City Council · 2022-04-12

history of code enforcement in Orem. So about 20 years ago, they formed what they call Neighborhood Preservation Unit, and this was in our police department, and it was a special unit that was going to be dealing with basic nuisance complaints such as properties accumulating junk, landscaping issues. In 2021, NP was dissolved and the Neighborhood Improvement Team was created, and this was due to police staffing issues, consistency, and turnover. secondary assignments, and a perceived heavy hand. So the direction of the City Council and city management, NIT was created for a more compassionate and steady approach to code enforcement. I'm gonna introduce my team. Most of you already know. Stephen is the Deputy City Manager, so he oversees me, and I'm the Community Services Manager, and then I oversee the team. So we have Brady Andreassen. Brady is our sworn officer on our team. Brady is a former MPU officer as well. And he's been great for our team and getting it up and running. We also have Gary Ledoux. He's our tall guy over here. He's been with us since July. And then we have Jeff Turner and Richard Earl, and they are— have just been with us for 3 months now?

4 months. 4 months.

It's been—

already? That went by fast. And then Aramid Naid, who's in Brazil right now, he is our attorney assigned to us. And so we have some neighborhood responsibilities. So Richard and Jeff work citywide, and then Gary actually works in our target neighborhoods. We use some CDBG money, Community Development Block Grant funds, to pay for code enforcement. And because of that, we're able to pay Gary's salary using CDBG money. So he's focusing his efforts in our target neighborhoods, and then Brady provides citywide support. So I'm going to turn the tour to Brady now.

Okay, so some things I'll discuss are just why, why we have code enforcement in general.

So some of the reasons that we came up with, obviously, neighborhood plan priorities, maintaining property values in our neighborhoods, improve the appearance of neighborhoods.

Prevent crimes and overall crime in our neighborhoods, encourage neighborhood stability, encourage homeownership, and also just kind of have some extra eyes out there. These guys are out in our community every day, and so they can help us out that way as well.

There's a wise little video clip as to the broken windows theory.

In '82, a theory was introduced by American social scientists. The theory was based on an experiment. Researchers left a car with a broken window on a street in New York City.

At first, people merely strolled by looking at the damage.

Time passed and the car remained untouched until some unspoken notion took hold of the neighborhood that no one cared about the car or the broken window, so who would care if someone broke another one? So someone did.

Before long, all the windows were broken.

The radiator and the stereo was gone.

The upholstery was shredded, and children played on the wreck that remained.

The broken windows theory suggests that disorder met with apathy leads to crime.

If a window is broken and remains unfixed, it sends a signal that no one cares, and then pretty soon all the windows will be broken. Applied internationally, it's just—

So it's a little bit of a dramatic effect as far as why we do code enforcement and the broken windows theory. All right, so just discussing some code violations that we deal with regularly.

I'll show you some examples.

This was taken out of the great big picture window of the living room of an apartment. This was taken out of the upper window of a house.

So these are things that people were looking out their window and seeing.

These 2 were provided by Richard.

This one was one of my cases.

These are all empty cat food cans out here. That was one of the first things that got the neighbor's attention.

Same house, just from a different angle.

It's another house down on Sand Hill Road. This could also be seen from a neighboring upstairs window. This is a house over Geneva area.

Can I toss that? Another thing that we're dealing with, and these guys are great to help me because it's something that I've been charged with To the police department, transient camps.

This is in the dumpster enclosure of Checkarama.

I believe since it's been cleaned up, I haven't been down to do the inspection.

I do have a burning question. Okay, you get them to go and leave and you help them get a resource for a hotel, or do they show up the next day back where they were?

Kind of can discuss some of the resources we do, but we do offer resources.

But there's only so much we can do. And so sometimes it is just kind of moving along, but they cannot come back to that place because we've generally gone through the process of being trespassed.

Okay.

So yes, we've come up with a homeless count process. We've been working with Aaron and the legal team to do that. And so we do have our NLEs and our mental health team go out if You know, and provide resources when we can.

So this one on the right was down by the UTA station.

This one was just off the freeway on University Parkway. A couple of NIT guys helped clean up, some other city employees as well.

Then graffiti, another thing that I've been charged to deal with, and these guys have been helping me out with as well. The thing about graffiti is on private property, um, the property owner is unfortunately required to clean it up, and so those are some of the things we have to try to navigate. We, we—

that's a question.

We used to have people— this is probably, you know, We used to have a deal where kids would get involved in some crime would help clean up these areas. Do we still do that?

Yes.

Yeah, it's called TAD.

It's run through the district court.

So thank you.

So I just want to touch briefly on what we enforce.

And I think before I jump into that, just for the council members, in the packet that you received, you'll see a copy of Chapter 11 in the city code.

And those are specifically the nuisance codes.

Right now our job is to enforce what's there.

As you guys read through that, if there's anything that you think might be, you know, if there's something that could be changed or looked at again, definitely let us know.

Right now we're just doing our best to enforce the codes as they are right there.

But these are some of the more common ones. Weeds and landscaping is a big one that's going to pick up a lot in the next few months. Junk, you know, just junk in the front yard primarily, whatever is visible to the street or to a neighbor. Occupancy cases.

Occupancy cases.

And we've been mostly reactive for those when somebody complains about, you know, too many people at home. That's what we investigated.

Vehicles inoperable, unregistered, parking on landscaping, things like that.

Brady mentioned the homeless camps.

And this is just a quick rundown of—

this is CommCate, the software that we use to track everything. And these are the violations from July, from when I started until now.

So We've had 307 violations of junk, 228 for improper parking or storage.

And it goes on down the list.

Gary, for the sake of everybody, would you mind reading through that? Because, for example, I can't see that.

Yeah.

So accumulation of junk, like I said, 307.

Improper parking or storage, which right now is inoperable vehicles or unregistered vehicles that are parked on the property.

We've had 228 of those, 169 parking on landscaping.

121 required landscaping, so that could be a number of things like they're not maintaining their yard, their landscaping is overgrown, or they just don't have grass, which we see quite a lot, quite a bit of that.

Improper accumulations, 87, so that's like accumulating big piles of brush or, you know, some people just put materials in their front yard. And then we get into, you know, some of the occupancy cases, family, accessory apartments, Vegetation is a pretty common one too, so things growing out like onto the sidewalk or, or like a tree hanging down too low. And then weeds kind of falls under landscaping, and improper maintenance is the last one. So that's number 23 right there, 2348, all the way up to 3007.

And there's more after that, but they were 1s and 2s. One question, are these individual or did one person get this one and this one?

It could be that too, yeah.

Do you have any idea how many unique individuals this represents?

We'd have to dive into the reporting.

Okay.

Violations.

Okay, so a case could have like 5 violations, and I'll turn it over to Richard. Okay, so I'm going to go over kind of basically what—

how, how we do our job. Uh, it can start out one of two ways. We can either get a complaint through 311 And then once we get that complaint, usually we go out same day. Somebody calls and complains, same day to go check on it. If it's not done through 311, then we'll just go out proactively, check the neighborhood, see what's going on. Or again, if we get a complaint, once we get that, we address that, then in that neighborhood we'll just kind of— we'll go up and down the roads and everything. We'll make sure that everything everything that's out of compliance in that neighborhood gets taken care of. That way nobody feels like they're singled out.

We don't write up one house and not the next house or anything like that.

Um, when we, when we first started, we put a door tag. There's some door tags in your packets there. So that door tag has recently been redone. There are, uh, there's a spot on there where we put the what code that they have broken. If it's not one of the pre-written ones, then we'll write it in at the bottom. On the back side, we will make sure that we put a description of what needs to be done, uh, what needs to be done to fix it. Uh, every single one of them, depending on which one of us 3 gives them the violation, it will have our name, our work cell phone number so they can call, text, leave a voicemail. It will also have our email address. So our biggest thing right now is getting people to actually contact us instead of— when they contact us, we can actually work with them a little bit. Once, once we leave that on there, once we leave the door hanger on there, we generally give 30 days to be able to fix the problem. If the problem is not fixed within 30 days, we can't get a hold of them, we usually send a citation after that point, and then usually it'll go another 30 days. one more citation, and then after that is when it would go to ALJ, which is when we would, uh, is when we would, uh, be able to take it to the judge. A lot of these end up getting taken care of before it gets to a fine. We'll leave a note, uh, we'll leave one of the door hangers, and it'll get taken care of within the 30 days. Uh, so this is just another picture of these. Uh, we redid them. We made these a little bit bigger right here with the red so it's highlighted so they can actually get a So they see that and try and get a hold of us. Like I said, that's our, that's our number one thing is that it's hard to get people to get a hold of us.

One of the things we've also added is if we have not heard from that person in 15 days, within that 15-day time period, we work to find them so that we can see what's going on with them as well.

So when it comes to our job, you know that there's a lot of people that we think that we're overstepping a boundary or something like that when we're trying to do our job. So we try to use as much compassion as we can. When we get a— when we get a home that has excessive junk, we will leave dump passes with, uh, with the door hanger. We'll staple them on there. That way, you know, hey, you've got a lot of junk at your house, but here's some help. Load it up in the truck, get it out of here. We don't have any problems. We're good to go.

You all have one so you can clean up your yards too.

We also, we also leave resource cards. We will work with faith leaders to, you know, if we can't abate something or somebody has a hard time abating it, we'll work with faith leaders so that they can maybe, you know, get a youth group to help out, something like that. We're willing to work with residents who contact us. If they, if they don't contact us or if they don't give us some kind of information, it's hard to work with them, and then it ends up just kind of escalating and not getting better. We organize cleanups for people who are in violation. We'll actually go out and help clean up on our own if we have to. We will— real quick, I had a case where there was a complaint on it because the next-door neighbor was selling their home. The homeowner had a lot of stuff in his driveway. He didn't have a means to get rid of it. The day the case came in, I got a dump trailer, I took it to his house, left it there overnight. He filled it up, I took it to the dump for him, case is closed. It was that simple. And we also, we seek out any other resources that we can on a case-by-case basis, whether it's, you know, just reaching out to another department within the city, To find out, you know, hey, where can somebody get rid of drums of oil that have been there for years and things like that? This one right here was one that we did that Gary and I helped clean up not too long ago. A little bit of a backstory: the person who lived in the home, she had just gone through like divorce and whatnot. She had some kind of illness, I'm not sure what it was. She got addicted to painkillers. Lost her kids in a custody battle, and she was either in jail or in rehab the day that we did this. She couldn't abate her home. So Gary and I, we took 45 minutes out of our day, took a couple of dump trailers, and we got this place cleaned up. If you notice up here, you had all these tarps. Just one of them was held into the roof by a screwdriver. And the tarps were there, they were flapping all over the place. There's a bunch of just random items behind it. And then it's not 100% done, but this is what the home looks like now. 30 minutes of us doing that turned it into that. And we'll let you finish up there, buddy. So this is some of our successes. We also have some stats here.

So as of right now, we have 687 cases that we've addressed since July 1st last year.

We've obtained full compliance with 442. Um, the cases are broke up. We have reactive and proactive.

So when I started, the reactive cases were leaps and bounds above proactive.

In the 4 months that Richard and I have been here, we've kind of flip-flopped the numbers. We've been a little bit more apt to go out and drive around town find issues to help citizens, especially the neighbors of the people that have issues, kind of enjoy their city of Warren a little bit more. Um, normally we get 70% compliance within the first 30 days. So we hang the door hanger, and in all of our cases, in 30 days, 70%, we go back and close the case. Um, right now we're looking at less than a 2% case result for citizens' compliance. So out of the almost 700 cases, we've had less than 15 complaints.

Yeah, I just want to say that's a phenomenal number, right?

I was the sergeant over NPU. Dave and Lorraine and Tom, you guys can attest to this.

We had 20 to 30% more calls.

I mean, how many complaints did you guys receive about NPUs not doing anything? I need this looked after. Why isn't this being done? Why isn't this being done?

And this is— we're seeing the results of that better way that we created, and with the council's direction, and the numbers are showing that.

Yes, you may get complaints we're being a little hard or we're doing this, but boy, phone calls—

your phone's probably not ringing and that email's not going as much as it had been when we weren't doing things.

So that's a phenomenal number. I just wanted to chime in and say that. Thank you.

And also with that, the people that have heard complaints we've never heard from. They haven't contacted me, the person who put the door hanger, that gave them my phone number, gave my email.

They haven't contacted me to talk about the issues.

So this is kind of the stuff that you guys are getting that we're going through, and we're doing everything we can to eliminate. If we can get that down to a zero, that's my end goal. I want to be able to do my job without any complaints. Um, things we've done, we've worked on clarification of code.

We've gone through and done some updating the codes.

We've also worked with other departments Coming from Public Works, I have a lot of access to equipment. I have access to different departments that, that are there, but they were never utilized before. So now we're bringing them in. We're able to communicate more with Developmental Services. We're able to communicate more with Business Licensing. We're trying to smoothline the process for warm citizens across the board. We also, we've done property cleanups. So here's some transformations that have happened for some of our cases. So this is the Kirkwood property. It's down on, what, 8th West, about 600 South. So this— you got Gary in the corner. This is just kind of some of the pictures of what it looked like. You know, it was an eyesore for a few, but the project turned into a major success. We're able to see things happen. This one's down on 1600 South. Just looking at this, that's It's like, ah, it's really not that bad. But then you turn around, amazing transformation. Um, this one's over on 1200 West, just south of 400 North. Going from there to everything's cleaned up. And a little side story on this one, we had a water main break right in front of their house.

The stuff that they had was affected with that water main break.

It was a pain for Public Works to get in there and fix it. So here we've got The guy had some stuff for his business just laid out along the fence line. Now it looks great. I don't, I don't mind living next door to this. As a citizen of Orem, this is kind of what I like. Here we have a lawn. It's kind of, you know, run down a little bit.

Turn around.

Here we have great success. This one, the guy had a project truck. He'd worked on it for a long time. We had oil all over the driveway. Talking to him a couple weeks later, here we go. That was one of those 30 days, 30 days it was taken care of. He had a door hanger, he called me, he— I talked to him for a couple minutes, told him what needs to be done. Within 30 days it was completely cleaned up and it looked great.

And his wife appreciated it.

Oh yeah, yeah, I've had a couple of those too. So this one's right over here behind carpet. When we drove by, you can see the rope tied to the top of the fence.

The rope went to a boat, went to a truck, and they had the truck pulling taut to hold the fence up so that the fence didn't fall over the sidewalk.

We asked him, said, hey, this is a major hazard.

If somebody's walking by, if the windstorm we had last night, that fence is coming down.

So he went through, he tore it down.

He's in the process of redoing his fence.

You know, we're out here, we're trying to— we're helping people in any way that we can, trying to get compliance. We're trying to be the face of Orem in as nice and polite a space as we can. Sometimes we have to be the bad guy by issuing the door ticket, but at the end result, I get to go home and feel good about my job.

You can see I like working with these guys. I call them my guys. They are my guys. So, um, some other activities that we do, um, we do picnics. Some of the things that we have to do, especially in our target neighborhoods because of our CDBG funding, so we do picnics with police. Many of you have been to those. We do neighborhood leader meetings. We have one tomorrow night in the Stonewood-Lakeridge neighborhood. We do abatement on city property. 400 West was driving— or 400 North was driving me crazy from 800 West to 1200 West. And we went a couple weeks ago, we took a city team out, and now it looks, looks much better. We do back-to-school nights and other school activities. Here they build a 9-square game for a couple of some of our NP officers prior to NIT. We do preservation team projects. One of the things that Jamie has allowed us to do is bring out employees to work in some of these, to work on some of these projects, to give employees service opportunities and then help us clean up. We have a tool library, we have tools, we have trailers, we have all sorts of things to help with this. We have our Property All-Star Program. Dave's been to one of those where this is a form, this is a beautification awards. This is where someone has transformed their properties. They've taken it from not being a community standard and now a community standard.

And then all other—

we do other community services as needed.

So, Brady.

Okay, so just some implications of the lack of enforcement. One of the things that Lieutenant Pereskeva already hit on, lack of enforcement or failure to respond in an appropriate time. We got our own complaints about that kind of stuff.

So just kind of, that kind of encompasses the past complaints of slow enforcement response.

Potentially it undermines property values.

Kind of discussed that in an earlier slide, but that is true.

My wife recently got into real estate and it's something that she said she learned going into it. So definitely could potentially undermine the property values in the neighborhoods. And that's something that's attached to a lot of complaints as well, is so-and-so's yard looks bad, I'm trying to sell my house in a month, I need to get this cleaned up. Yeah, um, going back to the broken windows, Gary has a case, uh, started a while back, and he— it's a house that this guy doesn't live in, it's abandoned basically, he's had squatters in the house, and now people are just— he basically came in and he said, well, people just left stuff on my property.

People are leaving cars on this property, junk cars.

People are leaving boats. There was a boat, machinery, things like that. Not to mention there's been people actually squatting in the house.

So those are just kind of a few things there.

Some quotes just from the public, 2 different quotes here that we've received that we just kind of want to include. Many thanks for your update and great work.

are doing to clean up the city.

The efforts of you and your colleagues are greatly appreciated.

Code enforcement is actually occurring with plentiful and visible results.

And another quote, it is amazing the difference in our neighborhood with all the cleanup that was done this last year.

Things are looking up around us.

So now we're good for questions and comments.

And one thing I would like to just like to state is, have we done it perfectly?

No.

Maybe we went too far at times, maybe we didn't understand code at times. But you know, we're on a learning curve. And we're learning, and Aaron is helping us along. So we would just encourage you as council, when you get those complaints, have them call the person on the tag or have them call me so that we can work with them. That's our goal. We want to be compassionate. We're not a heavy hand. We want to be compassionate. We want a cleaner city. We want a better city. That's what we're looking for, and we need your help in doing that. We're willing to work with people. They just need to be willing to communicate with us.

Thank you.

So thank you.

Now we have questions.

I was at—

Gary went over the code briefly, but link to the city code that all our citizens obviously have access to as well. But if you guys come across those codes, if you guys want to go through and review some of our more common nuisances in those codes and you find some that you have questions about, or, you know, that maybe need to be modified or changed, let us know. And we'll get with Aaron when he gets back.

And we can start looking at possibilities of making changes to those. Any citizen can call you by dialing 311 if they don't live in Terry's or my neighborhood, or your neighborhood doesn't work either, or, or many of us.

229-7000. Oh, what's the 724-3000? That's our main number.

Okay, so we can call the number and they can register a concern, whatever. Thank you.

We are working on something.

Yeah. American.

Yeah, that's the thing.

So the mayor and I have been talking about this over the course of the last month, and obviously, as we have engaged with our NIT team this year, it has been a little bit of a paradigm shift as we're transitioning from one department to the next and trying to best understand what your priorities are as it relates to neighborhood improvement. Obviously, you as a council have identified safe and livable neighborhoods as one of your priorities. And so obviously the NIT team is aware of that, and we are trying to actively achieve that end. But we recognize that there is sometimes you know, a pendulum, and it shifts from, for example, a number of years ago to being almost exclusively— and I think Lieutenant Pereskeva would agree— a reactive type activity to now, as I think Richard, you were commenting, now over half of your engagements are actually proactive.

Yes.

And we're trying to find the balance as an organization. consistent with the direction you would like us to go as it relates to enforcement, because we want to reflect and represent what is important to you. So if there are specific codes that you have concerns about or questions about, then we want to talk to you about those and have a conversation as to, okay, well, if it's in the code, do we need to change the code?

Do we need to remove it from the code?

Do we need to strengthen the language in the code based on whatever your kind of sense is? I know to some degree the suggestion is, well, some of the feedback is, well, the team is too heavy-handed. Okay, well, what would you like us to do differently? And we're willing and wanting to do that. Oftentimes a lot of it just relates to education, and a lot of it relates to, to us better understanding the code. I know we had one particular circumstance where there was reading of the code and we went and we had a back and forth to some degree with the resident, and the resident said, well, this is how I interpret it, and the employee said, well, you know what, you're right, and I'm going to walk back. what, what I initially gave you in terms of a door hanger. But this is your program, so we want to do what you are most comfortable with. In the police department, for example, in years past, you have essentially encouraged our police officers to make DUI enforcement a priority. So they have made it a priority, and we have seen significant results that have come from that. If there are specific priorities in NIT that you would like to see, or things that you wouldn't like to see, please get with Kenna and get with the team and have a conversation about how we can better meet your needs. Because the intent of this group is not to make life harder for residents, it's to try and improve life for everybody.

in the community.

And on occasion, you know, somebody's junk is somebody else's treasure. You want to balance that.

Amen. Yeah. So if I could, if I could just add to that real quick, sorry. Finding that balance is going to be the difficult part too, because if it swings back the other way, then we run into what Lieutenant Perestiva dealt with when he was a sergeant in MDU, and you're going to start You'll still get complaints, they're just going to be the opposite. Why aren't you doing this? There are— like some of these guys, I've been caught a number of times with a citizen who knew the code better than I did, and I had to go back and review it and go, yeah, you're right, we should be enforcing it that way. We have to make changes, and so we're trying to, trying to find a balance, as in, like Jeff said, zero complaints.

We don't want either, either complaint. lack of enforcement, or too heavy-handed.

So—

Can I just add a— I went on a ride-along, is that what you call them, with Jerry, and I just watched his interaction with the citizenry. And he was there. I mean, he's kind of a big guy. I wouldn't mess with him. But you know what, he was very kind, compassionate, and talking to this lady and working. And so I think I'm really complimentary of an average employee, but I think you're all probably the same sentiment. You're wanting to work with people, you're willing to do it.

And it was—

but it was fun if you haven't gone to ride around, see the different things and notice different things. And so, um, I commend you for what you've done. I think your personalities are the right one because this could be a— you guys could be pretty ornery, and I think you've got the right temperament. So I commend you.

I've been called a lot of names that I didn't know.

So to kind of go along with what you said, what Jamie said, when it comes to being heavy-handed, I know that you've got roughly about 80 open cases right now. I've got the same, Jeff's got the same. All of us, we could probably send, I'd say, 60 to 70 of our open cases straight to ALJ and just let the judge deal with it and tell the citizens, you know what, you're not getting it done good enough. You go, just go to court, bye, have fun. But we don't do that. We're working with them. We've only got, out of all of our cases, there's only a couple that go to the ALJ because— I checked on a house today where I've been here for 4 months and I've pushed it back. I didn't— started the case like my second day and they still haven't proceeded to fine because they're actively working on it. And we work with people like that. We're not just immediately going straight to fines, straight to court. It's okay, there's circumstances here. If, you know, I'm going to come check on your house every 2 weeks, and as long as I'm seeing progress, there's not going to be any fines or anything like that. So the 3 of us, I mean, we're really working with people like that. Dirty little secret we're trying to push out.

