City Council · 2022-06-28

Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. We're so excited to be able to present to you today.

We've worked hard on this project over the last year.

So, I'm Nate Prescott. I'm the Economic Development Analyst here for the city. I'm presenting on behalf of Kathy Lewis, our Economic Development Manager, and myself. Kathy is out sick today. She wouldn't be here, or she would be here unless she wasn't physically able, and that's the case. So, so we're excited to present to you our current economic development strategic plan was created in 2014, and it's guided a lot that we've done over the last few years, and it needed to be updated. So that's where— that's why we've contracted to create a new economic development strategic plan that will guide us over the next 5 to 7 years. And through an RFP process, we interviewed multiple firms and we've contracted with Thomas P. Miller and Associates to create our economic development strategic plan. Over the last year, we held 6 different stakeholder workshops to try to get engagement and feedback from the community to try to guide and inform our economic development strategic plan. And so this— these strategies come directly from those work sessions. This plan will serve as a guide to support and strengthen local businesses and to create a thriving business environment here in Orono. So I'd like to introduce our consultants from Thomas P. Miller and Associates. We have Brett Weiler, he's the Director of Economic Development, and Aaron Finley, he's the Senior Consultant.

I'll turn the time over to Brett and Aaron.

Yeah, thanks, Nate. And as Nate mentioned, my name is Brett Weiler. I'm the Director of Economic Development. with Thomas P. Miller and Associates, and we'll give you a little bit more context about our firm here in a moment. This is my 4th trip to Orem. I first set foot in Orem, I think, July of last year, and I've enjoyed my visits. I've really relished the opportunity to connect with not only the staff members here at the City of Orem, but also to get to know some folks here in this room and some other community leaders that have participated in this process. So Our goal here today is to give you an overview of where we've been, our process, our methodology, touch briefly on some of our key themes or key findings, and then really get into— well, not the most important part, but we want to outline our strategic recommendations for you and then get to the most important part of the presentation, and that's fielding questions from all of you folks. So with that, I mentioned we are with Thomas P. Miller and Associates. We're based out of Indianapolis, Indiana. We've been in business for about 30 years. We are a professional consulting firm that specializes in workforce development, economic development evaluation. We do some work in education and broadband, etc. We're a fully remote team. We have employees across, I think, 15 different states. That gives us, I think, really unique perspective about programs and processes and tools and strategies that work across the country in different communities, and we try to apply that when appropriate to communities like yours. What we're going to do today, I mentioned a little bit, we've given you some introductions, again, some of our key findings. I want to frame up what we believe the purpose of an economic development strategy is and could be for you folks, and then get into those recommendations and field some questions. So, an economic development strategic plan. I have a quote on here that I think really summarizes the essence of what we've tried to create here with this plan. And that's really just bringing people together across the community to outline a vision for the economic future of Orem. It's an appraisal of what we deem resources, programs, perhaps constraints for the business community, and important— more importantly, maybe the opportunities for businesses in Orem. We wanted to outline a roadmap for the Economic Development Division to enhance their performance so they could better support the businesses in Orem, and outline steps that we believe that division and city leaders and key stakeholders can take to develop that economic vision for the future here. I think it's important to note that this is not a policy memorandum. This is not a— any type of legislative recommendation. There is no recommendations on how to allocate budget spending line items. This is really a plan developed to ensure that the Economic Development Division has the tools and the visions to best serve the business community here in Orem. And we'll get into a little bit about more of like what that means here in a moment. So With that, I'm going to pass it to my colleague, Aaron, to kind of talk through some of our process to get to this point.

Thank you, Brett. Just really quickly, everyone, my name is Aaron Finley, Senior Consultant at TPMA, as was mentioned. My role in this project, well, it's been multifaceted, to be quite honest with you, but part of it has been to work on some of the quantitative data and a lot of the research revolving, you know, involving Or, um, what you see behind me on the screen, uh, is, uh, kind of our scope of service for, uh, this almost year-long process that we've been engaged in to develop this economic development strategic plan that we're going to be covering, uh, some of those recommendations with you today. Uh, we started with that project launch. Basically what you'll see in front of you, we follow a logical model, uh, that starts, commences with a discovery phase, uh, in which, uh, we're going to cover a little bit more detail here on the next slide. Uh, that moves into an analysis, the SWOT analysis, identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the community. Then we did quite a number, as Nate mentioned earlier, and we'll talk a little bit here on the next slide as well, of focus groups, meeting with business, local leaders in the community, a variety of stakeholders to make sure that what we are finding out, either through some of our interviews and meetings and also through some of our desktop research and secondary sources, actually matches what we are finding Here, and it's happening on the ground in the community. And then that culminates, of course, with our final planning presentation, which— here we are doing that exactly right now. So did want to talk a little bit about that discovery phase, give you a little bit of an overview of where we've been and how we came to the recommendations that we're going to discover here. We do, as I mentioned, start out with quantitative data collection analysis. We have a variety of sources for our data. We got information, in fact, from some local sources. We've talked to the Utah State Tax Commission and got some information from them. We also, of course, use information from the US Census Bureau, the American Community Survey, and a variety of third-party sources, that some of which offer statistical analysis to produce some projections, a variety of statistical methods that we use. there as well. We also have reviewed over 2 dozen documents, including city budgets, master plans, variety of studies, agreements, many of which of course are specific to Orem. Reviewed those as part of our, part of our discovery phase. And then we, as I mentioned earlier, did a lot of stakeholder engagement. So we've actually had a half dozen focus groups, site visits. Brett mentioned he's been here 4 times. I'm lucky enough to be here today. My first trip to Orem, so thank you for having me. Including in those site visits, we've, as I mentioned, members of local business community, other regional and local stakeholders, several elected and appointed officials as well. We've had multiple sessions seeking feedback on the strategies we're going to go over with you today, on those findings and those recommendations as well. And in total, we've interacted with, I think we counted over 75 individuals connected to Orem who are committed to helping shape these recommendations, and of course the future of economic development and the business community in this city. So I skipped, skipped my one big shining moment here. So these are high-level findings from all of that document and, and research review that we just went over. Some really top-line information: Orem has a rapidly growing population.

I don't think that's going to be a surprise to anybody in the room.

We also found, of course, that Orem residents are healthy, they're well educated. But one of the things that was interesting, and I, I mentioned this during our session with the Planning Commission, Orem has 2 populations. There's the resident population and there's the working population. About 80% of Orem residents commute outside of the city for their jobs, and about 80% of the people who work in the city live outside of Orem. So there are 2 populations here. It's important to keep those separate just when we think about the data and look at these different things. Top occupations when we do look at the workers here, service-related, typically relatively moderate, low income. A lot of people work in Orem. Those top industries are post-secondary education, a lot of retail and business services, for instance marketing and IT. Those are the top industries when we look across the top 10 are all in those 3 or 4 areas. We do know when we look also that we have limited land. We're pretty built out here in Orem. Again, not a surprise I'm sure to many of you, limited land available for residential developments. The median sale price for homes is, is growing. In fact, it has recently reached over $500,000. It's already surpassing what were projections for a few years down the line. Just some top-line data as part of our job here is to give an update on some of that information about the city. That's a quick overview here, and we'll be happy to field questions a little bit later, but I will hand it back to Brett to talk about the strategic framework for our recommendations.

recommendations.

Yeah, thanks, Aaron. And maybe just a couple quick takeaways from me here is, you know, we believe that we've performed a pretty comprehensive discovery phase through this process. Not only the, you know, traditional desktop research, but we've tried to come out here and talk to people face to face and to get feedback from folks that are living here as often as possible. And so that comprehensive discovery phase has informed our strategic recommendations. We— so the, you know, the premier trade association for economic development practitioners is the International Economic Development Council, and they outline really these kind of 4 foundations of economic development for entities who are performing economic development. You see those 4 foundations on the screen here, and that's how we organized our strategic framework around these, I guess, 4 functions, if you will. And you'll see it's about retaining businesses, it's about attracting businesses, it's about launching new businesses, and then it's also being mindful of the quality of life in the community to support the folks that are working in these businesses. So I want to go into each of these very briefly because again, I think the most important purpose today is to answer questions that you may have. But our first, and arguably what I believe is the most important aspect of economic development, is keeping the businesses that you have here. They've already planted that proverbial flag in your community. They are most likely to continue to create jobs, and so we believe that the strategic priority of the Economic Development Division should be business retention and expansion outreach. We believe that the Orem Business Alliance is a really great vehicle to do that. We believe they're doing great work now. We believe that it can be more intentional. More strategic, and is the most cost-effective way to do economic development in City Hall. The other note I would point out is that we believe that there's an opportunity to better track aggregate information. So intentionally meeting with businesses and asking them what opportunities they may have or what challenges they're facing, we believe that information should be kept in a CRM system and that aggregate information should inform the team of trends that will then hopefully inform programmatic offerings or outreach strategies. We believe that there's an opportunity to be more informed about the trends of the businesses here in the community. Second quick— or third thing I would point out too is we believe that there's a role for the division to play in supporting local businesses. We think that could be done with perhaps reviewing current city procurement policy to ensure that we're taking full advantage of procuring goods and services from our local businesses. We also believe there are opportunities to educate the business community, maybe our larger employers, about opportunities that they may have to purchase goods and services from local vendors when appropriate. Next, I want to talk about business attraction. So business attraction is always kind of the top line, maybe the most exciting aspect of economic development, I would argue that this requires intentionality, and it involves and requires a very— requires a process. And we believe that one of the first steps the division should do, should they look to attract business to the community, is to understand what businesses make the most sense for Orem. So we recommend that they conduct a target industry analysis so that they can, again, intentionally go and try to attract businesses that support and complement the existing business base, but also maybe meet the needs of consumers here in the region as well. After the target industry analysis, if appropriate, we believe the division could activate an integrated business attraction marketing campaign. I think the keyword there would be integrated. It involves traditional media, social media, perhaps trade shows, etc. But that, we believe, comes after doing some of the early— earlier steps outlined in this particular focus area. Also, one important note, in our experience, regional, and maybe more so state economic development leaders are critical to the business attraction function. And so we would encourage local leaders to be more consistent and more structured and meet with state agencies and state leadership on a more regular basis and work as a team to conduct any business attraction activity. Third, entrepreneurship and innovation. I want to focus on just increasing access to capital across all stages of the business life cycle. We believe that there is a sophisticated capital ecosystem here in Orem and in the region. We encourage the team to assess the current ecosystem to ensure that there is capital access from business ideation all the way through business succession and everywhere in between. That requires working with commercial banks, private lenders, public entities that offer financial products as well. We also believe that, that business outreach is a great opportunity to better understand the capital needs of the businesses here in, in Orem. We also just want to talk briefly too on the entrepreneurship side. We believe that there are programmatic offering opportunities, offering more programming and education and seminars and networking events around innovative and tech-enabled industries and businesses. Take advantage of existing entities in the region. One in particular, the UVU Entrepreneurship Institute, is a great partner and continues and should continue to be a great partner for you moving forward. And then lastly, quality of life. What we really want to focus on here, I would say, is placemaking. We believe that there are opportunities to think perhaps differently about how to develop or reallocate potential funding sources to provide facade improvement plans to local businesses on some of your major transportation corridors. We also believe there are opportunities to perhaps make some of those corridors more accessible for pedestrians. And then we love some of the work that we've seen around the promotion of public interactive art to create deeper connections between community residents, residents and their community. So we tried to keep it brief. This is not a comprehensive overview of the strategies that we've outlined. We tried to provide you what we thought were the highlights from each focus area, and we are happy to answer any questions that you may have.

You come up with several ideas. I'm wondering who does these things. You know, you're talking to a strategic board of directors setting. Is this Nathan and Kathy? Is this the local Chamber of Commerce? Who does all these wonderful things? How do we get funding? I mean, I don't disagree with anything you said. I just don't know when all said and done who will be doing what. what we're talking about.

Yeah, in the plan, we've tried to identify a champion for each strategy. In some instances, we believe it is Nate and Kathy. We would never promote duplication of services or efforts. And so we would, I guess, generally encourage Kathy and Nate to continue to coordinate with appropriate regional agencies, chambers of commerce, when appropriate. So if somebody is already doing something that we've outlined as a strategy, we would suggest they support that ongoing initiative and look for opportunities to put it in.

And Nathan and Kathy, as you knew about those, I assume you pulled the mayor in on, you know, because people want to visit with the mayor if they're coming in to see the mayor. I guess if you've had some of those type of meetings in the future, you also talked about funding sources and I don't— I mean, I'm happy to get money off of that magic tree out there. And Nathan, do you know where those sources are that you apply for grants, etc.?

Yes, there are grants that come out and that we try to push out to businesses, but there are other organizations. So one, we have our revolving loan fund program. We still have money through that. And there are county and state programs that come up periodically. And there are also programs like groups of investors get together for new entrepreneurs that they want to fund them. And so a lot of these programs exist. It's a matter of getting in touch with them, making connections, and putting them in touch with the right businesses or the right channels and really connecting the dots.

Okay, if I may too, Nate, one of the other resources, Federal Economic Development Administration, they've been very helpful in the past as it relates to helping us achieve kind of more local-type efforts. The Business Resource Center at UVU, for example, is one of those where, while the center itself is under the umbrella of UVU, it was actually the city of Orem that made the application to get the federal money because that kind of effort had to go through a city. So we worked through the EDA in cooperation with UVU and then got BRC up and running, you can see contributed. And now we're even having conversations about, okay, how can we leverage this to make it better or make it different to kind of scale and meet the different needs of today as compared to when we did this 8 or 9 years ago. So that's also a good resource.

That's a great example of what we're talking about.

The other thing, if I may, There are certain things that, for example, our relationship with Utah Valley Chamber is a very positive relationship. And several years ago, they decidedly took a more policy-driven approach to, uh, to their efforts, similar to what the Salt Lake County Chamber has done in past years. And they kind of de-emphasized this idea of, you know, networking and small businesses coming together and engaging with each other. And so we decided that that was not something we could go without. So we actually created Warren Business Alliance. So, so when we talk about the— we call it the OBA. We talk about the OBA, that's a homegrown organization that we created, Nathan, Nate and Kathy created to connect with our local businesses and to provide them that venue or that opportunity to connect on a monthly basis for training, for networking, for better understanding what for example, resources are available through Small Business Administration, through other grants and other state programs and federal programs.

