex there.

And from what you're saying, you guys, you've gone lightly into it. You've got numbers, you've got that, but as far as really getting down in the weeds and figuring out exactly where you want to go—

Difference between remodel and addition versus new construction, about a 15%, 10 to 15% decrease in cost in the estimate overall. But that was back in March of 2021. Again, 12% escalation. Then we're up to—

Can I stop?

Is anyone thinking remodel?

No.

No.

So I think you can skip that.

It doesn't make sense.

Hit fast forward.

It's more money and it's—

Okay, so skip the remodel options.

Great. So bottom line, we're looking at $360 to $400 a square foot with today's construction prices according to You're just shy of 30 minutes.

How do we pay for it?

With—

It's like, let's get it done now.

Okay.

Yes, sir.

Let's get to it then.

Bring your waist up.

Oh my gosh.

Do you want me to walk out again so you can vote on this chair?

So the $354, I have no idea what the difference is between retail and commercial, but retail, I mean residential, is through the roof. I mean, that's— no one can build for $354 on residential from what I'm being told.

Well, we built, we built the, um, we built the library hall and the fitness center for under $4. Granted, it's a different—

very high ceilings which add to the expense, right?

But, you know, we're just working off of what the architects are telling us.

Maybe at current rates, right?

Yeah, we would anticipate this would be a steel— would need to be a steel structure.

We built the new—

I don't know. I don't know the differences in how to—

The finishes are different. We wouldn't be building to an A standard, more of a B standard. So that could be some of it. This doesn't include, I'm sure, landscaping or anything outside the footprint of the building, so there would be that cost there.

By the way, if it's ever helpful to tour the new buildings at UBU, I know you're going to be there Wednesday, I think, right?

Yeah.

You know, those buildings, we We spent just under $400 a foot, and they're more office space than fitness center and library hall space. So it's, it's more comparable to what we're doing.

If you—

I don't know how long the tour they're going to give. I'd be happy to give you another tour before or after, Mayor, and show you some of that space. But it's pretty nice fit and finish, and it was about $400 a foot.

Yeah, as far as cost right now, Even though it seems like we're on an upward spiral endlessly, there are a lot of things that are leveling out. A lot of developers are kind of projecting, you know, actual decreases, not in labor, but in supplies and materials.

And that 4 included most of our F&F.

Oh, wow. So, I mean, and Mayor, we're hearing the same thing. In fact, we're seeing the same thing in our Development Services Department. Things are starting to slow down a bit.

Yeah.

So you asked the question as to— and this is— this was a discussion that we— and an effort that we put together in October of 2021. So it doesn't take into account these cost increases. So when I represented to Mayor Brunts that I'm confident we could fund this building, it's representative of what I understood the cost to be. So we would have to go back and revisit. But essentially what We have the primary monies we would be using to construct is $13 million in unrestricted capital project monies. Those are the dollars that Brandon and Steven identified in the capital projects account as fund balance. So we have been setting money aside in recent years for—

Capital projects.

For construction of a project like this. The first 2 items, the first one is identified as non-departmental contingency. This is the money that we have essentially available from the CARES Act. So the first round of federal stimulus dollars, we would set aside about $4 million of that. The next amount of money is ARPA money. So this is a piece of the $16 million that we've gotten from the federal government. The, uh, about $11.5 million of it right now has been set aside for Hillcrest, but there is additional money remaining. And the argument and the rationale for using federal dollars to build something like this is there's an emergency component associated with it, and in addition In addition to the emergency component, there are provisions in the new building that would enhance safety and deter, for example, the continuation of COVID And by that I mean touchless, touchless bathrooms and fixtures, HVAC systems.

In-room?

Windows, doors, all of those things can actually count towards federal qualification for ARPA. And so I set aside— we set aside about $2.5 million for that.

Do we think that'll fly?

No, yeah, that's in the regulations. There's other cities that have done this. That's in the regulations. In fact, some of the work that we did, now we have touchless doors in the city center. And such. That's all use of federal dollars.

The other—

the remainder of these accounts kind of dive into the discussion that Brandon and Steven had earlier today, where as an organization, much of the operations of the city is run out of the general fund, and we charge those enterprise funds for our services. So the 311, our customer services representatives, are actually funded and in the general fund, but we charge the water fund and we charge the sewer fund and we charge the storm drain fund for a portion of their wages because they're doing the work of those funds. They're just doing it in the general fund. The same rationale And that's just for operational people. The same rationale can apply to a physical facility. So we would actually charge these additional funds for a share of the new building to cover the cost of running operations for and on behalf of water in the new city center, storm in the new city center, roads and the tax in the new city center. So it's perfectly legitimate for renting a space?