Well, we appreciate that.

I was just going to say, Jamie and I have been talking about this quite a bit, uh, because that's been one of the favorite emails that I get is people, you know, upset or whatever. And so, I mean, what we've been talking about is—

and I really like your presentation, I think it's great, you know, the path you're going down and the fact that you lead with compassion, because a lot of people who, you know, find themselves in this situation are down on their luck in other areas too. And so that compassion is a really key part, um, and I would encourage you to, you know, as long as you keep compassion at the front of everything you're doing, you're probably going to be fine. Um, just a couple thoughts. The— as far as I think to the education standpoint, and that might be something to work on, you know, with the city, uh, is to put together something You know, an online PowerPoint or just some sort of presentation, or even something that you give to the city council. So when we get these notifications, we've got something that we can send back and explain what the program is.

That's a great idea. We've been talking about that, but that's a great idea.

Yeah, I think that would be really effective, um, just to get that out, brand it, because if you've got compassionate beautification, I mean, everyone wants a more beautiful place.

but how do we get there?

And so it's balancing that.

Just one last thought too, you know how you talked about how you've gone in and fixed up different houses and helped and done that?

That's awesome.

Um, it seems like there could be some kind of bridge to the community possibly where, I mean, youth groups are always looking for service projects, and if you were to somehow— I don't know. We've actually discussed that, uh, clear back when Lieutenant Persky was still doing MPU. I was working with Canada trying to come up with something like that.

The thing that we're trying to figure out is how to navigate the liability issue if we as a city are having a service project on someone's private property.

So— Our bad.

What's that?

Our bad. Sorry, Brady.

But it's something we would like to do if we, if we can get legal to a point where they're happy with it. Jason Adamson, you know, to where they're happy with it, we'd love to be able to do something.

But at some point too, there One of the things we've experienced as well with kind of these, for example, neighborhood groups or others assisting, is there's almost a codependent relationship that develops. So a group will come in, they'll clean up a property, and then 6 to 9 months later it gets back to that same condition. And then the suggestion is, well, when it gets again, then I'll just call on the neighborhood group.

We've actually had faith leaders who have contacted us and said, No more.

We've done this 3 times, and we, we were happy to do it the first and second time. The third time we kind of did it because we felt kind of obligated, and now it's like we're willing to help, but they also need to respond appropriately too. And so finding that balance is part of the challenge.

And that's what it is, balance, right?

Yeah, if you have someone who just takes advantage of it, it's going to work. But there is something there from a, you know, from a marketing PR standpoint that if you can engage the community, yes, we're all helping each other, that sort of thing.

But, you know, that is a problem.

So anyway, that's all I got.

Is there anybody else?

Yeah, so on these, um, they're hung on the doors.

So do we automatically write tickets?

No, sir.

No.

So you give a warning?

Those are, those are simply just warnings.

And so I'm talking like, say it's a car on the street.

So that would be part of parking enforcement.

So when we—

I don't want to deal with it right now.

I can't handle it.

We are struggling here.

Yeah, so just, just, just as clarification, just as clarification, when we moved code enforcement to our department, the police department developed what they call the parking enforcement team. So we're responsible for what we call sidewalks in.

And Skiva's—

or Per Skiva's lieutenants— is required for parking out. So you can talk to Jim and Keith about that.

We can talk.

So I just— but there is a, there is a cure process and a notification.

Yeah, Richard, you can maybe walk through what to do.

May I see your door hanger real quick? So this is the door hanger we give out when there's an actual issue. On the back, we added to it that this is a warning. With no fines. If the issues are not addressed, then the fines can be—

And that's an update, right?

That's—

yeah, that's an update that was updated that way people know. But this right here is not a fine. This is a, hey, if you could please take care of your issue, we're not going to have any more problems. And then after 30 days, if nothing has happened, nobody's reached out, uh, we aren't able to get a hold of them, um, it gets worse, which I've seen That's when the citation comes in. And our citations are very small as well.

Our citation's only $50 per violation.

So worst case scenario, it only gets to be a high fine if the judge feels that, hey, you know what, this has been really, really, really, really bad. So we're gonna hit it up for that. So they do stay pretty small. And the 3 of us, We found that citations actually help the abatement process sometimes. So if we don't get any actions, we'll send a citation. They'll call us and say, hey, I just got this citation in the mail. Honestly, nobody ever gets the door hanging until they get a citation. But we fixed it. Like, okay, we're gonna waive your fine because the 3 of us, we have the power to waive and stay the fines. So a lot of times we will, we will just do that because the situation gets taken care of.

And one of the other things is we do, besides the door hanger, if it's a landlord-owned property, they're mailed, you know, if the address is different than the address on the property ownership, the landlord is mailed a warning so that they're aware as well. This one here is just an attaboy.

Yeah, we drove around on Valentine's Day.

We hung out a single bad door hanger and went around to all of the yards that look really good in the neighborhoods that needed work.

And we hung out some of those, like 2 or 3 of those on each street.

So I think we call them our star award things.

Because, you know, a lot of times you'll have 5 bad houses and 1 good one. And, you know, so we'll put a star award on the good one to say, hey, thanks for keeping it nice.

And the last door hanger in there was our friendly reminder, and that's just for Uh, you know, let's say we, we get a house that got within code and it's starting to get out of code again. Leave a reminder on the door. Say, hey, you know what, just a friendly reminder, if you could please make sure that you're— that the weeds are, you know, this, this stuff growing up the fence is not blocking the stop sign, then, you know, we're good to go. So that helps out a lot as well.

Okay, any other questions?

Just one more thought on that, uh, on the youth groups.

And that's one thing is, I mean, it's got to be dealt with by legal, right? Right.

But then beyond that, to try and circumvent some of the issues that Jamie's talking about, I mean, you could do something where you only do it one time, you know.

And then the other would be to just use your discretion to say use it when a person's world's falling apart and they just can't I call a lot of faith leaders on, you know, when we're not getting compliance, we know it's an issue. And maybe it's, you know, it's a person that's disabled or senior, you know, senior or something. I call a lot of faith and they'll come in and help our preservation team. We're able to do as many projects as we need to, just with— and those are with city employees, so we can do that as well. But yeah, definitely, we still would like to do that.

Okay, that sounds great.

The only other thing, as you get calls, I think what we would maybe just request is just ask them if they've, they've made contact with the individual on it. And if they have and there's still an issue, we can work with it. But most of the ones that have kind of come back through, we just, we never had any.

They got the door hanger and called you or called somebody else.

We would just encourage you to call them. They have the resources to get them the dump pass, get them the trailer.

Let us—

we don't want you to have to be the middle person.

We can really usually get it to a resolution without much pain.

Yeah, we can explain what the violations are and how we feel we can help them change them or what they need to change.

Yeah, exactly.

Just also note, this, this week is the start of our spring cleanup program. So we are at Palisade Park this week, and we will run through the next 4 weeks Anybody who has any sort of debris, yard waste, junk, recycled metal materials, they can drop off at any of the park locations for the next month.

And we will deal with that in cooperation with Waste Management.

I think you may be astounded how much junk is in every, you know, every community. Batteries, they can't just drop batteries. No, there are certain limitations. And we, when we sent out our newsletter, we send out, you know, mattresses, paint, oil, batteries. But we have also provided an avenue where they can take those. Now, some of those are not necessarily free of charge. But we also included in the newsletter a coupon that they can use at the landfill, the transfer station. So our goal is to rid the community of junk. And after a while, you would think that we would run out of stuff to throw away. But wow, they multiply.

Yeah, they reproduce. I'm actually stapling those to the door hanger this month. That way, not only do they have their door— their dump pass, but it's also telling— reminding them, hey, dumpsters are in these neighborhoods on these dates.

You have unlimited options to be able to get rid of these.

And we do a similar program. We do a similar program in the fall. So in addition to what these good folks are doing, give other opportunities within city limits to take care of these issues on your own.

Okay, well, we did go a little long. We appreciate you guys listening to us. Yeah, we really appreciate it. Thanks for all you do.

Chris—

Chris is out of town.

I'm gonna be presenting on his behalf.

So I'm gonna make up some time. This is a discussion that we've actually been having over a period of time. This is an ongoing utility relief program, a monthly— a monthly credit to a utility bill. And this, this builds off of an agreement we've had with Community Action for a number of years to provide utility relief for somebody that's down on their luck, low-income family.

This is the $200.

Yep, $200. We've updated— we updated to $300 last year. In fact, or sorry, October of 2020. So September of 2017, we entered into an agreement with Community Action to provide this utility relief program. If you remember Service Line Warranties of America, they're the ones that do— they actually started giving us a $5,000 grant every year that we hand over to Community Action to administer this program.

So it's privately funded.

Citizens, some citizens also contribute to it. When somebody is down on their luck, something's happened, they're, they're struggling to pay the utility bills, they can go to this program and they can get them a check up to $300 to pay, pay off these late bills and make sure water isn't being shut off. So we already have that in place, and then we're adding one more component. So how they can qualify for this, this first program that Debbie kind of mentioned, is that their gross income is under 200% of the federal poverty line. Those numbers change. We targeted that percentage so that it doesn't have to be updated every time these income levels change. They've suffered a life-changing event which has caused a significant financial burden to the resident. One example of this, it was just recently happened the last couple of weeks, there was a family in our community. The husband was arrested for domestic violence. He had been abusing her pretty, in a really rough way. He was arrested by the Orem Police Department. He was in prison. She didn't know that he was behind on all these bills. And so far behind on the Orem City bill, we were able— this program was able to pay that off so that she didn't have to get her water shut off. And so that's, that's that kind of life-changing event that may cause that burden.

So that's what the program's for.

The other thing we added recently too is if they are on what's known as a circuit breaker program, This is done through Utah County for property taxes. A senior who's low income can apply for this circuit breaker. If they show us that, that also is an impetus for them to be able to receive, receive this.

The annual benefit was increased from $200 to $300 within a 12-month period.

So that this program is already in place.

What we want to talk about is the new offering in addition to that. This allows low-income residents who are qualified by Utah County for the Circuit Breaker Tax Relief Program to receive a $10 monthly credit. Essentially what that ends up being— there's a lot of math here— is it covers all the indoor use of their water. They may have abilities to adjust things on the outside, but at the end of the day, they have to shower, they have to cook. So that $10 a month can essentially cover all of their indoor use.

That's just how the math works out.

So anybody who's on that circuit breaker program can also receive a $10 monthly credit to the utility bill.

You know how many people would qualify in our community for that?

I don't have the numbers on how many are on the circuit breaker program right now.

How do they find out?

How do they engage in this?

Yeah, many, many already do.

We'll have people contact us about it, but it's done through Utah County. They do all the Qualifying to make sure the incomes match, things like that.

So is that both programs or just this one? That's—

that is just for the one way of qualifying for the program for the 12 months. These other ways we were able to address, or Community Action, I should say, address it. They're our partner in it. They're the ones that look at their income to see if they're under 200%, and they also talk to them about what the event is. Utah County does the circuit breaker relief. All they would have to do is come show us that they are on that circuit breaker program, and then we would apply a $10 credit.

So I guess my question is, do they talk to somebody in the city, or they talk to somebody at these other agencies?

Yeah, so Utah County is where they're going to— so they would call the city, we would say you need to work with Utah County to get the circuit breaker program in place. It's going to, one, reduce your property taxes, two, it allows you to have access to this credit, and then they would come and just show us that they're on that.

So could they just call the utility department?

Yeah, we can give all that information exactly how to do it.

Yeah, we have open communication with Community Action to, to work through those, because that's who—

because what will happen is we'll talk to them and then we'll call Community Action and confirm that they've met with them so that we can hold off on any shutoffs. Shutoff doesn't happen while we're waiting for the payment to come through.

Okay, for Community Action.

Yep, so we can collaborate on that.

So my other question is, are we just— is the city doing the $10 indoor? Is that us credited, or is it coming through like a—

This one would be us. Yep, that would be us. So now we have kind of a few things that have happened. We've worked on the utility relief process to make it a little easier so that they don't have to kind of prove income. They just show that they're on utility relief. Or they're on the circuit breaker, which already proves the income levels.

We increased it from $200 to $300.

And then now we're adding an additional $120 annual through a $10 a month credit for somebody on the utility bill. So those kind of 3 things is kind of where we're at.

And that's something that we would, we would probably start this July 1st as we're starting a new fiscal year.

We'd have the programming all in place. And then each year they would just show us that they're still on that, that circuit breaker, we'd apply another 12 months worth of credits.

So any questions?

So please.

So will this cover our water increase rate? We're going to start July 2nd.

Yeah, the 1-cent increase.

Yeah, the 1-cent increase.

Yeah, it will more than cover that. Because when we're talking about indoor use, the base rate, which is a fixed number, Includes 10,000— 11,000 gallons. So yes, it would cover that.

Yep. Do we have any, uh, education that we provide for people that are trying to figure out how to lower their water bill?

Yeah, yeah, we do.

We have quite a bit of conservation education. It's been in our most recent newsletter, as well as grants that they can get for smart meters. There's a lot of grants that are administered through like Central Utah Water Or sprinkler timers you can access through your phone and turn it off when it starts snowing or something.

That's just timely.

But yeah, we do have a lot of information on that and it's on our website, and our utility clerks also have that information as well so that they can work with people to help them reduce their bill.

And we did have this last summer a significant reduction in the amount of water usage happening in our community.

Yes, because we limited water twice a week.

We never, we never, yeah, we never did that.

Some cities did.

Yeah, there were some other cities just in your neighborhood. Some cities had to. Yeah, they were just out of water or running low on water.

That was the message from the state.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

I like what the mayor's asking about. It'd be nice if they had a little handout they could give. I think some of the people coming in to pay their utilities, my guess is some of those are like What, last minute?

I mean, they got to come in today or the water's going to get shut off.

It'd be nice if you say, let me give you something and here's where you go to get some help.

Yep, we do have—

yeah, we do have cards for that. But I think maybe even with what you're saying, Terry, we can go a step further and say, and in the future, here's some— maybe some ideas of ways you can conserve water moving forward as well. We do have the cards for the utility relief. Good, because, you know, telling them to go online, that worked with some folks. Oh yeah, yeah. And then to your point, the ones coming in here aren't— there's a reason they're in here, not online, because that may not be their cup of tea.

So we do have those forms, we'll continue to hand those out. But maybe we can also have a little flyer about the conservation ideas as well.

I like that. Great questions and comments.

Thank you.

Anything else?

So we will get that in place.

I think it's great. I think the 200 to 300, it was a huge benefit to the people.

I'm dealing with.

And yep, the $120 would go a long way.

So I appreciate that.

Yeah.

Well, tell Chris that Steven did a great job.

Chris doesn't need any credit for this stuff.

We went through a lot of stuff, but it was good.

Yeah, no, Chris put this all together and he wishes he could be here.

I know he's been working on this closely this summer.

So thank you so much. Thank you.

Thanks.

Let's see, next we've got Heath Stevenson.

Is going to do a pre-disaster mitigation plan.

Okay, thanks for your time. My name is Heath Stevenson. I don't know if I've officially met everybody. Mayor, maybe a handshake here or there. So what I'm here to present— so every 5 years we have to go through a company called MAG here in Orem and put together a pre-disaster mitigation plan. I just put those links. I don't know if you guys would have access to this. So what this plan is, like I said, every 5 years we sit down as a region. It's Utah County, Wasatch County, And Summit County to put together this pre-disaster mitigation plan. The reason that we do it is without this plan being adopted within our cities, we're ineligible to receive FEMA funding grants. And then pre- and post-disaster monies to help us either on the recovery end or hopefully in the mitigation side of things. This one is one that FEMA always points out. So about every $1 that we put towards mitigation funds will save us $6 in recovery. So even though we're looking at a project of a million bucks, hopefully it's going to save us $6 million in the long run. Again, let's say updated every 5 years and a region-wide plan. Kind of, as I mentioned, the reason we do this is to be able to participate in those FEMA grants. We have emergency management grants, fire grants. I know there's plenty of other grants throughout the city.

Excuse me.

It also makes our city able to handle any sort of disaster scenario that may come up. Hopefully We're able to handle those emergency situations better as we do those mitigation steps of planning and training in our exercises and the different projects that we do throughout the city. And then lastly, there, it keeps us all on a common goal. Like I said, it's a Utah county. Everybody is involved in this plan. We do that— we have to adopt it every 5 years, but it's about a 3-year planning process. So we'll wait a couple years once this one's adopted. Gets us all on the same plan, knocking out the same projects, trying to get the county as prepared as possible. So in those 3 years of planning that I just mentioned, what we do for OREM here is we start with these kickoff meetings. That's a region-wide kickoff meeting saying, hey, FEMA still requires this. hear any updates or any changes which they have made. And then we participate in individual meetings. So here within the city, myself, Sam was part of those meetings, Jason Bench was in on those meetings, sit down with MAC, talk about what we did the previous 5 years, how our plan and our projects lined up with what we said we were going to do, and then move forward Creating other plans where we're at and trying to mitigate as much as possible. So the vulnerabilities that here in Orem, the group I just mentioned that were in those meetings and MAG, these have all happened in Orem since 2020. We've had a wildland fire up on the hill. We also have pockets throughout Orem Vineyard and Linden with a lot of forest space that I know our fire guys are working on.

We did—

I mean, the earthquake was in Magna, but we were affected a little bit down here. And then we've had flooding within the last about year and a half with the different storms. So those were kind of the ones that we highlighted as our biggest vulnerabilities here in the City of Orem. And as I mentioned, so Jason Bench is our floodplain manager. A lot of you guys are already aware, so he does a lot of the floodplain and different planning and mitigation on that side of things. So here's just some of the maps that we put together, that were put together. As you guys can see, this is our fire map. So a lot of the stuff up here on the bench, which is where we already talked, but then these are the pockets throughout the city. That I'll show you guys. We have a list of mitigation projects that we're hoping to get done in the next 5 years at the end, and a lot of those kind of COVID these maps and the areas within these maps. So this is our flooding one. As you guys can tell, along the lake, along the river, and then if we were to have this big section right here is if both of the dams were to break, Deer Creek and Jordan L. Luckily, we kind of sit up on a hill, and so I feel bad for Provo if both those dams ever break.

So is that the map if Deer Creek broke, or is that—

Uh, so this would be Jordanelle and Deer Creek.

And then it doesn't go much more than that, I mean, it would stay a little warm?

Yep, yeah, so we would stay down here just along the river. Uh, if we were to get anything in here, it would be inches, is what we've been told.

So that's pretty good.

It'll channel all along University Avenue.

That's where we probably got the Spanish flu.

It looks like it would flood kind of Berkshire's area, the Cardinal Road area. You got a beautiful home there. Not that it's actually on the floodplain. And then so the last one here, we have our earthquake. This is our fault line, the big red line that runs right down through us. Same place that we're going to have fires and flooding. So these circles are where we've had earthquakes in the past, and then this yellow zone is our liquefaction if we were to have earthquakes. So I hope my house looks good. We do have lots of— kind of on the outskirts there, lots of areas that we do have potential to do these mitigation projects.

Wait, go back to that earthquake.

So, so that shows most of that part of Orem is just gray. Um, yeah, so, well, so this is the earthquake hits. This is the fault line, so it's going to affect a lot of Orem. The purple around here is the liquefaction zone. So if we do have that shaking, then there's a lot of vineyards.

Your soil just turns to liquid.

Vineyards will be in the Middle East of Lake Yeah, so show us the Provo Temple on that.

Is it right about where the Provo Temple would be?

Not the downtown, but are those lines up on the foothills of Provo? Yeah, so here's BYU right here, if that helps. Okay, this is BYU. Yeah, you're gonna be up here along the foothills. I mean, it's essentially on Shoreline Trail.

Yeah, okay, so it follows that.

Yeah, so, but the problem is River Bottoms is not Great, an earthquake.

Is that—

or is that not true for flood? Uh, first Trouble River and all that? Yeah, so for flood, earthquake, or liquefaction, down in that area is going to have issues. So, so we should charge more for our houses if we're up in the country. That's right. Yeah, it seems to be safer up there.

All those ones down there.

Well, that's why FEMA does their studies, because, for example, for floodplains and such you do get charged more for your insurance.

Yeah, right. And we had a meeting with the council. It's been a little while, but they're, they're updating those things right now and looking at that. Yeah, yeah, they're hoping to have all the funds for the new maps out here in the next year or so. Yeah, so because we've been doing insurance for 20 years, how we're going to present that to residents when we have to be like, hey, you need to pay more now.

So yeah.

So these are just a few of the numbers that MAG throws together for us based on those maps of the disasters that would hit. So here's your disaster over here, how many buildings it's going to affect. So the earthquake line, as you can see, is blank because if we— it just depends on how big an earthquake. We get a 3 or we get a 7, that's going to affect those numbers. So they just kind of leave that one blank. And I guess we hope it— we always plan for it, hope it never happens.

So that's the homes in the path of the water, the dam failures?

Yeah, yeah.

So the flood is going to be—

yeah, the dam failure, the flood are those ones along kind of Vineyard and down the Provo River. And then our fire, obviously up there on the bench and then those few pockets that we talked about. So those are the homes that are involved They would be involved if we were to have those situations affect that entire area.

So they upgraded your crib— I'm sorry, the dam there?

They're in the process of it, yes.

Is it done?

No.

Okay, what's it rated for?

Do we know?

I don't know, but they're actually in the process starting this summer upgrading it, and they'll actually do it while the dam is still full. So they have an underwater process apparently.

So they don't like to hand out numbers. They've told us it would take a terrorist attack essentially on the dam itself, directed at the dam, to bring it down.

So define that liquefaction concept because that affects the most.

Yeah, let me go back to this map. So When we have an earthquake and the ground shakes, especially down in Vineyard where you're kind of sitting there where the lake used to be, as that ground shakes, the water is going to come up to the top, which is going to cause— you're going to have flooding to homes, and you're going to also have structures and foundations that are being destroyed with houses coming down. And so that's a big number because we have a lot of homes along the river here. So obviously this is down here, we get into Provo. But, and then a lot of that— so this is Vineyard. They lump Vineyard in with Orem still. Um, so a lot of this stuff with the Vineyard, those are homes that are being shown on our order.

So we're saying, they think, saying that ground turns to Jell-O.

There's Jell-O.

Yeah, but then it instantly turns to poop.

Really?