And to add to that, one thing that— one success from the Orem Business Alliance is that I really believe we built a strong channel of delivering important information to businesses. And for example, during COVID we, we started sending out information and about grants, programs, all these things to help businesses. And like, our, um, usage rate of businesses in Orem using those grants was a lot higher than all the smaller size facilities.

The PPP program, we had a disproportionate number of PPP payers, right, or recipients in Orem than we did the rest of the county. I attribute that in part to the efforts of Nate and Kathy and their They're more in business loans, right?

And so we built the channels to deliver that information and facilitate those relationships.

If I may, there's a saying that business owners are, are too busy running their business to understand all of the services and resources available to them in the economic development ecosystem. And that's why we believe the— probably the number one priority of Nate and Kathy and their team is to get out there, build that trust, build that report and ensure that those business owners are taking full advantages of the resources that are available to them.

So are there specific businesses— the reason I say that, in the past, full of sales tech, we did report, and we've always been efficient, I should say always, in hotels and service stations, gas stations, but we were far superior in other areas. So do you have specific recommendations like that to try to go off? Or are they more general?

So we, we did pull a sales leakage report for you. There's a somewhat lengthy explanation in the back and an appendix in the report that talks about the sales leakage report. When you do look at particular areas of retail, I'm Happy to report that lodging didn't appear in the negative as it had previously, but some of the others you know remain. There's very few, as you know, areas of the retail sector that that Oram is leaking those sales numbers to. But as far as kind of specifics about industries or anything like that, we were really kind of focused more on general approaches to. retention, attraction, expansion, and things of that nature. And one of the reasons that we did recommend that targeted industry analysis is to do a little bit more of that deep dive into some of those things to find out a little bit more information. However, there are full updated numbers on sales leakage reports provided in the report.

Do you give us targeted industries, or is that a recommendation that they—

Part of our recommendation is that there is a targeted industry analysis conducted. you know, I think an RFP put out and have the opportunity to do a little bit more of that deep dive. Again, we did provide some data in that space, but our scope was just maybe a little bit kind of broader, I guess, and strategic than focusing on some of those specific industries.

Although, again, a lot of that data is there for you to take a look at.

And I feel like a recommendation— when I was an economic development director of the American Fork, I would ask the this is what keeps you up at night. Yes. And what are your pain points?

And they—

it was interesting as you talk to people, very similar. Yes, very similar. So I think once you find those similarities, then you can work on those points and help. And I know one thing that we found at the downtown businesses in Merrick Court, on a sandwich sign, sandwich board signs on the blocks. I mean, I wouldn't know that was something that they And so we are able to work. Just a small example, when enough people have a pain point, you can try to work on a solution. So I do think it's good that they get out and talk to people because businesses will tell you what keeps them up. And probably right now is, you know, lacking employees and not having qualified employees. And I don't know how much you can do on that, but I think that's, that's a good question to always ask because an owner will tell you that information.

Yeah, absolutely.

Have you noticed a strong relationship between you and the Forum as far as internship opportunities? Is that something that you're—

That's something we're exploring. Yeah, so that's something that, uh, Kathy and I have brainstormed of like, how do we put, um, you know, because we believe that there's a, uh, there's a lot of great minds that are graduating, and then how do we keep them here in Orem?

How do we get them starting their business here in Orem?

And so that's something that we're brainstorming of, like, how do we make that connection? Whether it's, you know, one idea that we've had is, is holding kind of like a job fair, but where students come in, you know, because we have this venue where once a month we have businesses come in, we have a great turnout. So we've got this organic already going, and we thought of turning one of these into having students come in, they're like, hey, this— they have a presentation or like a little board that's like, this is what I'm interested in, these are the types of projects I can do, and I'd love to do an internship or start a job. And so it's kind of like reverse job fair. But so there's lots of opportunities, there's all kinds of things we're doing. That is a concern and one that we're looking to address.

You guys compare with what they're doing, suggestions with our graduates here?

We believe that, again, I hate to overuse the word, but just again, maybe being more intentional, we believe that the intellectual capacity at UVU can help the business community, right, through capstone projects, internships, right? And then I think in turn, the business community can also support those students by opening those doors, offering those opportunities. So in our plan, again, we've just offered maybe a more structured approach to making those connections and bringing those 2 realms together, if you will.

As far as interns go, I think it seems like Most— there is a disconnect between companies that think, oh, I think I have a union firm, and then you've got the internal departments, and those really need to be brought together, I think, because there's resources missing. Um, and then as far as, as far as presentation, I think— I mean, I agree with everything you said in the presentation. I think that's great. My question is, okay, so we've got this presentation, it's got this framework, and then we've got 2 people in our economic development department. So they got this big presentation. How do we get from here to there? I mean, it seems like it has to be broken down in terms of priorities and focus. And, and what have they got to work with as far as, you know, budget, all the rest? They might just seem so My concern about this is that, yeah, it's great, but a year from now, how much of that are we going to be executed on versus just that was a good idea? So that's, that's where I'm at. I'm curious to see, okay, how do you make that happen specifically, and then how are you held accountable for making that happen? Because that's a big project.

Yeah, so I appreciate the question, Mayor. It's a fair question. Um, 2 comments, and then Aaron or Nate. I will say that in our discovery, we recognized that Orem was very successful at implementing their 2014 economic development strategic plan. We spent some time really going line item by line item with the team, you know, hey, did you achieve this? Did you achieve that? And we found that they were very successful at implementing the previous plan. So I guess, for what it's worth, we have confidence that that will occur again. We've provided an implementation matrix in the plan that— I don't know if we prioritize steps. We certainly provide a timeline of steps that we believe need to occur in a certain order, maybe some short-term wins, maybe some medium-term wins, and then maybe some more long-term aspirations. And then, as I mentioned, previously, I think we've also outlined what we believe are champions and possible partners. I don't believe we are suggesting that Kathy and Nate go it alone, but to continue to connect with the local resources to attack it as an ecosystem. And then I will say, I think that there are very few recommendations in here, in my estimation, that are going to require like more capacity or more funding. We believe what we've seen is that they're doing all the right things, just some more strategic thinking, some more intentionality will continue to enhance the performance of the division as it is today.

I like, I like one of the 4 bullet points about keeping existing businesses as large as possible. Small and civic, that's critical. We've lost some big companies. Did you study the master plan and how that impacts— our new master plan, how that impacts your original study? Did that come into play?

So if— correct me if I'm wrong, is there a master plan being conducted right now? Are you in the process of developing a master plan as we speak?

There was a big change with State Street, which was going to be a lot of apartments. Now it's going to be retail business, and that's the direction of the city council. So, uh, just as you're talking about— well, you mentioned rapidly growing population. We're growing about 1% a year, so I wasn't sure what you're looking at. We've gone from 90 to 99 in 10 years. But Uh, but we have a lot of— Exactly, lots of big companies that were here that really hurt, and, and we were going to lose some small companies on State Street until that change was done. So that, I think, that's great. But just a question, you said you studied 75 individuals and used in the study any elected officials? Because the elected officials, I mean, all 7 of us I've been out knocking on doors and having a payment, hearing what citizens want. So were any of us involved in the study?

Yes, we had, um, David Spencer and Lynette Millett came to, uh, our stakeholder workshops, and all of you were invited.

I sent you all emails, and we also— we presented on it, um, either at the end of January or beginning of February.

We presented kind of an update, a midway update, and we briefed you on that as well, that that was coming up. So we invited everyone, we tried to get almost actually every single one of the Planning Commission came.

So—

So is this the Miller study or our own study? Is this part of what they did?

This is part of our own study.

Yeah.

That was a little—

I have to say, that was a little— it's shifted a little since then because we've since changed the State Street master plan. So we do have huge needs now for commercial development on State Street because that plan of the high-density Housing is now no longer known for that. So to me, what you're doing with coordinating with businesses and what you presented, this is huge. I mean, I like this. I grew up very young. We've got to figure out how to implement this now because we have this new zoning. We want to help these entrepreneurs, these graduates say, you know, we may have an old building on State Street, but come, come and let us work with you on how to renovate that, how to revitalize that area. and bring jobs that are something— I mean, we love our tax, our sales tax base, we love that, but we've lost— exactly, we've lost these more professional jobs. As you said, we've got 80% of our population living outside of Warren. So that's what I see, and I, I've seen their, um, luncheons. They're doing a great job, but I'm really hoping that you're giving them some additional ideas. These are great people.

Thank you.

To implement with that.

I think this, this study and the findings of the study can serve as a great foundation for the discussion that we need to have about State Street perspective. So we went through a process, we amended the State Street Master Plan, and we made some changes to it. But I think now we need to say, okay, We, we were heading down one path on State Street. Now let's redefine the path. And the redefinition of the path, I think, can in large part be driven by some of these findings. If in fact, for example, we want to encourage or promote certain things as noted in the plan, then how can we do that along State Street? And what are some things that we need to do and include and essentially vision along the State Street corridor to achieve many of the things that are noted in this plan. So I see this not necessarily as independent from, for example, State Street, but serving as a means to start a dialogue about State Street and say, this is what we know, and this is what we think we need and we want. Now, how can we in the implementation phase accomplish some of this?

Well, you've got a statement here. You said finding city leadership should forge strong and sustainable relationships with regional commercial real estate brokerage community. I agree with that 100% because they know the industry, they know what needs to be done. Those kind of meetings too.

But that really is true. I mean, anytime you have a commercial building, the success depends on the realtors you have promoting it. And so to the extent you have that promoting the essence of the foundation—

yeah, so thank you.

So yeah, so like I said, I like the plan. I'd like to see it continued on. I'd like to see it integrated with State Street. That's a huge business resource. Another part that I think you mentioned there, but I think it would be appropriate for State Street, would be identifying essentially inventory in our locations.

Yeah.

And then proactively going out and recruiting businesses to fill those spots. that fit our target. Yeah, that's one of our action items, is creating an ongoing inventory of open real estate possibilities.

So yeah, I totally agree, it's on there.

Yes, maybe one question for Brad. You could explain in more detail what exactly is a targeted industry analysis study, because I think you may not speak to it Do you want to take a stab? I can take a stab.

Yeah. So, oh, maybe speaking generally to start, you can't be all things to all people. So we believe that taking some of the current industry mix, maybe understanding what some of the strengths are, some of the supply chains, value chains in those current industries, conducting an analysis on the quantitative side, pairing that with maybe some of the qualitative research, understanding some of your educational strengths, some of your institutional strengths, perhaps the desires of the elected officials. And essentially what we would do is create some type of methodology that would then narrow down you know, 4, 5, 6 industries that we believe make the most sense as targets for Orem. I don't believe I explained that as well as I wanted to. We've recently finished a targeted industry analysis in Yuma, Arizona, not a particularly all that different community in terms of some of just the demographics and the size, where we were able to identify 6 target industries that we believe makes sense for them based on kind of those qualitative factors, those quantitative factors. And I'm happy to share that with you as perhaps an example, but do you want to take a stab at maybe explaining that better than I did?

Yeah, sure.

I think that when we talk about targeted analysis, a lot of things that go into that when you want to identify target industries. Obviously some of that is where there's opportunities for growth. Obviously we want to identify industries that are showing growth across the board. We don't want to attract, you know, maybe a whole host of businesses or industries that are kind of fading out of prominence.

Yeah.

So, obviously, like, we look at growth industries. We obviously look at all these other opportunities to see, much like we, we had just discussed, maybe there are some areas in the retail landscape, maybe in, you know, what we identified here, in our current top industries in Orem. While there are a lot of service and retail industries, we understand that retail hub of Utah County, but what we also want to understand is, well, we also saw opportunities there are in the top 10. In addition to the post-secondary education, there's marketing, there are IT services.

Now a lot of these are services that might help further the goals and the the plans of existing businesses, something like identifying IT or other business support services. Maybe that's something you want to look at.

I think there's a lot of different opportunities to try to see what already are strengths and improve on them, or maybe find where there are areas for, you know, opportunities to continue to grow, to fill in some gaps that might help further support the business.

Yeah, maybe a story, um, just briefly, and I hope I'm not being Aaron, but going back to kind of the retail concentration, you know, we had numerous informal conversations with folks about like, what if we focused on attracting tech-enabled companies that supported the retail industry? So somebody who's come up with a novel piece of software for inventory management, right? Or warehousing and distribution technologies, right? Because, you know, just again, kind of our thought process, build upon those strengths that are already here. And look for those emerging industries that hopefully have a certain trajectory, but again also support and complement your existing business base.

If I could add to that, Brad, just to give everyone an example, obviously went through this and they decided to target outdoor manufacturers, manufacturers of outdoor products, and that was who they went for. They incentivized them. They had a lot of little warehouses in Austin. a lot of open ground, and they've been very successful in that. Black Diamond, I think, is one of the companies located there, a number of bicycle companies. So we need to find our niche in Orem. Like Brad mentioned before, it used to just be, hey, we'll just take anything. Yeah, and that was kind of the approach when I was doing this, but we need to figure out what our little niche in that market is, and that's, that's what we go after. What makes Orem special? What makes it Once you run a few of them, they start to kind of join. Yes, that's a great point. As far as Ogden, I mean, Ogden had a lot of competition. They went after that outdoor— that's what they've kind of become. Yeah, it's become a big deal. If you're interested, maybe Brian could speak a little bit to how did we implement the last one. What would you say, what were kind of the keys to this? Well, the keys were just to make sure you had attainable goals and then you knew what you were working towards. When I took the job, Jamie came to me and said, hey, I want— are you interested in doing this? I think you'd be good at it. I didn't know what I was doing, to be quite honest, but going through the strategic plan process, all of a sudden I had a goal, set of goals and guidelines of how to do my job, and then I knew what I needed to do. Then Kathy, they've been following along the end of what I, I started, and they've been doing a great job, and they have a lot of relationships and networking, but it's been time to refocus and redirect and outline where they go. And I would just say it's kind of happened organically. You start to get momentum and you start building relationships, and all of a sudden things just start Clicking, you start checking things off as you go. And they're not the only ones that we're doing. I mean, Jason mentioned this team helped a lot with some of those goals with planning, and they'll be working with our team, I imagine, too on some of these. I, I don't know how else to put it, but it works. You need to start working hard. Yeah, so Any other questions or comments?

Just that we'd be happy if any questions or comments do come up, anything, any follow-up items, we'd be happy to respond to those as well. Should anything occur to you as your head hits the pillow tonight, I just wanted to give our contact information.

