City Council · 2022-03-09

How many times?

So there's such a— so much abundance of compost, they've said we don't want it. We don't need it. It's on a very small scale or single use only when people come to the, to the transfer station or landfill. So they've said, we just don't have an appetite for it. So the new process would be curbside pickup, goes to North Point, it then goes to the landfill. And you think, okay, hey, gosh, that's, that's concerning. As Tom mentioned, Councilmember McDonald, Honorable councilman. So here's essentially what has happened, okay? There's not a huge market for it, but we're taking it as green waste now, even though when that green waste comes in, the transfer station landfill just collects it and it all comes together. So there's one small local outlet that processes organic waste, but it's, it's contracted through North Point. None of the other Partner cities take advantage of that.

So if they're—

now here's why we don't want to get rid of green waste. Okay, if outlets develop, and they do develop, then we want to make sure that we still have that capability to be able to provide that resource. So this is not something that I want to say, oh, green waste is going away. It's just being repurposed. Okay, and when it comes back, should there be an outlet for it?

Great.

So, and this isn't a waste management thing. This is not an OREM thing. This is just the landfill saying, no, we're no longer in need of the green waste. Okay, but wait, skip one. So essentially, here's what we found from Lehigh. So Lehigh began just commingling the material. Many of the residents have just kept it because they like keeping it separate to avoid the smell and keeping it separate. But if you didn't want to, you can put additional trash in there as well. So here were some of the questions that came in for Lehigh residents. Okay, and you'll notice it's giving the residents options. Okay, if they don't want to use it, great, we can pull that away. You can use it as an additional container. Um, Yeah, we moved into, uh, why the situation has changed. So we will provide— and Brent will get into what the, you know, FAQs look like so everybody is fully aware. But here's the benefit. So you ask, wait a second, I'm concerned, you know, this is happening. There's still a huge benefit behind having that green waste But it's just collected in the material. So what happens when that green waste comes in, it develops methane. Okay, that methane is then skimmed off and turned into fuel, essentially. So it's still— there's benefit behind having your green waste in the stream. It's just collected differently and repurposed differently. There's no need to separate it out at this point unless you would like to. Does that answer your question?

Yeah, at least you'll have to, you know, power wash one of your cans, right? The grass and stuff gets kind of yucky versus the bag trash.

Yeah, and this, although it's being done differently, I don't want this to come off as— it's just being repurposed.

I mean, it's—

there's nothing changing other than we're no longer going to have a dedicated truck picking up green waste. Doesn't go in a separate green waste pile. You know, it's all just being commingled and collected together.

Blake, would you say also there's a benefit in keeping green waste in a green waste can? Because if you put it, for example, in your regular can and you bag it, typically that's plastic, it goes in the landfill, and we don't benefit from the same environmental benefits you're talking about.

Absolutely, Jamie. And, you know, so there's still huge benefits, and there's also, you know, ground cover, and there's, there's many other elements that come into play by separating it out. And we can go through a list of those, but at the end of the day, really it boils down to there's benefit. We also need ground cover for— we call it landfill cover— is what they need for that methane gas so they can turn those gases into something that can be repurposed.

At the same time, and Blake talked about this very quickly, if our residents want to take their green waste directly to North Point still, that green waste will still be combined with the biosolids from the sewer treatment plant.

TSP.

And then that is turned into compost, and that's been the right amount supplies the demand for that compost that people use in their personal gardens.

And Brynn's much more articulate than me, and that's spot on. So there's still an outlet for individual residents. So, like, Councilmember, you know, that's very passionate about it, you can take that directly there.

So spot on. I have a question then.

So will this save money if the regular garbage trucks are just picking it up along with your trash than having a separate You know, I always wondered how they just come down each thing and look for the green waste.

So it will be cheaper.

There is, there is an element to that. You know, I can only speak for Waste Management, and there is some, a little bit of savings.

Savings on our roads and all that kind of stuff too, right?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's savings on roads, there's savings on the truck, there's savings, you know, there's some minimal savings that, you know, we can get into offline. But yes, absolutely. Across the board. So, and this is what it looks like when you really think about it. And it's the old Stephen Covey, you know, when you mix green waste, you know, it looks like this. When it's separated out, it looks like this. There is also the element of being more efficient as well. And that's where taking the trucks off the road and getting into, you know, the wear and tear and stuff like that.

And when it, when it is mixed in with our regular waste stream at the landfill, that, that ends up helping the decomposition to happen throughout the cell where all the waste goes to. And that actually does extend the life of the landfill.

It does.

Yeah, absolutely.

Do you want me to take this one?

Yes.

Okay.

So, and you talked about efficiencies and where that comes in. I feel like you guys are teeing me up. Like each time you ask a question, the next slide comes up. Yep, less trucks needed, less wear and tear on the road, less labor dependent, and year-round pickup. So rather than the March to November pickup, you'll now be able to have access to it year-round.

And we now have to pay for the can for 12 months instead of for 9 months, is that right? But you do—

you don't have to. You still will have that option. So if you want to, great. If you don't, no problem. So It has the added benefit. The nice part about this is it gives the city flexibility. Residents like flexibility, and this is what it allows to do.

So my question is, like, right now I have it for 9 months. If I want it for 12, I have to call in. Otherwise, would it stay what I have now?

We, we would work with the city on that. It's dependent, it's city by city. If you want to keep it for 12 months, great. We could do the 9 months and then activate it. Really, there's options associated with that, and that's up to you as a city how you would like that to look. You know, I can tell you Lehigh's just leaving it year-round. If people want to discontinue, they call to discontinue. So it's really dependent city by city.

Um, so we think people will see it as, as essentially a bonus bid at a cheaper cost. Yeah, so less expensive, less labor. So how many people are you going to absorb them in somewhere else?

Or we will be So we'll be absorbing them other places. Trust me, with labor shortages right now, if you know anybody with a CDL, send them our way. So we're clamoring for drivers and workers. But yes, we will be repurposing them other places within other cities.

So in terms of what this means in cost, Waste Management, they just worry about going from curbside to the transfer station. Normally in recycling, and with the original original intent of this being having a market at the end of it where citizens would purchase the compost, that originally was intended to cover some of that cost. So essentially, the cost savings from the efficiencies that Blake is describing, that'll then cover the cost from going from transfer station out to the landfill. So at this point, then we eliminate that it wasn't covering all of its costs previously.

And now we will just kind of keep the cost the same moving forward.

Um, so already gotten with our communications team, Pete Wolfley, he deserves the credit, as we were talking about how to, how to educate and get the word out. We figured we'd take advantage of Dr.

Seuss and, uh, you paid a royalty, I assume. We'll see how he responds.

Usually we've been small potatoes.

So yeah, we'll put up— we'll have a dedicated webpage that goes over the frequently asked questions. We have been keeping an eye on what other citizens in other cities are saying about it, and we'll continue to team up with Waste Management as they come out to different events and things to make sure that we're continuing to get the word out. And then most important thing, this is an optional service already. And so we'll make sure that people— that that's loud and clear, including on the website. You know, this is— it's an optional thing. And if you want to keep it, great, you can. It becomes, you know, a cheaper bonus bin. If not, just let us know. Again, we'll go back, we'll work with Waste Management, pick up the can, and decrease that no longer charge that fee on the citizens' utility bill.

And can I just jump in and say one thing? We're very involved in your community. And so when we do the Touch-a-Truck events and the different sponsorships, we'll make sure that we're continuing to educate as well throughout. So this isn't something where, poof, hey, we did this. We're going to continue. And when the option hopefully comes up to separate You know, green waste again, we'll be making sure to educate residents that it's, you know, available.

And I think, if I may too, when we look at right-sizing our rates, our residential waste rates for customers, we kind of take a holistic view. So we look at the residential can, the garbage can, and we look at recycling, we look at green waste. And we don't necessarily just look at each one in a vacuum because, for example, we try and price our recycling can as economical as possible and potentially push some of the responsibility for that recycling can onto the cost of the first residential can— waste can, because there's advantages for all of our customers in using a recycling can versus a standard waste can. If people use a recycling can, then that material actually gets recycled and it goes to a processing plant. It doesn't get in a— it doesn't get put in a landfill. We don't have to pay tipping costs. So it's actually cheaper for our customers to recycle than it is to go to residential waste because we avoid the cost of a landfill. So that was one of the things we've tried to look at too, is Okay, well, how do we still keep it advantageous for many of our customers to keep their green waste can so they feel like it's a win for them and they can continue to take advantage of a can that stinks for all of their, you know, green needs? And let's be honest, I think a supermajority of everything in those green waste cans on an annual basis are grass clippings.

Yes.

So grass clippings are not the kind of green waste that you generally will produce wonderful Top mulch with. If it's wood chips, if it's things like that, that's great waste. Grass clippings, not so great waste.

But it's great for methane.

But it's great for methane. So, you know, can we provide an option for customers for green waste at a rate that is less than a second residential garbage can, still provides the customer the benefit of, you know, having the stinky can, having spot to put their trimmings, their clippings, still frees up the space they have in their regular can while at the same time maintains the integrity of our recycling program. And so we look at all 3 of those as we price them together. And so that's why we don't necessarily want to just say, let's just do away with green waste cans, nobody's using it. Well, people are still going to want to use it, and there's actually a benefit, and let's reward them for that benefit, and let's price that green green— or continue to price that green waste can $4 less a month than the standard garbage can or your second garbage can. And then the recycling, let's price that even more competitively, encouraging people to recycle, thereby discouraging additional tonnage in the landfill. Because we're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just on tipping fees to put stuff in the landfill. Every recycling bin we generate is less money we have to spend to tip and put into a landfill.

And it's somewhat anecdotal because we're kind of early into this to some extent, but Blake can speak to how other citizens in other cities have responded in terms of how much are they still using green waste.

We haven't—

I mean, we were and talk to you about, you know, in the Salt Lake Valley, but I can use Lehi as an example. Okay, they really haven't seen an impact on that, you know, handful of calls here and there. This really is not, you know, the, the biggest question that happens is somebody will go, hey, the, the garbage truck just picked up my green waste. Yep, it is now. It's going to be done, you know. That's— and there's a whole list of FAQs that we provide And we've just found that they're very simple answers to questions that come up. And on a rare occasion, somebody wants to remove a can, it's fine.

It's—

you're giving the customer options. Okay, this is not like, you know, a mandatory program. If this was a mandatory program, this would be a much different conversation. This is an optional program, and if somebody doesn't want to do it, that's okay. But there's still many added benefits behind Having that green waste container.

So we just want to be transparent, come through the front door, let you know this is what's happening. And in the event you get any feedback, you can explain, and we're happy to provide you with additional information to explain. We do anticipate that we will have some calls.

You will.

And we will have some people who want to— want Waste Management to pick their can up, and that's okay.

Yeah, but yeah, this, this, this is not a huge controversial item, but yeah, you'll get a couple calls as mayor and council members.

And but, you know, there's, there's a whole list of questions on how you address that. If somebody wants a green waste can down the road, we can still provide it, still can provide it at a discounted rate.

And that's why I had mentioned to the city, I I've had this happen in other cities where they're like, you know what, hey, just forget it, pick up, you know, we're done, you know, it's not coming back.

It's really difficult to reintroduce something. It is.

And where if you're doing it for a little bit and then we need to reintroduce it, it's very simple. You know, I use this example.

There was—

Orem wasn't one of the locations, but there were cities that when recycling got really bad and there wasn't much of a value on commodities, they took out— not our customers, but competitors' customers— they took out mixed paper and said, hey, that's not a viable commodity in your recycle container. Now cities are trying to reintroduce it, and Brandon's been on the forefront of a lot of this. It's near impossible trying to reeducate people. It's just like plastic bags. You still have people put plastic bags in you know, the recycling, even though you've told them a million times not to. So that's why, you know, a gradual approach on this to say, hey, there's still a benefit, continue to use your green waste container, it's just going to be collected in the same truck. Should it be a viable option, we will reintroduce it.

If there's any questions that end up coming up that we haven't anticipated, of course, always open to additional feedback. Blake knows I'm always willing to go and, you know, shake them down for anything else for the benefit of all of us.

A little too much.

So I've got a question. So out of that fee, how does that work? Does the city get a piece of it? What's the split between what you get and what the city gets on that fee for the greenways? Sorry, I guess I'm confused.

So how the contract works Is group— is Waste Management charges the city just for the cost of picking up the can and taking it to the transfer station down in Linden, the dump, the Linden dump. Our entire charge to the citizen includes the cost of what the transfer station charges us and what the cost is to haul it from the transfer station to the landfill. In Alberta, and then the cost of the land. And so all of those costs go into ultimately what we charge.

Our rate that we charge is a hauling rate to the city, so I can't speak to customer rates or anything.

So do we make money? Will we lose money if people quit doing green? No, no, it's not true.

Yeah, we, we as well roll in To our customer charge.

Oh.

The spring and fall cleanup programs.

So when we send out the free dump passes that go out in newsletters, we work that into the program as well. We also have obviously the recycling program. Our relationship with Waste Management is by a long-term agreement. And we agree to the terms of the agreement that every year, for example, will be subject to rate increases based on cost of living schedules, or essentially in our case it's the Western Region Bureau of Land Statistics.

Yeah.

Schedule, and we base whatever the cost is of the program with the agreement, uh, if it increases 4%, then we pass that on to the rate and it's loaded into next year's rate and we move forward prospectively that way.

The other thing is the city provides the billing, right, through our utility billing, so that's included in that rate as well.

Do you anticipate with inflation and gas went up that there will be It's gonna cost more.

Um, we, we just recently did our CPI index.

Um, you—

I think you should have much higher rates, but you have a very good staff that beat me up very good this year. And so we're, we're adhering— at this point, we're adhering to the CPI index, so which is contractual. Um, I can tell you there's some alarming things on the horizon. That are coming to a head. If you've looked at gas prices, the fortunate part is your trucks are CNG, which helps a little bit. But there are some things on the horizon that could potentially be scary. But, you know, we'll look at that down the road.

So when we renegotiated our— we went out to bid as we're required to do, awarded the contract to Waste Management. But as part of the bid process, the last time we went out to bid, we required compressed natural gas trucks. So in fact, we were the first city in the valley to require that. And so in awarding the agreement, the contract to Waste, that you purchased a whole new CNG fleet.

Fleet and station. I mean, we built the whole thing out for Orem.

So that has benefited Waste. But it's also greatly benefited Orem because in the past we were subject to what we call diesel fuel surcharges. So the pricing of the contract actually fluctuated up and down based on the cost of diesel fuel.

So CNG has helped the city, and I can tell you, fast forward, we now have it at our West Jordan facility, we have it at our West Haven facility, and we're looking to add it into our facility as well. So It looks like we were forward-thinking, really. We just got pushed, and it looks to be a good endeavor to get into.

Thank you. All right, anything else? Any other questions?

Okay, okay, thank you.

Absolutely, thank you and welcome.

So a couple new faces.

Thank you. Next up, we got Brandon to go over budget, revenue, and compensation.

This will be the first of 3 work session meetings covering different elements of the budget.

Today we'll be discussing revenues and fees and charges, which I will touch base on, as well as compensation, which Jenica will touch base on. So we'll switch as soon as I finish the revenue and fees and charges section.

In future meetings, we'll be discussing, discussing operations, fleet, IT. And then we're at the next meeting, then we'll finish up the first week, first meeting in April with some CIP capital projects items, with then the tentative budget coming to you in the first council meeting in May.

Just to kind of give you a structure of where we're heading.

To start, I want to touch base, just to kind of give you a base as to where we're looking at our fiscal '23 budget, where we're at now. And so this, this schedule gives you an idea of where our fiscal '22 budget is, where we are year to date with revenues in relation to those specific— these aren't every revenue, but these are our major revenues. And then where we are year to date in relation to those. You can see, you know, where some of these revenues are sales taxes, for instance.

Well, that only—

we are only through December, so that number is through December because there's a lag between when we actually get the sales tax revenue versus when the original sales tax was collected.

So, sorry, but just so we can understand, so the fiscal year '22, actual year to date, that's where we're at. And what timeframe? As of February. On a— the budget ends June 31st? Yes, June 30th. June 30th. Okay, so that's where we're at right now. And then that's the entire budget for the entire year on the slide next to that, right? Correct.

Yeah.

Okay.

But when we say as of February, that sales tax number is What was collected.

Yeah, so, so that's what I— that's what I'm—

even though we say it's as of February, you have to keep in mind that some of these revenue sources are not— they only apply to, for instance, sales taxes only through December. Its collections through February, but it actually only relates through December.

So remittances through December.

Remittances through December.

But we do it on an accrual basis.

But we, because we work on an accrual basis, so when we get to June, we actually have 2 months after June that get put back into the prior fiscal year. Franchise taxes, a majority of those are a month behind. Property taxes are, generally speaking, a month behind. building permits, business licenses, E911, ambulance, all the rest of those are all as of February 28th.

But property taxes be a month behind, we get all of it in November, December, January. So February doesn't have a big problem.

That's why you see 97% of it, because we're basically there. We have very little, but most of what comes in the remainder part of the year are actually auto registration.

So the most meaningful thing then is the Variance, right?

Yes, the right, far right column is really the most important piece of that.

That's adjusting for all those different lags.

Yes, that's comparing where we were with sales taxes with exactly the same time period from the year before.

And so those—

that is the most important column.

Brandon, too, just as a note, they're not— not all of these revenue sources are equally distributed across each calendar month.

Correct.

So for example, So, sales tax, December sales tax are typically a big month for us because it's Christmas season. So, we'll see a lot of sales. Franchise taxes, for example, if we have a really hot summer, people will use more energy.