Yeah, so it liquefies.

And then as it solidifies, it's basically just concrete.

That's what you described to me.

Do the structures sink?

I don't, I don't necessarily know if they sink, but it's— from what I understand, the ground moves more.

Yeah, it moves like waves because the water level is higher. So the probability of damage—

Wow, more, more damage along there. It'll come right up to our 300 West. I mean, the edge.

Have you factored in the islands? What would happen to them out there?

I have not yet. That's the new island.

The $8 million island?

Yeah, maybe it becomes the next one.

So you're saying because I live next door, I need some good insurance? Otherwise I'm joining this one.

Yeah, you are down there.

I'm telling you, there's a chance.

But you're a one-level home, so that's That's true.

That's true.

Does that answer your question? Where's the golf course?

Right across the street from my house.

You're purple. We found this area, so hopefully you're not on hole 9.

I can see if I have flood insurance.

Okay, and so these are The mitigation projects, like I said, myself and Jason, we've had our fire involved with Chief Hurst, and then Sam has been involved in putting together some of these projects with Mag. So I think we got 10 or 11 that we came up with. Again, this is for the next 5 years is what we're aiming for with some of these projects. I'm just gonna leave— I'll read all of those. I'll leave those up for a minute. To look at. So I'll just— so this first, so this is the disaster that we're worried about, so the drought, and this is what we're doing to try to obviously mitigate that drought, mitigate the issue with our priority, the cost, and then who's responsible. So that's how Each of those 11 or 8 that are on site.

This is the project that came—

that we identified initially, the cost, well, updated $9 million, that came in at $18.7 million. So we hit the pause button on it, and now we're, for example, working with the mayor and others trying to get local grants through Dutch County, federal dollars through the federal government, as well as the state government to try and figure out how we can make that project happen and have the means to build the project even though it's double stopped.

Correct.

And just a reminder, this has been a 3-year planning process, so a lot of the stuff, some of the stuff that Jamie may have already changed, which we will update and talk about. We get together and go over these projects and see how we're progressing, so that's good information that you want to add to that already. And then obviously anybody in this room, if you guys are thinking, if you come up with any mitigation projects, some areas that we may be overlooking on the emergency management side, please send me an email with those so we can get them taken care of or get them added to the plans. Oh, look at that, our fire logo doesn't want to show up.

Are you still doing your CERT trainings?

Um, so we are— we've said this possibly— so we're looking at maybe transitioning into neighborhood preparedness instead and doing monthly meetings on the neighborhood preparedness side. Just so we can do one class.

We've been—

we've done a couple that we've had 150 to 200 people show up to do a portion of CERT, whether it's a fire extinguisher, maybe a winter weather training, instead of trying to get people together for those 4 or 5 weeks in a row, just because we've had numbers that are dropping down into 10 people signing up for those courses.

And you still have your ham radio crews?

Uh, yep, that's a backup plan for communication. Yeah.

Yep, so we do ham radio classes. I actually sponsor the ham radio club, so we have those classes tonight. So we do do those 4 classes a year, and then the club meets every month.

So, so if I may, Mayor, too, probably the last 6 months Heath has been joining our executive staff meetings on occasion. We've been increasing our preparedness efforts internally within the organization. Each department within the city has specific assignments that they are expected to meet during the course of disaster. So we have obviously some of our public safety employees that will be specifically responsible for emergency response in those types of situations, but we also have departments that are assigned to deal with and address food and shelter issues, pets, finances, records, all of the kind of aspects that you would need to deal with as it relates to emergency management and managing an emergency event. Many of our employees are relatively new, and so they're not familiar with some of the assignments that they have during an emergency, essentially in lieu of or in addition to their day-to-day jobs. And so Keith has been working with each respective department in an education process, trying to help all of our employees understand that in the event we had an earthquake, this is your responsibility as representatives or members of the Recreation Department, as members of the Public Works Department, City Manager's Office. the finance department. And so the hope is that all of us can be trained. There are specific trainings that we need to complete as an organization and employees within our organization to qualify for Federal Emergency Management Agency dollars in the event we have an emergency. So we also have been working with our employees to get them to take Those classes are what we call 100, 200, 700, 800, and 2200, which is the National Emergency Management Incident Management System. So all of those things are what we are trying to do internally. This is kind of external, required by MAG as part of our overall regional emphasis on emergency management. So, excuse me. In addition, in the future, we plan to involve you to some degree in some of this training and some of these exercises, because you too obviously will play a part in emergency management and would have to respond to certain situations. Because, for example, if there was a situation, there would be dignitaries, there'd be public information that would need to be manage. There would be probably for you lots of phone calls and emails if our systems are up and people talking to you, you know. So you would have a role in that emergency response. So our plan is let's get our internal organization on track and then let's bring you into that discussion as well.

And one training we've been talking about for elected officials is towards the end of the year doing a countywide, bringing all the elected officials into the Utah County Emergency Management Center down there and putting on a senior official training that we have out-of-state people come in and do the training. They go through this all the time.

So, so when we had the onset of COVID we mobilized an emergency management team and we met Well, initially we met 3 times a week, 2 or 3 times a week, and then over time as we kind of had that incident under control, we were able to better manage it, then we started relaxing our meetings. But we used the same structure for COVID that we did for the fire that we had in October of 2020.

Right.

We would use the same structure if we had a significant snow event where an earthquake. So there is— and it's not necessarily the structure that we follow day to day. So roles to some degree change in the middle of an emergency situation. Everybody understands that, and everybody's okay with that, because that allows us to manage the emergency situation.

Can I ask a question? In our new city hall, we have this emergency command center that's built at once. Are you designing that with certain of these parameters in mind? I guess I'm wondering how— tell me how that's going to look.

Yeah, so I'll be involved in that process. We went toward a couple of decision centers already.

Part of, part of the discussion that we are having with the architect is building and fitting a certain piece of our building to accommodate emergency response and emergency management. So for example, That section of the building potentially would be built to a different and a higher standard than the other piece of the building.

And you mean earthquake standard, or what?

Earthquake standard. Some of the telecommunications may be different in that area. Some of the power, in terms of providing emergency power within the building, we may only provide, you know, incremental power to certain pieces of the building outside of the Emergency Operations Center, but within the EOC.

We would have full power.

We would potentially look at ventilation systems different. So we would have a spot to manage the event that would be hopefully fully operational during an event, even though, for example, things happening in our finance department may not be perfect. We would have an operations center would be perfectly operational.

And I don't mean to pick on Brandon.

That's not atypical in other buildings, right? The war rooms, if you will, have extra juice and extra protection. Correct.

But, and this part of the funding for the, for the city center is coming from federal ARPA money, which has been set aside in part for emergency management purposes, for example.

So we would, we would use that money in part to beef up the building area.

That sounds good. Other comments, questions?

I think that's great, great education. So, and I think your neighborhood meetings are a great idea because I know there's a comment right now, right, about this.

So, okay, yeah, I think that's the route that we're going to start heading towards. So, yeah, well, thank you. Okay, thank you for your time.

Next up, we've got Sam Kelly. He's going to do a presentation on capital improvement projects.

So, Mayor and Council, we have talked in past council meetings about ongoing operational issues within the city that are included in our budget. This specific focus will include primarily one-time project-related type expenditures.

This is like the current list, though, correct? Yeah, yeah.

Does this include fleet or no?

No, we covered fleet.

Well, here we go.

My name is Sam Kelly.

If you guys don't know me, I'm the city engineer here. I'm just going to give you a brief— I think I got 60 minutes, but it's been cut down to 40 maybe— on what we plan on doing for this year's fiscal year CIT. First off, just a summary of what we're Looking at and what I'm going to bring to you guys. Looking at our CIP fund, which is generally our general fund, or Fund 45 is what we like to call it. And those are just the amounts that we're looking to allocate towards those different funds. You got the general fund, water fund, water rec, stormwater, streets, and street lighting.

Is our water tank—

Yeah, so that's going to be part of the water fund, and the water tank is a project that's ongoing. And when I get to that, we'll Water Fund portion of it. We're actually— there's quite a few projects in there that are on hold until we actually get some better numbers for that tank.

Okay, so just a reminder in terms of revenue, the CIP fund is generally funded by way of general fund operating revenue. The Water Fund is water revenue, water reclamation, water rec revenue, stormwater, stormwater revenue. Streets, the gas tax, and what we call our transportation sales tax. That is what funds our streets. And then our street lighting is funded by our street lighting fee.

Yes. And Jamie, these are all related to our 7-year plans that we adopted.

Correct.

Yes.

So are these all on track?

I mean, these are—

they're updated annually. So yes, Sam is the kind of keeper of that.

So they're somewhat on track except for The reuse project and the tank project have kind of blown up our numbers because I don't think anyone anticipated 8% inflation and some other things with COVID Starting off with the parks, we're going to look at setting aside $10,000 for some entrance signs, and I do have some asterisks in here, meaning that these possibly could be funded through CARE. I know that's a whole separate meeting that you guys will have in a month.

month or so. But these are some of the items in parks that we can go ahead and utilize instead of the general fund. We could go ahead and utilize some CARE funding.

There's just really quick with the CARE funding. This is the rec side. There's the art side that this— yeah, just, just remember as you go into it for the first time, there's 2 different pots.

The name's been on the commission.

She knows.

Yeah, these are all taken right there.

So we'll be talking about 2 different pots as we go into the CARE discussions in the future.

So we have entrance signs, $10,000, some city center, city entrance monument signs, similar to what we did on 8th North. Look to improve some of the other areas. We do have some monument signs on State Street, for example, we could go through and select, but we would like to start to move forward and update some of those signs.

So these park entrance signs, these are more just designation of Hey, welcome to Palisades Park, right?

Welcome to—

and they, some of them have been historically on these timbers, and they're looking pretty rough. So we need to swap them out. Yeah, the park entrance deeds. Next is our, what we call our gateway signs, essentially signs welcoming people to the community. And we would anticipate over the next number of years, we would upgrade them at some of the key intersections in the community. So for example, as you come up 800 North and you're heading east off of I-15, there's a sign that welcomes people to Orem. If you're coming up Center Street to Orem and you're heading west, we just right now have a large metal sign. Well, potentially that's one of the locations we Where we want to improve signs similar to what we have on the north. So over time, our plan would be incrementally to add those larger, I guess, more attractive monument or gateway signs.

Like the one from Provo to Orem should be really big because, hey, you're finally getting out of Provo.

Yeah, yeah. I think all our roads should have nice signs coming in.

And that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to step it up.

8 North Center.

Part of the challenge is we don't own those right-of-ways. So that area on 8 North that we worked with, that was a UW— we worked with UW, and they allowed us to put it on their property. So we'll have to have some of those conversations. So how many of those would $25,000 represent?

Would that be for one One sign, it would probably likely be one. Seemed like it was around that.

Yeah, definitely one.

We might be able to do 2.

Yeah, if we start to start to go down the Council of the USA path, that would be incorporated in like future signs.

Yeah, that'd be great.

In fact, that's our next council meeting, the work session.

We have our branding consultant coming in to talk about that.

And other things.

And I asked her when I was on beautification, this was an important thing for them. Is it still?

Yes. And then, I mean, also Center Street, they did the one side, they need to do the other side. Okay.

Yeah, that's to some degree, that's a factor of cost that we set aside money to do the entire corridor for what was ours as property. When the bids came back, Sam, how much did it cost just for that north side?

The north side was just $300,000.

Just 3.

So you look at it and you go, what's a bunch of crushed stone and a few plants? That's $300,000. We had planned $300,000 for both sides.

And the hard part, to your point, Dave, is that on that south side, not all of that slope is Orms. There's a big chunk of it too that's private. So we would have to coordinate with that business in there to try and make it all look the same.

Ryan has even had conversations with some of the property owners along that stretch of the corridor about, is there a possibility of even engaging in a land swap with the city so that we would have more of that frontage property to improve? We're not there yet though. Yeah, we've given them a presentation and kind of a brainstormed idea, and we're waiting to hear back from them, but it's been 3 months.

So when they're ready to develop, we'll probably hear from them. And then they own the property around the corner up— what is that, 1,000 West?

Yeah, and it's an interesting area too because Kenna's group has wanted to go in and totally scalp that and take down weeds because of, because of, you know, yet this neighborhood presence trying to clean up things. But yet from my standpoint, those weeds or those native plants are what's holding all that material there, so we don't really want to remove those. But yet I don't want a fire. I don't want Mark to go down and put out a fire. So we're trying to figure out a way to balance that. Plus, with everyone's trying to be more drought-tolerant, native scapes becomes kind of an interesting area.

We currently have in our budget, for example, improvements that stretch along 800 North. Remember several years ago we made improvements up the hill heading east? There's a remaining stretch that we're going to finish on the south side this year. In fact, the architect has their Just signed off on the architectural. Yeah, we just saw the agreement today.

This is by June, I think.

Yeah, so we're trying to— part of our goal is we would like to clean up some of our key, what we call gateway corridors into the community, so that we put our best face forward as people come into the—

into the communities.

Yeah, and we see these gateway signs as part of that.

Right, okay, that's great.

The next one is some park dumpster enclosures. This is something that we need to do to be in compliance. When you're in a non-residential use and you have those dumpsters, they should be enclosed. That's what we require of other commercial-type developments. So if we have parks with dumpsters, we need to figure out a way to enclose them. This next one is final year of some seed money going into the crematorium— or excuse me, it's a new job we have too— but that's the cemetery niche for cremations. We'll actually have now a total of $500,000. So once this is funded, then we can engage with an architect and we can develop something, have some sort of plan put forth up at the cemetery, and you guys will be involved.

That's in the new park, correct?

I think that's where it's looking to go, but I know we've discussed some ideas of maybe moving the Veterans Memorial. I mean, there's a lot of moving parts with what's going on up there, so it'll be something that we'll bring forward to you. City Center Park infield rehab. This is just bringing in some new material, leveling those out. So it's— I know there was recently that they brought in some dirt to go ahead and take care of some low spots in there and help with some of those ponding issues, but this will actually be bringing in an actual company to level them out and grade it.

Some of that material is actually synthetic material, so it absorbs water better, and we want to make sure that we don't— we want to keep that investment, so if we don't maintain it, then we lose it.

The next one will be some walkway lighting, and this is going to be along that walkway between the fields here at City Center Park. We also are looking at the City Center Park North Pavilion. This is going to be CARE eligible. It's the really large one there right next to the outdoor stage. It's starting to see its, its life, and with this money we go ahead and likely— I think we've even talked about engaging with a firm possibly to look at multiple type of pavilions because we have small ones, medium ones, large ones, and it'd be kind of nice to have somewhat of a plan going forward. Hey, this is what we're going to have in this park. It's a similar look. It helps out with our maintenance folks as well. And also the last one that's going to be eligible for CARE funding is Springwater Park, a playground. And this is kind of a total of what we're looking for CIP out of the parks section.

So can I ask you a question about Springwater Park?

I've talked to neighbors down in that area.

So, um, are there other things you're doing for that park? It's a little rough right now, you know. So is this— I mean, are there— I guess they've complained about flooding and things like that.

Of course, last year was a drought and they maybe didn't have that as much, but we had issues down there.

So part of that park, on a historic—

I mean, historically, the very west end of that park was part of the detention basin. So this last year we spent a large amount of money, part of our master plan in stormwater, we put in a 54-inch diameter pipe. It goes right now to that pond on, on the golf course. So now there isn't that detention facility in that park anymore. So as long as we don't have a 100-plus year event, we shouldn't have any flooding in that park anymore. So that west end should be relatively dry. If there's other items that they'd like to have done there, they're looking at a revamp to the tennis courts. Or things like that. I think we're open to that.

We just haven't heard anything.

I haven't heard anything. So that's maybe something, maybe, right?

We've asked our— we've asked our parks team to put together a repair and replacement plan, and they've identified specific needs that need to be replaced. One of the needs is this park playground. At the same time, when we— when we make these improvements, we kind of like to To do it kind of all at once. We don't want to do one season, do the playground, next season do the tennis courts, the next season do the parking lots. So there may potentially be more, but this is actually a park that is not as well, I guess, utilized as some of our other parks. And so we want to maintain it, we want to make sure it's safe, we want to make sure that what needs to be replaced is replaced, but this park is not necessarily a focus of—

Pickleball courts down there to improve that area, because that's one thing that she had said to me.

She's like, I feel like we have the worst park in Orem because nobody comes down here, you know, and the flooding. And I said, well, let's look into that. But yeah, because the basin— would you need to keep that basin there?

No.

Okay, well, maybe.

Yeah, we can look into it for sure. Moving on to our next source of projects that are funded with CIP money, your general fund money. We're looking to start funding some transportation improvement projects. According to— I mean, there's a lot of projects that have been outlined in our transportation master plan, but we don't— it's not necessarily an enterprise-type fund.

So looking at the plan, we'd like to ask for this money to be brought forward.

on an annual basis. We can, with that money, then we can look at improving signals. We're already going to be doing as part of the water tank project, we'll be putting in a signalized intersection at 4th West and 4th South. But with this money, we could also look at if there's occasional road widening projects that we could have. This money could be used to fund our match for MEG projects. We also have some other signals we'd like to look at. And the hard part about priors with signals is that Sometimes those signals are prioritized because of opportunity. We understood that there needed to be a signal at 4th West, 4th South. We felt like the volumes were balanced there, that it made sense. But with the tank coming in there, we saw the opportunity— hey, now that there's going to be construction, there's going to be someone there, let's go ahead and put that signal in there. We'd also like to look at realigning the intersection at 8th South and Warren Boulevard. possible intersection, a signalized intersection at 8 South Carterville Road. There seemed to be, when we worked with the school district, HAWK signals seemed to pop up. I know we discussed this with TRIO. They wanted to have a HAWK there to access our park, which is a great idea. Understanding too, though, that they need to be able to fund half of that. That's typically how we operate with those HAWK signals, and once I mentioned that, they seemed to not be as interested in much, which was fine with me. But also, you know, we'd like to be able to finish off the roundabout that we installed down by Mountain View High School. We went in there with somewhat of an urban tactical type transportation improvement in there. We put down the knockdown delineators. It's a 3-legged intersection, seems to be working really good as a as a roundabout, and with this money we can go in and actually put in some permanent features. The next would be, we're asking for some, as I mentioned before, some— this is money that we would use to fund our 6.77% match with our MAG projects that we have submitted and got approval for. This one is 1150 South signal relocation project. Currently, that project was approved at $1.689 million.

Our match is $100,000—

it was $114,000 is what we needed to have for that match. We do have $102,000 in there, and this additional $20,000 would give us that little bit more cushion, put us at $122,000, then we would have money for inflation. Looking at the project, this was some of the documentation we submitted on our concept reports. Yeah, it's kind of hard to see. But what this is showing, and this isn't necessarily for the mall specifically, what we're trying to do is improve some of our level of service. This is a 2040 no-build option, and it's showing you what's happening. There's 12 South Boulevard, this is University Parkway and State Street, and this is 12 South and State Street. So what we'd like to do is move that signal to this location. This is what you'd see in 2040 traffic, no-build option. You have an E, which is not acceptable according to our Transportation Master Plan. D is, and F is not. And F is obviously a state facility, we're not too worried about that. As we relocated that, then you can see now all of a sudden we get Level of Service C, we get a Level of Service A. But this University Parkway still stays at an F, and it's going to stay at an F, but it kind of goes from an F- to an F+, if you will. When you get to all of these, the level of service is all dependent on the amount of delay. And when you get to a level of service F, I think that's 90 seconds or more. And I don't know what the exact figure is, but what it does by moving that signal further to the north, it allows for more left turn stacking. And then they can do some signal things to kind of help that out.

So hopefully more left turns can get through there without interrupting that signal at 12 South.

Next slide.

The issue that's really going to turn that from an F to a better grade is grade separation at that intersection. And that is a conversation we've had with UDOT. It's highly controversial. It's incredibly expensive, but at some point in the future, that is going to have to be the solution we look at. Either State Street will go under University Parkway, or University Parkway will go over or under State Street. As you learned, obviously, over the weekend, part of the challenge with that intersection is we have a lot of utilities in that intersection. We had a water pipe that we needed to repair over the weekend and we closed a portion of that intersection off. So it's, I think it's by UDOT standards, the second busiest intersection in the state in terms of traffic flow. Yeah, so it's, that F is gonna over time gonna have to be addressed.

Controversial because of the cost, so because of the design and price.

Well, you, you actually have to engage in some takings because you have to acquire a wider right-of-way to facilitate people getting on and off the road. And then if you, for example, go over a road, then you have obviously people's viewshed concerns. You have people who don't like it because it's blocking their for example, their retail developments and things like that. So we've had this conversation, UDOT, Woodbury, obviously city staff, in earnest probably 3 or 4 years ago. At that point, we all agreed at some point it's going to happen. Now is not the time.

Yeah, it was, it was more— I mean, UDOT is taking more of a stance of economic development. They don't want to go in and ruin cities by, by putting that in. So that's why they wanted to make sure they had stakeholder buy-in, and that wasn't there at that time. So that's why they go ahead and they went ahead and pulled back, because they recognize it needs to have something happen. But until everyone at the table is wanting to do it, then they'll just go ahead and keep moving.

So wouldn't under be a lot better than over as far as—

oh yes, yeah, you know, city, I mean, it's a lot more expensive to go down with But I mean, but, but either way, you're going under those retail businesses on the other side and losing their visibility.

That was their main concern.

Even though chances are now at this point, you can't see much anyways because there's so much going on. It's hard to argue that point with them. But until they realize, hey, we need to do this, we need to have it happen.

Whatever scenario, you're going to essentially— if this is the intersection, 2 blocks to the west, you're going to drop. 2 blocks to the east, you're going to surface. So those that are in this general area are saying, wait a second, you just built a road that bypasses my store, my restaurant, my office tower, whatever.

Yeah, so that was that meg project. The next one we're starting year 1 of 3. to ask for a total of $300,000 for this MAGA-funded project. This is the improvements at 12th West and Center. We did a study in this area 3 years ago looking at this UVU area, and they noticed that there's a huge deficiency with this northbound dual lefts to go on, on the I-15. As well as you have to have some more storage in here if you're going southbound on I-15. So we worked with MEG, we developed some plans. These are some preliminary ones showing that a solution would be to have some sort of a through U similar to what's at 123rd South to come through. And that's for the eastbound through movement east to north. going eastbound on Center and you want to go north on 12th West. Instead of having that left turn movement there, we would go ahead and move it further east. And what that allows you to do is it allows you to stack more cars in this westbound to southbound movement as they come up here to this speed for their leftbound or their southbound left. Because I travel this every day and I am terrible because I always go on the very far through lane and I past everyone and then I get right up to where I need to. I just— I'm that guy that blinkers and merges over and I go home and there's maybe a few horns, I don't know, but I just—

But you got the strategy down.