So if I may, this discussion in this economic development plan is going through the process to be included as essentially a subunit of the city's general plan. So what we would be— will be looking for from you in the future is adopting this as kind of our strategic vision for the future. Any, any amendments or changes we make to the general plan, we actually have to begin at the Planning Commission level. So we've had actually already one meeting with the Planning Commission and had one conversation. The Planning Commission requested some additional time to review the document. And so We will revisit that plan with them next schedule. Yep, July 6th. Our intent is to return to you on July 12th to seek your consideration for adoption as part of the city's general plan as well. So once it's essentially formally adopted and that vision is there, then that accountability is in place as to this is the direction We're going, and then we start developing specific executables to accomplish the recommendations that TPA made.

Do you have the detailed plan right now to send us?

Yes, uh, I thought we included it in the package. Yeah, as far as— yes, he should. As far as the plan goes, I think stage 3 is covered. That's Well, no, I don't, I don't think State Street— I think what you have here is a 30,000-foot, maybe 20,000-foot altitude plan. State Street and, and kind of the specifics of State Street are going to require more of a 10,000, even 5,000-foot. I think it's more of a subset of this. So I would say take these guiding principles and then initiate a stage 3 process and talk about specifics that are representative of the overarching plan that we've all— and though, no, I don't see this as— I don't see this as a specific vision and plan for stage 3.

Right, but, but this plan will be enhanced with the strategic plan for State Street.

Yes.

So do you think the timeline is correct? Meaning on the 12th? I mean, it's not, it's not something that has to be adopted on the 12th. So, you know, can we push it to another meeting? Absolutely. Yeah, I'm not like, yeah, I'm not, I'm not saying it's a it's something we have to do. But this is worth it. So if you're more comfortable putting it on the agenda for the first meeting in August, I mean, personally, I think I would— But as a work session item, or is it the city council? To consider adopting this? Of what we just saw.

Yes.

Okay.

I thought—

yeah, I thought this is in our back of our head.

10,000-foot memory.

No, no, we need to actually initiate. We haven't started on that. So we are in the process of council instructions. So that would be finally the 9th. The 9th, yes, the 9th of August. I think that makes sense. Yeah. Okay, thank you. Well, we appreciate the presentation.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Next up we have a presentation on progress. This is the last night. For a while, yeah. Yeah, that's right. So if you would all—

I handed out this fraud risk assessment paper just so you could have it in front of you.

The State Auditor's Office, Utah State Auditor's Office, for the mayor and councilman, councilmember Millet.

So this is a required thing related from the Utah State Auditor's Office. Office that Finance Department is required to bring forth to you, just to give you as a council an idea of what the State Auditor believes. If these elements are present within our internal control structure, our finance structure, that put us across the top. You can see there the category of risk, whether we fall in a very low, low, etc. risk category. As you can see, I've identified— I've gone through each of these elements and identified where in either our policies, our procedures, or our ordinances, which elements within there that we have something already in place or that we follow in relation to each one of those items. You can see also on there Item 4, 5, and 8 do not have a checkmark by them. That is why you see at the very top where I have circled, we are in the middle of the low-risk area because we— those 3 particular elements we do not have in place. I don't— I will be honest, item number 8 is very difficult for most organizations.

How would you Okay.

So item number 8 is, does the entity have a formal— which is the important component of that— formal internal audit function? A formal internal audit function requires us to have a certain employee whose only responsibility is to, in essence, continually audit the functions of the city. and they report directly to city management and/or to— in our case, it'd be either the audit committee or you as a whole as a council. We don't feel like that is a necessary element, and you will find that in almost no city. Most cities that do claim to have some sort of a formal internal audit function, I usually hire an independent audit firm to come in and do an audit, do one of these internal audits on some sort of regular basis. We have done those in the past on occasion when, when maybe there was some kind of a question or something like that. So it has not been something that we've done regularly. Obviously we could, and that if we were— if that is something that we wanted to explore, then that's what it my recommendation would be, obviously, rather than going and hiring an employee to do that function. So just to give you an idea of what that particular item is. Now, item number 4, which states, are employees and elected officials required to annually commit— this is the important part— in writing to abide by a statement of ethical behavior? And annually, right? So not only in writing annually. This is something I think we can definitely do. We will be— over this next year, this fiscal year, we will be trying to figure out the best method and way to have all of us sign off on. So we already have in place in our policy—

I know you can't read them—

in our policies and procedures, we already have this 1.3 Employee Ethics and Disclosure Policy, which outlines what we are— would be agreeing to. So in essence, we would take this policy and have every employee— and what we would pro— as well as, as you as elected officials sign off on that, yes, I understand this policy, I've read it, and I, I agree to it, to, to follow it. Whether that be done, and more likely than not, it will be through an electronic means, right? We have various required trainings that Jason Adamson does and some other things like that that we anticipate we would use some form or another to make that happen. So assuming we can make that happen, that puts us right on the cusp of very low. We would need one of those 2 remaining items. The other item which we think we can do is item number 5, which is have all governing body members complete entity-specific online training at training.auditor.utah.gov within 4 years of term appointment election date. So for each of you, I've, I've provided some information to Jamie, and then we will figure out the same thing. We'll figure out a way and provide you with that link to that training on the audit— State Auditor's website. You would simply, at the end of the training, you get a certificate indicating you've completed that training. Obviously, you would then provide that to somebody, myself or somebody in the city manager's office. And then again, we can check off that box, which then gets us into the very low category, which is in essence our ultimate goal, right, is to be to that point.

So, sorry to interrupt, but so my only question is about— we do all kinds of practice things in my industry, and I mean, a 3-hour test, you know, figure out the format. But a lot of it just feels like fluff. It feels like if somebody's a bad person, they're going to do bad things whether they sign a thing or not. Doesn't really make a difference. So I guess my only question is, we put the whole organizations through this, does it make a difference on— I mean, to make a difference on this, or does it really make a difference in the organization?

Well, which side of me do you want me to answer?

Because we've actually had this Yes. We believe we have very tight controls. We believe we have a good system. But if we are just filling out a scorecard as requested by the state auditor, there are certain areas where we fall short. For example, this training— you participating in 3 hours of videos, is that going to make this a better more ethical organization. Not really sure to explain. So this is something we have to fill out, but it's something we give a lot of attention to. That's my concern, is we don't just create things for people to do because it's on checklists, they don't really accomplish anything necessarily. In other words, can we say, okay, our theft or our crime or whatever problem Went down 12% because of race science? Nope. Nope. But we do worry though that there will be somebody who would look at this and say, Warren's not an ethical organization because you don't have the highest score of— as determined by the state auditor. Therefore, we're going to be— I guess this is going to be weaponized in a way where somebody's going to try and find fault because you haven't taken the training. You don't have— I mean, we have employee handbook, we have employee conduct expectations, we train on that, but we don't have our employees signing specific documents that says we are willing to abide by the following ethical behaviors. They just abide by the entire employee handbook as a document. And so if you're trying to protect from, from saying that have the ethics statement and come inside with their new employee and they decide if it's worthwhile. And it's not an every year thing anyway. I'm just trying to do things that make sense as opposed to just doing things. So me and my company, we do it every year. It's a little video for 5 or 10 minutes, turn it into HR and you're good. So, and we do the same things.

It's more of just a mindset, like you know, what is an ethical behavior?

What, you know, this situation, how would you react? This is ethical. So basically walk them through and say, hey, this might be— I mean, your mind might be unethical, ethical, but this is ethical or unethical. And it's just a little thing you sign in and then you get to check the box.

I will say both of those, both of these items The one good spin, if you will, in regards to either one is at least it makes you think about it, right? If you have to go out, you have to read the employee ethics policy, you at least know it specifically, know it exists, and it makes you at least think about it. And same with the elements that are on the training for elected officials.

Okay.

Whether you use it or not, it's up to you. At least it was brought to you and made you think about it, right? Whether that has an end result or not, the state auditor thinks it does. You know, we kind of question that to some degree, so that's why we haven't pushed it in the past. But today's point, yes, if we, if we want to say we got the gold star, then I think that's obviously what we would need.

Every 4 years. So why couldn't you do it?

Could.

I'm just saying it doesn't make any— I don't know, I haven't done it. Once I do it, I give you my opinion. Yeah, it was good or not. But we got another 20 points. That's 40 points. Yes, so on number 8, does the entity have a formal internal audit function? It sounds like you have—

We have internal audit functions.

Does that mean that it has to be somebody that works for the entity conducting the internal audit? Because otherwise I feel like you should check that box.

I don't have a formal internal audit function. I have people who do internal auditing. They actually perform— they check P-cards, they check payroll, they check petty cash, etc., right? We review all POs, and those are all internal audit functions. But the term formal internal audit function means there's somebody whose job it is to, if you will, they go out and they check, is this function working? And it's not me. I'm inside of that function doing it. If I'm auditing myself, right, it doesn't serve the purpose. So that's why it's a third party.

It would be a deeper audit than what we're currently doing with an outside audit firm. Yes.

So an outside audit firm would come in, look at our P-card process, and say, yes, those functions are working as proposed. So that process is good. Oh, let me look at how your petty cash process is, your cash receipting process. They look at each one of those processes and say, yes, that is good. Obviously, our independent auditors are— they look at those things too, but they are looking at it from a financial perspective. Do the financial statements— do these controls, are they in place? Do they but do they lead to the financial statements being presented correctly? That's not what an internal audit function does, right? They're just looking at, does it work? That's their only question is, does it do what you say it's going to do?

So Ron Stewart does the financial audit?

Correct.

Ron Stewart, like, yes, that's not— that's different, like you're talking about. Correct.

Now, Ron could— his firm could come in and do this. Like I said, any internal— any independent audit firm could do that. We hired a firm out of Logan last time.

Or technically, we could hire an employee and give him or her a specific job description of, you're our internal auditor, you don't report to Brandon, you report to the city's audit committee. for example, and you spend every day of your job auditing functions throughout the organization. And most organizations that have that are bigger than I assume. Yeah, yeah. So hiring a part-time one can ease some of that without having the expense. So, Brandon, are most cities a low rating? I mean, most— if we look at Provo, are they a low or a very low?

They would be in for a very low, I think.

That'd be very low.

Yeah.

So that's kind of it. I mean, it's not— low is not good enough. Everybody wants to be very low. Of course.

The smaller the organization—

so just so you—

to give you some history, this assessment started with special small special service districts and smaller towns and cities because they didn't have any idea what made up a good internal control structure. And so the State Auditor's Office, as they worked with those entities, created this. And then it kind of grew from that into thinking of, you know what, this is probably a good idea for any board, any elected body, to at least have an understanding and have people who are in charge of finance express to them, yes, we are meeting these specifically sign-off, as you can see. Jamie and I need to sign this document and send it into the State Auditor's Office. We're sending, you know, stating that yes, we do these things. So I don't know if that helps answer that question.

Part of the back and forth Brandon and I have had is, for example, I serve on a number of boards in agencies, and they have to complete the same fraud assessment, and they're bringing these fraud assessments to our board. They're giving themselves almost a perfect score. How are they getting a perfect score? And we're a much bigger, more sophisticated, with far more internal control than they do, and we're scoring lower. And, and in part, it's the way people are interpreting this. And they're saying, oh yeah, do we have an internal audit function? Well, yeah, we do a financial audit every year. Check, 20 points. To Jeff's point, I have a conversation with Brandon, and Brandon Says, no, internal audit is different than financial audit, hence we don't get the 20 points. And I'm saying, well, this shop of 7 people that I serve on, they're giving themselves a full checkmark. They're getting the 20 points like they said.

So to your point, I'm somewhat harsh on ourselves in that regard. Number 8, I can't consciously sign off on that. item knowing what that really means and not having the function that that intent is for, right? So I don't want to— to Jamie's point, there are a lot of others just look at it, go, oh, internal audit function, I need the points, puts me in a very low category, I'm good, move on.

Yeah.

I want it generally to have some element of meaning, right? And that's why number 4 and number 5 I've not pushed because I've not felt that those are going to move the needle, right?

Chris, I just wanted to comment.

The Metropolitan Water District board met this morning. We have to go through the same process. We have a flood risk assessment. Ours is low, if it's not very low. We're pushing to get it to very low, but we can't honestly get there right now today without making some changes to our policies. regarding, um, regarding, uh, purchasing as well as conflict of interest. So we're adding a lot of these policies they're saying that we should add or refine. And so there are some very positive things that occur as a result of this audit that Mr. Boudreau was part of requesting, especially for smaller local districts or metropolitan districts. Probably not as effective with the larger districts.

Chris, you said you guys took the training?

Yes.

And how long did it take?

About 10 or 15 minutes in the training that we took. For you specifically? I'll send you the link.

I have the one for the cities, so I know yours is slightly different.

very beneficial just as far as checking the boxes of the things that make a difference. My issue is just doing things that don't make a difference just to do it. I'm not wired that way, but it's not my decision.

Well, I think it also shows that we are following the practices from the state, and if they were to come down and we had a problem, we could show them we have this, we've done this, we've done this. And I think, I think it's not cheaper Yes, it is to be.

Don't go there.

It is to be burdensome.

But you're right. It helps our bond rating or anything really significant, or if it's a thing we put in the file, it sounds like it doesn't change our bond rating.

Any final— so again, the idea will be just to make you aware of where we're at. What maybe our— some of our intent is, we'll be signing this off and sending it up to the State Auditor's Office, working on it throughout the year potentially, and then coming back to you next year.

We'll give you the other 20 things you get by having us sign it and then find out how burdensome the training is.

Right.

So Tom will do the first training. Yeah, sorry. If you do 7 trainings for the entire City Council, not a problem. All in favor?

All right, that will keep having his name over and over.

Wipe it out. Next we've got, uh, Gary.