Yes.

We'll see a spike in our franchise taxes. If we have a warm winter, people aren't turning their furnaces on, lower natural gas bills, actually see a drop in our franchise taxes. So you can't necessarily just look at those and go, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take that number divided by 12. And I'm going to extrapolate to the end of the calendar year, to the end of the fiscal year, because there are some ebbs and flows in some of these. Property tax?

No.

Sales tax, franchise tax, even building permits and things like cemetery fees and court fines and fees actually will, will fluctuate to some degree.

All of those.

So Brandon, with that in mind, not knowing if there's going to be a hot summer, whatever, are you really conservative on your initial budget with the idea that you're gonna have to— you just don't know which?

They're all conservative. I'm an accountant, obviously, so all things are conservative.

That's what I thought.

But we'll see that when we, when we start talking about the budget, the actual proposed fiscal '23 budget. But so I just wanted to give you— this just really gives you an idea of where we are. Obviously sales taxes are doing very well, as you're well aware. Building permits struggling a little bit. That may or may not be related to the moratorium. We'll see. As Jamie mentioned, lots of the building permits historically come in in the spring. When people are getting ready to start those summer construction, so we may not be quite there yet, but comparatively to the year before, it's down.

We do have some unique sales tax as well. President Biden family credit that was issued between July and December of 2021, some of the other stimulus dollars that have been distributed in recent years. I'm not necessarily sure if what we are seeing is sustainable and projectable into the future because there have been a few, I guess you could say, outliers that have made surges in sales taxes probably more likely than they could be prospectively.

Inflation certainly affects it as well. Inflation as well, yeah.

Over 80% of it's the first 3 lines.

And then, you know, some of it, you see some of the other impacts in relation to— any questions before I move? Just to give you an idea. So this is going to— how those fees break out, and it's just those fees. So the 53% out of those major revenue sources that we have, sales taxes represents 53%. percent of those revenues, or those major— and our major revenue sources represent 2/3 of all general fund revenue. So overall, sales taxes represent 40% of all revenues of the general fund. So just to give you some perspective as to how big sales taxes are.

And franchise tax is just a fancy name for sales tax. So It's the same thing. I'm sorry, I cut someone else off.

No, I was just gonna say, and if we wanted a breakdown of where that sales tax is coming from, is that in that CAFR report?

Like how much comes from auto sales, how much comes from retail?

Correct.

There is a page in the statistical section of the, the comprehensive—

what they call it now.

Yeah, yeah, the CAFR. Yeah, for our annual financial report, for lack of a better term. Yes, there's a doc. page in there that gives you an outline, generally speaking, what kinds of company sources those dollars.

So does it show changes from year to year?

It doesn't show percentages. Yeah, there's a 10-year history, so you can at least see the number. And then, but it doesn't give you a percentage change.

But it doesn't necessarily say last year the auto dealership sold this many cars in or still generated the sales tax, but you do have it separated by those categories.

Okay. Then let's talk—

so that was general fund specific. Now these are the other major revenue, major funds, major revenue sources that we have within the city that are separate from the general fund. And this, this table is exactly the same as the other one, you the current budget, where we are year to date, how much of that has been collected. These have very similar— as Jean, they have fluctuations in particular times of the year when perhaps they have bigger things, bigger pushes than other times. Obviously, care tax and transportation are both sales tax related. So we should expect those to be big, just similar to the general fund sales tax. And you can see that reflected here. Recreation, obviously, we had a fitness center that wasn't open the full year, the year before. So we should expect a big increase there, obviously. Water, we obviously decreased the rate for the current fiscal year. So you can see the impact of increasing that rate, what that has done in comparison to the same timeframe from the year before.

Did decreasing that rate affect the water usage at all?

I know water usage has also gone down. It's a little harder to tell because it also was a very dry summer, and so obviously when we have a very dry summer, people conserve as well. Sometimes that's not the case, sometimes they actually use more, but we did see a conservation there. So yes, I would say yes, but sometimes that's hard to differentiate. We can't differentiate between—

I'm just curious if lowering the rate affected the usage at all.

But usage has gone down as well.

But the rate didn't get lowered until July, right? Yeah, July 1st, correct. Right, so the usage actually was down about 15% during the drought last year. During the heat of the drought, people conserved more than what we anticipated they would, and I'd say the primary result of that revenue reduction is the fact that we had extreme weather conditions and we had a lot of public service announcements by the owner and others in the water industry that drove those numbers down. So we are concerned about where we're going to land at the end of this fiscal year.

So how does that work if you have the reduced usage but our wells are still producing all the water, we're still getting the springs and bringing all the water? Does it get offloaded somewhere?

Uh, no, we—

so—

Or do we sell it? Are we making money off of that reduction?

No, we're not, because we're not selling it. So we're just not using it. It's not demanded, so we're not providing it.

So it's coming from the springs, so it has to go somewhere.

I think what— I think what you're referring to though is we have certain sources like, like for example, Provo River. Yeah, we just, we just don't pump our wells as much.

We don't have Anything for you.

So then you'll stop— you don't pump the wells as much, and that's our cost savings.

Okay, any questions about any of those?

You know, at a future meeting, it'd be interesting to see how much of that 16% reduction is from lower usage that we've talked about versus lower fees. If that's not difficult, maybe you could send an email out and let us know what that is, because we applaud people when they're using less, but we get less revenue when they're using less. So, but it is still good to see the social impact.

Normally happens just on the inverse, Tom. So when we increase rates, then they use less, right?

Right.

But here they use less because they were— every time they turned on their TV, they were being proselytized to use less, right?

So guilt or action or whatever. Thank you, Shane. Shane, your lawn is too green.

And this just gives you an idea from the revenue of those other major revenues.

And the same thing where those major revenue sources are, how they compare to each other as far as utility.

So now looking ahead to our fiscal '23 budget. So, obviously our current budget, same column as from the slides before. This is general fund we're specifically talking about, and where we anticipate our tentative budget currently is, obviously year-end as a proposal. The sales taxes, to give you an idea where That cup, the $31 million is coming in, is we took our fiscal '21 whole year, what our actual was, and we said, let's add 5%. Let's assume there's a 5% increase. We are currently at 14.5%. So about the conservative nature that I mentioned. So, but I still have 6 months, right? We still have 6 months of sales taxes that I have no idea I have no idea what Ukraine is going to do to that. I have no idea what the lack of advanced child tax credit— granted, we're having a lot of refund time, right? So maybe— but are people, given what's going on with Ukraine, given what all these things, are they going to— is it going to be spent? Is it going to be saved?

Who knows?

I would assume it probably won't drop too far, but that said, it's a very conservative 5%. Then for the budget, then I took whatever that new number was, and I added another 5%. And that's how we got to $31 million. So there's some leeway there that if either the 14.5% drops, or if fiscal '23 doesn't turn out to be 5%, it's less, then there's some leeway there that we're not going to hopefully be too far off. As you can see, all of the other major revenue sources are pretty much flat until you get to cemetery and court fees. Court fees primarily as they continue to ramp up and are able to do more things.

We expect those fees to gradually increase as they're able to do more than they have been under COVID restrictions.

So you anticipate a lot more people will die?

I—

yeah, I guess part of this is fee-related, which we'll get into a little later.

But actually, yes, because we haven't named them though, Terry.

We haven't got them by name, just by number.

Okay, we actually, we actually are having conversations about adding personnel to the cemetery because we are experiencing and conducting more burials up there than we have in years past.

So there is a trend in And but we're down quite a bit.

But people, people buy lots and they, you know, they may buy them in 2005 and use them in 2022.

So yeah, so to that point, lot sales in fiscal '21 were 180% of normal of the year before. Because of the new Probably new fee, probably because of the lower cemetery being opened, right? So a big rush.

More died of COVID

So cemetery fees includes lot sales and interment fees, right? So you got a big, huge jump in, in lot sales in fiscal '21. Now in 2022, not nearly. It's actually down 16%. But interments, on the other hand, have stayed pretty steady, if not slightly increasing.

We have experienced an increase in interments, actually. So burials have gone up. So even though somebody's buying a property or buying a lot, a plot, they're not actually tying that to a burial at that time necessarily.

So we have—

we're starting to tie this to the baby boomer curve, and we're going to see this Continue to grow as, as you know, baby boomers— it's not COVID-related necessarily.

No pressure.

I know those people.

Everything is COVID.

Flipping from general fund to those other major revenue sources. So B&C Road revenues, we expect an increase. Honestly, again, I was told we're With gas prices, I don't know how that's going to impact roads. I assume there will be some impact related to that, but for right now, that's what we've estimated is a 6.3% increase in those. Again, associated care tax, transportation sales tax, both of those again sales tax related, same idea as I mentioned with the other one, other than we've probably pushed those a little bit more, because obviously we know that those CARES tax dollars, you want to get those spent, but it's really the same 5 and 5 concept. Water revenues, pretty close to neutral. And you'll see when we talk about the fees and charges as to why that is the case. Water reclamation, same concept. Stormwater, we have an increased proposal, so this— those revenues reflect that increase. Obviously recreation, there's a whole lot of things going on in recreation related— in the recreation revenues, that's the fitness center and the outdoor pool. And so we anticipate, based on where we've been seeing with memberships and the activity there, that we're going to continue to see quite a bit of growth in those. And then street lighting revenues. Prior, the biggest piece of this increase is going to be in relation to trying to get all of those new places that have the old poles and get all the new poles put into place. And we're needing to do that because we're talking about some cost increases in relation to those poles as well as the labor to, in essence, get those done.

So, Brandon, question about— I've had a resident ask me about that.

Their comment was, is that an internal cost, street lighting? Will they pay on that the rest of their lives? You know, because they have the—

they've had their pole for— I don't know how long they've had their pole, but a long time. They're still paying every month for street lighting. Yes, it's a maintenance.

I thought we lowered it though a little bit.

Yeah, we did lower it.

Capital investment fee of $325,000, which paid for the bond. Now it's switched over to an O&M fee. So we're paying for the cost to operate and maintain the system in perpetuity. Okay, so they always will pay?

Yes. But it was less, right?

Was it?

It went down from $325,000 to $234,000 in 2018. And we still have, we still have 2 major phases of lighting districts to be replaced. Like Brandon mentioned, those cost increases we're anticipating going up maybe as much as 20% between now and July of this year. We're hearing some really bad reports coming from Kodak Electric on street lighting. So it might cost us to delay that and push that out just a little bit. Instead of 2 years, maybe 3 years. We have to be more creative in our solutions for funding those remaining projects.

Just because I think it's, it's a fun statistic in terms of recreation, just when, after about the first month of opening our fitness center, we had just about 15,000 members at our fitness center. And just, I think, last week, Bryce, we hit 23,000 members.

And so that's a source of revenue now. Are we break-even or are we making money?

Do we make money?

Uh, has yet to be seen, but we will probably still lose money for this current fiscal year. Um, but we are anticipating for fiscal '23, the budget, that yes, it will be a small profit-making center, which is the idea of it being an enterprise fund, is that it does produce some additional revenue, in essence, to replace those items within it.

But it's mainly an operational break-even, not a capital structure.

But we used to fund it, was about $400,000 when we had the old one.

Is that correct?

So that's just to bring that up to zero.

Yes, which that's at least that's, that's our base, right? Is to cover that.

We don't want to have to have it subsidized anymore. Our peak membership with the old fitness center, like the most we ever had, was about 13,000 members.

So we're going to be moving into fees and charges. Are there any questions about, you know, global revenue in relation to these things?

I don't know if Bryce would know, but on the outdoor pool, are we expecting just a flat fee? status quo from last year, or an increase? I mean, I think— but do I— For the 2022 summer, or for the next year's budget, the 2023 summer?

This summer.

This summer. Um, it is hard to know, but we feel confident that we have— we now have 23,000 members that are that much closer to the fitness center and our sort of in tune with what we're doing. And so we hope that that will realize an uptick in users of the outdoor pool as well.

And I think we're going to do anything special for—

Bryce and his team are looking to repackage pricing.

Yeah, we're sort of retooling it to align it with the fitness center membership.

We're waiting at the pool all the time.

And now And now you can be there even more often for less money.

We can tell from your face. You know, we are trying to move away from the punch pass where they have to pay every time they go and move to more of a membership model.

So families that frequent the pool alongside the Spencer family can do so for a greater value. So we'll hope—

we hope that we're working with IT to make sure we can get it done before this summer, but that is in the works.

We hope to have that ready to go at the beginning of April.

So our first talking about— and keep in mind, so I've identified, as we go through here, I've identified some, some of our bigger areas, the fees that we either are important to residents in general. There are a our fee schedule has 47 pages of fee stuff. So at the end, you'll see that I invite you to— if you want a copy of that exhibit, you're welcome to request it, and we will, we will send that to you. But just know that this presentation does not include every single fee change that we have. Cemetery, we touched on that. Not only has there been an increase were also cut primarily because they're very heavy in labor cost related. We also are attuned to that, and so we are proposing various increases that you see here to not only the lot fee in the upper and lower cemeteries, but also the resident/non-resident relationship, and then also the interment fees you can see on the bottom.

So, Brent, you know, other cemeteries, is that in line like with Bobo?

Or, you know, I mean, can you get more money because it's a lower cemetery? I mean, like maybe $2,000, or is it that maybe not that big a deal?

Chris, do you know the answer to that?

I don't know what other cities are proposing this year, but we do have a differential, and that's what's us— it's a larger fee for the lower cemetery. And we also have a non-resident fee that's higher to discourage non-residents from being buried here too, to kind of preserve the residents.

But as we've looked at cemetery fees in the past, we actually have had people come and request burial at Orem because pricing is more favorable in Orem. So we've tried to right-size our pricing to discourage that. So for example, American Fork, they have a beautiful cemetery, but it's almost full. So they have some very expensive plots, and people looking to economize have been going shopping around. So we don't necessarily want to do that. And maybe, Brandon, this is a good point to have a conversation about. We actually, from a fee perspective, have looked at trying to be and offer economical fees for our residents and our Orem customers in relation to other customers who may be doing business with the city, who may not be residents of the city. We want to make sure that if they are coming in and requesting a unique service that doesn't benefit the city, you know, in the whole, then they probably are the ones who should bear more of the cost for that service than those who are residents of Orem, and we're just trying to cover our costs and pay for the, you know, the ongoing operation. So you'll see, for example, the first here as to cemetery increases.

We anticipate that the cost of running the cemetery is going to be more this year than last year.

But you also see that we're raising our non-residents fees higher than our resident fees. We want to provide, to the degree possible, value to our Orem And those who wish to do and participate in Orem activities as non-residents, you're going to pay a premium fee. We do that as well with some of our development services fees. If you're coming in and you're pulling a permit and it has some sort of overall city benefit, then the fee is probably less than if you're coming in and you're a developer, you want to develop a project. And the cost of developing that project and the associated work with that is going to exclusively benefit you to a greater degree than the whole entire city, you're going to pay more for that.

So trying to right-size the fees is what we've tried to do here as well.

Or is there a limit to how many plots they can buy?

I, I don't know that.

And then they manage whether they resell those?

they limit the resale.

You can't resell to somebody else.

Do you manage that? Do you follow that?

Yeah, we do.

It has happened in the past where somebody might come in and buy 20 and try to market it somehow, and then if we get catch wind on that, then we kind of shut that down.

We over the platform.

And every year we have—

Because I know this is a big thing, right? A lot of cities are trying to control this, especially especially if we're trying to offer competitive, competitive low rates to our residents, there is this shop around for the city. And I know, you know, anyway, cities that I am from, they really upped the charges for the non-residents to discourage that. And, but there's a balance to where, you know, my great-great-great settled that place. I need to— how come I can't be buried there?

And you're going to get— invariably, all of you are going to get a phone call this year, and it's going to be the 75-year-old individual who has passed away, or the 80-year-old individual who's passed away. They lived 72 of their 75 years here in Orem, but they're no longer an Orem resident, and they come and they ask us, can I get it at the resident rate because I used to live here?

That happens Or they want to be buried in the veterans spot.

Correct.

It's—

I mean, it is—

there are people who do try and game these, these activities and these services.

And how much of a difference is there between residents and non-residents buying plots?

As far as topic of issue, is it a lot more punitive in other places?

I, I don't know what that difference is.

So maybe look at the non-resident, maybe look at the resident. We can certainly, and we have made— so to your point, Renee, we've made some significant strides to kind of prevent that from happening and occurring.

And over the last maybe 5 years, we never had a non-resident fee in years past. But that was the direction of the council.

Yeah, yeah. I don't think that's one you would encourage personally, in my mind. So Dave, I looked at the Provo Cemetery fee schedule and they charge based on what type of stone you put in, flush versus upright.

And I don't see a residency distinction, but flush stones are $1,200, upright stones are $1,700.

Where is that?

That's the Provo Cemetery fee schedule.

So they provide the—

What's that?

They're saying whatever stone.

They don't have a residency.

It's more expensive.

Yeah, there's no distinction.

If you have an upright stone, Perpetual maintenance is more with an upright.

There is an argument. Once you go in the cemetery, you're definitely a resident.

Permanent.

That's truly— I mean, we want to definitely save form, which we're almost sold out in the upper cemetery. Maybe look at that and say, you know, maybe it's not $600, whatever, $500. It's $1,000 or whatever.

And the place that I am referring to that has found out that they were selling— buying plots and reselling them, the city would then put the charge on when they actually buried somebody in there. So they would learn you're not a resident, you bought this under that guy's—

so the traffic—

so you're gonna, you're gonna pay more at the burial time. So that's kind of how they enforced it.