Correct. Super direct examples are utility billing. We take all of our calls and complaints about utility systems in City Hall.

We have limited dollars that are there for police and fire impact fees. We collect those. This obviously has a public safety component, so we can use those dollars for capital construction of public safety facilities. So that is included as well, and we get to a number of about $24.7 million.

What's the $13 million future projects number?

So that is the money that Brandon— that's the money that Brandon and Steven were representing money in our capital projects fund. In the last presentation, it was like $13.4 million.

Not the rainy day fund?

That is not the rainy day fund.

Oh, no. Okay.

So that's really—

that's just money that's just sitting in the capital projects account.

Yes.

And that was for the city center WU?

That is what we have.

A project just like this.

So we were— it's not necessarily for the cap— it's not necessarily for the city center. Prior to COVID, We knew that we were interested in the Hillcrest Park property, or the Hillcrest School property, and we knew that we needed to start collecting some money. And so we had this money in the, in the budget in anticipation of a big project. And then COVID happened and we got all this federal money, and then we realized we could fund the park with COVID money. We didn't have to fund the park with The city money. So all of a sudden, this project became far more attainable because we had now this federal. So that's how we've gotten to this point.

Yeah, that makes sense.

I do have one question.

These, um, the different funds, the water, sewer, is this going to be a one-time transfer or will this be an ongoing operation?

It will continue to be an operating operational transfer every year to pay for the, you know, the ongoing going in. But this would be a one-time capital assessment from each of the funds.

If we come up $5 million short through all this kind of stuff, then sales tax isn't quite as wonderful next year. I mean, because I know we do better typically than we budget because we take a conservative approach, etc., etc. What do Can we do a bond, or does a bond need to go to the vote of the people? How do we borrow the additional $5 million if it was a $30 million number?

I mean, we could even enter— and this is where Brandon jumps in— but couldn't we do like a capital lease or something like that? Or we could do a revenue bond for sure.

Yep, those are options.

We talked about 15%. We could borrow, if you will.

Against our rainy day fund.

Against our rainy day fund.

Obviously, there would be expectation of some sort of replacement thereof. So as far as immediate cash need, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

What happens if we're short is what—

Construction time would be over 2 years, right? And so then we can better assess how much contingency do we really need over that time.

And And we're going to have to rent 40,000 square feet somewhere.

In a perfect world, you'd get to the entire number. But if you didn't, you know, that's $3, $4, $5 million or whatever, the cost of that money for that little piece of $4 or $5 million for the benefit you get out of the city center, it'll make sense.

Yeah, I mean, I'd hate to go to a bond for $4 or $5 million because the cost of issuance are so high for $4 or $5 million. You know, if we're going to go for a bond, let's go for a big number. I'm not suggesting—

for us poor people, that's still a big number.

Go ahead, Rob, explain.

I'm not saying that. But, you know, if you bond for $4 million and you pay $150,000 or $200,000 in bond fees costs—

issuance costs are the same here at Darcy's, generally speaking. Pretty much.

They're pretty flat.

But we've got other better options than I believe so.

And my question is, are we legally able to reach those without going to a vote, do those other things? And you're telling me yes.

Yes. I believe so.

Because you have the money, right?

Yeah.

Because you have 80% of the money.

Yeah.

And you have access to it.

And then you get ready to do the leases.

So this is kind of where we are. We have obviously let it sit for a while. The costs are increasing. Interest rates were, when we had this conversation earlier, a concern because we were looking to finance a significant part of this building. That's not the case now, so the dynamics have changed a little bit.

Remind me the timetable on the CARES and the—

CARES?

Yes, CARES is completed. We have the money, it's ours. We were able to allocate it to public safety. Personality, remember that, captured. So that $4 million is in the bank.

I didn't care.

No, that one doesn't care.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Make sure Adam knows this is CARES. So, so that one is already ours. The, uh, the other one has to be spent by December of '26, the ARPA, which is the second half.

And we may get a third tranche that isn't on this board.

Good.

We don't—

we're not being talked about.

Yeah.

Okay. Thank you.

But there is some time we wouldn't have to move to get the—

for that $2.5 million. Yes.

So what is our next step?