Not a presentation. I don't even have any slides or Sure. So this is just to give you a little bit of background if you're not familiar with our retirement systems. We do have 2 tiers in Utah Retirement Systems. Tier 1, and that would be all employees that were hired before July 1st, 2011. And then we have Tier 2 employees that were hired after that date. So most of our new employees are Tier 2, obviously, because they were hired Retired after 2011. So, um, because of the recruitment issues that we've been having in police and in fire, Utah Retirement Systems decided to change Tier 2 for those 2 groups only. So we're not talking about our public employees. This is specifically for public safety and fire. So they wanted to enhance that, and in order to do that, they required employees to pick up a portion of the retirement contributions. We as a city, back in 2020 when they started this, decided to pick up the employee portion, which was 2.27% at the time, so that employees wouldn't have to pick up any part of that contribution. And we have built that into our budget moving forward, but for 2022, the increase, the increase to the employee piece went up to 2.59%. And so what we're proposing is that that 0.32% we also pick up, and the retirement systems require that we do this by, by resolution. So that will be on the agenda tonight. It's already built into this year's budget, so it's already been approved. This is just formalizing that additional pickup. What's the expense?

Did you find out before me? We're gonna hold on something. I don't know what's in the budget. I mean, it should be pretty simple math.

Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't imagine it's significant. But just to be aware, there are only 2 entities in the entire state that are requiring employees to pick up that portion, and all the other cities are picking it up for them. So for us to not pick it up, it would be very difficult for us to retain employees. Yeah. So can I ask? Yes. So it's South Ogden and Tremont.

So all of our competition—

Yeah, all of our sister cities are picking it up.

And this is cities in Kansas? Anybody in the state returns?

Correct. You know, we've actually— I believe— any questions? So that'll just be on your resolution, on your consent items here today. Thank you.

Consideration for the school district today. Mayor, City Council discussion. Um, we're just going to talk about what we're thinking about doing as far as public outreach for the school district today. That's what's come out. Is that a move back from what it was? Was it mid-June, or have I understood the date? It was always a July date.

The draft was June 15th.

Have we seen it since?

Draft June 15th, and then July 15th. Have we seen the draft?

Okay, they'll be released back. That's why it's welcome here. So we won't see a draft. So that's when everyone will see it and they will start to evaluate it and review it, that sort of thing. Does anybody— I think you're a liaison with the March of FMA. Are you hearing some results or not?

I'm just, I'm just an arm's length here, so yeah. Okay, I mean, I see like that they're meeting with the district. I've seen they've had several meetings with the district. to go through numbers and to collaborate, you know, on getting information. That's the emails I'm interested in.

So what we've got here is we've got— this will be introduced in July as well, City Council, and that's when we'll have a presentation from the consultant, right, at that City Council meeting. Will that be in a work session? Well, I mean, that's kind of, I think, at your discretion. I think the interest in the plan is probably going to be pretty high, pretty high. And so we probably won't be able to, for example, hold the meeting. Yeah, you probably want to hold it in a bigger venue. So it may make sense, for example, to have a presentation formally and Actually, yeah, actually relocate the meeting if there is interest. Yeah, okay. Now what we've got, and this is what we keep getting to work out in this meeting, so we're supposed to receive that presentation from the consultant on the 12th. Um, we're talking about going to the city council, so that would be a presentation to the city council about the findings, right?

Correct.

But then we've got, as far as outreach goes, and these things proposed to do a meeting on the 13th, July 13th, so the day after, July 19th, and July 28th. Now, the other side of this is we have to vote on this by what day?

August 2nd.

So we have to vote whether we want to put this on the ballot or not on August 2nd, which is 3 weeks after we get a multiple, multiple hundred-page report, right? It's got lots of pictures. Good, good. But, and we're going to ask for— we're going to try to make a community Q&A 24 hours after we get the report.

Who's going to lead that?

Who would have read it? That's, that's what we've got to figure out. And as far as— I think most of the Q&A wouldn't necessarily apply to us. It wouldn't be us, it would be consultants. So we would be there in the meeting with the consultants. Um, we could be asked questions, but as far as anything here, substance, we wouldn't have had time to read that document, right?

Yeah.

But, um, so anyway, that's what we need to work out right now. So we got, we got the August 2nd date to vote on it because if you vote against it, then it's no big deal. It doesn't matter if you vote for it. Then what's our next deadline after that? That has to be from the ballot. August 8th is, uh, Jody has a deadline. Is that right?

You have a notification deadline on August 8th.

The notification to the county, I thought you said like 25th of August. Yes, right.

I was going to say our timeline's got kind of— my timeline is completely different than yours, so my brain is over here.

I think it's a notice to residents that has to go by August 10th. That's because we have a 90-day— yeah, that's what we're talking about.

But when does he have to— when do we have to tell the people in the county?

So essentially, council would make a decision upon the second office. If you choose to proceed, then Jody would be required to notify through our regular notification efforts. So on our website, on the Emails.

Emails.

Our intent as a city to move forward to put this on the ballot, and then we would need to have all the paperwork including the ballot title, which is the question that goes on the ballot, to the county clerk by the 25th of August. So, so back after the August 10th date, That is simply a notice of the city council's intent to put this question on the November ballot. So this timeline, essentially, that's where we backed into— we need to vote on it by August 2nd so that we can— so there's no big August 10th deadline for the town council.

That's the best scenario.

Yes, because Jody's notification requirement is 90 days before the general election. So essentially what we're looking at is we receive this on July 12th, and then we want to have 3 meetings between July 12th and August 2nd.

So you got 3 weeks.

Yeah, I got one day before people are asking me about it.

Well, I see— I'm not defending it. I mean, yeah, discovery.

But as soon as it's released, it's on our transparency portal. Everybody has it. Yeah, so everybody wants to connect.

I think there will be some citizens who are up to speed on that and will be ready for questions, but there will be others that will read it over the next week. They will be ready for the next meeting.

I agree we want to move fast because we don't want this holding over us for a year and waiting for next, uh, August to make this decision. They did report me fast. I just wish they had given us a draft mid-June as we had anticipated. You're not required to have public meetings, uh, you're not required to have it the day after. You can— when we spoke the other day kind of in an informal setting about some suggestions, a lot of people are out of town during July, and we felt that to spread it out over a 3-week period, somebody can say, well, that's not fair, you have them all in a week. Well, we don't need that 3, we could hold 2. You could hold 2, you're not required to hold any other session. But if this meeting is the company that— all right, yeah, the other one's going to be running short.

And it's almost— I know, I, I was okay with it because I saw the 12th as, you know, some people We'll see that meeting, but then others might come to the 13th. You couldn't come on the 12th.

Yeah, as long as we're not supposed to be right here.

Yeah, but you'll have a mic.

Good, good. I don't want to have a hot mic all the time. So July 12th, 3 more presentations to us to basically present their findings, and then it's July 13th, which would be That's open house or whatever. I mean, my guess is it would be something where we would take questions from the public. I think if you like to state your master plan, I think since they'll be answering questions, I think people have to submit their questions online or whatever when you get there instead of just yelling out. So let's say, for example, you've had a 2-hour walk. You may want to have, for example, some stations where the consultant can post information about certain outcomes, certain areas that they focus their research on. And then maybe you could take on the hour, you could say, okay, we're going to take 15 minutes of questions from 6 to 6:15, and then the next hour from 7 to 8. So you're talking about more of an educational situation? Yeah. Well, I think there's— I think we're kind of potentially looking at a hybrid type approach where— because I think if you just have an open mic, I think it becomes somewhat chaotic. It's difficult for people to understand, keep track of, you know. If you want to have a time designated to ask questions. And there's a time in a much bigger setting to ask questions. But then there's also time if you want to have a specific conversation or ask a specific question of the consultant, and you don't necessarily want to do it in front of the whole crowd, the whole group, you can do it in kind of that open house setting where they have more of an opportunity to Address your questions specifically, because the consultant's not going to be— if he's got or she's got a room full of people, they're not going to be able to take 10 to 15 minutes per question. But in a more intimate kind of conversation, in an open house setting, you can have a 5 to 10 minute conversation.

So I like that, but at the same time, they might be answering the same question over and over.

I think a lot of people will have the same question. I think there will probably be 10 questions that everyone has. Yeah, that's why, that's why, for example, we could collect the questions in advance so the consultant would have an understanding about what questions are being asked. He or she could say that 14 residents have submitted the same question. This is probably a question I need to address to the global audience versus this one question may relate to one specific individual or one specific program at school. That's probably not a question that we could cover in a general term. So, so what you're saying is, is we want to have them address the questions that apply globally to the bigger audience. If someone has—

yeah.

One question. Yeah, yeah. I asked, I asked Pete to kind of put together, and we can make this available. This is just, for example, a mockup where we, we said, hey, this is a memo that we would send out. So, hey, we've completed the feasibility— consultants completed the feasibility study. They're going to present the results of the feasibility study on July 12th. We're scheduling specific open houses on these dates. And then the next page— hey, you have a question for the study team, then there's— you can submit the question electronically. To learn more about the study, you can scan the QR code and reference the information we have already available. And I'm anticipating that we would load the study results on the site as well. Thank you. So people would get this in advance of the 12th, and they would have an idea as to, okay, this is what's happening on the 12th, and these are the 3 meetings that open houses have happened, and they're pretty much the same format. Probably a lot of the same questions. So it's like the format, you know, let's say from 6 to 7 we have the displays and everybody's mingling, and then say 7 2009 is the question. It's kind of your— it's kind of your call.

I just think you start off with questions. People are going to be there, and then for the individual, more targeted questions, those people can stay and get those answers.

A lot of people are running late, so give them a little buffer. publish the answers to those type of questions on the same note, can't we? And I think the question that was asked in the end— I think every question that's asked will be on the conference call. Yeah, and I failed to note too that we would, we would record these meetings, so you could go into YouTube, you can watch it live, or you can watch it after we run vacation. You can watch it the next day. Well, if you run out of time, you know, Maybe the consultant can go back and make sure those questions are answered so they're on the portal if we run out of time that evening or what. So we are transparent that everybody gets their question answered. A lot of them are going to be redundant, right? If you're going to be getting bits and pieces, you have no idea what way this report's going. We may get enough information right away to say, nope, we're not moving forward, correct? And then we cancel these meetings, right? And I, I did send an email to the city council to say we have 3 options. The first option, right, you're not required to do it, right? You can look at it and say, uh, I vote we not put it— or there's a consensus that we not put it on the August 2nd city council meeting and not have it, right? So, so the only challenge is if we want to provide advance notice to our residents, we have to let them know before— We have to let them know. Yeah, so we're kind of in this— So we have to let them know the first meeting. The next ones we get 24 hours or 48 hours, we can tell them we're planning to, but none of us will have read it in any detail. I was hoping you were having this great tunnel into the future. But if we are going to send out— if you are going to send out some mailer, then we almost build the expectation that we're going to hold these meetings.

This is what— this was the process, this was the result, and we're done here. Yeah, you know, certainly asking questions.

Although Jamie's point, if we send out a mailer to talk about 3 meetings, we just cancel after the first meeting, you'd be better off just to have the 3 meetings and have the conversation. But it's like, at least we're not going to do it. But you're right, man, we got a whole— yeah, well, and there's— there will maybe citizens that will say, why not? Why did you not proceed with this? And it's not just going to be— yeah, that would make it educational as far as what the results of the study were. Well, the other thing is that, uh, Raiders of the Lost Ark— is there 4 movies or 3? So we could show that next night.

3 nights.

So I really like what I'm hearing about having written questions, because I think what Jeff's saying is absolutely right. They're going to be the same questions, probably. And, and if we have, you know, the mayor's the moderator, he's reading the questions, because what we get in some of these meetings, the same people every time come and dominate the mic.

Yeah.

And you've got hundreds and thousands of people in the city who would really like to have a question. They don't have to sit and listen to that person. dominate the microtemas with their, you know, whatever their issue is. So I agree 100%. In fact, the consultants may have— here are questions we think you might ask. They might have a dozen of them already prepared. And, and maybe at this point, maybe we don't want to allow non-residents to be asking questions. That's been somewhat of an issue when non-residents come in. If they're not going to be on the voting portal, do we even want to let them ask questions? I don't think anyone will be asking questions. No one's asking questions. We're going to take written questions. Yeah, but they ought to say where they're from.

Is that, um, that's— so we have teachers also.

Oh yeah, no, they ought to be free to— you're right, Alpine School District employees ought to be able to ask a question. You know, open it up, Tom.

You can, you can.

Because if they're not voting, I hope we'll drive up the mic because it's a legit question. Yeah, makes sense, right?

But you're exactly right, it's kind of pointless because the questions are kind of awkward.

Jesse, the slideshow is intended to answer the major questions that are found in the other feasibility studies. So the slideshow will answer some. That's the Reader's Digest version of the whole report. To your point, Jesse, am I saying that right? So I would recommend that what happens when the questions come in, that Pete and I or whoever, we look at the questions and put it in categories. And so when you ask the consultant a question, here's your question, but here's 3 subcategories to that question. Could you address the question in the 3 subcategories? So, so that way we don't take— we don't keep this phone saying, well, we answer that. So are we going to want to have a slideshow that basically is the setup to answer any questions.

Executive summaries that we're looking at.

I think like it might be more about— so I think my sense is they would have something for the 12th, on the 12th, that they would share a presentation that we would share with council. Perhaps they could amend or modify that to share So I've asked that the slideshow, the PowerPoint slideshow, uh, be available when they hand me the disc, that they have that on there also, and that the slideshow presentation be within the study. So if anybody says I missed the slideshow presentation, it will be both within the study and there will be a separate link. Does that answer your question? It does. I just think it might be appropriate to kick off the meeting with the slideshow.

Information and any specific questions, and then let those people who want to stay longer look at things. I heard 3 hours before, and that kind of gets a little—

So when I hear 2 hours, are you looking at 6 to 8, 7 to 9, 6:30 to 8:30? Well, I mean, the question is Consultants able to stay later to answer questions. They've committed to be here from 6 to 9. So 6:30 to 9:30, that's, that's 3 hours. Oh, I mean, they'll still linger.

Well, they can linger.

So, you know, 7 is when ballgames start, next school programs start. It seems to be the magical number for a lot of them. I'm sure they can stay longer if we ask them. I just— they asked what their commitment with DI, so 6:30 to 9:30 seems reasonable. But if you wanted to stay till tonight, I'm sure— I'm just saying we want to make sure that if there's questions to ask, if somebody wants to stop They have that opportunity.

I don't think we'll be talking for 2 hours.

The main meeting will be 7 tonight. 7 tonight. Everybody okay with that? Yeah. So 7. Do you want to have— you want to have Displays that have information on them, or do you want to just have a slideshow and Q&A? Do you remember the state— how they had remote displays? You want to have remote displays and talk about the results of the study and then the slideshow and the Q&A, or Yeah, so I prefer not to have remote because none of us have the ability— we just got the report. So yeah, so I don't know who could be there to answer the questions other than the guys who did the studies. You know what, if there's that in there, if you want to write it.