And they're just—

so, you know, they don't own the property, but they have a perpetual lease.

So I have a concern about—

just because of what Jamie brought up, you know, for that guy that lived here for 72 years, they died and they want to bury mom and dad here.

And, and if there couldn't be a more emotional time than when they come in to talk about that, and we're going to charge them $400 more It might not be the 400, but the principle of the fact is, you know, they lived here, they went to school here. So unless it's a big issue, I'd like to know what was already asked. How many people— how many are we talking about?

If this is 10 or 15 people, I'd say let's don't.

Maybe one a year.

But we, but we with frequency have, for example, let's say Councilmember Lamson's parents don't live here. and they want to be buried here because it's economical, Councilmember Lamson will buy the plot and then he'll give it to a family. We have that all the time. People will come in, say, well, I have an Orem address, or— there, there is gamesmanship that is played. The challenge that we have run into too is where do you draw the line?

Do you have to be a permanent resident for 10 years, 20 years, 30, 40, 50? That's what it really comes down to. How big of an issue is it, right? I mean, if it's just a small number, that's a lot of messing around.

And our cemetery sexton, Dan, he— I think he does a great job of trying to filter through that. But you'd be surprised how many games people play with this.

I'm going to hire new staff, more staff for the lower cemetery. I mean, yes.

But I like Terry's point. Someone who's lived here his whole life and maybe just the last few years had to move somewhere, someone to take care of them, that seems like a very reasonable thing. And I think, I think we could—

That's a case-by-case basis. But if you are an American, you want to be buried here, it's cheaper. What, you're gonna be charged $1,000 more?

Yeah, and I don't have— you know, that's, that's different.

That's my thought.

I'm not— your, your point, I agree.

Or Jeff has family he wants to be buried with. Buried by him.

A bunch of people want to be buried by Jed.

I mean, like my parents right now, they lived here for a long time, 30 years, whatever. But right now they're in a probable care facility.

Did they buy their lots before they moved?

I have no idea.

Or you buy their lots for them and it's no big deal, right? If the mayor dies.

But if you don't know that, yeah, and your parents are in Provo and you're caught, you're just going in to buy their lots.

Yeah, it's crisis time.

I think it really comes down to how big of an issue it is, and otherwise it's like just morphed across the whole thing.

Yeah, well, and frankly, that's why the council did what they did years ago, is they said let's just have a flat fee because we don't want to engage in this discussion as to whether you're a resident or you're non-resident. Unfortunately, what that precipitated was an increase in sales. And well, then all of a sudden, we're filling up the cemetery faster.

We're charging roughly the same price as Procore, American Fork, or whatever the other competitors in this business, then I think we're okay.

And then just give our sexton the ability to have flexibility. There's a case.

I mean, I think none of us would ever say The apocalypse is coming, so the less people that are buried, the better. So increase your fee.

Well, our cemetery section has reported that there are some Saturdays where we actually will have 8 burials, 8 or 9 burials.

Oh, I've seen the canopy set up.

Yeah.

Which is really—

that's a lot.

I mean, it's a lot of burials, and you can't essentially take care of one until the next is held. And so we've had staff until midnight burying plots because we can't do— we can't have a backhoe in the middle of somebody's service.

And Saturday is your most popular day, right?

It's the most popular, that's correct. We're even looking at potentially Sundays as well. We don't want to do that. But we can't do realistically safely more than 85 or so. And if they're really close together, then it can become very problematic, the proximity to each other.

Well, so can you—

because mortuaries say we can't do your service on that day, do it instead of Thursday, you gotta do it Friday.

I mean, yeah, we work with that.

Do that?

Yeah, we try to— we try to— they try to coordinate with you, but if the family's got certain flights coming in or whatever, We gotta make sure we're definitely breaking even. We are, we are for sure. Okay, made it through one.

6 more to go.

6 more slides.

You gotta talk faster. I know, apparently I gotta flip you through my slides.

So, as you're well aware, last 2 years ago we started a credit card convenience fee. We promised we would reevaluate that after a full year. We've done that. As you can see, we're proposing to drop that fee from $3.95 to $3.45 based on what we've seen in relation to the cost of those charges.

Are you getting pushback on that?

On the $3.95? Majority of people already are so used to paying that fee on everything they do that we only got it right when we initially started it, July, August timeframe, and hasn't even been an issue.

I mean, I got pushback from somebody on Sunday, but I think that's one.

Yeah, and there's ways to get around, right?

They come in and pay, we think we can't charge in person, it's only online. That's the rules that they provide.

They come in and pay with their credit card.

The rules, that's what I do. Yeah, well, for other people, but the— no, sorry, the—

yeah, so there are, there's rules that we have to play by, and that's one of these kind of odd rules. But they obviously, they pay with a bank, you know, with their bank account.

There's no fees either. So it's the reason that we're lowering that, just because we feel like we have enough history now.

And now that's combined with, you know, Visa, MasterCard just came out yesterday and said that they're going to be hiking their rates on people like us come April. So we lowered it with the anticipation that those are probably going to come up, but we still think we'll be just fine to cover, to cover that.

I would think you better keep it at 3.35. So if you do that, you should put it out as a social media post.

So Yeah, yeah, you know, we talked about that. We leave it at $395,000.

We just don't want to be in a situation where somebody comes and says, are you making money on this? And we're sitting on a lot of—

I mean, a lot.

But we don't want to be sitting on cash as if this is a revenue source. It was never intended to be.

We just—

for the current and future new council members, we were in a situation where we were paying over $400,000 a year in just credit card processing fees. And we went through a process to try to eliminate those.

And there was a series of things we did.

One of them was adding a convenience fee.

And most people at that point then jumped off and started paying with—

because they wanted the rewards, but it's not rewarding if you have to pay for it.

Yeah.

So that's related to that water fund. We show here proposed each of the tiers usage charge. We're proposing a 1-cent increase in each of those tiers for the use, as well as a 10 cents. So most of our meters are 3/4 and 1 inch, so that's why I'm only showing those 2. You have a half a percent increase in both of those rates as well. Water, the route of reclamation and sewer, again proposing a 0.5% increase in the base rate and a 1% charge rate into the volume charge.

Stormwater— Why are we raising water rates?

Why?

Yeah. It follows the financial plan.

Because what?

It follows the financial plan.

Plus, we obviously— the cost of doing business is increasing.

So we love—

we lowered them, we did our bond, but we still, we still need to start raising them again. Yeah, this financial plan that we've adopted is a 5-year plan. It's tied to the new 5-year water master plan, and that new master plan is a hybrid approach accommodating the bond and pay-as-you-go. So it's a hybrid of sorts, and so we're able to accomplish everything and still manage our debt according to our portfolio that we have. And so there's no expansion per se, but it's following the plan that we have adopted in place. We— I'd like to also mention that we're incorporating a credit for those that can demonstrate that they're part of the Circuit Breaker program in Utah County. So if they have a certain— meet a certain threshold We've investigated that in accordance with Dave's request, Councilmember Spitzer's request.

South Jordan City currently does that, so we're going to incorporate that as well.

But Chris, percentage-wise, what did we decrease last year compared to the half percent increase this year? It was a pretty dramatic cut from, from our plan.

98.15 to 83.

So, so a 15-cent decrease, a 1-penny increase a year later.

And just, there are obviously the cost of doing business, the cost of fuel, the cost of chemicals, the cost of labor, I mean, the cost of piping, everything is significantly increased.

Can I mention specifically, so our water reuse project that we originally designed for about a $5 million project. Okay, this is water reclamation, but it is tied to this discussion. That was about 5 years ago when that number was generated. Then we did an update of that number and it came up to be about $9 million. We put it out to bid, the lowest bid came in at like $18.5 million. The cost of doing what we needed to do, that we need to do, has gone up dramatically, and that's not accommodated in our master plan or our financial plans. So, for example, we are concerned about what it's going to cost us. I think Mr. Gray is going to report on a project that we're doing, 10 million gallon tank. But that, the cost for that, we have bonded for that, but we are very concerned that we may be short on that. And we are shifting around projects. We're delaying projects as a result of these inflationary forces right now. They're unforeseen and really out of control right now. So it is a modest increase, but I don't know that it will accommodate our needs, actually. Thank you.

And each one of those, each one of those kind of reflects that same concept related to master plans and the associated 5-year financial plan for each one of those. Solid waste, as you heard about earlier, and proposed in relation to— there are obviously, even though all of those changes, there are cost increases in relation to that. relation to the contracts that we have, not only with management, but also potentially tipping fees, etc. And you can see the cost proposed increases across each one of the different can types. Street lighting, we touched on the need to be able to increase that. In order to be able to finish out all of these old street poles with the new street poles and be able to get that accomplished within a relatively decent timeframe. And then, as I mentioned—

Brandon, will you just make that bigger for me?

Okay.

So this then, as I mentioned earlier, are just some of the other areas That have also have fee adjustments. I say increase, some of our increases, some of our decreases. So if you want, again, you want to see those, I can get you a copy of the Exhibit B, what's called Exhibit B, which is fees and charges schedule, which would have all of the fees and charges in it.

We said I'd like a copy of that. Okay, I'll take— we'll just send it to them.

And I'm just— I mean, I've sent it. I'll just send it to everybody.

everybody.

And, you know, if you don't want it, throw it in your trash.

Recycle.

Or green waste.

Either way. So I'm gonna— you want to just go? Yeah.

I don't know what time the—

I know you have the blue line, I think.

We also wanted— Council, we also wanted to give you an overview as to directionally where we are going with our compensation and benefits program this year. We are still early in the budget process.

Yes.

And we are still trying to assess how some of our peers— what some of our peers are going to do. So we haven't finalized anything, but, uh, Jenica is here to provide provide you with a kind of an overview as to the direction we're heading.

Yeah, thank you for that introduction. So we'll try to make this quick and hopefully painless. So just by way of information for benefits, this shows the historical cost since 2015 for the premium for family coverage for the high deductible plan. It includes the contribution to the HSA This is by far the most common plan used among employees, so we're not going to go through each different insurance plan. But since 2015, the premium costs and employer contribution to the HSA has risen from about $13,500 to now this year just over $19,000. So this is a total increase of 43.5%. It increases about 5.3% on average each year. Next year we're expecting an additional 7 to 10%, so we're considering that as we build out our compensation plan. The employee premium has remained relatively constant over this same time frame. It has increased from $70 a month a couple years ago to now $85.20 a month, but the current year that is waived for fully vaccinated employees.

And then it's our rate based on like the amount of people that were sick and had babies.

So it's—

Yeah, we're individually rated, so we stand alone as a, as a plan. So we have approximately 425 employees on the insurance. They account for about 1,600 participants on the plan. And so we— our premiums are based on the experience of all 1,600 members on our plan. You may be interested to know that we have about 25 people on our plan that contribute to close to 50% of the cost of the plan. So, and we actually purchase insurance, reinsurance.

So if we have catastrophic type situations, that kicks in after $250,000, I think.

But it is Health insurance is just one of these head-scratchers throughout the entire country, and we continue to manage like Jenica said. We feel fortunate we're about 5 to 6% a year cost increase.

You said 25 people out of 1,600, yeah, account for 50% of the cost of the plan. Is that just an average of the whole works out that way, or?

No, I mean, it ebbs and flows, but generally you'll have, you know, a small percentage of your participants who have catastrophic type situations, a premature baby, some sort of cancer-related illness. We have, for example, we have some members of our plan that require injectable prescriptions, and They require them 4 times a year, and the cost of one of those injections is $16,000 an injection. So those, those kind of expenses contribute significantly to our plan. Of course, we have about 20% of our health insurance costs are tied to prescription medications, and that is more evenly distributed across all of our membership.

But the annual cost is $1,000 in 2022 out of pocket. That's cheap. It is very cheap.

And, and that has been part of our overall compensation program with employees to try and—

that's very cheap.

Yeah, I mean, we don't, we don't— well, it is a high deductible plan as well. So I think the most expensive family deductible we have is $8,000.

For the out-of-pocket? Yeah, deductible is $6,000, $8,000 for the out-of-pocket. Yeah, yeah. Our HSA for this plan, it's— our HSA contribution is much higher than comparable agencies, and our employee premium is quite a bit lower.

So what did it cost us to do the vax thing this last year?

I don't have it.

It's about—

I think it was about $300,000 from, uh, well, actually it's based on the number of employees that provided documentation, so it is, it is less than $300,000 because we had less than 300.

So a little under $300,000, and it's covered through federal stimulus.

So 69% full-time employees submitted documentation that they're fully vaccinated. So about that percentage.

Is the theory behind that because they're vaccinated, their healthcare costs will be lower? Yeah.

Okay, and this just shows our turnover since fiscal year '15. What the blue line on the top represents is our overall turnover rate for all employees. This is due to all reasons, so retirement, going to another agency, resignations, dismissals, all of it. It's kind of hard to see on this because the state unemployment rate hasn't varied too drastically over this time, but as the state unemployment rate decreases on the bottom, we see higher turnover in the city, and that's normal, and that's across industries and other entities as well. We are down in turnover quite a bit this year. In particular, we're having quite a bit less turnover in fire and police as a result of our hybrid STEP programs. So for example, the past few years we've had about 15 to 20 police officers leaving each year. This year we've only had 5, and fire, we've had about 5 to 7 in previous years, and we so far only have 1. So we're seeing great success from those programs. Any other questions? And then as far as recruitment goes, Yeah, is that just full-time? Yeah, this is just full-time employees. So this is just full-time job openings and applications that we've received. The green line represents last fiscal year for applications, the yellow line is the current fiscal year, and then on the bottom, the orange line is openings from last year and the blue line is for the current year. So this year we did— we saw more applications At the beginning of the fiscal year, the first few months, but we also had more openings. We've seen a decrease compared to last year, but last year we did have quite a few positions, for example, in the recreation department that— but as we were preparing to open that, so there were more openings for that, of which we received more applications. Then as far as compensation goes, so this is just some of the Biggest changes we've made in compensation for the past several years. In October 2018, we implemented phase 1 of the Public Safety Career Ladder Program. This was just for the entry-level positions, kind of giving police officers, firefighters, paramedics a career path and a way that they could see progression here. So after meeting certain years of service requirements and training requirements, they could advance from a Police Officer 1 to 2 to a senior, and then in fire from a firefighter paramedic 1 to a 2 to a senior. And we, let's see, yeah, it didn't include any set elements at that time. That was, it came in October 2020. We expanded this program to include all positions and police, from police officer through lieutenant, and then in fire from EMT through battalion chief. So it included that same career ladder component where they could advance within their position, but then they also knew exactly what their pay would be depending on when they were hired. When they got promoted to that position, they would receive a set increase, and they would know exactly what that would be. Last July, NFP— we contracted with them to complete a comprehensive compensation and benefits review of all the positions in the city, and they completed that last July. We made some Several changes as a result of that, including restructuring our grade system and making sure that each position was placed appropriately within that grade system. And they also recommended this Public Works hybrid step program that was implemented at the same time, modeled after what we have in public safety, but it included just a few positions for phase 1. So Public Works technicians, operators, and fleet mechanics, kind of those ones that are harder to fill, harder to make people stay. We wanted to create that career path and encourage people to have longevity with the city. And then just a couple months ago, we adjusted the police hybrid step program, and this was largely a result of what's going on in the external market. Many of our sister cities and agencies around the state were providing significant increases to police officers, and we wanted to make sure that we were competitive and making sure we're doing what we need to, to take care of them. So We— there was the biggest increases for entry-level positions for police officers. The bottom of the range moved up 18%, top of the range moved up 11%, and then that decreased through sergeant and lieutenant. And then annually we do perform an internal review of all of our positions, compensation, and benefit programs. We use a database called TechNet, which a supermajority of the cities in Utah report to where we can evaluate each of our positions, how they compare to what our sister cities are doing, and if we need to make adjustments to those.

Any questions?

So this chart just shows what we've done in terms of merit and market over the past several fiscal years. It's typically been 3 to 4%, typically a 3% merit and either not a market adjustment across the board or a 1% But that's not— we're not tied to that by any means.

We—

that's dependent on what's going on in the outside market. This past fiscal year, for example, we had a 3% merit, and we didn't have an across-the-board market, but because of the compensation study we completed, there were quite a few positions that received targeted adjustments. And so in terms of what our sister cities are doing, For the current fiscal year, we're kind of in line with what a lot of other cities did. Most of them provided a 3 to 6% total increase combined between merit and market at the beginning of the current fiscal year or calendar year, depending on how they operate. But there were also many cities that implemented targeted adjustments like we did for police, and some did this for other employees as well partway through the fiscal year. So these are just some examples: Sandy, South Jordan, Provo, Layton and Incai that did that. This is just who responded to our survey that we consider our traditional sister cities. There are quite a few others that reflected similar things, but they're either smaller cities or we don't consider them to be comparable to us. So we're kind of in line with what other people have done. And then looking toward the next fiscal year, it's just too early. Like Jamie said, we don't know exactly what we need to do. And that's what our sister cities have said as well. No one's made a final decision, but because of what we're seeing in terms of inflation and what's going on in the outside market, cities that have responded are reflecting that they expect about a 5 to 10% total increase combined between merit and market due to inflationary pressures.

Can you go back to the last slide? So, late—

so, but they end up paying their employees You know, I mean, I don't know what the specific data is. I do know that's huge.

Oh, it's 1.5.

Oh, sorry. You know, for example, like, see, if that would have been fire, it would have been a riot.