Yeah, I just, I just kind of wait for that gap.

As soon as it turns green, there's always that person that takes too long.

I'll use that same strategy.

I know I'm not the only one.

I'm not quite there.

But that's, that's one of the— that's one of the MAG projects. The next one is going to be Lakeview Parkway.

This is one we're actually actively pursuing right now.

This is a project we're looking, I guess, for year 105 for $251,000. Just a brief overview of where this is at, it's that red spot in there. This is something that Kind of caught us by surprise a little bit. I know UDOT has been wanting to have a parallel facility to I-15. They've always wanted to have Geneva Road widened to 5 lanes. And they wanted to take that opportunity with Temple going in and putting those improvements in, so they've moved up this project. They're currently now updating their state environmental study as well as moving forward with design drawings. Looking at those meetings that I've attended, we're looking to at least take the 5-lane facility down to this area here, this northern piece of Dale Johnson's property, and then they would continue with the 3-lane facility down to where Lakeview Fields is.

So you can point me an arrow.

We can't see that first.

Oh, again, I don't know. So is that 2000 South where that— yeah, yeah. So this is 2000 South. And they're going to carry their 5-lane facility down to right there, and then from that point to the south, they'll go ahead and bring down a 3-lane facility. Initially, their environmental study had a 5-lane facility cleared all the way down to 2000 South. But I don't know where the communication was lost, because since that time we have had Clear Horizons come in, we have had this store come in. We've had Jeff Mansell's piece, this Lakeview Fields, this other piece here, Lakeview Park, and they've all approved the 3-lane facility.

And now they're coming through saying, oh gosh, we got this 5-lane facility, look at all this property we have to buy.

So I have to tell them what the meeting is. Hey guys, you guys were all aware of this.

I don't know why we're going down this project. I think we think is driven a lot by Provo and the expansion of the Airport. This is the northern, essentially, piece of that belt.

That's what the red road is, right? That takes them to Provo Airport.

So yeah, so this is right up there, so I'm on top.

And this is—

Provo has purchased all this right-of-way already for Lakeview Parkway. So there, as soon as this— as soon as they have sewer capacity in this area, this area is going to look like this. They've already got a plan, this master plan.

They just don't have sewer capacity.

They purchased all this right-of-way. They're going to build half of that. And for me, when we're going—

so this MAG funding we're seeking is for 2025-2026.

At that point, Geneva Road is going to be widened to 5 lanes. If we were to build a 2-lane facility, according to the estimate that I received from our consultant, it's going to cost about $17 million. To build the 5-lane facility is going to be $18 million. So I'm going to MAG right now for the full ask because, because of the timing where Geneva Road is going to be complete, 5 lanes to there. This portion is going to at least have 2 lanes. It doesn't make any sense for us, in my mind, to have just half of this road built even though we have that full barrel of Geneva Road. I'd rather build our portion here and then put a little pressure on Provo to finish their piece.

So the theory is, if I'm going to Provo Airport from Orem, it's going to be quicker for me to get off on 13th South and take this road than go down the center.

Yeah, because it'll, it'll take you all the way down right in front of the airport.

What's the south at the top of the red?

What's the—

here, the other north end? 15th, 16th?

Yeah, that's roughly about— that's roughly about— yeah, I'd say it's probably about 16th.

So it connected Geneva Road.

So how come they're not connecting up higher on 13th?

Well, so what's going to happen is Geneva Road is going to come down with 5 lanes. They're going to follow their, their alignment they have now. And I guess to back up, we did get money from MAG to do a pre-environmental study of what is Bormes' likely alignment to be in here for this Lakeview Parkway. And the alignment they chose was this one. They had it going straight up Going up further, but the problem is this area here is wetland area.

Okay, that's—

That costs a lot of money. That's— you usually have to, for every acre you disturb, you have to mitigate 2. We don't have a wetland bank, so it becomes quite costly. So we swung it out around, and what will happen is this 3-lane facility for Geneva Road will tee into it. And this can either be a 4-legged intersection where we service this area, but the problem is, is Most of the folks in this area don't want to develop, so it doesn't really make any sense to have a full intersection there. It might make more sense to have a T, then we have another road where this piece here can develop and then this piece can develop.

Where's the White Center neighborhood meeting, Ryan, for development?

Just off— that's the Welch property.

It's this piece right here.

Um, they were talking about drainage issues there.

Yeah, that's the Welch property, or what's the name of the lady?

Johnson?

No.

I can't remember.

I've talked to her a million times.

So that doesn't interfere with that?

No. So she's asked me about how she would connect, and I said, well, if you want this to be a 4-legged intersection with the signal, then your development is going to have to have a collector-type road going through the middle.

Because they needed more than the one entrance.

Yeah, because they want to put in—

I can't remember how many units—

60 units. I said you're going to have to have 2 access points. So you can either have this go right through, which means that we're going to want a collector to go through, which is a wider piece of property you're going to give us. Or you have it connect to Geneva Road and then come down here to this road. Okay, I mean, I just kind of have to leave it up to everyone.

So Sam, I'm confused why we would care about that Fred Road, because if you're going to the airport from Orem, you could go down the new Geneva Road And then cut over.

So, and you know, Nippon is going to build their road up.

So you'd say go 5 lanes to here and jump on this too?

Yeah, and go that way.

I'm not sure why we'd want to be so involved with putting that 3 or 4 or 4 or 5 lane road in the middle of nothing.

Well, I mean, there's, there's a few interesting things that are happening with Geneva Road. Initially, the state environmental study cleared 5 lanes to here, but then here south It was 3 lanes, and that was their political side because you had a lot of historic homes and all kinds of things there.

So they only cleared 3 lanes to here.

UDOT needs to have a parallel freeway facility to I-15. The thought is this facility is going to be built and UDOT's going to own it and maintain it.

Probably another jurisdictional transfer.

But to your point, this is a big project. It's probably the most regionally significant project we have. Because it will tie to University Parkway. It'll go clear down to the airport. There's other projects.

You have the Lake Crossing, which is figuratively looked at coming into this area.

And you have all kinds of other regional-type facilities. So yes, it is— there's not as much here for Orem, but it is a huge regional core or that will affect everyone because it becomes a bottleneck.

I think to Councilman Pedersen's point though, why, why do we care?

It's more of a direct route.

More businesses and citizens will utilize the airport.

It'll help with economic development for the region.

Um, there's a lot of good behind it.

Yes, it hardly, you know, impacts our but all, but in the end it'll create circulation better circulation in that area for traffic as well. It'll peel a lot of traffic off Geneva Road that then can bypass Geneva through that area where we have a lot of those residential uses.

I probably should have thrown up Transplant 50, but even down below where you drop down and you go past the airport, there's also a visionary plan to actually have a road cross that Provo Bay and then come around. So it's actually truly going to be a parallel facility That'll go down and then reach into the south part of the county.

And if I could add, from an economic development standpoint, it gives us the hard corner on Geneva Road there where the Red Line ties in. And you may remember we did a general plan adjustment, uh, 6 months ago or so to turn that into commercial in the future. So we think that's a great spot for a grocery store down in that part of the area if we can beat our competitors to it.

Yeah, I think they're trying to put one here next door. So, and this, and this is ready to go too. UDOT's planning a signal right here. It's ready to go. Provo would like to build 2000 South to tie in here. Um, it's just the owner here, our developer friend there, wasn't exactly the best statesman, and she doesn't like him, so she's not going to sell a little piece of property.

I remember.

Yes, Morgan.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So this is a, this is a project that we would like to essentially save up for and build a fund over 5 years to meet our required match.

Yeah.

And is the match always 50/50?

No, it depends on the deal.

It's always 6.7% match. We've been lucky in some of our projects where UDOT has recognized the need that it's really on their facility, and they have taken over the project. They have taken over the match, and we've just kind of walked away. That's similar to a project that's going to happen on Gaylord with the missing sidewalk in front of that orchard by the hospital. UDOT is going to be doing a similar project on the south side of the road, and they want to just incorporate our dollars and finish off that whole area. Any other questions?

The next project is the 400 West sidewalk project.

This is going to be installing some sidewalk curb curb gutter asphalt. Yeah, this is the biggest pain.

I don't know what to tell you.

It goes with the territory.

But just, but just as a side note, this is what the picture looks like too. We are going to try and engage the, the one user of that ditch to see if we can give her some sort of a water connection, because you're looking at about $175,000 just to pipe that ditch. And just for you guys, it's been something that I have done and I've been supported by Jamie. We have a lot of these areas in Orem where there's a ditch there and we haven't, we haven't finished off the road. And I've told them when they've approached me, I said, if you guys would like to relocate that onto your property, I have no problem finishing off the road, but that's— it's really, it's a private utility, and I'm having to take general fund money to fix that. Now, I will, if you guys direct me to do so, but that's kind of been my policy because I know there's been some of my— Tom's house, there's been a gentleman, and they were going to go out there and get a backhoe and move, and I said, hey, that's great, but it's been a year and they haven't done it because they realized, wow, that's going to be a pain.

So is that still used?

That's it.

Yeah, there's one user there. There's one Farm up there. She's been to some of the meetings with the State Street stuff.

Is that the Christiansen property?

Yes.

So we're just going to see, hey, would you— in exchange, would you rather have a water connection that's easier to irrigate with? You can do it when you need versus this timing, and then we wouldn't have to have this pipe here. And actually, if and when we get to the point where we put another well in this area, I'd have to put a pipe in here for a storm drain, which is needed. But I really don't have to have competing pipe in the same alignment.

For example, Mr. Farley at the tank site, we had a similar situation. Sam and Lane Gray, our capital facilities administrator, met with Mr. Farley. Can we abandon this ditch and give you something in lieu of? He was amenable to it and saved us— how much money did that save? $60,000, $70,000?

Yeah, a lot of conflict as well.

Having to have his irrigation pipe across.

Yeah, because you have this— it's not just the irrigation, and they have to have a spot for the tailwater. He would have had to have had a pipe go across the parking lot, and then he would have to drain it. He would have had to have worried about that tailwater flooding neighbors. So this is going to be a similar thing.

We're going to go talk to her and see if she's open to it.

I have flood irrigation for my grass, and if I knew that I could do it besides any other time than 2:30 in the morning, I said maybe there's some local, potentially some local neighborhood connections. Yeah.

We might be able to, because obviously we're concerned that the conversation may be met with some level of concern. Why is the city doing this? But if we had a friendly face with us, then perhaps they could say, hey, we're not out to, we're not out to take advantage, we're just trying to save $175,000 to Avoid having to pipe something for one user.

So that's the total there that we're looking at for transportation projects that are funded through CIP.

So we're getting wavy lines, we better—

Any more questions? So maybe just through the CIP ones, we can go real quick. We got fire station roof replacement, this is a sinking fund. Furnace replacement at Fire Station 3, another sinking fund. Public safety buoy, Boiler, this is the sinking fund. These items haven't happened yet, they haven't failed, we're just putting money aside knowing that their end of service life is coming soon. Chiller, public safety, this is— we're setting aside some money for the electronic locks here at the city center when it's built. Security cameras. And then we also have some syrup pool mechanical improvements, which include a filter sand replacement, Some of the backwash systems, some pumps, and to rebuild 4 of the UV water treatment systems.

Can I ask, I was at the pool today and your, um, Bryce, your leisure pool was not operational again. Tell me what the latest is.

The bottom of the pool has a Myrtha liner, and during spring break the Myrtha liner was ripped. It was about a yard long, and so to replace the Myrtha the liner, we have to drain the entire pool. So we had the contractors over today to put a patch in. They will refill it starting tomorrow, should be heated by the weekend.

Thank you.

So what about Station 1?

No one's ever said—

I mean, Jamie and I have talked extensively about it. So we've actually talked about potentially relocating that station and moving it from the existing site to a site that's more central to the needs of Station 1. We've engaged on a limited basis with the property owner to see if there's a potential where we could facilitate some sort of property swap, or— but we're not there yet. But it is something that's on our radar. Yeah, totally on our radar for sure.

Sorry, sir.

So is there nothing we can do to fix the water problem in the meantime? They can't drink the water, right?

Well, I think there is sediment in the water lines, and it's either coming from internal pipes, and we have—

our team hasn't been able to figure out where it's coming from.

The water's safe to drink, it just doesn't look safe to drink.

It just looks like—

we're providing bottled water.

And the showers, are they still cold, or are they— No, they have hot water. They replaced the heaters, but there's still sediment that comes through those showers.

And so it's, it's, it's a well-known issue. And the guys are—

the guys know that administratively we're working on options. When the building was remodeled, all of the interior plumbing was not addressed. From what we think, it's coming from the interior plumbing. All the water heaters have been replaced, all the water softeners have been replaced, thinking that those will help solve the problem.

They haven't.

And this was a rehab, what, 15 years ago?

Yeah.

So it's getting time to—

after the city center, this is our next capital project that we need to build.

Sarah Pool locker room boilers, year 1 of 2.

And some carpet replacement in the library, some stage risers. So that's the total that we're kind of looking at for the general fund for facilities. Next one, we have some miscellaneous ones.

These are going to be comprised of some funding sources. This is year 2 of 5 enterprise funds as well as—

The stage risers, is that required?

Yes.

Charlotte, the library risers?

We had old donated risers that we've been using for a number of years, and over the past year of using it at Library Hall, we had several incidents We almost had a Chantinette go off the back of the risers completely, but she was stopped a little bit by the sound shell. One of the Sarah Zaki Nup kids fell off the back of the riser and sprained his ankle. We've had a number of close calls and accidents laying in wait, so it really needs to be addressed, or we just need to tell people that they can't have any riser stops.

Just need to get more safe risers.

This is the Public Works rooftop HVA units. They're multi-funded through all the funds down there, including the general fund. So all total of $54,000. That was year— I think that was year 205. Same with the roof replacement. They're all funded with those operating funds that are down there. They're looking at new entry gates. They want to upgrade these, not just the motors, but also to put them on, on the fob system. they can track who's going in and out. Right now we do have some projects where contractors store material there, but we don't know who's coming or going. And if we had a BOB system, we could kind of track that. This is also, um, some of this— some of these miscellaneous ones I have in there because they're multi-funded, or they are going to be in the capital. We're going to be purchasing these, but these will be covered by some fee increases. This one, this miscellaneous Sports field equipment. We got a turf tank, soccer goals, and some Bluetooth blocks. For those that aren't aware of the turf tank— is that the right picture, Bryce?

It's the one I found online. Nailed it.

Um, what it is is you program it and just let it go. It's kind of like your Roomba. It's going to go out and knock out some stripes for you. Hopefully no one's hacked it and put their name out there, so that's kind of what's going to happen with that, or worse. Yeah. The next one, to some of the points on the water, we are going to put towards— we're going to finish the final phase of AMI this year with $2.1 million. Now these next ones, they are going to be asterisked and looking at the fact that yes, we are— some of these are going to be on hold pending the results of the tank project, that being the maintenance replacement and improvement projects. System replacements. The water reuse, initially the water fund was going to contribute $3.9 million to that project. Now we're kind of waiting to see if that money is going to be used towards the tank. The same thing is going to happen to water reclamation. A lot of those projects are on hold. This 400 South Well 10, we initially had about $3 million set aside to do both wells at At the tank site, as well as— as well as, not to say pun intended, but anyways, relocate well number 1 to Hillcrest Park. But because those prices came in so high, we just reallocated that, reprioritized it to just be drilled into one well at well 10 at the tank site for now. So that's the total that we will be putting forward, understanding that some of these system replacements and the maintenance Those are 4-inch water mains. So if you guys do have some questions about, hey, you know, there's, there's a lot of main breaks or things like that, we are fully aware of it.

We're just waiting to see where this project with our tank and pump station— So essentially, we're worried that the cost of the tank is going to come in dramatically higher than what we anticipated, what we estimated. So we have this money budgeted. for these particular projects, but we anticipate if the numbers come in higher, then we're going to have to make some significant shifts in our budget. Because with this tank project, we kind of can't— we can't stop it.

We've got to build it.

So we may have to shift dollars, and these are some of the key projects that we would shift in the event we had to pivot. So we may have money set aside for system replacement this year, but we may have to hit the pause button on system replacement this year, take that $1.6 million, put it to the tank. The same thing for well number 10— or excuse me, well number 1. Water reuse, same situation.

Okay, next one, we're into water reclamation, and this is the same thing, pending the results of reuse, we're going to go ahead and reevaluate that.

Looking at frequent maintenance-related projects, H2S, this is typically what we do with our sewer rehab projects as well as some of our liner projects.

Same with the system replacement, this is where we have areas where there's a lot of maintenance. We will look at— there are a few must-haves. For this one, it's $340,000. We need to replace, we need to upsize a piece of pipe. From a 12-inch to an 18-inch. This is right down in front of UVU. This is close to one of our major trunk areas. This line actually leads over to our trunk line that goes below the freeway and down through where the Pedbridge is. Actually, that carries about 80 to 90% of our flow. So with the growth and things that are happening, we do need to have this. So this will be one project that we'll move forward with to upsize that pipe. I would, I would imagine in this area, looking at where we're at, we'll probably be looking at some sort of a pipe burst project. But if we are doing some sort of a conventional type construction, you guys will all be aware of it. Likely it'll be this summer when school isn't in session. The next one is this replacing the existing solid presses. I don't know what they have existing, but I know they are looking to put in these screw-type presses to go ahead and press all of the all the liquid out of the solids down at the biosolids building. I don't know if you guys have ever had the luxury to tour the plant, but you guys should go down. It's pretty fascinating, actually, what they do.

Yeah.

But there's kind of a total we have for water reclamation. Going into stormwater, it's pretty basic. We're just focusing on canal abandonment projects. Right now we're looking at this area here, this West Smith Ditch. and West Union Canal.

We—

this Sierra Park, we have a lot of projects in this area. We're looking to relocate a line, either have it come down—

you guys can't see my cursor—

either see if we can work with a private property owner across here and discharge into the river, eliminating a lot of these projects here, or we're going to look to come down Cardville Road. We already discharge at a point here at 8 South, which we You would come in there and discharge there. So right now for stormwater, our biggest priority with West Union Canal— I'm getting out of the water purveyor business. We're just trying to get all our stormwater out of there so we don't have any liability.

Because in years past, that's where our stormwater went.

In some of these areas, yeah, we had to go in there.

We paid—

yeah, we paid a nominal maintenance fee. They went and maintained it. They didn't have a problem with it. But now Provo is looking to utilize that alignment for their aquifer recharge project. Um, it's, it's, there's just a lot of moving parts. The West Union Canal still thinks they own it. Provo thinks they own it. Um, I just want to get a project done and convey water.

These guys are still bickering.

So, and Provo has interest, they are interested in some of our stormwater, um, but they don't know how much because essentially what they want to do is they want to be able to take some of their water Water shares and take them from the Provo River, use this alignment to then convey those down, and then use that water injected into the aquifer and use it as some sort of a credit-type system. So we're just kind of along for the ride, but until then, I'm still going to look at projects to convey it, discharge it into the river. Next one we have are streets. This is, to Jamie's point at the very beginning, this is a combination of B&C road funds and sales, the transportation sales tax. This is about $2.4 million that we'd look to put towards those projects. And similar to what's happening with our tank project and water reuse project, I can't really speak to which projects we'll be doing next year because all those utility projects are on hold. And usually the streets and the utility projects go hand in hand, so we'll probably be waiting to find out what's going happen with that. $600,000 still will go to slurry seal.

That's what slurry seal looks like if you guys ever see it in your neighborhood.

It's got more of a little cape and they drape it on. Usually have to wait all day before you drive on it, or you shouldn't drive on it. Next is crack seal. This is similar, it's similar to what we're doing. It's about an 8-year maintenance plan where we crack seal it, then we slurry seal it. We try and get 2 to 3 of those in before we have to do asphalt. That's what crack seal looks like. They do that during the winter. Microsurfacing, we usually do this on our arterials, collectors, some of our more heavily traveled streets because we can get on there, do that rejuvenation, give it a little bit of time, and the traffic can be on top of it. Trip hazard mitigation, this is ongoing. They're doing it right now where we have a system set up like this where they actually take an angle grinder in there and they and they cut those trip hazards off throughout. And then we have PDA ramp upgrades. This is when they're coming in. This is kind of showing when they're getting it ready to go.

And then finally, what is the finished product?

Pretty amazing stuff. So there's a total of $4.5 million for the streets. And as much of what you see there is standard annually.

Yeah, for our plan.

Of course, Most of this is petroleum-based, so as gas prices fluctuate, so do these projects based on how much we can afford.

The interesting part this year, Sam, correct me if I'm wrong, is our road project actually came in at a reasonable number.

We didn't see the inflation on asphalt prices.

Yeah, luckily there's, there's not that many people that use asphalt oil to drive around, so it's been— this pricing, it's been pretty good, so it's been pretty stable.

So it's pretty close to the estimate, which is still— that's a lot of money.

Street lighting this year, we're looking at a little over $1 million, and this is going to be funded with what we have in our existing streetlight enterprise fund, as well as we're going to look at some of the transportation sales tax and start knocking out some of these areas. And just for your knowledge, it's these areas that are yellow, those are the Rocky Mountain Power lights that we need to switch out. This is an area south of Like about 14th South on both sides of State Street. Um, then we have an area up just north, north of here by the Catholic Church, and then a small little area down off of 12th West to south of 8th North. So that's our CIP summary in a nutshell, just like the first slide. Tom always likes that one.

He just wants to get right to it, how much money I'm spending, and then we continue ourselves. So it In the, in the tentative budget we will prepare for you, all of this will be broken down and you'll be able to see across the 5-year capital history of what we're looking to spend this year and future years where we're going to be spending these dollars as well. So this is obviously a very high-altitude discussion, but as you receive a copy of the budget, it'll be more granular.

Thank you. Sure.

Any other questions?

That's all I have for now.

So, Shane, you want to take a break for—

yeah.

Sure. Dear kind Father in heaven, we're grateful for this today, the opportunity we have to meet together and discuss the needs of community.

We're grateful for the food that has been prepared for us.

We pray thou bless it. We're mindful of those who work and protect and serve the city of Orem. We pray that thou would bless them. We're grateful for these things in the name of Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Amen. Yeah, I do that all the time. Just ask Darla, she'll tell you. Was this a, an economic move or— I think she feels like she's just kind of maxed out her potential there. Are you coaching again? I still can get you on the board and you take over. Doesn't pay enough.