Yeah, presentation at 7 and then a Q&A, because you could— the report will be online then. They can pull up the charts.

Would you want to ask the presentation once? Once at 7 PM? Or just one presentation? Well, um, the attention span of people is pretty short when you get to a presentation, so I'd ask them to limit their slides if not, but I haven't seen the final slide list. That's the presentation that they're showing up, right? But that's the presentation that's going in the study, and that's the presentation. You want the presentation following that, they're not going to add to it. So between the 9 and 11 slide— yeah, so that might be a half hour and the rest of the evening.

I would hate to cut off the opening trying to— yeah, I think since we're having 3 meetings, I don't know, just definitely—

I'm just going to ask, are you going to just say how many are here for a proper school district?

Anyone?

As well, probably as part of a presentation, it would just be the company that's doing the— can we just do the study, the results of the study, and then anyone would be welcome to be there, and we would go through the questions that are submitted. Um, yeah, I, I like the idea of just doing your slideshow once and then Having questions and having them ask. You always want to talk afterwards, whatever they could.

Um, you have 10 questions, you got 10 minutes a question.

We have also considered setting up, for example, some feedback portals where people can come They can type their comments and their feedback. You can be already at the meeting, or they can just go online to do it. It's up to you how you want to structure it. We can have— we can have computers on site where people can sit down and enter their comments, or you can say, if you have additional comments, welcome to go to this website and enter them. I think the questions would be more useful than comments. I think like comments, based on what I've seen on Facebook, can be all over the place. And I like that meaningful conversation. That's where I think, you know, serious questions are useful. With what's going on today with the election, there's not a place for me to comment. I just told this group I wanted to follow the yes or no. I don't know if I need to share my opinion about this guy. Let's try and— let's try and nail down these dates. So the ones that are proposed, they can probably change these. 2nd of April, 12:00. We're not meeting. July 13th, 19th, and 28th. Those are the proposed dates. Are those dates— and those are when they can do it? They confirmed those dates? They confirmed those dates. 13th, 19th, 28th. And that recommendation came out of our meeting with, uh, Jamie and some of the city people. And then I went back to him and said we wanted to have one every week. That was the recommendation. And you had a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, right? Right.

Yeah, I like that.

And it's not all of us will be able to make it every time. I don't assume we're not sitting on the stand if it's open to the right order. Well, that's a good question. I— because the state council could be asked questions, I mean, not specific to the study, but just random questions about their thoughts on something to do with the school district. So I don't know if We have any opinions on— I'll be there. As far as sitting on the stand or just in the audience, we can sit up there and fill up during the presentation. Probably not the Q&A.

We're not going to answer questions if we can answer.

Well, I'm saying, what if it's just asking a question to a specific elected official about their thoughts on something? We can answer that. I have no problem answering. So would we— so, so Jamie would Yeah, on the stand with the consultants, or would you be up on the side? I would, I would discourage you from being up on stage. I don't think this is a city council meeting, because if you do have a form that's up there, you can be in the audience with your spouse, and as long as it's not an official meeting. Steve, help me on this one. I think it still needs to be an official meeting, but that doesn't mean they have to be up on stand. They can still be in the audience. It doesn't mean they have to take questions. My concern is if you're up there, then it kind of suggests that you are going to respond to questions. You know, I think probably closer to the first couple of rows to have you there. Maybe just the mayor pro tem should sit up there. How do we decide when it's official? Well, I mean, your text—

this is a city matter.

So I mean, technically, I think, I think we want to notice it as a meeting just in case there are 4, certainly. And if they're not 4, then it's maybe not an official meeting, but you can still have the meeting and, you know, give the information.

Or do you want us to sign it?

No, I like his idea of making it an official meeting.

That way we're recording it.

So Steve, we're not even— as a city council, we're not voting on it. August 2nd. So we're still back gathering and reading the study like everybody else. Yeah, in fact, I, I probably— you know, the question was raised, do you want to respond to comments about how you feel? I would probably discourage you from doing that until you've had a chance to participate in all those meetings and hear all the questions and the answers, digest all the information, and then have that discussion of whether you want to vote for it or not on August 2nd. Okay, so this will just be The consultants, moderator, questions. No, I think it probably makes sense to have the consultant do that. You can say, here are the questions that we've received, you know, and they can take the ones that are deemed to be the most important, the most commonly asked questions, and answer those. I actually think that would make them look unobjective. So I think the questions should go to the city and somebody Like the mayor should say, these are the questions I received. Sorry, yeah, that's a good point. I didn't mean that they were the ones determining which questions were most important, but they were the ones that were saying these are the ones that have been determined, not that we've made that decision. There should be somebody conducting the meeting to keep order and all the rest. Yeah, that's true. Okay, so is everyone okay with those dates? 13th, 19th, 20th, 27th, and the 2nd. Yeah, okay, so we're adding 3. That 3rd meeting could change the first 2 depending on the questions, and people might be tired. I mean, they may have— maybe we learned from the first 2 days. It didn't work. You may try something, you know, something different.

And that's actually a really good point. We could make them continue to submit questions for upcoming meetings. We don't have to do the same questions.

Right. So, so that— then we're down to where to have the most meetings. Uh, Library Hall is an obvious place for at least one. We could do all 3 in Library Hall. Oh yeah, well, you get paid again. You continue to pay for it.

So I think library hall makes sense.

Yeah, I think so. Library hall, it's the same price every time, and I think, you know, there's plenty of parking. Okay, any other issues with these that we need to figure out? I don't know if you've sent out, but I think what you have— Well, yeah, I mean, this was just a mock-up that Pete put together today without any details. Pete can take the details now. I'll get— I didn't take notes. Okay, I'll feed that information to Pete. He can send out a draft. So, Jane, I wonder if that could be a statement of work when the utility bills are done. I mean, well, what do you mean? The problem we have is we send out the utility bills a batch a week, so we do 4 batches, so we won't be able to hit all— so we'll have to do it as a separate mailer. We would do it as a front and back postcard, essentially, like the stationery.

Yes.

And every—

Nobody does that. Yes. Okay.

Yes.

You got a QR code or whatever. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty simple. It doesn't include any information. How is this going to integrate with the information portal we've got right now? So the information portal, this QR code, this web address would be essentially destination. So until July 12th, all of the information that's currently there would be available. And then after the 12th, so that your car would go right to the study.

Yes. Link to the questions, is there a separate one?

No.

So this would take us right into essentially the school district study home page, and then we would have a Click on this feasibility study, click on questions being asked, click on some other questions. Yeah, and it's already a website people are familiar with through this whole process. We're just keeping it all in one spot.

So we will have a list of questions. I mean, I know the 13th is gonna be— we'll still be gathering questions and have them then, but can we list the questions that were asked on the 13th? And then say, here's the video of the answers. So then, oh yeah, we're not having people continuing to submit the same question over and over. They'll see that that question here, and then if they watch that and want more clarification, then they can submit something.

Yeah, we're asked a question, we can easily refer them to— here's the question, here's the answer.

That would just stop some redundancy.

With this, I don't even know if the consultants have a website where they're going to be putting this study up explaining it, but you know, I've heard they are. I looked at— I just looked at their website before the meeting today. It's pretty scary. I mean, it's pretty simple, so I would imagine this would probably be a better portal, has more information, and it's city-specific. So I think we have more— I think we have more hits and more people traveling to this site. All right, any other concerns, questions, issues on this? I just think one other comment. When people ask a question, let's just get to the core of the question. A lot of people ask the question, tell their political side or their views. So let's just stick with the core of the question and not read whether they're for or against it. And so let's just try to be objective in the question. Yeah, I, I agree with that. I mean, we will have to sift through the questions. Yeah, how do you want that to look? Ask the same question. Yeah, so they're going to come in here with their questions and then wind up at the meeting library halls. So I don't know who's going to change that process with something like that.

Yeah, yeah, the objective is educational, right?

Right.

It's not a debate.

It's not a debate.

It's just here's what the report said.

My sense is There are going to be a series of themes that will develop, or patterns that will develop. The effort will be to essentially try and find questions consistently as they proceed. Like, for example, is this going to improve— is a study split going to or a split district going to improve student test scores? Or is it going to lower my taxes? Or is it going to result in, uh, teacher pay decreases? Class size? Yeah, class sizes. Is it going to improve or decrease class size? I'm guessing those are some of the themes.

That's awesome.

Okay, um, and these guys are no dummy. They should know what the questions are that are going to be the hot signs, right? And you can work with them on some of that too, just say, hey, these are the things I think the citizens are going to be mostly concerned with. We just queued out half a dozen of those. If you could help them with that so they're ready to go. We want them to be the best prepared they can be. Yeah, and in fairness, we did give them all the questions. Okay, and I do think that they were broad enough to cover the nature of this. Perfect, thank you. We, we well armed. And any questions, I mean, the council or like the officials, any questions that any of you have, we should make sure they get submitted through this. What school want people? I don't want to know that.

School lunch?

Yeah, school lunch. May I follow They sent a text to me a couple nights ago regarding how the sports work if there's a new district, and so I presented that to them and said please add this to the study. So they reached out to you— Yeah, they reached out today with specific questions and they got answers back. So if you have any other questions, you know, it's getting pretty close where they're pretty final now. So if you have any other questions Get them to me and I'll— if they're not already included, we will do the research. Hey, you got to tell me my number.

I am.

So between 30 and 40 is Jamie?

38.

You are good, Jamie.

Thank you.

All right, let's move on to the next topic. Thank you, Mayor, members of the council.

Tonight we just want to go over some things that we've modified in our process. We haven't really changed the process.

We've called meetings a little bit different.

We have been a little more strict on some of the application processes, which we'll kind of go through tonight.

You're gonna have to speak up.

Yeah, too soft?

Too quiet.

Okay, absolutely.

I'll try to yell, how's that? But don't get offended if I yell too much. So our DRC, which is the Development Review Committee, is what DRC stands for. Application processes are due every Monday at noon. And we have in the past allowed applications, if they're missing one or two items, to make application and work to get that processed in. We have since changed that to allow— we basically reject any project application, excuse me, that is not complete based on ordinance or checklists that we have available for the applicant. The application and checklists are all the same, so when somebody gets an application for a site plan, for example, Checklist comes along with that application, so it's one document. So there's no way that they cannot see that they need to have everything that's applicable on that checklist. We do have some applicants that, you know, designate that it's not applicable. As we look at it at the counter, we'll let them know that, no, it is actually applicable. Here you go, come back next week and resubmit. So that's kind of our process as far as applications are due every Monday at noon. If somebody comes in at 2 o'clock on Monday, it goes on the next week. It just automatically gets bumped to the next week. We're pretty hardline on that specific thing just to help the process move forward. In the past, we've had a Technical Design Review Committee. So Design Review Committee has been used in multiple meetings as it deals with the process. We have a Thursday meeting, which— and then the following Monday meeting, which were in sequence with each other to not only do the technical but also been coordinating those requirements. So we've changed the Technical Design Review Committee meeting to Technical Coordination Meeting. That's where the public works people, all the public work, all those, our staff, engineering staff, fire, all those get together on that Thursday meeting and technically look at the— does the sewer work, does the water work, does all the different things like that technically work for that project, they make their comments, and then we've changed the meeting that used to be called Policy Design Review Committee, which is on a Monday, which one the staff, Ryan and myself, meet in those meetings to go over all the comments that were made on that previous Thursday meeting on those projects before we then send them out to the agent for the applicant and the engineer. We send out the corrections not only to the applicant but also whoever they designate as their agent. Most of the time it's going to be their engineer or their architect or things. We make sure that the owner also gets a copy so that they know what the issues are. We've had in the past some developers that have said, well, I don't know why the city's taking so long, because we— they didn't get the comments. And so the engineer, for whatever reason, was blaming the city for not getting this sequentially through. So we've now— it's been a couple years. done that, actually sent out to the owner as well, so they're well aware of what is coming down the process. And then we've, on Monday now at 11 o'clock, we have what's called the official Design Review Committee meeting. So now we've basically, by ordinance, there are 7 members of that team. So instead of making any decisions in the technical coordinating meeting or the Monday coordinating meeting, now it's held at 11 o'clock where we get together the 7 members of that team which are made up of police, one from police, one from fire, one from legal, 2 from public works, and 2 from development services that then actually hold a meeting and then vote on that, whether or not it's a complete project and ready to move forward. So if it's in the process technical review, they still have corrections, and it goes back through that process again and again until it gets cleared out of that and then gets scheduled for the DRC meeting. In the last month and a half, 2 months that we've been holding this project or process, we have not held meetings every Monday. So we haven't had projects that have always been on that Monday meeting, so we've canceled a few. And if they're not ready, we just don't hold the meeting. It is legally noticed. We do notice it on the state website. We do notice it in our city center. So it is a publicly open meeting. The door obviously is open to Room 107. We hold that specifically there. We do take minutes. We record the meeting, and we also then do a formal motion On that item to make sure that it's complete. Our planning staff will make the presentation, and then it's only after that's gone through that Development Review Committee that it's deemed a complete application. So that's kind of the question we've had in the past. So this is the process that we've updated to make sure that this is the meeting, this is the designation, and if it gets to that point, we've made that approval through that designated through ordinance that this is the committee. Once it's done that, then it will go on then to Planning Commission, City Council, as a complete application. So any specific questions on this process?

Well, that's a good question. I actually have a couple questions on this as well. It's complicated. Put it that way. I mean, basically an application is complete when they have submitted all the elements, right, that are required by ordinance for a site plan application. So, and this is something maybe I need to talk to these guys a little bit about, but for example, we have a requirement for a stormwater pollution prevention plan, which oftentimes historically developers haven't submitted until farther down the process, right? So I don't know, is this something you're going to require from them up Up front for— No, not necessarily. So that's a good question, Steve. So let's say traffic impact study is on the checklist, but engineering decides or deems it's not necessary. This formal motion at the Design Review Committee meeting is when we basically say we don't need that traffic impact study, we don't need that Storm drain at that point, we're deeming it complete at that point, and then we're working with them on those other issues that's needed, or we're exempting them from them. So sorry, this is probably a discussion that the council doesn't really want to hear because it's going to bore you to death. But I mean, essentially what I'm suggesting is that maybe there are certain items that are required by ordinance that we will not necessarily require a developer to submit in order for us to begin processing it, but which we would require them to submit for it to be legally vested. Correct. So I guess to answer your question, I don't— I think maybe where we're saying application not deemed complete, I think that would be— that determination would be we're willing to move forward on the application, but we're not making a determination that your application is complete.