For example, Lehigh, and I think that's listed here, listed, they made significant increases for police, but then they also adjusted all of their employees 2% in January, which is outside of the regular increase. Linden, they gave an across-the-board increase of 6% for all of their, all of their employees, and now they're working on a targeted study. So they decided to do everybody first and then target communities after that. Sandy did a similar thing. South Jordan did a similar thing. So we find ourselves in a situation where we are expecting that compensation is going to be a pretty big component of our budget this year, just to keep up with where some of our sister communities—

What do their benefits packages look like? Does that just look like a pretty sweet benefit?

No, we, we do include that. This part of— yeah. So we look at what we call a TCV, total compensation value. Everything from health insurance, dental insurance, retirement, if they're in Social Security or not Social Security, health insurance or life insurance.

We look at all of that and then we come up with a number.

And Jenica is the one who works on that. So we do have a relative kind of baseline. The one thing I will represent, and maybe some on the council who have— who've had these conversations in the past, employees acknowledge the fact that they receive benefits. What they're really focused in on are the base wages, the hourly rates. And while, for example, our health insurance program may be 5% better than another community, the fact that somebody else is making 35 cents more an hour than they are seems to have more attention than benefits.

Let me remind you, we were doing a study of our wages across.

Yes.

And has that been completed? And where is that?

That was completed.

So they completed it last July.

Oh, last July.

We made adjustments to our compensation based on that.

If I may, I think the mayor pointed out, I think it was you in a previous discussion, that we don't have a handcuff that holds police here if they've been here 18 years. They're just held to the system because they can go anywhere in the system and have that same benefit. Is that true of all employees? Police and fire, forgive me. Is that true of all employees?

Yes.

So if I'm a wonderful division manager of X and I go to Citywide, I get— I don't lose any of my perks. So it isn't like we have a hook on the person who's been here 18 and a half years because he or she won't leave until they've been here 20 or 25.

As long as they're in the system, the hook is the system, not us, not the city. Correct. Okay.

That's it.

And to that, remember last time we talked to police and fire, you said we're essentially— those benefits were mandated at a state level?

They're all mandated, yes. All the— all, all public employees in the Utah State Retirement System, we are required to contribute as an employer into that system, and the rates are actually determined by the state legislature. So every year we, we are told what the rates are going to Not their health insurance and other—

no, no, but just retirement. Police and fire was the entire benefit package, wasn't it? At retirement, it's just retirement, correct? Okay, so, so then it does vary as far as health insurance and all the other perks. That part varies. Yes, the, uh, retirement is constant.

Yeah.

So, so, so I'm looking at total compensation because it's time to take it into account. Right.

In fact, Carrie, our HR manager, she wanted to be here this week. She is actually on vacation, but she'll actually sit down with employees and she'll walk them through the scenario. Okay, you're going to City X, let's compare City X's benefits and compensation to Orem's benefits and compensation. And in, in a number of circumstances where she's had that conversation, while your base wage is higher in City X, you actually could benefit and have higher take-home pay in, um, Orem based on some of the costs associated with the benefits that you pay.

But do you think, based on what you said earlier about the primary focus is the dollar amount that you're getting paid, Do you think that indicates we should look at that piece of the puzzle? I mean, if that's what people want, then, you know, build things more that way.

And that is, that is kind of the, that's kind of the balance that we have to, we have to exercise every year. Because if you're talking to a, let's say, and we'll take the case of a firefighter, if you're talking to a 22-year-old firefighter versus a 47-year-old firefighter, it's a different conversation because the 22-year-old wants it all in his or her pocket. The 47-year-old wants the good health insurance benefits, and they've got kids who are in braces, so they want dental insurance. And all of a sudden, they're, they're talking about their mortality, and so they want life insurance. It's a, it's a different conversation based on where we are with every employee. And our experience has been prospectively, if we deemphasize benefits and emphasize more in wage, that doesn't seem to be too much of a problem. But if we try and take away from benefits, that is always the concern. The argument then becomes, well, yeah, you're giving me a you know, a 4% increase in pay, but you're also increasing the cost of my benefits 2%. So now I'm really only effectively getting a 2% raise.

I, I—

it's way more simplistic than I'm— I'm trying to make it simplistic, but there is a delicate balance that, that we try and strike.

It sounds like benefits are not appreciated until they start to go away.

Yes.

Or you start to— you have some sort of life-changing event and all of a sudden you need to draw on the health insurance that you have, and then all of a sudden it becomes very important to you to have that benefit. Whereas when you're, you know, when I was younger, I thought I was invincible and I didn't worry much, and then I started having kids, braces, then they broke their arm, and then they— and then all of a sudden the benefits became much more multiple.

Yeah.

So we try and strike that balance. Obviously, the most expensive benefits that we manage within the city is the retirement. Much of that is required by the Utah State Retirement System, and then of course health insurance. And those are, those are, uh, The health insurance is a— retirement is a variable cost.

The health insurance is a fixed cost regardless of where you are in terms of compensation.

So that's all we have in relation to those 2 pieces.

Any final questions before we turn it back over to the mayor?

Next item, I said you're free to obviously send any questions or things that you might have—

think of in the meantime till our next meeting, uh, send those questions to me and we can try to address those.

And obviously you're welcome to discuss any other things that may come to mind, even if it's not part of these 2, 2 pieces that have been brought forward today. Okay, thank you, Brandon. All right, next up we've got Jason to go over, uh, probably those 2.

Members of council, I want to go over just briefly some changes that we made to our noticing. We've had discussions over the past year or so that maybe they were too small, and so we want to go over some changes that we have made. Thank you.

That's okay.

First, I want to talk about the technical noticing requirements that we have. The city has some requirements as far as notice of people, when, the place, and the time, and purpose of the meeting. But the state— these are all state code requirements. You can see there's quite a few that we have to cram onto a notice. What I want to talk about briefly is the bottom 2, which talk about the fact that we need to talk about what the proposed regulation is and what it's going to do to a property owner, permitted uses that are part of that, and how it physically changes that. And then this year they added an element that says we have to make this on a card that's understandable to the layperson. So we have to provide a lot of technical requirements in the notice. So the section that we're amending, or the area, or the legal description, things like that that are more of a technical issue. At the same time, we have to put it on a small card in order to be able to keep all the costs economically as well, because we pass all the costs that go to a notice for a rezone, for example, that's somebody else. They basically pay that cost. So originally, this was the notice that we sent out. Basically, you see it's fairly small font.

It's, you know, it's easy to read if you have glasses. Yes.

What we're proposing is to change it to this card, so a half sheet. This is a quarter sheet, so they fit on the full quarter sheet. We're going to propose it to take it to a half sheet. What it does— so this is the example of what we currently send out. This is the one that we're changing it to. You can see that by increasing the card to a half sheet, we were able to increase the font size, so it's a lot more readable that way. We've added the additional important development notice. We're also going to take it so that the standard color is going to be this yellow color, so people can identify that it's potentially something they want to read. You can see the different font increases in city meetings and things like that. And it gives us a little bit more space on the backside. The thing that I want to point out is now with this one, we didn't have a lot of room to put QR codes or, or something that would stand out specifically.

So this is a permanent marker now that will be on all notices.

So that's going to be— so in case sometimes we forgot to put the link of where you can find that information, so this is going to be a standard link. If that QR code is going to be a standard for every one that goes out, if somebody wanted to actually get that QR code, you pull up the actual document, it'll take them directly to the location of the documentation. The orm.org/planning takes them to a location on a website, they have to drill down to the actual folder, whereas the QR code will take them directly to that folder. And they can see exactly what's within that folder, then it'll be, you know, it's a rezone or something specific, it'll be there, they can open it. So the purpose of the original purpose and the continued purpose is really more of a technical modification to meet not only the city but the state requirements as far as those. The purpose of the QR code and having other documentation is to then drill down to more colorful photos, site plans, more information that's applicable to that specific site. Whether it's a full page or a half page, there's no way we're going to get all the jargon on them that we wanted to get on. That's why we're sending them to the QR code and other places to find that information. The purpose behind this is simply to let people know that, hey, if you're interested in knowing what's going on. Not only that, but then if you go back to that, it provides who's doing it. So somebody can call, they can find out who to contact, and have a web email, there's a phone number they can call.

So there's multiple ways to contact the city if you're having a question on what exactly is going on. Did I read it right that it was 40 cents to mail this Smaller one, it's $0.53 to mail the bigger.

So let me get this. So right now, for example, these lower ones were— this is just an example of 100 mailings. So $0.80 a card for this one. To go to this one, it's going to be $1.04. And it decreases as you get higher because there's a set base fee that they charge. Typically, we send between 20 to 100. So the fees are going to stay consistently up to that.

A little bit higher.

The more we get, the less the cost goes with the developer again pays for that, or the city pays for it if we make that decrease as well.

Does that include both the printing cost and the postal postage cost? Right.

The advantage we have with these 2 cards— well, again, now we're going to this one— this is all computer generated, so it saves staff a lot of time to be able to just input the information, spits it out into a format and send it over to the city mailing.

We're able to send these out without us putting a lot of time in designing those types of things.

So we just want to let you know that's what we're doing. If there's any questions, we could modify the format if we needed to.

That's, you know, the direction we're going.

And that—

so that QR code, I know how you— I mean, you can take your phone and you can put on QR code, but if you're looking at that on a computer, is there any way to That QR code into what you're looking at online?

So if you're, if you're going to a computer, it would be simple enough just to type in org.org/planning, okay, the website, and that'll take you right to that page. You can see where it says public hearing notices, and it will take you directly to that same page.

So you say you just go through the website that way? I think the advantage of the QR code is more for mobile devices when you can actually just click on it and then speed of Getting to that location is a lot quicker, right?

But on a computer itself, I don't know.

I don't know how to do this on a computer. You just go to the website that's listed.

Which is why we're going to provide both on a permanent basis. So the QR code is going to stay the same, so that's not going to change. Every mailing is going to have the exact same QR code.

It's going to take them to the exact same folder.

In that folder, there's going to be different projects, but it'll take them to that same location. The website will take you to the same Age, and then you can drill down.

So is that— is it going to be easy for them to distinguish the project that they need to look at?

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah.

So I don't know if somebody wants to come and click on that. They can take it directly to that. You can see within that there's going to be— currently there's 3 folders that talked about some past projects. If you open that folder related to that project, then you're going to get the site plan, you get the color elevations, you get all the stuff pertaining to that. That we can't— we just can't physically stick it on the card. That provides them with the information they would need, and then if they have further questions, they can contact us directly.

They can email us.

Okay, so I'm there right now. So I've got like 3 PD-21 sections.

So if you click on that, it'll take you to other—

Yeah, on my computer. So is that on that card? Does it say PD-21 somewhere?

So that would be on the front. So this happens to be that So on the front it does say, yes, it was part of our requirements by state law. We have to identify what the project is. So this one was amending PD-21. We had to identify that it was talking about parking. And so that's—

we kind of did as much jargon we could put on there and then provide additional information on the website or QR code.

Any other questions?

So you didn't see—

Questions on the noticing? I think the bigger noticing is great.

I think the yellow is good.

Now we asked to do yellow, we ended up getting it the last time, so I reminded him again of yellow.

So I'm hoping it goes consistently yellow.

We'll make that change if for whatever reason you get it. We're working on it to get it out.

Uh, next we've got a discussion on Hillcrest Park with Lane Gray. Good afternoon to you all, Mayor and Council. We appreciate the opportunity to come and give you a little update in regard to Hillcrest Community Park. As you know, the City of Orem has teamed up with Blue Line Design and WPA Architecture to design this particular project.

At this time, I'd like to introduce you to the design team.

With Blue Line Design, we have Corey Shute and Scott Stevens.

With WPA Architecture, we've got Bruce Fallon.

These 3 gentlemen He'll give us the update on the project today and address any questions that you may have. So if you need to plug your machine in out here, you can do that. While Scott's plugging that in, I just want to say thank you.

We're excited about this park and for the opportunity that it is for you all as a community. And we've had a lot of fun as we've started learning more about it, visiting the site, and really starting to unravel the complexities of the site and the building and all that's going on there. I understand that we've got between 20 and 30 minutes, so we're gonna go through and give you some highlights, maybe help you understand what it is we're trying to do, and then leave some time for some questions and answers. Hopefully answers. Might just be questions with more questions.

Oh, yes.

So that was just a cover page. If we want to jump right into it, why don't you jump?

This is your laptop.

How do you display?

Oh, not popping up. Usually I just plug it in there. So it looks like we split screens. There we go.

Okay, so I'll just pop onto this one here.

And I know there's a way to screen. There's a button that you can go full screen, but I'm just going to pinch it so we can see the whole thing now.

Okay, so this plan that we're looking at here was a plan that was done previous to us getting involved. By Landmark, and it was a plan that was approved.

Sorry.

So you should be familiar with this plan, is that correct? Y'all saw this and it's been approved, and we really think there are some wonderful things in this plan. A lot's going on in here. A lot of things have been addressed. It should be a park that can appeal to any and all, quite frankly. And what we've tried to do is take the bones of this park and keep them all intact, and then answer and maybe ask some more questions. And so you'll notice that our plan is almost exactly the same, but I want to highlight—

Maybe I'll just use the mouse. You can see on the screen.

I'll move it slow so you can kind of see, but I'll bounce back and forth. The primary thing that we recognized in the first plan here is that it felt really underparked for what we're programming here with the basketball, the Junior Jazz, what's going on. Our main concern was we weren't going to be able to park the numbers of people that are going to be coming and rotating. That's a big thing with parks is when you program space, you've got the teams that are playing, and before they're done playing, the teams that show up to play show up, and if there's nowhere to park, they start to spill into the neighborhoods, and that tends to cause real issues. And, and so parking is always super important, and so we try to address that here by keeping the same Design, we've added more parking.

Could you A/B that again? The one before and this one?

You betcha. So this is before, and you have basically single bays of parking right down through here. So what we've done is come in and added another bay of parking right along this area.

And so back to B.

So some of the green space goes away, but none of the functional—

Correct.

Okay, programmable space.

Exactly. The other thing that it did benefit us was, you'll notice right here in this area, and I'll bounce right back, this building that's existing started to feel distant. And so when you're headed there for, you know, if you're coming from out of town, my boy's on this team and we're going to play at this place, we've never been there before, it started to feel a little distant and hard to recognize because there was no entrance into it. Felt like it was, you know, 100 yards into the site. And so that is one of the benefits of going to a little bit more parking. We also changed up the alignment of this main feature. You'll recognize as we bounce back here that as you pull in off of this street, it wasn't right necessarily at the end. This is really designer picking kind of stuff at this point. But we like to locate these things as iconic, recognizable elements. And so all we did on this one was shift it. So now as you pull in off of that road, it's the same area, the curb cut's already there. We pull right in and it's in alignment with that drive so that it's an icon at the end of that hallway. The other big thing that you'll notice is right up in here. It's the same number of pickleball courts. We have done hundreds of pickleball courts up and down the Wasatch Front. It's an awesome sport. It's a lot of fun, and it's gaining more and more and more traction. And so you'll notice here what we did here, we kept the same number. That's 12 courts. But it reached down into this area of this plan, and so we were curious, can we take that same number And reorganize it at the top, and open this area up to the building and what's going on in here. So that's exactly what you're seeing: 12 courts again. We just elongated it to the west, and we were able to push this parking up further north. The site's much flatter than we had initially anticipated, and so expanding this parking to the north right up in here really does work. work well. And so we were able to capture that. You'll also notice that we changed— let me bounce back here again. This is some parallel parking. And what we did was we changed it to 90-degree parking, which allowed us to get double the amount of stalls in there. Now there's a caveat with that weird move, and that is that there is going to be a well house out in this area. We don't know the exact location of that quite yet. When we understand that, we'll make the necessary adjustments to that.

It's represented by this building right here. Yeah, and we're worried that building's too far south, to be honest with you.

In this concept, not knowing exactly where it's at, we just want to pin that down first and then make our necessary adjustments. So, but if we could parallel— not parallel, but park at 90 degrees along here, We'll double our amount of parking. We kept this separator island, which we felt like was important, but in the event— and there will be times where they need to get in and service this, but it will be very periodic. It doesn't happen very often, every 4 or 5 years potentially. So, and those are the major differences. There's one other kind of major-minor difference. Let me bounce back to the one you Approved here. The water feature was located here. Now, when I say water feature, we're going to take 2 minutes and dive into that, and so I'll stop the explanation soon and we can get into those details. The water feature area in this approved plan was located here, and that's a great location because the restrooms are anticipated to go in right here, and then there's even been talk about some restrooms over In this area.

Most of the mechanical equipment.

Thank you, Scott. Yes, and the mechanical, mechanical equipment. So what we have done in this one was we actually moved it from this location closer to the building, in this location closer to the restrooms, closer to the mechanical. And all that does mechanically is shorten your runs, which does save you a little bit of money. So But there are always challenges with, with splash pads and the amount of concrete that's going on there. And then the not so obvious challenge of a splash pad is, in our lovely climate, we've got about 90 days that we use that splash pad. 90 days, and then it's closed for the rest of the year. So usually June to September, kids are back in school and it shuts down. So with that, we have some—

Can we talk just a little bit in the dark? Yeah, the idea of shifting the splash pad from this area into here is this: we have this patio area right here. If you have a large event, it would allow you to open up the area further for a larger event and use that splash pad for Yeah, thank you, Lane. Corey, could we maybe have Bryce comment on his vision for that area? I don't want to steal your thunder if you were about to cover it.

You do it.