I did that 12 years.

I still think I could spend every night down here. I still got my keys. Yeah, it's just 3 and 4. Skip a quarter and then that's sweet. So Jared, Jared, um, one of the days Jared Wood was saying on our coaches meeting, I mean, obviously they're struggling to hire anybody, but I'm tired of knowing that after this last year They had more umpires, and sometimes parents of umpires come this year and say, "I'm never doing that again," just because the coaches have been so nasty. And I know if my kid can make fifteen bucks an hour checking legs or go for a similar way to get yelled at by coach, I mean, there's no question where my kid.

Yeah, you have to always be.

I mean, I was always walking up and down.

Right. Yep.

It was out of control.

And Jared said this year.

Essentially, they're going to start. Oh yeah, you get. Yeah. I mean, you get. Oh for sure. We went to a game up in Salt Lake where a friend came over and the referee was getting in trouble. They played more than one take on high ref. You too. I don't think I don't remember. We don't have any professionals down here. No, yeah, exactly. I told them every year we need to evaluate the kids, you know. They're doing just a little draft to try to make— try to create equity so the best kids are getting spread out. When I was telling them about Sweet, I said I gave them one. I want to do an evaluation. We just have the meters, the meters platter. So I just— yeah, thanks for bringing it up.

Sure.

Okay, you want me to go through my— you want to whistle real loud?

Hey, Tom's on the docket.

Hey, I'm happy to do the report, Mayor. We have 3 areas that I have responsibility for. One is the Heritage Group, and they do the veterans programs and the Memorial Day. And, Brynn, you and Christy do the Fair of part of that lifting.

Our volunteer group has always been a little bit questionable there.

We've often met without a quorum, but the duties get done. And so hats off mostly to Brandon and to Christy for that, that effort.

This—

the other item, one of the other items I have, and that's just starting up again, and I now turn to you about the youth program. And we had a first meeting, and I got like about an hour's notice and couldn't Do you know when the next one is on that?

Yeah, so Tom, probably May. The Orono Council participated in a 5K race, a volunteer. That's kind of what they did for this month, so it wasn't directly with us, but we'll probably have a wrap-up with them in May. We usually wrap up when they wrap up with school. Yeah, so like an end of the year thing. So I'll give you all— let you know on that.

And you've seen them all? They come in before the city council in their events?

Can I ask how many you have on the council right now? On the youth council, we have 10, and they're all girls, but we have various levels of participation depending on our activities.

Which high school?

And then the other is the Orem Community Outreach, and Canada Joe sits on that as well, as well as various other people in the community. And that's, um, you know, the nice thing about Orem Community Hospital, they primarily do the good news They don't have a full-service hospital, so they're primarily doing stuff— primarily it was a baby birth, a baby hospital 40 years ago when they opened, but they provide a lot of services and they, they provide a lot of help to our community, to the community. They do their grow boxes and they have their area. They donated a bunch of land to us. They've been a great community partner. For those newer on the community council, maybe they don't know that, but we've got land donated to be a part of our park system, and they keep up part of their ground. That is, it's kind of hard to know where their ground ends and our ground starts, but it's, it's very much a park-type atmosphere.

We appreciate that.

Is that where they do the gardens? They do the gardens on their land, and our land is to the west of that, correct?

So our property that they donated to us is west of the hospital and east of Geneva Elementary, or the old Geneva Elementary property, and it runs the full width all the way to the, essentially, the property line back fence, um, to the south. And then if you just take a quick—

excuse me—

quick right to the west is our Geneva Park.

Yeah, and we were already maintaining some of that ground.

Yes, we had a long-term lease And a year and a half ago, through a relationship with Intermountain Healthcare, they deeded that property to us as part of their Community Gives Back program.

And they're very active. I'm sorry, Mayor, did you have another question there?

No, you're fine.

The only other question— did you say they'd only been there 4 years? Did I misunderstand that? What did they do for 4 years? Well, I mean, they've been there for a long time, right? 40 years ago, when they were opening, they were primarily just a baby. I'm sorry, 40 years ago. In fact, our oldest son was the 5th or 6th child born there. And a couple of months ago, they did a write-up of that, had a picture of him as a baby with my wife, and then us 40 years later with our child. And Kay's still 38, so it's amazing.

They've been really good with our Harvest Festival up there.

They do great.

They weren't able to do it the last couple years. I'm sure we're on track to do it. Yeah, we are. Sebastian.

Sebastian.

Yeah, yeah. So they do a harvest fair and bring in some animals and some— it's, it's a country— it's a county fair, you know, kind of thing. Yeah, it's fun. Kids come get their face painted and get various things along the way. They're quite a give-backer in that area, for sure. So that's it, Mayor, unless there's any questions. Other questions?

What's the time on the Memorial Day program over at the cemetery?

Do you know yet?

I don't know the exact time. Do you know that?

Memorial Day program is normally at noon. And it's obviously much more well attended than Veterans Day because it's a holiday for everybody, where Veterans Day isn't typically, unless it happens to fall on a weekend. So the Memorial Day program that's attended by hundreds. Mayor, normally they—

you'll have a significant portion on that program if you're going to be out of town on Memorial Day.

We'll plan around that. Okay, if you'll let Bren, myself, and Christy know, we'll plan for you to be a pretty active part of that. Of course, all the city council—

for those of you who knew, but all the city council are invited to that.

It's 9 AM on my calendar.

Okay, sounds good.

No, would you ask Christy to send out a calendar invite so they see clear for others.

Okay, nope, that's it. Thank you. Okay, thank you.

All right, just real quick, we'll just run through what's going on tonight.

Just going through the program, we'll just have a call to order, invocation, Pledge of Allegiance, mayor's report.

On this side, preferred by the council, we'll have a A report on— are we doing that before the personal appearances?

Yeah, item 6.1.

Yes.

And that's going to be— so we'll just announce that report.

How long will that take, you think?

Well, we passed into limit generally.

10 minutes.

Okay, so after that report from the Beautification Committee, then we'll do Personal appearances.

And depending on what this looks like tonight as far as personal appearances, I might ask to break it down as far as who's in favor, who's against, and then we pick some people and just get it so we don't go on forever and ever.

Is everybody okay with that? Anytime, I'm a fly.

Um, and then After, after the public comment, I'd just like to make a comment and kind of clarify some things because there's a lot of confusion about what's going on out there.

And then we'll go into the consent items.

We'll have the approval of city minutes. Consent items, maybe a little minor group on the email. But he feels we could, we can approve it.

Okay, then we'll have scheduled items. What I— well, we've got quite a few, but what I was thinking about doing is, uh, basically turning these appointments over to the council person that recommended these people and just let them say something about that, and then we'll do it.

Okay, so should that person make the motion?

Yeah.

And are we going to do these as a group? We're not going to do individually.

We'll do them as a group.

So tell me, who's, who's over the Arts Council?

Debbie.

And then transportation.

That's me. Hey, Jeff, is Jay a Davis relative?

There's not—

can't be too many of those last names. Priscilla?

Priscilla?

I don't know.

Okay, thank you.

And we've got the senior citizens.

That's— Did everyone hear that Kay Bradford passed away?

Yeah.

Okay, sorry.

So Kay was a longtime senior citizen, uh, kind of chair. She was 98 years old and she passed away on April 4th. So that may be worth just mentioning, just as a—

okay, she's a big part of us for a long time.

Do you want to do that when you introduce people? Okay.

So I play bingo with my dad on Tuesdays. And so Gina reported that the family requested that the senior citizen band be driven to her funeral and be part of that whole session. Because it was such an important part of life. So the band went to her funeral.

Okay, so that would be— so Dave, were you going to be saying something about her? You want to include that?

And Gina will be here, so Gina wants to be killed.

Okay.

And we're gonna do a tribute to her on social media too, just to our channels.

She had a great-great-grandchild.

Great-great, honey.

That's great.

So by the way, Garth Seastrand passed away.

Oh, Mark Seastrand's dad.

And that funeral is on Friday.

That's true.

That's another—

we got a public hearing Uh, about this community development block grant.

Yes, so Kenna will be there, and this is per the federal guide. Yeah, per federal guidelines, uh, we have to schedule several public hearings for community development block grant allocations, and so this is the first of 2, and Kenna and Ken Ransom who is the chair of the CUBG Advisory Committee.

And this one, there'll be no action on it. We just hear it, it opens up like this 30-day window for public comment. And then she'll come back again and then the vote will be taken at the next time she presents.

So she'll do that, she'll just open that up?

You'll still open up for public hearing, but when you close it, there's no action to be taken tonight.

Okay, so are we having public hearing tonight?

Yes.

Public hearing, we'll have those people.

Yep, that stays open for 30 days. Yeah, there's a public comment period that's being facilitated kind of offline— online, I guess, out of this meeting. Then that— then she'll come back and it'll close that public comment. There'll be another public hearing, and then that night we vote on it.

Sure.

Okay, so tonight we would open the public comment period, accept comments, and then we would close.

Yeah, so I just close. Do I say anything about this or anything?

No, no.

Yeah, okay, so we'll just open and close. Okay, and then we'll have our motion on, uh, as far as taking out the favorite topic of the city council, the bull bounce.

City councilor, can we just instruct staff to do this?

Yeah, yeah, we'll do it on the agenda.

I'm just saying, in the future, I mean, these kind of things don't normally come to this.

Well, usually something when like become like this gigantic thing. Yeah, I know.

But since it did, I thought we should address it.

So when we, when we're voting on this, this is also those posts? Yes.

So we're talking about taking out the post and the—

yeah, that was a letter, an email.

So they're—

yeah, the only thing left is—

Brian tells me they're what we call lineators. So they're mounted to the bulb-outs. So when the bulb-outs come out, they're off.

So will the Yes, good.

So we don't have to address that separately.

Good.

Never to be returned.

Famous last words.

Then you're gonna paint arrows. All right, then we got, uh, this information item. Sure, we'll take care of—

we'll adjourn, and then we'll, uh, we'll have a motion to go to a closed meeting.

So we just go through whoever ends up making the motion, the legal requirements for closed hearings that have to be stated on the record. So first we need to announce the reason for the meeting in sight to the Utah State Code. So it's Section 52-4-2051A, that's in here. Then the location of the meeting needs to be listed as well, so 56 North State Street City Center, Room 107. And then we need to do a roll call vote, and the roll call vote needs to state the name of the council member before they vote. So, Mayor, probably the best thing to do is for you to just say, you know, Council— Councilmember Spencer, and then he votes. No, I just want to make sure all of, all of our statutory requirements are—

This is the motion for the close.

Yes, and then we need to have—

we need to say 56 North State Street.

Yeah, it would be my preference. We can see to have the address there too, but it's fine.

So I'll just read this whole thing and then I let it—

and then I—

yeah, whoever's making the motion. So let's just say, I mean, the motion could say I make a motion for the City Council to adjourn to a closed meeting to discuss the character of professional competence. Just read that and then just say the meeting will be held in Room 107, Orem City Center, 56 Morse Street, something like that. And then make sure you do the roll call vote.

And how do you identify that?

You just ask each person?

Yeah, you just— you can just start down the line and then vote. Do we say our name before, or does he say? The mayor can call for each one of your votes. Um, yeah, I think sometimes the mayor calls your names and sometimes he doesn't. But on a roll call vote, I need your name stated on the record before you—

Just Councilmember Spencer.

That's fine.

Okay.

Or just like Jeff, if you want.

J-Dog. I prefer J-Dog.

You can tell me your royal highness.

Thank you, everybody. That was Bryce who just said that.

Long time no see. Um, yeah, wasn't I just over there? So I mean, my sisters came from Colorado. I said, you gotta come play bingo with us.

You were there today?

Oh yeah.

Oh my gosh, I didn't see you.

Well, how was it?

The meal? Um, I, I could only do the first one because I had a financial— but it's fun. It's chicken and rice. It was Yeah, she does a good job. I'm not Keith Bradford, I'm just a—

are we gonna wait?

She wouldn't want us to be silent.

She'd want us to help.

Yeah, I'm gonna hurry and pull up her poem. Yes, yes, yes.

We're talking about going back through the old meetings and pulling out the greatest hits.

You should.

Oh, you know what you're doing. Hey, I owe you an apology.

How was Hawaii?

It was awesome. The last time you and I was together, I think I called you the wrong name a couple times. I have a John Lamson that I went on a mission with. I apologize. So, so, I'm on the first.

Well, I do.

I'm on the top of the list. I've just been doing time talking to you guys for a couple months. It'll be short. He's good.

I was supposed to go see him.

In fact, I was over to see him and then he said, no, don't bother. I went to the post office. He said, no, don't bother, go do what you gotta do. And I said, I'll stop on the way back. Then I remembered you guys were meeting tonight.

Thanks.

How we doing?

How you doing?

I'm good. How are you? You're excellent.

Yeah, they're good looking.

Hey, how we doing?

No, I've been trying to—

he still, still thinks he's doing 5 logs this summer, all summer.

About the same. Thank you.

If I send you a picture, can you put it up on the screen?

I think so.

I love that picture.

It's in my favorites album.

Ignore the drink.

Oh.

Test, test.

We'd like to welcome you all here tonight and call this meeting to order.

Thank you.

We'd like to have an invocation by Ralph Olson and then the Pledge of Allegiance by Annette Olson.

Our Heavenly Father, as we are met here tonight, we express our gratitude to thee for the privilege of living in a country where there are freedoms based on freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, We're grateful to be assembled here tonight in that spirit to discuss matters of importance to our community. We pray for thy spirit as we discuss each item on the agenda, that we may do so in a respectful way, in a way that would represent the issues that are before us, and pray for thy guiding influence. That the results will be satisfactory to the most people that are affected most directly. By the decisions that are made. We're grateful to live in such a pleasant community and pray that we will always make decisions that are in harmony with keeping it that way. We are grateful for all that we enjoy as citizens of this nation, state, and city, and offer this prayer with gratitude in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Amen.

Thank you.

I'll rise.

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

Now, now item 6.1, we'd like to have a report from the beautification committee.

Sorry, flip over.

Sorry.

Yeah, that's not, that's not our presentation.

Pete?

Oh, okay, Pete.

I'm blaming you. It worked earlier.

Do what?

That's our commission. Oh, except This way.

There you go.

Yep, you got it.

Thanks.

Thank you. Um, so to start, we're just going to go through some introductions real quick. Um, my name is Sean O'Roulian. I am the Vice Chair of the Beautification Commission, and I'll just— we'll go from this side across and let each, um, commission member that's here introduce themselves.

My name is Aaron O'Roulian. I'm his father.

I'm Elaine Parker. I am the chair of the commission.

I'm Tanya Harmon.

I'm a member of the commission. Anne Stahman.

Josh Dottie, member of the commission.

And our City Council representative or liaison is David Spencer. We'll start with the first slide, and that is going to show our mission statement. And we have not changed it. We've used this for the past few years and we like it, so I'll just read that real quick. The Orem Beautification Advisory Commission seeks to preserve and enhance the beauty of Orem City. We strive to inspire businesses and residents to continually beautify their surroundings through city-sponsored initiatives, events, and programs. There's a picture again and list of all the commission members. One that's not here is Jason Bond, but everyone else is in attendance. So let's talk about our 2021 accomplishments. We don't have a lot to really talk about, but we'll go through the stuff we have just because, you know, you guys know last year and the past few years have been kind of challenging with activities and such, but we'll show what we've done. We participated in the Summerfest Parade. I don't know if anyone recalls our entry. This was the vehicle that we had to kind of stand out as who we were. I just thought the vehicle was beautiful, so we used it for the beautification commission, and we had some signs on it, and we, you know, did the whole deal with candy and all that fun stuff. Um, we also had free gardening classes. Um, this is kind of coming up in different—

sorry, I'll just let it all show up at once.

We did social media stuff on Facebook, not as much as we have because the person that we had running it in previous years left the commission, but we have maintained a social media page on Facebook for our commission. We have newsletter entries through the city newsletter and also information through that regarding garage sale rules and regulations because we've had concerns about flyers and postings around the city on, on posts and signs and stuff that just get left there after the, the sale is over and then just kind of leaves clutter. So we've kind of addressed that. And also the other thing that we do a lot of, and we'll talk a lot more about this, is recognizing the neighborhoods for their— for the yard-specific residents for their yards as far as beautification, and also for holiday decoration.

Can I mention something?

Yeah, my, my responsibility on the commission is I work with the businesses to make sure that they keep their, their properties up and nice and beautiful. And I work with the, the, the preservation officer to help them so that they can enjoy the beauty and help make our city look beautiful. And we do give them an award for that. It's, it's similar to that one for their accomplishments.

So a few of you, a lot of new faces on this council now. I'll just, I'll kind of review what we do on this real quick for those that aren't completely familiar. Each commission member is given a section of the city, and I believe I believe there's a sign on here that shows that. Yeah, here's, here's the city broken down into different areas, and each of the commission members is given a certain area. So for example, the green area is my area, and I am responsible for going through those neighborhoods, and if I see a yard that I think deserves recognition, then I give them a recognition, those little— that sign you saw at the beginning of that. So each one of those is assigned to a commission member. Those are all the ones that we did the past year with different highlighted spots, and then the ones that have little— the little snowflake on there, those are recognition for holiday decorations. So what we do is if we see someone that has a nice yard, if we see that someone has taken their yard from really bad to really nice and we feel like they deserve recognition, we go out, we give them a sign kind of like the ones you see for campaigns. We give it to them, we kind of talk to them about it, take some pictures, and then we post that on our Facebook page, and then they get to keep that sign so they can put that up year-round if they want to brag about their yard. Some are kind of shy, but some do put it up. So yeah, they, they also get a letter from the mayor that's signed that basically says, you know, thank you for your hard work and efforts in making the city look nice. So let's go through— I'll just kind of scroll through these, some of the pictures of This is just a snapshot of the ones that we've given out. There's a lot more than that we could, that we could have put on here, but we didn't. So let's go scroll through these pictures of the different yards in our, in our city that received awards last year. It's always fun to, when we hand out these awards, to talk with the neighbor or the person if they're there and kind of give, get some feedback as far as That's what— that one's not coming up. As far as what they did, why they did it, and a lot of them like to talk about their yard. There's a lot of cool stories that we hear that they share with us, and it really makes it entertaining. It's kind of nice to see how much effort that some people put into their yards. And now let's jump to the holiday decoration awards. Just, you know, if we think someone has taken a lot of time and effort in decorating with lights, you know, displays, whatever, then we give them some recognition for that because that's always fun during the Christmas season to see these. So here's a few of the ones that we've had submitted. We also, when we do these awards, we like to get recommendations and referrals from city members. or the council members, if you guys have, so people can contact us and then we can go out and look at them. Otherwise, if we don't do that, we— if we don't get those, we have to go out ourselves and scour the city for them. So it's a lot more helpful if someone can recommend. But yeah, it's a good way to, to help the residents feel like they, they've taken a small part in the city.

Well, I do this for the businesses, and we've been encouraging the businesses to decorate, and we've had several businesses that have done some real good decorating jobs. So they also get an award if they decorate their business.

Okay, so let's talk about some of our goals that we have for this year coming up. First one is to promote worthwhile practices that enhance the beauty of Orem, and those include this following list: encourage Orem's residents, Orem's residents and businesses to beautify their yards and properties through recognition awards like we did last year. We just continue that, and that goes along with the next one, which is recognizing the same residents and businesses for their holiday decorations. We're also looking into exploring ways to recognize residents in the city for wise water use. We haven't decided how we're going to go about doing that. It's kind of like the beginning of, of a goal, but with the drought and with all the issues with water that we have in the state, we figured it would be a good thing to recognize people in the city that conserve water but can do it as well as— They can conserve water by And also make their yard look nice in this, in the same, at the same time, if that's, if that makes sense. So you don't have to have tons of flowers and lush grass and pour a bunch of water in it to make a yard look nice. There's other ways of doing that, and we want to explore ways of recognizing citizens for doing that. And also participating in the city's Arbor Day activities, which are coming up actually at the end of this month. the 29th of April on Friday, and we hope to have some of our Commission members there to participate in that. Our second goal is to promote the roles and activities of the Beautification Commission. We want to continue to promote the Commission and the beautification activities and education opportunities through its Facebook page and city newsletter. So we— the Facebook page is a big deal for us. We like to post a lot of the stuff we do on there. Recognize the city or the residents on there through their awards. Anything else that we can do just to give education as far as how to beautify your yard, you know, tips, tricks, and tricks of the trade, things like that. And also, we will be participating again in the Summerfest Parade. Hopefully we'll have a bigger entry because we have more on our commission this year, and we'll hopefully promote our commission that way and get a lot of excitement for what we do. through the city. Um, that is our presentation. Um, I would like to maybe open it up to you guys if you have any questions or comments to us, recognize—

or hold on a second.

Um, any kind of suggestions you might have as far as how we could do better or what we could do, if you have any of those things. I'll let him make his comment.

Yeah, I want to thank you for The money that was put forth to fix up West Center Street. It looks real good now. And we've got the, the north side taken care of, and we're looking at eventually getting the south side done. We own part of that property, part of it is owned privately, but we want to thank you for your support in that.

Thank you. Does everyone— anyone have a question? Debbie?

So when I was on your beautification committee, I know you talked about welcome signs and the point of entries, and I'm wondering if that's still a priority of yours.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I, uh, yeah, I think we could really do a good job because we're the center of the county. And people come here. And I think it's very important that entryways into the city should have a sign that really looks attractive, and I see other cities doing that. So that's a recommendation that we'd like to see happen, but we don't have any control over that, but that's our recommendation.

Yeah, like you'd mentioned, we had talked about that in previous years, and that's probably something we might bring up again. Obviously, the past few years have been kind of crazy, but that is probably still something that's there that we would like to look into.

So yeah.

So, Dave?

Yeah, so I appreciate the opportunity to serve with you good men and women, and it's been a joy. And we have some new members which I'll get to know, but, you know, we need to beautify Orem, and I think the signs coming into Orem, I think We're working on that, as we talked about in our study session, so we should be able to hopefully have some funds this, you know, this budget season coming up that we should be able to start on that. So thank you for your service.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Hey, great.

Thank you.

A lot of you have been on this for a lot of years.

Thank you for your service up and down the road.

Thank you for your efforts.

In the past, we did some hanging plants along Center Street.

Is that part of your goal?

goal this year?

And if so, I think you needed help with raising private funds in the past.