That's a good possibility to do as condition as well, right? If that's something that's the only outlier, we could say—

But I don't, I don't think you can say it's conditionally vested though.

No.

So, but anyway, this is a discussion I think we can have internally.

And I think the purpose for this is so we can get consistent, right? So that's what you're saying, right?

You're trying to determine Yeah, I guess what I'm saying is some things that are required by ordinance, it doesn't always make sense to require them at the outset before we will start processing it, like your SWIFT, for example. So that's what I'm saying is we may come up with a checklist that says, here's what you need for us to accept and start processing your application. But the fact that you have all these items doesn't mean that you have a complete VISTA application because some of the required items we understand won't typically be submitted until later on. down the road after Planning Commission. But yeah, sometimes even after— correct. But isn't it vested once the Planning Commission hears it?

Correct.

Before that, if it goes to the Planning Commission, then it's not vested once it hears it, right? Well, that's a good question. So see, put that in our ordinance delegate. With our current situation with some litigation, this is a conversation that we might have Yeah, I think it's probably advised not to, you know, maybe table this for another time. I apologize, I thought we had this ironed out. This was the direction we were following. So no, but I think, I think I understand where you're going. I think it's, it's good. Some of these are just kind of technical details. But anyway, sorry. Internally, we'll talk and then bring it back. At least you can for my benefit, if I may. There may be things— an applicant will come to the design review committee, they may still have outstanding redlines, or they may have questions tied to, let's say, a traffic study. Does that— do all redlines need to be resolved? All issues, including issues associated With traffic study need to be resolved before they can come to design review and receive final approval?

I would say 99%. There might be a minor exception that we'll allow because they just can't work it out, like a UDOT letter or something will condition that they provide that.

But if, if they presented something and the fire hydrant should have been 50 feet To one direction versus where it is today.

It needs to be all complete.

They would need to come back the following week, recap, essentially revisit with the DRC and say, we've made the corrections.

Well, the way that it works right now, Jamie, is the technical coordination meeting and the money coordination meeting are the 2 meetings that are going to rotate those projects through. And once everything is done, so it's going to be complete before it ever gets to The DRC, we're not going to send it back unless there's some reason we've discovered something that's— oh, by the way, what about this?

We forgot about that.

Then it would be changed. Otherwise, it's going to be complete before it ever gets to the DRC.

So, so maybe a clarification. The underlying statement you've got there, application not deemed complete until DRC approval, maybe we change that terminology a little bit to say not deemed ready to go to Planning Commission until DRC approval, because the complete term is kind of a loaded a term. And I think we should probably— let's visit, if we may, offline to hear Councilman Peterson's suggestion.

Sounds good.

I guess the intent of sharing this today was to tell you we are sensitive to the feedback you have given us. We're wanting to make sure that that process is tight. I think I understand the process. I just—

So our direction was to make sure the council knew that those meetings were held Mondays at 11. They are open. You're welcome to come. We're not expecting you to come every time. You should have gotten an email today too that showed you what's on this week's agenda. So if there's something on there that you're saying, hey, I want to find out more about it, obviously I would rather you come in and talk to us personally rather than come to that meeting. But you're welcome to come to the meeting. It's an open meeting. You're— it's an invitation to attend, but we're not expecting you to come to that meeting.

We've just added you as an information item so that you're aware of what's coming.

You will be getting an email every week based on what's on the agenda that week.

But I would like the opportunity to maybe, if those customers want to, to meet with you guys, have a meeting, and you guys kind of share some of those things back and forth. I personally received, um, how can we create a better relationship between the residents and developers? How can we facilitate good relationships?

I don't know. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. All right, got, uh, absolutely.

the business of the city and community. We ask too that it'll be something that will provide nourishment and strength to us. We're grateful for those who organized it and provided it for us. And we ask these favors and blessings in the holy name of Jesus Christ.

Amen. Okay, these ones here to the side are the, uh, unwitches. So if you want the no bread option, I'll go ahead and sit here. What's that?

Oh, no reason.

I'm not trading. I'm just kidding. So, I don't know, several weeks ago, maybe a couple months ago, Monet and Debbie kind of approached Jason. and I about doing a new ordinance requiring— regarding parking for residential developments. And by that we mean developments with attached residential units, not single-family dwellings. And basically the idea was to consider a requirement that required parking stalls be within a certain distance of the unit that they serve, as well as Requiring an assignment of parking stalls for the exclusive use of individual residential units. So I think that— You can, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the concern was, number one, trying to enhance safety for residents of dwellings so that less distance they had to walk, you know, particularly late at night, safer they're likely to feel. as well as, you know, maybe have people who have mobility issues, make it a little bit easier for those people. So, and the other— there's one other reason too, now I can't think of it. Anyway, so we came up with this draft language. This is in our general parking ordinance. So created 2 additional proposed subsections. The first one, as you can see from the title, requires an assignment of Essentially, in most cases, it would be 2 parking stalls for each residential unit that would be for their exclusive use. They would have some official designation that's for their, their own use. And, and then the second part is the proximity aspect of it, requiring that required parking be located within 175 feet of the unit that it serves. You know, when we talked before, we've had some discussion about what that number should be, whether it should be 175 or should it be 150, 200, something else. I think there's a different range of opinions on that. So that certainly would be something that's up for debate. But again, this is just a draft and subject to any changes you might like to make, or if you just want to scrap it entirely. I think this is just kind of to get the discussion rolling. if you will, and talk about if this is something you're interested in moving forward or if you're not. So I think there are, you know, there's some pros like we talked about to doing this. I think there's also some potentially down— potential downsides to it, some potential unintended consequences. Um, maybe Ryan could speak to those a little bit better than I can. Ryan, do you mind just maybe saying what some of your concerns might be with something like this? Yeah, just one of the concerns Is thinking about it this morning. And quite frankly, there's not a lot of opportunities in Harmony to build these projects right now, so I don't know how much that matters. We aren't going to see any of these, but a lot of developments will center a green space around their buildings or a clubhouse. So I'm thinking of a complex in America where my son lives. They have a big green field, units around the green field, and then clubhouse on the floor right there. In this, I think one of the unintended consequences is you may surround your buildings with parking on all 4 sides for proximity. So then you're gonna have your green spaces not up against the buildings, creating a more enjoyable development. They're going to be isolated. Or you're gonna have to cross parking lots to get to those play areas, and that kind of will affect the design of the development. You know, another, another potential unintended consequence that I thought about too is it does take away a little bit of flexibility from, say, an apartment manager. I mean, you might have an apartment that's rented out to one person, they only have one vehicle. You know, and if you're requiring that 2 stalls be assigned to that unit, you're effectively wasting a stall that nobody else can use. You know, and I think that an apartment manager would say, look, give us the flexibility to assign, you know, the use of these stalls out on an as-needed basis, depending on what our tenants are like. So anyway, there's some pros to it, there's some cons to it.

So Our main concern was really safety and making sure that it was— like, I'm okay if someone only has one car.

What do you think about that?

Well, I think when we spoke about that, we talked about that, um, that would be an individual management issue.

And which part of the management?

Where is— if there were an apartment where someone lived there and they only had one car, there were 2 cars assigned to that, you know, the manager then have the opportunity or the ability to sublease that from that.

Yeah, the difficulty is making the two— the difficulty is making the two elements of this work. Number one, that, you know, all the parking stalls within 175 feet, which that basically essentially means you have to designate designate them on a site plan so you know which parking stalls go with which units, so you can measure that they're within 175 feet, right? But then if you do that, then you lose the flexibility for an apartment manager to adjust. Well, there's only one tenant here, you know, we're going to assign that extra parking stall to somebody else. So that's, that's the challenge, I guess. You know, one way of addressing that might be to say, you know, instead of requiring them to designate and assign 2 units for you, maybe you only say one. One stall for each, and then they have flexibility with the other one.

That would be one of my experiences with the townhomes by Mass, and you guys most definitely did something right. So she tells the story that she's on the board there and that they had lots of problems with— when she'd come home from work, there was nowhere to park, halfway out on the street in front of her home. She didn't have a place to park. So then the board decided the way to remedy that was to do one covered spot and one covered spot. It actually— the way it worked out is it was across the way, you know. Um, so within this, they were actually within 125 feet. But, um, and she said that that just alleviated all of the complaints. The residents felt like they were, um, you know, it was their home and they were treated like homeowners in a way that they had a— they knew they had a place to park when they got home versus the whole students mantra, right? I don't know if you guys went through that, but it was always, where am I going to park my car when I get back? So I think the intent here is to create something where there's more security and safety and equal treatment for apartment dwellers as people who live in single-family homes. They know they're going to have to stop in front of the house to get there, you know. So I felt like the tenants in apartments should also have that issue. We have problems in total right now. Some homes— I had a woman tell me she didn't have a spot in her house. That's a home, that's not a neighborhood. I understand what you're saying to me. If there's an issue of an unused parking spot, is that something that the management can deal with? I don't think we'll be able to release that.

Once they did it to one spot, they had 2 assigned spots for town. Oh, they did?

Yeah, one covered.

I don't really have anything on this, but I just think if you don't look at the unintended consequences, you have one assigned spot, that's your spot, and then your other spot is a choice spot. Do other communities have anything like this that you all see? I haven't looked to see. I'm not aware of any of it. I haven't really I'm sorry.

Yeah, I agree.

I just saw this this morning. I think of the place, Mayor, when you spoke at the Woodbury and Tate one, most of the homes aren't within 175 feet of a parking structure because they're— the parking structure formed then, and then, you know, they're not physically that close to any part.

And that's the issue that I feel Well, your safety, right? Yes. But there's a well-lit—

and you're walking by a lot of homes between the parking structure and that, so it's not like you're out on a dark street.

Yeah, but if I'm stopping at the grocery store and picking up my groceries, I'm gonna walk to the ball field to get to my house where I live.

I have to go back and forth to get my groceries from my car.

Oh, there's that one too. I mean, I think they're—

I don't know.

This is coming back to the pools of apartments. You know, they're people too. We seem to have a lot of— a lot more people renting now than ever. And so that's the term. And let's— that's how to say it's using the same lifestyle as someone who owns a home, meaning the same parking spot.

Thank you.

I feel like 2 is very reasonable. I could see the instance where you have one, but I, um, in a 2 or 3 bedroom apartment, you know, is that, is that the norm?

I don't know.

And to your point, Brian, I mean, I, I actually think it, it drives a better development. I think it provides for better planning, more, um, space. The ones I've seen anyway, instead of the whole There's a car complex and there's a parking structure. It lends itself to more beautification when you make it more of a residential type. And Amaranth has a clubhouse with a swimming pool. It has green space all around. Um, they, they tilted the buildings.

I think townhomes lower the crime rate. I think I agree with you. In townhomes, I think it works because your parking is always— but to Councilor McDonald's point, with Green on Campus Drive, that would be a different product because parking is spread out. Yes.

I don't know. I mean, I was just— I just feel like, you know, if you don't cut down on some of it, that's what you're gonna get. You're gonna get parking in a parking structure above Hillway, and you got the same problem. I didn't like walking those distances. I lived in Rain Tree, and I had to walk to the North 40.

I didn't like walking. I mean, I got home at midnight and the library closed. I think we can look at the safety issue and maybe look at it further in depth. Maybe you can do some research on it based on what other cities have. Some unintended consequences. These sound good, I just don't know what happens.

Right.

So I think safety is a number one key in it. It has to be safety, and it's 175 or 150 gallons. I think I can do that. Let's consider data.

I, I agree with that.

I think it's an interesting idea that we're still going to look at.

Nate Prescott has published the website where they're collecting art submissions from local artists, and then And then the Arts Council, or a subgroup within the Arts Council, will review them, and, and we will contract with a local contractor to vinyl apply them to the boxes. $300 to use the image. We don't own the image outright. They can still sell that piece of art or reproduce it themselves, but that was the— Just on one box. And if we had a— it was in a social media post or something like that, We would, we would have the permission to use it. We can do about 30. If you look at them, there's some really great art locally. Yeah, it is last year's. It's, it is the money from last year. Nate and Christian were working on the website for kind of a landing zone for art submission, and so that's been published now, and the Arts Council will receive the submissions, and either a group of them or the, the whole group will select.

As far as local artists, how local is it for them?

I don't think that it's been restricted. I think it's just been advertised locally. Cassie Barney did ours. She's local. The one at Sarah, have you seen that one? That one kind of behind the stage. She's a local artist. They've done it earlier. What else have we done? Uh, there's a piece that Jess Smart Smiley has contributed, and Cindy Clark, who was on the Arts Council, contributed a piece. So we're in the works to put those out.

I don't think there's a problem with it going outside of Orem.

We've done in the past, we've had an Orem kind of roots art show, and we have a lot of artists who started in Orem. They grew up here, they went to high school here, they've lived, lived in Orem for some time. So there's a lot of people have a real affinity for Orem, but they may be in other areas now. I think we're more excited about looks like and how attractive it is. And I mean, I think that's what the art council will look at— what's the quality of the production and what they're expecting.

Okay, I'm just having a few last-minute notes. Yeah, yeah. Okay, um, I had a clarification on the 5-foot agreements.

My husband and my dad.

We got, uh, resolution authorized participation in Utah Valley Home Consortium. That is the follow-up from Ken Matthews's presentation last month, where we participate rather than just working independently, get together with the Utah County Global Consortium. Projects throughout the county, essentially get better advantage of it.

So when we, we had that discussion, um, she made a comment about, you know, because we talked about the renewal of the remodeling options, is that something that has to be directed by someone? How do we say, hey, can we start looking at this?

We pull that off anytime. You want to have a long discussion? No, I'm good.

So 9.1, 9.2.

I think they're here. The eagle has landed. I just have a couple of items. I'm happy to just come in. Yeah, okay. Just, uh, by way of information, our staff has switched to a new timekeeping system. We work with our programming team. This is the first big hearing that we launched that timekeeping system, so I want to give a special shout out to Carrie. and her team and our IT programming team. All of our employees now— historically we've had some who have entered time online, we've had others who are having to use paper time cards. So now we are all electronic. All of our employees will enter their time electronically, and we have a particular app that's been developed that all of our employees can use and access Internships. So that's a significant—

For non-exempt?