You look like you were queuing up for it. Go for it. No, I mean, and I don't want to speak out of turn, so cut me off because you've got the master discussion on this, but I think really just combining the several options of how that space would be used depending on the time of year.

And so if you have it closer to the building in October, you could potentially purpose that in a different way towards a farmers market or a community event or an event inside and outside the building.

And then in the summers, it's still perfectly located by your mechanical room and restrooms and all that.

And so instead of having a 90-day amenity, we have a 365-day amenity.

365-day-a-year amenity.

And so I feel like our dollar that we spend could go a lot farther, and both us as a city and each of the user groups, community groups, citizen groups that would be using this would have so many more options in this really centrally located space.

Yeah, no, well said, Bryce. Thank you. And we are still in the, in the very beginning process. Now we're going to need to make some decisions quickly so that we can hit our other time timelines and get it constructed. But as we started to unravel this, we really started to find that this space could be super interesting and lead exactly into what Bryce is referring to. I toured this building the other day, and this is a hall, this is a corridor that basically ends here, and then this is the gymnasium over in this area. Part of the thinking as, as we were starting to look at this and how it could be designed was There are large windows along the side of this building here that could potentially be completely opened up and become doorways. So, uh, that you're not capping this, but now you're allowing individuals to flow from the kitchen area out through here and into this nice outdoor space. And that can be utilized in a number of ways, 2 of which would be, if you're there watching your kids and you've got an hour between your tournament games or whatever, you don't have to run downtown necessarily, and then run back if you brought your lunch, or you could go grab something and come back. And this could be an outdoor lounge area that's really pretty nice and connected to the building visually. We, we did a project for a holiday where we did this exact thing. They had a gymnasium, wanted it, they use it a lot for art shows and other events. It had a little stage in it. But they were asking us to come up with a design where could be utilized 365 days a year, rather than it was cut off. And so we did this very similar thing that we're suggesting here, which is utilize this space, make it more indoor-outdoor and functional. And then what Bryce is referring to as well is, in the event of a large gathering, not only is it indoor-outdoor here, but we now can utilize this area. And part of what we would like to suggest on this is, I think some of these slides got moved, maybe not.

Okay.

Are what does that area look like? So for example, in this splash pad area, you'll recognize— I'll just zoom right in on these— there's no above-ground features. These are all nozzles placed within the concrete. So to have a secondary tertiary use, it's really accommodating to that. Now there is some slope, obviously, that we've got to get the water back in, recirculated, and be cognizant of that. And so this type of a splash pad does assist with that. And we've done a number of these. There's also—

I don't know where that other slide went. It may have popped up to the top. Let me just go check.

We were trying to get screens going.

Here we go.

This is another option. And I don't want to say this is not an option. It's an option, but it does limit you on what we're talking about as far as utilizing that splash pad space for something after it's been shut down. And the reason why is these fixtures don't come out. They're fixed. They're there. And so for 9 months out of the year when this is not operating, you have— The unfortunate side of it looks like it's being underutilized because it is. There's these, these features that you can't really utilize that space.

And they're undoubtedly more subject to vandalism as well.

Yeah, sure, absolutely. We've done, like I said, we've done a number of these others. In fact, Palisade Park, you, if you're familiar with that one, we did that one for you guys as well. And that has in-ground nozzles. They're really fun. They come with different sprays and different things that you can do. You can even get lighting in some of them. You can even place on the exterior sides bollards that wouldn't be in the way of setting up. You can activate those. They're fun and interesting and allow you ultimately to utilize that space differently. So we use Water Design, Tom Anderson, and their group for our hydrology and helping us basically design these after we've got concept in and tell them what we want. They'll come in and they'll do all the mechanics and the nozzles. Prices, let me just bounce down to the bottom of this again. Prices vary, right? It's going to vary greatly on what you're looking at. I was going to go to probably the most affordable ones are the above-ground.

I don't know where it went again. I don't know why the slides got mixed up. Is it at the top? Thanks.

If I recall correctly, a splash pad similar to what you're seeing here, and this is just the splash equipment and the hydraulics, basically the equipment, this recirculating equipment, you're looking at $400,000 to $500,000 for something like that with the fixed above-ground items. The other ones are really above and beyond that. You'd think they'd be cheaper because there's nothing above, but depending on how many nozzles, what quality of those nozzles are and the type of nozzles, you're really $600+ almost. And that cost does not take into consideration the concrete, the coloration of the concrete. You're going to want to texture that concrete. We do what we call a sandscape in our concrete because it's not a broom finish. Broom finish tends to be too rough on your feet, but a sand finish is more of a texture, but it is not slick, so it's not trowel finished at all. That would be a nightmare and you'd have broken bones all over, so don't, don't do that. So you're really looking at, for something in this fashion, we would say comfortably your kind of baseline, $600,000.

Do you know what the amount was originally in Landmark's plan? Cost-wise for this?

They—

I don't know that we've ever heard that. Um, I don't know what they were planning.

No, I mean, we were kind of operating on what we paid for our last one, obviously, which was a little different setup. And I think we were south of $1 million based on concrete and the water nozzles and things here. I think we were shooting for that $850,000 to $1 million price.

You're referring to Palisade? Yeah, Palisade was in that neighborhood. I think we were plus $850,000. Yeah, but lower than $950,000. So, and it did have an existing structure that we used for some equipment, but there was also a structure that we built. Yeah, you're going back on my little running waterfall. And pretty, pretty nice.

Either one would fit into our budget. That's what I'm trying to get to.

Either one would fit into our budget, is that correct?

What we initially planned.

I mean, yeah, we didn't want to— the council, the direction you gave us was don't skimp on this. Yeah, so we didn't want to skimp.

In my mind, it was $1 million, so I'm—

And that sounds reasonable.

$800,000.

It's a safe number. And the reason I say safe number is because, as y'all know, everything's gone through the roof. Concrete's not what it was back then either. Everything's doubled and tripled, and also the wait time.

We won't get into that, but— If I could add to you, one of the reasons I think we built this type of design is it's different than what's at Palisade. So instead of replicating with a similar trough system or channel system, this is a different interactive play feature, giving our residents a different amenity to experience versus what we already have. Right.

No, thank you, and I think that that's important. And this does hail back to the initial— our concern over the amount of parking. There's one thing that we know for sure, given all the water features that we've done up and down the Wasatch Front, it would have been underparked by a long shot. Moms typically show up around 8 to 8:30 in the morning, and they'll stake their property on the grass, and then they'll spend until lunchtime, and then there's a new crowd that comes in after lunch. time, and the parking is a nightmare if you don't plan for it. So, and it would have been all over the neighborhoods. So, and this, the reason we show this is you can kind of see some of the lighting that some of these have, if that's a direction that you were to go. Same water feature, just one in the evening and then one a little later with the lights that have come on.

And they can be pretty dynamic too, where there's a lot of movement and nozzles coming on and off.

Correct.

There's a whole spectrum of things, and, you know, there's different control systems depending on which option. Correct.

If you're familiar with Gateway, they've even incorporated, you know, synchronized music, all of that. Of course, all these things just make it more expensive, but they are fun. Um, but, uh, yeah. Um, okay, so if we go back to the other thing I was going to say about The plans too was when I, when I mentioned the grass real estate. That is so important. That's so important, um, because even at Palisades, if you've been there, there's some fun berming. And part of the reason we did the berming was so that moms could stake their property and have just a little bit of an elevated view. I mean, it's not by feet, feet, feet, it's like 3 or 4 4 feet. But as you know, if you've been there, that grass real estate gets eaten up in a hurry. And so that's why we try to surround our water features with that type of area so that it can be staked out. Next, the next big topic— we're probably getting close on our time, so I apologize. The next big item, our topic The next one was a train. We had heard in our kickoff meeting that there was some interest in a potential train. Let me just bounce to this real quick because so many people in Utah tend to relate to Thunder Junction, which is in St. George. Their train is— we want to call it new, relatively new. It's actually coming up on— well, it is 8.

8 years old.

8 years, 8 years old. I know personally the director who was over this when they put it in. Jeff Pay and I went to school together when we were back at Utah State, and so I reached out to him for some numbers and a little history on kind of the idea behind it and how it's operating and how it's functioning. He was kind enough to communicate back and forth with me. We had a number of like emails and phone calls, but one of the advantages that you're seeing to this park that's kind of unique is the fact that you'll notice, uh, that the train portion is basically isolated and double fenced. That's to control people. Um, and, and so what you're seeing here is this is the train station. And so the train pulls up here. This is where you load and unload. It goes around. This is half of a mile, that entire length, and it doesn't feel all that long, but that's pretty long. That's pretty long. I don't know that I would go a whole lot shorter than that. The other major thing about this system is not only is it double fenced and isolated from the other park area. There's no public crossings. Let me bounce to— we tried to look this up. I think it's still up. Yes, right here.

Okay, I'll shut that one down. Right, right here.

This is a good one.

So, you, Councilmember Pedersen.

This is how they've treated their, their access into their controlled area, is grade-separated crossings, which is really helpful. I talked to Jeff. He said an at-grade crossing has a number of issues, but he began with price. The price is between $50,000 and $80,000 per crossing, and you have to fence it because when the train comes by, you can't have people running in front of it. And that was a big concern. They do charge— currently they charge $1 per rider.

That doesn't cover any costs.

Which it really doesn't cover any costs. They are considering, and you'll see this, uh, changing that to I think 250 head, which is still not enough to cover. And then they're even contemplating, um, a park fee access. So you pay to get in the park and then pay to ride the train per ride. So, and the reason that is kind of that way, I mean, we jumped right to price really quick. The reason it's that way is, um, in part to pay for their engineers. When they first ran the park, there were a lot of people that were excited about volunteering.

Yeah.

And they did that, and they operated it that way for about 2 years plus. But what they found was those that were volunteering to drive the trains also wanted the same days off when all of us northern Utahns wanted to go to St. George. And those were the very busiest of times, the same times they wanted off. And so that started to become a conflict. So they have hired engineers to drive their trains. The other thing that he brought up financially is they didn't have the money to purchase enough in their housing station. They park it underground. Well, it's a tunnel. Let me bounce back.

I'll just go to this one.

They park it right here, which is basically like a UDOT culvert, and that they're able to gate within the gate and secure it at night so that it doesn't get vandalized. And, and, but when they need to, to service the trains, which he said is a bigger deal than, than they realized, uh, because You can't service it here on site. They couldn't afford that, so they have this service entrance right here. They have to come in and they actually have a truck that has— with a boom on it that picks up the engine, puts it on another truck, they haul it off site, it gets serviced, it then comes back and loaded again. So those are additional maybe expenses that he said you should be aware that that is something that they need. They're running a lot and they need to be maintained a lot.

So just FYI.

Other things. The costs that he gave me were from 2016 and they were really only for the train portion and the rail portion. And that was just at that time just under $1 million. And then he did say, we didn't know, and this surprised me because they, they did hire a contractor that does trains like this throughout the US. But they get enough temperature fluctuation, they were getting a lot of expansion, and so they use their own facilities folk to go out and they ended up doing another— I don't know what it was, but it was concrete blocking to keep those rails from sliding too far with the expansion and with the heat.

And he said that was in the tens of thousands again to just do that portion of it.

And so he just was trying to make me aware that that was going to happen for us too, because we don't get as hot, but we definitely get colder. And that might be shut down, but it is going to, it is going to move on us. And then kind of lastly, Part of what makes this park so fun is all the, all the other stuff. I'll go back to that. This, this kind of drawing here, or photograph is what it is, and this doesn't really do it justice, but there's a lot of grade change, a lot of mounding, and the price that he gave me did not include that at all, and it didn't include, you know, the volcano, the shade structures. train station, train station. And so there was, there was millions of dollars above and beyond.

They have no pickleball courts inside this park. They have plenty in the city, I realize. No, I see our park being different. I know Terry was a big champion of it.

Well, it's a million-dollar expense that I would rather put to other things in the park.

Yeah, yeah, you could definitely see that. Let me, let me bounce Back to this, this loop, and this is just us guessing, okay, if there were to be a train in here, where would we put it? This loop is a quarter of what that one was.

A quarter mile.

Yeah, quarter mile, thank you.

It's half of what that one was. Yeah, it's half, and it is just a circle and there is no grade change and we're not separating our pedestrians.

And so that became super, super, super complicated. As I showed you before, the other in Thunder Junction, it's all completely separated and double fenced. We don't have necessarily that here. I would say if this was going to be a train park, our recommendation would be just make it a train park then, because that's what they've done down there and they're able to control that, and then do some of the funner activities in the center of this area rather than trying to mix that. And so it's kind of 2, 2 different things going on, uh, and it's not as maybe straightforward as just saying, okay, we're going to introduce training here. Now having said all that, you know, there are pros and cons to both, and so our job is not to convince you one way or the other. So just—

That was triggered by somebody that was willing to make a donation. I mean, there's still— so that was the million-dollar donation.

Okay.

And that's when I—

when they brought that up as well, you know what, let me— let me— that's when we talked to Jamie and said, well, let's see if that's even possible, if you're willing to do that, uh, and that would work.

So that was where that came from.

Okay.

And speaking of that, what's that?

You must be Terry. Yes. Okay, nice to meet you.

To me, you would put it on the—

if that were the case, you wouldn't circle because you want to keep access from all angles to your grass, you would do the edge. What's our measurement there if you went around the outside? Yeah, just even up and back.

I mean, you know, around like here, right here.

Yeah, so this bottom edge here, what is that, southeast, up to there, over there, and then back, you know, the L, maybe an L shape.

Okay, you just kind of let me do that, Scott.

I agree with you, the double fencing on both sides.

One of the things we talked about, Blue Line, is perhaps there's another park in the city that could accommodate—

try and find a park that is not as pedestrian intensive.

You know, is there a way for us to design Modify another existing park to include an amenity like that.

I would say to that, if there's a park that lends itself to just segmenting a portion, that's the biggest thing that we saw with Thunder Junction was it had the ability to just say, okay, this is it, and then run your double fences around it, and you could do something on the interior of that. But if there was one that wasn't maybe just an oval Or whatever, it might be more worth that donation to get it in there.

Well, when we first talked about this, we wondered about a water park. It seems like the water park is pretty important, and that's a million dollars spent. And maybe if there is a donor who wants to handle a train park, see if we can find another place for it.

What, what is the cost? As far as you said a lot of things, but what's the cost for the train setup and then the annual Maintenance?

He didn't give me a cost on the annual maintenance. He gave me a cost in 2016 numbers for basically the engine and the rail and the coach cars.

Yeah.

So basically the train and the rail without the city's adjustment to that rail was just under $1 million in 2016.

So No fencing, no.

Yeah, no. So there were— my guess is that, that portion today would be well over a million, but then you've probably got easy another $4 to $5 million that they put into that.

I'll bet they put a million into the volcano alone for just the amenities around the train.

Correct. And then you've got things like the bridges. There were 2 bridges, the culvert. I mean, the culvert alone is $500,000.

You're not, you're not saying 4 to 5— are you saying $400,000 to $500,000 or $4 to $5 million?

For the rest of the park. Yeah, well, because when you start— yeah, when you start looking at it truly, I mean, these, these shade structures, uh, we have 2 of these similar to this in Sandy.

Oh no, no, I'm just talking about the standalone Uh, train pieces.

So the train pieces were a million plus.

Although you're talking about the terrain, like making the mountains and making the volcano and making the amenities to go around the train to make it nice.

That's the other $4 to $5 million.

That's what you're saying. And then is there— do they have one train engine or 2 train engines?

I think he said he actually— yeah, they actually have the one engine, but he— I think in my conversation, I could go back and look at my notes was saying they really need 2, because when it's down, it's down.

And that's a problem. I think the other thing too is the volunteers and the staffing is, you don't want to be in a spot where we can't staff it. And so it's closed down all the time because there's nobody to run the train. Seems like the maintenance would be a big piece to apply to on building, right?

Yeah, that's in so many projects that we deal with. That's sometimes the elephant in the that room. gets overlooked is the ongoing O&M. Yeah, you might dump, let's say it's $5 million into that train, but over a 20-year period, you actually dump millions on top of millions operating that.

Yeah.

And it's like, oh my word. For example, we did the Hill Center Theater. I'll just throw this out. We knew what we were getting into there, and the city knew. The city owns that feature. It moves 4,000 gallons a minute. It's a big water feature. The electrical bill on an annual basis is $200,000 for the electrical group. That doesn't count any of the maintenance. And they knew, we ran all of that before, but it thankfully is located there at Hill Center and can offset a lot of these costs, and they worked out that deal. But it's that long-term O&M. Yeah, they wanted something fabulous, they got something fabulous, but luckily they were aware because they weren't aware, it'd be shut down the first year.

Like, we operated this and it cost us this much money, we're never doing that again.

And you'll see a lot of water features, not just here locally, that are shut off because of the O&M.

Yeah.

They afforded to get it in, they could not afford to keep it going. So anyway, not to—

like I say, we're not here to persuade you, we don't have to, but to train. I mean, How many times a year are you gonna be able to use it? It's gonna be the same as like a water park, or 6 months, and then in the wintertime it's spring and fall? It's just 6 months.

I think that almost goes more toward, uh, how long are you gonna employ someone to drive it? Because where it's difficult—

well, there's a lot, you know.

Yeah, right. Where it gets difficult is like days like today where we got 3 inches of snow and they're like, no, it's off. Uh, but next week when it's— or last week, uh, when it was 71 degrees, it's like, yeah, we're gonna drive the train. Yeah, but I don't have anyone to drive it because we didn't hire them for this month.

So that, that, that could be a little tricky too.

But, um, boy, what else? I talked a lot.