I don't know how we fund that now.

So what we've—

so the hanging ones are the ones that we had around the City Hall on the, on Center Street and University Avenue, or State Street, sorry.

I think—

I'm not sure if you know, I think those have been taken over by the Public Works or something. So that's, that's done regularly now. The other thing that we did before then, we had— we, we went to different businesses to see if they wanted to have planters and flowers out front, out in front of their businesses. We kind of did that for a few years and it kind of fizzled out because we didn't get enough support. Those that wanted to do it kind of still kept going with stuff, but that's the only other thing that we kind of did that kind of phased out.

Well, thanks to you for starting it, and thanks to Public Works for continuing.

It's a beautiful tradition in our city.

There's one more thing I want to mention. We're so happy for the banners that we have that UVU gave us the money for, and the commission and UVU worked together on that, and I would like to be in contact with them to see if we could kind of increase that. Now I know we, we can't do too much on State Street without— because that's a state highway, but we're told that— in the future, if they— maybe they already done that— put up new light posts so we could put hangers on there to display Christmas decorations or even more banners for our city, because we're kind of in competition with BYU with that too. Because I mean, I'm a BYU guy, but this is my city and my city is UVU. So I gotta be loyal to that too.

Any, any other comments? We just want to thank you for all your efforts, and it's very much appreciated. I'm sure it's appreciated by everyone out in the audience. With Orem, we want to make Orem the best place possible to live, and beautification is a big part of that. So we really appreciate your efforts.

Thank you.

Okay, thank you.

You're welcome.

All right. So now we're on to the next part of the program. We could skip it if you would like. But my guess is there's a few of you are here for this. So, so I'm, I'm pretty good with magic, but we have 30 people and we have 15 minutes set aside. So if we, if we go 3 minutes per person, then the math, that takes us to an hour and a half. And so what I like to do is I know everyone likes to be heard and wants to be heard. And I think it's important that you be heard. And so what I'm going to do— do the senior citizens still have a committee?

She's mentioned that she has a presentation.

No, no, I don't have a presentation, but we're supposed to do the appointments.

Yeah.

Okay, yeah, we have the agenda set. I'm sorry. And you don't have to be here for the appointments, but if you can, that would be great. Okay.

Okay.

Um, so anyway, back to our situation. We have We have 30 people. If we do the normal 3 minutes, that's an hour and a half. And as much as I'm sure everybody likes to talk about this, I don't think anyone wants to talk about it for that long. And so what I think we're going to do is we've got a few people that are, that are not here for school district. I'm going to have some of those people go first. And I'm going to, I'm going to have some requests as we go along so we can we can, we can move this along. And if you've got— if you're here with friends and maybe you've got the same thing to say, you might agree within yourselves that, you know, just let one person go. But let's start with— let's start with—

this is—

we've got a few people here that want to talk about the bull bouts on palisades. And let me— I'll let you decide. There's Annette Olson, Ralph Olson, Gary Zam— Gary Zam, I can't read your writing, um, and Alan Johnson. And either you can each do 1 minute, or you can decide amongst yourself you want to have a spokesman do 3 minutes. Any preference? You go there. No, no, go, go, go to the stand. We don't want you to get too comfortable.

Yeah, my name is Alan Johnson.

So I'm not— so, Alan, are you going to speak for that group?

I don't—

they all say yes, but I'm just one individual. Okay, that's, uh, lives on Palisade right off of it.

Okay, so, so, so if your group agrees with that, then we'll just go— we'll go 3 minutes with, with you. Okay?

Yeah, fine. I don't really have that much to say other than a couple little things. I have to be really careful because sometimes I get a little emotional and say what I think, and it's not that professional sometimes. I'm keeping it Good. But the one thing I would do want to reiterate before I say is that, uh, has the city just left the road like it was with speed bumps, which, you know, I drove across Orem for a lot of years and I— it's only— and there, I'm sure there is a few out there, but I've never seen speed bumps in the rest part of Orem. I'm sure there is, just haven't seen it. But if they'd left the original speed bumps and got done away with those, that's where I'm going to be careful choker islands, bulbs you call them. You saved a lot of taxpayers' money. And, and I am here on behalf of the neighbors that I know and myself on the choker islands. They are absolutely— I've had a bike come in front of me, I've had skateboarders come in front of me that dart because I have to go around it. And, and I absolutely think those should be meant for schools and not for neighborhoods like we are. And I've watched I've watched issues with some of the neighbors that's had them right there by them that so don't like them, and understandably from my point of view, so much. So I'm just going to say that. And beyond that, I just think that, you know, we can live with those now that they've been put in, those raised crosswalks, because they're nothing more than a speed bump and a little bit different style than But I think it was like I said, so they left the original ones. If that's what they're trying to accomplish, we wouldn't have paid taxpayers' money to redo that. But the Choker Islands, I think, are an absolute joke for the city and shouldn't have been there. And I'm just saying my piece, and, and I have my experiences with a couple of items already. So, and I, and I'll speak for what Gary just, uh— Zamboni was who you were trying to figure out his What it said. Anyway, just for him, you know, he lives right there on the corner of Bella Vista and, and Palisade. And when those leaves in the fall come up and just jam up against it, and those people that come by with the street sweepers, they couldn't do it. So they had to bring a truck and get out brooms and shovels and clean it all up because it was a huge mess. Normally he would clean it up because he keeps a very nice yard too. But because of the situation, put it in It became an issue, so there's no sense me getting in more. I don't care for them, and I know a lot of neighbors that don't. I'm not sure how that— apparently there was something put out there ahead of time that made the decision to go down that road. I never seen it, and the people that I've talked with have never seen it, so I, I don't know how that happened, but I didn't, and I'm just expressing my thoughts. So that's all I have to say.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

If you'd like to come up for 5th East.

Received a message suggesting that I represent our group, which is south of 8th South and east of State Street.

And if you can state your name and—

Oh, Ralph Olson.

And you're from Orem?

Yes. Okay, we've lived here for 46 years. So, and we've loved living in Orem.

When the berms were put in, these bump-outs, the first—

immediately, I mean, the cement had hardly dried and we were hearing people complain. How did this happen? And so on and so forth.

And through the years, that's basically the sentiment of the people in our neighborhood.

And I— the point I'd like to make tonight goes right along with the gentleman who just spoke.

They're actually dangerous.

I know the intention was to create safety, especially for children and slow the traffic down, but I think they've not only failed in that objective, but it's actually created a dangerous situation. There's a block in particular where there are 2 of these on every street as you approach the intersection, and if there's somebody waiting at the stop sign and you're trying to make a left-hand turn where they are parked, it's almost impossible to do it. And we've seen the signs go down and put back up, and the signs go down and put back up, and people go over them on purpose. And, and I've seen— there's one neighbor who, he drives his truck over the top of it, and the front tires are at the front of the berm and the back tires are at the back of the berm.

He parks right over the top of it because he needs parking space.

So it takes away parking space and it's dangerous. And we were never consulted. One of the main ideas from all of the neighbors that I ever talked with was that we as neighbors were never consulted never informed, never asked permission, never discussed, never got any notice of any meeting where it might be approved or disapproved or have a chance to talk about it.

And that was a huge oversight, I think, as well.

Thank you for listening.

Thank you.

Okay, now I've got some Other random ones.

Okay, so we're going to go.

So I've got Sierra Bradley has a zoning issue. And Sierra, if you could keep it less than 2 minutes.

Okay. Um, hello, my name is Sierra Bradley. I live here in Orem with some friends. We wanted to discuss— there is a zoning ordinance that talks about rental homes, um, that no more than 3 unrelated people can live in a rental home. We were unaware of this when we first moved into our home, and then when we became aware of it, we have done everything in our power to be in compliance with this. However, we do rent a 5-bedroom home, and the best way that we have come to be in compliance with this is that we have a set of sisters, a set of sisters, and then myself So that we have 3 unrelated groups. However, we're unsure if that is quite following the ordinance. We just— we request that you guys review this and discuss as a council so that we might be able to stay in our home because we have loved it being here in Orem.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

If we could note that somebody could look into that and see if that is in compliance, then let them know.

Mayor, if I may, the reason I was consulting with our city attorney was I think that our ordinance is consistent with state law. So this may not necessarily be a City of Orem issue, but a legislative issue that's identified within Utah State Code. So that's what we're looking into. There's been some some changes most recently in land use development code within the state, and so I just want to make sure that what I'm representing is, is consistent with current law.

Okay, thank you. Okay, let's move to Jim Hadlock. He's written water. And Jim, if you could keep it less than 2 minutes.

Thank you.

Jim Hadlock, live in Northwest Durham, here just to talk about water and water conservation specifically.

Currently, the state's at about 58% of its reservoirs being full, so it's below normal, way below normal, and the outlook isn't very good for future snow or rain. rain in the coming months to help fill them again.

So I think the city needs to do some things, as other cities have done, to help conserve water, particularly with the largest water users, which is the city. And I've talked to the city people, and they are doing things in the city, which is good.

But as of last year—

I haven't talked this year— but last year, in talking with the other 2 large water use—

largest water users, which are the schools and then the LDS Church. None of those organizations have any water conservation plans set.

And so it could have changed this year, but I doubt it.

The schools are left up to each individual school, and the school's watering then is determined by, for lack of a better word, janitors.

I don't know what they're called nowadays, but janitors.

And the church Watering is done by each of the geographic managing systems.

I think Orem has 4 or 5 of those for all the churches in Orem, and each one of those then sets their own watering programs, none of which are very good, none of which are set to conserve water.

And so the state—

the city should do something to regulate those, and then to even help home Homeowners, and I thought maybe what the city could do would be to send out to homeowners ways to conserve water. The number one way I think is to make sure you don't cut your, your grass any lower than 3 inches, because if you get lower than 3 inches, then you start having quicker evaporation, and the watering you might do, you can lose over 50% of it to evaporation during the hotter months.

Thank you.

Thank you. All right, now we move on to the school district. I think what we're going to do is what I like— we can reset that timer to 2 minutes, right? Okay, it's on 2. So there's not really a fair way to do this without taking a whole bunch of time. And so what I'm going to do Is I want everyone to stay to 2 minutes or less. If you're here with someone who you know well and you're going to talk about the same thing, then maybe decide amongst you who goes. Um, the only fair way that I can think of without taking much time is to go down the list, but I want it to be equally split between people who have something that are for doing a feasibility study versus people who are against doing a feasibility study. And so I'm going to go down this list. And I'd like you to just kind of keep track of the person who goes in front of you. And if that person is, you know, the opposite way that you are, then don't stack on with like 3 fors or 3 againsts. And but we'll come back to you.

Okay.

Everybody got this?

Mayor, might I also suggest that we do have to have reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on personal appearances when there are so many, but I know the council wants to hear from you all. There is always the option, of course, if you do not have the opportunity to speak tonight, to submit your comments in a written form to the City Council so that everybody can be heard. It's just, it's just, as you know, there are so many of you and so many of you want to speak, so I don't know if the mayor is comfortable with that, but that would be a suggestion.

Mayor, while you were talking— yeah, Heather, just repeat that quickly.

My suggestion is that anyone who doesn't have an opportunity to speak tonight have the opportunity to write their statements and then submit those statements to the City Council so that you will all have the benefit of the comments that were given tonight.

That'd be perfect.

Yeah, so, okay.

Thank you. And if you have any questions about how to do that, As far as on the website, it's got everyone's emails, right?

In fact, Mayor, if I may, on the screen currently there is an email address, communications@forum.org. That is an email that we could suggest people remit messages to, and then we could take that information, take those emails, and forward them to each of you.

Okay, that would be great.

That'd make it simple. And is that email up or—

Yes, it's on the screen, communications@orem.org.

Okay. So yes, if you, if you want to say more or address specific people, feel free to go to that email address and send us your thoughts.

What if there's a time-sensitive matter that's like, say, tomorrow that they need to hear about?

Regarding the school district?

So I need to interrupt for just a moment. We need to be able to record the comments from the council and individuals. Mayor, you recognize all individuals as a point of order. So for the record in the meeting minutes, if someone is speaking, they need to be speaking into the microphone.

Okay. Thank you. I'm just trying to understand if— because what I wanted to do was to hit the different areas that are not related to school district. Is there something you have that's not related to school district that's time sensitive? You do? Okay, what was your name?

Douglas.

Okay.

Well, Douglas, if you, if you got something that's not related to school district, Because we want to tackle that all at once, but if you've got something, I didn't pick that up on here, so.

My name is Douglas Vertell. I live at 450 West 1600 South. The reason I'm here tonight with some of our neighbors is there's a development that is wanting to be made about 450 or about 400 West and 1600 South. It hasn't come before the city council as of yet, but we as neighbors have opposed this. This is the second notice that this Bach Homes has sent to us. They're having a meeting tomorrow night at the Orem High School, the gym, and we as neighbors are opposed to this rezone, and this is the reason we're here tonight.

I do have—

I don't know if, if any of you have been notified.

But we do appreciate Councilmember Millett and Peterson and Spencer for being at the last meeting.

Thank you for being there.

We invite you to, you know, be there tomorrow night.

I do have some flyers here from Bach Homes giving the information out, and so I'll leave that at the desk here. So if any of you want to, you know, take that.

But we as neighbors, you know, have looked at this and were very much opposed to it. So that's why we're here tonight, to invite the council members if they would feel inclined to be there tomorrow night. We do appreciate them being there last time, but that's our purpose for being here, is to invite you to this meeting that is 6 o'clock tomorrow night at the Orem High School in the gymnasium.

Thank you.

Okay, thank you. All right, let's start. We've got somebody else has something non-school district related. If you'd like to come up and identify yourself.

Good evening, my name is Lori Thoman and I live in the Springwater Park neighborhood. I was here in October to discuss some— an issue in the neighborhood with multiple homes having land subsidence problems. We have an update on the Perez home. They have received a notification— they had somebody come in and take a look at their home, and it's going to cost them $80,000 to repair their home from sinking. The northeast The windstorm woke them up in the middle of the night with the house creaking and groaning, and there are more cracks in the home. They— the $80,000 is without a warranty. If they want a warranty, it's $120,000. When I was here in October, the city manager was going to take a look at the issue, and I thank every one of you that have been involved in this.

Thank you.

that took the time to come and take a look at the neighborhood, we have multiple homes that are having the problem, which we believe is associated with the water wells that are being drilled and water is being taken away for vineyard to meet their water demands, because this problem only started happening 5 years ago and the neighborhood has— was first established in 2008.

Let's see.

Yeah.

And no, 20— sorry, I'm nervous.

Sorry, guys.

The homes that are having the most difficulty were built around 1995, so it's not normal settling. And so I'm here to get an update on that issue and to give you an update on where we are right now. And just a little note with the City of Orem, the beautification committee We received one of those awards. I brought the sign into the house. My husband was giddy as a schoolgirl. He went out the next day and added more lights, and you've created a monster.

Thank you.

Thank you. All right, let's move on to the school district. Let's see how far we can go. And like I said, we'll start out with an against, a for, against, for, however that works out. And so, and just keep it to 2 minutes. And just to remind everyone, everyone seems great tonight. We just ask that, that you give factual information. We ask that— we want everyone to be heard, so we're okay with letting people clap, but we want you to limit the clapping to respectful clapping, like no more than 5 to 7 seconds, and then just let it die off, just so we can— you can give each other an idea of who's in favor, who's against. But keep it very civil. So, okay, that's a good idea. So why doesn't everyone— yeah, let's say everyone that's for, go on this side, that would be for the feasibility study. And then anyone that's against, go on the other side. I'm sorry, I didn't hear you.

What's that?

I'm sorry, you, you, you're not allowed to speak without permission. I'm sorry, that's the way the rules work. So, is anyone— is there anyone who is against? Okay, anyone who is against, if you would go on that other side, and then we can just line up and we can alternate back and forth.

Can we have against be on this side? She has to keep— just for—

Sure. We're going to do for on this side and against on this side. Okay. All right, we'll go ahead and start. First, we've got John Barrick, and please state your name and if you're for or against.

I'm John Barrick, and I am absolutely for.

I came 90 minutes early to get a 2-minute window.

Thank you.

10 years ago, Northridge Elementary in Orem was among the best schools in the entire state.

It is below average now. They are changing class sizes for 3rd and 4th, 3rd and 4th grades between 33 and 34, and 5th and 6th grades to 37.

I would like to thank Debbie Larray for asking the school board about the naked issue at Northridge, which parents were not notified.

Now they're blaming the principal. Also on March 3rd, there was no— there was a jackhammer going all day and no one No, no plumbing. Teachers had—

one teacher had to go home 3 times to go to the bathroom, and students weren't allowed to go to the bathroom.

So that's Alpine School District. Now, I would say a lot more about it, but I'm ready. I'm here to thank you for taking up Alpine School District Orem split.

Why?

Because there's many problems which I'll address. Like you, I've been bombarded with without any— with a biased petition without any background. Let me give you, let me give you, um, an option on the 2 firms.

One firm has 3 Bachelor of Finance students, lots of security licenses, and no educational experience. That's the firm you didn't choose, but they're really good at tax-exempt bonds. This firm you did choose has a PhD, a law degree, several master's degrees, 40 years of educational experience, 8 years in the state legislature, including chair and vice chair of a couple educational committees.

I think they're probably qualified.

I would say that the lady doth protest too much, methinks, quoting Shakespeare. Now, $30,000 isn't too much for a study, but Orem pays $55 million in taxes every year to the Alpine School District. This is the Alpine School District's presentation in 2018 on school district finance. It says transparency, but not too transparent.

This is from a guy that makes $232,000 a year in salary and $328,000 in salary and benefits.

Our last superintendent made $247,000 last year in salary and $349,000 in benefits.

And don't get me started.

Okay, thank you. We'll go on this side. I'm not going to go in order since you're in line, I'll just have you come up.

My name is Sissy Rasmussen and I'm an Orem resident, and the first thing I request is that comments should not be from non-Orem residents on this issue. I am here to share a petition that I started 2 days ago as concerned involved Orem residents, we ask Orem City to cancel the contract with Discovery Education Consultants immediately and begin a new search for a company to complete the feasibility study.

I'm not—

I'm going to skip over some of this. We expect our elected leaders to act in good faith to find an experienced, independent, unbiased company using best practices, including creating an experienced panel to use a rubric or scorecard to assess the bids. The study should appear— avoid all appearance of bias, conflict of interest, or cronyism. Above all, whether we agree with the district split or disagree with the district split, or whether we're undecided, we all deserve a study that is done by an experienced company, not in education, but in feasibility studies. This petition that I started on Sunday, 50 hours ago, has been signed by 1,255 residents as of 5 PM today. That is a strong indication of what people think about the company you chose to do the study. I believe in transparency and ethical decision-making.

I believe you also value those ideas.

The choice you made, whether it was intentional or not, will reflect poorly on this council, and it will diminish the validity of the study.

study.

I encourage you to listen to your residents, make responsible decisions, and choose a new company immediately so that we can learn the best facts to make a decision that will affect our entire city. Again, I ask you to not allow, in this very short time, comments from non-Orem residents. Thank you.

Good evening, my name is Mike Stiles. I live at 665 South 250 West in Orem.

Sissy, thank you.

I am for a feasibility study. An earlier study indicated that the cost of splitting our school district could increase property taxes by as much as 25% or more. Let me be clear, I am for a feasibility study. A one-time cost of less than $1 per household with more than 30,000 homes in Orem is something I can live with. I can live with double that. I could pay $2. I'm fine with that. But if our property taxes go up 25% on the average, $800 to $1,500 a year, what people are paying, that's $287 per year per household with no guarantee of any better education for our children than they're getting right now. You said you're looking for an objective answer about the feasibility study to split the district. Mayor, that was in your video that you posted in April on Facebook. The company you selected is Discover Education Consultants. This company was formed days before the contract was awarded to them. It's inconceivable to me that Discover Education Consultants could have started a company, been included in the completely fair proposal process, done the substantial prep work necessary, submitted a thorough proposal, been awarded a government contract in a matter of days. Government contracts don't happen that way, nor should they. I'm for the feasibility study.

That's what they asked— no feasibility study, feasibility study.

More than 1,300 residents have now signed that petition. Will you not listen to us or them? You work for us, not the other way around.

My name is Ada Wilson, and I'm one of 2 of Orem City's representatives on the Alpine Board of Education. I represent the Mountain View High School area and the city of Vineyard. I would like to respectfully ask all those in the room who have come in protest of the feasibility contract, would you please stand? Thank you. These will probably not get to speak. It is the practice in Orem and in Alpine School District to expand the public comments to help every voice be heard. And that is not a joke. Terry Peterson.

Close the door.

As I, as I communicated with you in an email on March 8th, I stand ready to talk to any one of you regarding the advisability of an Orem-only school district. I sent you some basic facts talking about the relationship of Orem and Alpine School District. I also sent you direct links to 4 presentations that have been made to the Alpine board about district reconfiguration, I want you to know that I and my colleagues are not afraid of this conversation. The sole purpose of my involvement in this issue is to protect the rights of Orem's families to access the best education opportunities for their children and to protect their rights to have fair and accurate information and to ensure that the 780 teachers 863 staff and 41 administrators who work in our Orem schools have— are not hurt financially or professionally by this decision. I am grateful for the many who have signed our petition, and as an advocate for Orem families, I will continue to do all I can to get correct information information to you and to our public. Mayor Young has invited me to— has asked me to get some information to him, and I am happy to do that for him and for any one of you on the council.

Thank you.

I feel like it's only fair to ask those who are for the feasibility study to Please stand that came tonight. Looks like a few more, I would say. It's a bit ironic to hear Ada come up here and talk about having a conversation and to talk about listening to the people's voices. When Alpine School District locked parents out of board meetings for several months. They didn't care about the voice of the parents. They didn't care that your parent— your kids were being forced tested, forced quarantined, and forced to test to play. They had an agenda. You're out of— you're out of line. You need to please respect the speaker. And so I am not out of line. I am speaking to the corruption of Alpine School District. The district is the biggest, the wealthiest, The most powerful district in the state of Utah. That is where all the money goes in Utah for education. That's the district. It needs to be split. These representatives say that they care about parental rights and they care about your voice. They don't. They sat there and they watched parents stand outside buildings in very cold weather, even with children, and they did nothing to stand up for you. And also, they still haven't apologized for My name is Brittany Lindsay. I'm being criminally charged. I have to go to trial next month, and they're using their— our taxpayer dollar money against me. I have to go because I honked my horn outside of a meeting I was locked outside of. And I wasn't the only one. There were several other parents doing it, and we were doing it because they were— they were punishing our children and they were harming our children, and that's not okay.