For— yeah, for— and then exempt by exception. So all employees in the city submit time cards. Those that are hourly employees submit specific hours and time cards. Those that are non-exempt, just no vacations. But this is the first time we've had all that electronic. Very happy about that. Very appreciative of the IT staff as well as Carrie and the HR team for doing that. And then just the other item, we were notified last week that Congressman Curtis has included a $3 million appropriation into the Environmental Protection Agency appropriation or budget for water So our water reuse project, we have been working there, and of course Chris, we were involved in meeting with Congressman Curtis's office. And Brent, I'm sorry, I don't want to leave anybody out. But, um, that has been included and is the result of Congressman Curtis's efforts, so we're really appreciative of him. Last month, we have— remember, we had an $18 million project. We only had about $9 million to build this project. In the last month, thanks to the efforts of many, we now have $19 million to build the $18 million project. That was fun. I was very excited about that. We're hoping that the $18 million project, when we rebid, is actually $14 million. Yeah, I see that all the time.

Yeah, about half of the money goes to underwater projects.

Yes, yeah, so while it's not final, uh, it still has to go through a, uh, what do you call it, conference in the House and Senate reconciliation. It needs to go through a reconciliation process, but that's, uh, we're on the absolute right track. So very, very much appreciate everybody's efforts. Now we have $10 million more for a project that we thought was dead. Yeah, so I'm excited about that. And the drill, the drill, uh, the drill rig has been mobilized and we are drilling new wells. And it is a continuous effort, so once we start, we can't So we have sound walls set up. We have one sound wall. It is— I mean, how tall is that? 30 feet? Is it only 30? It's not 3 sides. So yeah, we'll let you know when we hit Middle-earth. You sent out an email today about this.

Yes.

What's the end result there? So I'm sorry, I communicated with the mayor that we set that out. We essentially have an individual who came in and made application for a subdivision. And the suggestion of neighbors is rather than connect streets, that we create 2 sub— 2 cul-de-sacs. For, for a variety of reasons, it's staff's opinion that For utility, public safety, and convenience and circulation purposes, it makes more sense to have the street run through. But there are obviously some neighbors that are interested in wanting to keep it as a cul-de-sac. I don't, you know, I think it's staff's recommendation that we connect the street. I think we could have the cul-de-sac. It's going to cost the property owner more money, it's going to require more of his property, and it's not going to obviously address the issues associated with utilities and public safety circulation.

But technically, the issues with—

Does it cost much more to do it as far as utilities? Yes, because rather than connecting the utilities, they actually have to loop the utilities in both cul-de-sacs. So you're actually having to do more work on the storm and sewer. And the sewer is a particular problem because the sewer line to the left is a foot and a half lower than— I'm not sure. When I talked to Sam, to the engineer, Because of the elevation of the sewer in that area, you're actually going to have to have those homes sit higher out of the ground to get the gravitational force, gravitational push from the sewer. So there are some issues. Then in addition, our ordinances require that if we do have a cul-de-sac, that it meets certain specifications. And so we're going to have to create those cul-de-sacs that are going to take more property, more ground. from the property owner. So yes, we can do it. We don't think it's ideal. It's going to cost the property owner more of his square footage and more money on his part because he'll have to duplicate some of the services. So the property owner said he wants to do it. He has, he has expressed an interest in doing. Doesn't make a lot of practical sense to us, but still in the planning stage. There's been half a dozen other neighbors who— yeah, we've all talked to those neighbors. I mean, we're talking about a street and there's about 20 homes. Yeah, I think we should know both Danny Streets would solve all the concepts behind that.

Right.

Yeah.

So back in 1985, Yeah, back in 1985, there was an agreement on H-10 that they would connect the road, but then the property owner died, sold the property to somebody else, and that property owner is now wanting to make something. Thank you.

Others are already leaving.

Excuse us. Test, test, test.

We would like to call this meeting to order and welcome all of you here tonight. We appreciate you coming. We'll start out with an invocation by Jim Larray, Debbie's husband, and a Pledge of Allegiance by Blaine. Vlad.

Vlad.

Blame Vlad. He's related?

Dad.

Okay, your dad.

Okay.

All right, thank you. Our Father in Heaven, we're thankful for the blessings that are ours and the chance we have to live here in this wonderful state and city of Utah, of Orem, for the freedoms that we enjoy and the opportunities we have to have the prosperity and the Camaraderie and the feeling of family here. Father, we ask for thy spirit and guidance to be with the council this evening. We hear and listen to those ideas and, and items in the agenda that we can be inspired to know what's best for the city and for the people, and that we can make good decisions. And we pray for these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

Amen.

Thank you. Now we'll please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance.

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

Thank you.

We've got some—

item 7, we've got some personal appearances. And just to read how this works, time is This time has been set aside for the public to express their ideas, concerns, and comments on items not scheduled as public hearings on the agenda. Those wishing to speak are encouraged to show respect for those who serve the city. Comments should focus on issues concerning the city. Those wishing to speak should have signed in before the beginning of the meeting. And please limit your comments to 3 minutes or less. We'll start out with John Barrick. And if you just, just announce what city you live in, you don't have to put your actual address.

Hello, my name is John Barrick. I live in the city of Orem. I'm grateful for the city council to take up the Orem feasibility study with the Alpine School District. I'd like to talk for a minute about property taxes within the Alpine School District that Orem residents pay. I've got some slides.

Hopefully they'll be able to get them up.

If not, that's all right. I've handed them out to the city council. This is an example from page 169 of the current year— page 169 of the current year budget. They keep the property values constant at $370,000, and they show you at the bottom of the slide in yellow small property increases or decreases in tax. They actually show that over a 5-year period that taxes went down $77 over that period. Now, the second slide shows the average—

actual, actual—

the actual impact on an Orem taxpayer. All I did is took Zillow and took the average Orem home over that period, $291,000 in 2018, 322, 336, 337, and 494 at the beginning of 2022. Our property values have gone up, as you know, and did the same math that the Alpine School District did in their example. And this shows a property tax change in the first year of $50, $57 in the second, $143 in the third, and $290 in the current year, which is a 24.7% tax increase. Now, how does this work? It's a little bit of sleight of hand. Notice the consistent tax increases. This is the reason the Utah State Legislature passed a law called Truth in Taxation, or TNT, is to blow up the kind of shenanigans the Alpine School District is playing in their budget. This shows that property taxes have gone up 33.6% in the last 4 years. Okay, that's a very large increase. Now, what else? The next slide, please. The next slide. Well, on the last slide, it does show that the bond will raise taxes another $105, so don't let anyone tell you otherwise. The next slide shows the average property taxes paid over the last 20 years as a percentage by the residents of Orem, 28.2%. That is $570 million in property taxes just since 2009. Now, why do I mention 2009? Because in 2006, the Orem City Council took up a feasibility study and elected on a 3-4 vote not to put it on the ballot, and we would have split about 2009. Since then, Orem residents have paid $570 million in property taxes. Now, all of those property tax Would not have gone to build schools because 55% of those property taxes go to the general fund, but they would allow us to pay teachers more in an Orem school district. They would also allow us to decrease class sizes. Alpine School District on their budget on page 185 shows that they are raising class sizes by fourth in fourth, fifth, and sixth grades to 31, and it says next to that actual class sizes may be higher because they count all teachers, not just teachers who are teaching in their calculations. And as you know, in Northridge Elementary, between 3rd and 7th— 6th grade, they're going to have 33 to 37 per class, which is unacceptable. Thank you for the courage to take the feasibility study, and we're looking forward to seeing it.

Thank you.

Thank you. Next, we've got Ben Wheeler.

Yes, good evening. In keeping with what John's saying, you'll notice from the taxes that Lehigh is— I'm sorry, Eagle Mountain is the only city that actually has a windfall. Every other city, specifically Lehi and Orem, are definitely paying more in taxes than they're receiving back in services. I will say to you that there is an online group called Stronger Together, and they are being very active in regards to talking about teacher benefits, teacher pay, and special Education will not be better in an Orem school district, and I challenge them to think that the people in this building will do a much better job than what's happening today in the Alpine School District. They're publishing this information on the internet. Joe Johnson, who spoke to you last week, is the resident of Lehi. He was even told by the leadership from Alpine School District and the Stay Together that if he wanted grandma requests, he didn't need to request The normal way, and we had a talk about that that said if you take that, that's bribery. So we're very proud of what you're doing as a city council, that you're standing up for what we what we believe in, which is control of our own school and our own destiny. We we we don't want to build schools in Saratoga Springs. We don't want to build schools in Vineyard. We don't want to build schools. Schools in Linden. Really, I have about a minute and 35 seconds left. I also want to thank the Orem City Council and the Orem Library for standing up this year and taking the opportunity to move the Pride exhibit out of the children's section and put it into the adult section. I visited it just before I came in the building to see how it was presented, and it's as you walk in. And I, I thought, well, I'm going to be open-minded and try and understand what this means and how it affects us. You walk out the door, you turn right, the first thing you see is the exhibit, and this is the book that you can see— what you can see first.

And if you can speak Spanish, you'd be disgusted.

That was the biggest book facing the doorway as we walked out of the chamber. Thank you for standing up for who we are and what we represent as gatekeepers in Zion.

Thank you.

Next I've got— and it's hard to read this writing— but Cade Kidd, is that right?

Okay, you got it.

Okay, I'm going to invite my neighborhood Friends and family to stand, just so you can see who's here that we're representing today. And I'm also going to read to keep this simple. Good evening, Mayor Young and City Council members. First off, thank you for this opportunity to come before you today. In respect of your time, we have consolidated our thoughts to present to you today. I stand with my friends and neighbors here this evening because we found out this week that a home in our neighborhood has been purchased by Heritage. Behavioral Health Incorporated. We were all surprised to find out that this is a business that has purchased other homes and uses them as transitional homes. We were not even aware that this was something that could take place. I'm sure you can understand the surprise and worry that has followed since finding this out. We are concerned with the unknown of who the tenants are that would be allowed to reside in the home. We are parents and grandparents of children in this neighborhood, many of which live in very close proximity to the home in question. We are concerned for the safety of our neighborhood, what this might do to the value of the homes in close proximity, and how it would adversely affect the ability to sell a home should a homeowner decide to. We recognize that facilities are necessary to treat those that are in need and support that effort, but struggle to see why it should be done in a residential area. We are aware that federal law permits the use of this home as a group home. However, we would like to understand the permit process. Our hope tonight is to come before you to raise our concerns and let you know that we would like to work with you, our City Council, in an effort to find out more information on the intended use of this home and the impacts that will have on this community. If you could direct us to whom we could work with to research this, we would be grateful. It is our goal to research this further and return To the next council meeting in hopes of sharing what we find. We stand here before you as community members whose goal it is to maintain safe neighborhoods that provide the best possible environment for our community. We will be vigilant in making sure that the guidelines, laws, and purposes are met by contacting city— the city with any grievances. We ask that we be informed if the business license and permit issued by the city is used for any any purpose other than what it was originally approved for, or if there is a request by Heritage for modifications. Most, if not all of you, included in your election campaigns the need to preserve Orem's neighborhoods. It is our hope that you will do all you can to help us preserve our neighborhood in this current troubling situation.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you, kid.

Okay.

Yes, what will— yes, what we need to do is have, have you meet with Jamie and possibly myself.

Yeah, I think, Mayor, if I may, obviously our Development Services Department and our legal department can speak to specifics associated, one, with the application. And 2, with the legal aspects or issues, we're happy to set up a time to sit down and have a conversation and involve you in that conversation and explain what we have to this date, to this point. But if you have, you have, you have their information, and so you've got our contact, that's how we will for sure reach out to you.

Wonderful.

Okay.

Appreciate it.

As we'll just reach out to you as the representative, and if you would be so kind as to reach out to your neighbors.

Thank you.

I spoke with Ryan about that today, so I think he's got a head start on this.

So now you're— I'm happy to include you in whatever way you'd like to be included.

Sure, I'm, I'm happy to try and help. It is a very difficult situation in that it's, it's basically federal law over farm laws. But anyway, we can talk to you and let you know what the options are and what the best things are to do. Next, I've got Jill Barrick.

Hi, I'm Jill Barrick, and we live in the Northridge Elementary School boundaries. I'm here tonight to speak about the buffet of educational offerings available at Northridge Elementary. Let's start with a large portion of child endangerment. That's right, Northridge offers your children the opportunity to be exposed to unbelievably loud noise, namely that of jackhammering in the brick corridors right next to the 6th grade and kindergarten rooms. during school hours. The aroma was so strong and loud it could be savored throughout the entire school and even in the parking lot outside. Yum! It was a delightful blend of flying debris, exorbitantly jarring noise, no perimeter barriers to prevent injury, with children wrapping coats around their heads to muffle the noise. A delicious side order of holding your potty all day was served as a side dish. Yes, OSHA violations of having the water turned off all day was served up hot and fresh in January— in February. As another side dish included with your order of child endangerment, the robust refusal of ASD administrators to send a team of nurses to check the children's hearing afterwards. We asked, they declined. For those who enjoy a visual display whilst dining, Northridge offered not one but two incidents of naked children Both of which were withheld from the public's knowledge. It's the chef's secret. The tangy entree of terrible test scores is also available on the menu. Where Northridge once ranked 46th in the state in 2011, by 2017 they took a sharp nosedive to 335th. Superb. For those who prefer their smorgasbord with a more minimalist approach, Northridge offers just specialty part-time PE. That's right, for those with a plate devoid of flavor for music, art, STEM, dance, drama, or any other creative pairing, rest assured Northridge is at the ready to meet your minimalist needs. As a final and classic amuse-bouche to top off the buffet, Northridge is now offering heaping portions of class sizes in the mid-30s for this fall Exclusive menu. Bon appétit, parents. Alpine School District owns this mess. A local school district would mean accountability, which ASD is refusing to give us parents and students. Thank you for commissioning a feasibility study. This gives us parents hope that we can be heard and our money can stay local. Thank you.

Next we've got Sissy Rasmussen.