Uh, I'm just curious on that water feature. Yeah, if you do go with the flat so that you can use it, you know, as an amenity next to the building, and it's kind of all seamless as far as an area to use. Um, yeah, I'm just curious as far as you would design that so in the off-season people would have places to sit out there and there'd be something kind of making it look like an area that was a specific area or whatever.

Yeah, we would— we anticipate doing something similar in ways to this one, hopefully not I still got the measure tool going on here. Hopefully not maybe as bland as this. I don't mean to be sharp, that's kind of a sharp word.

It just seems like you'd want it to be like a destination-looking place even during all those other 9 months, right?

And did you have 3 shade structures that look like on the map? Because shade is very important in a park.

Yes, and in a water park, yes, we would. These are pictures obviously don't do that, but yeah, we did those. There's a couple different cool ways to do those.

We've done—

in fact, none of these images that Tom provided show the shade, but our Sandy water feature has the shade, our Syracuse water feature. Sandy, we did the large sails, really fun. That was the first time any, to our knowledge in Utah, any shade had been provided over a water feature, and it was loved. And, and so we did the same thing in Syracuse, but different. Syracuse, they claim to be the gateway to Antelope Island, and so we created these metal structures that had birds from Antelope Island cut out in it. It's really beautiful.

Yeah, and Palisades has shapes too.

I think you're referencing the rendering, which did show—

yeah, it looked like 3 different colors.

Yeah.

And as a grandma and a mother, shade is vital.

For sure.

Yeah.

So we had right there.

Yeah.

Perhaps follow up on the mayor's comment.

I think maybe there's ways that you can make that splashback plaza-like feature either immediately around it or through it.

Yeah, a lot of that, a lot of that, Mayor, will have to do with What that ground plane looks like on a day-to-day basis, and that goes to the concrete and to the texture of that concrete. If it's just a gray concrete, that's going to be, oddly enough, more difficult because it's not as exciting of a space. But yes, we would design that and work at how do we create a unique design that can be fun for a water feature, but also the day it turns off, the next day we have farmers market in here or whatever.

You just don't want to look like just to shut down Water Feature Hillwards for the 9 months. Yeah, yeah.

And can I make one comment?

So I know you had the picture of the one that, um, the brick half— so that's a seating area, correct? For— and you as a mom, you want to be right there with your little toddlers. Older kids, you don't have to be that close, but your little ones— yes, that's advantageous.

But there's no shade.

Yeah, the shade over the top or something like that would be ideal.

Yep, I totally— There's a whole slew of options. You kicked around too, Corey, maybe some ideas of the seating being arranged in a fashion that looks like rocks. Yeah, yeah, you're not going to want to sit on that wall too long.

No, I like that idea. Dave had a really good idea.

He said holes in there and put your umbrellas and they can be removable.

Yeah, absolutely. Like to bring your own umbrella right in here.

Overcast, but I'm gonna be renting.

Thinking like a mom there.

Only $25 an hour. You could rent them.

That's what he's saying.

Corey, can you go back to your concept drawing there?

So your thoughts?

Would you like for us to pursue the amenities that we've talked about today? Is that the direction that we have? I would like to have this done by May, if that's okay.

Thank you so much.

Good year. Yeah, this year. I like the added parking.

The residents were concerned before.

I'm glad because that worried us. We did not want to come in here with a completely different design. That, that is not what you approved. But, and so when we looked at that, we really worried about the parking. We worked hard at keeping the integrity of the design, but adding the necessity of parking. So thank you. I hope you're okay with that.

Because we—

I'll tell you, you'll hate it if you're underparked. And even at this, you may.

I like opening up the square. I think with young mothers, it's nice if you're nursing or something, you can go inside the building if you don't want to sit outside, you can still see the water feature. I mean, all that I think is just great. I love, I love the idea of opening it up and having it all year long. You can just use this space all year long.

This, this space in particular, right?

Flexibility.

Is that what you're referring to? Yes.

I will say something about Palisades, the water park there. I went to another event there where they used the pavilion and we kind of used that area, but it was a little difficult because it went like this and there weren't different colors. I did the little step down a few times, you know, so the coloring of the concrete can maybe help visually or on that. Is that what you guys do so that doesn't occur? Because I kind of twisted my ankle coming down.

Yeah, when it's used, that one is designed to be used As a water feature, and that's what we're— that's what Bryce is really trying to do.

I mean, it has a lot of stream feature, whereas these would be flat.

We have not quite the grade.

Not at all.

No, this is like a 2% across it. So I don't see a walk— is there a walking path around, around it?

Well, there's, there's this big old—

So that would be it. Okay.

Yeah, but then there's, you know, all these other walkways and things that cut through.

Okay.

Yeah, so that oval is a quarter mile, didn't you say?

Correct.

So that's nice.

Go all the way around.

Yeah, you could even— we did not connect this.

If you could connect that, that'd be great. So you could make it— you know, Tom could walk 3 times.

Joggers.

Yeah, we could look at connecting this here. It's difficult because of the— difficult because of the university.

You come through the middle though and do modified loops.

I'm going to try and delete that. Okay, we're gonna have to wrap up here. So based on what we're hearing, then we'll move forward. Go for it.

And I would say let's make a really nice water park. And what I mean by that is one that's going to be attractive, look good. And like Terry said, that was a very important feature. And so in my mind, we go up to $1 million, but up at ground level, ground level, not the water features. But attractive.

Yeah, different colors, make it look good.

Yeah, let's, let's design it so that it's well appointed, an asset for that park, and becomes a very beautiful place. At least that's what I want to say.

Permanent. Would there be a problem with the pickleball? We have that sidewalk going right by University, right up here.

That's why I say we can look at that.

That might be an area when it's done, maybe that's some mischief or something.

Yeah, we'll look at that. The grades do get a little tricky here and we do get a little pinched here, but why don't we— we made a note, we'll, we'll try and pull that down and see what we can open that up because I like that idea.

I like that, Dave. And you can walk around the whole park.

Yeah, yeah.

And even if, even if it costs you a couple pickleball courts, I think it'd be nice to have— not a couple, I mean, you shift it.

Yeah, just shift it down to 6. I think walking around the whole I think you got the care center there too.

Yeah, they want to walk.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, Scott's shuffle. Scott's pointing out too that if for whatever reason we can't get it here, though, the path does come through here and it does still connect through. You can—

oh, we know that you'll get that done.

Yeah, perfect.

That's what I do.

So let it be done.

So just quickly, I will add that we are receiving proposals for CMGC on this particular project as we speak.

In fact, those are due on Tuesday of this coming week, and then we'll move forward with the selection. I do agree with these guys, if you can walk around, it would be a big deal because there's a lot of people that walk the park.

That's the number one asked for Item in any survey up and down the Los Angeles River.

And I know I won't be such a nerd, but there is a well site on this park as well. And so we anticipate that the first thing you will see is probably well rigging on this site, and we will start to drill the well in advance of all the other work associated with the park. So in order for us to, you know, work out the timing and and logistically make sure that the well is not happening at the same time construction of the park's happening.

Probably start that sooner rather than later. There's a lot of moving pieces with this project.

Thank you for your time. Enjoy your pizza.

Have a good night.

Our cult pizza.

But I was so educated. Okay, thanks guys. Thanks for the interview. All right, we've got it, George. Uh, can we ask somebody to give a blessing on the food, and then we'll grab the food and have everybody go? Any volunteers?

Happy to.

Looks like Tom.

Happy to, sir.

Heavenly Father, we're grateful for this food, but not only for the food, for the organization that brings us together where we try to better the city.

We're thankful for those who arranged to bring it to us and provide it for us easily. Although we're blessing this food, we clearly ask for a blessing on those who are in harm's way in Ukraine and ask that wise leaders would prevail and that peace might come. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen. So when we were in Gilbert a few weeks ago, they've got a— just for that, to my son— they've got a train park there called the McCormick-Stollman Valley Park.

And it's basically a railroad museum.

They've got old trains there, and they've got, you know, each scale a room, warehouse full of little tiny trains. Oh really? But they, their train, uh, I mean, it actually runs through the park and there's no fencing around.

If we ever do acquire, and our hope is to acquire property southwest for a park, then we have a blank canvas, right? Then we can kind of incorporate something like that, build in the old railroad, rather than, rather than try to retrofit something. We could So I don't— it's not that I'm saying there's not a place for it. I think there is.

I just—

this just isn't it. Yeah, let's just try this. Yeah, thank you.

You said it was something else. Was there other information?

Okay, sweet. Oh, there he is.

I was wondering where you were. 2019, the legislature approved a bill that requires—

Okay, well, I'm sorry, I thought you were done, Jody. I left. Sorry.

That's okay.

If you remember back in 2019, the legislature adopted a bill that requires the cities to make what they call VPNs, voting participant— voter participation areas. The reason for this is specifically for referendums and initiatives, for the signatures that they get. Instead of just keeping it in one area, it has to be distributed throughout the whole city based on your population and your precincts. So we did that in 2019, and you're supposed to do it the December after the Next census and for every 10 years after the census. Since the census got delayed this year, so did this. We approved a resolution in December to keep the 2019 map until we could get this updated information from the county. Obviously, we currently have that now. You can see the difference over here. They cannot break up a precinct, and we have 50 of them. So they have to go along precinct lines. They have to try and keep them as equal as possible in population. And so this is the map that has been proposed. It's kind of hard to see. The county didn't outline it very well. The lines aren't very dark, but the county has done this, and they average about 12,000 population per area. So we— what we need to do now is we need to just approve that at a city council meeting with a resolution. So that when we get a referendum or an initiative, we have a map to go off of as far as how many signatures we can get per area. Is there required—

is this a political hot issue like Jerry may—

or are our areas so much—

No, I think homogeneous that we don't care. I don't, I don't understand.

It's a political hot issue because it's harder now.

Well, it's not necessarily harder, but it's more equal because you would find that somebody, say, in the southwest area had a problem with an issue. That's where all the signatures were coming from. And people in the northeast area was going, it's on the ballot, but I have no clue what this is, right? So it helps even it out that the word gets out. And so everybody has an opportunity when it's on a ballot to vote. Yes.

I guess I'd be harder because of that issue. Yeah.

the people who are affected by it, and that's why they're doing it. And yeah, I would say the controversy was when the bill was passed back then. The update of the map isn't really a controversy, it's just the county gives us the map.

We did the first one, the county did the second one.

Yeah, but a few years ago it was.

Yeah.

So to some degree, Jody, what I hear you saying is this year's map is county-generated.

Yes.

So nobody can say, well, Councilmember so-and-so Creation of the map to benefit a certain outcome.

You just say—

And it's set by state code. Because of the size of our population, we have to have 8 areas. Some of the smaller ones only have— you either have 4 or 8. Some of the smaller towns or areas have 4 areas.

So is this anytime there's a petition that has to meet these requirements?

Has to meet these requirements. The requirements are basically they have to have 8.25% of the active voters in the city overall, and then they have to have 8.25% of the active voters in at least 75% of the BPAs. So that's basically 6 of our 8 BPAs have to have 8.25% active voters as signatures. If they don't, then they don't qualify.

to be put on the ballot. Is that any petition, including statewide petitions?

It's only local.

Yeah, that's for local initiatives and referendums.

Okay, so thanks for explaining that because I remember that law and I never really understood it.

So like, for example, when they did the service tax, and that was a big deal a few years ago, that was statewide. Or the marijuana, that was—

yeah, that was statewide.

So those fall under different rules than this, right?

Yeah, I think that's slightly different.

This will just be a little bit more solid.

Okay, so if everybody's all right with it, those economic consent is done by resolution, so we do it by consent on the next city council meeting.

Sounds good, thank you.

And your agendas were not printed with the amended one, so the amended one you will have on the dais. Sorry, that includes the library board. Yes.

We'll jump into, uh, just going through the agenda real quick here for the city council meetings. Essentially— oh, we've got Dave still.

I can be real quick.

Okay, go ahead, Dave. So I'm, uh, I'm over the Beautification Commission, the Senior Citizens, the Public Safety, Recreation, and then Chair Sharon with Jeff Lamson. So our senior commission, we are re-upping new people because most people have passed on or don't do it anymore. So that's going to come up, I think, in the next city council meeting. We'll vote on that.

The really spunky lady was okay.

She asked to stay. It's definitely like a punch in the gut. So you're saying more than 2 terms, they're re-upping them additional?

Is that what you're saying?

Well, no.

They need an exception to that, that you can only get 3 terms?

I think there's an exception. I'm sorry, are you wondering what the renewals are on?

No, I'm a senior.

Senior.

I think that, that probably should be exempt, right, is what you're kind of—

I think most of them, we've made a change.

I think most of them have the flexibility to be exempt in the instance that you can't get applicants.

Okay, somebody wants to continue.

I mean, Kate Bradford was on for a long time. Okay, um, but she was just a dynamo.

And those are kind of changes.

But, um, so, you know, recreation, I think, uh, we're working on fees right now.

with the price.

So, um, I think CARE will be coming up. Public Safety, we had our first meeting, um, went very well. We're working on the mission statement and our second meeting, which will be done in detail, they can see the council. But it's a good group, and I think it'll be a good support for the police and fire.

So, Dave, I have a question back to your rep.

Now that the fitness center has taken their half of CARE, do you know what's the next thing that ref wants built, or where do you want them? I think we're looking at the Hillcrest Park, right? Okay, so Hillcrest and then some other things, but they're looking at some— maybe doing a swimming program. So we're not really sure. Care Arts is going to change pretty dramatically, I'm assuming, right? And we don't know. I mean, I'm assuming what the town gets. Yeah, but even if they put in a request for the and we're not buying enough longevity. I'd say that's zero. No, no, I think you're 100% right.

I think they know that's coming.

I had a conversation with them. Yeah, they had excess cash already.

They're planning on— I'm assuming a big goose egg for us.

So I think the beautification will be presenting end of this month or in April.

They're still doing the beautification yard signs and also doing the Christmas awards.

So, um, I think we're re-upping quite a few of our people that are on the commission right now. So moving forward, so it's been good. Okay, sounds good. Appreciate that. We'll just run through real quickly here tonight. Tonight's pretty light. Um, we'll start off with call to order.

An invitation.

We'll have a pledge of allegiance. And you're doing that, right?

No, just me.

Oh, just you. Okay. I forgot to do someone else. Yeah, would you like to do one? You forgot?

Um, how about you do the pledge?

Okay, that's perfect. No, they emailed me. Mayor's report, items referred by council. We've got 3 presentations. We've got Mark Seasbrandt doing a giving machine presentation for the church. We've got an annual report for Sacred Gate Bridge Golf Course. And we've got an award, Walter C.O. Emporium Award, that we'll present.

Yeah.

And then we have personal appearances. They're really quick on that.

Well, just to work—

so we—

I have the 2 awards here printed and framed, and then I got kind of a script for you to read that's essentially this award but add some prompts because there's family members that are here.

Okay, so Clyde Weeks, they're like kind of one of the original postmasters—

not the original, but long time His family will be here.

This is actually the day that he passed away a few years ago, on March 9th.

Oh, wow.

So the family gathers every day to celebrate— every March 9th to celebrate his life.

So it works out perfect that we're doing that here. So she's here and would love to say just a couple words about her dad and how much he loves her. I have all that scripted. We'll give her some time.

Yes, yes.

Jesse wrote this up and we added some script.

You've got 2 awards there, so how does that work?

Do you want to speak to the—

Dave, you'll speak to the second award?

Well, Jesse was working on trying to get the postman, the current postmaster here, but I'm not sure if Jesse was able to get—

So the acting, uh, postmaster should be here, plus, um, a mail carrier, because they're still on the route. Okay, so they should be represented. So the purpose of the award is that, uh, they wanted to recognize them for their service during COVID And for their service to some of our senior citizens where they actually go above and beyond. Yeah. And so, uh, I don't know if they call them the postmaster. They think they call them the supervisor of the area or something of that sort. Yeah.

Okay.

The gentleman, uh, was notified. Did you talk with him? I talked to Tracy. Okay. And she talked to Tonya, and I sent emails, so they should be here. Okay. So what I'm trying to understand, though, is we're 2 going awards. So is that all outlined in the script?

Yeah, you'll stop—

you'll—

the yellow is where you'll kind of stop, make the award to Clyde Weeks's family.

Okay.

And then you'll continue on to make the award to— the name put in there was Teodoro Arellano.

But am I doing that whole thing, or is Dave doing part of that?

However you want to do it.

I can do the second half if you'd like. You want to do— so we get down to where the, uh, highlighting—

so after you have Clyde Weeks's family come up And when you kind of sit back down, the date can read that.

Okay, just work off— I got my glasses so I can see. I'm gonna borrow your glasses too.

15%.

What's going on?

At 1.5, you got it. I forgot. Okay, I'll have these glasses for that. And so you haven't changed the script since you emailed it to me? Okay, okay, that all sounds good. And then we'll go into personal appearances. Pretty quiet, so we may not have it tonight. Oh, there you just jinxed it.

Just had 12 people sign up.

Yeah, where did that line go?

There's a lot of folks in there.

Grab the paper.

And then we'll go through consent items, uh, which is just there for a couple of minutes. And then we've got scheduled items, and we've got, uh, we got Yeah, the Board of Adjustments.

We've got the Care Advisory Board.

We've got the Advisory Committee. We've got the Beautification Advisory Committee. So we'll just go through, list all those people. We'll vote on them in blocks of their committees. And Library, right?

Library's on there.

I think there's an updated one.