Thank you.

And that's all I have to say. Thank you.

My name is Bart Francis. I'm a resident of Orem, but I'm also a teacher in Orem.

So I just wanted to give my perspective as a teacher about my anxiety that's that's been placed by the choice of, of who's going to do the feasibility study. I feel like this decision is so important that it's not the time. I feel like sometimes we're kind of rushing the issue, where I feel like we need to take the time to think about this. This is a generational issue. This will affect generations of kids.

There's no undo button.

Whatever the decision is made, the study needs to make sure that it takes into consideration the time and the length of this decision.

It's monumental.

As a teacher, things change, right? I've taught in the district for 15 years.

Is it perfect?

No, it's not.

But this decision is important. And so I just don't want to rush a decision for an arbitrary deadline. I'm concerned about the time that's given between when the study is going to end and when a decision has to be made. I don't know if that's enough time to adequately look at this complex issue because I feel it is a complex issue. And so I want to be— it'd be an informed issue, an informed decision that's made, not one that's made because we're trying to rush a deadline to try to get something on a ballot. Thank you.

My name is Stephanie Grant, and I agree with that last line that you said it should be an Orem decision. And if you all just witnessed— if you remember, Ada just barely said— spoke about— she said our petition. So she— the district is helping coach parents to put up a petition about the study. Which, why would the, why would the district have such an interest in coaching the parents on how to do this?

Because—

Excuse me, can we sit down, Ada, please, and not do charades over in the corner? Were you going to speak again? I can't have you—

I can't—

Ada, you're— it's not your turn to talk. Could you please sit down? I don't want you doing charades at the members. That's not fair.

So, thanks. So why is Alpine fighting so hard to not let this come out? I went to their, to their meeting when they talked about splitting the district. And they didn't—

they—

Amber Bonner mentioned in a town hall meeting that the district said, let's speak about this. Let's, let's put this on the back burner for 5 more years so we speak about it again. So it's not something they want to do, to bring it up. So, or Orem, they've, they've closed Hillcrest, Geneva, Polaris High School. That's just in the last couple years, and they had a bunch more on the chopping block. So they have a plan to talk about closing it in 8 years. But at that point, how many schools are going to be left in Orem in 8 years?

Those schools—

Thank you. Those schools that are being closed— Hillcrest was a Title I school, and now those children have to be bused Away from their school.

They—

the district did not care about when we tried to speak on behalf of those kids that they were closing the schools. And our representatives are not representing us, and they're not listening to parents in the school.

The school system—

the school district is way too big to even know what stuff is being taught in the schools. And I get 20 more seconds, so interrupted. Do really fast. Um, it really doesn't matter who who chooses a study. This is all about trying to stall so it doesn't get on the ballot. That's why it's being orchestrated. That's why Alpine is helping fight this so hard to not let this come forward. And being a parent who's been involved trying really, really hard to speak with Alpine and meet with them and not letting them meet with me before they even locked us out of meetings, try to speak on behalf of our children, like I I can see where when a district has too much power, it is not good for anyone or the citizens, and the district needs to be split.

Okay, thank you. Your time's up, but thank you.

Hi, my name is Elizabeth Ludwig. I am an Orem resident. I am also a teacher at Lake Ridge Junior High and a parent of a child who shortly will be attending the same elementary her father, who was a lifelong Orem resident, attended. And I have lived here for over 10 years. There is not an area of my life that is not affected by this decision. And I am not against a feasibility study, but I do have my concerns. I have talked to many coworkers and hear again and again that if we were to split, teachers would leave, seasoned teachers would retire, new hires question whether they want to accept positions in Orem because of what is going on. And other teachers say they would do whatever they could to stay with Alpine. These are amazing teachers, professionals that I hope my daughter one day can have in her own schooling, and I hope we can keep them. As an Orem homeowner, I worry that if my property taxes increase 40% as it did for residents in Canyons District after their split, and if my pay as a teacher If the score fell after the one year that you're guaranteed to keep it where it's at, I would not be able to continue to both live and work in Orem, the city that I love. When I expressed my doubts to city council members through email and in person about the study, I was repeatedly told Orem wanted to have an unbiased study. It is clear that the group chosen to conduct the study, who has no direct experience with feasibility studies, is comprised of individuals vocally in support of citywide school districts. And was formed days before the selection process does not meet the City Council's own standard of unbiased. I would request the City Council to rescind the offer and search a truly unbiased out-of-state group to conduct the feasibility study. I would also request the City Council to enact a policy for the future that ensures the hiring process of groups for studies be conducted by a committee with a scorecard or some way of actually rating bids, rather than being the sole choice of the mayor. Thank you. of a single non-elected individual.

Um, thank you.

Hi, my name is Kathy Owens. I live at 2138 South 140 West. I first just want to thank our mayor and the city council for being who you say you are and who you said you would be when we elected you. Grateful for your integrity. And because we voted you into this position. We also have confidence that you will represent us well and that you will follow high ethical standards and morals as you make this decision. I'm in favor of this study and the analysis team that you have chosen. They have over 100 years of cumulative knowledge and expertise in the area that we need. The team has been involved in multiple public school evaluation studies— Granite School District, the Canyons district split, and it is currently involved in a proposed Draper Schools district split. We value their unique experience in this matter. They also have deep experience in finance, acquisitions, real estate, education law, public policy, and government regulations. And it is critical that this study gets done now. It's not an arbitrary date that has been chosen. Alpine School District wants to put a $500 million bond on the ballot, of which Orem's money would be used to build more infrastructure outside of Orem. Right now, annually, taxes collected in Utah County total $616 million. Alpine School District received $406 million of that tax revenue. There is anecdotal evidence to suggest Orem contributed 28% of that figure, but we are not getting 28% back. for our schools' infrastructure and programs. It's getting distributed outside of Orem. The residents of Orem are entitled to reliable information and data. No one should stop that. But this decision has to be made before the bond is approved and our money is given to them and not for us. And there has been information that the school district wants us to split after they get our money. Thank you.

Bye.

My name is Kara Ludwig. I live at 115 East 1000 South here in Orem. I'm a parent of 3 students at Westmore, a Title I school here in Orem. I'm concerned about the action the city has taken to move forward on a district feasibility study. The available information makes it clear that an Orem school district would reduce resources for our students while increasing our property taxes for Orem residents, where it has in the Jordan Canyons area between 20 and 40%. Additionally, the selected contractors, Discovery Education Consultants, was not selected in a way that seems in accordance with the city's promise to select an unbiased and professional group. Discovery Education Consultants does have, as you said, 100 years of experience, However, that experience is not directly related to district feasibility. Orem is presumably the group's first client and the first attempt at a feasibility study. Though the city has indicated each of these individuals are professionals in their field, and though they have participated— they may have participated in previous studies as citizens or even as professionals, they have not conducted a study which is an overall different skill set. I ask that the council reconsider the hire and go through proper channels to hire a contractor, a contract contractor that is experienced and reviewed in school district feasibility studies. I'm concerned additionally because I'm a parent of a special needs child. Support for special needs are often provided by and supplemented by the school district. The possibility that those, some of our most vulnerable students, will lose access to the many offerings the Alpine School District has worked over many years to develop is worrisome to me, and I hope it is worrisome to you. Additionally, my students attend a Title I— one of 7 Title I schools that are in Orem. These schools are heavily funded by the district at large.

Schools—

Orem schools receive 83% of Alpine's Title I money, though there's an attitude that we give— we keep what is ours, but we should share. And I think that that's another reason that we need to reconsider this. Thank you.

Hello, my name is Brooke Peterson, and I am an Orem resident. I've lived here for 20 years. I'd like to thank the Orem City Council for voting 7 to 0 for support of a feasibility study to see If Orem should split from Alpine School District. This is an important year for Orem taxpayers. The Alpine School District is going to put out a $500 million bond on the ballot this November. Yes, $5 million. This is a huge bond that will financially and significantly affect the citizens of Orem. The Orem City Council is being very conscious and diligent about its attempts to protect Orem taxpayers.

And I commend you.

How will Alpine School District distribute the half-billion-dollar bond money? They will distribute it to several cities.

It is safe to say that Orem residents will definitely not get out what they put in.

Orem taxpayers will pay a high price for this bond, and we will not see its fair share of dividends.

Our tax money will not stay in Orem.

Alpine School District has said they have done a feasibility study. Feasibility study, and they recommend that Orem does not split from Alpine at this time?

Of course not.

It would not financially benefit them. Why are we allowing Alpine School District to audit themselves and do their own feasibility studies? Would we expect Alpine School District recommending losing approximately $1 million in bond money? Of course not.

They cannot possibly be unbiased in their own recommendations.

I support a third party that will analyze specifically how much Orem pays to Alpine School District and how much Orem receives in return. We need transparency from Alpine School District, and we can only get it with a feasibility study.

If this feasibility study is delayed, then Alpine gets our money, and then we split. They take the money and then they boot us.

We pay double, guys. It's unclear to me why the opponents of this feasibility study would not want transparency for Orem taxpayers. Delaying uncovering the truth seems like a stalling tactic to get the extra bond money Alpine School District wants in their pocket. And I just want to take a quick moment.

I'm sorry that you'll have to The time is up, but thank you.

My name is Keith Wilson. My family's loved living in Orem for over 30 years. Point of disclosure, I'm married to Ada Wilson, who's been serving on the school board representing West Orem and Vineyard for the last 4 years. The question of whether Orem students, families, and residents would be better served by its own school district is an appropriate question. It deserves thoughtful and fair consideration. It deserves and requires expert analysis. We'll be pretty blunt. By choosing an inexperienced group and a group that is headed by a person who is also leading a campaign to have Draper City become a single city district, it's clear that Orem City is not seeking impartial opinion. The national trend for the last 70-plus years has been to consolidate school districts. The most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that across the US from 1991 to 2000, the number of school districts decreased by 499. Then from 2001 to 2010, the number of districts decreased by another 1,271. Numbers for 2020 have been published, but the trend has not changed. Why are districts consolidating? Because it's more cost effective.

It allows more of the limited school funds to go to the classroom.

It saves taxpayers money.

It's factual evidence that both Jordan Canyon citizens pay higher property taxes since their split.

It's factual evidence in Provo School District and other small districts in Utah, a larger percentage of their budget goes to the district overhead, leaving less for classrooms. While these are compelling facts, it still doesn't mean that the question of a separate school district shouldn't be considered, but it needs to be done in a competent manner. I do not believe there's any intent by the district to delay this, nor is there a district-backed effort. This is my wife who's concerned for citizens of Resonorm. She's assisted with the petition. It is not district-backed, I assure you that. Taxes will not be raised because of the way the proposed bond— that's not the way that the bonds in the last couple decades have been Issued, have not raised taxes, and they will— and they would not continue to do so. So I'm Aaron Davidson. I am from Lyndon, so I'm not from this city. But, you know, it sounds like everyone here that this is a feasibility study. It's not that we're going to— you're going to do it or not going to do it, but everybody assumes that if you're for the feasibility study that it's going to happen, and if you're against the feasibility study, it's not going to happen. So I appreciate that you're actually doing a feasibility study and find out if it's something to do or not do.

But I came here to basically address the fact that this last weekend was the county convention for both the Republican and the Democrat Party, and there was, in the split-off to If you look at the current candidates for the school, for the school district, for the school board, none of the current school board members received an endorsement from the, from the Republican nor the Democrat convention.

But they, their opponents did receive a recommendation. So the people have spoken because you elected the candidates, the delegates that were going to go to this convention. convention and the delegates spoke, and none of the current school board members received an endorsement. Actually, it was very low numbers that even voted for them as an endorsement. So the people have spoken against the current school board, and to have Adams stand there defiantly with the superior superiority and condescending behavior, uh, and not sitting down is, is, uh, Israel is a manifestation of the Alpine School Board's attitude toward us, the parents and the students. So I commend you.

I commend you for wanting to do a feasible feasibility study.

Thank you.

My name is Kay Clark. Thank you for having us today, Mayor and Council, City Council. I've been born and raised in Orem. I have raised all my children here. I've taught in Alpine School District and been an administrator in Alpine School District. I'm very concerned that the Orem City Council is pursuing a separate district. I do not think that that should be the purpose of the council is to get involved in creating a new district for the city. Your purpose is to take care of the needs of our city, our beautification, take care of the budget, safety, and growth of our city, but not to be involved in deciding whether we should have a separate school district. I feel like you're overreaching in that area. I understand that in the past, if information's been shared that taxes would be raised significantly in Orem if we were to split off and be our own school district. I know there— this is an aging population here in Orem, and I know that the residents, most of the aging residents, would not be able to afford the taxes that it would go up. Also, it's a declining population, as we know. that some of our schools are, are closing, and that is very difficult to continue to have a functioning school district with a declining enrollment. Alpine School District has specialized schools for students with significant disabilities. Orem District would need to provide a way to provide services for those significantly disabled children. Where would these services be provided? Students with severe disabilities sometimes require personalized, personalized nursing all day. They require specialized personnel like physical therapy and occupational therapy, which costs the district more. When, when those costs are spread out through the district, it does not cost so much. I'll come back next month and finish my comments.

My name is Scott Swain.

And Scott, you'll be the last person. Thank you.

And I've been a resident my whole life in Orem. My 7 kids all spent every day of their public education in Orem. My parents are educators. My father was on the Alpine School District board.

My in-laws were educators.

So I like education. And sometimes it's not all about money. You know, we're talking about money, but we want a good education for our kids. And we don't— I agree that Alpine School District is really, really big, and honestly, I think they're a little bit arrogant, honestly. And Ada, it doesn't serve really to stand there.

I'm sorry, I'm—

I have nothing against you. But we, uh, I believe that we could do better, but we have to— in this feasibility study, we got to look at what it's going to cost us because we can't afford— I mean, we're all—

Orem isn't a rich community, you know. We don't have a lot of extra money.

So please, if you do this, we got to figure out a way to cut costs so that our, our property insurance doesn't go Way up. I think I think Alpine School District is okay if they just go out. You know, they'll they'll be oh they'll be okay if they're off doing their thing and we do our thing. Provo School District has done it a long time ago, but I don't like the fact that the school districts are. closing and we're combining. That's like a federal government problem. I think smaller is better. We've closed down Geneva, Hillcrest, Sierra, and built megaplexes. I don't think that's a good thing. So, so anyway, that's it.

Thank you. I appreciate everyone for their comments, and I appreciate your civility. I do have a few comments I'd like to make before we move on. I feel that there's— I need to make these comments because I feel like there's a lot of misrepresentation going on. And I want to put this in context of what I feel like we're dealing with. There are those who have been very focused on being against anything this council has done since the very first meeting we had. They were opposed and very vocal against us hiring our own attorney. They were opposed and against us changing the Planning Commission, which needed to be done. They were opposed against us eliminating the 9,400 apartments on State Street and changing the State Street Master Plan. The vast majority of citizens were for that. This group was against this. Essentially, you pick your topic and they're against it. They were— last time they were opposed to even considering a study. They don't— they didn't want to do a study to see how much ORM residents pay into the school districts and how much benefit they get out. So they were completely against that study. All I heard was the study is going to cost $70,000 and it's the end of the world and it's not fair and it's not right. Well, then we found out the study cost $30,000. I didn't hear anyone recant. But now we've changed the narrative to now we oppose the firm that was selected. And so let me just say, I know there's a petition going around And if I believed, or if I was concerned about things that were being said, I would sign that petition. But I— but what's on that petition is not accurate. And what's out there in social media and being put— I mean, this is the way it works. You'll have somebody write an article or write a letter to the mayor and city council. That person will take that, they'll send it to the Daily Herald, then they'll take that. and they'll post it back on their Facebook to give themselves credibility. And what we're doing is, is we're not dealing in facts. Now, some of those facts are, we've been told property taxes will go up 35%. We've been told class sizes will go up. We've been told quality will go down. We've told teachers will leave. We've told students— we've been told students' quality and quantity of resources will go down. We've been told we already have a study by Alpine that they have done on themselves. Now, if any of that were true, if one of those things were true, I would sign the petition. But it's not. These are all— these are all things that there is no basis in fact. These are suppositions. We don't know if they're true or if they're not true. No one has any idea. That's why Orem proposed to do a feasibility study. We don't, we don't have an opinion whether or not Alpine School District should be split. We honestly don't. We just want to know how much Orem pays in and how much Orem gets out. before we do a half a billion dollar bond with Alpine School District. Representing you, the taxpayers, we feel that is a responsible thing to do. So let me— going on to things that, that are, that are not accurate. We've been told that this group that we hired to do this feasibility study, feasibility study, is not qualified. Let me give you a quick— and yeah, I want to even go into that. But as far as— let me just ask Dave here. We put out a press release yesterday to try and clarify this for the citizens. Unfortunately, in the press release, this part was deleted. This was the qualifications of the people who are running the study. So let me— So these are, these are people who are supposed to not know anything about what they're doing. and have just wandered in off the street, and now they're doing a study. Let me have you have Dave just say some of their qualifications so you can actually hear them.

So Dr. Paul McCarty has served in education for over 40 years, everywhere from the front line to the middle management to administration, and knows how school districts operate. He has been involved in multiple public school evaluation studies while working at Granite School District. He is intimately involved with a community-driven effort to help understand the capacity of schools, facilities, and identify future needs and educational programs. Many residents have correctly pointed out that Dr. McCarty was involved with the Canyon School District split and is currently involved in the proposed Draper School District split. And while some may see this as concerning, we value his unique experience in this matter. Dr. McCarty is particularly well suited to conduct this study because He has an experimental understanding of— experiential understanding of the opportunities and challenges that need to be addressed by this feasibility study. Michael D. Waneker, CPA.

So hang on, Dave, one sec. So that was Paul, Dr. Paul McCarty. He's doing the education, he's heading up the education piece of this, the study. There hasn't been really any debate about whether or not he's qualified. He's extremely qualified. But what we've heard and what it states in this, and when— what's out there is that there is no financial piece to this study, that there's no one to do the financial analysis. And so let's just see. So Mike Winkler is the person that is overseeing the financial part of the analysis.

So Michael DeWinker, CPA, will lead the financial analysis part of the feasibility study. His extensive background includes being the former Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President of Larry H. Miller Management Corporation. He also was the controller for Pinnacle Security and was responsible for the development of, of an accounting and finance function that supported a multimillion-dollar customer base. During his career, he has led financial feasibility studies for various projects, including acquisitions, construction projects, and real estate and development projects. He has a network within the CPA community that allows him access to high-level CPAs in both the public and private sector. In addition, he worked as an auditor and was rated an exceptional performer at the prestigious Big Four accounting firm KPMG. Early in his career, he also worked at Arthur Andersen.

Okay, thank you. So, and his resume goes on for 3 more pages. But to claim that someone who was the, the chief financial officer for Larry Miller Corporation, which is one of the bigger corporations in the, in the state, and is also the, this, the chief financial officer for Pinnacle, to claim that person is not capable of bringing together some CPAs and doing a feasibility study. If you believe that, then you don't understand accounting or math. I'm sorry. But I just want to clarify that because that's, that's important. That's the reason I'm bringing that up is because that's what you're voting on, on the petition, is that these people are not qualified and they should be disqualified immediately. We obviously wouldn't have hired them if we felt they should be disqualified immediately. So I'm going to stop here, but how many of you pay income taxes or state income taxes?

Sure.

Okay.

So in the state of Utah, 100% of what you pay in state income taxes goes to education. How many of you pay property taxes? Okay. 65% of what you pay in property taxes goes to education. So there's a lot of money on the line here. And so the question is, why are they trying so hard to stop the study? I mean, can't we just have a study? And can't we know the answers to these questions that we talked about earlier? Because I don't know if property taxes are going to go up 35%. I can't— if I knew things like that, we'd be a lot more profitable on my investment firm. Nobody knows those kinds of things. So to claim that anyone knows that without doing an analysis or study is pulling it out of the sky. So my question is, why? I'm just asking, why are they trying so hard to stop the study? Why do they not want anyone to see the numbers? Why is this group so opposed and so, so afraid to have this independent feasibility study. Why, why don't they want armed citizens to know whether they're putting in more or getting more back? And why, in that light, all we're talking about, if we're not allowed to do the study, is we're censoring us. And we're— this is the complete opposite of transparency. With transparency, we can see exactly what's going on. So this is simple. Do a study. That's all we're asking for. I mean, the other things we did were a lot more difficult. Stop repealing the entire State Street Master Plan. That was difficult. All we're talking about is a study. Once we have the study done, evaluate the results. Okay, then we look at the results, then the City Council decides, do we want to vote on this? Do the numbers make sense? I mean, does our city council look like we would vote on something that would raise taxes just because we felt like we wanted to? I mean, that doesn't make any sense. You know, we're all conservative. So evaluate the results. And then, and then we would put it on the ballot. And once it's on the ballot, if it goes that far, then you, the citizens, would make that decision. We wouldn't make that decision. All we're doing is providing the mechanism so you can figure out and make the best decision. So, to go completely off the rails about a feasibility study, I'm saying, let's do the study. In my business, we do studies all the time. This is not unusual. Terry and I were on the audit committee for the city. We sat in meetings a couple weeks ago, and the study needed to have an audit. The city has a $130 million budget. We had to go through 5 firms, we had to pick 2 and then pick one that would be the most likely. No one had a breakdown, and that's a major study. Anyway, I can assure you that what this city council is doing is representing the people that elected them. The city— the city council is focused on doing what is best for the taxpayers. That's why we're having a study. What is best for the teachers. that work in our schools, because if we go down this path, it will only be for the betterment of the teachers. And most importantly, and least talked about, what is best for the children that attend our schools. So thank you. All right, moving on. We've got some appointments here. We've got, we've got consent items. So we need to have an approval of the meeting minutes. Yes, the public appearances have been closed.

I'm on your agenda for a different topic. And I feel like now what you've said, what I'd like to say fits in with what you said, but it's a whole different topic.

Yeah, I'm, I'm sorry. It's We're past that. I apologize.

I've been here for 6 months.

Anyway, whatever.

I just felt like it fit into what exactly followed what you just spoke about.

I appreciate that. I just have to follow the protocol of the meeting.

It's not—

no, I'm on your open agenda meeting.

It's not about the school.

Well, we might—

I should have raised my hand earlier, and that's my fault.

Okay. All right, so we back to the consent items. We need approval of meeting minutes.

So moved, Mr. Mayor.

Second.

Okay.

Aye.