Hi, my name is Sissy Rasmussen. I have been an Orem resident for almost 20 years. My kids have been going to our public schools for 17 years, and we will be in them for the next 10 years, so you can imagine I'm very invested in the future of our schools, and I'm experienced in the past realities of our Orem schools. I'm here to extend an invitation to the City Council and to the Orem residents to a Facebook group that friends and I started recently. We've been meeting for some months and trying to understand the feasibility study information, trying to spread awareness about this issue. Our group is called Stronger Together. You can find us on Facebook. It's a body of parents and other interested members of the Orem community committed to a thoughtful and honest appraisal of an Orem-only school district. We believe that Orem schools, students, teachers, and residents are best served by staying with Alpine School District. And in the 3 weeks that we've been formed on Facebook, we have almost 800 members, many of which are school employees, and the overwhelming feeling is that these, these people who are part of our group are in favor of staying with Alpine School District, which mimics what I've seen in PTA meetings and school community council meetings throughout Orem, where the vast majority support staying in Alpine School District. And I know some of you disagree with that assessment, but I've been in those meetings and even seen a vote taken, and the overwhelming majority of the people in PTA and school community council meetings do not support an Orem School District. I think you would be very interested to be in our group. I know a couple of you already are and have even engaged with some of the commenters in our group on Facebook, and I really appreciate that. I think what you'll see is that teachers have serious concerns, and I think what you see is parents have serious concerns, and these are your constituents. And I hope you'll take a moment— if you don't want to engage on it, I understand that. It's a— Facebook is tricky, but I hope you'll come and read their comments. As far as information that we present, like Mr. Presented the property taxes, we cover that plus the other sources of income which make the vast— make up the vast majority of the budget for Orem schools. And we have some— we have based that on data that is publicly available through Alpine School District, which is the same data that Orem City Grammar requested from Alpine School District and which will be used in the feasibility study. So I just wanted to come here and invite you all to be a part of that, to hear your constituents in that way.

Thank you.

Heidi Clark.

Hi, I'm Heidi. I have lived in Orem for nearly 20 years now.

One of the things I've always valued about the community is that the police department has always seemed invested in keeping our community safe and informed. They use social media to keep the community informed of things of particular interest, and they take measures like crosswalk stings to keep us safe. Which is why I was surprised and saddened by the radio silence after an armed police officer hit a pedestrian who was in the crosswalk crossing with the signal at 11:29 on the morning of June 16th. The officer was making a left turn onto Center Street from Garden Park. This intersection— this is the intersection at the Wendy's, uh, and post office in front of The intersection had its protected left turns removed a few years ago.

The officer was the lead car at the traffic light, followed by a white Tesla, followed by me.

I could clearly see the older woman waiting to cross as I waited for the light.

I remember wondering if I'd have to wait for an extra cycle.

The light turned green. The woman got the signal that it was safe to cross. After all of the pedestrian stings covering exactly the same intersection, this issue, the officer just went under the turnbreeks. The woman was in the second lane when she was hit. It's been crickets from the Orem Police Department. They haven't so much as acknowledged it happened, let alone reported on the status of the victim or asked for patience while Lyndon investigates. I'd like our city's police force to be more transparent in this. Not acknowledging this, you erodes trust, and trust for law enforcement has been eroded enough nationwide without incidents like this. I'd also like the city to reconsider the protected left turns at that intersection. It will protect pedestrians by not signaling them to cross Center Street while people are turning left. And drivers also don't tend to have a lot of patience for people going straight through that intersection on Garden Park, which leads to a not significant amount of close calls. People turn—

attempt to turn left into people who are going straight through the intersection.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thanks.

From Orem.

And just to Heidi's point, it's always been kind of interesting to me that we kind of clamor for a system where we have to drive everywhere when that's the most dangerous thing any of us does any day. I mean, when else in your day are you operating a killing machine?

It would—

I don't think the police officer intended to, and it would be great if we didn't have to drive everywhere. for everything. About 6 months ago, you created the Director of Legislative Counsel on a kind of trial basis. I believe that that term is up soon. By nature of the position, this attorney isn't in direct contact with staff nor citizens, and I believe that's led to some, some poor advice in 3 instances. First, the State Street Master Plan. Good advice would have been, people have concerns, let's peg down Exactly what they're worried about and see if we can work together, together to alter that. What you chose to do instead was remove the plan entirely, which has led to some consternation in your partner agencies, with staff, with anyone who was involved in the 5 years and $500,000 it took to create that plan. Second, Planning Commission, and you know, this is a little personal, but you were worried The Planning Commission might somehow thwart that state street master plan change. Good advice would have been, we don't see any evidence that Planning Commission is going to do that. If they do something wrong, request their removal, but it's— you don't have to take their advice anyway. What you chose to do instead was remove power from the city manager and switch out of those vocal supporters, those who had any support for State Street Master Plan with those who thought the way you did, which has kind of eroded trust between your past, present, and potential citizen volunteers that they won't be similarly dismissed if they disagree with you. Thirdly, Alpine School District.

Good advice.

Yeah, the district does look big. Let's get together with Alpine. Let's have some public meetings, get everyone answering questions together. Perhaps we can even do a joint study and get a target date. So our citizens are working toward a date to split from Alpine. Instead, you chose to, to go it alone, which has led to some awkward grammar requests that I think could have been avoided if you were working more closely together. And I, I could be wrong, but if the Director of Legislative Counsel has moved you down roads that have created unnecessary discord. It's, it's not too late to seek better advice, and it's not too late to rebuild some of that trust.

Um, so I have—

thank you.

Thank you.

Move on to item number 8, which is consent items. There's item 8.1, a resolution to authorize the City of Orem's participation in Utah Valley Home Consortium. Item number 8.2, a motion, Mayor Pro Tem July through December 2022. The mayor and the city council will appoint Councilmember Lenee Millett as Mayor Pro Tem to serve from July through December of 2022. And item 8.3, a resolution to the— to have Orem contribute to the Utah State Retirement Contribution Amendment.

Move that we approve the consent items, Mayor. Second.

Do we have a second?

Second.

Hi.

Hi. Hi.

Hi.

Hi.

Hi. Thank you. We've got item number 9. We've got an ordinance amending Chapter 23 of the Orange City Code for stormwater utility. We'll have Reed Price come up and do a presentation on that. Yes, so, okay, would like to say something.

Thank you so much. I hope I'm not out of order here, but I would, I would like to make one comment regarding some of the comments that were made during the public comment period. I would just like to encourage all members of our community when they engage online on these Facebook pages that people are creating, if the administrators of those Facebook pages Facebook pages could encourage civil discourse. I think that would go a long way to help us to have a factual, data-driven, non-emotional approach to what we're doing with this school district study. I've seen some very vicious and attack language from some people. I notified the administrators And I would hope that they would follow through and delete those comments, and then encourage the participants to have civil discourse. You know, sometimes people forget who they are on social media, so let's encourage them to be kind. Thank you.

Thank you. Rita, you all set to go?

I think so.

Mayor and City Council, it's a pleasure to be in front of you again. We, uh, discussed this in greater detail during the work session a couple of weeks ago. It's my purpose to come in front of you to review what we discussed as we— as staff is recommending that we amend Chapter 23 of the stormwater— of city code, which addresses the stormwater utility. We are going through this update as kind of a house cleaning effort. We wanted to make sure that we clarified some language that was in the code, address some deficiencies, and also to make sure that we were in compliance with new regulations that have come out from the Division of Water Quality. Some of the basic changes I mentioned, primarily housekeeping. We've clarified some of the definitions. We've fixed some basic grammatical errors. We've added and updated hyperlinks in the document. We've removed references to gender as it appears— as it applies to titles. We have changed employee titles to match what we— what their current titles are. We reformatted some areas to consolidate space, and we've deleted some sections that we felt were unnecessarily repetitive. Those were primarily the basic changes There were some that were a little more significant, however, not earth-shattering by any means. This included a recommendation by staff to include a new $1,000 bond when a development occurs to ensure that property owners continue to comply with the stormwater regulations after construction is completed and before landscaping is installed. There's also some requirements that were added To the section on long-term stormwater management, that those requirements would require developer developer to complete a specific questionnaire related to long-term stormwater management during the planning process, which helps us as we review plans. We are also asking that developers would provide a map as part of the final. Approval that show exact locations where site improvements were made, so that when we go back to ensure that these structures continue to function in the future, that we know exactly where to go. Finally, the retrofit plan was added to the code. This retrofit plan would require redeveloped properties that are larger than an acre, as well as established properties that we know are adversely impacting stormwater quality to come into compliance with measures to manage and protect stormwater. That's a quick summary of what we discussed in greater detail at the work session last time. It's staff's recommendation that, that the code be, be, be changed and updated with these, with these recommendations.

Thank you, Reed. Do we have any questions from anyone?

We just—

we discussed this at length in our work sessions.

Are we good to vote?

Would someone like to make a resolution?

I move that by ordinance we amend Chapter 23 of the Orem City Code for Stone Water Utility. I'll second that.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye. Aye.

Aye.

The ordinance passes.

Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you, Reed. Next, we're going to have a presentation from Brandon Nielsen on amending our recent budget. So I misspoke.

This is our prior year budget, right?

This is current.

Well, yeah, technically still our current year budget for 2 more whole days. So thank you, Mayor, for allowing us to come forth with these budget amendments here at the end of the fiscal year. As you know, and as we've discussed in prior meetings, we have various changes that occur during the year, primarily related to grants in most cases. cases, and this time is no exception. To begin with, all the items you see with a note of 1, as we go— as you look through there, all of those items are related to a grant or donation in some way, shape, or form. Obviously, up in the right-hand corner, I highlighted the biggest item related to those grants, and that happens to be the second tranche of the ARPA money that we received, which is— there are only 2. So we received one at about the same time last year. This is the second half. The first one was that exact same amount. The primary use, obviously, of these funds that we— the intent of those use of these funds is in large part to Hillcrest Park. So just to give you an idea, make you aware that those monies have come in, and obviously this budget accounts for those funds coming And then obviously we will be spending those monies as we go. The second item of major importance with these amendments is item number 2, the 2 items in blue. You can see there are 2 of them for 5— a little over $5.7 million. When we complete our fiscal '21 actual financials, there is a requirement in state law that we have a maximum amount of fund balance on what's termed unassigned fund balance that we can keep within our general fund. We are allowed a time frame by which to transfer those funds out of the general fund, and the reason you see 2 entries here obviously is one is removing it from the general fund and the other item is bringing it into our capital projects fund for use for whatever capital projects we have— may have need of within that. Normally those are parks-related, street-related, sometimes equipment-related, and most recently probably city center-related. And so that is the amount that is— portion of that is required to fall underneath that state required ceiling, that 35%. Another portion of it is related to— and that's approximately $2.2 million. The other portion of that is the city has followed a general guideline of, well, there's not necessarily a reason to leave that money sitting unused within the general fund. Because it could always be brought back into the general fund if If needed, so we take the other portion of that money to get down to, and and it's approximately 15 percent. Not taking into account items that are already encumbered. Encumbered means we've created a purchase order to buy something, and we just haven't received it yet, or and or haven't paid for it yet. So not so it takes that those pieces and doesn't take them into account. So between the $2.2 million to get us down to the ceiling and $3.5 million to bring us down to approximately that, that 15%, it comes to— that's $5.725 million. And the last item, which is somewhat of an unusual nature, is this item at the— near the bottom in orange, item number 3. We received a Volkswagen grant to replace certain vehicles that were not based on VW getting sued because they were, you know, cheating on their mileage, how much they said the mileage that their vehicles were getting. The state received that money and then granted that money out to anybody who applied. City applied for funds and received based on certain vehicles. One of those vehicles that we applied for was the senior citizen bus. Through various things that have occurred since then, the approval of that original bus, mainly not being able to find that bus, and because of COVID several operators no longer make buses. The world during COVID kind of changed that whole transportation world upside down, and so several of the bus manufacturers actually went out of business. So we were left to figure out how to find another bus to replace the aging bus that we currently have. We did eventually find a bus that was already available, and unfortunately that bus was a little bit bigger and Cost a little more costly than the amount we were getting from the VW grant. The state did allow us to, in essence, transfer and to the grant award money to this new bus, but we had to come up with approximately $45,000 more to pay for the bus. The Senior Citizens Fund has a rather decent-sized surplus. And that was agreed that they would split that $45,000 between, in essence, general fund operations and the senior citizen fund to pay for that additional cost. So those are the big items in relation to these budget amendments. Any questions about any of those particular items or anything else on there that you see that I have not specifically discussed?

Just to clarify. So that $5.7 million is essentially coming out of the general fund, right? And it's being moved to the capital improvements project fund. And based on all the criteria that you had to meet to get it there. And then, as far as capital improvements project fund, is that likely earmarked for the city center? Is that something else, or is it earmarked to anything?

It isn't. It is not earmarked for anything in particular. We have, through our budget process, identified certain elements that— certain things that we intend to use approximately just short of $900,000 of that for. And they're in the same arenas as we have set-aside funds that we've set aside each year related to roofs, various facilities, whether that be HVAC-type things. So there's certain elements in relation to those that we're in essence saving up for over time. There are other elements related to some recreational components that, such as a line machine, I think it's called a turf tank, if I remember correctly. Some things in that area to help our parks crews in relation in the recreation area. So, so some of those items have been identified up to that, up to $900,000. The remaining amount, approximately $4.8 million. You know, that is left to be determined where that need— obviously, given certain pricing that we currently have related to potentially the city center, there may be a need for those funds in relation to that.

Okay, thank you. Any other questions? Okay, would someone like to make a motion? Oh, actually, actually, we have to have a public hearing.

I got it.

Okay, we're going to Open a public hearing for anyone that would like to say anything or comment about this. Okay, we'll close the public hearing if no one wants to speak. And now we'll move to a vote.

I'll make a motion. I make a motion that we amend the fiscal year 2021-2022 budget as so described.

Second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye. Aye.

The ordinance passes. Thank you, Brandon. All right, lastly, we've got— you're good. Okay. We've already gone over some of the city manager's information items. And then we've got Item number 11. This is a communication item, monthly financial summary for review only.

That's just included in your packet for your, for your review when you get it.

Okay, thank you. All right, like to make a motion to adjourn. We're going to adjourn to a closed meeting. This meeting will be held in the conference room number 107, Ormsby Hall, 56 North State Street. I am Orem, Utah, and this will be a closed meeting to discuss the character or professional competence or physical or mental health of an individual pursuant to Code Section 52-4-205.

I'll second it.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

We will adjourn. Thank you.