Yeah, it's on your— it's on your—

on the data. And then we'll have Jamie go through anything we need to go through. Do we expect these people to be here tonight? I think some of them might, but it's hard sometimes for them to make it.

Now, Mayor, with the new process in place where it's been reviewed by the council and reviewed by you and then it goes on the agenda, I don't know if you're interested at that point now. We could put this on the consent agenda again now that it's already been reviewed by mayor and council, if you're interested in that. Yeah, I'm comfortable with either Doing it all as one block to all the, all the appointments because, I mean, tonight it's been noticed.

Yes, yes, for sure.

So we have to do it this way. Thank you. Just options. We'll do it this way tonight. We can talk about other possibilities. All right, we got some minutes to go. So thank you for coming and Raise for it.

There's also the ability to better match specific gifts with specific needs. You can you can do a sock run and end up getting ten years supply of socks because our community can give so many socks in one thing. So being able to get the right level of needs and the right level of gifts together is an incredible. incredibly challenging thing. It's been a privilege to work with, on one of our assignments, the Giving Machines here in Orem, Utah. Orem is one of 10 cities in the nation that were selected to host the Giving Machines. This is their second time of hosting. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints initiated the Light the World and the Giving Machine project just a few years ago and has seen amazing success. It overcomes these 2 challenges of the cost of running an event as well as the specific matching of the, of the needs with the donations. Because the church completely funds all of their activities without charging the organization, which includes the development and physical placement of the machines, the technology, the tracking of the credit card costs. And the effective distribution and tracking of all the funds to the LDS charities. There is no cost of this program that, that is borne by the fundraising itself. Therefore, 100% of the funds goes directly to the charities in this project. Also, by working with other organizations, the specific charities who are closest to the action, we better identify the specific needs the community needs. And then can, can craft gifts that can be donated by members of the community to help those specific needs. And thus we find a really good match between the gifts themselves and being able to get those gifts to the individuals that are in need. And, and we leverage this by not only working with various charities, which we'll recognize here closely, but also many businesses and other organizations are part of the solution. We wanted to specifically recognize University Place and their team for being such an integral part of hosting this particular event. I'm not sure if any of them are here. Is anybody here from University Place?

Uh, we—

it would be really hard to hold this event without them. So they not only offer the location, but they also supplied free of charge the electricity the internet access to be able to make the transactions. They did all the custodial services, provided security, and were very valuable in making sure that this event went off without any security or without any problems whatsoever. We really appreciate the University Place, the Woodbury family, Rob Callis, and the rest of their staff. So thank you to them. I'd now like to turn the time over to to Mr. Chaney, who will then specifically identify the organizations and the success that they had in this giving process.

Thank you so much. I'm sitting here looking at myself in this camera, and I didn't realize I have this bald spot back here. I never look at the back of my head. It is an honor for me to stand here. This is the fun part of my job. Well, there's lots of fun parts, but this is truly the fun part. On behalf of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Latter-day Saint Charities, I just want to express our sincere appreciation and gratitude To this, to the city and community of Orem, for all the community members who made this possible, for the University Place Mall, for, for everyone that is supporting and has supported the Giving Machines this past year. In Orem, the machines raised $1.23 million. Total across the world, which the world this year consisted only in the United States because of COVID we raised $5.8 million. And since 2017, Giving Machines have raised $15 million, which goes all around the world and locally here. to provide needs and goods and services to those who struggle. Of the $1.23 million here in Orem, half of that is going to stay here in Utah County and be administered by the 5 charities who participated with us. It will feed thousands of individuals, hundreds of thousands.

It—

the money will be used to clothe, to house, to provide cancer research, to provide opportunities for people here as well as abroad to better themselves. So if I could, let's give a round of applause to all of the charities who so generously and, and who so well will administer these funds. We could not do it without you. Let me first have Alan Hill from Habitat for Humanity, if he would come forward. And Mayor, if you want to come and present this. We live in a housing crisis, and we know of the stories that Habitat for Humanity offers in helping a number of families in the community work together to build a home that they can afford. But what we don't hear is the additional work that they do to improve the living conditions of families in the area. And these funds, $55,685, will go to provide some modifications on accessibility. Carpenter's boxes, I love that idea. Kitchen islands, light fixtures, roof repairs. I think actually each of the members of the, of the council have a little card. Will you read off for me? Let's start here with Mr. McDonald.

59 kitchen islands.

100 accessibility modifications for Habitat.

Roof repairs, $177.

Light fixtures, $240.

Carpenter's boxes, $391.

Thank you so much for providing all that you do here in this area.

I guess other ones are the next round.

Next, if I could have Bill Huddlestrom come up.

Thank you.

Hallstrom. Oh, my apologies. United Way focuses on helping many families secure the needed education, health, and wellness shortages for children and families to grow and develop in. I believe— where did we end? With Jeff. Yes, Jeff, and then we'll kind of go back.

Okay, so for United Way, suicide prevention training, 342. 507 office visits for doctor office visits.

768 educational toys.

1,671—

oops, 1,671 new baby kits.

So this is the art supply kit. Children and low-income families get creative with their own art supplies, $2,659.

And that is a total of $144,385.

That's awesome.

And finally, Karen McCandless. Karen is with the Community Action Services and Food Bank. And, uh, we've got some exciting, uh, news and numbers to share with you. So let's see, uh, are we at— Lynnae? Lynnae?

Am I the only one?

No, no, no.

So do you want me to— okay, a full holiday meal for a family, $969.

Pantry staples for a senior, 1,365.

1,772 people bought 100 meals, making 1.772 million meals to be given.

177,000.

No, this says 100— one— well, that's not what it says, but that might be right. It says 1,000 people bought it, so it's only 177. You're right, but Anyway, I read what was written. Forgive the math. I'll cover the other $900,000, Karen.

And I don't do math very well.

So, uh, 300 meals, 341 people, about $102,300 total.

So take-home meals for a child, uh, $54.64.

So meals alone, not the take-home meals, but just the meals alone, $279,000. 500 people are going to be fed, and I didn't look at it closely, and we've got 5,400 kids that are going to be able to take a take-home meal. I just think it's remarkable. Thank you. The total, um, of all of this is $216,615. Again, I'm great. Thank you, Mayor. Again, I am I just have the opportunity to represent the thousands of people that came and participated in Giving Machines this year. In Orem, we are estimating 75,000 people came to University Place Mall to interact and participate in this endeavor. We are grateful to each one of them. Without Without them, none of this could happen. So thank you.

Thank you. Thank you very much for that. That's awesome. Next, we're going to have Bryce Merrill from Sleepy Ridge Golf Course come up and give us annual report. Bryce is from the city.

Hello, Mayor and Council. I'm glad to be here on behalf of Sleepy Ridge Golf Course today. Jamie and I actually had the opportunity to meet with Sleepy Ridge just last week and get a lot of the important information on their annual report. But the news was good and very exciting. It continues to be an exciting amenity for our residents. Golden Holt, who we had met with Really was excited about the longevity and the consistency we have from reorganizing or renegotiating the agreement between us and the golf course to last another 40 years. And looking back on the last year, knowing that we'll have that in place will allow for appropriate reinvestment into the facility from the staff and the city. Priority— the priority is from both parties to have a golf course that continues to operate successfully now and in the future, and the agreement that was set up will ensure that. The golf course has several operations that are happening simultaneously right now, including the office space, the golf course, wedding and other venue events, and the variety of program that we— they have. Golden communicated that that diversity in programming is what has helped them continue to be successful. We talked about, you know, You know, maybe 10 years ago during the recession, the golf was a little bit slow, but the office space and some of the events were really high. In the past year or two during COVID golf as an industry has seen an incredible surge. And so having a golf course operation that has a diversity of programming is good for them and good for the city. We were really excited about the additional outreach from the golf course as they talked about the high school programs that they offer. The partnerships that they have with the city, including hosting recently hosting the second annual police and fire memorial event, and the golf committee, which is comprised of residents, golf course staff, and city staff, continue to meet to ensure that we have the best interests both of the residents that play golf and those that don't as well. As a city and as a city staff, the and as the recreation liaison to that, we're very grateful for the partnership we have with Sleepy River. bridge, and we're excited for the future. So I don't know if there are any other questions, but it was a very successful meeting, and we're very confident and excited about the relationship.

Any questions?

Great. Debbie, one question.

Since I live on the 9th hole, I can tell you we've had a lot of great people, and I'll tell you what was great is you saw families out there, you saw seniors, especially during COVID being outdoors, giving people opportunity. I think it was a bright spot and gave people a great way to rec— to recreate during the— during COVID So I personally golfed it many times and it was well maintained. And it was just a fun thing to do. So they've done a good job and should be commended for their great service.

I'll be sure to pass that along. Thank you.

Thank you, Bryce.

Thank you.

All right, next on our agenda is we've got the presentation of the Walter C. Orem Award. What we'd like to do is we, we've, we've got a couple awards here. And I'm going to read through what's written on the awards so you can all see what we're talking about. And then we'll present that. In order to establish a post office in Orem, the residents were required by the regulations to daily retrieve the mail from Provo and deliver the mail to Orem for a period of 1 year. Those making the trip would pick up the mail for their neighbors and drop it off at Melissa McBride's small store where customers would retrieve their mail while purchasing stocks or supplies. It's a much simpler world back then. Melissa McBride was the first postmaster in Orem, appointed on January 28, 1898. It appears that Miss McBride may have been the first woman postmaster in Utah. A portion of the McBride store was designated as Orem's first post office. The longest-serving postmaster of Orem, Orem was Clyde E. Weeks. Clyde served in the Marine Corps during World War II and received a Purple Heart for his heroic service in the Pacific. In 1951, Mr. Weeks was nominated by President Harry S. Truman to be Orem's postmaster. He continued his service for nearly 40 years, retiring in 1990. The political appointment process of postmasters was eliminated in 1971. It is our belief that Mr. Clyde E. Weeks was the last politically appointed postmaster serving in the United States at the time of his retirement. Tonight we honor Clyde E. Weeks, the former postmaster. I'd like to ask for— we'd like to make that award to his children. That's Marie Husband, His daughter. And are there any other relatives here? Okay. So let me meet— let me meet you out at the podium. And then this is— is it Mary? Mary? Okay.

Okay.

I'll meet Maria at the Mary, sorry, at the podium. And I've got this award for you. And then if you'd like to say a few words.

Okay.

You can both come up.

You have the family come up.

Anybody with the family coming up for Let's have you just stand up here.

I'll get over here.

I might get emotional. I am born and bred and everything Orem, as most of our family are. When we moved— well, we'll go past that. We are just thrilled to be under Timpanogos Green. My dad loved Orem more than anything. We had a large family of 9 children, and he was always putting a newsletter together, He wrote a book, Sagebrush to Steel, wrote poetry for all the neighbors when they died, when they got married, when they had children. And he loved to write poetry in iambic pentameter.

Is that how you say it?

Yeah. Which was very hard to understand. He would always go around the house counting the syllables on his hand and had a yellow notebook to keep track of all of those. How many of you who are from Orem remember a slogan, things are happening in Orem?

Yes.

That, that should be drug out again. It's very nice to see everything coming back. As was mentioned, my dad, our dad was born in the Philippines. And when he was about 3 years old, he was playing out On the grass, and along came a great big snake, and it was a python, and he was looking for lunch. Luckily, they snapped him up and we were able to have him for our father. Um, trying to hustle through this. One of the things I remember, and I think we all do, is the way he had, um, just a very kindly way about him. And he would go every— I think it was Tuesday night. Has it always been Tuesday night for the city council for the last 500 years? He loved to write and support Orem in any way he could, so he was at every city council meeting for years. He would write up what happened, take it over to the Orem Geneva Times where that was printed, And people were informed about what was happening at Orem.

Let's see.

Dad was involved with so many things. He served as president of the Orem Chamber of Commerce, chairman of the Orem Betterment Committee, president of the Orem Kiwanis Club, president of the Orem Boosters, president of the Sierra Board of Directors, member of the Orem Bicentennial Committee, and author/publisher of the Orem Peace Officer magazine for 5 years. He made up that idea to honor the police officers. I thought that was so awesome. Sagebrush to Steel was the first history book published in 1961. And from 1974 to 1980, he wrote and published the monthly Orem City Happenings newsletter for Orem City, which was mailed for 63 months with Orem's monthly utility bills. The people around his circle of friends liked him so much that they loved partnering with him. On one occasion of the city's 90th birthday on May 5th, 2009, 4 copies of Clyde Weeks' latest book, City of Orem Millennial History, 1861 to 2009, have been given to Clyde Weeks— was given by Clyde Weeks to the City of Orem Library for the use of its citizens. He's always been a wonderful example to our family. It was mentioned he served in the military. He was 17 when he joined. And he was hit by tornadoes as they were launching onto Guam. And he was hit down in the front of his leg, and he carried those pieces of shrapnel his whole life. But even though he had damage that slowed him down, he was up and at it. Going all the time. I can't imagine what a sacrifice this must have caused for him over the years. In spite of his serious handicap, he has always been active and helpful in lots of physical things that needed to be done around the house. He wrote several columns. The first one was called This Week's Wit, and more recently, Under Chimpanzee Screen. These articles chronicle the perspectives about life in the community. His creative outlet has been a gift of love from our dad to this community. Dad was a loving father. He's always been loyal and committed to our mother. And the two of them— I hope some of you had a chance to hear and see them sing together. My mother helped start the Utah County Opera Association. She sang several opera—

operas.

I think we should bring that back too. And then Dad played violin very well, and the two of them joined up. Dad put a cummerbund around his belly and a mink tie that my mom made and went all over. It was great to be part of them. We were also able to do The Sound of Music by, uh, I think it was 50 times around the state. And we were blessed with a musical heritage. I wanted you to see the medals that our dad got.

Do you have the other one?

Oh, yes, that would be great.

He received the Purple Heart, and we are committed as a family. Luckily, all 9 of us live here in Utah County, most of us in Orem, so we want to do whatever we can to support Orem. We love it too. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Mary.

And your dad sounds like an amazing person. And we're proud to give him this award. We appreciate you coming tonight. I'm gonna let Dave Spencer carry on here. Yes, go ahead, Terry.

I just like to make a comment about the Weeks family. Did you— was your family home really close to here? Okay, because my wife is a Sondrup. So I think they— so, and I grew up in Orem. And so Clyde Weeks is one of those names you all knew. Now, I never went to the opera, I have to admit, but, but I just knew who Clyde Weeks was. And you just don't know how wide your influence goes and how many people know you or know your family. But I don't think I'm the age of any of your family members that I remember. I might be, but my wife was Sherry Sondrup, who's, you know, Keith and Sherma's daughter. And so, you know, I knew of your family, my wife's family, and it's just really part of Orem to have somebody like Clyde Weeks. I can name some of the policemen when I was growing up. I can name the postmaster. There are certain key people. I can name some of the mayors. And so your family has had a great impact on the city, and I just want to thank you. And I'm— and this is coming from someone that you go, I don't even know who he is, but I, I know who you were. So your family has done a lot for our community. So thank you.

Jeff, did you want to say something?

Well, yeah, I, I just want to say, echo what Terry said, and I had the privilege of working with Clyde. I helped him distribute his book that he wrote on LDS temples. And I just wanted to share something really briefly with you. Every once in a while, he would show up at my office, and I always looked forward to those visits. Because he would come in and sit down, and he would leave some little pearl of wisdom that I was not expecting. and a complete blessing to my day. And I just, I really cherish those, those opportunities. And, you know, one of my, one of my failures in life, I attempted to get Clyde to create a position in the city of Orem. This is several, several years ago, with the then city council to create a position for a poet laureate for the city of Orem. And that didn't ever get roots. But I was always impressed with his ability to write a poem about any event, any occasion, and how he— the gift that he had to bring those words together and make a rhyme and tell a story was an absolute gift. So thank you for sharing your father and, and your mother.

Definitely 2 pillars of Pillars of greatness for our community.

So thank you.

Thank you, Jeff. Dave.

Okay.

Our appreciation, our appreciation does not end there. Even during these trying times, the great men and women of the United States Postal Service have continued their faithful service to the residents of Orem. Some of our carriers went the extra mile, and instead of placing the mail in the mailbox, they delivered the mail to the door to some senior citizens. These many acts of kindness have not gone unnoticed. Many of us remember the theme of the post office, neither— that neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night would stop the carriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. We also honor the United States Postal Service today, and we present to Teo, Mike Nelson, and Tracy Jacobson, and their entire team at the United States Post Office with this award for the dedicated service to the residents of Orem as the postmaster family for nearly 125 years. So would you please come up, Teo, Tracy, and, and Mike?

Thank you for this honor. I, um, I too love Orem. I was born and raised here, and I have a story about, um, your father. You know, I heard it today. I've been there 29 years. at the post office, and I heard that if it wasn't for Clyde Weeks and our union president, we, we have no rural routes. If it wouldn't have been for Clyde and, um, you know, the carriers' representation, we would have had rural routes, and that can be kind of a mess. And Orem doesn't have any. Even Clearback, you know, Vineyard, all that, we've always had city routes. So we really appreciate that as a carrier. And also, being a carrier for 29 years, I've seen a lot of change. And It's, it's been for the good. And you guys don't even know how grateful us carriers are to be able to represent and work for the City of Orem. Um, I, I'm going to retire here. And anyway, I just want to let everybody know the residents how much we love and appreciate their kindness, and can't wait to serve another year and a half. Thank you.