And I have a caveat that they're going to fix one of my statements on the— so I say aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Thank you.

The motion passes. Or the approval passes. All right, we've got some appointments. And what I'd like to do is turn the time over to East City Council members that work with these councils. First, I'd like Debbie to talk about the people that she's working with on the Arts Council.

Thank you, Mayor. It is my privilege to be the liaison to the Arts Council. We have a 13-member commission council, of which 5 of them will be new appointments. We did take the time at our last Arts Council meeting to review applications. If I remember correctly, we had 13 or 14, maybe Char can tell me our total. We went through them individually, um, and we are pleased to put forward these 5 names. Um, each of them had a different focus, interests, I remember some had a theater background, other had— Mr. Swain does our another theater, Freedom Cries, Cries of Freedom. And I'm sorry if I can't remember the other people, but all of them were qualified. All of them had unique and interesting arts background, and I think they will be a great asset. So we're putting forward— I'm putting forward these names, and I believe that they will be a great asset to the Arts Council.

You want to read their names?

Sure.

Michael Smith, Labine, Alex Malone, Scott Swain, and Mike Ramsey.

And if they're here, could they stand?

Scott's here in the back.

Second that motion, Mr. Mayor.

Okay, thank you. Let's vote on it.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Thank you. The appointment's passed. Next we've got Jeff, if you'd like to speak about your appointments to Transportation Advisory Commission.

Yes, thank you, Mr. Mayor. So I serve on the Transportation Advisory Commission, and in a similar process, we have reviewed several applications for individuals that would like to serve on this commission. And this evening, we would like to put forth the names of Laura Redford and Jay Prisbilla. If they're here, would they stand? There's Laura. Thank you, Laura, for being here. She endured a grueling interview session with Sam and I, and we are grateful for both of these individuals, obviously living in Orem and both willing to serve on this commission. They both have a background that will be complementary and give us some, some good opinions and some good insights as we move forward on that commission. So we would like to to present the names of Laura Redford and Jay Prisbilla to serve on the Transportation Advisory Commission.

I'll second that.

Thank you.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

The appointment passes.

Thank you.

Last, we've got some appointments to Senior Citizens Advisory Commission. Dave Spencer is over that.

So I've had the privilege of serving on the Senior Citizens Advisory Commission for quite a few years and had the joy to work with Gina Brodson, and she's totally awesome. And I think these are all new appointments, so Gina approved all of them and I also approved them, so I appreciate your willingness to serve, willingness to serve. So we have Joyce Otten. She's here. She's the one who had to leave. Kathleen Thurgood, Sarah Paulson, Virl Huley, and Craig Hewish. So we'd like to appoint them to the Senior Citizen Advisory Commission and excited to get going.

Second his motion, Mr. Mayor.

Thank you, Jeff.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

And then, Mayor, I'd like to have Gina Burleson come up and talk a little bit about Kay Bradford, who served on the commission for many, many, many, many years. She was so energetic and enthusiastic, and I still have a pink flamingo from her, but I will turn the time over to Gina. Thank you.

Oh yes, make that picture of her bigger and more beautiful. And I do want to remind Mayor and City Council We're seniors, we go to bed early.

Thank you, Jeff.

Hi.

Okay.

Hi.

All right. I really started jotting down some ideas about this amazing woman, and then I remembered that her granddaughter had written such a beautiful post. So I'm going to share that with you. It's from Emily Powers' father.

She's so energetic.

She said, how do you live a life with feathers, sparkles, and glamour, with wonderful and relaxed God's in charge.

With See's candy and chocolate kisses always shared with contagious positive attitude. Not for lack of trials, life brings many trials, but despite trials. I really started jotting down— With beautifully written notes to all you love. With fine china and mismatched foods.

Entertaining, always entertaining.

With service to others, award-winning service.

With enthusiasm above all else.

With feather enthusiasm. With business savvy when called upon to support those you love. With 7 kids who feel like even 98 years isn't enough. With grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren proud to tell everyone that you are there. With a light so bright that no one that has met you failed to feel the warmth of it. This, always, this is how you live, Charlie. And that is exactly how Kay Bradford lived.

Thank you.

We're a little bit dimmer here on earth because of our loss. Business savvy. If I could throw kisses at you and get away with it, I would. She got away with it at every city council presentation meeting, reciting her poem about hugs and kisses, and she'll be greatly missed.

Thank you.

So, Jeannie, could you mention Well, we witnessed it on the senior bus or the van.

Oh, she is actually, um, the crowning jewel on the back of that bus. We had a graphic wrap on it, and I had had a photographer come in and do pictures, and we took from those pictures, we took Kay's picture and put it on the back, and she's waving, and it looks like she's just inviting you to come and be our friend.

We greatly And in conversations with her family over the week, she passed away last Monday, which she would have named Marvelous Monday.

Whenever she saw you, whatever day it was, she had— it was Thrilling Thursday or Marvelous Monday, or, you know, it was always something wonderful. But they asked if they could have the bus at her viewing and her funeral, and we were just so happy to make that happen for her. And it looks like she's inviting you to come and be our friend.

And in conversations with her family—

Right now we've got item 9.4, a public hearing. Let's see, we'll receive public comment on the Community Development Block Grant projected use of funds for fiscal year 2022-23.

So, Mayor, Gina, if they need to leave because it's past your bedtime, that would be great. We will excuse you. Appreciate you coming. And we look forward to having meetings at 2 o'clock so it's not past your bedtime.

Hey, and Gina, if you see her family, would you give them our very best and our condolences? She was a bright star.

Okay, thank you.

You're fine. Okay, Ken, we'll, we'll turn it to you.

Okay, I give up.

I volunteered to do this.

I give up. I have a question for Ken. How many times have you appeared before us?

What number is this?

18.

You obviously—

Well, I think it's important because I— you may need to get a special award for that. We'll try to make this quick because it's been a long night already. So I'm Ken Matthews, I'm Community Services Manager here at the City of Orem, and this is Ken Ramson. He is our chair of our commission and he'll be presenting with my help tonight.

Hello, Mayor and council members. Appreciate the opportunity to appear before you once again and appearing on behalf of the CDBG Advisory Commission. And this is not our COVID— we don't have any COVID recommendations for tonight. Tonight is our regular CDBG funding that we have recommendations for. So I first want to acknowledge the other members of our commission: Tanya Harmon, Giovanna Alisa, Eileen Black, Stephen Heaps, Ashley Gill, and Miguel Echeverria. We thank them for serving on our commission and, and for their help with this process. So just a quick reminder that CDBG funding goes to cities with over 50,000 people, and historically the funding has been between $600,000 and $700,000. We do not yet know our official funding amount for the current year, and we're expecting to be around what it was last year, which was approximately $684,000. And so, with assuming what the funding will be similar to last year, and with the rollover CDBG funding from unspent funds from previously, and with program income from like the loans for the home revitalization program. So with those funds, we have approximately $775,000 to make recommendations to you on today.

Thank you.

So just— we have partnered with Provo and Utah County.

Is that advancing?

There we go.

And we have a joint effort with them to— with the oversight that's required for these grants, trying to simplify this process. We, the last 3 years now approximately, have been partnering with Orem and— excuse me, Orem, Provo, and Utah County have partnered to reduce paperwork, to reduce oversight. to hopefully make the process more efficient. And so I served with, with Joey Alisa on the joint commission that we had with those other, other entities. And so we had funding requests, and the idea being that there'll be less, less bureaucracy to deal with if we, if we split up how this is done. And Not split up, excuse me, if we share how this is done. And so Orem City, our recommendation to the council is that we fund as part of this process— Provo and Utah County have other funding things that they're, that they're funding— and so we recommend that Community Health Connect be funded $13,290, Kids on the Move $8,860, and the Family Haven, formerly Utah Valley Family Support, be funded $26,000.

Thank you.

$19,580. These funding requests are being funded only by Orem, and then combined with Provo, Orem, and Utah County, Mountain Lion Community Health Center, the other entities are chipping in as well, but the Orem recommended, recommended funding amount is $19,745. So the total is listed there. There are no joint capital projects this year. And so, as we've mentioned earlier in the presentation, this is our funding that's available to allocate, and now we'll move on to the city-specific projects. So previously it was the projects we're partnering with Provo and with Utah County on. These are Orem-only projects. And so the first one we want to make a recommendation on is the Orem Police Department's Homeless Services Fund. These— this fund is used to help get homeless people to other services and resources. So we recommend that this amount be funded. And the Orem Police Department is requesting $30,000 for victim services. So an important program. We heard a presentation about that, and we think this is a valuable program for Orem City. We recommend that this request be funded as well. And the city's requesting $136,950 for the administration of the CDBG program. CDBG program. We recommend this be funded since it's an important funding for our city. And we recommend the— that the loan that was taken on a few years ago, several years ago, that this can— this payment be made since it's probably not optional to not make it.

So.

And the City of Orem Community Services is seeking $100,000 for the Critical Home Repair. This program serves low-income people with loans and grants to fix up their homes and properties. That's an important program for Orem, and we recommend that it be funded as well. And then the City Community Services is seeking $115,000 for the city's code enforcement efforts in target neighborhoods. So it pays a portion of salaries of one sworn and one non-sworn officer. We recommend that this is important. We heard a presentation on this. This is an important program for the city, and we recommend that this be funded as well. And so we recommend that $5,000 be applied to the city CBG Community Services neighborhood revitalization activities. There's examples of what those are on the slide before you, but we think these are important— this is an important program that we recommend be funded. And we also recommend that the new roof at the Senior Friendship Center be— that this be funded. This is an important resource for the city, and this would be an important project to help protect that resource for the city. Here's a summary of public services that we've presented to you, and the next slide is the non-public services summary. And so, total recommended allocation, again, that includes some income, program income, and unspent funds from previous, previous processes. So that's the amount that's available. We just want to note that this week, ironically, is National Community Development Week. And so we just want to highlight, on behalf of our Commission, just want to highlight the important funding that this provides to our city. And I thank Mr. Mayor for you presenting that, that resolution earlier in the last week, it was. So thank you for that and your support of this program.

Thank you. Do we have any, any questions?

First of all, if we approve this, does this mean you don't come back again, Ken? I mean, I'll be happy to not approve it to get you and Kenna back again.

We'll be back in 2 weeks.

Okay, good.

I do ask—

Jamie, I'm assuming that, Kenna, you and others vet these so that everything we're approving is within the guidelines, because we don't all know all the guidelines for these fundings, and make sure that you have vetted those and feel comfortable with the recommendation.

That is correct. So 15% of the allocation can go to public services. So we give 10% of that to the, the joint entitlement process, 5% to OREM-only projects, 20% can be allocated for administration. So we take that full 20%, and then everything else can be allocated. They're all vetted by both the Joint Commission for the joint projects and the Commission through us.

Thank you for that assurance. Thank you both for your efforts.

Yeah, thank you, Debbie.

Um, 2 things. First, um, this looks like this isn't COVID-related. This is just the normal CDBG. Have all the COVID funds been allocated, or are they what's been rolling forward here? And those are the ones— those will not be rolling forward. These are just funds that maybe weren't used throughout the years that we're just rolling over. Um, so, but how much of the COVID do we have?

Do you know?

After we present in a couple weeks, we'll have about $50,000 Okay. And then I hadn't brought up the question of the water bottle, water bottle fill-up things at our parks. Any, any idea if that's something you could consider? I did talk to Public Works about that, and they're looking into maybe making that request through the—

Okay, thank you so much.

I agree. I think that's a great request. Dave Spencer.

So, so, Ken, I've got a question on Now I Can Foundation. Do you think they would qualify for anything on the CDBG?

Um, yes, they could apply.

So, so maybe somebody could reach out to Tracy Christensen and see, because they just— their grand opening is the 19th. I think that's a great program that I think that hopefully we can help in that area.

Yeah, so she, she would have been made— given communication to apply. So the application process actually starts in October. And so she could apply again in October, starting in October. Okay, but I'll make sure she knows about it.

Yeah, they've had—

they've gotten funds in the past from various entitlements. I'll check with her.

The grand opening is coming up on the 19th, and I think it's a great thing that we have an arm. So I think if we can benefit them, that'd be great.

I think—

Do we have any public comments at this time?

Yeah, Mayor, just to be clear, we're opening the public hearing right now for public comment.

And we're opening the public hearing comments for this particular project. Do we have any? Okay, we'll close the public comments. Thank you for your presentation and your good work. Appreciate it.

Thank you.

Mayor, can I make a motion then? Should I just go ahead with that?

We—

this is actually only a—

we have to have 2 public hearings on these, these funds, so you will vote again in May. That's when you'll vote on the allocations. So it's required by HUD.

So thank you.

Thank you.

I was about to do the same thing.

Yeah, that's it.

Take it back. They're coming back in 30 days.

Oh, I have one more question. There was supposed to be a— sorry, Mayor, I apologize. There was supposed to be a food pantry at the The Friendship Center is getting closer. It's getting closer. They've had some supply chain issues with their refrigerator, but it's getting closer. Yeah. Okay, so the answer we get— I just remembered that was— yeah, that was on your list.

Okay, thank you. Now we'll move on to item 9.5.

Can this move right to a motion, Heather?

Does it need public No, no, it's not, it's not a public hearing.

So we're not going to have a public hearing.

Are you ready for a motion?

I want to have just a discussion.

Okay.

Okay. Um, because these citizens from Palisades have been working on this over a long time. And we just want you to know that, I mean, we've, we've heard you. We've heard your concerns. We've had more emails go back and forth than you can imagine within the council. And we came to the conclusion that, that we think that the, the bullbouts, chokers, whatever you want to call them, should be taken out of both of those neighborhoods. And in Palisades—

Okay.

Palisades, we're going to leave the, the speed tables, the speed tables. In the other area, are we going to do the painting, or—

We haven't, we haven't talked about striping, but we're going to remove the bulb-outs.

Okay.

And we can re-stripe, get with our streets department and stripe whatever is—

Painting doesn't need to come to the City Council.

Right. But the idea was we were going to take out the bulb-outs, and to help offset any concerns about that, we were going to do some painting in there to try and create the same effect.

We'll make sure—

we'll have the conversation with our traffic team and make sure we do that.

OK. Bottom line, we have heard you, and we're taking care of you. So now you can make a motion.

Jeff, can I just say one thing?

Sure.

There was also some discussion about putting up some signs in the neighborhood near University Place so that people aren't wandering into the neighborhood thinking that they can go through to University Place. There was some discussion about putting up some signs that would prevent people into going into those neighborhoods, and I think that would be a worthwhile thing to do as well.

Yeah, we'll add, we'll add signage to the conversation with our traffic team.

Yeah.

I think we're also going to have paint on the— on that over there, 500 East, that can mitigate speed.

So I think—

but we're going to pull all the—

I'm sorry, I'm just calling paint striping.

So, okay, no, that's fine. So we're going to pull all the chokers on 500 East out.

Yeah, the chokers that are located between 800 South and 1150 South along 5th East will be pulled out.

Yes.

Good deal. Thank you, Terry.

So I do have a comment about the survey that was done. So this March 22nd, Addie Burris— I don't know if Addie's here tonight, but she's at BYU, works at BYU, does surveys for the military, the government, universities. Anyway, she, she came and did a community comment. I'm just going to quote a couple things she said. The questionnaire created by the city is a great example of survey bias. This is something that researchers try very hard to avoid. Most of the 13 questions focused on our feelings towards pedestrian safety in general. Those questions that were sent to us were inappropriate, except for the final 2 questions, which were about the choker islands.

This is misleading and skewed the data. by using emotional feelings about our safety, which we all believe is important. The survey should have been— survey should have been entitled Pedestrian Safety in Orem City instead of what it was actually called, Please Let Us Know How You Feel About Raised Crosswalks on Palisade Drive. If the city really wants feedback about choker islands, they should have omitted the first 11 questions. I just bring this up because I hope in going forward in the future, if there's a survey that's going to be done, first of all, it should be seen by the city council, and it should not be a push-pull or what they call survey bias.

So I think I heard some of the frustrations that you had as citizens. I got— by the way, I got the survey and I live down by the mall, but I don't know if that's just because I'm on the city council or what. But so I thought that was, was a little embarrassing that, you know, it wasn't just a yes/no survey. But we hear you, and I'm so glad to get to be part of this vote tonight too. And Dave Johnston came and spoke about this. I don't see Dave, but talked about all the, all the north-south roads, and none of them have them except for Palisades. Anyway, great, great comments from the citizens. Thanks for your patience.

You've been working on this for a couple years.

So, can I just say one more thing? I just want to clarify too, we talked about this work meeting, but just to make sure I just want to make sure that we've got it here that the bulb-outs or chokers are going to be removed and also the traffic delineators, because I got an email, few emails about those.

That's going to—

it's not an, you know, we'll make sure that that's, that's part of that bulb-out, so it will be removed also. Is that correct?

Yeah, the delineators are actually permanently mounted to the bulb-outs, so you remove them out, you remove the bulb-outs, you remove the delineators as well.

Well, we appreciate the bulb-out manufacturers making this easier. All right, somebody want to make a motion?

I'll make the motion.

Okay, okay.

The motion is Marin City Council—

let's see, I move that the removal of bulb-out traffic calming devices along Palisade Drive, which include 8th North to Center Street and 500 East from 800 South to 1150 South, be removed.

Second.

Jeff?

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

The motion passes.

All right, we're almost done. Item number 10.

Mayor, I will be— I'll be very brief, given obviously I know we still have some time on the agenda for another agenda item, but I wanted to just bring you up to speed on a couple of things. The first one is we are in the process of making seasonal hires this year. Unfortunately, that effort is becoming very, very difficult. I'm worried— I'm starting to get worried that we have people to mow the grass, for example, and maintain some of our parks. We, we are posting jobs at $15 an hour and are not receiving applications, so we are actually in the process of raising our seasonal rates, potentially $16, $17 an hour, so that we can compete competitively in doing that work. I think that's just an indication of the, the work environment and the, the demand for employees that we have. So if, if you know of individuals who are interested in seasonal work, we have a job for them at a very, very competitive wage.

I think Tom likes the mow grass.

Yeah, it's more than I make on the council.

I've had several, I've had several of our department directors express an interest as well. So we did have a meeting yesterday in relation to Hillcrest Park. That project is moving along very nicely. We had a conversation with Bud Mahas, Mahas Construction. They were the winning bidder. We actually sat down with them yesterday, had a very good conversation with them. And so they will be— and have yet to be— they will be notified that they have been selected as the general contractor for our Hillcrest Park project. If you're familiar, for example, with the All Abilities Park in St. George, that is one of the projects that Bud and his team have worked on, as well as other parks projects around the Wasatch Front. So we're very— excited to work with the firm, and we are working in earnest with Blue Line Design trying to get to what we call 30% design of the park. And immediately we will begin to meet not just with the architects but with Bud Mejia's construction as well. So I wanted to let you know—

Jamie, can I ask you one question?

Sure.

The renovation or the demolition of the Hillcrest part that we're not preserving, will they be doing that portion too?

So yes, we, we had a conversation with them.

They—

that is included as part of the agreement. There is some asbestos in that building, and so we will need to work through some asbestos mitigation as well as part of that effort. But yes, they will be contracted to do that work. We also had a meeting last week with City Center architects, very encouraging meeting. One of the biggest concerns that we've had is potentially in aligning a new building on the City Center campus impacting a good majority of the landscaping that is to the west of this building. They have brought forward some ideas and designs that would in many respects preserve a lot of the landscaping that is on the west side of the building, not preserve all of it, but preserve a good amount of it, including what we all call and identify as the Freedom Tree. So we're looking at that. If we can stay in this building while we're building a new building, it would save us over $2 million in relocation and rental fees and things like that. So we are kind of working in earnest to that end. And we feel confident that we have some options that we'll show you that hopefully will meet with your approval.

That's great news.

I didn't—

Yeah, that, that's the hope.

Great hope.

It's—

that's the hope.

I didn't have great hope before.

At the end of this week, we actually closed the bidding process for general contractors to be the general contractor for the City Center building. So once that effort is closed, we had a pre-construction or a pre-bid meeting, submission meeting, a week and a half ago. We had, I believe, 9 contractors that participated in that meeting. So we had some very, very good turnout, including some of the big names that you see up and down the Wasatch Front, and also the same firm that built our fitness center. So very encouraged by that. And then finally, just a word about Utopia UIA. We continue to see growth in the Utopia UIA network. And for fiscal year 2023, as you know, we have a debt obligation for the original Utopia debt that was— that we bonded for many years ago when we initially started down the road with this project. For the first time ever, part of the reimbursement reimbursement that we will receive from Utopia UIA this year will be a contribution that will allow us to offset some of our original debt service responsibility. So we don't have a specific— we don't have a specific number yet from— obviously we have a tentative number, but it could be, for example, $250,000 to $300,000. And if everything continues based on the way the network is growing, that number obviously would improve and increase over time. So I'm encouraged. I still acknowledge that we still have a very significant debt service obligation, but if we could incrementally cut down on that debt obligation $250,000 a year for many years in the future. We have that obligation with us till 2039, so that would be a great win for the city. So that's, that's exciting news. Yes, so we have one neighborhood that remains, and to Councilmember McDonald's comments, we have supply chain issues, so Just like any other construction project, we're struggling to get the necessary materials from, from Asia to finish the project.

I saw the—

I saw Utopia in my neighborhood. Is it up near me?

Yeah, there are, there are pieces specifically in what we call, from my memory, Neighborhood 18, which is that neighborhood that is to the east of Palisade Park and to the kind of the north of Palisade Park as well.

Oh, to the north?

Yeah, so that area.

Okay, thank you.

And then little, little kind of outstanding pieces that have been somewhat difficult to get to, but yes, Utopia is planning an event, uh, midsummer, we believe, where they will announce that they have completed the network for all original Utopia cities, which is a significant milestone. That's all I have. Thank you, Mayor.

Okay, thank you, Jamie. All right, we're going to adjourn. I'd like to make a motion to go to a closed meeting. This meeting is to be held in room— at 56 North State Street in room 107 of the Orem City Center. We're going to— the City Council will adjourn to a closed meeting for discussion of the character, professional competence, or physical or mental health of an individual pursuant to Utah Code Section 52-4-205. And I need someone to make a motion.

Did you just make the motion?

I made a second.

So second.

Yeah.

And then just individually vote for this.

Tom?

Aye.

So you're—

Debbie?

Aye.

Dave?

Aye.

Terry?

Aye.

Lynnae?

Aye.

Jeff?

Aye.

And myself?

Aye.

We're adjourned. Thank you for coming.