Well, I mean, what we— if you were comfortable with this potential proposal, then we would go and start developing a formal bid or a formal RFP where we would solicit, um, request for proposal. So we would go out and we would solicit bids to help us bid this work. We have to do a vote on it first, just authorize you to move forward.

Okay.

And then we would essentially come back and I imagine we'd probably follow the same process as we did with the fitness center and go with the CMGC process because it was the most efficient way to do it. So the CMG process is one where the store— or the kind of the traditional process is you get an architect, they build Plans, then we take the plans and we go to the marketplace and we say, this is what we want to build, give us a price. The CMGC process is we bring— we have about 30— we go to 30% drawings with the architect and then we hire the general contractor. And the general contractor comes in, he or she looks at the plans and says, I think there are efficiencies that can be garnered if you don't do this. Or here you have this round kind of feature. Round and steel generally don't work. If you do it this way, you save money. If we go and use this type of HVAC versus that— so they are actually in the process of helping you design the building at the same time you are pouring footings and foundation. Foundations and actually digging the hole for the building. So it is kind of a collaborative process all the way through to— at a certain point in the process, you reach what we call guaranteed maximum price, where the contractor will say, okay, we've now finished all the architectural drawings. We've sat down with the contractor. The contractor feels confident that we can deliver this building at At this price, and then we lock in the price.

And we did that with Big D?

We did that with the fitness center, yes. We didn't do that with the library hall, and frankly, it was a problem because we were also working off of 10-year-old plans and modified the plans. And so it's, it's a more streamlined process. I'm not saying it's a faster process, but it is more streamlined.

And, but it's per For example, everything's approved. I mean, they're not going to change. You're not going to go in and go, oh wait, I thought this office was going to look like this.

Yeah, we're not, we're not going through a ton of change orders. So, and in addition to bringing the general contractor on, we will bring the subcontractors on relatively quickly too. So a subcontractor, like a steel subcontractor, you can say, hey, you're speccing out, you know, 56-inch We don't have those. We have to go to China. There's a 9-month turnaround time. But in our yard down in Sanpete County, we have 50-inch posts. So if you build to 50-inch rather than 56-inch, we can get those immediately. It doesn't slow down time. And we do that with plumbing, we do that with steel, we do that with electrical and all the, all the subs. And it works better, at least our experience. with the fitness center was, it was a really, really good experience.

So the mayor, Franz, wanted this resolution in November or December. That was just to say, that's my legacy?

Because I think the mayor, the mayor was very passionate about putting his name in history as being very supportive It'll stay there. Yes, it'll stay there.

I mean, we were pushing it in 2014, we got elected, but there's a place in time too.

Yeah, I mean, I can't speak for Mayor Brunson, but I do know that he was very passionate about this project.

Well, that's why I said the resolution, because he was pushing this resolution at city council. So do we have to do that? No, if not, we just tell you to move forward.

Okay. But it, it's, uh, Yeah, if you just give me a head nod, then I will be going through this process.

Do we need to take a head nod from everybody or what?

Well, do we have any other concerns?

I'm in favor of the head nod. That's what you're asking for, Mayor?

Yeah, I mean, my only other, uh, the only other possible conversation is just do we have other competing things or I agree with you.

And that's a fair conversation. We have been, and I know Brandon has left, we've been pretty fortunate in recent years where we have had a good cash flow from overages and in sales tax. We've had some good building revenue fees. Oh, here's Brandon. Brandon, we were talking about kind of in recent years we've had just positive revenue gains on buildings, sales tax, and we've been able to fund a lot of our capital projects with those monies.

Correct.

And the mayor is asking, you know, are there other big outstanding projects in the general fund that we need to be mindful of?

I mean, just to kind of I think I was— our conversations earlier with potential raises for the police department, or just inflation issues we've got going on right now.

The only thing I would say is this is, this is one-time money that we would use, and some of these other issues that we're talking about in terms of raises and operational needs, those are ongoing concerns. So I, I would I would anticipate that we would look to sales tax and other revenues as a means to address those issues, and we would be using capital monies for these improvements. So earlier Tom mentioned, you know, setting that budget as far as being conservative with our sales tax estimates, right?

So where—

what is your Conservative versus, let's say, my conservative, right?

And where do we want to target those budget and sales tax dollars, at least initially, and maybe thinking about that into the future as far as potentially funding those ongoing public safety type dollars.

Yeah.

But that would probably be the biggest source of where that might be.