Good evening, Mr. Consul. Good evening, Mr. Family, Mr. Mr. Clay, um, I'm really excited to be present over here representing the United States Postal Service. I had this conversation with my employee this morning, and then I was amazed that within the 20 years, this is probably the first recognition that the Postal Service has been receiving from the city. And I've been here with the Postal Service for 8 years, but it's really honorable to be present here representing the 104 employees that we have at both offices right now. And it is really amazing how the community has been growing over the last year. We have been adding about 40,000 deliveries within the last year and probably expecting another 50,000 within 2023 and 2024. It is really amazing how the carriers, clerks, and all the team together have been coming with this accomplished goal to deliver every day, delivering the mail until work night, 10:00 PM, 11:00 PM. It's just amazing how the work has been done. So we are right now delivering a team for both offices to try to create a new establishment delivery on this office, on this city. So it's really, really amazing how we have done over the last year. So thank you for the recognition tonight.

Appreciate it.

Mike, did you want to say anything, or you're, you're good?

I'm proud to work for the United States Postal Service. I'm very proud to receive this award. I have— I've worked here in Orem since 1995, so 27 years now. I walked the streets for 20 years, and I've been part of the management team now for 6, going on 7. My family moved into Orem in 1979. When my parents moved, I bought my family home, so I'm still here. I did, uh, I've raised my family here, I have my children here, and now I have grandchildren here. And so we're very pleased to be part of Orem and to serve through the United States Postal Service, uh, every single house. There, there was a time in my career when I, I could say that I had been to every house in Orem, and that was, that was something I was very proud of. Uh, since that time, I've, uh, certainly not anymore. That was many years ago. The city has grown quite large. And it's a wonderful place. And I'm very pleased in the way that it's, it's run. I had the privilege of meeting Clyde years ago when I had started, and he introduced himself to me as I was delivering the mail. And that was, that was a privilege to meet the, the previous postmaster as well as the managing editor-in-chief of the Orange-Nebraska Times. That was very great. I just want to say thank you to the City Council for This award. Thank you.

I just want to say thank you for what you do for the city of Orem, and I appreciate Tracy for what she does for my parents and everyone on her route. So she's awesome. But tell your team that we appreciate you, and I think it's— I think we don't— we take you for granted, and I think that we need to not do that anymore, and hopefully you're treated nice. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you for coming tonight, and we, we really appreciate all that you do for us. We're going to move on to the personal appearances, and I'll just read how this is outlined. Time has been set aside for the public to address express their ideas, concerns, and comments on how items not scheduled as public hearings on this agenda— on the agenda. Those wishing to speak are encouraged to show respect for those who serve the city. Comments should focus on issues concerning the city. Those wishing to speak should have signed in before the beginning of the meeting. And please limit your comments to 3 minutes or less. I've got a list here of 5 people, and we'll start out with Jim Hadlock, if you'd like to come up and say a few words.

Thank you very much. Good to be here this evening. I just have some things for this mayor and city council to consider. First is water conservation. As of last year, the last time I checked, none of the 3 largest water users in the city— that's the city, the LDS Church, and the school district— had uniform water conservation policies in place. None of them also had any type of electronic water sensing equipment at their locations to sense when water wasn't needed. For instance, when it's raining. I have, as you probably have, driven around the city and seen sprinklers on when it's raining. So I think that's something the city needs to really consider, particularly in light of the continuing drought and the forecast for it to continue, I imagine, sometime into the future. The second thing is, according to Orem City published numbers, approximately 20% of the city of Orem is Latino, and I think that our police force should reflect the population of So I think the City Council and those in charge of hiring police people and recruiting new policemen, new police people, should do more to have that reflection in the police force— more Latino officers, certainly more women officers— so that the city is truly represented by our police force. And the last thing then is the city, I believe, could do more to help low-income families, the homeless, poor, and with housing subsidies or whatever cities can do, which I don't really know what that is. But I know that some cities do have low-income housing projects for people that need that kind of help. So, I encourage Orem to do that. Because as you know, like I do, the cost of renting or buying in Orem now, as throughout most of Utah, is astronomical. compared to what it was just a few years ago, and a lot of people need help. So I hope you'll take those people into consider particularly. Thanks for the time, and I'll see what happens in the future. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Next on the agenda is John Barrick.

Mayor and City Council, I'm grateful for the opportunity to I just wanted to address you today with a few comments.

I—

we are grateful for your considering an exploratory study regarding Orem and the Alpine School District. The Alpine School District is trying to control the narrative through Sarah Hacken. We're grateful specifically for Lenee Millett, who's been trying to go to Parent Teacher Association meetings, but the Alpine School District is organizing these meetings and making them at the same time at this— at different locations to prevent Linné from attending each one. Um, they want to talk about lots of things, but they don't want to provide any facts or data to the public. It's often fake news or fake narrative. Last Friday, the principal at our local elementary school, Northridge Elementary, told all the 3rd through 6th grade teachers that they were going to cut one classroom for each grade level from 3rd through 6th. That would leave 37 students in 3rd and 4th grade classrooms, which is 10 more than the Alpine School District suggested or recommended level. 33 for 5th and 6th graders. Today, after my wife brought that to the attention of the Parent Teacher Association, Mr. LeBear tried to deny that and walk back that it hadn't really been decided yet. But they don't want the truth to be known.

Last year—

last week, we found out that in the, in the past year, one of the special needs children who was known for his streaking ability decided to disrobe and run through the halls. He was cornered in a glass atrium area in front of a group of 1st and 2nd graders, but no message was sent to any parent regarding their observation of the streaking act, which we think is a disservice to parents who had children, including our son, that was present. Today, Sarah Hacken told parents that Orem is too small. She claims that only 3 of our 3 high schools— that they would have to cut 17 faculty because of lack of funding, and that ASD provides that to us using Utah County property tax data. and their, and their financial statements, I estimate that Orem provides $48 million in property taxes to the ASD last year, which is 19.8% of all property taxes collected. Yet we only provide 17.8% of the students, so they have a 10% net increase of property taxes over the percentage of students that come from Orem. I think that it's fair to say that we provide a net benefit, particularly all that, all with all the growth that's happening in other parts of the county where Orem is subsidizing that. And I think that's what the Alpine School District is afraid of. We wanted to thank you sincerely for your efforts in this on our behalf of helping Orem children. Thank you.

Thank you. We've got— and actually, I said 5 earlier, there was actually 2 that were on the award, so there's just one more person left, and that's Scott Swain. If you'd like to come up.

Okay, thank you. Uh, with COVID the last 2 years, I think we've kind of lost a certain sense of our community, and so I'd like to propose an event that we add to our community. Um, I think it could go through the Arts Council, and I would entitle it Saturday in the Park. And it wouldn't cost Orem City anything at all, and I think it should be run through the Arts Council. I've applied actually to be on the Arts Council. I haven't heard if I'm going to be on it, but if I were on it, I would definitely want to head this up. What I would propose that we do is that we have an event every Saturday that— other than the Saturdays that there's the Fourth of July or the Freedom Fest And between the hours of 5 and 8, at least on the Saturdays that there's a Sierra Shell activity, we have live music and the food trucks. And then we also, if we didn't have enough live music, we could have disc jockey music, but it wouldn't cost Orange City anything because we'd use the money raised from the food trucks to pay for whoever's taking care of the sound. I think it's a really— would be a really neat thing for young people to come to, and they could all gather there at the park and they could just hang, hang out there and play in the park. I think that's something that we, we need, you know, we need to develop this sense of community, and I think that'd be something good that Orem City could, could have. Um, let's see.

Is there anything else?

Uh, um, let's see. On the nights that there are no Sierra shell activities, uh, we could stay maybe a little bit later. Um, wouldn't— we'd make sure we kept within the sound ordinances and everything. So are there any questions that you might have?

Any questions? Terry?

So just to comment, Scott has been very involved with what is done during the summer, uh, with the Freedom Heritage.

Yeah, it's the events at Sierra Park.

The events at Sierra Park. So it's not like he doesn't know how to line people up and organize and get people there. So, uh, anyway.

Yeah, we've had food trucks there. We've been at Sierra Park since 2008 doing those 4th of July things. And I have a real interest in Sierra Park because my great-grandfather owned all that land that was part of his, of his orchard. And he owned this where the Sierra is and the, um, or Lincoln Square and all that. And so I, I have a real interest in that. So I'd like to see that, that happen. in our area.

Thank you.

Oh, Debbie.

Yes.

Currently in the summer we have concerts in the park on Monday nights here at City Center. Would there be a reason that you wouldn't want to partner on that night?

Monday?

Uh-huh.

Oh, and just, just have it here.

We already—

the Arts Council schedules summer concerts every Monday night.

This would be a more casual sort of one. We just have some music play with live artists and that, and it would be here in this park at Sarah. So I'm proposing we do both, um, because it's just a little bit— it's a really, uh, casual sort of, uh, environment. And where they have the food trucks— are there food trucks at the other one?

Yeah, I think sometimes there are, but I don't think it's an event where we schedule them. They might show up.

So yeah, so yeah, but maybe, you know, if we coordinated that, but I'd like to do something over here at Sierra Park if possible. It's a very nice park. So, okay, that's all.

Thank you.

Thank you. All right, now we'll move on to the consent items. The only item on the consent items is to approve the meeting minutes from last session. I'd like to make a motion that they be approved, Mr.

Mayor.

Second.

Okay.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

The motion passes. Thank you. Next, we'll move on to the scheduled items, and this is primarily appointments to the different boards and commissions that we have here in the city.

9.1.

I'd like to appoint— this is Jamie.

Sorry.

Mayor, thank you. We have recently had a vacancy in our Board of Adjustment, and as I've communicated with you previously, Mr. Ott-Dameron, along long-term resident of the city, has made application to serve as a member of the Board of Adjustment. It's my recommendation, and I would move to appoint Mr. Damron to serve as a member of the Orem City Board of Adjustment.

Do we have a second?

Second.

He's not voting, so this is a first. This is a motion.

Okay, he made the motion.

It does require your advice and consent.

Oh, okay.

So you would need to consent.

So yeah, Tom, will you just— if you're wanting to, just make a motion to approve the appointment by advice and consent.

I move that we approve Damron through advice and consent to the Board of Adjustments.

Second that.

Go ahead.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Thank you. The motion passes. Next, we've got some appointments to the CARE Advisory Board. I'd like to appoint Denny Tyler, which is a reappointment, Stacy Golding, which is a reappointment, and Shiona McKay, which is a first-time appointment. I'd like to make a motion to approve those.

So moved.

Second.

Mayor, I did.

Okay.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Motion passes. 9.3, appointment to Summerfest Advisory Committee. I'd like to appoint Christy Eakins. to the Summerfest Advisory Committee, and I make a motion to do that.

I'll second that.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

That motion passes. Like to make some appointments to the Beautification Advisory Commission. We've got Elaine Porter as a reappointment. Sean O'Roulian as a reappointment, Jason Bond as a reappointment, and Tanya Harmon as a reappointment. I'd like to make a motion to approve those.

Second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

That motion passes. Finally, we've got some, some citizens to appoint to the Library Advisory Commission. And I'd like to appoint Mary Stovall Richards, reappointment. Chelsea Young is an appointment. Matthew Baller is an appointment. Matthew Brown is an appointment. Amber Larson is an appointment. Karina Lewis is an appointment. And Jonathan Reyes is an appointment.

Mr. Mayor, before there's a motion on this, did a lot of people—

are we expanding this? There's a lot of appointments, or did other people term out? There's an awful lot of names on there.

Yeah, Shar, do you want to—

If you don't mind, I'd like some clarification on that.

No, that'd be great if Shar could explain that.

We took advantage of the opportunity with some of the extra flexibility with the boards and commissions if people were good in serving to extend their terms a little bit, because last year we opened Library Hall and some people had been working, you know, and waiting for that project, so we extended it a bit through that. We had 2 members move out of Orem last year, and then we were just kind of going around until the new council got in place to appoint.

Okay, so this is normal in your mind. We had some overextend and we have a lot of replacements at this point, right?

Yes, we do.

So, is this most of this board, or is the—

That's the, that's the whole group.

That's the entire board we're replacing.

Yeah, we did lose a couple who moved out of Orem. One moved to a 55-and-older community in Vineyard, and another one, they just relocated for work.

So.

I'd like to make the motion to approve those appointments. appointments, Mr. Mayor, and reappointments.

I'll second that.

Okay.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye. Thank you. That motion passes. Last, we've got, uh, just any information from Jamie that you'd like to share with us?

Yes, thank you, Mayor, members of the City Council. Just would invite you after the meeting to recognize Councilmember Lorraine, she had a birthday several weeks ago, and given schedules and such, we didn't have a chance to celebrate with her. So if you would join us after the meeting in the City Council conference room, we can sing her happy birthday and enjoy a treat. The only other thing I just wanted to share with you is, as you know, we had the close of the state legislative session last week. Last Friday at midnight, the session came to an In total, the House considered 492 bills, the Senate considered 260 bills, and an additional 67 resolutions above and beyond those bills. We have— Heather is always good about putting together a debrief recap of what has taken place. Given obviously the timing of the end of the session and where we are today, we haven't had a chance yet to put all that together. But we just want to let you know that we do plan to share that with you in our next— here in the next couple of weeks and bring you up to speed on some of the bills that did pass. Maybe just a couple of key bills that maybe you were concerned or wondering about. One of them is HB 232, the Utah Lake Authority. That bill did in fact pass. It did modify the structure of the board board itself. It will include representation from a supermajority of Utah County appointees. There also was a provision in the initial bill to permit or allow for a toilet tax. That actual provision was removed from the final language, and so that flexibility is not included in that bill. So I know that was a concern to the council as we— as you were having that conversation. House Bill 151, which relates to retail incentives, was also a bill that did pass. This is a bill that specifically, I guess you could say— I won't say outlaws because it limits what an organ— what a municipality can do in terms of a retail incentive. The language reads like they are prohibitive—

prohibited.

However, there is, and I'm not kidding, probably about 20 to 25 exclusions. So they're permitted— they're prohibited but for a myriad of issues, everything from development to conservation to public safety to infrastructure needs. It is kind of like It's kind of like one of these bills that sounds real tough, like tough on crime, but at the same time there's, there's holes in and out of it. And I probably shouldn't editorialize, but that's, but that's what it was. The last bill I just want to brief you on is HB 476, which is the housing and housing affordability bill that was considered at the legislature. That bill also did pass. There are kind of 2 pieces to that bill. The first one relates to housing affordability and requirements that the city has to meet as related to representing to the state of Utah that, in fact, we are striving to build affordability into our community. And there is, for example, an annual report that we're required to submit that notes that we are compliant or meet a certain number of requirements relative to housing and housing affordability in the state. That historically has been a report that we're required to submit in December. With the change in the law, we're actually now required to submit it in October, and there was some clarifying language included in the bill relative to that. The other piece is a little more complicated, and it speaks specifically to what we call station area plans. Which are going to be required planning studies and— I guess you could say ordinances that we're going to have to put into place that speak to planning in and housing in and around transit stations, specifically within a Frontrunner station, a half a mile surrounding a Frontrunner station and a quarter mile surrounding each BRT station in Orem. Now we have, from what I understand, until 2025 to comply with those requirements, and we have yet to really definitively understand exactly what we're supposed to and expected to do, but the bill was 81 pages long. And so we'll take the time here in the next couple of weeks and try and digest it and give you a better idea as to what specifically will be required of us. But again, the intent of that language is to encourage additional housing in and around transit stations and specifically transit-oriented development.

So who are the legislators that support that?

So the legislator that's sponsored the bill in the House is Senator Steve Waldrip, and he is a legislator out of Eden. And the Senate sponsor is Senator Jake Andrae, and he is a senator out of Lehi-Saratoga Springs. And both of those are— excuse me, the bill in both houses received very strong support.

So I'm just kind of surprised at that because the initial meetings they talked about Frontrunner station, then, then they added the BRT, which affects Orem, right? Everything along University Parkway, every little stop where someone gets on the bus, then that zoning is forced upon us, required as a city, right?

Well, I mean, I think it is required, but I There's not a lot of definition to—

Yeah, and you know, there are exceptions to the vision. It's called a vision and a plan, right? And it has to have certain components. It has to have environmental components, it has to have housing components, it has to have transportation components. And if you look at where our BRTs are located, our stations, we already probably have some zoning and planning in place that are going to help fulfill those visions going forward. So it's really a nuanced analysis that we're going to need to do. We don't have it as bad as some communities. My understanding is Salt Lake has 29 station area plans they have to deal with. So, you know, I wish I could give you a definitive answer tonight about, you know, is our zoning adequate? Is it not adequate? But we have a period of time to do that, so we'll be able to look at it clearly, concisely, and come up with the best solution for Orem.

But even as I, even as I skimmed the bill, Heather, I wasn't even sure that there were density requirements that were built into it. So—

No, you and I read that the same way.

Yeah, I mean, initially it's kind of like you have to have these plans. But we're going to allow you to define what those plans are, and which thankfully I think provides some level of flexibility to the city and allows us to determine our own destiny, so to speak, rather than make sure we're comparable and consistent with Provo and Sandy and Salt Lake and Layton and all these other cities.

So there's really a lot of flexibility built into it. From what we were facing at the beginning of the session and during the interim to what we ended up getting. I think we're in a good place. I think we're in a place that continues to vest important zoning decisions in you as the elected officials here at the City of Orem.

Thanks so much for that clarification, Heather.

Okay, thank you for that explanation. Yeah, look, it looked to me like what you're saying, that that bill started out pretty draconian and it wound up being You know, not what we expected, so that's positive. All right, I'd like to make a motion to adjourn tonight.

Second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Thank you for coming.

Tom says aye.